Notes from the Underground

Armadillos dig, that’s what they do best, but the three-banded variety from South America — and anyone brought up on the Just So stories will know this already — can also curl up like a hedgehog, and protect its back with layers of leather armour- plating. So the heroes of Malvinas Requiem, a band of Argentine deserters who dig themselves an underground hiding-place from the horrors of the Falklands war, are bound to call themselves ‘dillos’. To convey the flavour of their fight for survival, as Brits grapple with Argies for control of the islands, there is one other fact, or fiction, about the armadillo that needs to be known. To get it to uncurl, according to a human dillo, ‘you grab its tail like a starting-handle, and shove your thumb up its arse. That forces the animal to relax, it retracts its claws and you can pull it out easy as pie.’

In the foreground of this fabulous, satirical, subterranean story is the crunching discomfort of fighting a war on the cold, windswept hillsides of the Falklands. Here, however, the campaign is seen from an Argentine perspective, where the Brits are efficient, well-paid, confident supermen eager to wipe out confused, hungry, half-trained peasant conscripts. Amid the carnage, the dillos live by getting food from the Argentines in exchange for kerosene and cigarettes. The kerosene and cigarettes they get from the British in exchange for information about Argentine positions. There is no overt morality except for the unspoken commentary provided by the image of the dillo with a thumb up its backside, an endlessly adaptable symbol for General Galtieri buggering up Argentina, inefficient officers screwing up helpless squaddies, and idiotic life messing up everyone.