The fascination of humankind with beaches goes to the heart of a time that has the form of a Rubik’s Cube. All the defining battles seem to take place on beaches. This isn’t because of the beach itself, but because every coast is a border, the last border before the setting sail of a ship destined to sink.
The small kitchen in Agustín’s house is very homely. I heat water in a pan with a flower design on the sides. As the water boils, the surface becomes another geography, a moving, shifting map.
The first person ever to use a credit card to pay for something must have felt like they were journeying to the centre of the earth: must imagine this.
That entire sea behind fridges.
Things that appear to us suddenly, like an image for example, or a memory, or a flesh-and-blood person, it isn’t that they weren’t there before, it’s that they hadn’t been switched on: somewhere in the world a switch was OFF. Sometimes the switch is the simple blink of an eye, other times it’s a complex process that involves great piles of rubbish being shifted around. I’ve seen the lights on the island-turrets blinking. Sure sign that the army over there is expecting an attack of some kind.
Thought today that there are two kinds of objects. Those that are condemned to give up their contents, like a can of Coca-Cola for example, and those for which such a forfeiture can only be an accident, for example the hard disk of a computer. The barcodes for the first group tend to be things of sadness. With the second group it depends on the intrinsic temperature of the system. I believe that the entire contents of this building have been forfeited. Agustín’s corpse, I don’t know. I took a good look inside his mouth. The teeth, I decided, were his personal barcode.
In the studio today, playing a CD of old Neapolitan songs full blast, I decided to make an inventory of everything in the bottom drawers of my library. I found a small but select grouping of LPs in one. I don’t remember ever acquiring these records. A lot of them had been cut very neatly in half and then stuck to the half of a completely different record. Like a personality swap. I tried them on a record player I also found there, also something I could never remember having bought. The first one I tried, at random, was half an Adriano Celentano record and half the Beatles’ White Album. This didn’t really move me. Then there was a half-Boney M., half-‘Essential Speeches of Il Duce’, more powerful. Others were the union of 4 records, 4 perfectly symmetrical pieces. The final effect of this one was far more interesting, as every 90° rotation meant a new sound and in the microseconds between one quarter and the next a landscape of micro-noises rose up, without the music ever fully dropping away. Other records were the recombination of 8 pieces, pizza-style. And so on with the sections getting smaller, to the point where I couldn’t even make out the cuts on one LP, it might have been more than 100 different LPs joined together. This one I played a lot, over and over. It was like a noise that wasn’t noisy. It reminded me slightly of the sound that comes out of casinos when they are closed, when they stop, but casinos never stop.
Farther along the coast, not very far away, there is a supposedly fascist building, all of us on the island know about it. A failed theme park, the last one built by Walt Disney before he died, his own design, in collaboration with Salvador Dalí. The Red Brigades burned it to the ground the year after it opened. I hope my ecoprison doesn’t suffer the same fate.
A man’s corpse: the thing the police
struggled most with
was the Barbie figure they found in the stomach dressed in
a Jackie Kennedy outfit. The investigations were also derailed by the fact that the dead man’s teeth were all rectangular, and that they were his milk teeth. This according to a TV documentary.
Sometimes I am sitting on the rice-beach and the wind picks up and some pieces of paper are blown from my hands. And from my hands into the sea. They speak of a man and a woman who travel to Sardinia. I watch them fly through the sky, and when they come down on one of the small waves I think: ‘Let them go, they are but the tenth part of some squalid bonsai tree, a bonsai tree that doesn’t even have any roots.’
The Coca-Cola I opened yesterday has already started turning gummy.
I went to the window that overlooks the garden today; there was electric light.
Verification of the fact that plugging something in is quicker than a word.
Something strange in the entrance to the inner courtyard today. There’s a bulge in the ground – the ground bulges, I mean. The protuberance is fairly large, 2 metres long and a foot or so high. Because the earth is plastic, there aren’t any big cracks, it just looks taut. There are some miniscule cracks, like when you stretch the arm of a rubber Fantastic 4 figure and the whole thing doesn’t break, just that part changes colour.
There are things that don’t have any skin,
like a bar of soap:
though rubbed away
its interior
is always on display. But
this isn’t normally the
way of things.
I found close to one hundred bars of soap in the bathroom, unused, piled up in the shape of this building which was once an ecotourism place, and a prison before that, and before that a monastery, and before that perhaps just an idea, a project.
Found among Agustín notes:
‘It is to be supposed that the day
when more plastic surgery operations take place
than appendectomies,
planet Earth will ascend
to the status of fashion object.
There are ceilings in Las Vegas
with thousands of CCTV cameras,
but don’t believe them, they surveil nothing.’
(Together the long grass and time are performing a very curious kind of surgery on his corpse.)
The bulge in the entrance to the inner courtyard has stopped expanding, but two further bulges, much the same, have appeared elsewhere in the garden. I went out for some air tonight, sitting in the chair outside the old reception. I heard, over the sound of the sea, a succession of cracking noises. I got up and followed them – over to these two new bulges in the ground. But saw nothing unusual. Also came across a small room off to the side of the garden, hadn’t previously noticed the door, inside was an array of gardening tools, secateurs, rakes, wheelbarrows, fertilizer, etc., which made no sense to me in a plastic garden.
I make web pages by hand. Paper,
scissors and sticks of glue.
Then I cut them up and use the small pieces to start a new one.
Now I make 3D web pages, also by hand. I take objects that I find in the living room and make a mound of them, however they happen to stack up, beside the chimney. When I think there’s enough, I kick the stack or mound into the hearth, where it goes up in flames. During my contemplations of the flames, not a single tear has emerged from my eyes, not one.
A change in the bulges in the garden: they’ve broken through the plastic simulation-soil and -lawn. Tiny roots have sprouted from them – of a kind: white, and both fibrous and gelatinous. Given that the garden is populated with purely plastic trees and shrubs, I have no idea which tree these roots can possibly belong to. The nearest actual tree is approximately 1km inland.
To do: climb the watchtowers on the main wall. From there get over to the main arch – straddle the top of the wall and shimmy along, taking care not to fall. Take pliers, screwdriver and hammer from trouser back pocket. Take down SING-SING: ECOTOURISM sign. This will need only a few blows to make it come off. Throw, hard, applying horizontal force. It will strike the ground and skim along a little, like a stone hitting a lake, until pitching upright and lodging vertically in the soft dry soil. It will quiver for a few seconds and then it will be still… I’ve just come back from doing this. It went exactly as described above.
‘Residue’: from the Latin ‘resedeo’: that which prevents progress, that which puts a spanner in certain works intrinsic to life. I have wondered whether Agustín is a residue or not.
The colour
ed bulbs in the rear courtyard have been blown down in strong winds.
There is a thick, blood-red line on the floor of my studio, like a bit of Chinese calligraphy I cannot read, like something done with a mop.
Today I thought about my head being like an empty mop bucket.
I am in a prison cell showing signs of recent habitation. I have turned on the TV, a woman’s face fills the screen, she says that if Manhattan had the same
population density as Sardinia there would only
be 25 inhabitants.
I see the lights on the island turrets blinking.
I write the word ‘Delete’.
New discovery: the TV in Agustín’s living room works. New discovery #2: it doesn’t pick up any channels. New discovery #3: the screen is on top of a video recorder. New discovery #4: no videos in the house.
My head: an empty mop bucket again.
Today, a luminous thought: if a machine gave birth, the baby would not have
an umbilical cord. But
every umbilical cord goes
into an empty can
of Coca-Cola.
That’s it.
Found out today that the nearest tree is not 1km inland but 3km away and in the direction of the coast.
The roots in the garden continue to grow, more horizontally than vertically, but, as is logical, not just horizontally. It had never occurred to me to see what they smell like. Got down today and put my nose up close, horrible smell, very unpleasant, but also unlike anything I could compare it with; maybe, at a stretch, burned plastic, and/or old shoes.
Experiment: have someone sit inside one of the crenellations of the outer wall, where there is a kind of gun-turret. The horizontal aperture cut into the curved wall means only this person’s eyes can be seen.
He meanwhile has a view of the entire horizon.
It’s me in the gun-turret. Agustín’s corpse is the one looking in.
Most of us live off the back of one glorious day in our lives; all the subsequent days are the fashionable outskirts that follow, they are the sweet propagation of that time. I already know when Agustín’s day of glory was. Even thinking about it frightens me, let alone writing about it.
The Shining: every object, if you look carefully, is an animal silently laughing at us. This silence, in its most ascetic form, is its barcode, which in turn is the ingredient that alchemists were trying to find in the material world. This occurred to me today when I found a small pair of dirty women’s knickers between the pages of one of the big books in Agustín’s library.
The days pass by like seconds. But each second lasts an eternity.
I’m on my own in the cell, it’s me and the TV. A light rain outside. Sparks from the TV, and on the screen an architect, who says his name is Rem Koolhaas, talking about seeing a vast, smoking rubbish dump in Nigeria – he saw it from above, flew over it in a small aircraft: ‘The rubbish dump is the lowest form of spatial organisation. Pure amorphous accumulation, its locality and outer borders both uncertain. Fundamentally unpredictable.’ Couldn’t agree more.
What happens when this dump is a body? (Come back to this.)
The roots in the courtyard garden are half a metre high now. Have asked myself if they are really roots and not the outgrowths of a creature shedding its skin beneath the ground. Every time I see some skin that’s been shed, I think of dirty knickers, and I think about Agustín’s corpse. Haven’t been to visit it for a week at least.
It strikes me that worldwide reading statistics are wrong: there’s all the writing on the side of packaging and wrappers to take into account. This has led me to see rubbish bins for what they really are: libraries. I walked past Agustín’s corpse today. Time is performing a very strange kind of surgery on him: time is an artist, constantly experimenting, never failing.
The TV in the cell is broken. It isn’t that you can’t see anything, but rather that all the different programmes are playing at once, all superimposed. This led me to come up with the following test, a way of verifying how much trust I can put in a particular TV: the idea is to position a number of different TVs alongside one another, each with the screen facing up, looking at the sky, and each of them playing the same channel so that they give off the same amount of light and heat. Then crack an egg onto each screen, like they were frying pans.
Start the timer, see how long it takes each screen to fry its respective egg.
Over time, more and more of the land slips into the sea.
I decided to make a record of all the books in the library today. I opened them one by one. After six hours, I’d covered only a tenth of all the books.
Not sleeping well here. There is a special intensity to the roar of the sea in the distance. I get up. I pour away the dregs of the red wine from supper, I look at the toxic-rubber Fantastic 4 on the chimney breast, which don’t move at all, and I ask myself how it can be possible that some things in the world never change position.
Discovery #5: there are videotapes here. I found them hidden behind a pile of dirty knickers that Agustín kept in his wardrobe; there are dirty knickers everywhere. The first tape I put in threw up something strange: it was a recording of me and a woman. Well, not me exactly, but someone who looks a lot like me. They seem to be living in one of the cells. The strange thing is that the filming is taking place from ground level, as though there were some transparent material between this cell and the one beneath. It doesn’t have any sound. Recordings nocturnal and diurnal. Them talking, writing, taking showers. Not sleeping, because the bed gets in the way of the shot; you therefore also can’t see if anything sexual took place. Just as strange, the camera moves with them, as though attached to their feet. Doesn’t have any sound.
I go down to the coast. I spend a long time looking across at the turrets on the island, some of the lights on which never go out. I lie down, face down, with my arms out wide, as though trying to embrace the grains of quartz, every single one. From this position, using my head, I scrabble and clear away the rice beneath me, trying to see if it’s transparent under here too. If I’m now being filmed from below as well.
The roots in the garden are up to my chest now. The original three bulges have multiplied, even more obstacles for me to pick my way through. And there are bulges outside the complex as well now, sending roots up the sides of the walls. I believe that Agustín’s corpse has also been lifted up from where it was among the clumps of long grass, the climbing roots have raised it up. I caught sight of it the other day in the distance, went over, and it turns out that the roots or climbers have also ended up destroying the perfect surgery Time was performing on the body. Either that or they’re putting the finishing touches to it. I don’t know.
This is how it seems to me: the reason we humans sit down and eat together every day is because the raw material, when we buy it in a shop, comes to us dead. Cooking it, serving it up and enjoying the way it tastes is the same as resuscitating it. This suggests an awareness of time as being marked by a death and a resurrection.
I eat alone. I know I’m still alive because of the smell of my armpits. I also know I’m still alive by comparison: I see Agustín’s corpse every day; that clearly is death. But in spite of this when I sit down to eat, the food on the round plate still seems more alive than I am.
Looking through the writings Agustín left, writings that speak of a journey to Sardinia with a woman and of an immense Project, I’ve found something new, discovery #6 – or, rather, a deduction: Agustín Fernández Mallo never existed, there was no such person, but a lot of people still paid tribute to him. Agustín Fernández Mallo might even be a pseudonym for a collective of frustrated writers, or it might be that certain great literary works have been concocted simply in homage to him. But in homage to whom? To someone specific? To this secret collective? Or neither, in fact, but a universal archetype instead – of which Agustín Fernández Mallo is a fictitious representative? Many famous books, it has become clear to me, are little more than things written ‘
in the style of’ Agustín. In my library alone there are quite a few, for example:
This:
I have told my story on television and on a radio programme. I’ve also told it to my friends. I told it to an elderly widow with a huge photograph album who invited me to her home. Some people tell me this story is a fantasy. And I ask them: if it is, then what did I do during my ten days at sea?
This is Gabriel García Márquez, after Agustín Fernández Mallo (Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, tr. Randolph Hogan)
This:
15 October 1914.
Quiet night. Now masturbate approximately once every 10 days. I am doing little work with my hands, but all the more, therefore, with the spirit; I go to bed at 9 p.m. and am up at 6 a.m. The current commander and I hardly speak.
This is Ludwig Wittgenstein, after Agustín Fernández Mallo (Secret Diaries, tr. via the Spanish)
This:
One does not find solitude, one creates it. Solitude is created alone. I have created it. Because I decided that here was where I should be alone, that I would be alone to write books. It happened this way. I was alone in this house. I shut myself in.
This is Marguerite Duras, after Agustín Fernández Mallo (Writing, tr. Mark Polizzotti)
This:
He lay on the sand with the rusty bicycle wheel. Now and then he would cover some of the spokes with sand, neutralizing the radial geometry. The rim interested him. Hidden behind a dune, the hut no longer seemed a part of his world. The sky remained constant, the warm air touching the shreds of test papers sticking up from the sand. He continued to examine the wheel. Nothing happened.
This is J. G. Ballard, after Agustín Fernández Mallo (The Atrocity Exhibition)
This:
Now, therefore, I am in the house, which means questions being asked of me that I dare not hope to resolve. I have already spoken of the singularity of the material with which it is made, and that it certainly cannot come from what I see in the swamp. This is what I see, but I know nothing of what lies beneath the surface of the swamp; there must doubtless be underground rivers, lakes, and maybe mountains, and maybe mines, and maybe forests. This house, I believe, was not built; for that men would have been needed, a good amount of time, places to get materials: all things that are incompatible with the swamp.
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