Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘English? Any of you? Anybody speak English?’

They take me to one side, where twenty Argentinians are huddled on the ground guarded by four or five English, who are sitting smoking on the rocks, their disjointed faces covered in mud and shoe polish and ash. Only one, who looks like a corporal or a sergeant, is standing, arguing with an impeccably uniformed Argentinian officer. Verraco.

‘Tell me what this arsehole wants before I lose my fucking rag,’ he tells me. I translate, partially.

‘My gun, tell him he can’t take my gun,’ Verraco begs without seeing me in his hysteria, looking all the while at the Englishman.

‘And why’s that?’ the Englishman asks after I repeat it to him.

‘He wants to know why?’

Verraco looks at me this time, then, still not recognising me, diverts his eyes, trying to take me aside and whisper.

‘Tell him that if I’m to maintain discipline among our men, that … that I’ll give it to him if they hold me separately, because they can’t leave me with you lo— with them unarmed, you understand, I’m an officer …’

I understand. The bastard’s terrified that, without his gun, we’ll kill him as soon as the English turn their backs. He’s right, I’ll be the first in line.

‘He says yes if you give him a blow job.’

The Englishman bursts out laughing and, still laughing, hits him in the balls with his rifle butt and brings him to his knees. Immediately he shoves the barrel of his SLR down Verraco’s œsophagus and puts his finger on the trigger. Verraco gags, eyes bulging.

‘Tell him what to do if he wants me to take my finger off the trigger.’

Verraco nods when I translate for him, at the top of my voice so that everyone can hear, and without hesitating he embarks on one of the most enthusiastic acts of fellatio you’ll ever see, while from the group on the ground comes a ripple of applause and shouts of ‘Go English! Shoot!’ He has to push him off with his boot to make him stop.

‘I’d like to shoot him. You can kill me afterwards,’ I hear someone say. The Englishman looks at me in astonishment, the smile wiped from his face, without saying a word. It was me who spoke.

‘That’s why he wanted to keep his gun,’ I say by way of explanation.

I don’t know if he understood; it would have been asking too much. With a gesture he indicates that I should join the other prisoners and, still looking at me every so often out of the corner of his eye, he leads Verraco away pushing and shoving him downhill.

Two English force us to take off our jackets, which we dump on a stack at one side — if only one could hollow out a den in the centre and curl up to sleep. One holds his nose; the other smiles wanly at his joke. Huddling against each other like sheep in the rain, too terrified to speak, our gazes slipping on things and always falling into empty space, we wait. Burying myself as deep as I can in the group, I hide my face among theirs at the first change of colour in the sky; for the first time I fear the coming of the light, of what it might show. At some point I fall asleep, but I go on dreaming the same thing, the reports of the artillery and the shouts of the wounded English and the silence of our men pass into my dreams, the cold easily pierces my scant sleeping flesh and, though my insides are ravaged by hunger, I can’t dream of food, the reality so devastating that sleep is limited to merely repeating it. Only the perspective changes: I can see the defeated heads sunk into elbows and hands, barely sticking out in the biting wind of the morning, I can see them from above, I can see my own among them and watch it with curiosity, one more in the huddled flock that the exhausted English shepherds, without lowering their weapons, stand watch over. A shake forces me back to my body and the mountain, created anew by the ashen light of the early morning, looms into view. A mud-covered Englishman, with eyes like distant depths of blue water in two pits of red earth, gestures to us to follow him. He points a finger: you, you and you. Left out, Chanino looks up in fright and I signal to him that I’ll be right back. We’re the only ones remaining from the forward positions, where the English took no prisoners, and if we’d known we’d never see each other again I suppose I’d have made my goodbye mean something. But there’s no way for me to know that I’m destined to return to the mainland unconscious in the hospital boat, nor that Chanino will get off the train taking him back to his home town at a station somewhere or other on the way — I never found out which — and hang himself in the ladies by mistake, with his civilian’s belt. It was when I found out almost a year later, when they bust me out of the Borda, that I realised: I was the only one left alive to tell the tale.

For all we know, he’s taking us to be executed, but despite it being four against one, it doesn’t occur to us to rebel or even to make a break for it: they know we’re utterly defeated. Stumbling in our laceless boots, we pass a row of bodies covered in blankets blackened with blood as it starts to seep through them. Judging by their boots, they’re English, killed before they had time to swap them no doubt. There are a lot of them, perhaps ten or twelve, although, as you have to count them by their legs, their numbers double and I get confused; anyway, I’m surprised and wonder whether it was us who killed any of them. We leave the caterpillar of corpses behind and start to climb. I recognise just enough of the terrain to realise that we’re heading straight back to our position. Two more English are waiting for us while guarding four Argentinians who have finished their work and are sitting down to rest. In one fairly flat, rock-free hollow there’s a square drawn with bayonets in the snow, and beside it, face down, they’ve piled the bodies we now have to bury. The brilliance of the first rays of sun stings our eyes, reflecting off the white crust that reaches to the edge of their ponchos and uniforms, halted there by the warmth — still enough to thaw it — from their bodies. We’re each given a shovel and a sign to start digging. Their spades are much better than ours: they don’t have that maddening hinge that absorbs half your momentum, but I have difficulty digging with my burnt hand even so, and by the third shovelful it’s red-raw. All the time I try to imagine we’re digging our own graves; I find it strangely calming. I recognise in the one digging beside me the face of Martín, who did his military service with me, and he recognises me too, but neither of us can say anything, not even with a gesture. I didn’t know he was over here too. A negative coincidence: two months on the same mountain and we never once run into each other. He’s weeping; he’s been weeping ever since we started digging, without any apparent sadness, as if digging and weeping go together naturally, and he doesn’t stop weeping as he digs. We dig for over an hour while the sun rises, blinding us as the snow catches fire. I think I fall asleep a couple of times with my eyes open, still digging. The hole is broader than it is deep and rather irregular owing to the stones that keep surfacing, when one of the English points at the pile and makes a hand gesture as if rolling tree-trunks.

The first one we turn over is Rubén. His quilted jacket is half open and the synthetic white stuffing emerges from the holes like some strange mould. His fists are clenched like a baby’s and one big toe pokes from a hole in his sock. I must have done something wrong at this point, because the Englishman on guard hits me in the cheek a couple of times with his rifle butt and I go back to my place, calmed by obedience. I’m bleeding quite badly but luckily he hasn’t broken any teeth. I think he’ll give us blankets to separate the dead, but no, we have to pile them up as they are to rot into one another. Under Rubén are the two Cordobans, Toto apparently untouched, as if death had come from the inside and out of his mouth in a beard of blood down to his neck. Rosendo on the other hand is unrecognisable; I can’t work out what’s happened to his face. Closing my eyes, I pull on his arms and repeat to myself he’s a box of ammunition, a mortar part, a heavy plank, until he’s resting face down. It’s more difficult to move Wally Walrus: he won’t roll and it takes four of us more than half an hour to accommodate him on top of the Cordobans. Then it’s the turn of the marine infantry, one a corporal who once caught me with some stolen food and ground my hand into the stones under his boot while he chewed away at it. I’d wanted him dead the whole war and, now my wish has been granted, I feel nothing, not because I feel sorry for him but because it could have been us instead of him: there was no punishment if this could happen as easily to Wally Walrus and Carlitos, to the marine and Rubén, to Verraco or me. They’d come to kill us all; the English bullets meted out no justice. The other marine had been caught by a phosphorus grenade, probably in his foxhole, and was carbonised like something left in the oven for hours. The last of the pile is Carlitos. I have to put him down, I’m shaking too much and, tripping over the other bodies, I start walking towards the English soldier. He trains his gun on me.