Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘How did it happen?’ I asked the girl.

‘A car. It was parked over there with the engine running and two men inside. I remember it because it had a twisted bumper on this side. It pulled out as he crossed, gored him like a bull it did.’

‘How beautiful the city looks from this angle,’ Palomeque was saying to no one in particular. ‘You know, I used to look at them every day, but I don’t think I’ve ever really seen them until today. You can only appreciate them properly from down here. Can you see them? They’re beautiful. The whole building rests on their shoulders and they never get tired. They’re so … white.’

‘They don’t support anything. They’re just decorations.’

‘Yes, but look how they strain. Look …’ he pointed and his body slumped backwards into my arms, his finger still pointing at the torso of the nearest colossus, from whose lap a white dove took flight and was sucked up into the blue. I laid him on the tarmac and slid his briefcase under his head. The flower-girl leaned over him and put a rose on his chest, taking care not to get blood on it. I walked away, with one of the ‘important papers’ stuck to my shoe for two or three steps, pushing aside the onlookers, who were now blocking the whole of Avenida Rivadavia, leaving the funeral oration to the chorus of bus and taxi horns and the wailing of the ambulance, which couldn’t get through for the traffic. This is no use, I told myself, supporting the weight of the gun in my jacket pocket from the outside. They’ve got the edge on me; I’ll always get there too late. I have to go straight to the root of the problem.

* * *

Something had happened to the tower since I was last there. The lawn that surrounded it looked not just unkempt but wild, as if the undergrowth from the nature reserve had worked its way in from below, and here and there were yellow patches, burned by frost and parched by lack of water. The marble base was now dingy-looking, a second marbling of dust and earth, scrawled on by the rain, superimposed over the first. Inside was no better. There was no one at the entrance to sign me in, no one in the enormous hall where my steps echoed like in an empty crypt. Of course, it was Sunday and there’s nothing deader and bleaker than an office building on a Sunday — even cemeteries are full of life by comparison — but, although the other times I’d been there when it was buzzing with activity, I still found it hard to believe that it was just down to general wear and tear, and that, polished and tarted up by an army of cleaners tomorrow, Monday, the tower would once again present a resplendent face to the world. There was no such army of cleaners in existence; there was nobody, and the exponential build-up of dirt and disorder was at least a week old. Footprints, papers, even gobs of spit rubbed in by anonymous feet had dulled the polish of the floor to such an extent that all it reflected of me was a vague, blurry form, featureless and subhuman, a degraded doppelgänger hanging upside down from my feet, like a dead pig on a butcher’s hook. The potted plants were as withered and dusty as in a drought, the cracked soil in their pots overflowing with old butt-ends and pebbly chewing gum; the mirrors on the walls were pocked with fly-droppings and it was repulsive to see yourself reflected in them. None of the lifts worked, so I resigned myself to making the laborious ascent into hell up the stairs, the gun in my left pocket feeling heavier with every step. At first, sure I’d find him there, I’d thought of going straight to Tamerlán’s house in San Isidro, but fortunately, I’d had the foresight to ring first. ‘He’s been in the tower since Friday,’ a dry, bad-tempered voice had answered, ‘look for him there.’ Evidently, I thought as I climbed floor after floor, which were in no better state than the ground floor, things at home weren’t going as they should either.

Somewhere around the fifteenth I heard laughter coming from one of the offices; snaking through the mirrors I could just see the reflection of two conjoined members of the cleaning staff, unmistakable in their open, mustard-coloured jackets and matching trousers, rolled up to their ankles. The woman — I guessed it was a woman from the naked thighs and the position — was moaning with a wet, grey floorcloth over her face; the man, however, noticed me — or my reflection — but, instead of standing and pulling his pants up over his hairy arse as you might have expected, he smiled mischievously at me and beckoned to me to come over, lifting a corner of the floorcloth to murmur something in the woman’s ear that made her take it off, let out an obscene cackle and also stare in my direction. I turned around clumsily, like a boy who’s just entered his parents’ bedroom at the wrong moment, bumping into a mop and knocking over a bucket of dirty water they’d left in the way. With one floor to go my nerves had filled my bladder so full that I plunged back into the hall of mirrors in search of the bathroom I’d shared with Marroné’s secretary, but the floor was covered in sticky patches of half-dried shit and I could go no further for retching. I could have pissed in any old corner, but I didn’t want to feel like part of the general degradation, so I looked for Marroné’s private bathroom. There was a light on and the unmended frosted-glass door was open. Sitting on the toilet, a square book with a white cover open on his lap, five gleaming ones piled by his left foot and one well-thumbed one by his right, Marroné just looked up and smiled at me, raised his thumb and went back to his reading. A mobile phone rested on the tallest pile; plastic pop bottles, and empty boxes of pizza and assorted delivery food spilled outwards from the bathroom floor towards the office. He lifted up the book for a second and I caught sight of the cover: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower . I tiptoed away reverently so as not to distract him and ended up going in a plant pot.

A reddish mist, the last glow of a dead sun, was still floating above the surface of the river by the time I reached the top floor. It was the only light there was in the succession of empty offices and, using it to guide me through the silhouettes of indistinct hulks, I reached Tamerlán’s office unimpeded. When the echoes of my cautious steps had died, a voice filled the twilit room.

‘That river,’ it rang out, ‘has seen more things than the whole succession of civilisations: geological cataclysms, ash clouds, mud slides; had to branch, a delta, to get through and rejoin its course. Colossal fish have plied his waters, reptiles with sabre teeth, amphibians that hauled themselves onto the land and left their tracks in the mud. The monkeys that came down from the northern jungles had to become flesh-eating hunters to avoid extinction on the awesome plain. Try to picture the moment: an evening not so different from this one, two or three million years ago. The river still unnamed, still unthought, merely felt and feared; not a river but a god. Mud, crabs, spiky grasses that cut like a knife. The figure of a monkey crouching in the undergrowth, clutching a bone, waiting for some piece of vermin to wander by and snap its spine and tear it to pieces with its peg-like teeth. Something more than a monkey. The first man. An Argentinian.’

A lighter flame flickered at the centre of the room, lighting up the whole desk as it bit into a sheet of paper and began to climb, warm and yellow, up its edges. Squatting naked on the glazed surface of his desk, his chin between his knees and buttocks, millimetres from the cold, glass surface, Tamerlán was holding the burning piece of paper in one hand and an open book in the other, his eyes contemplating it in intense perplexity, baring his teeth under curling lips to show the edges of the double row of teeth. He kept hold of the paper until the flame caught his fingers; only then did he drop it, still burning, into a large glass ashtray that brimmed with identical dead, black moths. Before the last orange tongue went out, he tore out several more pages and dropped them on it, putting his palms to the flame to warm them. It was very cold in there. Almost all the windows in the room were open and the wind from the river blew through it unchecked.