Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

25th May 1992

— I am certain that Divine Providence has mediated in this encounter. Together we shall make Tamerlán pay for everything he has done, then we shall use his millions to organise the recovery of the Islands.

Fausto, whom I now love as my own son, the boy-child I could never have, has told me that, once he takes control of the company, he will take my surname. Only one obstacle stands in our way. Fausto’s long disappearance has meant that he is considered legally dead and it is his brother César who will inherit after his father’s death. We cannot see our plans delayed by legal complications that may take years, so Fausto will speak to his brother and try to convince him to join us: from what we know he has more affronts to wash away than all of us together. But perhaps he will put the ambition of inheriting everything before his desire for revenge. We shall see what happens at the meeting. We have arranged it for the day after tomorrow.

28th May 1992

— All is lost, all is lost! I saw him fall with my own eyes and carried his broken body in my arms, far away where they cannot touch it. But his death shall not be in vain. I shall confront the treacherous father and his murderous son, I shall make them destroy each other and then, then …

The writing stopped there. After that the exercise book offered nothing but the virginal white of blank pages. I snapped it shut.

‘Finished?’ he asked me.

‘Finished.’

He nodded as if to show he understood my silence, or assuming I understood his.

‘Now I need to find out what happened at the brothers’ meeting. It isn’t difficult to imagine, is it? Horrified at such a monstrous proposal, César defended his father and sent the traitor to his death. Then, knowing the grief could kill me, he unselfishly kept quiet, preferring humble silence to recognition at the expense of my pain. How unfair I’ve been on him. I feel so ashamed. I haven’t dared to ask him in case I can’t look him in the eye. Canal’s with him now. They’ll be along any moment and then … I’d like to love him now with all my heart, but it’s still weeping over Fausto, the fruit of my womb. Where did I go wrong? Everything is so confused inside me. I try to see, but all I see is me. My heart is … covered with mirrors.’

He’s caught a dose of Major X’s purple prose, I thought. I have to tell him before it’s too late.

‘It’s a fake,’ I said. ‘You’ve been sold a cheap soap.’

‘What?’ Some of the old fire returned to his eyes. ‘How can you …?’

‘I’ve got the real diary.’

‘And this one?’

‘It doesn’t say a word in mine about your son. Only that they found the perfect fall guy to take a dive out of the tower.’

‘And make me think it was Fausto.’

‘With the fake diary,’ I completed.

‘I want to see it. Now.’

He jumped down off the desk and walked towards me with one hand held out. Naked and upright, humanly erect, he was even more obscene than as a monkey.

‘We have to negotiate.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Félix. Give me that diary this minute.’

‘The tower’s empty. You’re alone and stripped to the bone, and I’ve got a gun. You don’t know where I’ve stashed it.’

‘What do you want.’

‘A piece of paper signed by you, saying you had those six witnesses killed. If you leave the rest alone, your confession will rot in a bank vault; one more dies and I’ll take it to the pol— the television,’ I said, correcting myself. ‘Oh, and let’s not forget. A cheque for eighty thousand dollars which, give or take the odd cent, is what you owe me.’

‘All right, Félix, if that’s how you think you’ll be able to sleep at night. You’ve gone all sentimental on me.’ He tore out the double page from the middle of the Gloria exercise book and snatched up a Mont Blanc from the accumulated flotsam on his desk. ‘What do you want me to put?’

‘Buenos Aires, 14th June 1992. I, Fausto Tamerlán the First, hereby …’

He scratched the blank page, swore, and shook the fountain pen several times over the paper without blotting it.

‘Why not write it on the computer?’ he suggested.

‘No use to me. It has to be …’ I said, checking my pockets for a biro. ‘Shit, I remember to bring a.45 and not a fucking … Haven’t you got any cartridges over there?’

He spanned the room sadly with his arms.

‘Behold the ruins of the century.’

I had to rifle through the drawers myself while he looked on in amusement. I found a broken Bic and, after rubbing it between my palms as if making fire and breathing on the tip for a while, drew the first little stroke of viscous blue ink.

‘Now put the names,’ I told him when we’d finished the introduction.

‘You think I know them by heart? Dictate them to me.’

He signed it and held it out to me with a tight-lipped smile. It was surprising how quickly practical matters had brought him out of his mystical delirium.’

‘Well. Shall we go?’

‘Like that?’

‘True. It might be cold outside. What about you?’ he said, fixing his eyes on my combat uniform as if he’d noticed it for the first time. You’re walking around dressed like that? You should be ashamed at your age. Did you come in a car?’

He was putting his first leg into his underpants when he remembered something.

‘Cuervo wasn’t acting alone, was he? Do you know who else …’

Then something strange began to happen. A distant murmur like the wind of an approaching storm through a wood came from the floors below. I looked down. Something was happening down in the bowels of the tower, as if the light were getting brighter and the visibility more complex at the same time. Whatever it was was climbing towards us, and with it, growing louder by the second, the rush of the wind. I looked at Tamerlán and the change in his features frightened me more than the uncertainty. His mouth hung open and his bulging eyes fixed themselves on the depths as if the worst creature to walk out of his nightmares were approaching, the dinosaur from world’s end. Only when there were six or seven floors left to go did I realise. As if obeying some powerful sorcery, the mirrors had started to turn and we would soon be the ones trapped at the point where we could see no one and everyone could see us.

Tamerlán had sat down on the glass, his arms and torso hanging down as if dripping through the trapezoidal gap between his crossed legs. From his flesh, which ran like melting wax, only the two weak, blue flames of his eyes rose to cast me a look of abject entreaty. I had to put my ear next to his mouth to hear his words, which were barely distinguishable from his breathing.

‘They can all see me. Everybody’s eyes …’

He was trying to cover himself with his big-boned arms, but there was no surface, no corner, no atom of air that didn’t reflect his sagging, naked body, multiplied millions of times in the mirrors that hemmed us in. It was then I realised that I hadn’t given him everything, that I had one last, futile sacrifice to lay at his feet. What he’d lost for ever in the dark labyrinths of the blood came back to him by the less tortuous paths of chance.

‘Don’t worry, Dad,’ I said, pronouncing my own sentence once more. ‘I won’t let them hurt you.’

I put the gun down next to the keyboard and began to surf; the seconds magically became hours now that I was back in my element. I knew they were coming for us, but even if they started up the lifts again and ran down the passageways, they couldn’t move as fast through their world as I through mine. I found the commands that controlled the mirrors almost immediately and introduced a random sequence that would turn windows into mirrors and mirrors into windows in one continuous, maddening braid throughout the tower. No sooner did it start than I had to close my eyes to stop myself falling off the chair and rolling about the floor vomiting, as in the worst, most terminal of binges: it was like being locked inside a kaleidoscope that was spinning at the speed of a centrifuge, caught in a jumble in which whirled the river, the city, the floors of the tower and my body parts, sliced and diced, as if my brain and all its contents had been thrown into a blender. Crawling on all fours, shouting out his name, I tried to rejoin Tamerlán, whom I’d lost in infinite space. What a bad trip, I thought as I dragged myself blindly along, bumping into pieces of furniture or columns, what a bad trip.