‘Get out.’
I don’t remember exactly what Verraco’s reply was; something about a court martial I suppose, because Sergio uncoiled like a spring — a spring it had taken him six hours, or sixty days, to wind up — and in a flash was pounding his knee into Verraco’s groin, bashing his head in with the cupboard door and then dragging him out into the corridor by the hair, screaming at him wildly ‘Get out! Get out of my fucking room! Get out of my room!’ It took three English to grab him and give him a shot to calm him down, and Verraco wound up with five stitches in the head (which he later claimed to be war wounds). Luckily for Sergio, it all happened so fast that Verraco didn’t get a proper look at his face.
Ignacio watched him trudge back to the tea- and tobacco-coloured lozenges of the ballroom carpet, limping and bowed, but undaunted: rather than ask permission, he started kicking the slumped conscripts, waking them from their first deep, dry, sheltered sleep in sixty days (the ship’s coffee had come with something more than milk in it), braying for them to let him through, ‘Fucking dogs, the holiday’ll soon be over for you lot,’ and if a guard hadn’t intervened, half-doped as they were, they’d have thrown him overboard. Then he started shouting for someone who could speak English and, when he found him (some kid from Hurlingham that Ignacio had been talking to), he ordered him to act as interpreter and parley with the enemy. When the kid got back (without Verraco, the English finally realising they had to keep him in a safe place till journey’s end), he told Ignacio what he’d begun to translate, as far as modesty allowed: Verraco was apparently convinced that the surrender authorised the English to enter Buenos Aires and wanted to offer the friendly troops his services for whatever they might need. ‘I shall be your guide in Argentina,’ he made him translate to the English sergeant, who squinted at him befuddled. ‘I take you to the best grills and cabarets, Argentine meat, best in the world. You think you had enough of Argentine bombshells in this war? Wait till you see the ones we have back home,’ he said, obsequiously winking the eye that Sergio hadn’t shut for him, and, when he saw the Saxon’s indifferent expression, he turned to his interpreter and said, ‘Did you translate it right? Did you? Did he get that bit about the birds?’ But his insistence on the bombshells must have been his downfall, because the sergeant collared Verraco by his ear and frog-marched him off for interrogation.
I saluted a succession of familiar faces and asked them where he was. ‘He’ll be right here,’ they told me. ‘He was expecting you; he does nothing but talk about this video game. You brought it, didn’t you? Siddown, siddown. Want some coffee?’
They were watching a video entitled You Choose, designed to seduce the Kelpers into accepting Argentinian sovereignty. The bit I saw alternated images of local tourist spots like the Iguazú Falls, the Rambla and its sea-lions in January (‘Mar del Plata: Happy City’ read the subtitles), the Casa de Tucumán and San Carlos de Bariloche, interspersed with grey shots of the Liverpool Docks, the stony beaches of Brighton, abandoned coal mines in Newcastle and the slums of the East End under a winter fog. Next, exaggeratedly carefree, blonde-haired Argentinian families shopping in a mall, visiting the zoo, buying balloons for children in squares … against a multi-racial mass of squatters shooting up among piles of garbage, teeming Pakistani, Caribbean or Arabic quarters, punk parties where shorn teenage girls with tits poking through the holes in their corsets inserted tongues pierced like shower curtains into the ears of swastika-skulled skinheads (‘This could be your daughter,’ read the subtitle). A mellifluous radio voice crooned seductively: ‘Argentina, land of promise … where natural beauties by the hand of man have achieved at all harmony … the better country of the world can be yours …’
I approached the desk of Mr George Turner, the Kelper they kept as a consultant. On 2nd April the troops entering Stanley had found him waving a solitary little light-blue-and-white flag, and from then on he’d become the spokesperson for the conciliatory position. His attempts at rapprochement with the Argentinian authorities over those two months and a half hadn’t exactly paid off, unless you count being kicked out as a collaborator after the defeat. After bobbing along on the seas of exile, he eventually landed up in this dark cellar, where his first-hand knowledge of the geographic, demographic and economic ins-and-outs of the Islands had at first been deemed of prime importance. ‘If we’d had a man like this around when we planned the campaign in ’82,’ Verraco had announced with one arm around his shoulder, ‘things would have turned out very differently.’ The initial enthusiasm soon gave way to mere interest, then tolerance, and finally exasperation and ostracism. Turner knew practically everything about the Islands, but after the first two months there wasn’t much else to tell, and he inevitably began to fall into repetition, exaggeration and irrelevant anecdote. He became more of an anachronism with every passing year, and, little by little, his information and opinions acquired that sickly sepia tone that advertises how far the political has become the merely historical. George, however, hadn’t stopped dreaming, and few people defended the idea of recapture by any possible means the way he did: it was his only ticket back to the Islands. Macerating in Argentinian Scotch from breakfast time, his nostalgia would grow with the passing hours, until afternoon found him hugging the empty bottle, making a vaguely masturbatory movement with his hands that no one understood, until a passing native Patagonian from Chubut identified it as the action of shearing sheep, and they frequently had to take him back up to the surface and hail a taxi at the mall’s exit to whisk him off to his bedsit in Constitución. He hadn’t seen me for two years but greeted me effusively all the same: ever since my departure he hadn’t had a chance to hold such fluent conversations in his native English, and — lying through my teeth — I told him he was looking well, though, after such prolonged confinement away from his natural habitat, he was deteriorating like a zoo animaclass="underline" the once rosy red chops now pallid and bony, the vigorous, blonde hair now thatching his head with dimmed and dull tufts of dead straw. He poured me a half-glass from the almost empty bottle and started spouting drivel in his native tongue:
‘You might find it difficult to imagine now, my Argie friend’ — that’s what he called us — ‘but in my day the Islands were one of the quietest, most peaceful places to live on earth. Before the war it was all peace and friendship: life may sometimes have been boring, but it was simple. Our time was divided equally between work, looking after the vegetable patch and healthy recreation with family and neighbours: cutting and drying the peat, playing darts in the pub, going to the cinema in the church or having dinner at a friend’s house. True, there was a shortage of women and more than one suitor left the dance floor with a handful of teeth for not having respected the dance cards, and it wasn’t uncommon for us, well into the fifth pint, to burst into the ladies and grab a handful of whatever was on offer, but sometimes young English misses would come over with temporary contracts, and then we had a right old time, us Stanley lads did, trailing down the street after them like dogs on heat. I remember one,’ he said smiling glassily, a dribble of saliva trickling from the corner of his slack lips, ‘a secretary of the Falkland Islands Company, who used to go bathing in the sea off the company dock in summer. But the interesting thing was that she did it in her birthday suit,’ he said, winking a tearful eye at me, ‘and at that time of day — noon — all work in town would stop and the neighbouring piers were in danger of collapsing under the weight of the spectators. Until the local women, guided by our invaluable pastor, the Reverend Angus Mothbite, decided to put an end to the spectacle by removing the pier’s ladder while the unprejudiced and unprepared young woman waved her arms about vigorously in the icy waters of the bay. Her teeth were still chattering a week later when she boarded the plane. By the way,’ he went on, ‘did I tell you the one about the “nice girl” who serviced twenty men in one night? Before the war, the men used to get back from the shearing a little … “charged up”, if you get my drift,’ and he made an obscene gesture I couldn’t help nodding to. ‘It reminds me of a joke my friend Stephen “Hogpen” Bullock used to telclass="underline" why are pansies more sensitive to the solitude of country life?’ Then, without waiting for a reply from my already cramped smile of friendly interrogation, he said, ‘Because it’s always easier to bugger a ram than get buggered by one,’ he exploded, spraying Scotch like a harpooned whale spouting, and immediately pulling himself together: ‘Now that’s something you never saw among us; our community was safe from the moral corruption that afflicts the rest of the world. No homosexuals, no drug addicts, no communists (we used to carefully question every Polack who tried to desert to make sure they weren’t double agents), and — as you’ll have confirmed during your I hope pleasant stay in our midst — no colonial races. A few English tourists used to come and visit, not to discover the exoticism of the southern seas, but to regain the taste and smell of the England of their grandparents, now irretrievably lost. Anyway, to get back to our story, there are thirty men in the queue, and the one who goes first, well-known in the Islands for his virility, goes to the back of the queue and at dawn, when it’s his turn again, the girl turns him away in a huff: “What do you think I am? A whore?”’ he concluded and went as red as a pillar box with laughter. ‘I remember you as a polite, cultured young man, different from the insensitive rabble I’m surrounded by, which is why I’m trusting you with these vignettes of idyllic life in the Falklands …’ (the Islands’ old name used to slip out whenever he got sloshed). ‘Right now I’d be in the pub with friends, reminiscing about last year’s February celebrations. Have I told you about the February festivities, dear boy?’ he asked, the words floating in the aspic of his voice, and it was no use telling him he had — several times and in a wealth of detail. ‘The February celebrations are held at the end of the shearing and last for a week, and the farms fill with guests sleeping ten or twenty to a room. No coincidence then that most of us Islanders are born in November! The preparations get under way six weeks beforehand: the women make their preserves and puddings, and the men train their animals. We have country horse-races, sheepdog trials, tests of horsemanship, bull-riding, sack races, pillow fights … and the women have to catch a cock! They yomp in from the four corners of the camp to take part. And the dances! Every night there’s fox-trotting, waltzing, barn-dancing … even pop music performed by our local Beatles group: Agatha Kristie.’ (‘Just as well we lost,’ a passing orderly whispered to me and immediately dodged the rubber I shot at him.) ‘Ah, the last one I went to,’ he said, resting a hand on my shoulder so as not to fall over. ‘One of them got up on the dinner table, like that hippie film they sometimes show on cable — have you seen it? — and started dancing, and we had to whack him in the shins with a leg of roast lamb to get him down. And in the middle of the Scotch dancing someone let this huge pig loose on the dance floor! You should have seen the women’s faces! Terrified, the pig crapped all over the floor and people kept slipping and falling in the shit! Mrs Merryweather broke her hip and we’ve been calling her “the lame sow” ever since! Died recently she did,’ he said, downing another glass of Scotch to replenish his tear ducts. ‘If there’s one thing that’s never been lacking in our Islands, it’s good, clean fun,’ he went on and started giving me a detailed account of Friday nights on the town, ‘… five men to each woman, sometimes not even that, and then we’d end up dancing with each other …’