‘What’s your name?’
With a surprised arch of the eyebrow, he said:
‘Agustín, you already know the answer to that question.’
‘No,’ I insisted. ‘Your full name.’
‘Agustín Fernández Mallo.’
When something is so dizzyingly superior to you, you turn docile, you simply go along with it. I lacked the courage to say anything. We walked out almost immediately. We forgot about paying.
31.
We stayed up all night, talking about how it was impossible that he should have known my name; when we arrived he hadn’t asked for any documentation and we hadn’t been made to sign a register. He must have read it in the notes inside the guitar case. There wasn’t any other way. But this was just the nerves talking, nerves and hasty logic; after a few minutes we conceded that there was no mention of my name on anything inside the guitar case either.
She started to panic – a panic modulated by my presence, but panic all the same. I just felt bewildered.
My view was that we couldn’t let him steal our Project; to me this was unconscionable. She just wanted to get away, get out of there straightaway, even if that meant giving up on the Project. I wouldn’t budge, and suggested, as a way of getting her onside, that we ought to wait until he left his studio, go inside, get the case and run; but it wasn’t clear to me. I felt both extremely angry and extremely curious, a combination that resulted in me wanting to stay put: to find out how much he had found out; to see how far he’d gone in assembling and comprehending the assortment of things inside the guitar case. To me there was no question of leaving.
I managed to convince her, before we went to bed, to stay on for a few days.
32.
We decided not to leave the room at all except for food. We’d go and fix something, and bring it back up as quickly as possible. I typed away, and the whip-cracks of every keystroke melded in the air with the strains of the Neapolitan songs. She was finding the whole thing difficult to bear.
Our paths crossed at one point. We were coming out of the kitchens and he was going in; he looked more like a car-parking attendant than an erudite bibliophile.
‘Goodness,’ he said. ‘Been a while. What are you two doing up there all day long?’
‘Working,’ I said without thinking.
‘Me too, me too. You should come by again one of these evenings, that’s when I take a break. We’ll have a drink.’
‘Sure, sure. We’ll see.’
33.
I don’t know how she got it into her head to go there because she never gave much away, but one morning she was gone. We kept the cell door open and before I realized it, she’d vanished. She often went out to the gangway and sat at the edge with her legs dangling down, smoking and looking at the row of doors across from us. She said the echo of my typing was relaxing, that instead of a machine designed for typing it seemed to her like a machine for erasing, as though with every keystroke a fragment of everything she wished to forget had been erased. So involved in my writing was I, I simply didn’t notice her go.
I heard footsteps, someone running up the metal steps, first floor, second floor, third floor, and then the unmistakable sound of someone approaching at a run. She came in trembling, went over and sat down on the bed, I gave her water to drink and, still panting, she said she’d been down in the kitchens, and had had a strong impulse to go looking around his living quarters. She was nosing around knowing that as long as she could hear the music coming from the studio she was safe. After looking through the many photos in the chests of drawers, and the books in the library – all of them, curiously enough, cheap editions of noir novels – she opened a wardrobe and found, in a neat pile, all of her dirty knickers, all the knickers she had been throwing in the bin during our stay, a pile of very neatly folded dirty knickers; at that, she ran.
For me, the fact he had been rummaging around in our bin didn’t change things very much. For her, it was the last straw.
‘I’m leaving,’ she said. ‘If you’re coming, good, if not, that’s fine too.’
I couldn’t go. I couldn’t leave it like this, abandon the Project.
34.
We decided she’d take the car. Not that there was much of a decision to make as there wasn’t any other way out of there. We decided that when it came time for me to leave, I’d ask him to take me to the nearest village or town, and from there get a bus, or whatever there was, to the airport.
I don’t remember the exact date, but it was some time in early September. In the morning I went with her as far as the last barbed wire fence. We kissed. I stood watching the exhaust fumes until she was out of sight.
35.
I let a few days pass, but I had made up my mind: I was going to tell him exactly what it was he’d stumbled upon, and the enormous cost to us not just of coming up with the idea, but then of putting it in motion; that he had to give it all back to us, and that there was no way I was taking no for an answer.
And so, the week after she left, I went down to his studio one evening. I knocked on the door. I heard him turn down the music, and then he was at the door:
‘Well, well. I saw the car had gone, I thought you’d left without paying.’
He told me to come in.
We sat facing one another, and he said nothing as I told him the story, how it was that the Gibson case had fallen into his hands, I even went into details about the bar that resembled a bar in the Azores, the dock we had walked along, how we had thrown the guitar case into the sea; I went so far as to mention the dead cat; I laid it all out for him, followed by my demand: it was time for him to return these things to us.
When I had finished, he got up, poured himself some of the myrtle liqueur – I said I didn’t want any – and, without sitting back down, said,
‘I’m afraid that isn’t going to be possible. You, sir, are not the owner of this guitar case, or its contents, or this project. First of all, you say you’ve got the same name as me, Agustín Fernández Mallo. Well, I’m going to need proof of that. Either you are a madman, sir, or you are very barefaced.’
Patting my trouser pocket, I realized I hadn’t brought my wallet with me. In fact, I thought with a shudder, I’d left it in the glove compartment of the car; I had no way of proving my identity. My mobile phone was in the glove compartment too, I realized, meaning I also had no way of ringing anyone who could back up my story.
‘I see what’s happening here,’ he said with conviction. ‘Who are you trying to fool? I’m Agustín Fernández Mallo, and this is some bad joke. The contents of that guitar case belong to me.’
I got up and went over to his table – he came with me. Everything concerning our Project was there, and I was picking things up and turning them over – as much as he would allow. I pretended to compose myself, thinking I’d grab it all and run as soon as the chance arose, or at least snatch up the indispensable things, the things without which the Project could never get off the ground. I began acting interested, and I did actually feel curious about what he was planning to do with it all. Gradually I drew him in, until at one point he said,
‘Look, here it is.’
Extracting a sheaf of papers from a drawer, he handed it to me. 100 or so pieces of paper, typed up in a word processing-programme; I clenched them in my hands, I couldn’t believe this guy could have thought that the Project, our Project, consisted of coming up with a text, a simple text, the kind of thing any writer, even a quite ordinary writer, could have done. He clearly knew nothing, and certainly didn’t deserve to be the owner of that guitar case or the keys it contained to such a Project. While he poured himself another measure of the liqueur, I skimmed the first page:
Part I: Automatic Search Engine
True story, very significant too, a man returns to the deserted city of Pripyat, near Chernobyl, a place he and the rest of the populace fled following the nuclear reactor disaster 5 years before, walks the empty streets, which, like the perfectly preser
ved buildings, take him back to his life in the city, his efforts as a construction worker here in the 1970s were not for nothing, comes to his own street, scans the tower block for the windows of his former flat, surveying the exterior for a couple of seconds, 7 seconds, 15 seconds, 1 minute, before turning the camera around so that his face is in shot and saying, Not sure, not sure this is where my flat was, then gazes up at the forest of windows again and says, not to camera this time, I don’t know, it could be that one, or that one over there maybe, I just don’t know, and he doesn’t cry, doesn’t seem affected in any way, couldn’t even be said to seem particularly confused, this is an important story concerning the existence of likenesses between things, I could have stuck with this man, could have looked into his past, how he was living now, which patron saint’s day he was born on, his domestic dramas, the amount of millisieverts or gamma, alpha and beta radiation his organism had been subjected to in the past
I stopped, skipped a few pages and began reading again at random:
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
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I skipped straight to the end:
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 ’40s 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.’
At that point he snatched the pages from me, saying,
‘That’s enough. And by the way, I’m still waiting for you to pay me. Maybe when you do, you’ll let me know your real name too.’
Putting everything back inside the guitar case, he shut it, and then kicked it a short distance away, positioning it under a piece of furniture. He took the text and went off to the toilet, which was to one side of the room. When I heard the sound of his parabola of urine hitting the water, I unplugged his laptop from the wall, picked it up and ran; I failed to disconnect it from the small printer on one side, which fell to the floor, and I dragged it along behind me as well. I ran as fast as I could.
He didn’t run after me, he didn’t call out. Not a word.
36.
I shut myself in, and this time I did begin hammering at the keys non-stop – a defence mechanism, I guess. I couldn’t think, and I didn’t want to think. His Neapolitan songs carried on playing, and I couldn’t understand how he could have written all these things, how he could possibly know, not about these details so much, but rather about my life as a whole, because of course there was no way he could have found out all this information, everything in the text, from the contents of the guitar case; in the month we’d spent in the ecoprison, he simply couldn’t have learned all these things, some of which touched on events in my life years in the past. It was just impossible. To top it off, when I turned the laptop on to see if I could find any clues, it turned out to be empty; no user files, no folders whatsoever, whether containing text, image or sound, there weren’t even any programmes, nor any word-processing software – nothing. It was an empty brain, empty like mine was, I thought, identity-less, set up as if to prevent life from ever being written or constructed again. The only thing I found, some kind of seemingly macabre joke, was a succession of empty folders, one inside the other, named in sequence: Sing-Sing_1, Sing-Sing_2, Sing-Sing_3, Sing-Sing_4, etc., going all the way into the 200s, and effectively the most accurate representation possible of the infinite solitude inside an also infinite jail with a single man inside. I went along opening each of these in turn and, when I came to the last one, did find a piece of rudimentary image-processing software hidden inside. But what use was this? I now understood why he hadn’t bothered to follow me when I ran off with this pointless contraption.
I started having nightmares, and even on occasion woke up convinced that I had no identity, that I was the imposter, or, like in some cheap, straight-to-DVD movie, that it had all been a dream and since the day I’d been born I’d been dreaming his life, Agustín’s life. Gradually, and without realizing at first, any time he came to mind that was how I started thinking of him, as ‘Agustín’ – I began to designate myself as ‘I’, nothing more. In calmer moments I thought perhaps he might be a sorcerer, a seer, some prodigy of superlative genius, and that he was able to take the objects in the guitar case, our brain-children, and just by touching them, with a burst of some unknown energy, see everything that had happened in our lives, make them pass before his eyes like the frames in a film, and finally possess them. A hypothesis that got me nowhere. Looking around at the bed and the tables in my room, all of which were bolted down, I began to speculate about it being a cabin and the entire ecoprison part of an ocean liner now grounded on a desiccated seabed, formerly home to fish, seaweed, tides, ports, bars where the sailors pinned up messages for one another on a large corkboard that now also lay here, out on this hot tundra, formerly the very bottom of the sea; that those pieces of paper and the words that had gone to form those messages would now be dust, airborne molecules I was now breathing, as well as the molecules of the objects I touched and the green vegetables I was eating. Thoughts I found profoundly disturbing; a disturbance I could never get to go away.
I tried to work out some way of locking the room from the inside. I couldn’t just pile furniture up against it, everything being bolted down, so I removed 15 of the keys from the typewriter, levers and all, and jammed them between the door and the doorframe, like the bolts you get on domestic armoured doors. He’d still be able to get in if he tried, but never to catch me off-guard. It took me a long time to choose which letters to remove; it was a bit like removing part of the DNA that allowed me to write, survive. In the end I decided on the punctuation keys, the space bar and the accents, and when I’d used those up I had to sacrifice the X and the W too.
I felt a little calmer now, but after a few days I stopped writing, I was blocked, couldn’t do it any more; the reality of my situation became apparent: I was inside a prison cell, I had no means of transport, my personality had been usurped, and I had let myself lapse into a state of extreme laziness. All day, watching the TV and drinking water. Human beings can last approximately three months without food, but no more than three or four days without anything to drink. The proximity of the sea made the tap water slightly saline, so it was the closest thing you can get to survival serum. I also knew that lack of sleep would sooner kill a person than not eating, that you can lose your mind from not sleeping, and so I’d shut my eyes at night in an attempt to forget, but was never able to sleep more than an hour at a time. I’d get up, wash my face, and when I dried it the dirt that transferred onto the white towel made me think that it now had an emblem or a logo: that of the sheer ignominy I was being subjected to. When I looked in the mirror, I saw before me an aged twin.
I was gripped by a kind of Stockholm syndrome, I spent all day in front of the TV, taking in every single programme, test card to test card, and this put me in mind of my
time as a student, the time that he, Agustín, had now consigned to those slanderous sheets of paper, the time when I’d started writing, when I used to go out at 9 p.m. for cigarettes and come back up feeling god-like, sitting down at the typewriter with the TV on mute in the background, a muted TV that, like now in this ecoprison, served the function of a landscape, of a train window you simultaneously look out of and do not, a way of passing the time until your journey comes to a sudden stop. I hoped, in the same way, this journey would also end. The days passed, everything stayed the same.
I had the idea of taking photos of the TV again – something I’d done in the past. Previously my attitude had been purely artistic, but I had different ideas now: I set down on paper any possible similarities between this prison, this ignominious situation, and anything else in the world, bearing witness to my time there via photos of the one place in which life still existed, the TV screen. If anything happened to me, here would be something someone might later find. I began taking photos of films, reality TV shows, game shows, news programmes, newsflashes, cartoons, everything, but the story of how we had come to that place, and everything concerning the journey, became my one obsession, and my goal now with these photos was altogether different: to recount, to the extent that it was possible, my life, as a way of regaining myself, of reconstructing my personality. I uploaded the photos directly from my camera to the stolen laptop, occasionally modifying them with digital streaks, drawings, collagistic overlays and whatever fantasies seemed apt to the faithful reconstruction of the facts, printing it all out on the small printer, before feeding the sheets of paper into the typewriter carriage so I could add some brief remarks.
Nocilla Lab Page 8