Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘They say they are discandied from thaws who rearrived from the Norse, bringing the treasore to the Islands, moor yearns Iago than can be canted on the finngears of all the inhabituals’ hands. The world they repit, in-gland, seems to be a contraption of the original in gold land, or to give it the name by which it has been killed for sansureties: elder adder …’

Major X controlled him with clipped, precise orders, in true military fashion. ‘Speak,’ he’d say mechanically, and Emilio would speak:

‘I turned round to seaweed of my mean was responseable. Nun of them …’

‘Stop,’ he’d interrupt him, and for two or three minutes he’d feverishly write, cross out and erase, and reread everything, all concentration. ‘Continue,’ he’d say when done.

‘It tarned out to be that sold year from yer five, who had approached me on our revel, claiming his newt meat …’

‘Stop. Rewind.’ He’d count the seconds on his watch. ‘Stop. Continue.’

‘Noon often. It toured out to beta soldier from err five who had pup roast meat on our arrival, clamming he knew men …’

‘Repeat.’

‘Son of Sem. It tired out to be that sold year from er five who had peached on me to my rival, cleaning up no mean …’

‘Repeat.’

‘Noun of theme. It tarred out to be that sell dear former five who had upreached men on our arreveal, climbing the new me …’

‘Stop.’

Any moment now, I told myself, he’ll get up and go to the bathroom and I’m out of here. But he didn’t. Menhir-like, he’d settled in his final resting place. Eventually, out of sheer annoyance I tried to pull on my leg without him realising, but it was as fast as a rivet and so dead I could barely even pull. There was nothing I could do. As a last resort I reminded myself that this was the man who’d done all those … things to Gloria, to see if it made me react, but I couldn’t get my head round it; it kept sliding away down the waxed furrows of my brain and, rather than an urge to kill him, I ended up feeling an urge to die myself. Why not? After all, what did I have to complain about? I’d been given a ten-year bonus, God knows why; even without the will to live, life hadn’t been too bad a deal.

It was Emilio who saved me. The taut thread of his speech slackened, as if the fish had slipped the hook, and Major X got up and walked stiff-legged towards the bathrooms. I had no time to think what I was doing before my hands had grabbed the papers, stuffing them under my pullover. I leaped to my feet and fell flat on my face on Emilio’s bed, scattering the papers across the floor. Starting to weep with despair, I gathered them into an unmanageable bundle and tried to hop to the door, dragging my dead leg behind me. It felt like it had been amputated, I couldn’t feel it touch the floor, and when I tried to stand on it, it kept giving, like a slat in a Venetian blind. I only hope he’s having a serious crap, I prayed, and as luck would have it I found a wooden chair on my way out to the garden that I could use as a crutch to get to the main gate and out of his field of vision. Clutching my knee with my free hand, I managed to hobble a short way and, with a sizzling tingle, the blood began to flood back into my dead flesh. By the time I’d reached the exit, my legs were sliding along the tiled passageways as if on air, and I’d have had no trouble reaching the street had the guard at the entrance not blocked the way. I can’t have looked as presentable as I had when I arrived and my expression of forced sanity must have been even less convincing when I stuck my hand down my pants and started to rummage, all the while looking at him with a smile of abject apology. He already had one grappling hook on my shoulder when I felt something crinkly and yanked it out with an exclamation of triumph. Unrolling it against the light, he scrutinised it suspiciously, as if the understandable reluctance to believe a madman ought naturally to extend to his money as well, but I’d already crossed to the opposite pavement and was halfway down the block. I barged into a bus queue, from where I watched the entrance. I didn’t have to wait long. Major X came bursting out of the darkness and went straight up to the guard, grabbing him by the lapels and shaking him like a country dog with a rabbit. Miraculously, the 95 pulled up, because the guard was already pointing in my direction and Major X’s eyes burned into the crowd fighting to board the bus. Too late to reach it, in his despair he went and stood in the middle of the street with his arms outstretched, but the driver, goaded on by the amber light, accelerated straight at him and he had to jump out of the way to avoid being hit. He started running after it, meaning to catch us at the next red light, which turned green at that precise moment, and we stampeded on. Only after three blocks of crush did I reach the driver who, impatient ticket in hand, sat there waiting as I ransacked all my pockets without pulling out more than some fluff and a paperclip. One hand fondling a tyre lever, he suggested I get off. Almost without touching the pavement I dived into a shop, where I pretended to be making up my mind about what brand of yerba maté to buy: Taragüí, La Hoja, Nobleza Gaucha, Flor de Lis, Rosamonte, Unión, I managed to read before seeing Major X go past inside a black-and-yellow flash, and, resurfacing behind him, I waited for the next cab and told it to follow the 95. I improvised: ‘My girlfriend’s on board with another man.’ We caught up with it mounted on the pavement, embedded at a forty-five-degree angle in the taxi, while a whirl of indignant passengers and curious passers-by tried to undo a knot of struggling figures: the bus driver was grabbing the taxi driver by the pullover; the taxi driver was trying to throttle Major X; Major X, in turn, was dragging a startled young man by the hair, who from the hasty description of a Borda guard could easily have been me, then remembering I’d given the guard my last note, I yelled ‘There she is! She’s wounded!’ and, jumping out without paying, I blended into the crowd. As Major X threw the cabby onto the bus driver with a perfectly aimed commando elbow, grabbed the young man’s briefcase and wrenched it opened, rifling through the papers inside and scattering them in the wind. Letting him go, he whirled round in a fury, fell on a blind man trying to get through the crowd and started beating him with his stick, without stopping to think that he might have been a rather unlikely suspect, whereupon several burly proles who’d been watching him unsympathetically finally made up their minds to lynch him. After a few random punches, a perfect circle opened up miraculously amid the tangle of bodies, at the precise centre of which stood the isolated Major X, one straight, sleeveless arm brandishing a 9mm with which he speedily opened a passageway through the crowd and walked away down the busy pavement without anyone following him. Except me, of course.

Between the Garrahan hospital and Calle Caseros he stopped at a phone booth, and I went and stood right behind him, trying not to rustle the papers. He didn’t turn round the whole time. He dialled a number, which was engaged twice before he got through. I knew that number.

‘Hugo. Hugo. They’re here, they’re already in our midst. Disguised as headcases, camouflaged under the bedclothes, on the buses … They robbed me, Hugo, they’ve got it, it’s in their hands. If we don’t get it back, we’re done for, do you realise! Put everybody on alert! … Yes, yes, fifteen minutes at most … We’ll discuss it later, your phone must be tapped too.’

He hung up and, stepping up to the phone, I dialled any old number — I had no tokens — until he was at a safe distance. I tailed him for two blocks as far as the first stop — no one there — and went and stood close by him again. What would I do if the bus came? If I got on with him and I had nothing to pay with, the fuss might draw his attention to me. Likewise, I didn’t fancy scrounging the few cents I needed off him. Keenly aware of how close I was to losing him, I fell back half a block and crossed to the opposite pavement, where I stopped an old woman coming out of a shop with some milk and a little pop-eyed tyke. There was only one spiel I could hand her, naturally: