Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

The first shot rang out just as I found his knee, followed by a cataract of broken glass. The second sounded closer, and the glass, in my blindness, seemed to cascade into my ear. When he felt me, Tamerlán clung compulsively to me, like a drowning man to a bather only to drag him with him to the bottom like a lead weight.

‘What is it? What is it?’ he sighed.

My darkness had filled with its own ghosts.

‘The English,’ I replied idiotically.

The explosions were getting nearer and nearer, the thud of each detonation like the leg of the dinosaur as it climbed the mountainside and got wind of our fear to guide itself in the night. The last shot exploded in my ears, just as before the world had been blown to pieces in my eyes, and I heard the bullet whistle over us and shards of glass stuck to my face like stingers.

‘Are we interrupting something?’ came a shrill voice.

I opened my eyes. Framed by broken glass in the mouth of the long bullet-blown tunnel through the mirrors stood César Tamerlán looking at us mockingly. Behind him, with his usual wind-up-toy precision, Canal was removing an empty magazine and replacing it with a fully loaded one. He spotted my gun by the keyboard and gestured to César.

‘Keep an eye on them while I sort this out.’

He sat down in front of the screen. In seconds (but far longer than I’d have taken), he stopped the mirrors whirling. The city levelled off, the river and sky separated like oil and water, and assorted body parts assembled like the pieces of a doll. With the same ease he closed all the windows, bolted all the doors and trained a thousand spotlights on us. Exposed, Tamerlán let go his drowning embrace and pushed me away as if I’d been taking liberties with him.

‘Fausto, my son!’ he exclaimed with the eyes of a dazzled hare, looking in the direction of César. Shuffling on hands, feet and buttocks, I put a couple of metres between us.

‘Fausto my arse,’ the other replied, his knuckles white on the gun, luckily with the safety catch still on. ‘It’s me, César, understand? César! Your little Fausto is good and dead. Your little Fausto wanted to kill you and keep the lot.’

‘You’re mistaken, mein lieber Faust.’ Suddenly he was speaking German, tears pouring from his eyes, his hands outstretched to César who, shaken and bewildered, turned towards Canal.

‘What the fuck’s he saying?’

Gun resting on his crossed legs, swivelling to face us in the chair, Canal contemplated the scene with clinical interest.

‘That you suffered shell shock and think you’re your brother César. I knew it would come to this. It was only a question of time.’

‘Why don’t you explain to him …?’

‘It’s not worth it any more.’ He pointed the gun at Tamerlán, who was watching in silence on all fours. ‘Time for the next stage.’

César looked at him, then at his father. His voice shook when he spoke.

‘Now?’

Canal gave him a wan smile and pointed with his trimmed beard.

‘What better time. Look at him.’

‘Wait a second,’ said César eventually, looking again at Tamerlán when he was sure their eyes wouldn’t meet. ‘Before I do, I want him to understand what’s going down here. It won’t be any fun if he doesn’t understand. Thirty years this shit’s been building up. Or have you only just realised?’

‘We’ve talked about this.’

‘We’ve talked! And talked! That’s right! Every single day, two hours repeating the same thing at the wall while you stared at the ceiling! Till all the hatred turned into boredom, and back to the beginning the next day! No, I’ve waited long enough. Now I want it all.’

‘All right then. Go on. Treat yourself. Begin.’

‘Something to say to me, mein lieber Faust?’

‘Yes, you old fool, of course I’ve got something to say to you! I’ve got everything to say to you! A lifetime of stuff!’

‘Did you miss me?

‘I am not Fausto!’ He screamed so loud I thought he was going to spit blood. ‘I’m César! Won’t you ever see?’

‘César? César? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know any …’

‘See?’ the stranger exploded in Canal’s direction. ‘See what he does to me?’

‘We’re not getting anywhere like this,’ Canal opined.

Tamerlán looked up at us both from the floor. Then, with difficulty, he stood up straight and entered the cold cone of light from one of the dichroic lamps in the ceiling.

‘I had a son, Fausto, once. Your mother once had a son, the one you mentioned. It was her idea to bring you into the world. If you don’t like it now, you can go back where you came from. Don’t come complaining to me. If you want to be my son, my son’s name is Fausto.’

‘Shut up!’ howled César pointing the gun at his head. ‘Shut up! Shut up!’

‘And who’s going to make me? You?’

César looked at Canal again.

‘Make him shut up! Do something! He won’t even let me speak now! See what he’s like!’

‘I want to know what this ridiculous stunt is all about right now,’ Tamerlán began, staring him in the eye until he made him divert his furious gaze to the floor. ‘My son wanted to come back to me, didn’t he; he approached you for help, and you murdered him so you could keep the lot and kill me with grief. You sided with my worst enemy, you both tried to trick me with the fake diary. Didn’t you!’

César, disconcerted, looked at Canal. Canal just smiled and looked at me.

‘How do you know …?’ César began, and then he noticed Canal, and then me. ‘See?’ he said to Canal. ‘I told you that one would fuck us up.’

‘It was Cuervo’s idea to hire him, not mine. And you went along with it,’ the other stated flatly without defending himself.

‘You too, Canal? All these years of trusting in you, pouring out my most intimate secrets to you …’ Tamerlán began to chide him.

‘Precisely. It was starting to bore me.’

‘So what happened to the superman?’

Canal pointed to César with his open palm.

‘That one? He wouldn’t even pass for Supergirl.’

‘Give me that tape! Now!’ screeched César.

Canal produced a thick roll of duct tape and a pair of scissors, snipped off a length and stamped it over Tamerlán’s mouth, unwinding the rest several times round his head, neck and down to his wrists, which he made fast behind his back. Never had he looked more like a spider. He struck him once with the butt of his gun in the pit of his knee, and Tamerlán fell to his knees.

‘All yours,’ he said.

César entered Wonderland in a single bound.

‘All my life you never wanted me for anything but to compare me with Fausto and choose him over me. You made me think it was all my fault, but you thought everything I ever did was a fault because I did it. I was closer to Mummy because she protected me, but she was only playing along with you. She was the good cop, you were the bad cop. I once heard you shout at her that after Fausto she should only have given birth to girls. It didn’t matter to me if I was a boy or a girl. All I wanted was for you to hold me and carry me in your arms. Then Fausto suddenly disappears and from one day to the next you want me to start acting all butch. “I don’t want a mincing queen as a son!” you used to say while you abused me. If I at least thought it had given you some pleasure, but no, you only did it to humiliate yourself; I’d see it in your eyes afterwards: you despised yourself, you made yourself sick, you promised yourself this time was the last and then half a bottle of whisky and two or three grams of coke and there you were, back degrading yourself all over my body. Don’t make me do it, you’d shout, don’t make me do it, as if I were the one to blame! I never meant anything to you; I was just a diversion for you to despise yourself more! Then suddenly you want me to be like Fausto, like you! Take over the company, have children ! Can’t you see what a walking contradiction you are? Can’t you see I couldn’t give you what you wanted, Daddy? That even if I wanted to, even if I tried as hard as I could …?’