This is Giorgio Manganelli, after Agustín Fernández Mallo (La palude definitiva)
The list of related texts I’ve found is very long. I’ll stop there.
Walking through the forest of roots in the garden – they are almost at head height now – I have come to an understanding of something that strikes me as important: these are the roots of a tree that can only be found in another part of the world, perhaps the Antipodes, I don’t know, but certainly somewhere very far away. Certainly its roots have travelled through the centre of the earth before emerging in this garden.
The sea grows louder all the time. No sleep.
The roots devour anything in their path, they have also broken through the floor in the building, they are growing up the walls, have begun splitting furniture apart, they are all the way up to the cells on the top floor, their tendrils pierce the metal gates of the gangways, they are forming a solid mass, its final shape as yet undefined, I can’t use the little remaining food in the kitchens out of fear that the gas cooker might set fire to the roots and then the whole place goes up, the other day I took a machete from the garden-tool room and hacked a circular space in the roots invading the kitchen, this at least means I can sit at a table, this at least means there’s a space for making fire, there is now a curvature to the walls of the kitchen, it’s like a wooden bubble, I’ve had time to create another space, also spherical, in the living room, not huge but it works, I’ve watched the videos of the ground-camera recordings again, it’s all of me in one of the cells, well, someone who looks like me at least, with the young woman, she’s not bad, though it’s difficult to say precisely how not bad because of the perspective, she wears a bikini, you can see it when she leans down to pick something up off the floor, two daisies on the bikini top, sometimes she leans so close to the floor it’s like the daisies are going to break the lens, the soles of her feet are curious, practically no lines on them, though perhaps that’s just how they look pressed down against the floor, I’m now working on making another hole so I can get out of the building because during these last few days, while I’ve been making these other holes, the roots have grown across the main door, barring my escape, I’m also on the videos alone at certain points, well, someone who looks like me at least, he paces back and forth while the woman sleeps in an armchair, it’s night, the lamps are on, and at other points there’s no one in the cell, hours of that, a comprehensive nothing, this until Agustín comes in, always smelling bad, it’s like I can smell him through the screen, that bargain-basement Kusturica mop, I’m not sure exactly what he’s doing, he isn’t doing anything, he sits in a chair and looks out the window, a rectangle, a window, this repeats for the entire duration of the tape, which lasts days, the date of the recording is some time 5 years ago, this shows on the lower part of the screen, the time and date must have been set wrong on the video camera, but he is older, and this I find disconcerting, the roots are already there on this recording, you can see them quite clearly through the cell window, Agustín seems to have had the same idea as me and has been hacking at them with the machete so that he can see out, I also see he’s excavated the cell, its walls are made of roots, this dark and fibrous woody mass can be seen quite clearly at the corners of the screen, this video is blank (because all future videos are necessarily blank videos, of this I am in no doubt).
Notes & Credits
Nocilla Lab, written in the summer of 2005, is part three of the Nocilla Project, following on from Nocilla Dream and Nocilla Experience.
From 2006 to 2009 I worked on a video version of the Nocilla Project, which can be downloaded from the blog El hombre que salió de la tarta.
Acknowledgements
In the years I have been working on this project, I have had help from more people than could possibly be named on this page. My sincere thanks to one and all. I consider these books to be as much yours as mine.
Thanks to the publishers who have believed in me, and to Grupo Nutrexpa for allowing me to use the word Nocilla in a creative context. Thank you for the forbearance of the many authors whose work also forms part of these books, which would never have been published otherwise.
And to Pere Joan for his graphical input, for his enthus-iasm and for being so receptive to the idea in the first place.
This book is dedicated to Aina Lorente Solivellas.
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About the Author
Agustín Fernández Mallo was born in La Coruña in 1967, and is a qualified physicist. In 2000 he formulated a self-termed theory of ‘post-poetry’, which explores connections between art and science and has been the principal focus in several prize-winning collections of poetry since then. The Nocilla Trilogy, published between 2006 and 2009, brought about an important shift in contemporary Spanish writing and paved the way for the birth of a new generation of authors, known as the ‘Nocilla Generation’. His long essay Postpoesía, hacia un nuevo paradigma was shortlisted for the Anagrama Essay Prize in 2009. In 2018 his long essay Teoría de la basura (cultura, apropriacionismo y complejidad) was published, and in the same year his latest novel, Trilogía de la guerra (forthcoming from Fitzcarraldo Editions), won the Biblioteca Breve Prize.
Thomas Bunstead is a writer and translator based in East Sussex. He has translated some of the leading Spanish-language writers working today, including Yuri Herrera, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Juan Villoro, and his own writing has appeared in The White R
eview and the Times Literary Supplement. He is an editor at the translation journal In Other Words.
Copyright
Fitzcarraldo Editions
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Copyright © Agustín Fernández Mallo, 2008
First published in Spain in 2009 by Alfaguara Editorial, Madrid
Translation copyright © Thomas Bunstead, 2018
This edition first published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2019, by arrangement with Literarische Agentur Mertin Inh. Nicole Witt e. K, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
The right of Agustín Fernández Mallo to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales are entirely coincidental.
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Nocilla Lab Page 11