The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab

by Agustín Fernández Mallo

  32

  Nothing capable of carrying information can move faster than the speed of light. This is why the cosmologists have come up with what they call the “event horizon”: the boundary beyond which we cannot know what happens. Light signals emitted millions of years in the past and whose existence we yet know nothing about. This horizon is not flat, however, but encircles us, or enspheres us; a closed, impermeable ball until the point at which its obverse is indicated by a simple formula linking speed and time together. Then nothing materializes as everything, and, during the shooting of Journey to Italy, Ingrid Bergman weeps to see a couple embracing in the lava at Pompeii—an “event horizon” that was not in the script, but that somebody happened to be in place to film, to transfer or elevate it to fiction. The artist Damien Hirst says to the media: “The only thing my work demonstrates is the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living.”

  33

  Ernesto, postulating himself at the top of his crane, lowers the empty container into the bay. After a few minutes he brings it up again and hurries down the ladder to look for the fish. Today he finds he’s also brought up the front cover of a Bible, which he places in the pocket of his army parka because it amuses him. He selects a number of fish, turns off the crane, and walks to the nearby bus stop [the fish stop, as he calls it] on Park Row. He takes a seat under the shelter and it isn’t long before the fish pulls up. He boards and even the sound of the 2 hydraulic doors shutting reminds him of gills. He and the driver are the only people on board and as they cross the Brooklyn Bridge he remembers how he always used to think that someone should build a bridge between Alaska and the old Soviet Union, barely 100 kilometers across the Bering Strait. When he was 9, Pegg, the first girl he fell in love with, went out fishing with her father and, in spite of the forceful prohibitions of maritime law, made it across to Provideniya, Russia. No one ever found out why, but the pair did not come back. He turns and looks back at the high-rises, the illuminated lofts, before focusing on the sea, whose darkness penetrates the darkness of the sky. Arriving back at his apartment, he greets the old woman who lives on the mezzanine floor—she is out throwing away some trash bags containing empty sacks of pig fodder. She has kept a pig since the day she saw a program about them: apparently their body tissues, and especially the heart, are the closest to those of human beings. In her solitude, she says, the creature gives her the feeling of being understood. His apartment is damp, he puts the heating on, dons an ATLANTA ’96 tracksuit he bought at the same time as the sports bag, and checks the mail. His parents have written, how’s everything going, et cetera. He turns on the TV and mutes the sound; he likes watching these silent images pass, like those outside the window of a train. He unwraps one of the fish and places the rest in the freezer. Scaling it, he feels something solid inside. Opening along the belly, he finds a dice: it has a pearlescent plastic finish, black dots for numbers, and the 2 and 6 sides have been partially rubbed out. He places it in his trousers pocket, fries the fish, and sits down to eat in front of the television. Looking up from his food intermittently, he catches a silent advertisement for tires, images of Marines in Iraq, an advertisement for a rerun of The Bionic Woman, which he keeps on missing. Afterward he sits down at the computer to work on 2 architectural projects, remakes of two already well-known buildings, the Suicide Tower and the Museum of Ruins. Before climbing into bed he looks at the sheets. Though he changes them quite often, and he does not know why, they constantly become dirty, his body prints a diffuse grayish silhouette on them—larger than the size of his actual body—like the tweed jacket of some vanished giant. And no one even knows exactly where the border between Russia and Alaska lies, he thinks.

  34

  So Julio goes away and writes:

  Would I find La Maga? Most of the time it was just a case of my putting in an appearance, going along the Rue de Seine to the arch leading into the Quai de Conti, and I would see her slender form against the olive-ashen light which floats along the river as she crossed back and forth on the Pont des Arts, or leaned over the iron rail looking at the water. It was quite natural for me to climb the steps to the bridge, to go into its narrowness and over to where La Maga stood. She would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite, and that people who make dates are the same kind who need lines on their writing paper, or who always squeeze up from the bottom on a tube of toothpaste.

  And then the following lines:

  Definition of Closed Ball: A ball b is a closed ball if its complementary set (Rn – b) is open.

  Each is considered an open set in the space Rn, though it can be defined as a diffuse space if the two balls intersect inside it.

  35

  One day J said to Sandra, Know something? There’s a radio still playing in that Parchís palace, a laborer left it on by accident. I’ve heard that when nomads pass by the grounds they hear a foreign voice reverberating around the empty rooms, and when the wind blows in the right direction they continue to hear it for many miles. I don’t believe it, says Sandra. Well, it’s true, he says. By the way, I saw that Journey to Italy’s on again, a late-night showing. Shall we? After a moment’s thought, Sandra says, No, sounds boring.

  36

  Marc came across Josecho online, on a fashion website. What drew Marc to him was that, according to the site, Josecho was an exponent of a surprising kind of literature. A little more digging revealed that he lived in Madrid, was 35 years old, held Saint John of the Cross and Coco Chanel in equally high regard, was a practitioner of a truly fanatical solitude and that he, too, cited Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and the Unabomber [though instead of Cioran on his list he had Tarzan] as examples of authentic fermions [though he did not use this term], of solitary souls par excellence. Then again, Josecho did not have a word to say about the great Henry Darger, who for Marc was an exemplary fermion. He also learned that he was looking to science for the poetics of the century to come and that, again like him, he claimed to resonate with all of the lyrics to the song “Bad Poets” by the band Astrud. On the same site he discovered that Josecho was a fervent practitioner of an aesthetic tendency he himself had termed “transpoetic fiction,” which consisted of creating hybrid artifacts somewhere between science and what is traditionally known as “literature.” Marc grew more interested but took it no further until he found that Josecho also lived in a hut on a roof somewhere in Madrid; the seduction was complete. Josecho, in emails with Marc, quickly showed an interest in the Fermionic Solitude Theory, which seemed to him an almost unadulterated example of “transpoetic fiction.” Marc sent emails with attachments detailing the different phases of his theory. Once a certain trust had grown between the pair, Marc revealed that he had met another transpoet, a tall, bearded man who went around in a tweed jacket in summer, and who had come up with an exceedingly interesting theory he called Open Ball Theory or Hopscotch B. But, Marc said, he’d only seen the man once, a fleeting encounter, and hadn’t learned his name or where he might be found. Over time, Josecho told him about his other projects, all of which Marc found deeply exciting. Their bond grew. Then one day Josecho stopped answering Marc’s messages. Marc carried on trying, but nothing. It had been this way for a year.

  37

  Saigon … shit; I’m still only in Saigon … Every time I think I’m gonna wake up back in the jungle. When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. [Grabs at flying insect.] I’d wake up and there’d be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife, until I said “yes” to a divorce. When I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. I’m here a week now … Waiting for a mission … Getting softer.

  APOCALYPSE NOW, FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA

  38

  Ulan Erge is experiencing one of the hardest winters in living memory. The snow has piled 8 meters high and it has become extremely difficult for Mihály and his colleagues at the hospital to carry out operations
safely; just yesterday a 22-year-old man came in to have part of his pancreas removed and left the operating theater minus part of his nose—frostbite. The shelters are full. Mihály’s thoughts keep turning to Maleva and what might have become of her. Out in the empty streets the cold divides up the graffiti, quartering them, giving them the appearance of impossible maps of the world. More than ever the city, 3 stories deep in snow, resembles a half-full reservoir with antennae and rooftops breaking through the surface. The traffic lights continue to change beneath the snow, giving the dirty but still-transparent ground the feeling of a party without any partygoers. The sections of buildings above the snow have been covered with huge swaths of cotton sheets—sheets originally rescued from Siberian concentration camps and from a wide range of hostels, now sewn together; never having been washed, they are covered in stains. What this means is that it makes no difference being above or beneath the snow, because in either case the horizon is vertical and white, and nothing can be seen. A bus driver named Jodorkovski came up with the idea for the cotton sheets; he drove the bus between Ulan Erge and Berlin once a month, and in Berlin, in 1994, attended a show he found very impressive. An artist, apparently very famous, named Christo, had covered the Reichstag with a large white sheet. He had literally gift-wrapped it. You could still go inside, and that was what Jodorkovski did, and found that it wasn’t cold, it was almost warm, and he immediately saw the sheets as a solution for the freezing temperatures that gripped buildings in his architecturally symmetrical city; the white fabric also had the effect of diffusing the light from outdoors so that the rooms seemed larger and lighter. When he went home to tell people what he had seen, the local authorities were very taken with the idea. The initiative came together quickly. Mihály, drinking coffee in the office next to the operating theater, thinks perhaps Maleva might be on the ground floor of someone’s home, beneath snow level, sitting in a chair by a fire listening to Lou Reed on tape, or maybe she’s somewhere higher up, covered by the cowling of the white sheets, inventing horizons. He’s lucky to be living in one of the attic rooms at the hospital, which is the only building not to have been covered over, due to concerns about ventilation and hygiene. Finishing the coffee, he goes back through to the operating theater, another young man with appendicitis. That makes 15 this year. He already knows what he is going to find, a radioactive Iodine-125 capsule lodged in the appendix.

  39

  From inside all you can hear is the wind outside as it buffets the wire fences. The books line the shelves, programs are loaded on the computers, the plates in the kitchens are clean and neatly stacked, the meat in the walk-in freezers remains intact, the board games are in the display cabinets, the counters and the dice shakers encode hypothetical games. Somewhere a radio … “A robbery has occurred at branch 24 of the savings bank Caja Madrid, and the robbers are said to have gotten away with half a million euros. A jeweler’s in Girona has also been raided. The criminals, said to be part of a Czech gang operating across the Mediterranean, smashed the shop front in clear daylight using sledgehammers, and came away with jewelry worth 1.6 million euros. This is Radio Nacional de España, Radio Five, stay tuned…”

  40

  Every time Marc goes to the market in the lower reaches of his building he comes back annoyed by people trying to sell him products they label “organic” or “natural.” I, madam, will take the artificial option. Do I look like a country peasant? Don’t you know what synthesis is? Since he does not own a washing machine, once a week he takes his clothes a few streets away to a laundromat called Pet Shop Boys. The owner, a gay man in his thirties who inherited the business, has had the group’s music on constant rotation since the day his parents passed away. He always greets Marc with the same wave of the hand and says he’s ordered some new machines, super-powerful, super-cheap, made somewhere in the East—he always forgets the country’s name. Marc watches the drum go around as he waits, and it surprises him every time to think that the thing spinning around in there is nothing less than his own solidified skin. But today he has come to the decision that this mixture of skins means the destruction of the Theory of Sets, the defeat of the organs of a body.

  41

  Scientists at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, have implanted video cameras in the impaired eyes of a group of blind volunteers, giving them back their sight. The resolution of their new view of things is 16 pixels, sufficient to make out a car, a lamppost, or a wastepaper basket. 1,000 pixels was originally thought the minimum requirement, so they were amazed when the blind people reported being able to see relatively well at just 16 pixels. The scientists were neglecting something: we all have what is called a physical “blind spot” through which we see nothing, so that the brain, as a reflex, fills in what is supposed to be there: we make it up, in other words, and we are usually right. This is what allows us to see a house in its entirety through overhanging tree branches or, in a race featuring thousands of people, to have a sense of where a certain person is throughout the course of the race, though he or she is at times obscured. And it is why 16 pixels are enough for the blind volunteers: the imagination supplies the rest. Our eyes include a point that invents it all, shows that the metaphor constitutes the brain itself, puts things in a poetic order. This “blind point” ought more accurately to be called a “poetry-maker point.” Equally, in the great eye that each and every one of our lives finally constitutes, there are dark spots, points we cannot see, and that we reconstruct imaginarily by way of an artifact we call “memory.” This could be where the other dimensions are hidden, ghosts and specters we fail to perceive but that wander the earth waiting to emerge out of someone building a metaphor in this very blind spot.

  42

  A Sunday in the town of Corcubión, and the bimonthly feria has been set up in the main square and adjoining streets. There is a fractal-like structure with an elliptical awning inside which cattle farmers and black marketeers basically traffic their wares, and the busiest hours are between 8:00 and 11:00 a.m. To one side there are secondhand clothes and shoes; farther off, on one of the streets that leads away into the town, farm implements and agricultural machinery, and, at the venture’s heart, a couple of marquees in which people eat octopus and tripe. The tourists drink wine, as do the locals—country folk doing deals. Antón walks between the stalls, avoiding the secondhand computer stall he sometimes visits. I need a couple of ropes for barnacling, he says to Amalia, who runs the “Wicker etc.” stall. They haggle briefly and agree on a price for a pair of 15-millimeter ropes, which he slings over his shoulder as he leaves. His feet are very cold. A ray of sunlight falls on his neck, nosing around in the folds of his clothes. He ends up buying a thick sweater with a red and green lozenge pattern, and a pair of fleece-lined gum boots, both from a Peruvian trader. Rock on! he says as the man gives him his change. Then he hears a voice behind him: Fuck me, it’s the Prof! What’s up? We’re going for a drink, I’ll get you one. He turns to find Anxo, who is wearing a plastic poncho, and he says, No, thanks, must dash. Come on man, one drink! Can’t, another time, Anxo, all right? Christ on a bike, Prof, what’s the hurry! More shitheap computers to fiddle about with? No, no, I’ve just left the computer on at home, I’m downloading this film and I want to see where it’s got to. If I get home late I’ll end up messing around with that and I’ll be in a rush to get my stuff ready for tomorrow, bound to fuck something up—we’re off barnacling first thing. Anxo puts his bag down and says, No worries, early bird catches the venereal disease, off you trot, first, though, check out the films I just bought, got them from the black guy over there, bargain. And he takes out a handful of cartoon DVDs. They’re all for the kids, they go ape for this stuff. What about you, what you downloading? Oh, it’s the nuts, it’s this movie from the ‘70s called The Omega Man, I saw it on TV ages ago, just the once: Charlton Heston’s the last man alive and this gang of zombies come after him, but they only come out at night, so he can go around the streets all day, go into shops, which are
untouched, helps himself to whatever he likes, and when the tank runs out he just jumps in another car, fan-fucking-tastic, I swear—there’s some shots of the city from above, the place has been trashed, there’s paper and all kinds of crap in the streets, and Charlton driving along one of those big avenues with the top down, and I swear, it looks like the sea, seriously. Fair enough! says Anxo. Reminds me of the Prestige oil spill, the sea was such a mess after that, too. Tell me about it, says Antón. I almost feel like I want another spill to happen, seriously: the fish stock hasn’t suffered, and all this compensation everyone’s been getting, millions! Don’t say, says Anxo, you and everyone. All right, well, let’s find a time for that beer. I’m there! And Antón goes up the road to the Ford Fiesta, which he left parked in the ditch at the foot of the mountain road that leads to his house, a forest track that, the higher you go, becomes progressively overgrown and foggy. He arrives home and tries on the lozenge-pattern sweater and the gum boots, Rock on! He leaves them next to a pile of stripped computer casings. Antón’s closest neighbors are Braulio, 200 meters to the north of the property, and the Quintás family, 150 meters east. Forest separates them. The red roofs are all that can be seen of them. Antón’s dream would be to live in a cement box right on the cliff edge, as close as he could get, but since the recently passed Coastal Law building has been prohibited in such places. He checks on eMule: 100 megabytes until The Omega Man is his.