Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘Everything, please. Now lie down here. On your back, on your back, I’ve already told you your privates are quite safe.’

Once I’d made myself comfortable on the couch (I had to close my eyes to the brightness of the dichroic lamps), they tied my wrists, ankles and neck with adjustable leather and aluminium bands, and Canal knotted a length of rubber hose round my biceps. I tried not to watch him, but instead let my eyes drift upwards to my prone body, reflected full length in the whorehouse mirror of the ceiling. I had trouble recognising myself. I’d thinned over the last few days and my skin had gone saggy and yellowish. I’d lost a lot of hair too. I was looking at a mirror image of myself ten years back.

‘Clench your fist several times please and keep it clenched when I tell you.’

I obeyed. You always obey doctors. The jab was quick and precise; I barely felt it and it was over.

‘You’ll see how fast it takes effect,’ Canal said to César.

‘What effect does it have?’

‘Pain.’

First I felt cold. Only natural being naked with a south-easterly whistling in through the broken window. But this was a cold I’d never felt before, no, not even in the Islands, where your flesh ended up dying and falling off your body. It was as if millions of tiny splinters of ice had entered my pores all at once, freezing my flesh as they penetrated, without melting, then entering my guts, my bones, my heart. I was freezing up, freezing up like a corpse in the morgue, but not dying, my eyes froze solid in their orbits, my tongue on my palate; my guts hardened and cracked with unbearable cramps and my blood froze in my heart to a single block of red ice. Yet, even now, I could still move, see, scream …

‘The window! Close the window!’ I screamed. Speaking felt like chewing on barbed wire.

‘See?’ came the sound of Canal’s voice through the oceans of pain. ‘It’s already starting.’

The light seared through my eyelids into my retinas, as if I was being forced to stare at the sun with my eyes sewn open. I tried to wriggle free, but the straps cut into the soft flesh. Something — something immensely heavy — was crushing my chest. Deformed and monstrous from the unprecedented pain of looking, all I could see was my own jacket. I’d worn it over my naked skin hundreds of times, but its nylon lining was now fibreglass and scorched my skin like a phosphorus grenade in a full cave.

‘Get it off me! Please get it off me!’

‘Make up your mind, Félix. Are you hot or cold?’

With one tug they tore off the jacket and, with it, all my skin. I was now nothing but a flayed animal, skinned alive on the operating table, thrashing in its death throes, without even eyelids to block out the red-raw body stretched before the hugely bulging eyes. How could I still be alive! How! my brain screamed, spinning in a vortex of liquidiser blades, amid whose roar I could make out and understand every whirring word:

‘Know how it works? The drug does nothing to his body that his body isn’t doing to itself, all the time. It causes no special pain; it merely blocks the usual pain inhibitors. It is proof that pain is the essence of life, the basic condition of physical existence. The body is a ball of snakes writhing in constant agony. Everything in there operates in a constant state of unspeakable pain: heart beating without a second’s rest, joints grinding against each other, muscles stretched on the rack of bones, blood burning within, shit rotting in the intestines, neurons in permanent electro-shock. Germs, viruses and parasites hammering on all the doors, every day massacring the millions of cells that can barely keep them at bay, and those same cells, thrown into civil war, warring with other cells to see who keeps the lot, every tissue striving to be the cancer that devours all the rest. Billions of cells working desperately, howling in silence, writhing in the intolerable fire of life. The human body! A grill of bones with the flesh roasting on it till it chars, every jet of blood stoking the flames like kerosene. We survive day to day because we live anæsthetised, macerated in a soup of endogenous morphines. This is what happens when we neutralise them. And they ask me why I hate the body. A writhing worm cut in two, that’s what a feeling human being is. And that’s just when we aren’t doing anything to it. Just imagine when we do.’

‘Can I try?’

‘Wait. Watch me.’

Canal had pulled up a chair, its legs grating against the glazed floor.

‘Can you hear me, Félix?’

Some part of my body must have said yes.

‘Open one eye, Félix. I know it’s hard but you have to try. Can you see what I’m holding?’

As intense as sun on water, the light bounced off the wet steel, the curved glass, the translucent liquid inside it. The lethal dose! Yes, the lethal dose!

‘Morphine. All for you.’

My eyes must have rolled back wildly, my mouth must have drooled. Like a headless chicken’s, my body had a life of its own.

‘Not yet. First you’re going to answer a few questions for me.’

A thousand red-hot needles drove themselves into my skin from my lips to my groin, a carpet of pins unrolling down my body for people to trample on. Canal had blown on my skin, like someone blowing on a spoonful of soup.

‘Can I try?’ César put himself between the light and my face, a cloud of unspeakable relief.

‘Gently does it. He’s fragile.’

He twisted my ear, trying to rip it off at the root; I tried to bite his hand. My effort hurt more than the indignity he was inflicting on me.

‘Bitch!’

Canal laughed, shaken by short, dry chuckles like the tick-tock of a clock striking my skull.

‘And dangerous. Imagine the morphine, Félix, coursing through your body. No more pain. Nothing, no pain. Here it is, Félix. First question. How did Sr Tamerlán know the diary was false?’

‘I told you. It was an accident …’ Speaking was worse than anything.

‘No excuses. Information. How did you find out?’

‘I have the real one at home. Please, give me the morphine now and I swear to you …’

‘It’s your time, Félix. If you want to waste it like this …’ He applied the slightest of pressures to the piston, and the precious liquid began to flow thickly from the hollow, chamfered tip and slide down the straight steel cylinder.

‘ I stole it from Cuervo … Major X … but I told Tamerlán straight away, I told all of you. I didn’t know you were …’

‘Don’t try and second-guess me, Félix. You’re not here to please me, but to tell me what you know. Speak without thinking and let me be the judge. You remember our first session? The time has come to tell me your memories.’

I talked without stopping, I don’t know how long for, chewing over the filthy mess of the last two weeks of my life in the open sore of my mouth, vomiting it out every so often in sickening gobbets, choking on my loose teeth which, mixed with the words, lacerated my tongue and throat; and the more I talked, the more excruciating the pain became: it tore my organs from their places and with every retch I tried to expel them through my mouth; all my life it had wanted to escape from my body for good and ooze out over the couch and the floor. I talked until I didn’t know who I was, until much later than I would have stopped caring, until I was reduced to a voice that was nothing but one endless vibration of pain.

‘What got into you over the witnesses, Félix? First you tag them for death, then you want to save them? What for? To be God ?’

God, the trampled cow hanging from the hooks in the shed, lowing pathetically, jumps about in its death throes. The veiled globular eye of a slaughtered sheep, sky blue amid clouds of fat and pallid flesh, encompasses a world arched by the meridians of pain. Not God. Worse. Human.