Nocilla Lab

by Agustín Fernández Mallo

  We ate our fill and it struck me she and I were a cassette tape, one that had been altered and manipulated, and that one day someone would find it in a ditch somewhere. I don’t know why it was a ditch I thought about and not a pavement, or a crate or an alleyway. But it was a ditch that I thought about.

  14.

  But the true space-within-a-space affecting us was a different one.

  The dark space contained in a guitar case which in turn was contained inside a car boot, also dark.

  We did not open the car boot again.

  We went around with our suitcases in the back seat, which meant we couldn’t leave the car unattended for very long in case thieves should be attracted by the wares.

  It could have been inertia that made us so determined to keep the boot shut, though, because I think we’d both lost faith in the Project by this point. Sometimes projects grow larger the more you try to keep them at arm’s length, and the more you try not to think about them; you distance yourself, but the metaphor does its job.

  15.

  While remaining within or close to the touristy part of the island, we spent a few days in a city which, according to the 2005 census, had 70,000 inhabitants. To find ourselves walking on pavements, to find shops we could go into, verifying for ourselves once more the wondrous thing that is spending money, did us more good than we’d expected.

  In every shop we went into she would elevate the act of buying into a truly sophisticated system of codes and signs. I envied the way she handled the summer dresses, which were hung in series, cold from the air conditioning. I shuddered to think of this coldness as being to do with bodily absence.

  The perfection of a city lies in it being a cosmos unto itself. Everything’s there. As it is on the grid of state-owned motorways. Yes, you can live in a city and never have to leave, yes, you can have the sensation that all life’s environments are there – being created and reproduced as well as extinguished. And any that are not, it doesn’t matter, the city invents them.

  I bought a replica of a shirt worn by Steve McQueen in a motor-racing movie.

  The countryside, on the other hand, is an open space, not a cosmos in and of itself. You can be okay there for a while, yes, but at some point the feeling will arise that something’s missing. We discussed it: maybe this was what had made us criss-cross the island, the largely rural island – maybe we’d been looking for something. Coming to the city, it suddenly seemed our search had ended.

  We were in a shopping area at one point and, looking down, saw a mound of shotgun cartridges at the bottom of a drain.

  She told me a story from her childhood concerning cartridges and shotguns.

  16.

  I have a tendency to neglect important details.

  I’m reminded of a very hot day, possibly the hottest that summer, when we were still at the campsite, and seeing a middle-aged man sitting in a chair on a small area of dry earth, near the fence – not an ounce of shade to be found. I was out with my camera, searching. When I passed him, he asked if I had any water. I immediately recognized him: I’d seen him out jogging a few times.

  As he gulped down the water, I looked at all the clothes he had on: wool jumpers, boots, a special, highly waterproof jacket for bivouacking under.

  ‘Aren’t you hot?’

  I saw sadness in his eyes as he looked up at me, such sadness that it actually made his eyes look heavy, almost ovoid. He was unable to produce sweat, he said; it was his great hope to be able to sweat. Never in his life had he produced an ounce of sweat, and that was why he went out running, and why he let the sun beat down on his body.

  ‘I want to be a normal person, friend,’ he said, handing back the bottle. ‘I want to be normal, but it’s impossible. My friends call me “plastic man”, “unreal man”, or just “nothing man”. I try and compensate for my unrealness with food. I eat so, so much, I get fat,’ – he rubbed his belly – ‘because what I want is to be in the world, and for people to notice me. Sometimes I manage to forget I don’t have any water in my body, and then I’m happy, but sooner or later the truth of my situation comes back to me.’

  He tried to stand up, and in doing so nearly fell down. He was woozy. His thin legs could not bear his body mass.

  He should smoke, I said, not eat. We’re made up of 70% water, 30% smoke, I said, this is the perfect balance, bearing in mind that tobacco makes you thirsty all the time, so you end up drinking a lot of water. The whole 50% water, 50% fat thing was old news, I told him, it didn’t work: water and fat don’t mix, friend. Don’t eat, smoke! I said.

  ‘So you’re saying if I smoke, my body will be 70% water again?’ For a brief second, an ounce of happiness had entered his face.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘That’s the law.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, hugging me. ‘I’ll give it a go.’

  The hug lasted a few seconds. In spite of his roundness he was a dry stick, the driest thing I’ve ever been in contact with; he more or less crackled.

  ‘That’s that then,’ I said. ‘Would you mind telling me what your favourite sound is in the campsite, and could I also get you to draw me a picture of how to get there, and could I take a photo of you in that place?’

  He stood thinking about it, for long enough that I was forced to add:

  ‘Do you not want to? Doesn’t matter if not.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, hiking up the waistband on his tracksuit trousers, ‘not at all. I’m just thinking.’

  He remained in standby mode, eyes twisted skywards, and then suddenly:

  ‘The thing is, my favourite sound isn’t anywhere in particular, so you can’t take a photo of it.’

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  He knelt down, put his right ear to the ground, and moved around like that in a small circle, probing the earth with his ear. The waistband of his trousers slipped down to reveal the top of his buttocks. He scoured the dry portion of earth like this, on all fours, until he came to some grass where the tent area began. Stopping every now and then he’d straighten up and take a breath, before putting his ear to the ground again. Soon:

  ‘I think I can hear it.’

  He stopped every now and then, finger to lips. I’d stop too, wouldn’t move a muscle. Then he’d beckon me with the same finger and we’d set off again. At some point he stopped, a eureka expression on his face:

  ‘Here!’ he said. ‘It’s here!’

  I stood quietly, waiting.

  ‘The water down in the drains,’ he said, ‘underground – that’s the most beautiful sound there is.’

  He got to his feet, and I could see he was welling up again:

  ‘If I just had a water network like this inside my body… Come on, let’s follow it.’

  ‘But you only need to find a tap and the sound would be there,’ I said. ‘You don’t need to go searching around for it.’

  ‘It isn’t the same. Taps, fountains, they don’t interest me: they’re outside. What I miss are those pipes inside my body. That “inner hum” – you surely know what I mean – some people call it the soul. Now, get a stick, would you, and dig a line in the sand. I’ll tell you where.’

  I picked up a branch, he got down like a tracker again, and I went along marking the alleged water course. Soon enough I had marked out a labyrinth, only one with neither beginning nor centre.

  ‘This isn’t right,’ I said. ‘Drains have to lead somewhere, they have to start somewhere too, and there has to be a base point with a siphon and so on. This isn’t right.’

  Hours went by, and I knew she’d be waiting for me to come back for dinner. I left the man, his ear still to the ground, and in his left hand a Smeraldina mineral water propaganda pen. He went on working that increasingly convoluted furrow.

  17.

  A day came when the monotony began to seep out through some gap or other in the Lancia. Gradually all conversation between us ceased. Not for nothing, since there was nothing to say. It was as though the two of us were one now, one so fa
miliar with itself that silence is its natural way of interacting with things. Most of the time, when it’s like this, you don’t notice yourself. You pick up the phone and there’s no one there, for the simple reason that you’ve called yourself.

  There were times when I wrote in my squared, spiral-bound notebook and it seemed like she was the one doing the writing.

  One day our water ran out, it was a Sunday and all the village shops were shut. We were a good day’s drive from anywhere very populated. It was afternoon by the time we reached a petrol station. I sank myself, literally, under the tap in the toilets, which was a first-generation mixer tap. This led me to think about the fact that, since more or less the beginning of the 1980s, all taps have been mixer taps, i.e. not with one hot and one cold tap, but with a single central channel in which the water mixes, and a single handle. This shift came about just as modernity was segueing into postmodernity, the end-of-history moment, no more left/right ideologies, the time when a way of life arose in which everything was mixed together, a perfect block (or sphere) in which no direction (or vector) was privileged over any other and beyond which nothing(ness) lies (all is emptiness).

  Couples usually strive to create their own self-contained spaces – self-contained as in nothing beyond them seems to exist.

  The perfect couple is the mixer-tap couple.

  18.

  One day we came to a small village on a small island to the south of Sardinia.

  We drove around looking for somewhere to park and the impression we formed was of somewhere strikingly similar to a village in Portugal on the Atlantic seaboard. It was almost the exact double of a port in the Azores I’d read a newspaper article about by a writer called Vila-Matas, I said. We went into a bar-pizzeria for something to eat, to watch the ships coming in, to watch bits of newspaper blowing around between the feet of passersby, to nothing, because all conversation between us had ceased. There was a neon sign on the door with a ship, much like the one in Moby-Dick, in a storm. A waitress with a very pasty complexion came over.

  My mobile phone vibrated in my pocket.

  19.

  A few days later she said:

  ‘What would happen if you were in your villa one day, say a Sunday, and you went out to get your post, and the wind blew the door shut, and you’d left your key inside, and you’re there in your pyjamas, nothing on your feet, and you find yourself looking in at your coffee pot, the living room table with the little porcelain statue on it, the photo of the cat on the shelves, the books you left open on the floor beside your table, where your Mac is, messages flashing up on Messenger, your coffee cup on the draining board, the bin overflowing with Coke cans, and it struck you you’d been afforded a view of your life without you in it? What would happen?’

  ‘I’d smash the glass,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, OK, but what else?’

  I said nothing for a few seconds, then:

  ‘OK, I don’t know if I’d have the guts. For that kind of “return” to myself.’

  The same day, she bought a Kinder Surprise, didn’t eat the egg, just broke it with the same careful self-absorption as a thief smashing a window, handing me the chocolate to eat, which I did, in a professional sort of way, the way you see mother-apes place bananas into their babies’ mouths after peeling them. She got the cut-and-paste truck from inside. The island seemed to have awoken a sudden interest in her for trucks. I had a thought about a cassette tape and wrote down the following:

  ‘There is a before and after in the history of humankind: the moment of the emergence of the cassette tape as a consumer product, and with it the possibility of cutting and pasting, and mixing and changing tracks.’

  This was immediately followed by the thought – I’d had it before – about the two of us on or in a cassette tape, and that cassette tape being dropped in a ditch.

  20.

  I felt tired one day and she, for the first time, took the wheel; I lay down in the back, leaning my head on her bag of knickers. The implicit order in these white undergarments, the way they were perfectly stacked, their smell of industrial ironing – all of this felt peaceful to me. A mineral world. I shut my eyes.

  When an object moves forward at a constant rate, and you are inside it, you feel nothing: Galileo’s principle of relativity means you are as though stationary. But upon acceleration or deceleration, the body registers the change, and then, if you are asleep, you wake.

  This was what woke me, a slowing-down, a subtle braking, similar to the fluctuations of a dream. I opened my eyes. Suddenly everything was quiet.

  ‘I saw it in the distance,’ she said from the driver’s seat, speaking the words slowly, as though to herself.

  I opened my eyes properly and, still lying down, saw a large yellow sign with black letters through the rear window:

  ITALIAN REPUBLIC PRISON. NO ENTRY

  I sat up abruptly. She seemed in a state of shock. She couldn’t explain what had happened:

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I got lost, I don’t know how I’ve managed to bring us back here again. I could’ve sworn I’d never seen that road before.’

  I didn’t get annoyed with her, it wasn’t the end of the world, but I’ll admit the situation did make me uncomfortable. I had slept, and my deactivation of the world hadn’t in this case had a repairing effect. There, hanging from a bush, was the pair of knickers she’d thrown away 6 weeks earlier, now with holes in them from the nibblings of small animals.

  I’m of the view that when life presents you with a line that turns out to be a curve, a pure curve – that is, when one comes back to the exact place one set out from – it means there were two possibilities in that place, and you chose the wrong one, the one that winnows out the arbitrary from life, sending it tumbling into an abstract deterministic bubble, a stable attractor: this is the witchery of stability, a spell that has to be broken. This is what led me to say we should carry on to the prison this time.

  She didn’t need convincing.

  21.

  The road that unfolded before us was no different to some of the ones we’d seen a few months before. The tufts of grass grew sideways, from which I deduced it was a place of constant winds. I took the wheel.

  A little over half an hour on, we spied a quadrangular building of indeterminate size. There was a high stone wall with an overhanging roof and watchtowers at every corner. The entire complex was surrounded by large rolls of barbed wire in place of fences.

  It was a little before noon.

  We drew closer, passing what appeared to be disused pillboxes on either side. Seagulls stood on these, looking south-west.

  The road didn’t go past the prison as expected, but stopped outside it, directly in front of the first of 3 tall, gated fences.

  And we wouldn’t have gone through even the first of these had we not seen, on the final one, a sign. On a board positioned symmetrically between two watchtowers, someone had graffitied the words:

  SING-SING

  ECOTOURISM

  We drove on, in first gear. The grass grew very high in a kind of no-man’s-land between the rolls of barbed wire, which themselves stood at least twice as tall as any person. We came through the last of the gates, which was set into the stone wall, and came into a courtyard that must once have been the recreation yard but had now been turned into a garden, 75x75m2. The soundtrack from Breakfast at Tiffany’s was playing somewhere – a low, trickling sound, in a version saturated with violins. There were lawns intersected by gravel paths and well-tended hedges. The trees, all of the same variety, one I didn’t recognize, were scattered here and there, and gave shade to a small fountain in the middle. Each of the four walls, which were quite vertical, had a multitude of small, unbarred windows in neat, bitmap-like rows. Two small dogs were copulating beneath a tree.

  We drove around the outside of the garden, staying in first, and came to a wooden portico door. There was a sign to one side, very new-looking, which read ‘Reception’ in Andale-Mono font. I pres
sed the buzzer.

  When we entered, the man inside took a number of seconds to look up from whatever he was reading behind the counter. He took off his reading glasses, looked at us and said in a flat voice:

  ‘Welcome.’

  The price seemed reasonable.

  He showed us to our room.

  22.

  Investigating the grounds in their entirety, we found that the edifice was indeed built upon square foundations. The 4 sides of the aforementioned garden were formed by the 4 former prison wings. Each was set out over 3 floors and had a central passageway, 75 metres long, with the cells on either side; it was more like a central road than a central passageway, except it wasn’t open to the sky [it made me think of shopping centres]. The 2 upper floors were accessed via enclosed stairwells and gangways. There must have been over 1,000 rooms.

  Ours was on the third floor and had a window that looked out over the interior garden; we could also see a little of the horizon. TV, double bed, shower, toilet, air conditioning and everything else one would expect of a 3-star eco-hotel. And the original metal cell door with the original sliding peephole. The ground, walls and lamps were spotless, they reminded you of an operating theatre. The bed and bedside tables, also made of metal, were bolted to the floor. We put our luggage down and I immediately went and splashed water on my face. There was a mirror: I looked tired. I didn’t feel tired but, as though pretending, my face looked tired. The hand towel, white, which I used to dab my face, bore no emblem or logo of any kind.