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

by Agustín Fernández Mallo

  43

  Since Ukraine and Kazakhstan seceded from the Soviet Union, a strip of Russian territory has continued to lie between them, and beneath it a network of pipelines that once took crude oil to the southern USSR and which, in turn, forms part of a larger network ranging as far as Turkey, Iran, and the foothills of China. This means that the Russians, like the Ukrainians and Kazakhs, have had to build new networks for themselves, and the former ones have fallen into disuse. This in turn means that there is a geometric labyrinth of steel, plastic, and iron down there, thousands and thousands of miles long, 6 meters in diameter, and keeping a constant temperature of 3°C, set on a very slight incline, and quite empty. A coil in the form of interlaced hands or tentacles seizing that underground territory, pulling it toward the Middle East. Another subterranean labyrinth exists, but this time a very full one: the CERN laboratory, which is buried 100 meters below the Franco-Swiss border. There, scientists from around the world are smashing together streams of particles at close to the speed of light, thereby journeying into the past, to the moment the universe began, and there are a few shining seconds before they go back in time, bringing word of that spectral, fortuitous, and entirely morally neutral vision, one that has come down to us in spite of our blindness to it.

  44

  There is an account in Philippe D’Arnot’s Secret History of the Second World War of the Russian army arriving at Auschwitz. The first thing they are said to have done is to release the thousands of men, women, and children left there by the fleeing Nazis. And when the site had been cleared, it is said that a corporal and a private, upon investigating a tremor of light that had been spotted in a basement, found 4 emaciated men sitting on the floor in the lotus position. Unaware of anything going on around them, the quartet had used their ID cards to draw a Parchís board on the floor, and the spots on the dice they had been using were partially rubbed out.

  45

  End of September, Ernesto arrives at his apartment in Brooklyn, turns on the TV, mutes the sound. The hoarse grunts of his neighbor’s pig can be heard over the sounds of the city; the animal’s pen lies just beneath Ernesto’s studio, and sometimes it is as though the creature is whispering into his ear. He sits down to put the final touches to one of his 2 most tantalizing projects, the Suicide Tower. The idea behind the building is that the thousands of suicides in New York every year, those successfully carried out as well as those less than successfully, become overly dramatic and difficult because of a lack of adequate, suitably organized facilities. Messy affairs: blood on the pavements, failed hanging attempts when the rope breaks and people have to be revived, scattered body parts after people jump in front of trains, not to mention the consequent mental harm for the true victims: those who remain behind, those obliged to witness such spectacles. The 8-story tower includes an elevator, a chaplaincy service, a cafeteria, a fast-food outlet, a psychologist intended to help them face the critical moment in the best mental state possible, areas for family members, and a medical center in case the attempt should go awry. And on the 8th floor, an empty white space, and a gap to jump into. In the courtyard below, following impact, hoses are activated to spray purifying water on both autodefenestrant and the paving. Across from the 8th floor is a perfectly white wall, so that the postulant will see no horizon. [Abortive suicides have said in interviews that the sight of a horizon in the moment before jumping has been the thing to renew their desire to live, leading them to abort the attempt.] There are also sections in the basement with other options: beds with large receptacles of sleeping pills beside them, special rooms with nooses attached to the beams, carbon dioxide showers, you get the idea. Ernesto is so proud of the concept that he is considering entering it for the Complex Architecture Prize held annually in Los Angeles. He smells fish. Something is burning in the oven.

  46

  The mystical properties of fizzy water are manifold. Microspheres of air rising vertically at a constant rate and entirely heedless of the curvature of the universe. An ascent that lacks any correlate or reflection in space-time. Mass has a propensity to fall, and all is mass, and we all are and always will be mass, and perhaps one day by smashing together 2 streams of subatomic particles the physicist will finally find that yearned-for Higgs boson and the realization it may prompt: of the great amount of weight that both surrounds and constitutes us. The bubble ascends at a constant rate, cold and small, though if introduced into the bloodstream it would be deadly. Someone needs to think about what would happen if all the snow on the steppes was frozen fizzy water, what form would be assumed by the stopped time inside these microspheres.

  47

  Josecho, in a meeting with a handful of executives from Other Directions, the publishing house, and Chanel, the fashion house, in the hut that is his home atop Madrid’s Windsor Tower, signs a contract for the publication and circulation that will link the 3 things. For some reason not visible to the eye of comprehension, the moment Josecho puts pen to paper Marc comes to mind, and the fact that he has not written to him in almost a year. Josecho is the kind of person who just has to look across the Madrid roofscape to feel enlivened, or imagine changes to its geography, topography, and, as in this particular moment, to the advertising billboards. One night, 2 years previously, he had a clear vision of his next transpoetic project. The idea was to devise a novel, an artifact, really, something never seen before: taking the openings, just the first 3 or 4 paragraphs, of already published novels, and placing them one after the other, making one flow into the next, the final result being a perfectly coherent and readable novel. So, beginning with the first lines of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, going on to the opening of The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq, followed by the first fragment from Manganelli’s The Definitive Swamp, followed by the opening of Corín Tellado’s Atrevida Apuesta [“Bold Bet”], then that of Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs, then that of Einstein’s The World As I See It, appending parts from over 200 of the titles that make up universal literature, The Divine Comedy included, and ending with “Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember…” Knowing that Spanish publishing houses lack initiative, he pitched the idea in the U.S. instead, and the team at Other Directions, Philadelphia, were immediately taken with the idea. The second part of Josecho’s strategy was to put together a similarly unprecedented marketing campaign in the history of publishing. He suggested that the Other Directions executives pick the capital of a Western country—Madrid, for instance—and flood 50 percent of the advertising billboards with an advertisement for the book and a photo of him dressed and posing like a model, and have the whole thing sponsored by a big fashion label. The fusion between fiction and catwalk object excited the publishers still further: the novelty of the phenomenon would resonate around the globe and the media response alone would ensure sales. It was a montage they considered to be the end point of contemporary art. With a single, spectacular incursion into just one point of the socio-informational network, at just one node and in just one city, and letting TV, radio, and word-of-mouth do the rest. Several labels were approached and Chanel selected—as well as offering to pay for the billboards they had the idea of a clothing range inspired by the book, garments spliced together from an assortment of other garments, along with accessories: earrings, brooches, perfumes, et cetera. After long consideration and much wavering, Josecho chose to entitle the book Helping the Sick, in a nod to the Siniestro Total EP [or single? we’re not sure] of that name.

  48

  The footsteps grow louder inside the empty oil pipe, making the sound’s attenuation length approximately 3 kilometers in both directions. The reason being that, like light in a fiber-optic cable, the sound waves are almost entirely unobstructed inside this circular tube and so will continue to resound almost indefinitely. Aided by lanterns and a detailed sketch of the route they must follow, with the tunnel splitting every kilometer into 3 or 4 further tunnels, 2 boys of 10 and 11 are walking, 50 meters underground, across southw
est Russia, in the direction of Kazakhstan. They left Ukraine 3 days ago. They know the importance of not losing their way, that many children before them have emerged in the north, in Volgograd, and been arrested; and that others, exhausted and running out of supplies, have come up in one or another of the old oil fields in the Caucasus Mountains where, their voices echoing off the empty oil silos and defunct chimney stacks, they inevitably perished; some, they also know, became so lost that they ended up back in Ukraine. At one of the forks, where the correct tunnel is marked with a binary YES in spray-paint, they sit down to rest and take on water. I’m hungry, says the younger one. Hang on, says the older boy, you know we can’t eat anything until we get there, we’ve got 4 or 5 days still. They pause for 15 minutes and set off once more. Their echoing, multiplying footsteps give them the sensation of walking in a crowd, and this drives them on; they are afraid of what will happen if they stop. After walking for 14 hours in the dark, they stop to drink a multivitamin drink—prepared expressly for this purpose—before bidding each other good night and collapsing into sleep. In a place where it is always night, they pretend it is night—a redundant iteration similar in ways to a dream inside a dream, but signifying the opposite.

  49

  Next Julio writes:

  But she would not be on the bridge. The thin glow of her face was probably peeking into the old doorways in the Marais ghetto, or maybe she was talking to a woman who sells fried potatoes, or she might be eating a hot sausage in the Boulevard de Sébastopol. In any case I went out onto the bridge and there was no Maga. I did not run into her along the way, either. We each knew where the other lived, every cranny we holed up in in our pseudo-student existence in Paris, every window by Braque, Ghirlandaio, or Max Ernst set into cheap postcard frames and ringed with gaudy posters, but we never looked each other up at home. We preferred meeting on the bridge, at a sidewalk café, at an art movie, or crouched over a cat in some Latin Quarter courtyard. We did not go around looking for each other, but we knew that we would meet just the same.

  And next:

  Definition of Open Ball: Let a be a point in Rn and let r be a given positive number. The set of all points x in Rn such that the distance between x and a is less than r

  |x – a| < r

  is called an open n-ball of radius r and center a. We denote this set by B[a] or by B[a; r], applicable to all systems, spaces, or persons that are receptive to apparently random searches of all kinds.

  50

  Q: Are you still a punk?

  A: Yes, I think so.

  BOBBY GILLESPIE, SINGER-SONGWRITER, PRIMAL SCREAM, INTERVIEW BY PABLO GIL

  51

  To look down from the top of a building is to see an accumulation of roofs, pointed and flat alike, bubbling unsystematically to the tops of buildings; sensitive taste buds connecting the people of this city to the world; antennae, wiring, rain gauges, moss, and microorganisms exclusive to the ecosystems of rooftops. Change is the thing. As when the surface of the sea is covered in oil, and the DNA of life returns to the origins of life, the liquid from which we all come. Marc has received an eviction order this morning. His illegal hut has been reported by the people downstairs. The man who talked about Hopscotch B and Open Balls immediately came to mind—some council spook looking for kicks, he thought. Low-life bastard. Murmuring this, murmuring other things, he makes a paper airplane with the eviction notice and sends it out over the wide street that leads down to the sea. He opens the Philips Agricultural Guide: 1974 at page 87, then plucks down a piece of paper featuring a now-obsolete formula, and writes his response on the back:

  Articles 334 and 337 of the Civil Code contain definitions of what we ought to consider movable and immovable property. Being that my hut “may be moved without any damage to or reduction of the property to which it is joined” [article 335], and being that its situation does not fall within the description “fixed or impossible to separate from the ground without breakage of the material or deterioration of the object” [334.3], it is my understanding that my dwelling place is entirely legal.

  52

  Mohamed Smith arrives home from school to find his mother sitting at the computer, her back to the door. Mohamed’s favorite thing is the moment she hears him, and then turns and smiles. In time he will come to learn that this is the closest thing to the “mother” concept, or happiness. He eats at a small table to her right while she continues working on her sketches or trying to come up with the definitive portable dwelling. Meanwhile, John is in the kitchen at El Rachid, having taken over the job so she can dedicate herself entirely to her projects. Mohamed, between spoonfuls, looks up at the computer screen, thinking about his mother in the way one usually thinks about a genius. A simple trustfulness he will also, in time, come to learn is the closest thing to the “mother” concept, or happiness.

  53

  Let us accept the following: no convincing argument has been made for the idea that pig farms must be laid out horizontally, and even less if the site is in an area of steppe lands with a fragile ecosystem in need of preservation. This was the argument made by Vartan Oskanyan, a young, self-taught Armenian farmer, who after traveling around Europe and Central America returned to his native land and built an 8-story building for nearly 900 head of porcine livestock. An actual building, as commonly understood: floors on top of one another, windows, a reception area, emergency ladder, elevator for people, elevator for freight, et cetera. The pigs live on the first 4 floors, in conventionally compartmentalized spaces, and may range around—all part of Vartan’s quest to humanize their existence. On the 4 upper floors live the people: 20 families hailing from refugee camps or victims of the ongoing, successive wars that have taken place in the Middle East since halfway through the twentieth century. They themselves built the complex using materials provided by the Armenian state—though the authorities do not know about the continued presence of the refugees: officially the building is only for pigs. The sows go on the 4th floor with the piglets. As the animals grow, they are moved successively down until they reach the ground floor, where they will be kept for just 2 or 3 days before going to the slaughterhouse. The reasoning is purely pragmatic: the region can be intensely cold, and the best way to create a comfortable dwelling without any electricity is by using the heat generated by the animals, which rises and is collected by panels in the upper floors. Aside from that, the problem of the smell can be solved by efficient insulation. The flammable gases produced by the pigs on the lower floors are used to heat water and generate light. The 20 families enjoy these living standards—comfortable, decent—in exchange for looking after Vartan Oskanyan’s livestock. And with what they make from the sales of the animals, they want for nothing, even going on excursions in the region from time to time. The top floor Vartan has kept for himself. On quiet nights, when everyone else is asleep, his shining attic is the only light to be seen on the plain, taking on the appearance of a lighthouse, pulsing brighter and dimmer with the brief outages in the rudimentary but secure electrical system, and he puts on a Chet Baker record he bought in Saint-Germain during his time as a waiter in Paris, and over the trumpet the attenuated grunts of the pigs below are heard as they stump across the floor tiles or slip down ramps or gnaw the remaining wood finish on the handrails, through to the iron inside. The light in the attic goes off at around 1:30 a.m., leaving only the light in the upper attic, which is little more than a hut containing the hides of over 3,000 blond pigs, perfectly cured and hanging vertically from the snouts. Arranging them according to size and color, he numbers and observes them, and in one corner, on a drafting table complete with compasses, set squares, mechanical pencils, and a protractor, he sits overlaying them with various maps of the region he sketched out himself. No one else in the building knows about the skins.

  54

  Henry Darger died at his Chicago home in 1973, having played out what is perhaps the strangest, most solitary episode in the history of art. He is believed to have been born in Brazil in 1892. When
he was 4 he lost his mother, who died giving birth to a girl who was later given up for adoption. Henry never met this sister. Soon after, Henry was admitted to a mental institution. Henry’s diagnosis was that “his heart is not in the right place.” He never saw his father again after that. He escaped from the asylum in his teens and found his way to Chicago. He rented an apartment, after which nothing more is known about him except that he only went out to attend Mass—sometimes as often as 5 times a day—and that the only conversations he entered into with neighbors concerned the weather, a subject that obsessed him after he witnessed a town in Illinois being destroyed by a tornado in 1913. No one had any inkling of the secrets tucked away in the home studio of this unrefined, quiet individual, a studio that occupied part of his living room and kitchen.

  55

  One September day Harold, a doctor by profession, 32, divorced, and childless, born in Boston but a resident of Miami since the divorce when he realized he needed a change of scene and a stint in hotter climes, is in his single-story home with its sea view—a sea today so flat it resembles mercury. He is playing tennis on a 1979 Atari console connected to the TV screen. The screen is black and a white square represents the ball, and 2 white lines, moving up and down on either side, represent the player-rackets. It is the middle of the day, people are sleeping or taking a swim, blinds are lowered, silence, and after each shot he hears the spongy boing that reminds him of a heartbeat. He has been playing constantly and devouring milk-drenched cornflakes for the past 3.5 years; this is the 78,567th time the TV has vanquished him. Going through into the kitchen for another oversized cup of cornflakes, he finds the box empty. In the garage there is a pile of boxes, empty and unopened ones all mixed together. He digs around, wading deep into the pile, but finds nothing. He is surprised to find they are all, in fact, empty, except for his old Converse trainers forcibly stuffed inside one of the boxes. He takes them out, they give off a mossy odor, he lifts them up to his eyes and turns them over a couple of times before putting them on, going out into the garden, and setting off up the road at a jog. He is wearing a pair of pleated chinos, a red polo shirt, and a bomber jacket. At nightfall he is still running.