He and Sergio (Tomás was still upstairs on guard) filled me in and, although their voices came and went as if they were covering and uncovering my ears with cupped palms, I listened to them patiently. It had, after all, been their first confrontation with the English, and they’d done it for me.
‘They swore in Spanish,’ remarked Sergio, with more curiosity than suspicion.
‘Special commandos,’ I answered him. ‘You remember how they warned us about them in the Islands?’
The first maté flooded through my body like a transfusion. From a tin between her knees Gloria fed me biscuits, which I ate at first with difficulty, then greediness and soon desperation. In the intervals she handed the maté round to the others, who took the gourd from her hands with shy and grateful smiles.
‘Can you tell Tomás to come down,’ I exhaled, stuffed. ‘There’s no further danger of attack. Gloria, are my clothes around?’
She helped me get changed, as I could hardly stand up. The combat uniform ended up in a pile of olive green at my feet.
‘I’ve got some bad news for you,’ I announced when I had them all together. Sergio, Ignacio and Tomás looked at me in concern. ‘The aim of the English attack — Major X — he fell in the line of duty. He’d come to Buenos Aires to elicit support: they located him.’ I looked at Gloria out of the corner of my eye. The back of her neck lodged in the back of the sofa, she was smoking, her eyes lost somewhere in the ceiling. ‘It may be of some consolation to know that at least one of his murderers paid — the one you shot. They were the same ones who came here.’
The three of them now looked at Gloria who, only just catching on, sat up in the armchair to accept their condolences.
‘We didn’t know, Señora, our deepest sympathy,’ they muttered softly.
‘But there’s something else,’ I went on when the moment had passed. It was strange: we were all deadly serious, even Gloria. ‘He left you something. Gloria, there’s a bag in the girls’ room. I don’t know if you saw it.’
‘I’ll go and get it.’
I took out the still unmanageable wad of papers and stacked them on my knees. After I’d put them in some sort of order, I handed the sheaf to Tomás, who took it in both hands. The three of them looked at me without daring to ask.
‘Major X’s diaries,’ I told them. ‘From now on you’re going to be their custodians. It’s a big responsibility,’ I added, to confirm what I read in their eyes. ‘Everything that was ever said is true. They hold the secret of the war.’
Gloria and I got up to see them out. Before they left, Tomás pointed to the pile of clothes on the floor.
‘Take them,’ I answered. ‘Thanks for coming. Lads,’ I called to them when they reached the empty centre from where all roads departed, ‘there’s something I never said to you.’
‘What.’
‘Thanks for coming to get me from the Borda.’
The three of them answered me with a gesture of that’s what friends are for, and I stood there in the door frame until their backs vanished in the amateur Tetris of morning sun and shade. I closed the door. Gloria was sitting waiting for me at one end of the sofa, patting the cushion of the other end with an outstretched arm:
‘Spit it out.’
‘I’m wrecked.’
‘They almost killed me, they almost killed my girls. I can’t wait. I need to know now whether to thank you or to hate you. Come on, kiddo. You’ve already seen me do it ten days ago — a thousand years ago. You survive.’
‘Surviving’s shit.’
‘Tell me about it.’
I had no alternative then. I started with the day I first entered Tamerlán’s tower, or with the day the three cops brought me the draft to rejoin the army, there wasn’t much difference. As I went on, I realised the two stories had ended up merging into one like two rivers that join to form a third; or perhaps there’d only been one river all along and it was me who had encountered two separate stretches of it at two moments in my life without realising the water was the same. Gloria smoked the whole time, taking cigarette-long pauses between cigarettes; only from the desolate Zen garden of fags and ash that her almost-full packet had become towards the end did I have some idea of how long I’d been talking. She only got up once, to pee; I didn’t even do that and, apart from the odd twitch on her face in the parts where he appeared and smiles when it was about her or her daughters, and once when I choked up and couldn’t go on till she stretched out a hand to touch my knee with her fingertips, she never interrupted or said a word the whole time. I kept talking, the thread of my story guiding me almost blindly through the dark labyrinth of the last ten years of my life, feeling neither relieved nor liberated nor justified as I advanced, just sadder and tireder, and at the same time loath to finish; I remembered Ignacio and how he’d looked at me that night, standing beside his model, the day it had all started again. Now I was the one in his shoes, delaying the end for as long as possible, because I’d understood that when the words of my story had walked the last streets, when my weary feet had found the green-painted door opening at the centre of the mandala and, walking through it, led me to this sofa where I now sat, the circle would at last have closed and there would only be one thing left for me to do. Now I understood the feeling that had begun to flood through me from the first words of my story, the feeling, not white but browngreengrey that the others had become as the colour wheel spun faster and faster: it was the indefinable sadness of goodbye. Not in another ten years would I relive it to tell the sad story lived twice or add another twist to the Möbius strip that, weaving between two worlds intertwined like two facing mirrors, had ended up merely finding its own tail. Tempting fate, the traveller had tried to cross the bridge again and this time the verdict was to hang him.
‘I totally agree with you,’ said Gloria when she saw I’d finished. They were the first words she’d spoken since I’d begun.
‘What about?’
‘Let’s top ourselves. It’s the best thing.’
She leaped up and disappeared into the bedroom. I could hear her opening and shutting drawers. I sat there motionless, still wondering if I’d heard right. She came back with her two hands clenched into fists, which she stretched out to me, knuckles up.
‘Let’s give ourselves one last chance. Pick one.’
The tips of three of my fingers lightly tapped the back of her left hand. Turning it, she showed me her open palm on which, side by side, lay two yellow pills, rough-looking, like granite.
‘What are they?’
‘Cyanide. Ok? I’m open to suggestions.’
I felt a blow to the chest, violent, as if I’d been winded; when I inhaled, I felt my lungs fill with this new, innocent air as the skilled hands of relief caressed my startled heart, unknotting and smoothing my intestines. A languid sweetness invaded my limbs and I felt them fall, abandoning themselves to the weight of the world. Why not? Why not, after all? I’d been weighing up the options all these years, but in none of them had it ever occurred to me that I could do it with someone else. Maybe that was why I’d never really made up my mind. If I’d had an opportunity like this, I wouldn’t have waited so long. I started to open my mouth.
‘No, not here. Let’s go to the bedroom. These things should be done properly.’
The bed was unmade and full of crumbs in the folds in the sheets. Stockings, knickers, bras and T-shirts hung from various angles of the furnishings as if they’d recently rained from the ceiling.
‘Imagine if somebody found our bodies in this mess. How embarrassing.’ Gloria flitted about, manœuvring between the narrow spaces, lightly swiping the garments from their haphazard perches, and finally straightened the sheets and the blue quilt. I sat down on the edge of the bed.