… now, if nobody minds I’d like to tell a personal anecdote, an anecdote that no one knows about, not even Jorge Carrión, our author; absolutely no one. It took place in the summer of 2004, in July. I am a person who does not like to travel, as my friends well know; and yet in spite of this I made the error of going to Thailand for a month. (Something to point out: a few days before setting off I had begun taking some notes, creative notes, notes I thought of as quite strange, and I had no sense of where they would take me.)
4 days into this trip, my female companion and I finding ourselves in the northern city of Chiang Mai (incidentally, very Blade Runner-like in ambience: constant rain, tall buildings, market stalls in the street forming what look like shanty towns), on this fourth day, I was saying, a motorbike drove into us as we stepped out onto a pedestrian crossing that might or might not have been there. We were sent flying through the air. We watched as the guy on the bike drove away through one of those picture-postcard shanties. She came out of it with a few bumps and bruises, but I broke my hip, a diagnosis not given by the doctors there, who said there was nothing wrong with me, but via a number of phone calls to friends or family in Spain who were orthopaedic surgeons. They told me to rest and not move at all, just stay in bed, for our remaining 25 days in the country. So it goes, my life delimited to this hotel bed, a window with a view over the city, considerable heat, considerable amount of air conditioning, considerable pain, considerable number of pills, and around the bed bottles of water, the remote control for the TV, and little else. My girlfriend came and went, bringing food from nearby stalls while I gazed out the window, like in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Jimmy Stewart being brought food and magazines by Grace Kelly. My girlfriend didn’t bring me magazines, because I’d brought some with me, just in case, along with one or two books, books you never read at home but that, excited, stupidly, by the prospect of some new place, you think you might on holiday. Among the magazines I’d brought was the most recent issue of Lateral, a publication I’d written one or two articles for, and it had a ‘Summer Stories’ pull-out. Many of the writers were unfamiliar to me, but when one is a long way from home, and when the immediate future is uncertain, a kind of anxiety kicks in, one partially alleviated by familiar things, like, for instance, a magazine you bought at a newspaper stand in your own neighbourhood that you now look upon with special fondness. As you can imagine, for want of anything else to do, I read those stories in Lateral quite a few times, and I wrote a good deal too, picking up where I had left off with the previously mentioned notes I’d begun making in Spain. It invariably rained between 6 and 7 in the evening, while I read, watched special programmes on Fox dedicated to the history of surfing, and wrote.
There was one story, by a writer completely new to me, that really stood out: ‘Brasília is the Name of a Blind Cat’. Something drew me to the piece – in spite of the strangeness, the utter plainness of the prose. It described the writer going and staying with some friends in Brasília, and viewing the city from one of the windows in their house (or so I liked to imagine); though the writer did walk the streets, whenever he described anything it was like he was looking through a window, at a distance that was simultaneously tender and scientific; I felt very close to the writer in those moments. I, meanwhile, at my own window, carried on writing, working on the series of notes. It was also in these moments that I realized how happy convalescents are, who get to do nothing. And there was something gratifying in seeing the notes develop and begin to take shape. I ran out of paper and started writing on the little notepads you get next to phones in hotels, and in the margins of my books, and on napkins, and on our return plane tickets, and eventually, as we came to the end of our month there, I saw that I had a novel on my hands – which for reasons irrelevant to this current discussion I called Nocilla Dream, and which is now about to be published. On 28 July I was put on a plane. We left a lot of things in that room, some chewed pens, a short-sleeved orange shirt with BRUCE LEE: A RETROSPECTIVE written on it (I was annoyed), the good-looking Thai maid who came to make my bed each day, blushing all the while, and a couple of magazines, including that special issue of Lateral. Have any of you ever wondered what becomes of the things people leave behind in hotels?
Nocilla Lab Page 2