Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘Excuse me Señora, I’m a Malvinas veteran,’ I said, pointing at my pants, the only thing vaguely military in sight. ‘I got the bus here looking for work but when I told them I’d been in the Islands they told me to get lost, and I’d only brought enough for the outward journey …’

The old woman looked at me sympathetically and said with a smile of apology:

‘I’m a pensioner.’

Another 95 was approaching down 15 de Noviembre. Surely he won’t take this one will he, I thought, racing to the corner. This time the spiel came out all garbled, with me glancing over my shoulder the whole time at the approaching yellow beast, but the little pen-pusher, who I almost grabbed by the tie, didn’t believe a word, and I was about to suggest he feel the lump in my head when, grumbling, he pulled out three five-cent coins — not a red cent more! — and dropped them into my outstretched palm one by one without touching it. ‘Veterans! Two months! Do me a favour! Now we have to keep them for the rest of their lives,’ I heard him muttering as I ran for the bus, overflowing with passengers from the one that had crashed. Major X had climbed onto the running-board with ease, the people sticking out of the door like an upside-down bunch of bananas swiftly having made way for him as soon as they recognised who he was; but I didn’t have his advantage and had to bob alongside the bus for half a block before it left me behind in the street in a cloud of white smoke. A 50 and a 134 went past — no taxis — before the next 95, which was almost empty, which for some reason I expected would make us go faster, but the one in front must have been driving past the stops, because a mass of swearing passengers was waiting for us at each, slowing us down. As I scanned the streets and pavements desperately in case Major X had got off, we passed Independencia, Belgrano, Rivadavia and Corrientes, and I was just beginning to lose all hope when, four blocks ahead, I made out the broad yellow back of his 95, appearing and disappearing, broken up by other buses and delivery trucks. We caught up with it at the lights on Avenida Córdoba and our two buses sat there for a few seconds, side by side, the drivers leaning across to each other and saying the kind of daft things bus drivers say when they meet. Had Major X looked out of his window, he’d have seen me in profile half a metre away from him. My joy was as short-lived as the red light. The drivers waved each other goodbye and we pulled off down Pasteur at a rate of knots, soon leaving him several blocks behind. I turned round to a little old man with a toilet-brush moustache.

‘Can you lend me fifteen cents for the bus?’

‘You’re already on the bus,’ he opined.

‘I have to take another one.’

‘What’s wrong with this one?’

People who refuse to give are savvier than the ones who ask nowadays, I thought to myself, and tried the Malvinas trick on the girl on the other side of the aisle. It worked to perfection, and I pushed my way through to the back door as Major X’s 95 approached.

When I boarded it, I took less than a second to see through the compact mass of passengers that he wasn’t on it, and jumped off without buying a ticket. It had stopped on Avenida Las Heras and I’d last seen him at Avenida Córdoba: it would be impossible to track him down, however hard I scoured the blocks in between: Córdoba, Paraguay, Charcas, Santa Fe, Arenales, Beruti, Juncal, French … French and Uriburu. ‘Fifteen minutes at most,’ I remembered, feeling throughout my body the familiar, almost forgotten adrenaline rush of the triumphant hacker. Got you, you bastard; I know where you are.

At least there was a bar on the corner of Hugo’s block. Sitting down at a table with a view of his door and the two pesos the girl had given me, I ordered an espresso and settled down to wait. To while away the time I started flicking through Major X’s papers; I had two hours to read them with the eye that wasn’t looking out of the window and had just started to think I’d been wrong when out came the man himself, blinking in the light and striding with military gait towards Pueyrredón, which he crossed with his head bowed so low that he was almost run over by a taxi. He turned onto Agüero and began walking down towards Las Heras, stopping before the corner of Gutiérrez. He lived in one of those tacky, futuristic ’70s tower blocks with formica panels and acrylic bubbles, like something out of the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey , opposite a workers’ rotisserie exhaling its breath of endlessly spit-roast chickens at the pavement. From the door, I could see that his lift had stopped at the fourth floor. I looked at the polished brass ranks of doorbells: A, B, C, D, E, F, G. I’d have to narrow down the alternatives.

‘Sharpener. Anything for sharpening?’ I said in a high-pitched voice.

‘Yeah, my prick you dick to stick up your arse,’ answered the man in A, making me green with envy at the neatness of his reply; no one answered at B; at C a woman’s voice said ‘Yes, I’ll be right down’ and so on till the end. It had to be A or G. I went back to A.

‘“O cut over in twenty, sever: The Pulpe blashes the murderniced instilletoes of housewitch” translates as “October 27th: The Pope blesses the modernised installations of Auschwitz”, you dick.’

He swore at me again, this time less imaginatively. I was about to press G when a woman in a frilly apron appeared, holding two knives and a pair of scissors.

‘Where’s the sharpener?’

‘He left.’

‘But … wait a minute, I recognise your voice. You ’re the sharpener.’

‘Bike just stolen … grindstone, the works.’

‘And you dragged me all the way down here to tell me that?’

‘What do you expect me to sharpen them on? My teeth?’

Luckily, instead of going up to her floor she went to ring the caretaker’s bell, convinced it was all a plot to mug her; having the lift downstairs suited me fine. I rang G again and repeated the same paragraph. This time the voice that had answered said nothing in reply and, peering through the door, I saw the lift begin to climb; it stopped at the fourth. I got out of there, fast .

The rotisserie had its railings down, but the side door was open and, while I gave an evening order for twenty guests and gobbled down the meat pasties with which the jubilant owner kept egging me on (I stuffed down four, desperate, having forgotten how delicious food was), I saw him burst onto the street, beside himself, looking all around him. He ran to the corner, dived into a bar and a phone exchange, then looked in our direction and for a moment I panicked, despite the carrousel of dripping chickens that stood in the way. Finally, he just stood there outside the door to his building and, raising one fist at heaven, exclaimed in English to the sheer wall of balconies with their potted plants and their clothes-lines and their parrot cages:

‘I get you suns of the beaches! I get you!’

I realised then that he’d become pretty harmless.

I called Tamerlán from the phone exchange and gave him the exact address. Fortunately, as I had no money left for the bar and it was fucking freezing outside, they didn’t take more than half an hour. I stamped on the tiles to thaw out the soles of my espadrilles a little, telling myself it was all over: I’d done my duty like the star pupil and could go home at last. Whatever happened from now on was officially none of my business. I suppose what I was really waiting to see was the two of them marching briskly out with Major X sandwiched between them like the sausage in a hot dog, the barrels of their guns for toothpicks to stop him slipping out. But what if they decided to stay up there all afternoon, the three of them chatting, swapping stories? They might know each other from their truncheon and hood days for all I knew. What I didn’t expect was to see Tamerlán’s two goons come out laden with towers of paper so high they could barely see over the top, tip them into the gaping boot of the Ford and set off in a cloud of white smoke. They hadn’t been in there more than fifteen minutes.