Time passed, 1 year and 9 months to be precise, when, having forgotten these things and having made a complete recovery, I get an email from someone who says he’s the writer now sitting on my left, one Jorge Carrión, though not how he came across me. He tells me he’s had a book published called The Compass, and would I be able to take part in the Palma launch, this launch, now. I say yes, and when the book arrives I find to my great surprise that this is the same writer whose Brasília short story kept me company at my Thai window, and the piece is actually included in the book, the book we’re launching right now, as well as the fact that it isn’t a short story but a description, a very faithful one, of some time spent by the writer in Brasília. And I thought then what a wonderful thing chance is, and that perhaps, just perhaps, simply to be alive entails a kind of overabundance, a glut…
… and this is the type of chance occurrence I mean, chance occurrences that, like paradoxes and entropy, are the fabric of life, and that run of days in Sardinia, 6 days to be precise, lazy beach days, that wholesale and to-scale reproduction of the childhood paradise had a sort of un-historied flavour, a lightness that came of having shucked off the tradition, the weighty Western backpack I’ve been talking about, seaside-bubble days which due to a kind of law of anti-symmetry seemed all the more eternal the longer the shadow grew of our real reason for being there, looming over our beach towels, lengthening across our pineapple juices, darkening our gin and tonics and our swims and the sex we were having, the thing that had taken us to that island, our mission, our Project, as we liked to call it, about which neither of us had so much as breathed a word since arriving, so one morning, after gorging ourselves on the buffet breakfast, one of us, I can’t remember which, flung the napkin resolutely aside and said, Time’s come, and later that morning I put what little luggage we’d brought in the back seat of the hire car, a Lancia, my leather suitcase, her wheelie one, and her plastic bag containing precisely 107 pairs of recently acquired knickers, and she kept the boot solely for the hard guitar case she’d brought to throw people off the scent, throw people off the scent in the sense that it didn’t have a guitar inside but in fact everything we needed for our Project, preparation for which had consumed and positioned us, to all intents and purposes, outside the world for the whole of the preceding year, a guitar case I’d given her some years before, though it had a guitar inside at that point, a black Les Paul with a white pickguard, a guitar she had never so much as picked up, never played a single chord on, having previously taken a fancy to it when, on a trip from Málaga to Madrid, we’d gone for a drive around Albacete and, stopping at a petrol station out in the middle of a desert of sorts, we heard guitar chords floating out of the little hut occupied by the pump attendant which only stopped when we gave 3 blasts of the horn, at which point a young guy emerged, though close-up he didn’t look so young, bowl haircut, pair of Adidas Campus, and he put the unleaded in for us with a curt, Fill her up?, and she had then gone to the bathroom and, coming by the hut, saw it, leaning up against a Peavey amplifier, black and gleaming in the strip of sunlight from the doorway, she thought it looked very lovely, and when she came back she asked the guy, What’s with the guitar?, and he answered, I make records, with supreme indifference, that was all he said, I make records, and before I had started the engine up again we heard the chords drifting out once more, and eventually they dissipated behind us in the distance, and she, donning her sunglasses [I believe it was on that trip that she bought them], said she wanted one, that was what she wanted for her next birthday, her 34th, and that she wanted a hard case for it, black and waterproof, ‘for when rockers go outside in the rain’ said the man in the shop where I eventually bought it, winking at me, and the interior was lined with purple imitation velvet, and it was the same case she had now, here, containing all the essentials for the Project, our Project, an out-and-out laboratory containing all the utensils we’d been selecting and even designing ourselves with utmost care over the course of the preceding winter, we were the binomial par excellence, the best two-seat sofa anyone could wish to own, and so, without having planned where we were going, still suffering the after-effects of the 6 chemically neutral, carefree days we’d spent, in technical terms flat days, productive, too, and days that were antithetical to our days to come, we set off, and we didn’t mind about this radical change of direction and style, it didn’t bother us, we’d read the Andy Warhol phrase about how it’s crazy to think of an artistic change of direction as a betrayal, and that you should be able to be an abstract artist one week, and a figurative or a pop artist the next – an idea we subscribed to wholeheartedly, as we did to the rest of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, for us the very pinnacle not just of integrity but of intellectual profundity, too, a work we considered to be on a par with Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique and Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, and we set off, weirdly, ambidextrously, we drove south, like Bonnie and Clyde drawing their guns, with a Project sweating inside two layers of darkness, breathing that darkness, the darkness inside the hard guitar case sheathed in the further darkness of a Lancia car boot, and this double image, this duplicity, while maddening to me had a soothing effect on her, and soon we found ourselves driving along mountain roads from which we could see the sea but not the point at which it met the land, a hot day, we were gaining altitude all the time but something inexplicable meant that the higher we went the less clear the view out to sea became, blurring the horizon, any ship masts, or indeed the coastline itself, while the vegetation, following the same law of 3’s or perhaps some other, knottier law, became increasingly shaggy but at the same time lower and more scrub-like, and the ground covered in rabbits and shot through with warrens, and at points we would crest what seemed to be the tops of hills but were in fact all part of one vast, high plateau, to all intents and purposes an infinite plateau, yet still we could hear the sea, I think it’s the wind, she said, and then the going became harder still, the road narrowing, tapering away in the direction of hills we’d ascend only, suddenly, to find ourselves coming down the other side, and though it was my first time in that place I felt as though I had seen it all before, and this repetitiveness (a figurative repetitiveness) somehow gave me confidence, and at the same time a certainty that my mind would never slip into the kind of extreme indolence that she and I had been prey to on other occasions because, I thought to myself, I’m the captain of this ship, if I stay strong nothing bad can happen to us, and we spent a couple of hours like this, seeing no houses or buildings of any kind, the landscape unprepossessing, nothing to see, until at one point the road dropped down quite suddenly and we found ourselves in a eucalyptus forest, which surely meant a campsite or some other mark of civilization would be near at hand, and we carried on descending, hairpin after hairpin, for another 10km, until the forest suddenly receded, giving way to some overgrown gardens with broken-down children’s swing sets, sandpits, toys and so on, and we came out in front of a metal barrier, the striped red and white sort that bars your way at borders and customs points, but rusted and broken down, flat across the ground, and the Lancia bounced a couple of times as we drove over it, her breasts bounced, too, not a trick of the light, they bounced, and we found ourselves on a straight stretch of road that led directly to the sea, an empty beach, and to our right along the coast we saw a cement building, very large, out of all foreseeable proportion, a great slab of a building with a rectangular foundation, prismatic, many-windowed, all the windows identical, a building which, when we caught sight of it on the horizon earlier that day, we took to signify rooms for rent and poor hotel food, a place in which to stop and do a logistical rethink of our Project, to make a few final touches and tie up loose ends, but when we came to the building we realized it was abandoned or, rather, in a state of dismantlement; some of the blinds were open, others broken, giving a view of the empty interior, a sunlit skeleton we were able to walk straight into, and part of a huge, graffiti-covered pane of glass still sto
od in the main entrance, giving back neither our reflections nor any sense of what was behind it, and the windows on the top floors had tongues of soot reaching up towards the roof, surely there had been a fire, a hyper-rational building filled with that same sweet-sarcophagus air you get in out-of-season beachside hotels, then she pointed out something written near the top of one of the side walls, CENTRO RICREATIVO STATALE, XVI E.F in large type, the Roman numerals denoting the 16th year since the inception of the fascist calendar, i.e. we understood that it was a recreational facility for the offspring of Mussolini, the altogether excessive square-footage as redolent of Platonic quietude and Chirico landscapes as the perverse vitality always on show in the exercise of absolute power, the overall effect a question of proportion or, rather, disproportion, and, months later, sitting in the bar on the same island to the south of Sardinia that greatly resembled one in the Azores, where we’d gone for food, to watch bits of paper rolling around between the cars on the pier, to watch the ships coming in, to nothing, minutes before the news of the cat’s death I had said something about proportionality in general, its importance in my own equilibrium, Maybe every unstable person is like that, I said, because of some measuring error, before confessing to a secret mania of mine, a mania that, in spite of our years of cohabitation, she had never so much as guessed at: that I need to sleep in beds that have the same proportions as an A4 piece of paper, with sides correspondingly scaled, It’s the only way to ensure one rests flatly, the only way to deflect nightmares, which are engendered by imbalances between the heights and widths of beds and, by extension, between everything else, and, I said, it’s also the only way I can write, and she laughed at this, in the bar on the island to the south of Sardinia that greatly resembled one in the Azores, because there were still another 2 minutes to go until our friend called to tell us about the cat’s death, we were still unaware, and while she was laughing my mind went back to a moment, months before, when I’d turned the key in the ignition of the hire car again and driven us away from that badly proportioned building, the ‘fascist building’ as it came to be known in our conversations, a building that, like all excessive things, exerted a telluric-aesthetic force on us that in turn made us want to forget it, a force that however turned out to be equal and opposite to our actual ability to do so, the same had happened to us years before with a different fascist edifice, a hotel in Cabo de Gata that was still under construction, right on the seashore, a stepped white building reaching like the prow of a beautiful and grounded ocean liner from the beach up into the terrain inland, the ideal place, clearly, to repair for a year in order to come up with a project like ours, in order to turn it over in our minds day and night, to the point of exhaustion, a place in which to create a project that would outdo the place itself for greatness though, sadly, it was due to be knocked down, owing to pressure from ecologists, a kind of universal law exists whereby all fascist phenomena, if they are to be destroyed, require another kind of fascism, equal in scale, this is the way of things, because there can be neither disputes nor war between two forces that are not idempotent, and we left behind that building erected for Mussolini’s pups, and we never did learn the reason for that old behemoth’s existence, its original function let alone its current-day one, we found no mention of it in any reference books or any of the local maps or history books, or even in any travel guides, nothing at all, though we also didn’t actually put that much into trying to unravel the mystery, and as we drove back down the road everything looked familiar, and that made it tolerable, and we turned onto a different road alongside which the landscape remained the same, as did the distant murmur of the ever-invisible sea, and which led us to an area with beaches similar to the one on which we’d spent our 6 childish days though the land here was more rugged, more dignified somehow, and I commented how the people on the beach looked like wax dolls, and it was here that she, unexpectedly, took the CD case out of her handbag, CD-R’s in the main, and minutes later we were listening to Broadcast, and she half-hummed along as we came by beach stalls and apartments whose balconies were strung with wet beachwear resembling national flags or micro-national flags, and then into a town where we stopped for water and fruit, just that, a mobile cinema had set up there and we saw they were showing a Disney movie that night, I don’t remember which [strange, I now think, never to have seen a Disney movie in my life], and after which, as soon as we had exited it, the landscape was as it had been before, as were we, and we asked ourselves if all the people lying on the beach and otherwise billeted in that town were, like us, looking for places to put on projects, and if they had thought the thing over so much that they’d decided just to stay there forever, maybe they could begin fishing the local waters and live off that, I thought, and then, again, as the voice of a female singer went round and round on the CD, we were hit once more by the unpleasant smell of rosemary and myrtle, 35°C in the shade, the sound – but only the sound – of the sea, we felt tired, the windows were open a crack and cool little gusts bathed our faces, our bruised-looking faces, she was wearing a bikini, a great two-piece she’d bought on a Sunday night in Las Vegas 2 years earlier, a two-piece that encapsulated her fascination for that city, a place she always referred to as ‘so provincial’: there’s always something to be bought and the shops stay open at all hours yet the moment you stray from the main drag, the Strip, that great, city-bisecting seam of concrete and lights, it quickly begins to feel like you’re on a ranch, the neon signs seem tired, the desert sand, or sand-dust, is all over everything, and she took it upon herself to remind me of this while sitting in that bar on an island to the south of Sardinia that greatly resembled one in the Azores, a bar we’d gone into for something to eat, to watch the ships go by, and the bits of paper being blown around between the cars, to nothing, Yes, she said, still not having removed her pop-star sunglasses, just as they say the Mediterranean relies on Neptune sea grass to survive – if one perishes so does the other – if Las Vegas sinks the entire surrounding desert will sink too, all deserts will sink, am I wrong? she said, tell me now, right or wrong?, to which I nodded, while inside I was thinking the Project was beginning to affect her, and that the things she’d been coming out with, while lucid, were becoming increasingly apropos-of-nothing, I don’t know, I drank some of my fizzy water, saw a ball rolling along next to a moored sailboat, saw a one-armed man looking at a seagull, then another one-armed man who appeared to be in a hurry, while she went on making the case that the paradise described in the Koran – that garden promised to all good Muslim boys, full of nicely proportioned females and happiness without The End and a crystalline desert oasis – isn’t in the sky but in Las Vegas, and, not long after, midday came round and we left the bar, now apprised of dead-cat news, and walked along the pier in silence, looking at the ships and the fishing nets and the uneven cobblestones, all of a jumble like the thoughts inside our heads, and we felt part of nothing and nothing felt part of us, a Super-8 movie in which the world vibrated and flickered, and we were the silence, its silence, the silence between one flicker and the next, frame and frame and vibration and flicker, her carrying the hard guitar case in her left hand with all the trappings of our Project, our Great Project as we liked to call it, and me with hands in pockets, very much the redneck, pure redneck, in the words of that Belle and Sebastian LP we’d played to death the previous year while incubating the Project, our Project, neither of us saying a word, not saying a word is important, any creative person knows that, all good paintings and good poems say more in the elisions than in what they directly enunciate, good houses and good scientific theories are the same, silence is the thing they truly rest on, the rhythms of silence [the less said about the so-called ‘art of sculpture’ the better, this being the world’s most ridiculous activity, this and cross-stitching], and out of all the silences the most important one, for me, was the one rendered by a thinker from the first half of the 20th century called Ludwig Wittgenstein [similar to Andy Warhol’s silence after he was shot], who as a
closing remark in one of his works said that it would all be for nothing unless, once the reader had got to the end, he or she was then prompted to throw the book away, that the important part came after the work, in the ensuing silence, but there are other, apparently more modest kinds of silences, only apparently more modest, for example when I was a teenager and found it impossible to read comics, I could make neither head nor tail of them, found it impossible to follow the thread, I did buy some and I did try, I even went so far as to sketch out some illustrated stories of my own to see if this might lead me to the secret heart of their mechanism, but it didn’t, and then a friend of mine, an illustrator named Pere Joan, told me the important thing with comics was to know how to read the white spaces between the panels, These silences are what you have to learn to read, he said, they contain everything you need to understand, those were his words, and since then I have been reading comics, I’m no expert, truth be told I know nothing about comics, the one I managed to get on best with was a Manga comic called Aruku Hito (The Walker) which features a man who never does anything and that’s precisely what makes him interesting, his neutrality, he works in an office and spends his free time walking the city in his suit, looking impassively at everything, simply looking, this was the silence, that of a man who does nothing because an entire civilization was already there beneath his feet, pulsating, pulsating, the same silence that had revealed itself to us a number of months before being in a bar so reminiscent of a bar in the Azores as we drove along the edge of some mountainous terrain on our way to a different spot on that same island, a different latitude, hunting for somewhere to mount our Project, her in her Las Vegas bikini, me with a Lucky Strike in my left hand, this too was the distorted silence of the disassembled ‘fascist building’, as we liked to call it, this the silence of the final cat poo there on those scented litter granules, solitary like a beachgoer in winter, yes, something had told us to come here, to look on all these things, to contemplate them, to try to understand the true meaning of the words cat, bikini, death, organism, Coca-Cola, poo, Project, silence, yes, silence above all, if, that is, any of these words have a meaning, but I also realized then that something had made us come here, we had been called, to give us a chance to fathom the meaning of Las Vegas, which, like bikinis, has its nicer parts, the CCTV cameras that watch you day and night, and its not so nice parts, the slot machines stubbornly bolted to the floor, and you arrive in Las Vegas, which is perhaps the best city in the world to live in, with its money-based poetics, its declaration of money as pure poetry in the sense that any coin, no matter how humble, is a kind of meeting point for a million different buying choices, for consumer products and for dreams, just as a stanza in a poem is a meeting point for a million metaphors, for re-readings, this city of labyrinths joined by moving walkways, of CCTV cameras sending thousands of image-residues out into the desert, that dry raddled nothingness, and you realize that something completely different is going on there, completely different from the image you get in the kind of magazines that cater for vegetarian women and family men, yes, Las Vegas can sometimes seem like this pleasingly adulterated consumer product, generator of paradoxes, entropy, life, a bottle of Coca-Cola with a slice of lemon inside, a Proustian madeleine not baked by his maid but manufactured instead, full of preservatives and flavouring, or a bit of bread with Nocilla spread on it, with its thick, material fleshiness, and in that bar on an island to the south of Sardinia I tried to evoke for her the strange period when we’d met, 7 years earlier, a time when I had run aground, eating the kind of stuff that, while it prevented me from sinking, also prevented my boat from making headway, leaving me at once static and ecstatic, only able to see the theoretical structure of things, including of feelings, the skeleton, as though the neon signs and screens and walls of the hotels in Las Vegas had suddenly fallen away and left the pipework and the electric cables exposed, an apparent purity in fact bursting with dust, hairs, grot, rats, chipped-off pieces of coins and insects, this was what my life had consisted of 7 years before, and one day I found myself eating a slice of Nocilla-daubed bread that she had made for me and I thought about the fascination I felt for the sludge going around in the concrete mixer of my mouth, the anti-metaphysical nature of that bolus – which, while it was inside my mouth, lacked any clear centre of gravity – that brown conglomeration which was nothing but a thickly daubed slice of bread, surface, appearance, simulacrum, whatever you want, I said to her in that bar on an island to the south of Sardinia, and which was also residue, excreta, preservatives and flavouring that, by pure paradox, generate life, and this was how, thanks to a slice of bread, Nocilla-daubed, I came to repudiate metaphysics, how my personal evolutionary shift came about, the true leap, because our actions seem analogue, and probably that’s what they’ll turn out to be, but in practical terms they are digital, they proceed intermittently, one comic-book panel at a time, in the in-between silences we sow, leaving them there to help the interpretation, like a two-piece bikini and that gap between top and bottom, like the near-definitive silence inside that bar on an island to the south of Sardinia which was identical to one in the Azores and where we’d gone for something to eat, to watch the ships go by, to watch the movement of bits of paper between the cars, to nothing, a bar in which the one sole truth was strongly present: that we had been floundering during those previous few months, that looking for the perfect place to mount the Project had been a laboured and, I’d almost say, sterile search, like looking for a non-existant TV-viewing guide in a copy of Workers’ World, like going looking for a petrol station in a desert in Albacete and finding a Gibson Les Paul and a waterproof hard case ‘because rockers sometimes go out in the rain,’ said the man who sold it to me, wink, one goes in search of oneself but in a woman only to end up finding one’s opposite, a woman tries to kill some time in the small hours of a Sunday in Las Vegas and ends up the owner of a bikini with a daisy printed on either part of the top, and you’re in a bookshop and you happen upon a book called The Music of Chance, by a North American writer called Paul Auster, in a Portuguese translation, you’re already weighed down with plastic bags, themselves full of recently acquired clothes, and you stop outside a window display and see books written in languages you don’t speak, but still you cast your eye over them, and one jumps out at you, just one, and that’s it, there’s no way out, even though it’s in a language you don’t speak you’re going to have to buy it, your hand has been forced by the fact that this item has been placed on a lectern shaped like a miniature Eiffel Tower and studded with lightbulbs, while at the same time the life-sized lights on the Eiffel Tower crowning the hotel behind you are reflecting off the front cover, you have to buy it even though you know you’ll never read it and it’s likely to spend the rest of your holidays stowed in a suitcase, plus though you know you’re going to leave it behind on the bedside table in your hotel room, unopened, spine unbroken, its unprepossessing title, The Music of Chance, still emblazoned on the front cover, such a schoolboy title, none of this makes any difference, you have to buy it, because suddenly it is the magnetic pole for your desire, you have to buy it even if only out of compassion, solidarity, to keep people in work, to counteract your own egoism, to perpetuate the fungus of mid-desert lights that is Las Vegas, and so when I was out walking those streets not long after midnight and saw that book by that North American man named Paul Auster – both the author and the book were new to me – I had to buy it even if only to keep it on the bedside table until such time as I would be forced to add it to the unread shelf at home, and as I began flicking through it in the shop it initially looked terrible, commercial as anything, but then, on further inspection, I started to see it could perhaps be interpreted as docu-fiction, or something like that, and this is what clinched it, because I’m fascinated by docu-fictions, you’ve got Big Brother, you’ve got El desencanto (The Disappointment), you’ve got El encargo del cazador (The Hunter’s Task), you’ve got Después de tantos años (After All These Years) with the great
Michi Panero, Saint Michi, shouting ‘Let them go then! Let them go then!’, you’ve got the Bible of course, all very normal things that, once submitted to the filming and editing process, generate a sort of poetry that belongs to time itself, to silence, that is, to all that is simultaneously sludgy and neutral, this was the reason why, 18 years earlier, I was drinking a Coca-Cola with a slice of lemon in the bottle, and why, in Las Vegas, 2 years before coming to that bar on an island to the south of Sardinia that greatly resembled one in the Azores, I left this book, the Portuguese version of The Music of Chance, on a bedside table in a hotel room, as though waiting for it to say something to me, Portuguese is to all intents and purposes a language I do not know, while in the distance there was the sound of thousands of people standing at the fruit machines, cocktails in hand, people who had lost all sense of time or of its usual scale, day, night, whatever, people who were the waste-products of domestic biologies, and I went on reading this book, the lamp coming briefly on and then off again, the sound of the fruit machines in the background, like someone listening to a song but not entirely understanding it, and from time to time she’d pick it up as well, and read it as slowly as me, neither of us saying a word, just exchanging glances when one or the other, coming to the end of some fragment, put it back down on their respective bedside table, and she would lie pensively down on the bed as though in those silences building herself anew, as though in Las Vegas she were a different person, none of her trademark brilliant lines, the kind she so often managed to conjure at just the right moment, and as she lay there she seemed to have been stripped of both weight and mass, two things still quite mysterious to scientists, because nobody knows why we have mass, not even the theoretical physicists, who are like human machines, creators of the world, know why, they go along postulating the existence of the so-called Higgs boson, responsible, via the complex interactions of fields and quarks, for us having mass, they haven’t yet found this chimerical Higgs boson, but they will, mass is something that has always plagued humans, or at least it always did plague us, given that we knew when we came to the point of materializing our Project, that is, the moment when all of the theoretical architecture, which included not only blueprints but also texts in 12 different languages, apparatuses we ourselves had built, models and calculation programmes, when all of the things inside the waterproof Les Paul case turned into an object that weighed something, that had gravitational force, was for once irremediably, immensely full of mass, there was a chance it would implode under its own weight, a mortal weight for which it, the Project, could never be held responsible, as when a person grows so fat that their internal organs end up collapsing in a black hole, mass and weight are so important that even death cannot annul them, though some people do manage to annul them in life, for example me and her, such light beings, light to the point of buoyancy, that weightlessness, translated into our Project, was at this point inside a guitar case, inside the possibility of one day becoming reality, existed, in other words, as a concept (not-yet-but-possibly-soon-to-be-mass), and so she, in Las Vegas, sprawled on the pyramid-shaped bed inside the Luxor Hotel, itself a gigantic pyramid, while the denizens of the casinos wrung from the slot machines ein kleine nachtmuzik that would carry for miles across the desert, she lay with cigarette in mouth gazing up at the stucco ceiling, small pyramidal stucco blobs, having put aside a book called The Music of Chance, airy, weightless, no material connection with anything, and the cigarette consumed itself inside her body, her extraordinary body, 70% water, 30% smoke, and I could not understand it, how the smoke and water combined so well inside her body, how they combined so well inside the body of any person who, like her, is prepared to face the radical silence of a room in a pyramid-shaped hotel in Las Vegas, the light inside which, having pierced its walls, will never escape, in which even the ceilings in the rooms are made of a kind of stucco comprising millions of small pyramids, as though the ceiling were the brain of the hotel, the brain of Las Vegas, a brain that instead of convolutions had millions of small pyramids, the self-repeating fractal rivalled only in number by the thousands of CCTV cameras in the ground-floor casino ceiling, a camera every metre and a half, I looked at them and thought how strange it would be if suddenly no one were to be watching you, to suddenly exist in the resultant infinite solitude, the sad times such disregard would entail, and 2 years after being beneath thousands of stucco pyramids and thousands of CCTV cameras, travelling around an island to the south of Sardinia, we found all the hotels fully booked and so checked in to an ecotourism place, usually host to couples in their 40s who wore Prada trainers and had come for the bird watching, and we were eating al fresco one evening on a kind of terrace with white plastic tables when the sound reached us of some bulldozers at work between some trees along with the sound of a food blender in the kitchen, a perfect moment, and I passed her the packet of Marlboros and she lit one, and a fairly overweight woman who was sitting at a table with her husband 12 metres away from us, a woman who would happily ingest all manner of fats and thereby put an end to her youth, a woman who was cholesterol through and through, began compulsively wafting her hands and saying, for all to hear, You’re smoking me out! You’re smoking me out!, and it was a no-smoking place but all the same, this woman failed to see that she had destroyed her life to the extent that she no longer had any tolerance for other human beings, she was pure exaggeration, she had become the thing that resembles everything except itself, humankind reduced to a personality-less object, the very opposite of silence or of Coca-Cola, or that book entitled The Music of Chance that we had read in Las Vegas while she lay smoking in silence and made of her body the perfect combination of 70% water and 30% smoke, because that fat pedant woman was ignorant of the fact that smoke and water combine to delicate effect, when added together they form a perfectly homogenous mixture, ignorant of the fact that the 50% water and 50% fat of which her body was made would never mix, being antagonistic, and the crudest kind of antagonists at that – the kind of commonplace vulgarity that we would never conceive or put into practice, by this point we had become the makers of a sophisticated Project, our Great Project as we liked to call it, ours and nobody else’s, and so in Las Vegas we got a copy of The Music of Chance in a language we knew only the rudiments of and read it in chunks, both always in silence, taking it in turns, and then we would smoke and the smoke when she exhaled went up to the stucco-pyramid ceiling, fractals upon fractals, and when she exhaled it hit the dark window overlooking the desert, the desert, I thought, another great project, when a project truly is great, important, universal, it makes no sense to talk about it in terms of success or failure, it exists outside of time, immersed in the sludge of the Great Silence, like those days in Sardinia did for me, her body to the right of mine in the Lancia, her perfect bikini with a daisy on each breast, her blonde hair swaying against her pop-star glasses, all of it existing beyond the purely biological, beyond these people who accumulate not silence but fat, beyond the biology of that compulsive non-smoker who had spoken to us in such Olympian fashion, as though she were exempt from death, as though some new law had been passed, one she was zealously abiding by, that meant all biological processes in her body had stopped, and my girlfriend, extinguishing her cigarette out of respect for this woman’s mental illness, said to me, without taking off the sunglasses and without so much as looking in the woman’s direction, Give her a cause and a few million dollars and bin Laden would be a Boy Scout in comparison, it had a ring to it, she always came out with these kinds of lines, for example in the car a few days earlier as we sped away from the ‘fascist building’, as we had come to call it, as we left behind that dismantled, disproportionate edifice and all the misery contained in its walls and the nearby swing sets, and she said, Pass me the igniter, not ‘pass me the lighter’ but ‘pass me the igniter,’ and it was hours before either of us spoke again after that, not a word about the fascist building, or about any song, or, naturally, about the Project that was the reason we were there, and we came
to the beach town where a Disney film was going to be showing and towels were strung from the balconies like the flags of micro-nations, and then carried on to a point where the concrete, with no forewarning from the map, came to an abrupt end and a forest track opened out before us, a very wide and shallow river running across it, no more than a foot deep, the waters red, totally red, but clear enough that, when I stopped the car to take a closer look, the smooth pebbles were visible and among them the total absence of life or vegetation, and I put my hand in the water and decided it was warm, because it was warmer than my hand, there didn’t seem to be any bridges we could cross and when I got back in the car we saw a number of forest tracks on the far side, 4 to be exact, the fan in the Lancia engine started going, and we were feeling stifled, too, sitting still with no air coming in through the windows, so I started the engine and drove us straight over the red river, the wheels bouncing over the uneven stones, and, kicking up a huge dust cloud as we came to the other side, I took us down one of the 4 tracks, one at random, not thinking about it, whichever, like in Las Vegas when we meandered from casino to casino in no particular order, letting the moving walkways take us where they would, which was how she found a bikini in the small hours of a Sunday morning and I the only bookshop in the entire city, and one book in its window display, The Music of Chance in Portuguese, had called out to me from its bulb-spangled Eiffel Tower lectern, a novel that had then led us, more or less directly, to Sardinia, to that Lancia and to that road, a novel that had given us the idea for our Project, a Project whose opening moves, unbeknownst to us, were drawing ever nearer, that moment when you check if the clock’s still working, the time to put aside all blueprints, all apparatuses, all concepts, computers and ideas, the watershed moment at which, to put it one way, the Project would confront the material in the strictest sense, that is if ‘material in the strictest sense’ means anything, the moment incubated in docu-fictions, in Big Brother, El desencanto, El encargo del cazador and Después de tantos años when Michi Panero screams at the camera, ‘Let them go then! Let them go then!’ or in one of the Knight Rider revivals, or, of course, in the Bible, as well as in all the films and TV series that we adored and that had fed our Project, all the things we’d been reading and watching at home, day and night, all winter- and summer-long, things that didn’t strictly speaking breathe ideas into us but were responsible for generating an atmosphere propitious to everything that followed, a small and intimate sanctum, because first of all, before getting sheets of paper out, before reaching for set squares or computer programmes, before plugging in the Mac and devising programmes of our own, before getting the camera ready or any of the many lighters and cigarettes, before we came to propose any of the many hypotheses, some of which were accurate, some not, but in all cases immense, even before the preliminary thoughts came to us of what the project would be, we had to create this intimate bubble and in it look for the little cleft to slip through, an orifice but ultimately a silent rhythm, once we’d found it we would be on our way, and so we stayed home and ordered in pizza, a family-sized pizza from Telepizza, and opened a bottle of chilled white wine, very cold indeed, and turned the lights off and began ingesting films and TV series that were far more than simple films and TV series because everything, all phrases and objects included, thought about or spoken with enough conviction and depth, takes on an importance, can even become transcendent, can create its own aesthetic, for instance if someone sits on the sofa watching daytime TV and says ‘this soup is very good’ it doesn’t mean a thing, but if that same individual says ‘this soup is very good’ while looking the person who cooked it in the eye in the same way you’d look upon some final and definitive explosion, in that case the phrase acquires near-metaphysical profundity, and this was our attitude as we watched those films and TV series, food for our brain, a brain which, without being the Project, was at that time equivalent to the Project, a kind of conductive anti-material inside each of our heads, and as we sat there in silence, utter silence, at home, I was making mental notes of places, connections, expressions, things, all of them concerned with uncovering the cleft through which we would slip in the Project, a Project we had not even envisioned yet, had not even slightly inferred, and we kept this silence up for a number of months before beginning to compare notes, our jottings and often contradictory ideas, before we had our first brainstorming session, which in turn gave way to the first ‘title-deciding cockfight’, a phrase we borrowed from our favourite lower-league football commentator on the radio, but the pieces fitted together of their own accord, speech was more or less beside the point, we simply laid out our respective preparatory work on the living room floor and could see straightaway how little there was to discuss, it was all there, in perfect symbiosis, strange thing, extraordinary thing even, because throughout the entire preparatory year neither of us had said anything about the Project, not even the most tangential allusion, which is to say, incredible as it may seem, neither of us knew what the other had been silently incubating, or of course that the other had any Project in mind, hence how totally extraordinary it was that when we did begin comparing notes, what should we find but the very same Project, 2 takes on that Project, the same obsession that, we then found out, had its inception in Las Vegas, on those nights of mineral silence in which we had read a book called The Music of Chance by someone called Paul Auster before sparking up a Lucky Strike and listening to the sound of thousands of waiters mixing cocktails for thousands of people under the watchful lenses of thousands of CCTV cameras, yes, I mean to say that while we were watching all those films and TV series at home, eating that pizza and drinking that chilled white wine neither of us had the first idea what the other was planning, or about the immensity of the other’s incubation, a thing that was destined to change our lives, and all of this came out in our conversation that day in that bar on an island to the south of Sardinia that resembled a bar in the Azores, Strange, she said, that all this, all these things, can fit inside the case of a Gibson Les Paul, that something of such immensity can be reduced to a few cubic centimetres, to a pill, and then she put her sunglasses back on and adjusted the strap of her bikini top, and it was just then that the mobile phone vibrated in my pocket, news of the cat’s death and everything that brought with it, I was already used to getting projects off the ground, my entire life had been a series of getting projects off the ground and knocking them down again, being a rock climber, being a drummer, being a writer, being a physicist – jack of all trades, master of none – so I think it’s fair to say I’m an all-round average sort of person, something I can never be grateful enough for because, after all, it has allowed me to explore these many different environments, to orbit all kinds of different things, there’s nothing worse than the specialist genius, like that woman at the ecotourism place, bothered by someone smoking 12 metres away, she was a genius whose specialism was healthy living, or, like bin Laden, a genius whose specialism was destroying one thing in order to preserve the thing dearest to her, yes, I was already well-acquainted with projects and with changing course in life but none of it could compare with this, this Project, our Project as we liked to call it, and this was what made my girlfriend so fascinating to me, we were under the same sign, our destinies were the same, we had the same love of ‘imperfect inductions’, like my random selection of one of the 4 forest tracks after we crossed the red river, an imperfect induction: a mental mechanism that allows for the inference of a general law from particular instances, this is the basis of life, imperfect induction, the moment you see 4 forest tracks ahead of you in your Lancia and you establish a law based on other forest tracks you’ve been down in your life, a law you briefly elevate to a sort of infallibility, picking a possibility though you know it probably won’t lead anywhere in particular, and that you know is a lie, disappointment that way lies, you know, but still you go on, just as you know that your phone will vibrate in your pocket one day when you are sitting in a bar strongly reminiscent of a bar in the Azores, a b
ar you went into for something to eat, to watch the ships go by, to nothing, and you receive word that a life has been snuffed out, a life whose only legacy will be some poo in a scented litter tray, and after that you will walk in silence through this Mediterranean port town and, by dint of a further instance of imperfect induction, you will be prompted to say, This is the Atlantic, and, These are the Azores, and that will be your momentary salvation, and she’s at your side walking through the port with a guitar case in one hand and a cigarette in the other, taking a cigarette from the packet and saying to you, Pass me the igniter, not ‘pass me the lighter’ but ‘pass me the igniter,’ and this too will be your salvation, momentarily, all the literature ever written is forged out of imperfect inductions, the happy undertakings of all-round average people, this is, to put it one way, the raw material, the literary laboratory, and she stops at the end of the pier on that island to the south of Sardinia where there was a bar very much like another in the Azores, and, cocking her left arm, apropos of nothing, throws the guitar case as far as she can into the water with her right, the Project in its entirety, and the guitar case doesn’t sink, being waterproof, ‘for when rockers go outside in the rain,’ as the guitar guy said when he sold me it, winking, and it bobs about for a few minutes until the wake of a passing Zodiac carries it towards the boats moored at the pier, which it eventually strikes, you hear it bumping up against the hulls, and in the end, losing sight of it amidst the boats, you leave, it’s floating away and you know you’re never going to see it again, the pump attendant at the Albacete petrol station said as much, Gibsons are good guitars, as for their cases… they’ll outlast you for sure, and when, months before she threw the case into the port, we crossed the red waters of a river in search of the ideal place for our Project and I picked one of the 4 forest paths at random, she said, Red like the type in Workers’ World, and we both laughed so much we didn’t notice the sky darkening behind us, a storm coming in, we laughed because we suddenly found that to do so turned this inhospitable terrain into somewhere we felt glad to be, somewhere familiar, inhospitable terrains are one of the strangest things, the reason for them, I mean, the reason, unfathomable to me, for the phenomenon whereby mankind, who after all is life, gives up on certain places which are, after all, life, thereby rendering those places no longer habitable, why it is that mankind sometimes abandons houses, buildings, swimming pools, dock moorings, cities entire, perhaps it’s because none of these things exists, because, I mean, things like cities, ports, swimming pools, houses, mankind, nature and even life are figments, pure chimera, verbal representations of other things that are verbal representations in turn, and so on in an infinite chain, this I remember reading years ago in The Monkey Grammarian by Octavio Paz, a dead Mexican, the woman I was living with at the time had gone on a trip to New York, I don’t remember what for, to earn some money maybe, to buy tea towels for all I know, to nothing, we were living in a house in the country with a garden in the English style, semi-wild, at the bottom of which lay a not very large forest, one whose far end I never reached, it was June, already hot, and I could not have imagined the turn my life was about to take, still less the existence of a Project that would take me, 9 years later and with a different woman at my side, to a bar on an island to the south of Sardinia very similar to one in the Azores, and I remember taking a book down from the shelf, The Monkey Grammarian this was, a book I’d owned for a long time but never read or in fact opened, naturally – because apart from The Music of Chance, the subterranean river of whose pages poured into our minds and gave rise to the Project, a Project that was in some way already in there, in the book, waiting for us, and had also been encrypted in such a way that the cup needed only the slightest tilting for its potion to spill – I had hardly read any fiction whatsoever, and so, bored and lacking company, 9 years before, I opened The Monkey Grammarian that June afternoon when the woman I was living with had gone to New York to do I don’t know what, and the first thing I noticed was its strange structure, fairly indefinable, fragments followed by more fragments, prose poem-like things, and I was especially drawn to one in which the resounding claim was made that all words are metaphors, standing in for things that in turn stand in for others, and those others for others still, and so on until one alights upon the arbitrary nature of a no less metaphorical nucleus that will forever remain a mystery to us, which is what I mean when I say I don’t believe in the existence of the words city, port, swimming pool, house, mankind, nature and even life, and this is why I don’t believe that explanation for inhospitable places, places effectively deactivated from the flow of the world, is that mankind has given up on them, or indeed on life, given that these things exist only in language, rather I believe that this deactivation of inhospitable places comes about because they are the rest of the world’s daydream, places that exist in dream and only in dream, I mean, the dreams of the rest of the planet, and as such, they rest in silence, are not accessible by material, as is the case with sex and dreams, not accessible to be narrated, ruins are a special kind of inhospitable place, I think ruins become ruins due to their great symbolic potential before they become ruins, while still inhabited, still standing, their symbolic potential, I mean, is so intense that it forces their abandonment lest the people inhabiting them be destroyed by excess, by an excess of life, and this abandonment precedes the shift into dreams, the shift into inhospitability, in part so that these places will not suffer the same fate as matter and anti-matter, whose strange desire to be together means mutual annihilation, and so they won’t suffer the same fate as couples, who always break up when they become overly charged with a lifestyle individual to them, a style that resembles nothing but itself, yes, couples break up when they are most full of life, of the quotidian, of beauty, plain and boring as this lifestyle, quotidianness and beauty of theirs may be, they break up when they have reached the highest conceivable plane of human existence, indeed such perfection frightens them, they break up and leave behind a ruin, a place whose only existence is in dream, a zone of deep complexity, patterned with fondness and affection, ties that bind, hatefulness, moments of understanding, some objects, experiences, none of which can ever be inhabited again because nobody will experience any of these things again, and this was why she and I knew that once the Project was complete, the Project that had led us to that place after a year’s gestation, of work and study, it would also be the end of us and we would become a ruin, something never to be inhabited again, uninhabited like the terrain we entered after crossing the red river, laughing, when we headed down one of those 4 forest tracks at random and unbeknownst to us a storm was brewing at our backs, Broadcast were still playing, and on we went and after a few kilometres the track sloped down a light incline to a small ravine which looked like the kind of place a river might run through and we soon found ourselves crossing a dry river bed at the far end of which stood a row of dilapidated buildings, vestiges of what seemed to be an old mine, and squashed in among them the remains of a small church and, immediately to its left, a warehouse with bits of iron, broken conveyor belts and cranes protruding from the roof, and on the other side of the church, also hard against it, what might have been the pit workers’ quarters, in toto a ramshackle, amorphous façade or, to put it another way, a puzzle, and we were struck by this because these were precisely the kinds of things our Project was about, and she, without removing her pop-star sunglasses, took her camera out of her beach bag, got out of the car, stood there for a moment studying the situation before walking over to the far side of the dry river, I went next, it was hard going picking our way through all the rocks and bits of scrap metal, she was wearing sandals, we stopped for a few seconds in front of a fortified door, or what remained of it, and she eventually kicked aside the planks of wood and we entered what seemed to be a very dark space after the brightness of the day outside, though there were shafts of sunlight coming in through large holes in the roof, the floor was dotted with these like a black and white leopard skin and, indeed
, there was an altar at the back, it had once been a church, ‘Actually the beauty of churches is always a bit like leopard skin,’ she said, ‘with those fangs hidden behind the beauty,’ and to one side, our left, a door led through to a large, semi-covered space which, confirming the glimpse we had caught earlier on, was full of cranes and mining equipment, and on the other side of the church, on our right, a door led through to what had doubtless once been a cafeteria, the long benches and tables still had plates and cutlery on them, and she, in her bikini, her feet covered in small cuts, began shivering, and suggested we leave, ‘I’m cold’ she said, before taking a couple of photos, and the thing was, unlike the click of the camera, which echoed around the space, her voice when she said, ‘I’m cold’ came out without any kind of echo at all, as though, rather than being in that space we were in fact surrounded by a fictitious second-skin or a kind of housing or, say, a solid bubble, something stopping any sounds from getting out, and when we came outside it had grown dark and then we saw the dark looming cloud and hurried back across the river bed to the Lancia and set off again, and I saw how the rearview mirror turned the entire abandoned mine into a toy town, and the rearview mirror, with the rectangular cut-out it made of the scene, put me in mind of comic-book panels and of the white spaces between them, and the importance of those white spaces as the silences that give meaning to the story as a whole and, from there, reminded me of the time, 9 years earlier, when I was on my own because the woman I was living with had gone to New York to try to find some work, to buy tea towels, to do goodness knows what, and I had for the first time decided, decided in any conscious way, that I ought to become serious about my writing, to do it in a concerted way, until then I had only written for myself, the first instance having been while I was studying in Santiago, my fourth year at university I think, when, after reading some Bukowski stories lent to me by a friend, I sat down at a typewriter one night, things were flatlining for me, an unexpected flatline, even I was surprised by my newfound lack of interest in my studies, in my friends, I had broken up with my girlfriend, had been spending days alone in the flat, eating breakfast in front of whatever happened to be on TV at 3 in the afternoon, and not going anywhere, glued to the screen, drinking gallons of black coffee, very black, till sundown, there were two TV sets, a portable black-and-white Zenith from 1967 that my father bought in the US and that gave an extraordinarily clear picture but no sound, and one Telefunken, also portable, from the end of the 1970s which I had inherited from my sister and which had no picture but very good sound, and since they were the same size I put one on top of the other and watched the Zenith while listening to the Telefunken, an aggravating kind of doubleness but one that in time led me to some suggestive conclusions concerning concepts like ‘complementarity’, ‘subdivision’ and ‘cooperation’, as well as some of the rules governing set theory, conclusions and rules I later forgot, only for them to spontaneously reappear 15 years later as essential components of the Project, our Project, and otherwise at that time in my student life solitude had succeeded in infiltrating every aspect of my life, my food chain included, and in that 4th year of my degree I was reading very little, taking black-and-white photos from my kitchen window and sometimes of the empty rooms in my flat which I later coloured in with Plastidecor crayons, I’d unwittingly swapped my post-punk outfit for an utterly style-less grunge look, pure abandonment, I had music on day and night and I remember writing over and over on bits of paper that were already full of maths equations ‘I believe in the terrible ghosts, come from some strange part / and in the stupid things I do to make you laugh’ from the song ‘Lucha de gigantes’ [Titanic Struggle], which Antonio Vega had written for Nacha Pop, there was something hypnotic and beautiful and troubling in the way this lyric mixed with the scrawled equations, an exciting sort of twinning that I intuited as crucial, if I was ever going to create anything, in the creative process, it was a sad year, so low, so many priceless discoveries, such as how one might conceive of the television as a mystical instrument, the executive arm of an absolute wisdom, the place whose waves and photonic particles (a kind of nothing) emitted all the world’s objects, even objects and entities that were inconceivable, yes, the television was an empty receptacle, a perpetrator of old alchemies, forever waging war on the sceptic and the non-believer, every message that came from it was at least somewhat new, every advertising slogan a Zen mantra, a cosmos of light, a Borgesian aleph, that year was the first time I experienced the extraordinary pleasure of leaving the TV on and going out unshaven at 9 on a Saturday night for cigarettes and coffee, seeing all the people in the bars or out for a stroll or planning what they were going to do with their evenings, and you like some zombie walking among them, ignoring them, pitching up at the cigarette machine in the bar and extracting the pack you know you’re going to smoke your way through that same night, next stopping by the 7-Eleven for ground coffee and then home to try and make something, to sit at the typewriter, riding the hubristic sensation of fucking things up, guided by a ridiculous but not ineffective feeling of romantic superiority, every night I hammered away at the typewriter till dawn, both TVs on but the volume off, and a world was created and destroyed, created and destroyed in an endless loop, and it was during those nights, tobacco-TV-typewriter-gallons-of-coffee nights, that I first felt that making something was like ruling the world, and that the writer was a kind of god among the partying lowlife, everyone adrift until the early hours, a routine broken only when Saab, a friend I’d studied but also partied a lot with, called for me and we went out drinking at all our usual bars, ending up back at his house at sunrise, talking about Bukowski, Heisenberg and Boris Vian, a trio who to our mind formed a genuine triumvirate, and I graduated with a third-class degree and a terrible novel featuring a guy who shunned society, drank coffee and wrote and slept in front of the TV, a terrible novel, I realized in time, so I said to myself that the degree had been an unmitigated waste of time, and I thought I’d done away with the novel but then, moving house at one point, by now the author of a number of books of poetry, I came across it in a box and re-read it and realised that the essence of everything I had subsequently written was already there, born out of the time when I was in every sense unlettered, it contained the maxim I have always kept to, my ethical as well as my aesthetic principle: ‘Poetry is every object, idea or thing in which I find the things I would wish to find in poetry,’ and all of this, that year and everything it led to, is there on my shoulder every time I sit down to write, or to make any work at all, including the time she and I spent painstakingly designing the Project, our Project, it was all there, in the lowest stratum of whatever drove my work, my intuition, my anxiety, my jokes, my brain, in fact without that collage of equations, lyrics and that unlettered overweening, I don’t know what would have become of our Project 15 years later, those were the dawn lights, as it were, the pre-history of everything to come, but the decision to become a writer came years later, when the woman I was living with went to New York to buy tea towels or to get a job, something or other, it was then that I knew I needed to make a serious fist of it, come up with some actual poems, actual short stories, actual novels, artefacts, whatever, that the time had come to generate an inhospitable space of my own, a ruin, a place whose only function was to exist in people’s dreams, a place at the margins of planet Earth and its fascistic mechanical, ethical and biological functions, and that it had to be in the same spirit as The Monkey Grammarian, a strange artefact I never finished reading, it was too exciting to read all the way through, and when, years later, I found myself inside a small church, part of an abandoned mining complex on an island south of Sardinia, I knew that I was still on my quest to find the inhospitable, to the extent that, quite by chance, here I was doing the exact same thing again, the search itself had trapped me, and for many years, but above all it now struck me that this search had bound me hand and foot because of something else that happened on the night I have been referring to, the night when I read The Monkey
Grammarian, or bits of it, a night that, had it not in fact happened, would have seemed like a cheap bit of fiction: I remember that the sun had gone down and I had already eaten supper, a salad, and drunk a glass of tap water as usual, and also as usual in those days I had a Leonard Cohen CD on, Death of a Ladies’ Man, and there between the plates and cutlery on the table I opened The Monkey Grammarian for the first time, and began reading it, in no particular order, until I came to a very striking passage, one that, for me personally, was what I think we can call a revelation, I know that I spent the rest of the night turning it over in my mind, this much I know, it was like having suddenly found my own peculiar and untransferrable path, not just in literary terms, but in cosmo-vital terms, and the next morning, when I opened the book again, I couldn’t find that passage, it just wasn’t there, I looked, or rather I ransacked, I tried forever to find it, it wasn’t a big book, and come midday I had to admit that the passage in question had disappeared, I know it’s absurd but that’s what happened, the passage wasn’t there, I started to think I had made it up, but no, I could remember it too well, the moment when, embarking on the opening phrases, I had got up to fill my glass with water from the kitchen tap, was imprinted on my retina, as were the two cigarettes that burned down in the ashtray, so gripped was I by the fact that I’d lit two cigarettes unwittingly, I could even remember the song they had on repeat in a nearby villa, ‘Lady Laura’ by Roberto Carlos, the strains of which mingled with my Leonard Cohen CD, but the fact is I never found that bit in The Monkey Grammarian again, hence what strikes me as the importance of the man who goes back to Pripyat after Chernobyl, the way he fails to recognize his home, though it’s right there in front of him no one knows where, no one can know, it’s disappeared, I’ve begun to think that the revelation I had on that summer night was of such an order that it caused the destruction of the passage in question, it had to be destroyed so that something inhospitable could be left in its place, a ruin, even the contents were erased from my memory, only a trace remained, an archaeological layer that I must look for, am condemned to look for, producing words, tales, poems, artefacts and, why not, projects, or what at least seem to be (but are they?) projects, utterly removed from the lost passage in The Monkey Grammarian, like the Project that’s brought us to this bar on an island to the south of Sardinia very similar to one in the Azores, I said as she forked up a mouthful of beans, tuna and tomato, then the waitress came over, a very pasty girl, looked like something out of a Marilyn Manson fan club, an extreme precision to her words and the way she moved, she seemed to be on something, some substance that affected her sight, that prevented echoes or any field of resonance for words or breathing, like when we had been in the abandoned mine and my girlfriend’s words, ‘I’m cold,’ had had no resonance because we had been under the influence of the strongest substance of all: our Project, the Project par excellence, as we liked to call it, our very own Music of Chance, a Project with remote beginnings in my reading, many years before, of a disappeared passage in The Monkey Grammarian, and a more definitive inception 2 years earlier in a city called Las Vegas when The Music of Chance came into my hands, by chance, we read it in a hotel, the best way a book like this can be read, with no feedback, in silence, this is the only way to allow for the paradoxical increase in entropy that life, not death, generates, only then, when The Music of Chance in Portuguese came into my hands, written by a certain Paul Auster, a writer I had never heard of, still less read, and whose work I have explored no further, did I begin turning my mind to the existence and meaning of ruins, of all that is inhospitable, of the disappearance of a personally revelatory fragment in The Monkey Grammarian, and of the Project, the great Project now timidly taking form in my mind, and, unbeknownst to me, in her mind too, a response to the long-ago loss of that fragment when I was someone else and lived with a woman who had gone on a trip to New York to earn some money, to buy tea towels, goodness only knows, after which some time passed and it was a matter of laying out a series of silences before the eventual conception of the Project that had then brought the two of us to this island south of Sardinia, yes, the prompt had been a dawn shopping raid in Las Vegas when she bought a bikini and I came across a book with the word ‘Chance’ on the cover, that had set it off, the beginning of this evolutionary shift, this singular construction – a one-off, like Coca-Cola – because there, in Las Vegas, something unexpected happened: she, peeling her gaze from the pyramid-stucco ceiling, turned to look out the window and saw the airport, the enormous silvery concrete mirror that bisects the city, and all the buildings reflected in it, buildings already seemingly receding into the distance, on their way towards some flight or disappearance, and it was then that she said for the first time, Pass me the igniter, not ‘pass me the lighter,’ but ‘pass me the igniter,’ a phrase that would later prove key in the unfolding of our Project, and, two years later, as we drove away from an abandoned mine on an island south of Sardinia, saw that mine growing ever smaller in the rearview mirror, the church or what was left of it and the rusty machinery sprouting tree-like from the rooftops, I realized, in a vague sort of way, imprecisely, that that horizontal vision of Las Vegas, the city gathered on its reflective airport runway, and the ruin generated by the passage that had disappeared from The Monkey Grammarian, were there, inside the 50cm2 of the rearview mirror, the comic-book panel that my friend the illustrator had showed me the best way of reading – hopping from one to the next – leaping from box to box – and soon, suddenly, the raindrops had blurred the vision in the rear window, and the entire image faded, giving way to a more pressing search for somewhere to stay that night, it was raining hard, I am constantly surprised by the way the terrestrial sphere can sometimes, so suddenly, be covered in water, trapped beneath a layer of it, and when I think about it like this the earth becomes small, toy-like, a football bobbing along in a river, 70% water, 30% smoke, and in a way what we were looking for that night as we drove away from the mine looking for a place to stay was a receptacle to give form to all that water tapping away on the Lancia bonnet, to transfer the chaos around us into a vessel that would give it shape and meaning, a shelter, a place to rest one’s head, a place where our amazing stability could be found anew, it isn’t so strange, there are people who organize their lives around the rooms they have slept in as adults, I once read a book by a Frenchman named Perec in which he claimed to have made a complete list of all the rooms he had slept in, and there were hundreds of them, the majority used by him just that once, I can’t say the same of myself for all that I am by nature a nomad, for all that my mission may be to generate Projects, changes, jolts in the undercarriage, I don’t like travelling, hence I almost always sleep in the same bed, I don’t understand the need to go to distant places, to employ one’s senses, to travel in order to feel something, to me it seems basic, primitive, like something unevolved, there are other, far more civilized ways of travelling that do not necessitate giving up the comfort of one’s own home, that’s why, give me a TV, some books, the computer and some films and I’m away, happy as can be, this is the kind of sophistication I mean, the kind she and I had always discussed, for me the perfect holiday involves staying inside, somewhere with air conditioning and a window that looks out over the sea or a mountain, this is also why I chose the house I currently live in, the house that made the writing of Nocilla Experience possible, an attic apartment divided over two floors, with precisely these views and double-glazed windows, it also has a large terrace though I think I’ve been out there only once and that was when the estate agent was showing me around, a worrying experience, so many plants to look after, plants that I of course ended up, almost the minute I moved in, taking out or covering over with concrete, the vegetable kingdom and I aren’t on the best terms, it gives me bad feelings, the only thing that makes me happy is being at home on my own, TV, films, books, music, Mac, drum kit, my musical montages, pieces I compose using an old Fostex 4-track recorder, cutting and pasting chunks of old songs, and, in fact
, 4 years earlier, a long while before our fascination with the Project, our Project, as we liked to call it, had led us to this island south of Sardinia, when, as previously mentioned, we went to Thailand and I broke my hip and lay in a Chiang Mai hotel bed for 25 days and wrote Nocilla Dream, and then had another 5 bedridden months at home coming up with Nocilla Experience, when this all happened I found it inexplicably pleasurable, not for nothing was this my idea of a perfect summer, all day in bed, my toys to hand, heating the planet with my air conditioning on full blast and by a further paradox creating a cold and inhospitable place, a place that finally took the form of a novel-artefact, Nocilla Experience, created via the mixing-together and overlaying of bodies, of texts, of skins, songs, magazines, of film theory, of bodies that were unalike and yet fitted together, all of it speaking, deep down, of jars of Nocilla, it’s always the same with me and writing, I never know how it is I end up writing something, Nocilla Dream included, the writing of which was literally this, an apparition that lasted less than a month, in Chiang Mai, 25 hotel days, monsoon days, pain down the entire right side of my body, and it’s then that you come to understand that writer named Onetti, who went to bed one day and didn’t get out again until he was dead, 20 of the days were spent in Chiang Mai but after that we had to go back to Bangkok for another 5 days, and we stayed in a Sofitel Hotel, on the 19th floor of a glass skyscraper, astounding views across the city, one day my painkillers ran out and she, before going down to the shops, fed me a painkiller, a different brand but with the same principal active ingredient, and I soon started feeling ill, an indescribable anguish washed over me, an intense, all-encompassing anxiety, no way out, like being made prisoner not inside your own body but in the centre of your mind, I had a genuine urge to smash the glass and jump the 19 floors to the street below, the technical name for this is a paradoxical reaction to medication, a reaction contrary to what one would expect, and I remembered the image of people jumping from the Twin Towers out of pure fear, only in that case such a reaction was not paradoxical, indeed it was precisely what the multinational corporation bin Laden & Co. had intended, in the same way that the anti-smoking pedant woman in the ecotourism place had hoped we’d be ejected not just from her olfactory radius but from her field of vision and even from the earth itself, she’d have exterminated us if she could have, but what happened with me in Bangkok was different, my broken hip was clearly going to stop me from doing anything of the sort, I was a long way from home, in an inhospitable place, there was also the fact that she had gone out to buy some things and had left the mobile phone in the room, I felt something beyond panic: I felt indifferent about anything that might befall me, sheer abandonment, the defeat of a body, but more pressingly I thought about the notes I had been taking during those 25 days, my novel, my only thoughts were of what would become of them, there was no way anybody would be able to read my handwriting, the notes would become simply one more piece of rubbish in the waste created by a Thai hotel, they’d get washed out to sea and ingested by a passing fish, then maybe some editor from a Spanish publishing house would go down to the local supermarket and buy that fish, frozen, and take it home and fry it up and eat it, in the same way that the bits of paper stuck to a corkboard in an Azores bar had been lost in the Atlantic, their only remaining trace a sub-aquatic drawing-pin map, and finally she came back and, gradually, by the touch of her hand, she made everything calm again, and later, as the sun’s reflection traversed the skyscraper opposite, I watched a couple having a fight in one of the rooms before finally embracing one another, until everyone, that couple and us, fell asleep in the hope of a better day to come, moments that helped me see this state of anguish for what it was, the most inhospitable place I had ever been in, a ruin which your brain has the propensity to self-generate sometimes, however luxurious and pleasantly Western the place is in which you find yourself, pleasant like the Thai maid who came and made my bed every day, who smiled when she saw the state I was in, always smiled, smiling is important, it activates neural centres that tell us we are somewhere the Taliban can’t get us, a place where viscous cholesterol will never prevail, where we are more than mere biology, the scientific reason why people don’t smile during an orgasm, in spite of the intense pleasure, is because the very survival of the species is in play during this seminal explosion, biology, the absence of laughter, the deep seriousness of rabbits, this is also why nymphomaniacs are always very serious people, sad, too, not the kind to be very receptive to the idea of playfully making a comprehensive list of all the rooms they might have slept in, like that writer named Perec did, for fun, for no reason at all, for the sake of generating another ruin, as a way of leaving behind that abandoned mine and catching that glimpse of the abandoned church dissolving beyond a watery film in the rearview mirror, this was our motivation, she and I, for going in search of somewhere to sleep after visiting the abandoned mine, another room in which to make lists, a place in which to make sense both of that downpour and everything caught in it, us included, this was also the reason we had chosen one of the 4 forest tracks after crossing the red river, to try it out, to test the law of imperfect induction, 4 forest tracks like on the Fostex 4-track recorder I made music with at home, trying things out, like which of the 4 tracks to lay some guitar on to either save the piece or ruin it completely, and with this still unresolved, after driving away from the abandoned mine, with the guitar case inside its double darkness, the case itself and the boot, we drove on in search of a place to sleep and the track grew wider, which is what you want in a situation like that, and then suddenly we were driving on concrete again, by the time it stopped raining it was almost dark and we came out onto a high plateau resembling a green and brown carpet and, farther on, came to a yellow billboard with black lettering that said in Italian: ITALIAN REPUBLIC PRISON. NO ENTRY, the sun had already begun going down, we stopped and got out, there was the usual slightly cold breeze that follows a storm, and the smell of wet earth and a very strong, quite repulsive smell of still-damp myrtle plants, she took out a trench coat from her suitcase, it was inside out and that was how she put it on, the Zara label on view, and pulled it tight around her, while I cast my eye over the sign again, trying to establish whether our translation of the Italian was correct, ‘Italian Republic Prison. No entry,’ we paced around a little to stretch our legs, discussed our options, we assumed there had to be a prison somewhere but the plateau looked bare of buildings, the sun began to dip beyond the horizon, and she crossed her arms, hugging herself as though to ward off the cold, and it was a gesture I thought I’d seen a thousand times in thousands of the films that we liked, a very common gesture among women when they cease to be women for a moment and become girls, in fact I think there’s even a Bible character who does it at one point, she lifted her pop-star sunglasses off her face for the first time all afternoon and evening and, positioning them like a hairband, gave herself another squeeze and said, Now what the fuck?, she always had a great line like this in the locker, the sort of domino-utterance that sets things in motion, though it took me a while to see it, this knack she had for coming up with just the right phrase only became clear in time, first there was Thailand, after the ‘disaster of Chiang Mai’, as we liked to call it, when I had spent time cataloguing her gestures and expressions, little examples of her seemingly savage civility, or the way, like a cat, that she would silently insert herself into my writing during the times when the hand of some bionic automaton seemed to be guiding me, yes, it was all about her, her way with words, something that gradually became apparent during those monsoon days, Thai Nocilla days, until I one day found myself, years later, in Las Vegas, surrounded on all sides by her first-class intelligence and singularity, drenched, as it were, by the circle of bright conviction given off by that which is unique, that which resembles nothing and nobody but itself, in the same way that a slice of lemon in a bottle bobs about expectantly in this ‘universal liquid-element’ that, let’s just be honest with ourselves, isn’t water but Coca-Col
a, something I saw clearly in Las Vegas, a city whose Sunday opening hours alone would justify both its existence and that of the city councillor, possibly an altogether normal, vulgar man, possibly quite hapless, who one fine day had the excellent idea of everywhere being open 24-7, the consequences of which were simple but also impossible to guess, this councillor’s blind decision would end up with me purchasing The Music of Chance, in turn giving rise to our Project and all that followed, a seafaring village on an island to the south of Sardinia very similar to one in the Azores with a bar we went into for something to eat and to watch the ships go by and watch the bits of paper blown around by the wind between the cars, to nothing, because during our time in Las Vegas she developed a liking for a certain city worker, not the anonymous councillor with his possibly dark impulse for shops to stay open even on Sunday nights, but a different one, a US Postal Service worker, ‘a young guy with a cowboy face and pirate sideburns,’ as she put it one night, the night she confessed to me her attraction, an attraction, she said, that had begun with his hands, with the forefinger he used to place the stamps onto her postcards at the International counter, a wide, sturdy finger, like a buffalo’s hoof, followed by a dark, sordid smile – the smile of a chancer – I found this all out on one of the nights we spent in a pyramid-shaped hotel called the Luxor: it was a Saturday and I was sleeping, worn out by all the painkillers I’d been taking, the ‘disaster of Chiang Mai’ was two years in the past by this point but my hip still bothered me and all the more after walking around the casinos for hours, a faint but persistent pain had sprung up and I’d been finding it impossible to sleep, but that night I had slept deeply, and she vanished, I knew she’d gone because I was woken at 3 a.m. by ambulances and fire engines screaming by – one of the carts on the Russian Mountain ride that encircles the reproduction-New York had come flying off the rails – and I reached across for her and she wasn’t there, and I waited 3 or 4 hours in darkness before realizing she’d slipped out to look for her cowboy-pirate and, staring up at the stucco micro-pyramids, attempting to count them all, I imagined thousands of CCTV cameras looking down on her, I imagined her in their sights, her figure emitted via light rays onto screens and then out of the city, to a bin at the ends of the desert, a bin that contains blue, burned images, at the ends of the Internet, and, a little before dawn, she showed up, she came in without turning on the light, didn’t take a shower, did nothing, didn’t even get undressed, just lay down on the bed in silence, though when we got up in the morning, without me asking any questions, she confessed, she talked and talked for hours, I’d never seen her talk so much, nor look so gaunt, not in all the time I had known her, and I sat listening in silence, taking painkiller after painkiller, until eventually she stopped talking and we went for a walk, separate walks, it was night by now, Sunday, the decision to break up had been taken, not explicitly, she and I could never be explicit about such a thing, but in some way everything had been said already, a circle that went round and round the question without ever entirely clarifying it, she came back to the hotel with a daisy-pattern bikini and I with a book in Portuguese called The Music of Chance by someone called Paul Auster, an author I hadn’t heard of let alone read, and whose work I never investigated further, a book I put down on my bedside table, unread, and the next morning found on her bedside table, none of the pages were turned over because she hated marking books like that, but I knew she’d read some of it, before I had even looked at the first page, before my hands, exuding Myolastan and Nolotil through the very pores, had marked it, after that the book went back and forth between her bedside table and mine, and she, who had said so much in the preceding days in justification of her infidelity, now fell silent, did nothing but read, not much, a couple of pages a day, possibly, after which she’d lie staring at the pyramids on the stucco ceiling, Marlboro pinned to her lips, I remember very clearly the strange and unprecedented beauty of her body then as we lay in bed, me watching her in profile as smoke rose upwards from her lips, I carried on reading during these silences, I carried on reading whilst, unbeknownst to me, her crush on the postman with the cowboy face was abating under the narcotic effect of something greater, something with many more digits than that US Postal Service worker with his bison-like fingers: the Project, our Project, something that would lead us to the top of a cone with no way off it, in a Sardinian bar very similar to a bar in the Azores, and the days passed in the Luxor Las Vegas, and we both gradually became more possessive of the book, more watchful over it, neither of us saying a word until, after two weeks there, she, without looking at me and without turning her head one single millimetre in relation to the column of ceiling-ward smoke, finally broke the silence, ‘Now what the fuck?,’ the same talismanic phrase – the kind spoken by interrupter-people, domino-people – she would come out with 2 years later, on an evening when we didn’t know what to do, when we turned circles around the car, reading and rereading a sign that said ITALIAN REPUBLIC PRISON. NO ENTRY, completely stuck for the first time in 2 years, the first time since the lavish idea of the Project had embedded itself in our minds, our Project, as we liked to call it, paralyzed in a landscape that unfolded inhospitably as far as the eye could see, and that evening in Las Vegas, the first time she had come out with this same exclamation, ‘Now what the fuck?’, we had also been surrounded by a carceral, mineral landscape, at that moment Las Vegas was also a large billboard saying the same thing, only in reverse: STATE OF NEVADA PRISON: ENTER, or MUSIC OF CHANCE PRISON: ENTER, because from then on that book entitled The Music of Chance, which had previously been an object we owned, took hold of us to such an extent that she and I became its property and, as happens with all cellmates, forced us to compete for ownership of it, a never-stated but manifest ownership, and a rivalry that entailed a continual locking oneself in the bathroom to read it and a waking in the small hours and squinting to see if the light on the other’s bedside table was on, that would be a sure sign the other was reading it, 2 cellmates condemned for the entirety of that Las Vegas stretch to eat and sleep together, to listen to the other’s eager breathing, while reading, and not therefore being able to get to sleep, not being able to think, condemned to all the things that fall to a person forced to cohabit the space around a magnetic pole, one of these things that ceases to exist because it initially only came into being as a symbol of something far stronger than itself, and then, one day, it was time for us to leave Las Vegas, and, sitting in seats 17A and 17B in the Boeing, we weren’t surprised to find, as the aircraft took off, the entire city reflected both on the runway and inside our bodies, and we went home, and neither of us breathed a word about the book, we just watched films, lots of films and lots of TV series, but both of us knew that the book was still there, sending particles through our heads, we knew it precisely because of the silence around it, neither of us made the slightest allusion, no little passing comments about it, nothing, like the time I asked the neo-revolutionaries if the TV listings were in Workers’ World and that put a definitive end to all communication between us, ne’er a plain ‘pass me the lighter,’ far less a complex ‘pass me the igniter,’ all we shared from then on were looks, looks that said everything about what had happened, indeed, neither she nor I spoke a word from then on about the book or the time we had spent reading, enraptured, in Las Vegas, she always had these talismanic expressions, just so, just great turns of phrase, and that was why I found it strange when, 2 years later, in that bar on an island to the south of Sardinia very similar to a bar in the Azores, while we ate, while we watched the wind blowing bits of paper around between the cars, while we savoured a bit of nothing, at a point when we could say that our Project, or at least its opening phase, was complete, having, in this way, been mounted in the most inhospitable place on Earth, why I found it strange, I mean, is that she didn’t come out with any of her bon mots then, none of her usual wit, I was immediately aware of this but said nothing, rather I put it out of my mind, trying to ignore the irremediable change between us, and the
n the mobile phone suddenly started vibrating in my pocket and we walked to the end of the dock and she threw the waterproof guitar case into the water and with it our entire Project, both of us still with the very clear memory of the sign that had paralyzed us months before, ITALIAN REPUBLIC JAIL: NO ENTRY, the day we’d walked around and around the car, and she drew the inside-out overcoat still tighter around her body, see-through at the breasts, her nipples erect through the equally cold bikini, a bikini which, like us, was out of context, was being used for something it had not been designed for, and we decided to spend the night in the car, there in sight of the ITALIAN REPUBLIC JAIL: NO ENTRY sign, to wait for sunrise and let that make the decision for us: whether to go on or to turn back, back across the red river, back along one of the 4 forest tracks at random, and we opened a packet of biscuits and ate a couple of the peaches we’d bought in the morning in the town on the coast where they were going to be showing a Disney movie, I don’t know why I’ve never seen a Disney movie, we rationed our water, taking disciplined sips, and she expressed alarm at her lack of knickers, she put new knickers on every morning, felt zero compunction in throwing away the previous day’s, and every month, on the first of the month, she’d buy 30 or 31 new pairs, and that night she became worried upon realizing she had the wrong bag, she thought she had 94 to go but actually there were only 11, she was going to have to find somewhere to buy new knickers and only had that number of days in which to do so, while I was worried about the water and petrol, and as we sat back against the imitation leather upholstery and ate biscuits we spoke for the first time in days about the Project, considering the pros and cons of the island as a place to mount it, and after that she got out and looked at the stars, of which there were thousands, and she was reminded of the thousands of small stucco pyramids on the ceiling of a Las Vegas hotel room, and I of the thousands of CCTV cameras sprouting from the ceiling of a Las Vegas casino, just as they did from the ceilings of shops in Las Vegas, the false sky of Las Vegas streets and alleyways, and I thought about how she would be on one of those cameras, in bed with a cowboy with big sideburns and fingers like buffalo hooves, in a soiled motel bed, in the cheap bed of a US Postal Service worker, the two of them in all kinds of different positions on some screen, on the fuzzy CCTV display, we got back in the car and before reclining the seats I looked at the clock, the sun would soon be coming up, and we fell asleep hoping that tomorrow everything would continue but also that it would be different, different enough, sleep sometimes has the power to activate a mechanism for repairing the world, my mother once told me a story about sleeping, she lived in a village in León during the Civil War, she would have been 4 or 5 years old, and one day she and a friend of hers went to play in a valley meadow a little way from the village and, exhausted after running around all afternoon catching spiders, the pair fell deeply asleep on a pile of cut grass, when they woke it was almost dinner time, and they ran back to the village, and then, as they came by the first houses on the outskirts, one of their neighbours came out and told them the war was over, I’ve thought a lot about this story, about the part sleep had to play in the end of hostilities, specifically about my mother and her friend falling asleep, their deactivation of the world, about the way in which some of the places we migrate to during sleep can repair the world, and objects that are equivalent to the world, idempotent with the world, world-objects, I recalled the story of the man who goes back to Chernobyl and fails to recognize his home and how this was like my mother waking up and going back to her house and not recognizing it because, ever since she had been old enough to think, her house had been synonymous with war, and I slept that night in the Lancia with my girlfriend’s body next to mine, and with the hope that, the following morning, our deactivation of the world would alter the apparent cul-de-sac we were in, and I now remember the last thing to come into my head that night, an image I had never seen before or imagined, it was strange: a man was walking toward a beach with a flower in his hand and, a little before he reached the shore, thrust it into the wet sand and watered it with some fresh water he had brought in a plastic bottle, just this, a thought I had never had before, wholly without precedent, at least in my life, and this led me to suppose it was going to reappear at least once more in my life, there is an unexplained but certainly irrefutable law according to which everything that comes into being does so in order to come into being again, in one form or another, to repeat itself, nothing happens in a vacuum, everything takes place at least twice, this being the only way to create the rhythm, the intermittent wave that gives rise to a very powerful law, the law of verisimilitude, of likenesses, I suppose this is why all the visions ever had by humankind fall neatly into 2 categories, 1) those that see things in the world, incidents, as unique and unrepeatable, as isolated points in space and time, and 2) those that see them as necessarily repeatable, a succession of points in time, and it was this hope – a hope for repetition – that I saw that night as I fell asleep beside her shivering body curled up in the passenger car seat, fake-leather upholstery for our pillows, her bikini poking out where her overcoat was open at the neck, a bikini with two daisies printed on it, one on each breast, daisies that for a moment I saw as fried eggs, symbols of ductility, of the maternal, sometimes I see people’s eyes as two fried eggs, or I see them simply shining on a black background like the famous White Square on Black Back-ground, repetitions of one single image that appeared to me in another guise when least I expected it, everything in existence, as I said, is condemned to repeat itself, that’s law, and so, in this rather blunt and simple way, something called The Music of Chance, written by a guy one summer (could have been any summer) in his house in Brooklyn, was condemned to repeat, over and over, in Las Vegas, in Sardinia, on an island to the south of Sardinia, and even, paradoxically, before I had read it and still less knew anything about it, years earlier in Chiang Mai, at the time of what we liked to call ‘the disaster’, which was when our great Project began, but I wasn’t thinking about any of this as I fell asleep that night in the Lancia with the final waking image of her breasts spilling from the overcoat, two fried-egg prints, a coincidence, maybe, I don’t know, I’m a great believer in coincidences, an American writer from the middle of the last century called Allen Ginsberg wrote the following at the age of 17: ‘I will be a genius of one kind or another, probably in literature,’ but he also said: ‘I’m a lost little boy, lost my way, looking for love’s matrix.’
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