‘You too, Felipe …?’
‘You know there are people who’ve gone hungry to support you over this. But the idea was always to use it to plan the recovery. You’re perverting a collective project for purely personal ends.’
It was as easy and risk-free as making a child suffer.
‘How can you say that, Felipe?’ he said tearfully. ‘Look at us standing here together,’ he said, pointing at the barricade of old tyres and the blue-and-white house where we’d sometimes had to stand guard. Alongside Ignacio and myself were Sergio and Tomás, and we were eating something apparently and drinking maté all together, chatting and having a good time, hoping upon hope that the conversation would never end, as if we knew what was in store for us. ‘They just want to scare us. You’ll see, everything’ll sort itself out without a shot being fired,’ Tomás would repeat to us, world without end, like a mantra against the first screams falling from the sky, and we’d nod, confident that the mere repetition of sounds would be enough to stop time and make his words come true.
‘The tyres are good. How did you make them?’
He smiled proudly, wiping away a tear on his sleeve.
‘Polo mints and dirty fingers. And the best thing is you don’t need glue.’
‘Another display of Argentinian ingenuity,’ I acknowledged. ‘But you’re straying from the facts,’ I said, pointing at myself. ‘I was locked away with the radio all the time. They had me translating the BBC all day.’
‘What do you want me to do, put you inside where no one can see you? There’s no pleasing you bastards. Ramiro’s already driven me bonkers about putting a 12.7mm machine gun on Enriqueta, when he never actually set foot out of town or ever carried more than a twisted old FAL. Look, there he is, otherwise I’d have had to give him the money back. Ah well, I’ve no objections. Now at last we get to choose. That’s why I put us all together, Felipe. Even if you get annoyed with me and don’t want to see me anymore, here at least we’ll go on being friends forever,’ he said, and smiled in such a way that I couldn’t help being moved.
‘Actually, it looks great,’ I admitted, won over to his cause once again. ‘I’ll see if I can talk the lads into giving you an extension. It can’t be forever, mind,’ I warned him, but I think he only heard the first half. He was so desperate that every day gained savoured of eternity.
I hung around a long time, locating the vague and disembodied memories of ten years ago in the model’s network of precise distances and ratios, asking questions, recording details. I took with me a pile of books and magazines, staggering under their weight, and, at the top of the stairs, before I disappeared into the night with my burden, Ignacio, showing he had been listening till the end, shouted to me from below.
‘If you can’t persuade them,’ he said to me, ‘I’ve got another message for them.’
‘What?’ I shouted.
‘Tell them I shall defend my Islands whatever the cost may be. Tell them I shall never surrender.’
Chapter 3. THE MALVINAS STRIKE BACK
There was good news when I got home. Kevin’s game had arrived and, in my eagerness to try it out and see if it was any good, I dumped all Ignacio’s magazines and books on the floor and, bypassing the toilet, went and sat at the keyboard, still wearing my jacket, the last traces of alcohol neutralised by the onrush of adrenaline coursing through my veins.
The first few screens brought a knot of sheer pleasure to my throat, and I had to swallow hard several times before I got used to it. The game covered all the options of modern warfare, from the two World Wars and a hypothetical nuclear holocaust to the Gulf War — the real star I suppose, having been a war game before being an actual war. The most prestigious wars came ready-to-play: all you had to do was pick one from the menu, and away you went; but that wasn’t the best thing about the game. You could, for example, invent new wars — Argentina and the United States v England, say — selecting landscapes, uniforms and armaments from an apparently inexhaustible catalogue; or you could — and this nearly blew me away — change the rules of wars already fought: give the Bomb to the Germans, for example, or nuclear submarines to Argentina. I gave the catalogue of ready-made wars a quick glance: WWI, WWII, Korean, Seven Days, Vietnam, hypothetical invasion of Cuba, Global Nuclear Apocalypse, Nicaragua, Panama, the Gulf … The South Atlantic War wasn’t even named. The same with the armies: the only Latin Americans featured were the Cubans and the Sandinistas (an interchangeable option, with the same little bearded soldiers for both). There was nothing for it but to simulate our own by combining chunks of major wars, but before starting, I decided to try to get the hang of one from the menu.
Desert Storm. Just scrolling through the list of armaments and coordinating the main armies (I searched for the two frigates that Argentina sent to the Allies, but to no avail — the bloody ingrates) took me half an hour, but, once I had everything ready, it only took me a few minutes to bury the Iraqi cities in the desert sands. It was fun at first, then it just got monotonous: back to the old munch-munch Pacman routine; if you were lucky, a rogue Scud would pop up every now and then and be brought down by Patriots before you realised, or there’d be a building full of Kuwaitis to skirt around; the first one took me by surprise and I left no one standing, and the screen flashed up this banner: ‘Don’t be fooled by the sheets on their heads! They were your allies, Asshole! Wake up and watch out for the little flags!’ Only after several screens did the high command give me the go-ahead to launch a ground assault, and for the first time I made face-to-face contact with the enemy — at least for a few seconds, before burying them alive in their trenches with bulldozers that trundled back and forth like buggies on a day out at the beach.
‘We were right to choose prayer-time. They were all facing towards Mecca.’
‘Just look at that line of asses.’
‘Don’t forget the contraceptive, Mike. You know what these Mohammedans are like.’
With all those rifles and helmets and feet poking out of the landscape it reminded me of a sandpit in the local square after the kids have stopped playing soldiers and left half of them behind. I was shocked by the lack of sporting spirit, but you couldn’t deny it was practicaclass="underline" at least the Iraqi prisoners didn’t have to break their backs digging, the way we’d had to. I felt a little envious: just a few years later the first virtual war in history had been waiting for me and all I’d got were the trenches of 1914. On the other hand, I recalled in consolation, if virtual war had been possible in ’82, it would only have been virtual for the English: we’d have been landed with fighting on the side of reality — as usual.
So for the land battles I went for WWI, with its endless mud-filled trenches and fixed-bayonet infantry charges. I modernised the armaments a bit, of course, taking ours from the WWII menu and England’s from the Gulf War. I chose a landscape from the Russian front in ’44: there wasn’t so much snow and the terrain did fairly well; but the soldiers were wrapped too warm to pass for Argentinians. The Nicaraguans and Cubans on the other hand were just too summery-looking, many of them having Havanas and parrots on their shoulders — not to mention the beards. I searched and searched but in the end all I could come up with were Iraqis: they did very nicely, with their swarthy faces and their mid-season uniforms. I gave them a bit of a shake to get the sand off and they were ready for combat. All I needed now was our ships, but it was a doddle to download them from the WWII files, and, strangely moved, I keyed in the date — 1st April 1982 — and launched the invasion of the Islands. It must have been around nine at night.