At that point I began to read with greater attention:
The Islands being in the hands of their rightful owners at the time, the ship anchored in a cove of the less carefully guarded Gran Malvina, where they hoped to make contact with English whalers and seal hunters plying those desolate shores. But they found nothing more than mounds of whale-bones and patches of wet ash, and, exhausted from their gruelling voyage, they decided to go ashore and take on supplies. Faced with scant prospects of success, the wild cattle having been wiped out by the seal-traders, they decided that half the crew would try to reach as far as Brazil, while the rest would remain on the island to guard the treasure, which couldn’t be risked on such a perilous voyage. Five men remained behind in the bay and survived all that summer on a diet of penguin eggs and oil, and the bitter flesh of gulls.
With the winter came scarcity of provisions, despair, ambition, and derangement. They had no way of knowing that the
Fortune
had sunk off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, but they must by then have begun to suspect it. The simple, unspoken conclusion must have passed through the minds of alclass="underline" people will believe the treasure went down with the ship; nobody, save myself and
the other four, is in possession of the truth. Two of them avoided a worse fate, inadvertently removing themselves from the scene: less enfeebled than the others by fever and scurvy, they set off one day along the shoreline in search of food and never came back.
The other three did not long endure. We know what happened to them from the diary kept by one of their party, a cabin boy barely sixteen years of age, who had never fully recovered from the burns he suffered in the retreat from Buenos Aires. He had become lost in its unfamiliar, identical-looking streets while fleeing from the boiling oil falling maddeningly from the rooftops, and wandered almost blind around the port for many hours slipping about in slicks of mud until he was picked up by one of the
Fortune
’s boats.
The party’s last days were inconceivable: towards the end it seems they began to worship the bristly shadow of the rampant armadillo projected by the fire on the walls of the shelter, its raised claws reaching out towards them like those of the Devil himself, promising to each in turn that only the presence of the other two prevented it yielding up its treasure to him.
We can only speculate as to what happened next; the cabin boy must have stopped writing after he had killed the other two and fled on foot (on an island of all places!), dragging the heavy armadillo stuffed with gold. Guided by the survivors of the wreck of the
Fortune
, the members of the belated rescue expedition came across his remains only some two hundred metres inland. He had eventually eaten the jewels in a last-ditch effort to
make the useless treasure his, and, poking their fingers between his ribs into the peat of his intestines, they recovered a few coins. For several days, they searched unsuccessfully for the rest of the treasure: in all probability, one of the Islands’ wolf-like foxes had made off with the armadillo’s hide and the jewels were lying at the bottom of its burrow somewhere. A long, well-organised search would clearly be needed to recover the armadillo and this could not be conducted in these conditions. And so it was that, thirty years later, the English invaded the Islands and drove out its rightful rulers.
I broke off from my reading to have a word with Sergio, who was on his fourth by now and speaking with furred tongue.
‘Seen this? It says it was because of the armadillo that the English occupied the Islands in 1833.’
‘Course,’ he replied. ‘Didn’t you know?’ There’s no surprising some folk, I thought to myself, and went back to my reading.
But all attempts to recover it were in vain. The most significant one was contemporary with the invasion. In 1833 and again in 1834, an English ship, the Beagle, visited the Islands, allegedly to chart its coastline. On board was a young naturalist who would later become famous for very different reasons: Charles Darwin.
In his Voyage of the Beagle, there is a plethora of evidence, from allusions to his never-specified ‘purpose’, to his lively interest in the behaviour of the Falklands wolf-like fox (especially its habit of approaching human encampments to steal food). Omission is sometimes the soundest of proofs, and his detailed description of the eastern island only makes conspicuous the total absence of references to the western one, the true goal of his secret mission. The world doubtless has cause to lament his failure: the heinous and misanthropic theory of evolution would never have been formulated by a man upon whom fortune and riches had smiled.
Since then attempts to recover the treasure have been as frequent as they have been fruitless. Interest in it goes beyond the merely materiaclass="underline" according to the legend, whoever recovers the armadillo and its contents will have a legitimate right over the Islands, and until that day the question of sovereignty cannot be settled. Like all legends, this last one has a ring of truth about it: according to calculations of its worth (a cargo of incalculable value just arrived from Peru was what sparked the invasion of 1806), the treasure alone would have been enough to tip the scales of the war in favour of its owner. The enemy’s interest in the western island — of almost zero strategic value — only points to the veracity of this legend, as does the sophisticated equipment they use to ‘detect mines’ in areas that our troops had never even set foot in. If after more than a century and a half they have been unsuccessful, it is because the Almighty has ruled that the Cordobese armadillo and its treasure are destined to return to the hands of their rightful owners.
I handed the pages back to Tomás. There was an argument on the boil, but I had no idea what about: the five shots of Scotch were starting to kick in. The voices sounded more and more remote, and mingled with the wailing of wind in cliffs and the melancholy lapping of waves on pebble beaches. The terrain had become slightly undulating, and the advance was frequently hampered by rocky outcrops and hidden crevices. Even so, I managed to reach the bathroom, the green pipes of whose urinal had calcareous outgrowths on them. Stalactites and stalagmites, I thought to myself. Another tourist attraction for Buenos Aires. When I got back to the table, which had drifted like an unmoored ship in my absence, Sergio was trying to explain to Ignacio, with the aid of a serviette, whose pitted surface perfectly mimicked the choppy waters of the Argentinian Sea, his specular theory about the war.
‘They’re identical, see?’ he explained. ‘The Isla Gran Malvina looks like the other one reflected in a mirror. It’s the same, but in reverse, get it?’ he yelled down his ear. ‘If we’d invaded it instead of Isla Soledad, everything would have been exactly the other way round. It would be our flag that waved over the peat bogs now. The Belgrano would be proudly plying the southern seas. The Task Force would be an underwater scrap heap. We were pursuing a mirage: it was the other island that was the real thing. We mistook the reflection for its object. The name itself announces it: “Great Malvina”. That should always have been our target! Major X always knew it.’
‘Still out there fighting the English, is he?’ I asked out of politeness. There was a gap between two chairs and I stretched my legs out between them to keep myself from sliding floor-wards. For a moment I imagined it was the San Carlos Strait and tried to stand still and not disturb the waters too much. Better make this the last one.