‘Let’s be realistic,’ said Tomás. ‘The logical thing would have been to invade Chile first. A real country, I dunno. Meet other people, another culture, know what I mean? Go out to bars, restaurants … Go dancing at the weekend. There are some really pretty Chilean girls.’
‘And the fruit!’ piped up Ignacio, who only ever did so when he was confident he wasn’t contradicting anyone. ‘Have you seen the fruit in Chile? The size of the peaches! And it’s not frozen.’
‘Yeah, right. Chile’s something else,’ I said.
‘And anyway, we’d definitely beat them,’ added Tomás.
‘We missed a gilt-edged opportunity there. Thanks to that old meddler, the Pope,’ Sergio concluded.
Sergio was passionate about alternative history. He pored over every event with an obsessive attention to detail, always looking for the knot that might have led to things turning out differently, always taking a different path from history’s at every fork. It was easy to spot unsigned articles by him in the ex-combatants’ magazine because seven out of every ten verbs were in the conditional. He claimed to be working on a book called A Thousand Different Outcomes to the Malvinas War, but he’d never shown a single page to anyone, perhaps fearing that, if he did, one ending or another would become fixed for ever. I’d never come across anything like that in the English bibliography on the Malvinas war … The winners, it seems, reach their destination believing they’ve walked a straight line to victory; it’s us losers who are always left to fret over the multiple possibilities of history.
Tomás, on the other hand, proceeded in rigorously retrospective fashion, projecting the film of Malvinas in reverse so that everything would be back the way it was in the early days of the campaign. The ten thousand prisoners were released from the ships and pelted back to the Islands’ capital, which they recaptured, pushing the English back, street by street, hill by hill, earth flying of its own accord to fill in the craters and repair the walls of the trenches, blood trickling back to the bodies of the wounded and the dead, who picked themselves up and returned to the fray, forcing the enemy to retreat to their ships and scuttle back to England arse first. Then all you had to do was stop the film to freeze the image one sunny day back in April 1982, when the Islands were ours again for ever and the enemy so distant that nobody really believed they existed. I glanced at Ignacio, who’d now started on about the landscape in the south of Chile without realising the rest of us had tired of the subject, and wondered how building his model had helped him to deal with the facts.
‘Going to Hugo’s birthday party on Saturday?’ Tomás asked me suddenly as Patán brought over the second round.
I loathed Hugo, but, since everyone else worshipped him, I tried not to let it show. I loathed his razor-back buzz-cut and the way he talked at the top of his voice and the weapons that lined the walls of the dinky apartment, which the big fella still shared with his mum, and most of all I loathed the way he deliberately and obscenely thrust his stumps out over his wheel-chair whenever he held forth about the commandos’ performance in the war, particularly if he spotted someone who wasn’t nodding vigorously enough at his categorical assertions. I said yes I was, definitely.
‘Besides, we’ve got something to celebrate.’
‘The sinking of the Sir Galahad?’ I asked innocently. As these months marked the tenth anniversary of everything, the list of things to celebrate was as long as your arm.
‘No,’ he said to me, pausing for dramatic effect. ‘They’ve found some pages from the Diaries of Major X. You’ll never guess which ones.’
‘No,’ I replied. It was my turn to play hard to get.
‘The full text of the Legend of the Cordobese Armadillo. You can imagine our reaction,’ Tomás went on. ‘The only version we had till now was Emilio’s and you know what that’s like: you can’t understand a word of it. We saw him not long ago when we went to visit Petete.’
‘He’s back in hospital again, isn’t he?’
‘Emilio? Never left.’
‘Petete.’
‘Oh. It’s standard practice.’ He finished his second and sat there staring through the whorls in his glass, training it around the bar like field-glasses. ‘If you do anything weird, and I mean anything, it’s off to the madhouse with you. You were in Malvinas.’
‘What happened?’
‘He’d apparently gone to the supermarket and the Korean at the till looked at him funny through those peepholes of eyes they’ve got, or asked him for something in Korean and Petete got it all wrong, nobody really knows, but anyway he dropped all his provisions and began backing away and pointing at him, shouting “Gurkha! Gurkha!” He ended up hiding behind the tinned-foods gondola, defending his position with cans of beer — he was even pulling the ring-pulls; he may be off his head but he never forgot his training — till the coppers came to take him away. He tried to explain to them that all the Koreans in Buenos Aires were actually Gurkhas in disguise preparing the third invasion and that they’d be sending commandos to silence him, but they carted him off anyway and kicked his sorry arse all the way to the Borda. It’s easier to write him off as a madman. One day, when we have a Korean president and they paint the Pink House yellow, they’ll remember. Didn’t you hear what Citatorio said? The Koreans are one of the lost tribes of Israel. Haven’t you noticed they’re like the Jews in everything! They always do well in business, they’re tight-fisted, they intermarry, they talk different so you can’t understand what they’re saying, they hire legitimate Argentinians to do the legwork …’
‘Yellow Jews. I never thought of that.’
‘Well, if there are Black Kikes …’
‘The Gurkhas too, eh?’ I muttered, tutting in disappointment. ‘You can’t trust anyone these days.’
‘The guile of the Serpent knows no bounds.’
I’d only ever seen a few odd pages of the legendary Diaries of Major X, recounting the mythical commando leader’s early days in Puerto Argentino; the new ones covered the first days of his stay on the Isla Gran Malvina, which we’d only had Emilio’s account of up until now, the sole member of the ‘phantom platoon’ to make it back to the mainland and an irreplaceable witness — if it weren’t for the bullet suspended in the jelly of his brain rendering anything he said quite unintelligible. In visit after endless visit before we finally gave up on him we salvaged vague and indecisive references to the unfathomable enigmas of the unexplored moorlands of the Isla Grande, supernatural apparitions, spectral battles and the story of a mysterious entity that started out as ‘Conqueror Caterpillar’ and subsequently fluctuated between ‘Consular Chatter Pillow’ and ‘Cantonese Armoured Killer’, before finally settling on the improbable but consensual ‘Cordobese Armadillo’. Here, at long last, was its legend.
The story began in 1806 during the first English invasion of Buenos Aires, when Sobremonte fled to Córdoba with the Viceregal treasure and hid it inside a stuffed Priodontes maximus of gigantic proportions, got up in heraldic fashion: an armadillo rampant. Incapable of recovering the city by force himself, the Spanish Viceroy offered to bribe the invaders with the contents of the beast, which he’d secretly had sent to Buenos Aires. But the very day the English laid their greedy hands on the treasure, Captain Liniers’s troops were landing at Quilmes and, with the aid of its valiant citizens, the city was recovered and the enemy captured. The treasure, however, had been stowed away and the ship carrying it soon made the windy waters of the River Plate. The vessel in question was the schooner Fortune, which, lacking the provisions and crew needed to undertake the long voyage to England, sailed instead to the first safe port of calclass="underline" the Malvinas Islands.