‘He swore never to return until he recovered them!’ Tomás interrupted, awakening from a momentary slumber. ‘The Isla Grande was never defeated. Menéndez only signed the surrender for the other one.’
‘Any news?’ I asked.
‘In March they apparently captured a jeep loaded with explosives and ammunition. And they’re holding two prisoners. English,’ he added. ‘Course we only hear rumours. No news agency — not even one of ours — would ever admit that there’s an Argentinian platoon out there in the Islands, still fighting ten years on. And the silly Brits can’t find them!’ he laughed in delight.
‘If only we had the complete diaries,’ murmured Sergio, his mind roving free across boundless fields of supposition.
‘Whoever gets hold of that diary,’ Tomás now mumbled as he stared into space, ‘will unearth the secret of the war. It holds the key to the future of the Islands, which is the future of Argentina. We have to prevent it falling into enemy hands at all costs.’
Ignacio was staring hard at the fraying shoelaces of his army-surplus boots, his lower lip drooping under the weight of four gins. It was as good a chance as any to try and get him to come with me.
‘Ignacio!’ I shouted in his ear. ‘Ignacio! The model!’
‘Nearly finished,’ he answered automatically.
‘No, we’ve got to get back before it gets too late.’
It was working. Worried by the thinly camouflaged threat in my innocent phrase, he made an effort to stand up.
‘Are you off? It’s only …’ Sergio looked at the clock on the wall and exclaimed ‘Titans of the Ring! It’s time for Titans! Patán, switch the telly on, will you!’
Patán reached up to the television and switched it on, while Ignacio sat back down and I saw the model recede into the distance as if from a toy plane that had just taken off from its runway.
We caught the end of the fight between The Mummy and Don Quixote, and spent the adverts settling down for the one we were all looking forward to: the bout between the English para and the Argentinian conscript.
Whistled, booed and bombarded with plastic bottles, the Englishman made his entrance, roaring at the stadium: Union Jack T-shirt and hooligan mask, bowler hat, pint mug sloshing … He stomped about the ring like Godzilla, swiping at the air and laughing with anticipated pleasure on discovering how weedy his adversary looked, who stood with his feet planted firmly at the centre of the ring. The Englishman towered above him, perhaps in emulation of the English Tower, and beat the flag on his chest and bellowed, pointing at the little man with the defiant expression as much as to say that making mincemeat of him would be a walk in the park. When he saw that the other man didn’t bat an eyelid, he roared and mocked some more, until the audience tired of him and shouted at him to just get on with it, let’s see what you’re made of. The Englishman’s first clumsy drop kick was inevitably dodged by the Argentinian conscript with a nimble flick of the waist — a mere shimmy — and the Englishman went flying into the ropes and toppled out of the ring under his own momentum. ‘Out, out, out,’ yelled the ecstatic audience, ‘we’ve thrown them out!’ But the Englishman realises the wee man isn’t such a pushover and, after squatting at the side of the ring, climbs back in toting an SRL rifle, and, paying little heed to the audience’s horrified cries, starts pounding the defenceless Argentinian soldier with the butt; he eventually goes down on the canvas under the impassive gaze of American referee Bob Whitehouse, who starts the count as if nothing out of the ordinary were taking place. Seven … eight … and always, just before the count of ten, when the stadium’s filled with howls of disapproval, comes the miracle. The Argentinian soldier, who looked to be unconscious, is suddenly flying through the air and landing with all his might on the Englishman’s expression of bestial delight … Yes, it’s the Argentinian commandos’ famous secret flying kick: the Pucará Punt! To a man the stadium rises to its feet, the screams threatening to blow the distended dome off and into the night! The Englishman staggers and, before he recovers his balance, another drop kick, and another, until once again he topples out of the ring! The Yank tries to hold the soldier back to give the Englishman a fighting chance to recover, but the Argentinian starts laying into the referee and knocks him out of the ring too! Then he tears off the canvas and the Malvinas Islands appear, emblazoned on the floor beneath! One foot on each island, he raises his fists and proclaims himself the victor. The stadium erupts with happiness the way it does every week.
‘So when do we get to see the video game?’ Sergio asked when we were finished celebrating.
‘Two or three days tops. The sooner I get to see the model, the better,’ I said to Ignacio, who was miles away and went ‘Eh?’
‘The model.’
‘Not much more to go, honest,’ he said, thinking I was complaining.
‘You’ve been telling us the same thing for ten years,’ Tomás chipped in. ‘And there’s always more to go. We were supposed to be able to use it. That’s why we’ve put up with you.’
Ignacio looked at him with the expression of a frightened child, then at Sergio and me, his head turning this way and that like a sparrow on the ground.
‘You’ve got to be patient, lads,’ he begged. ‘It isn’t ready yet. I want it to be perfect for the great day. And there are so many details. I’m working on it at night too.’ He began to calm down when he realised nobody was insisting, not so much because they were convinced, but because they’d heard it all before. ‘It’ll be better than the original, you’ll see,’ he concluded, smiling, realising he’d got away with it yet again.
* * *
His smile was the last thing I saw before the darkness of his cellar swallowed him up.
‘Bulb’s gone.’ His voice reached me over the noise of his feet taking two steps at a time before I’d even dared to set foot on the first. I was still groping my way down along the peeling wall when I heard him reach the bottom and flick the switch, filling the enormous chamber with the light of a sudden dawn.
Sometimes when, after a sleepless night rocked by the constant shuddering of the bombs, we’d see the first blue light of day from the hill washing across the implacable sky and gratefully drop dead for a measly hour’s sleep, we’d awaken later in the morning to see the same view that greeted me now, as if the ten intervening years had been just a passing dream of that brief hour of peace. Before my eyes, as I looked on from the top of the stairs, nestling between the smooth, stretched sheet of the bay and the semicircle of hills that surrounded it like plumped pillows, were dotted the two hundred-odd houses of the Islands’ ephemeral and eternal capital, the town of Puerto Argentino, as it might have looked to a passing gull one quiet late-April morning, when there were still no craters, no gutted buildings with their insides on view, no torn-up trees heralding the arrival of history in the town.
‘Whoa!’ I exclaimed. ‘It’s exactly the same.’
Ignacio turned round and smiled. He’d gone red.
‘Looking good, isn’t it,’ he said, gazing at it again, as if in its presence he were only allowed to take his eyes off it for a few brief seconds.
Descending the remaining stairs, I put my arm round his shoulder and once again we gazed upon it together. He’d reproduced the houses identically one by one, erecting walls of cardboard or glued matchsticks, painting them white or yellow, roofing them with aluminium from beer cans in blue, red or green. ‘Corrugated,’ he explained proudly, ‘with a fork.’ Between each garden — or rather, vegetable patch — he’d set up fences of foam rubber, which also grew in the tops of the town’s few trees — the only ones on the island. I could easily recognise the two churches, the dance hall, the post office, the Governor’s house … Tiny soldiers stood guard in defences camouflaged with gauze, dyed — as he eagerly pointed out — with coffee dregs and surrounded by snarls of wire knotted at regular intervals to simulate the barbs, or directed their still sceptical eyes at the virgin sky painted on the basement ceiling and walls, at the neat foxholes dug in the papier mâché hills, or from the snaking contour of the Avenida Ross and its three straight jetties to the calm, corrugated-nylon waters of the shipless bay. He’d managed to find jeeps and tanks and anti-aircraft cannon that looked almost identical to the originals, models of plastic or lead that he’d carefully hand-painted himself. A Lockheed Hercules, like the one that flew us to the Islands, was unloading military supplies at the southern tip of the airport, and on every hill, following either orders or routine, the conscripts were digging trenches: the Correntinos of R4 among the crags of Enriqueta and Dos Hermanas; the marine infantry on Tumbledown, William and Zapador; the R7 perched on the edges of Wireless Ridge and Longdon. It was just like being back in the Islands.