Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

12th July 1982

— The EEC accepts the terms of unconditional surrender. All European states are immediately

annexed as provinces of the Empire, with the exception of Spain, Italy and West Germany, whose federated status is recognised.

24th July 1982

— The wheat of the great Fatherland shall grow on land manured with the traitors’ ashes. When we complete the conquest of the world, the opponents will have to go into exile on the moon. Ha! We’ll see how well they manage to organise the anti-Argentinian campaign from there.

2nd August 1982

— Chrislam, the unity of Christianity and Islam, is now a fact and the days of the Zionist enemy are counted. We shall crush the head of the Serpent forever. South Africa is granted permission, as an allied nation, to invade India, Australia and New Zealand.

20th September 1982

— Ultimatum to the Soviet Union: it must withdraw all its troops from Eastern Europe.

21st September 1982

— Spring Day. The Soviets comply with the ultimatum and fall back to the Gates of Moscow. Reunified Europe celebrates its liberation.

23rd September 1982

— The Berlin Wall falls.

12th October 1982

— Columbus Day. Slavery is reintroduced across Africa. With the presence of the Holy Father, in a heart-felt ceremony in Saint Peter’s Cathedral, the Inquisition is reinstated.

25th October 1982

— Revolution in the USSR. Communist leaders are executed and the brand-new Russian Republic

applies to be formally annexed to the Empire as an associate state. Formal initiation of World Reorganisation Process.

This was as far as he’d got. The rest was palimpsestuous gibberish, a garbled transcription of Emilio’s garbled words. That’s it for me too, I thought, closing it. Life’s too short. As soon as I muster the strength to see them again, I’ll call Sergio or Tomás and tell them to take it with them. They’ll get far more out of it than I will.

Together with these papers there was a ‘Gloria Brand’ notebook with orange covers and a sun and Argentinian flag. How nostalgic, I thought. I opened it, noticing that only the first few pages were written in; the last annotation was dated only yesterday. Major X had clearly been a man of deep-seated habits.

6th April 1992

— I am working rain or shine on the transcript of my diary, like an archæologist extracting fragments of marble from the rubble to reconstruct an immaculate statue. When I have achieved this, when I have managed to refine the mad language of war into the pristine original utterance, I will have only to recite it to wipe away ten years of spurious reality with a stroke of the pen, abolish this grimace of fate, this wound in the mind of God through which the Divine Word bleeds into unworthy stammering. When that is done, the Islands shall fall into our hands under their own weight like fruit from a tree.

15th April 1992

— I force him to repeat each sentence ten, twenty times, until he has exhausted all the possibilities.

The very slightest chance of error is hateful and perhaps fatal. An approximate version, a copy, is of no use to me; it is the original, word for word, letter for letter, that I have to recover. I sometimes wish I possessed an instrument capable of piercing all that disturbed flesh and truly reaching the untouched diamond hidden within, yet … The goose that lays the golden eggs. Ha! Prudence. We shall not commit the sin of impatience. Two Islands. Left and right. Two wars. Defeat and victory. It is

that

simple …

The day is near at hand. Now they tell me the end of May. I hope I shall have finished by then.

26th May 1992

— Tomorrow the first stage of the plan will be complete. The curtains will open at the exact moment and all will see the body fall. If everything goes to plan, I shall, in short, have the necessary funds to finance the expedition.

27th May 1992

— Tonight is the big night. Hugo has found that soldier’s telephone number for me, the one apparently linked to the traitor Verraco. Tomorrow, at the latest, when the name of Felipe Félix is whispered into the ears of the tower’s owner, begins the next stage of the plan.

Can’t say I was surprised. I’d entered this nightmare with such effortlessness, walked its corridors and opened its doors with such familiarity that I’d felt part of it from the start. But it wasn’t just a feeling . Was Tamerlán right? Was this all an act of revenge by his old enemy Arturo Cuervo? If it was, Tamerlán had beaten him to it, and the spider that had woven this net so subtly around my client and his son had been caught up in his own web. It was the most reassuring explanation, but it didn’t reassure me. How, through whom, had Cuervo croaked my name to Tamerlán’s ears? How did he and his accomplices, whoever they were, intend to use me; or worse, how had they been using me so far?

There were too many unanswered questions, so to keep myself entertained I turned on the telly in the rather naïve hope that they’d found Cuervo and it was on the news. I switched to Telefé, then zapped to ATC during the adverts, but they’d just started and it was all politics and international news. I turned up the volume and went to the kitchen to make myself a coffee. I hadn’t had anything for dinner and couldn’t be arsed going out. I detached the Pizzaphone magnet from the boiler and took it to the phone. I turned down the thundering volume of the television several notches and dialled. Large Neapolitan with anchovies and pepperoni and — I deserved no less after a week of Borda food — two helpings of fainá … ‘What do you mean you have no fainá?’ I exclaimed, muttering damn American chains to myself, when I saw it on the screen, captioned below the image of a familiar façade:

FRESH

REVELATIONS

IN

TIE

CRIME

I dropped the receiver and hammered the volume button: ‘—veloped in mystery the murder of Dr Aldo Glans … aberrant sexual practices … scarfing … his male secretary …’ The images showed him (presumably) being escorted by police out of an unidentified building with a jacket over his head. Next they showed a photo of Dr Glans in the flesh, lamp-burnt and smiling, sporting one of his unmistakable shining satin nooses.

It took me less than five minutes to break into Clarín’s police files and check last week’s cases: gunned-down rowdies, confiscated drugs, rioting reformatories, stabbed lovers, abused children: the usual litany. The first one I found was dated 10th June: ‘SUSPECTS ARRESTED IN DELTA CRIME’ read the headline, and I skipped through it ‘… at first … asphyxia from submersion … absence of water in the lungs … the wife, Lucila Romero de Soria, and her lover … the little girl’s grandparents …’ Bastards, I thought, my eyes injected with tears, reliving the dog dripping with water, barking noiselessly at the empty river; they killed this one outright just so they wouldn’t have to make another boat trip. And the heart attack of that other guy … Oroño? That made four at least. And this, of course, was just the beginning. Cuervo hadn’t been an isolated case. From the very start, the monster had planned to kill all twenty-six witnesses one by one.

The answering machine message began with a Pink Floyd number that went on forever, then ‘You’re through to Sole, Malvina and Gloria’s. If you want to leave a message …’

‘Don’t stay at home!’ I shouted. ‘Get out of there now with the girls and call me from wherever you are; it’s Felipe …’ I hung up. What if they were inside, waiting for her? Now they knew I knew. What if they’d already been and I’d left a message for a corpse? There’d been nothing about Gloria and the girls in the papers, but what if they hadn’t found her yet? And the girls? Would they be capable of killing them too? What a stupid question. Of course they would. They denied themselves no luxury.