The ‘Argentina’s by 2000’ Division occupied a sort of enormous, brightly lit cave, where more than twenty people, impelled by the eight-year deadline, were feverishly working — or pretending to — on a variety of plans to regain the Islands. Between these walls, painted that government-issue canary yellow that, even fresh, looks thirty years old, on this synthetic, mustard-coloured carpet pocked with small black craters from cigarette ends, and studded here and there with smooth patches of greying chewing gum, under the mind-numbingly lethargic light in which several outdoor plants were doing their unenthusiastic best to survive, on the sturdy wrought-iron desks upholstered in liver-brown PVC that stood like colossi supporting the unstable accumulation of folders, minutes, memoranda, reports, correspondence, magazines, leaflets, circulars and press releases that, like the walls of a gorge, displayed the different geological eras of official activity, had been devised some of the most brilliant alternatives to the second and final military occupation of the Islands, which for now didn’t look very likely. Among other things, Verraco’s people had laid plans to kidnap Prince Charles and Lady Di, and demand a ransom of one island each (they had to cancel when they found out about their imminent divorce in Hello!), to subsidise the IRA for terrorist attacks on the Islands, to play England for them at Wembley … The main problem was the obduracy of the Islanders, with whom Verraco was obsessed. ‘I told Menéndez when we were there,’ he’d repeat to whoever would listen, and didn’t bat an eyelid when imagining a lowly captain giving it straight to a brigadier in the middle of wartime: ‘Let’s sort out the Kelpers the Argentinian way: leave one of them standing and he’ll start kicking up a fuss about the Islands being his. But no, the bloody fool took it into his head to protect them like some endangered species, pandas or dogos or whatever, next thing you know he’d be sticking ‘Save The Kelpers’ stickers all over the Island. And now those 1,500 bastards spitting on the barbecue of 30,000,000, ten times as rich as before the war, and it’s all thanks to us — we ended up doing them a favour.’
I’d wondered about that more than once myself: why in the whole war the very same milicos, who had, in their own back yard, perpetrated all the atrocities in the world catalogue and added a few new ones of their own devising, hadn’t committed a single one against the native Islanders. Presumably, they were tending to their international image, but it just didn’t add up — too rational. Maybe it was just that, if you’re going to commit atrocities, you need to see the other as an inferior, and the Kelpers were too White, Aryan and Anglo-Saxon for the Argentinian milicos to dare trample on them. Resigning himself to political negotiation, Verraco had succeeded in interesting the Foreign Ministry in a purchase-and-sale plan: a million dollars for every Kelper in return for their acceptance of Argentinian sovereignty. The scheme was quite advanced when word filtered through to the ex-combatant centres, who organised a demonstration with the slogan ‘The Blood We Shed Is Not For Sale’, which Verraco himself took part in so as not to be caught with his pants down. ‘Now it’ll be another eight years and we’ll be back to square one, and in the meantime the bastard Kelpers will be fucking like rabbits to increase their worth, while we end up spending ten billion instead of one and a half.’
The English, on the other hand, he got on much better with: it wasn’t the first time he’d negotiated with them. He’d begun as soon as the war was over, when the victors returned 4,700 prisoners to the mainland on the Canberra and Verraco managed to sneak a lift: when he saw the English at the dock separating the officers from the winding lines of prisoners to keep them on the Islands, he’d got hold of a conscript with a bandaged eye and, taking him to one side, made him remove his coat and jacket and bandage, and swap them for his officer’s uniform, and barged his way back into the line. When the others started yelling, ‘Oy, you bloody queue-jumper,’ he lifted the patch and hissed furiously, ‘I’m a commando, you bloody fools; we’re going to take this boat and restart the war.’ Once he was on board, he discovered that all the deluxe cabins were taken and he’d be sent to sleep on the ballroom carpet, but remembering that when it came to sleeping arrangements he was still an officer, he decided to slip off in search of a cabin.
Tomás, ‘El Gordo’ Tomás, had just undressed for the first time in two months and, standing barefoot on the miraculously hot floor of the bathroom, was doing his best to recognise the skinny guy staring back at him in the mirror: hair matted in rat’s tails, the sunken hollows of his face covered by the undergrowth of patchy beard, an enormous head floating above a puny body with skinny little child’s arms and washboard ribs. Twenty kilos lighter, ten years older. Confused, thinking it was someone else in the mirror, he turned round and only found the half-open door, the silence of the cabin, Sergio’s feet; Sergio had been lying there in full combat gear for six hours staring at the ceiling without standing up or changing position since they’d arrived. The blissful rush of the hot rain made him forget everything: he was back at home getting ready for Saturday night and, when a knock came at the door, he almost shouted ‘Sod off, Tits. I’ll be out in a minute’ at his sister. Stepping back into his identity as a POW, he wrapped himself in a towel — spongy, white, unimaginable — and went out to see who it was; Sergio hadn’t taken his eyes off the ceiling in spite of the hail of knocking. Whirling in came Verraco, the Tasmanian Devil incarnate. ‘You fucking queers!’ he yelled. ‘These are the soldiers of the Argentinian Army? Your comrades-in-arms died in the trenches and you’re perfuming yourself like a cheap slut! What’s wrong with you, tarting yourself up like that? Got a date with a nice little English, have we? That why they gave you this cabin, is it? Get out of my sight, before I …’
In spite of the uniform, Tomás realised he was an officer and was about to obey the order automatically when something occurred to him:
‘Hang on. Shouldn’t you still be on the Islands?’
Verraco lowered his voice, his weasel’s eyes darting everywhere.
‘Shhh. This is a secret mission. We’re going to take this ship and recapture the Islands. I’m the operation’s Commander-in-Chief and I need this cabin as a base,’ he said, eyeing the thick beige carpet that Tomás was standing on in his bare feet, and Sergio, without taking his eyes off the ceiling for a second or moving his lips any more than was necessary, said: