N.B.: the correct interpretation lies not in the reading of the poem or in its translation, but in the equation of the two combined.
86
A day after he took up the job in the warehouse, Humberto already had a good idea of how things there went. According to Ron, the venture consisted broadly of sending secondhand clothes to Mozambique, where one of the vast number of newly established charity exchanges distributed them across an array of shops, which sold them on at a very low price, meaning that the children of Mozambique could have their nearly new Lacoste T-shirt, their Converse, all that. A truck arrives at the warehouse every day and Humberto works with all the fervor of a person who knows he’s doing good at the same time as getting paid. The town isn’t especially nearby, which means he hardly leaves the precinct; even so, as time has gone by he’s been decorating his room at the back of the shop, acquiring a wide number of implements, but what he still hasn’t done is buy a player for his cassette tapes. He has them there, perfectly stacked in columns seven-high—four columns in total. He looks at the 28 boxes, he dusts them, he even rearranges them, but because he’s determined to disconnect from every memory of his homeland, he does nothing to materialize the sonic-magnetic fields that, immobile, stay locked inside the tapes. Cleaning Ron’s office one day, he came across a cutting from News Today that talked about how the dispatching of secondhand goods to countries like Mozambique was wreaking havoc on most of the native Mozambican clothes and shoe shops, which were unable to compete with charity shop prices. The shop owners were, in their own words, powerless against the situation, and had denounced the government of Mozambique for failing to intervene; backing up their claims with considerable evidence, they said that the opportunistic ministers had been receiving sums of money from NGOs. Humberto put the cutting in his pocket. Today he’s found it within himself to ask Ron for an explanation. Ron said it’s nothing to do with him; it’s over his head, he’s doing everything he can, he’s just a man, not a superhero, Humberto should get back to work. After the shop shuts, alone once more, having disassembled each of his cassette tapes, Humberto’s gone outside and, working from the bottom up, has been wrapping the entire warehouse in tape, all the way around, and around and around again, unspooling the tapes from their reels, using a ladder to go higher and higher, and finally covering the building’s four façades completely, so that not even the tiniest glimpse remains. After this, for the duration of the night, he sits watching the gigantic box of silent voices, silhouetted against the dark sky, the vague flapping sound each time the breeze picks up, this sonic-magnetic bundle’s other music. Once he gets tired, he most likely puts a match to it.
87
Principle of superposition: 1. A general principle that applies to many physical systems, establishing that if a number of interdependent influences come to bear on a system, the resulting influence is the sum of the individual influences. 2. The principle according to which, in all theories characterized by differential, homogenous and linear equations, such as the optical, the acoustic, and quantum theory, the sum of any number of the equations is also a solution. In analytical terms: if f1, f2, f3, …, fn are the solutions to an equation, then f1 + f2 + f3 … + fn = F is also a solution.
MCGRAW-HILL DICTIONARY OF PHYSICS
88
As agreed, Payne arrived at the cemetery gates at 6:00 p.m. Kelly hadn’t arrived yet. He leaned back against a giant rubber tree, before sliding down and sitting on the roots. Chinese cemeteries, he saw, were like Christian ones but without the crosses. In spite of having had to navigate streets busier than he had thought possible, when he got to the gate all the people had disappeared and the silence was nearly absolute; the only sounds were the raw sewage trickling along an underground drain and the songs of certain birds. The cemetery contained a large number of manhole covers, and the railway stanchions were sunk into the ground at various points, clearly exhibiting, to Payne, a perfect harmony between forces terrestrial and celestial; not only was it a resting place for the dead, but also for the effluvium—and the most advanced technology—of a civilization. One that was also perhaps dead. If his brother Robert had been there with his plane, he thought, he’d doubtless have had something more intelligent to say. He let out a laugh. As he’d observed in his room, the trains passed at intervals of 5 minutes and 50 seconds, sending clatters and booms between the slightly cracked graves and mausoleums, when everything would again fall silent. This cadence he recognized as the perfect simulacrum of sea waves. Kelly never showed up.
89
Bearing in mind that the radius of the earth is 6,400 kilometers and the radius of a toy globe is 0.001 of a kilometer, bearing in mind also the complex movements of the seas and obstacles, we can assert that this globe of the world, though it will now never cease to be in motion, will never make its way around the earth, either, in the same way that that dreamer who threw it in the East Bay did not. Which means that, for this toy globe, the earth will always be a flat, infinite object, dimensionless, situated in a realm of pure metaphysics. Thus any human action is a reflection of its own limitations and, in addition, of the fact that we construct a world in our own likeness. Thus this error, in a certain way, reductio ad absurdum, makes gods of us.
90
Ernesto never wanted to make this trip. But she insisted. First he was against it because of how backward he thought travel was, given that everything’s been discovered already, and because it just doesn’t make sense going around trying to emulate nineteenth-century explorers. Second because the internet, literature, cinema, and TV are the contemporary means of travel, more evolved than physical travel, which is the preserve of simple minds unable to feel a thing unless they touch it materially. And third because Vietnam is a long way away and at 78 years of age Ernesto just wasn’t up for this kind of gallivanting. He’d done his fair share, leaving Argentina at 18 on his motorcycle, taking a lead role in the revolution in Cuba, and having survived three attempts on his life before, with the perfect timing of a watchmaker, feigning his own death in Bolivia, before going to Las Vegas to dedicate himself to gambling and opulence under the name of J. J. Wilson. But, against his will, giving in to the entreaties of his girlfriend, Betty, Vietnam it was. They visited the usual crowded Buddhist sites but come the fourth temple Ernesto grew tired and swapped Betty for a Vietnamese prostitute instead. As the days went by he adjusted himself to the usual tourist modus operandi, even entering into the bartering she initiated with the hawkers at the night stalls. The only difference between these little markets and those in other parts of the world, he saw, were the prints on the T-shirts, the true barometer of the emerging nature of a country’s culture. He found it amusing to see his own face, with the beret, repeated there as it was the world over. 7:00 p.m., a warm rainy evening at the market. He starts to feel excited, buys a pair of imitation Ray-Bans with blue reflective lenses, a pink Playboy T-shirt, even allows his picture to be taken by the prostitute, sunglasses, T-shirt, cheroot between his teeth. Next thing, they’re crossing the street arm-in-arm and he sees her sailing through the air, at which point he becomes aware of a heavy blow to his body. From on the ground, pinned there by an intense pain in his head and all along the right side of his body, he sees the motorcyclist drive off, blending in with the car lights. It was a boy, he thinks.
91
All planets, fluids, objects, people—everything in existence—are in constant collaboration, meaning that each planet, fluid, object, and each person is part of the gravitation equilibrium, the absolute overall collective zero. When a motorcycle hits you and you go sailing through the air, you break this cosmic inertia, at which point you become the infinitesimal most violent portion of the universe, you exert force against the earth’s spin, against the planets, the fluids, the people, and the things. And yet at the most critical moment you are suspended in the air, you lack all velocity, you float, are nothing. And it’s this nothing that kills you. Ernesto was buried 11 days later in Las Vegas. And, as per his wishes,
his gravestone has been fitted with a machine that, if you drop a coin into it, plays a Sinatra number.
92
Heidegger made a distinction between space and place, and in this respect philosophy has followed him ever since. Place is an already inhabited space, made to fit its inhabitant, imprinted with history, personality, and cultural particularity. The postmodern philosophers defined a number of impersonal places, such as large shopping centers or airports, as non-places, spaces that are identical regardless of the culture or location in which you find them. Which is why Kenny, on the run from the Canadian authorities, has been living in Singapore International Airport for the last four years. Lacking documentation, and tired of being shunted from country to country, he decided to stay put in what was legally a non-place, belonging to no particular country or state: a legal black hole that benefited him greatly. He goes up and down pushing his one or two personal possessions along in a metal cart. The people who work in the restaurants know him by now, as do the staff in the shops, the cybercafé, the stationers, and the cleaners, which means he can get his hands on everything he needs to survive—an airport’s copious daily leftovers more than suffice. So he’s carefree now, his boxer physique has faded, and he takes a certain amount of pleasure in observing the season-to-season changes in the shop windows. Once he stood on his own watching TV, and a news item came up on the International Fox channel: a fire was sweeping the state of Nevada, USA, laying waste to vegetation and forcing the evacuation of a place named Carson City. At the end of the news item, the girl working in duty-free said it was sad, the fire, and that that was why she lived in a place built of glass, steel, and cement. A little under a year ago the Singaporean government, making use of certain extraordinary measures, offered citizenship to Kenny, but he said he didn’t want it anymore, that at 57 years of age he was tired of running around the world and he had all he needed. The ascetic, shifting up through the endless unrest that surrounded him, becoming mystic, addressed the official who had brought him the news, saying: In this caravel, I shall be the light. Removing a number of coins from a number of pouches hanging one inside the other, he offered to buy the official breakfast at Burger King. The official declined. As an inhabitant of a truly frontier space, it means he’s now eligible to be a member of the Kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland (http://elgaland-vargaland.org). He’s been put forward as prospective Ambassador of the Kingdom of Airport Terminals.
93
If there isn’t any space there isn’t any light. The world is unthinkable without light. [Heraclitus said it, Einstein said it, the A-Team in Episode 237 said it, and many others besides.] And yet, inside everyone’s bodies all is darkness, zones in the universe never touched by light—or, if touched by light, only because of illness or decomposition. It’s unsettling to think you exist because this death exists inside you, this zone of endless night. It’s unsettling to consider that the inside of a PC is more alive than you are, that in there everything’s completely lit up.
94
Robert, who is originally from London but left as a young man, is the only inhabitant of Carson City to own an airplane. But, that aside, generally speaking objects are the strangest, strangest things: if we bring them very close up in our field of vision, for instance with the use of a microscope, they become simple structures, totally organized and exhibiting a geometry that mathematics can deal with perfectly well. Then, if we move sufficiently far away, shifting into the order of magnitude of the passing of days, such objects begin to overlap, they mix together and form a scape of some complexity, a daily complexity; impure and difficult to analyze, only chaos theories (and such-like) can account for them: the human scale, in other words. And if we move still farther away, as when we look at the earth from an airplane, we see how astonishingly simple and organized it all is again, the geometry very similar to that seen under the microscope. From the propeller plane, Robert, with recourse to Dolores Hayden’s A Field Guide to Sprawl, has already come up with a means of classifying urban landscape forms. Robert works in a bank, at an also semi-microscopic teller window, but on weekends he starts the rusty propeller and heads up into the sky above Nevada with the sole objective of delighting in this urban-human geometry, which to date has been neither properly analyzed nor submitted to any strict classification. In Robert’s eyes, of the constructions that fall within Sprawl Studies, among the most beautiful are the urban settlements made up of “ground cover”—edifices that are, according to the Hayden, cheap and straightforward to knock down, often warehouse units that have been built to generate income before the owners can embark on more lucrative ventures. Their hypothetical pavements feature no pedestrians. He sees some children playing. Feels moved. He sees a derelict Toys “R” Us, which he has filed under the “TOAD” category: temporary, obsolete, abandoned, or derelict. A few weeks earlier he found an area to the south, in Porter City, on the border of Arizona, which is the state’s best “unmanageable area” or, in other words, “an area of urban pollution that is impossible to eradicate and which the only way to regulate is to leave to grow, unabetted, into chaos.” He also finds McMansions attractive, the immense single-family prefabs, dotted here and there apparently at random; all the rooftops being different colors, from the sky each group of McMansions figures its own preconceived flag. All so well calculated, he thinks. But most fascinating to him are the “privatopias”: settlements, luxury or not, where the residents, for their own security, accept the imposition of almost jail-like restrictions; they have a self-destructive, seductively controlled quality. Climbing as high as the plane will go, he passes above Sun City, one such privatopia. The near-identical houses are laid out in perfect concentric circles—bringing to Robert’s mind those of a tree trunk—the one difference being that, in the circles he’s seeing down below, the outer ring is the first that gets made, plus it never moves position, and the rest are added in afterward. Once the center has been reached and the sprawl process comes to an end, the inhabitants move on, and another Sun City gets built, so that, like an organic sun, Sun City moves position. Its streets are strictly circular, and the size of the complex is such, 16 miles in diameter, that if you travel along one of the outermost rings you won’t discern the curve. Farther into the center, driving makes you dizzy. Robert dreams of one day being bold enough to go and live in one of these privatopias. They provide mobility, he thinks, they allow you to choose, to move—in the same way that in the past intimacy was the preserve of the rich. His most vivid memory of Europe: London’s Victorian terraces, nowadays an icon of the city, an object of pride, but which when they were built were scoffed at. [Something else he’s proud of: since the parks were never bombed, during the Blitz he’d buy a pint of milk and go to Hyde Park, where he’d sit on a bank and drink the milk and watch the fireworks display. But this is a lie, since he wasn’t born until after World War II ended.]
95
Tired of walking back and forth across his apartment, and since it had been months now and Jorge Rodolfo’s faith in Borges seemed impossible to recover via introspective methods or by voluntarily turning his back on the world, he decided to plan and build a temple to the Master, right in front of the aparthotel. The inhabitants of the caravans and trailers agreed to let him use part of their packed-earth esplanade, on the proviso that once it was built they’d receive a cut from any visiting tourists or browsers. This suited Jorge Rodolfo. The following months were spent in a reclusion even greater than the one he had hoped to escape: day and night he read and reread the Master’s works, making notes on aspects of the oeuvre that were apt to be turned into symbols, searching around for the building materials to best suit his symbolic world, working on blueprints and more blueprints, making more and more alterations to the blueprints, in short using up his energy, his sight, and his small savings on what would come to be his life’s work. The regulars at the Budget Suites often came by to see him, bringing food, cereal or corn crackers, and that was when he began to relax, even speaking to them, though never ma
king any reference to the temple, saying things instead about how to beat the roulette at this or that casino, or the nutritional advantages of rice over pasta based on anthropological studies of the miraculous survival of peoples in the Third World; diversions, in short, from the issue at hand, the construction of the temple, the details of which he had no intention of revealing. After six and a half months, construction began. A single space, 60 feet by 60 feet at the base and 60 feet high, with a pyramidal roof. The material would be the metal cubes of cars from the breaking yards, crushed to their minimum size by machines squeezing them from four directions. 63 days, the construction took. And, just as Jorge Rodolfo had envisioned, these perfect blocks possessed an aleatory gleam, from whichever angle the sun struck them, and the gamut of colors of the original cars could be seen. Sometimes at the surface, as though born naturally out of the blocks themselves, a back door handle will show, or a speedometer, or, apparently, a clump of woman’s hair—if the car was in a crash. And as he had envisioned it, piled one on top of the other like bricks, they form a never-before-seen composition. Also, as befits the temple of an inexistent divinity, this metallic mishmash would intensify the cold unbearably in winter, and in summer provoke a temperature far above average, resulting in an unvisitable temple; the portrait of the Master, hanging in the exact center, would never be sullied, the entranceway would be a purely theoretical entranceway, as no one would ever want to open it, much less pass through it, and the air surrounding the Master would remain immaculate. The caravan dwellers who gave over the parcel of land have as yet not been able to go in. People approach, look puzzled, take a few photos, and go away again. It shines in the late evening light, making the Las Vegas Boulevard glittering on the horizon seem minor by comparison, and at that point, overcome, Jorge Rodolfo sheds a tear. He has to leave one February night via his back window when the people who have been swindled, several dozens of them, come after him.
The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab Page 9