Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

I was awakened by a male nurse dragging a huge, light bag; dropping it on the floor, he counted the beds with one finger in the air and consulted his clipboard. Without a word, he pulled the blanket down to the foot of my bed and began to undo my pants. Before I could stop him, they were already round my ankles along with my underpants, and the male nurse was busy opening a nappy and checking the tackiness of the adhesive. Deciding it was too late, I chose — so to speak — to let him, looking the other way to avoid making him feel uncomfortable. I thought he might put on some baby cream on, or a bit of talcum powder at least, which had its pleasant side, but he didn’t; with two or three mechanical movements he slipped the nappy under my arse without touching me, adjusted the tapes, fixed them in position and, after pulling my pants and bedclothes up over it, he moved on, ignoring Emilio. What I should have done was take it off and put it on the man it was really intended for, but I’d never changed a nappy in my life, not even a crazy baby’s, let alone an adult’s. And besides, he might have been covered in piss and shit. I’ll inform the next male nurse that goes by, I told myself, and fell asleep thinking about it. I dreamed it was raining and I was on the Islands, my pants so drenched with freezing-cold water that I pissed myself for a few seconds’ warmth on my legs. I didn’t have the face to give the nappy back after that; luckily, next day they corrected the error on the clipboard and from then on started changing us both.

They also unified our diets: those who couldn’t eat under their own steam were spoon-fed with baby food (probably the liquefied leftovers of the others’ meals), which they put in a piping bag and squirted straight into our mouths. It was a good idea, I thought, as I flattened it with my tongue to swallow; when it comes down to it, biting or cutting food, chewing it, tasting the different flavours and swallowing, requires a great deal of effort and energy. Sometimes you don’t feel up to even that: a tasteless pap is all you can take; even if the stomach can stand it, it’s the soul that isn’t prepared for tasty and excessively nourishing food. After a short time on this diet, I started to put on weight and sink into the bed, or maybe it was the pap accumulating on the sheets, because it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep my head above them. I spent most of the day splashing about in this white mud — fortunately, it wasn’t as cold as the snow, just the opposite in fact: it had the lukewarmth of the human body, something like warm flour-and-water paste; it even tasted like it. And it was no longer just the food but the whole world that had been put through the liquidiser; walking through the world, now, getting through day after day, dragging myself laboriously to reach the next along paths, streets, tunnels, passageways, corridors, offices, parks, woods, rivers or mountains, had all been reduced and simplified to the same splashing and groping about in this watery mud. I say ‘day after day’ or ‘the next day’ out of habit, for the colour of the sky that stretched beyond this horizon of mud was an invariable nightday watergrey. Children at school are taught that the sum of all the colours gives white. White is the colour of colours, so the enthusiastic child grabs his paints — minus the white so as not to cheat — empties them onto the plate and begins to stir and stir the multi-coloured rainbow with his paintbrush, waiting for the miracle at any moment, and, even when his beautiful coral reds and chrome yellows and cobalt blues and emerald greens and purples and carmines have disappeared, forever liquefied into that greenbrowngrey sludge, the child goes on stirring, incapable of believing it: he’s been had. Still refusing to accept it, he picks up his brush and, over the beautiful landscape in his colouring book, daubs greenish clouds in the sky, brownish smoke coming out of the chimney of the cabin, mouse-coloured sheep in the field, then in a rage covers it all with the same ashkhakiolive and, when not a single brushstroke of another colour can be seen, he rips the page out of the book and throws himself weeping into the greenish mud.

After a while I discover that, by opening my mouth and swallowing as I go, I can feed myself: the pap that goes through my body and comes out of the other end releases enough nutrients to enable me to go on. Its smell is that unmistakable smell, at once dead and musty, fermented and dulled, into which all smells merge after being kept for long enough in a polythene bag. With no differences to be perceived the smell becomes indistinguishable from its absence, and my sense of smell soon atrophies. Everything gradually homogenises, everything becomes easier and easier. Certain protuberances that obstructed my forward movement are left behind, they wither and fall off: the teeth from my mouth, the hair from my body, my nails, my ears, my nose, penis, testicles … My fingers conjoin and my arms shorten to small fins that my body will at length completely reabsorb; my legs join together along their length and I learn to move by snaking through the mud — my eyes of course have for some time been sealed for ever and soon also disappear from my memory. I no longer need to see, no longer need to hear, all contact with the world reduced to two orifices: my mouth the only entrance, my anus the only exit! One day I stop moving and start becoming spherical. Perhaps it’s the first stage of a metamorphosis, but it’s difficult to tell: my new life is much simpler than my previous one, but not totally predictable. Something new is happening. While I was moving, time went on flowing, or perhaps it was me and my movement that created the march of time. When I stop, space loses all boundaries; my body expands to fill it completely and I am one, indistinguishable from this underlying substance that stretches to the ends of the universe from the beginning to the end of time, and for this conscious, unlimited, eternal cosmic mass there is no other name than — why not utter one last word before doing away with them completely? — God.

* * *

I was dragged back by a stream of pain, intense and local, as if someone were trying to bend my knee backwards — no point arguing I had no legs because it’s a well-known fact that amputees feel pain in the absent limb as well. That was what was happening: someone was tinkering with the body I’d left behind; I’d have liked to ignore it but it hurt too much, and if I was to escape or move, I had to come back. The pain was accompanied by an unbearable pressure, the pressure by a claggy taste of sleep flooding my mouth, the rancid saliva and its smell by an audible creaking of the knee, which was on the point of giving completely; the assault of the senses burst all barriers and, defeated again, I opened my eyes to a broad, insensitive back sitting on the edge of my bed, on top of one of my legs. I was about to shout out in indignation, wriggling my leg eel-like, squashed beneath the wall of rock, pulling on it like a jammed corkscrew, but at the last moment I noticed the grey Burberry, big coat, trench coat, raincoat, overcoat, and restrained myself. Emilio was sitting up straight against the bars of the bedhead, his bulging eyes fixed on the nebulous map of the Islands in the corner of the wall, and as if someone had pulled out the stopper from the toothless orifice that opened and closed in his face, now wildly poured the same words that earlier had trickled through his leaking mind:

‘Wood it not be bitter to with raw now, befur it was too late, and prey that the Islands should remain under cover for sever all millennui to come, that we should go on leaping in the no ledge, that a beast in a den survived in some distinct carnage of the planeat, even if inexcessible to use? …’

Instinctively, like a cat that wakes up with a Rottweiler on its tail, I began to bristle and hunch, drawing my whole body in towards the clenched lump at the core of the bed, save for the one, long, outstretched leg left far out there as a hostage. In the hollow of the sagging bed my body was practically invisible beneath the blankets; only a wedge of face peeped out to watch. A thick wad of papers on his knees and a tape recorder whirring at his side, Major X took notes, crossed out, revised his annotations, put on his headphones and took them off again, scribbled enthusiastically, stood up, crossed out everything he’d written and started again. Poking out of the ferment of mattress and unwashed blankets, Emilio’s talking head feverishly held forth, a buzz of words unrolling from his tongue like line from a reel when a big fish bites: