The events of that afternoon led to the discovery of one of the strangest and most bizarre crimes in the history of the USA: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
102
Chii-Teen is leafing through some old newspapers he’s been taking clippings from and copying over the years. All the clippings have something to do with physics, and specifically whether theoretical or experimental, with neutron detection, with science fiction, and especially with events held at the Beijing Museum of Science Fiction. On days like today, his days off, he stays at home, a detached house in a residential neighborhood, and passes the time taking tepid baths, reading, watching movies, or thinking about the tepid baths, about the things he’s been reading, about the films, though in his mind it always comes back around to the same things: science fiction or neutrino detection. Due to his delicate health, he’s on doctor’s orders to avoid any leisure-time activity that might generate strong emotions: ever since the heart bypass three years ago, low intensity is the order of the day. But something happened today that blew him off course. On the reverse of one of the clippings, he’s come across a picture of an elderly painter, clearly from the West, distinguished looking, with slicked-back hair and mustache, apparently at work in his studio. What he cannot understand is that the room the painter is standing in is full of paint pots with great daubs of paint on them, that the floor has daubs of paint across it, too, that there are lots of different brushes resting in white spirits, that the painter is wearing a paint-smattered smock, but that, without soiling it in any way, he’s working on a blank, spotless canvas, and he’s using a cutter to make vertical slashes, nothing more, vertical slashes. Chii-Teen suddenly becomes very excited, considering the possibility of a body without a mind, the possibility that the studio, the smock, and all the dense mass of painting materials could be a body that has been separated from the pure mind, Cartesian, fleshless, i.e., the blank canvas to which the painter is applying the cutter to. As opposed to what is always the case, Chii-Teen says to himself, the mind being assaulted by the body. The possibility of this mind-body separation was nothing new, he’d meditated on it before. Clearly, he said, a mind without a body would be immortal, in the same way that if software could be built independent of its corresponding hardware, it would go on working forever. But it was only through contemplating this photo, of a man alone and automatic like a neutrino in empty space tearing at that also lonely empty canvas, only by way of his very clear intuition of the two forces there—one telluric and one aureate, each seeking to become separate in the painter’s studio—only through this Sunday afternoon happenstance and its accompaniment by a painful and arrhythmic pounding in his heart, was he led to the certainty that: (1) the phrase “science fiction” is superfluous because all science is fictional, and (2) he would dedicate the following Sunday to less dangerous activities, for example looking at those innocent photos of his ex-wife in which the mind and the body were still very much together, together and scrambled like a chicken’s droppings and urine.
103
But it was a Sunday that never came. Each time he took out the photographs of his ex-wife, or whenever he was just about to open the photo drawer, or was searching around for the albums, the phone would ring: something work-related, something to do with the museum, or friendships, whatever. All phone calls that clamped him to the earpiece for a long time and that put his attention on other matters, more urgent but not necessarily so interesting. In the end, on one of these afternoons when he was reaching out for the photos, the phone rang and it was his exwife, with whom he hadn’t spoken in years; she was ringing to let him know she was going to the U.S., for good, “to join a kind of commune,” she said, “based underground in an old radioactive waste plant, or something like that,” and that she was giving up custody of the children, she was handing them over to him forever. He burned the photos in the fireplace, all of them, and as he watched them burn was prompted to think that, yes, now body and mind were together, now they truly were indistinguishable.
104
There’s a phase in life in which we are many: the period from the day we’re born approximately until we’re 3.5 years old, when we weren’t aware of who we are, so we’re only what people tell us we are. Until this moment, during this preconscious phase, we’re nothing more than these versions of ourselves, inert or vegetable elements: a stone, a clump of grass, a gust of wind, a bit of sand, et cetera, the sum of which is identical to a desert 3.5 years in length.
105
The day when the bank auditor, who worked at the local newspaper, commissioned Robert, due to his origins in the cultured classes of London, to write a small piece about the activities of the English colonists who came to the shores of the Americas in the sixteenth century, what they survived on, how many of them there might have been, the religious cults they practiced, how it was that in the first moment of history they came to domesticate the savage American wilderness, and how it was that after this initial phase they moved inland to Nevada and founded, with the use of a little mud and four pieces of timber, what is today Carson City, that day, we said, nobody imagined that Robert would go and shut himself in the cockpit of his plane for three days and three nights, motionless in the metal silence of the hangar, his hands resting on the controls and his gaze fixed on the artificial horizon of the control panel, going without food and virtually not drinking anything, either, refusing to see anyone, and refusing all suggestions, too, finally taking the following to the printer’s:
We have to free the fluids, all the fluids, whether they be liquid or gas, that we humans have been compressing here on earth. We have to allow them to expand. We have to turn on all the taps in our houses at once, and the taps on our pools and in the wells, the whole supply network. All gas cylinders must be unscrewed, all air supplies that have been compressed inside all sorts of mechanisms, in refrigerators, in air-conditioning units, and the gases used medicinally in hospitals, too, the wind in our stomachs, everything. They’ll do it themselves anyway, sooner or later. It makes no sense to carry on hindering that which the cosmologists call the Expansion of the Universe.
106
That the face on the Holy Shroud belongs to Jesus hardly seems the wisest conclusion. If so, thousands of people, spurred on by religious fanaticism and aided by plastic surgery and 3-D technologies, would take this face as their own; better that it remain unknown, so that it can change according to the different ideas we each have about it and, at the same time, be the same face. Like a fractal that, ultimately, would reinvent human complexity.
107
In this text—is it a novel, or a poem, or a report?—let’s just call it a “text lacking all glutamates and conservatives and flavor enhancers,” the tired language of the contemporary novel has been renovated. A masterpiece in which resources are invoked, not used. A classic.
—J. S. Simpson, The Daily Economy
Pure mysticism. Squaring the circle. Pythagoras would have loved it.
—H. F. Wood, New Ideas in Architecture
The emptiest and most pretentious pedantry reaches its zenith in this novel. Who was the author trying to fool?
—R. Santos-González, Revista Clara de Literatura
The first truly twenty-first-century artifact has been written in the Spanish language. Which rock was it hiding under?
—S. Merz, Art & Language Today
A nonsense, nothing more.
—Arcadio de Cortázar, “Letras en Plenitud,” Buenos Aires Post
The great poem of underlying harmony, positioned beneath the superficial layers of established culture. A portable internet. A shock to the system.
—Wang Wei, Cooking and Taste Bulletin
Without a doubt set to become the new indie icon.
—C. Walker, Manchester Music
Reading it is like experiencing the petulance of the author, blended in with a handful of out-of-date rags, and served in an unrecyclable plastic cup.
—Ignacio Foix-Salat, El Hilo de La Tinta
All novels have suddenly aged by fifty years. After reading this, we can’t look back in the same way.
—J. Hankel, Microcomputer Studies and Art
108
Linda and John just got married in Reno, she’s wearing a short flowery dress, he’s in a Texan shirt, tieless. 1982. It’s the moment that the Russian space station Kirchoff deviates from its orbit and the single astronaut aboard is pronounced a dead man walking. As a treat, Linda and John decide to go to Vegas. They’d never have imagined it. They aren’t gamblers. He gets a used car from the lot by the courthouse while she goes to the nearby supermarket for food and a few cans of 7 Up. Linda drives. They soak in the scenery, exhilarated by the great unknown represented by their two wedding bands. Arriving in the city, they find a place to stay and, skipping any food, head straight to the casino on the first floor. In the lobby, before they get to the tables and the movie booths, an exceedingly long row of slot machines calls out to her, and she changes some bills for coins and dives in, while John, more cautious, says, I’ll pass, there’s plenty of time for that. After the usual ups and downs in her luck, the loops so exhaustively studied in mathematics, she loses all the money she’s carrying, which includes part of their shared savings. They go out to the car, he loses his temper, and neither of them says another word. They drive, not knowing where to. They enter the desert coming along U.S. Route 50. John, who’s at the wheel now, suddenly notices a tree, and drives over to it, pulling up underneath. Getting out, she slams the door behind her and sits down with her back against the tree trunk. She looks up at the branches, which are free of anything but the many leaves weighing them down, no nests, no birds; she already feels nostalgic for the confetti rice they paid some people to throw as they came out of the courthouse. She takes her shoes off and places them to one side. To John, who does not go and sit down, the desert beyond the shade of the tree seems an exact figure for the future that awaits them. He starts shouting at Linda again, so vehemently that she threatens to go back to Utah on foot. If that’s what she wants to do, he says, grabbing her shoes, she’s going to have to do it barefoot. Oh, and what are you going to do, she says, burn them? John ties the laces together, swings the shoes around, and slings them up at the tree, and they catch on one of the branches. Linda’s jaw drops, and stays that way. John starts the car and drives away in the direction of Carson City. He sees the silhouette of Linda growing smaller in the rearview mirror, along with that of the shoes, still swaying at the top of the tree.
109
The largest diamond ever found is 50 light-years away, in the Centaur constellation. This is the star “BPM37093,” a crystallized white dwarf, the final resting state of stars similar in dimension to the sun once all their helium and hydrogen has been consumed in nuclear reactions. In five billion years our sun will become a white dwarf, too, and another two billion years later it will die, becoming another gigantic diamond at the heart of our galaxy. No one will be able to see its pulsating light. Also, we will all be dead.
110
The day when the bank auditor, who worked at the local newspaper, commissioned Robert, due to his origins in the cultured classes of London, to write a small piece praising the recently completed bell tower on the Carson City church, reflecting on the origins of its local style, the possible influences from contemporary architecture, the perfect examples of engineering behind the neon clock hands, the traditional support by pillars resting on the tholobate, the pastel tones on the four sides, and the radioactive lightning rod at the top emitting alpha particles, that day, we said, nobody supposed that Robert would go and shut himself in the cockpit of his plane for three days and three nights, motionless in the metal silence of the hangar, his hands resting on the controls and his gaze fixed on the artificial horizon of the control panel, going without food and virtually not drinking anything, either, refusing to see anyone, and refusing all suggestions, too, only to finally take nothing to the printer’s, but to look up into his teller window at the bank and say the following to his first customer of the day:
It’s true, there is something worse than the death of a spouse: the discontinuous line of the freeway penetrating marsh and swamp, traveling in the direction of an underwater town. [PAUSE] The overflow mark from the water where the asphalt ends.
It isn’t that there’s any certainty about the event, or that it cleaves to any universal law, and as an occurrence it won’t feature in any history books, it’s just the sensation, probably correct, that at this moment nothing in the world changed, and that this is the very stuff of human sterility.
111
In this case what you get is the Kuleshov Effect, an experimental montage effect in cinematography almost exclusively associated with the director it is named after. It comprises a series of brief sequences, in which the first close-up of the actor Mozzuchin was joined, respectively, with shots of a bowl of soup, a dead woman, and a child at play. The spectator experiences an alteration in the expression of the actor, though it doesn’t in fact change: respectively, hunger, pain, and tenderness register in that impassive face. The experiment led to the recognition and confirmation of “the enormous power of the montage.” The director was involved in intense and varied activities between 1918 and 1920. His application of scientific methods to cinematography rooted cinema in the principle of juxtaposition of two images, and led to the development of a new kind of art.
SILVESTRA MARINIELLO
112
And John entered the first bar he came to on the freeway, not far from Carson City. Fredda kept on bringing him the beers he ordered, until finally she said, Isn’t it a little early to be drinking like this? At which he burst into tears, confessing that he’d just left his wife halfway out along the highway, under a tree, without her shoes. Fredda, no stranger to drunken tragedies, encouraged him to go back. If this is the start you guys are making, what’s gonna become of you? And back John went, taking with him a bottle of water and something to eat. When he arrived she was half asleep. He woke her, she seemed weak, and he asked her to forgive him and gave her the food and water. She promised never to go on the slot machines again, and he promised never to abandon her. Seeing as you haven’t got any shoes on, he said, I shouldn’t, either. He took his off and threw them up into the tree. The happiness of Linda and John’s relationship was rooted in certain simple but durable rituals: two years later they came back, having now had their first son and wanting to throw his first pair of boots into the tree. As they approached they saw the multitude of shoes. And were both speechless.
113
Hey, Kenny, what’s up! he heard behind him, a moment before he felt the pat on the back. Clearly uncomfortable, Kenny returned the greeting with just a hello, as he got up from the bench where he was reading the paper; he didn’t remember the man’s name. You don’t remember me? Josep, man, it’s Josep! Ah, how could I forget, he said in a calm voice. 35 days, right? I said I’d be back, a little home visit, did you eat yet? Let me get you something—shit, some new shoes maybe? You’re all set up here, you’ve really got it made, I’m starting to understand you now (fucking immigration, he said under his breath). They ordered two mixed-grill platters—the waiters were surprised to see Kenny not dining alone. Good trip? he said curtly. Great, well, actually not so great—the Chinese never make it easy for you, do they?—but it’ll all shake out. Hey, remember I said I was gonna tell you a good one? A true story, the kind of thing someone might want to write down. Yes, said Kenny, I remember. So, shall I tell you? You’ll see, it’s true, it happened to me! Because the one I told you the other time, you didn’t swallow that, did you? I mean, it was half true, I did make the manhole cover for a place called Carson City, but I didn’t put any trees on it, I did shit, the story just occurred to me when I was on a highway near there—I was doing a little tourism, see, getting a few things for the wife and kids—and I saw a tree covered in shoes, and that was the clearest idea I had of what that country’s like, they don’t do anything by halve
s … But did you fall for it? No, said Kenny dryly, that part I didn’t believe. Smart cookie, okay, but this next one, this really is for real. I swear. If it wasn’t—do you really think I’d come here just to tell you lies? All the stories you must hear, you’re gonna have to go and write them down one day, right? Something to live off when you get old? Although, like I told you before, my parents are from Catalonia, born and bred, and me and my kids the same, my grandparents came from a town in León, the city with the manhole covers I mentioned before, Hong Kong’s secret twin town, okay, well at the end of the 1960s we moved there to live with my grandparents, the economy was bad and my grandparents never integrated in Barcelona, because of the language, and some other stuff that has nothing to do with anything, the point is, León was up in the mountains and out of the way no matter where you were coming from, after they rerouted the motorway in about 1955 and built a different one that passed nowhere near, although many of the houses were still occupied in those days and there were lots of children. One afternoon, I remember it well, one of those days when it’s so hot no one goes out in the street, a very striking car came into town, a black Dodge, and it parked up in the main square outside the town hall. Of course people were peeking through their window blinds, the kind you can’t tell they’re being peeked through from outside, and then a guy got out of the car, tall, thin, wearing a dark suit, dark just like this one I’m wearing, and he went straight into the town hall. They say he went in there shouting the mayor’s name. So he was from the government, or something, and his mission was to be there then, because a month later the great day was coming, a man was about to walk on the moon, and the town had been chosen as the location for some important tests which had to do with state security, tests that were never publicly revealed. So the mayor made everything available to the man, footed the bill, put him up in the Fondita Hostel, which was the only remaining hostel after, like I said, the road was moved in ‘55. And so the guy goes there, gets given the best room. I was 8 years old and, as you can imagine, we kids were totally intrigued by the arrival of this character, there was nothing for us there but the radio, going down to the river, and betting on when the Sugus sweets would come (we’d had word of them from an emigrant to Madrid who sent us cards telling us they melted in your mouth and tasted of tropical fruit), so anyway that was the end of blackbird-catching, swimming in the river, and listening to the radio, and no more dreaming about Sugus, either, because every ounce of our attention was focused on this dude. Luckily for us the son of Sabina, the woman who ran the hostel, kept us all informed, telling us the guy stayed in his room all day, like some kind of ascetic, that he took breakfast and lunch in his room, and that there were noises constantly coming from inside, machine noises, like the ones made by the big calculating machines you got in those days, and that he only came out at night, at dinnertime, when he went down to the restaurant—smartly dressed, suit and everything—he’d sit on his own, not saying a word to anyone, and he always ordered the same thing, a fried egg with chorizo, a carafe of wine, and then crème caramel for dessert, before heading straight back up to his room. And it went on like that, day after day. But we were so intrigued that one night we decided to make a human tower so that one of us could climb up to the window. So we drew lots, got on each other’s shoulders, and up went Little Seb—who, by the way, went on to become mayor years later—but he only managed to look in for a few seconds because our legs gave out, and the tower came tumbling down, but according to him there was a sack full of small, colored dice—picture it, our intrigue levels just went woof … Anyway, I’ll cut to the chase: the big day came and, since there wasn’t any TV in those days, a megaphone was hooked up to the radio and placed out in the main square, so the whole town could experience the first man on the moon communally. As for the outsider, he said that he didn’t require anything special for his studies, he had everything he needed. Picture it, all of us, the whole town there waiting, the guy on the radio giving it hell, and the government man who doesn’t join in, who someone has to go and tell it’s happening, and Little Seb gets sent, off he runs, but before he arrives at the hostel he trips and falls down in a heap. Then finally the man came out. He approached the square, he walked in this, you know, purposeful way, quite a picture, I can tell you, quite a picture, his impeccable suit, his gleaming shoes, but empty-handed, that’s right, empty-handed, and he comes and stands out in the middle, and a knot forms around him, and this hush settles, and he asks everyone not to come in too close, that he needs some kind of opening at least, and then he puts his hand in his pocket and, bringing out a lead box, or some kind of metal at least, he takes out a small ball, the size of a marble, made of dark glass, then he draws a circle on the ground in chalk, and then really, really carefully he places the ball down in the middle, and the commentator on the radio is still going for it, and a murmur goes around, and the mayor asks for quiet, picture it, crazy, and when the commentator says Armstrong is just about to set foot on the moon, the guy starts staring at the ball, I swear I’d never seen such piercing eyes, and the thought I had was that he must have eaten his dinner before coming because I thought I saw the red of the chorizo on his lips, I swear that was what I saw, and finally the commentator announces it, he’s down, Armstrong’s on the moon!, and the man lifts his gaze and looks up at the sky, he rolls his sleeves up, spreads his arms, and says, Phew, disaster averted! The ball didn’t so much as move, this is a very safe town you have here! And we children ran behind him, throwing stones at his car as he drove away with one arm out of the window, dropping Sugus in his wake, fistfuls of which he scooped from a sack, until his peals of laughter faded into the distance.
The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab Page 11