I gradually forgot my initial objectives, and began doing whatever came to mind, adding in playful shapes, sublimations of the state in which I found myself, potential lifelines, like I was on holiday, or taking a long weekend; like I had entered a childhood state.
I did a lot of these, certainly 500-plus. Here, as an example, are images corresponding with the days I spent there:
I realized that in this last photo I had been pasted into this inverse world, I had seeped through. And that, quite clearly, my life was being televised. I wondered how many TV-seers might be watching me. Minutes later, I became aware of the ridiculous thoughts I was having, felt worried.
37.
I woke up one morning, morning number 20. The TV, as ever, was on. They were doing a rerun of the second series of Moonlighting, which drew me in for a minute. The camera was on the chair, a glass of water next to it, the illustrated towel hung in the bathroom, and out of the corner of my eye I saw that, over by the door, there was a piece of paper on the floor. I didn’t react at first. I sat doing nothing, suddenly feeling myself to be the target for this sneaking paper creature that had entered my space. It must have been there on the floor for hours. I got up slowly, afraid to even touch it. I looked at it for a long time, down between my bare feet. Finally, crouching down, I picked it up:
Agustín (or whoever the fuck you really are),
I have thrown the contents of the guitar case into the sea.
The guitar case itself I have buried on the path down to the beach.
I am still at work on MY Project.
As far as I am concerned, you, sir, can do as you please.
Agustín Fernández Mallo
I sat down on the bed. I reread the message a few times. Quite a few times. I put the note on the TV ventilation grille. I embarked on an unconscious peripatetic simulation, pacing the room, but soon found myself taking photos again, adding typed remarks beneath, musing, with no particular goal in mind, and with Neapolitan songs drifting up unceasingly from his studio. In some way I believe I just didn’t want to accept that this message meant the end of everything, of our Project – it simply didn’t exist any more – or it did, but at the bottom of the sea, and that, along with it, I no longer existed. Not long after, with me trying to take another photo of the TV, a sudden flash filled the viewfinder. I looked up from the camera. The heat being given off by the TV had set fire to the note: it blazed for a few seconds, leaving a little pile of ash.
That was when I decided I had to go out: I had to check whether the note was true.
I had neither torch nor candles. I waited for a full moon to rise.
38.
I pulled the typewriter keys out of the doorframe and padded barefoot down the stairs. Silence hung over the place as I came past the reception and out into the gardens, through the 3 barbed-wire gates, making my way along the track that led to the beach. I covered the 2km with the lights on the island-turrets as my guide, and, to the right of the final bend in the path before the rice-dunes, saw a rectangular hump in the earth, clearly recently dug.
I began digging manically with my hands and feet – my sore-covered feet from the walk – and, half a metre down, came to the case, opened it, nothing inside.
I could have taken it with me, but for what? Then, an act of genuine exorcism, of pure mourning – at least that was my intention – I put it back in its pit, filled in the pit, picked some nearby wild flowers and used the stem of a shrub to tie them to a stick I found, which I then thrust in as a headstone.
This was perhaps the strangest, most innocent thing I had done in my life.
Then something changed.
39.
He moved into his studio full-time: the music began to play day and night.
Initially I only went down to the industrial kitchens for the odd utensil I might be missing in the cell, a tin opener, matches, this kind of thing. As the days passed I felt an unavoidable urge to go down to his living quarters, and would there take a seat in one or another of his armchairs and begin reading a book; a need to begin ingesting his library, taming it to my own ends. And a day came when, savouring some gin I had rescued from the depths of his wine rack, I felt there was now no way back. I understood that a change of tactics was necessary – if, that is, there’d been anything tactical about my approach until now: the time had come to expel Agustín from the ecoprison, and to take the reins myself. If he were me, if he knew everything about my life, if he even had it written down in the first person, by the same token it meant that he was the customer, the guest, the intruder even, and I, stripped of my past, was entirely justified in reinventing myself as the new hostel owner.
From there to assuming total control of the place required something as simple as doing up one’s top button at the first chill of winter.
So it was that I began to lock his living quarters at night, enjoying the feel of his bedsheets, dressing in his clothes, getting drunk on his liqueurs, playing with the Fantastic 4. Now that I had a home of my own, it was within my power to use my new telephone, I could have called for help, but I saw that this would make no sense; what did I need help with if everything here were mine? What kind of assistance might I request if no crime had taken place? It was up to me now to keep Agustín, the intruder, away from the telephone.
There was a range of clothes for me to choose from each morning, it couldn’t have been easier, simply open the wardrobe and take out what I wanted. Magic really did exist. I enjoyed going up to a small balcony on the first floor at dusk for my last Lucky Strike of the day, dressed in some satin pyjamas I’d found in their box, completely new. I couldn’t now stop myself from doing things in a new way, acts of self-sufficiency, aloofness and distance – the kind of things he did – the kind of actions you might expect from some solid kind of man, one who looks the world in the eye, troubles and difficulties included, and never flinches. I couldn’t help but imagine myself seen from above, a bird’s-eye view of me, my dirty hair combed back with water; such details added to the verisimilitude of this usurpation, and even helped bring it about. I used these moments, as I stubbed out the cigarette, to take the measure of the garden beneath me – both static and ecstatic in its plasticity – more real than reality itself: hyperreal, like me. I even came to imagine that I would soon take up position in one of the original prison watchtowers. Each night before going to bed I would open the wardrobe in which he had placed the dirty knickers, let myself take in a tantalizing lungful of that perfume, and stand appreciating the two piles or columns they formed, like two identical towers.
40.
Now that I could see it from above, from the balcony at the back of the complex, I saw that his studio was intermittently pulsing with light, beams or pulses streaming from the cracks and keyholes. Astonishingly, something the shape of a starfish or sea-urchin was being projected onto the night. I imagined him hovering a hand over the computer keyboard, him weighing his act of plagiarism, and it amused me to think of his studio as though it were part of a great digester, breaking down both subjects from antiquity and our Project, philosophically opposed ingredients that must spell his inevitable end. Even on the stormy October nights, or when I was having trouble digesting my dinner and got up to go to the toilet, on went his Neapolitan songs, like an extra point to his star, a star that I knew would soon be extinguished, finally to become his black hole.
It wasn’t long before I heard him climbing into the kitchen through the ground-floor window below. I’d get up the next morning and find something missing, some tin of food, or there would be the dregs of some milky coffee, or biscuit crumbs, or a plate bearing an uneaten fried-egg yolk. I, in an attempt to avoid all parallels, would make myself breakfast from more subtle ingredients, things found in the larder, but a little jam would always end up on my sleeve, or a runnel of tea would spill down my chin, and then I’d think perhaps today would be the day we were going to cross paths, and that his silhouette would have become more substantial by now, and, this being
the case, that there would be no further moral obstacles to my usurpation. I’d get up from the table with a burp – which the flies around the butter didn’t seem to notice, and neither was there any kind of ripple in the dust-mote filled shaft of sunlight coming through the window, nor, it must be said, did I feel lessened in any way – and, having washed the dishes and crossed out the day on the wall-calendar, I checked the ledger in reception for which of the cell windows needed opening, including in what order, to keep the whole place ventilated. The large folder at the end of the ledger contained the rubric that gave legitimacy to my daily tasks.
41.
Now, assured of my admittance to this second life, and perhaps as a folk ritual reminiscent of the very first folk rituals, my visits to the grave began, my visits, in other words, to the last memento of the Project. I usually set out first thing, taking the track that led directly to the beach, by the light of the moon if there was any, and with the flickering lights from the island up ahead. I picked plants as I went, a local kind of lilac and a yellow chamomile that also grew there, offset by the intense greens of the stems: discreet little bunches that seemed to me like fitting epitaphs, and that once I got down there I would stand in the soil at the head of the grave.
Nothing happened at first, but after a few days I came back and found my flowers gone, replaced by another bunch, also of wildflowers, which I would then take away, replacing it with a new one. 3 or 4 times this happened.
I was on my way back one morning when our paths did cross. I saw him stopping and bending down as he came towards me: also picking plants. It was the kind of encounter that is so charged with nervous energy, it’s only afterwards you realize you should have made a little more of your good fortune, and you kick yourself. And, by the way he was constantly scraping his hair back, from the sidelong glances he cast in my direction, I could tell he was feeling apprehensive, that I could have afforded myself something – an insult in his direction, a kick, maybe even spit in his face. But we kept our distance. A small bunch of flowers trembled in his hand.
From then on he started going down at night, and I’d respond with a trip in the afternoon, then he’d go at dawn, and so on in a continuous rotation; my normal grip on the unfolding of the days grew slightly tenuous. It went on like this for a week, and progressively the bunches of flowers became less pretty, little more than bundles of weeds. The day came when we had picked all the flowers along the track. I had thoughts of a dead person’s tongue, licking at their eternal repose; I wasn’t feeling unwell. To my final bundle of myrtle and thistles he made no reply. Or he did, but only in the shape of turning up the volume on his studio stereo.
42.
In my old cell, which I now went up to only rarely, I started to see things being moved around – I went and stood in a field outside the prison, and observed the movements from there. And it was true, there were nights when Agustín went up and installed himself among my things, maybe he was messing around with the typewriter, or the laptop, or perhaps having a laugh at my typewritten bits of A4. It’s possible he even tried on my clothes or, worse than that, drank the dregs from the cans of Coca-Cola that had piled up during my seclusion, during which I had drunk my way through the reserves in the cold storage room. The only substantive change was that the desk chair at which I’d previously sat was turned towards the window on the south side, the side the sea was on. Then I began going up too. I waited till I saw him coming out, that would be my signal. The seat cushion would still be warm, still held the impression of his body, and I sat and looked around, though there was nothing to see except the land stretching away into the distance, and the ruffled sea and, further off, the military island. Coming out of the cell one day, I left the chair in a different place, as a way of letting him know I’d been in too. He started going up at different times, and my schedule changed accordingly. That was when I started finding notes on the typewriter. Incomprehensible things about the Project, clusters of barely intelligible words; he was clearly trying to drive me mad. I never so much as laid a finger on these notes; I wasn’t going to play along. Sometimes the same note would be there for days, sometimes two new ones would appear in the space of an evening. I then decided to block up both the cell and the windows to the living quarters, using some joists I found in the garage. Lastly, I reinforced the doors. I had the only keys.
43.
Signs gradually emerged of his unmistakable defeat: the music growing louder and louder, or his coughing as he walked by beneath my window, the fact that his proximity no longer worried me, the stench around his studio, the charred remains of rabbits and birds outside his door.
But no changes of any real substance. He went in and out of his studio in a laissez-faire sort of way, like he didn’t care, like he knew he’d turned into someone else now, that none of this belonged to him. But he didn’t leave, and the signs of his unmistakable defeat soon became unmistakable signs of resistance, of my defeat. Something or other would change, seeming to suggest that I had the upper hand, only to be reabsorbed via some invisible mechanism, restoring the former state of affairs. There were still no visitors to the ecoprison, and increasingly it resembled a kind of animal, one wholly unaware of its fate, a fate that Agustín could do with as he pleased.
Sometimes, not long after going to bed, I’d begin hearing noises on the ground floor, floorboards creaking, nails being prised up, even footsteps in the kitchen. I’d jump up and run downstairs, but the place would be empty. So I’d stand guard, stay up all night monitoring the sounds inside and out, prowling around constantly till the sun came up. This meant sleeping during the day, half an eye always open, watchful for the footsteps and breaths that never came. On the rare occasion I did manage to fall completely asleep I had nightmares, and would wake with a start, hearing – surely now – the unmistakable sound of Agustín’s hammer at one of the boarded-up windows; down I’d dash, throwing open the front door, but again there would be nobody around. The only time I caught sight of him bodily was out among the clumps of grass, sunning himself like a lizard; in such surroundings, removed from the context of the studio, he seemed very alien, like a mannequin clambering out of its display and sitting down on the pavement to watch the passing cars.
44.
I think I can use it now without wasting it: ‘I’ll always have a clear memory of it because it happened so simply and without fuss.’
It happened at sunrise one morning.
I was having breakfast in the kitchen after a night spent chasing noises the length and breadth of the building. I was clearing the table when, still holding the cafetière, and without stopping to think, I said to myself there was an easy answer to this, something well within my power; in reality, it always had been, I just needed to reach out and take it.
And so it was that I entered Agustín’s studio that morning. The music was so loud he didn’t notice me opening the door, nor when I walked up behind him and stopped, pausing for a moment as though to further draw out a long-awaited coronation. He sat huddled over a laptop, and he stank. Scattered on the floor around his chair were all the objects concerning the Project, everything he’d supposedly thrown in the sea. All this dross – the useless books, all the other flotsam and jetsam – didn’t bother me in the slightest. I put my hand on his shoulder and gave a squeeze. Then I squeezed harder, and swivelled the chair around myself. Only when our eyes met did he seem to really notice I was there. I plunged the knife into his chest, blood spattering onto me. I kept on bringing it down until his hot blood on my pyjamas became too much for me to bear. I got the body onto the floor, blood still spurting out, huge gouts of the stuff. I dragged him by the feet over to the door, his mop of unkempt hair leaving a red trail. Down the stairs I pulled him, his skull bouncing on the steps, putting me in mind of a deflated football. And over to some rushes in the orchard, next to one of the side walls.
I went back to the living quarters. My nervousness soon dissipated, I felt a strange, calm sort of contentment descend; no h
int of euphoria. I’d committed, for the first time ever, a primitive act, something not meant as publicity. For once I had allowed myself to be carried along by the fascism of nature. I felt, then, that a crack had opened in the world of advertising, and death had entered in. Good, I thought. I went into the larder and took the last 2-litre bottle of Coca-Cola out from behind some expired tins of beans, squeezed 3 lemons into it. I sat down in Agustín’s leather chair and, taking the bottle in both hands, took a long, slow, appreciative swig. It resembled no known thing or person, and now neither did I: nothing and no one except myself.
III
ENGINE FRAGMENTS
I go to the beach a lot.
Today I remembered a film called The Warriors, which features gangs fighting in New York – after night-long skirmishes, they come out onto the beach at Coney Island. The waves are no higher than a foot, and this tells the warriors that death is of no consequence. I go to the beach a lot. The grains of sand are the shape of grains of rice. Across the water is a small island with turrets on it. They light up at night. In the daytime too. I walk past the corpse of Agustín. It moves, but not of its own accord, rather due to some external force, the wind perhaps.
Nocilla Lab Page 9