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

by Agustín Fernández Mallo

  56

  At Yam Festival in 1963, which took place on 9 May in New Brunswick [New Jersey], Wolf Vostell organized a “happening” that featured the strange, allegorical funeral of a television. For the ceremony, Vostell wrapped the television set in barbed wire and buried it “alive,” with a program still playing on the screen. “After the set was buried, the sound could still be heard for a long time … On one side there was visualization and burial, and then on the other, the purely cerebral work of imagining the object’s continued but invisible operation.”

  VIDEO: PRIMERA ETAPA [VIDEO: FIRST STAGE], LAURA BAIGORRI, MADRID: BRUMARIA EDITORIAL, 2005

  57

  The true motive behind Josecho’s novel Helping the Sick and for the proposal to launch it via advertisements on 50 percent of the advertising billboards in Madrid, and for Chanel agreeing to provide financial backing, lay not in a wish to boost sales, or because he wanted to mix with the most desirable models on the planet, and even less any hope of securing a place in the canon, no, the true motive lay with the white 75cc Primavera Vespa with its single seat [a guarantee of always traveling alone]. This was the activity that most fascinated him: driving around Madrid in a plastic Graham Hill windbreaker and patrol-officer-style sunglasses, helmet emblazoned with stickers and an iPod playing in his ears. Hence the fact that, once the book had come out, he would leave at midafternoon every day, locking his hut atop the Windsor Tower and going down to the parking lot, starting the Vespa, which he kept hidden between two pillars, and going to look up at his own face looking down over people’s daily life in the city. From Orcasitas to the Retiro Park, from San Blas to Chueca, and from Moncloa to Carabanchel, suddenly all the barrios of Madrid were equal, had been leveled, because his face was present alike in each of them. He would arrive home before midnight feeling satisfied, and eat a dinner of a couple of Pavofrío turkey cuts, brown bread, and a can of Mahou beer. These are the facts, and yet, nonetheless, this explanation of the desire for his face to appear on advertising hoardings is too superficial, obvious, possibly even hard to believe: lacking verisimilitude. An alternative has recently been proposed: one day, when he was about to throw away a recent parking ticket on the street, among the rubbish in the trash can his hand fell on what turned out to be a book written in English, which he placed in his rucksack, and later, up on the roof, found to be by a North American woman from Utah. On the first page was a handwritten dedication from her: Dear whoever has found this. Now, if you like, you can throw it away. Affectionately, Hannah. And Josecho felt moved to translate the poems inside. He was particularly taken with the following one:

  How pure the solitude

  of classified ads

  [billboards another matter: no solitude

  in a world occupied by a single object]

  and of the days on the calendar

  and of photos on certain office corkboards

  and of PC keyboards

  how pure, how pure

  the solitude of the drawers in the dressing table of a lady

  and of the elements in the periodic table: enclosures

  only accessible

  [and then only occasionally]

  to their corresponding isotopes.

  The lines “billboards another matter: no solitude / in a world occupied by a single object”: these impressed him. They seemed to provide the perfect way out from his monastic seclusion, because [and here is the crux, the reason why, while still respecting Marc, he had stopped writing to him], against all appearance, against the claims he himself had made, he did not love solitude, no, he did not love the Unabomber, or Cioran, or Wittgenstein, or Tarzan, in fact he was profoundly unhappy living on a rooftop and not having a normal job through which he might interact with people, bidding them good morning and taking his coffee and croissant in a bar, reading the sports pages every day, and not having anyone to accompany to the beaches of Alicante in summer, either, being condemned to stay in Madrid all that time, when it was so hot that everyone left town, when the only summer pastime consisted of going to the cinema at night, cinemas as empty as the city, where films not on general release would be shown, and where the stalls were as cold and lonely as those corkboard photos in the poem, those days measured out on the calendar, those PC keyboards and periodic table elements. Clearly, as the poem said, advertising billboards were another matter: there could be no solitude in a world occupied by a single object. And this was what set him off.

  58

  One consequence of the special theory of relativity is time dilation for bodies in motion nearing the speed of light. A person traveling in a spaceship near the speed of light for, say, one year as counted on their watch would return to earth to find that hundreds of years had elapsed. That watch, as well as the biology that yielded the wearer, his or her speed of thought, his or her ricocheting glances—everything—would then have fallen behind their earthly counterparts. Or the head of the Statue of Liberty jutting out of the sand on a beach where once, hundreds of years before, New York Harbor stood, and Charlton Heston screaming: “Ah, damn you! Goddamn you all to hell!” The equation that links the time on the 2 clocks is: T′/T = [1 – v2/c2]–1/2. But this being so, we come to the so-called Twin Paradox: perhaps we may all turn out to be mistaken twins living out of step with everyone else, desynchronized by journeys near the speed of light. When this light ceases, you die.

  59

  End of October, Ernesto arrives at his apartment, turns on the television, mutes the sound, and sits down to put the final touches to one of his 2 most tantalizing projects: the Museum of Ruins. Convinced as he is that the future lies in the observation of endings, exhaustion, death, this building is to be constructed in such a way that the works it contains, though extremely light, might cause it to collapse at any moment. People can come by and place bets on when it will fall down, and the money they put in will be handled by the local council, in concert with a trust. The museum will have to be built from without, using specially modified cranes and suspended scaffolding that must never touch the actual building. Looking up from the computer, he takes the pearlescent dice out of his pocket, the one that came from the belly of a fish. He throws it on the table and it lands on a 6 with the dots partially rubbed out, so that, also, he gets a 1.

  60

  The environment is in danger due to the 2 most widespread animals on earth: cows and pigs. Certain preeminently agricultural societies operate in contravention of every Kyoto Protocol recommendation. The reason is the flatulence of these animals: pure methane. A cow fed on organic fodder emits 90 kilos of methane a year, the equivalent in energy terms of 120 liters of gas. In the 1990s, London’s Tate Modern Gallery carried out a study into the damage being caused to their paintings. The flashes of Japanese cameras, pawings by badly behaved children, the passage of time itself—all were exonerated; the most corrosive thing turned out to be the wind emitted from the anuses of the millions of visitors every year. The annual emissions produced by 10 cows fed on organic fodder would be enough to propel a car over a distance of 6,000 miles. 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.

  61

  After nearly 8 hours’ sleep, Vladimir, a blond 11-year-old, wakes his younger brother Rush, who could for all we know be his twin since no one knows his real age. It is completely dark inside the oil pipe and the echo of their voices again makes them feel they are not alone. Oil still impregnates the piping and the fumes keep th
e boys in a state of constant stupefaction. This, allied with their very definite objective, results in an obsessive need to carry on, to keep moving forward. Rush says his stomach is hurting. They breakfast on the multivitamin drink and Vladi says, Do you hear that? Voices, not just the echoes of ours? No, says Rush, I can’t hear anything. Come on, Rush, listen again. Okay, yeah, there is something, but it’s inside our ears—my ears hurt. No, no, look—point the light at the roof. The beam from the lantern shows what is clearly an escape hatch, circular and with foldable steps leading up to it. One stands on the other’s shoulders and they wind open the steps. Vladimir goes first, gingerly turning the handle on the cover and peering out. It seems to be the lobby of a large hotel, deserted. He lifts his brother up and the astonished pair run to the doors of the hotel entrance, which they find shut. The double-glazed windows, also. Looking out through the windows, they see a steppe of brown earth and piled snow, dotted as far as the horizon by antennae and radio and television towers; the sun is coming up. There is also a portable radio in the foyer, emitting the foreign voice they had caught faint snatches of down in the oil pipe. It takes them a number of hours to explore the whole building—the main rooms, the spaces for video screenings, the dining rooms and soundproofed areas with display cabinets full of Parchís boards propped on their sides. They pass a bathroom and the younger boy says, My tummy really hurts, I’m going to the toilet. Me, too. A few minutes later they come out of their respective stalls, first Vladi, then Rush, holding 1cm-long lead capsules, which they hold under running water and then open. A two-tone pill inside reads: “Iodine-125 [125I] Radioactive.” Without a word, each places his pill in his mouth and washes it back down with water. They go through to the kitchens and open canned meats, milk, jams of 4 different colors, eating and drinking their fill before subsiding onto a sofa in one of the rooms where there is a television and a digital clock, neither of which they can understand. The radio wakes them after 9 hours. They eat again and hurry back down into the oil pipe. Before closing the hatch and continuing with the journey, Vladi takes a look at himself in the glass roof, the last time he will see a reflection of his own eyes. His brother just gets going.

  62

  Q: There was a time when your name was synonymous with alternative rock. Did you find it liberating when you stopped being so à la mode?

  A: I always found it weird to be associated with most of the groups from that time, so I never took it very seriously. Which meant it also didn’t affect me very much when it went away. It’s like flies: they can be annoying, but soon they get bored and go off some other place.

  STEVE ALBINI, LEAD SINGER AND PRODUCER OF SHELLAC, INTERVIEW BY PABLO GIL

  63

  Harold has already ascended through Florida and Georgia, and is now in Alabama—still running. Since leaving his prefab home in Miami and the tennis computer game, he has been running constantly, and has not been back. The only thing he has stopped for is to sleep; everything else he does as he runs. At each fork in the road, he turns at random, thus meandering in such a way that if his course were set down on a map it would resemble that of a woodworm proceeding up an America-shaped bed leg. [Someone has also recently pointed out the likeness with the gyri of the cerebral cortex.] Pair of pleated chinos, red polo shirt, bomber jacket, and the old Converses on his feet. No signs tell him to go on or to stop, and so he adopts the neutral solution of Newton’s law of inertia: an object continues to move at a constant velocity unless acted upon by a net force. His mind has closed in the same way flesh closes after surgery. This was one of the secrets most interesting to him during his time as a doctor in Boston: Why does the body, though subjected to gory operations, always tend to close up, to heal, to re-create the darkness inside itself as though the light, which outside the body is the sign of life, if admitted would mean death? Now Harold is running, his body mass increasing, and so it becomes more and more difficult for the light to get inside, to access the center of the body, which, once maculated by light, can no longer be restored. Very far away, this light accumulates on a black-and-white screen, along with thousands of tennis matches won against itself with a spongy boing. A 3,057-kilometer run, and not a single memory.

  64

  The Bélmez faces are an alleged paranormal phenomenon in a private house in Spain which started in 1971 when residents claimed images of faces appeared in the concrete floor of the house. These images have continuously formed and disappeared on the floor of the home. Located at the Pereira family home at Calle Real 5, Bélmez de la Moraleda, Jaén, Andalusia, Spain, the Bélmez faces have been responsible for bringing large numbers of sightseers to Bélmez. The phenomenon is considered by some parapsychologists the best-documented and “without doubt the most important paranormal phenomenon in the [20th] century.” Various faces have appeared and disappeared at irregular intervals since 1971 and have been frequently photographed by the local newspapers and curious visitors. The appearances in Bélmez began on 23 August 1971, when María Gómez Cámara claimed that a human face formed spontaneously on her concrete kitchen floor. María’s husband, Juan Pereira, and their son, Miguel, destroyed the image with a pickaxe and new concrete was laid. However, the Pereira story goes, a new face formed on the floor—apparently male, with open eyes and open mouth, and some long dark lines like a moustache. In the coming days other faces appeared on the floor of the kitchen and hallway, only to disappear and be replaced by others, or reappearing in different spots or transforming into different faces, in a continual movement that goes on to this day.

  HTTPS://EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG/WIKI/BÉLMEZ_FACES

  65

  Second Sunday of the month, Antón makes his way directly to the recycled computer stall that can always be found beneath the feria awnings. Back again, Prof? It’s been a while, says the young man there, a sound card in his hand. Hey, Felix, yes, it has been a while … What have you got for me? Well, I’ve kept this batch of 386s, 2 of them, a Pentium I, and 5 of these 286s I got for a good price from the hospital in Santiago. Get in! I’ll take the lot, I don’t need to look at them. He gets in his car and goes back up the mountain road, ever more overgrown because of the increasingly long periods in which he has not been leaving the house. Apart from a strip of a sweater with a red and green lozenge pattern, all that is visible inside the Ford Fiesta is a mound of PCs. Back at his house, installed in his workshop, he dismantles the CPUs, removing just the hard drive from each and throwing the casings on a pile. Taking the hard drives—compact, rectangular black parts the size of pocket diaries but containing thousands of millions times more information than pocket diaries—he drills a small hole in one and threads it with a fishing line, attaching one end of the line to a small stone. Carefully laying this conjunct drive-stone on another pile on the floor, next to the kerosene stove, he repeats the operation with the 7 remaining drives. Then he sits down at the PC to check on the progress of the Omega Man download. Soon he hears Eloy, his barnacle-collecting colleague, calling outside his window: What are you up to, Antón? Nothing, I’ll be right down! Fuck’s sake, enough playing, Prof, let’s get the stuff together! On the way to Eloy’s house they take a shortcut Antón claims to know well, hidden between some clumps of gorse growing beneath a handful of eucalyptus trees. After a few minutes, Look, says Antón, look, there’s the ant nest I was telling you about. A needle, 5 meters high, made of very fine earth, ant spittle, and dust from the surrounding scrub. Jesus, says Eloy, look at all those holes. He picks up a stone and hurls it. No! says Antón. Don’t destroy it, fuck’s sake! Upon impact, a hidden life-form is revealed, an undulating network of black points that responds to the shock by expanding outward, vibrating at a steady rate. Eloy walks away. Antón stands watching for a few moments.

  66

  Then they found a body floating faceup in the lake, and the right eye—the only one remaining—was open and showed no sign of trauma. The volume of the body, due to the water it had absorbed, and due to the high density of chemicals in the lake and the differen
t fauna and flora that had formed inside the intestines and other passageways of the deceased, had multiplied by almost 2—by a factor of 1.87, to be precise. Marlon Brando’s monstrous obesity in a Vietnamese jungle as a swarm of butterflies hums “The End”; the failed taxi driver sending his vessels to fight not against men but against the very elements; the replicant who turns out to be one of the good guys; Ingrid Bergman’s face when she sees the Stromboli volcano isn’t precisely vomiting caramel; that child who said, “I see dead people.” They found the weapons of mass destruction and there was only one and it was lodged in the dictator’s stomach.