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

by Agustín Fernández Mallo

  90

  Mirrors should only ever be positioned vertically, they should not reflect any world other than the one that stands in parallel to the forces of gravity. What sort of monster would think to lay a mirror horizontally on the floor where it would only reflect the emptiness of the sky and its lack of horizon, the flat mirror of swimmers who look out of the corner of their eyes and see false ceilings only? But then what even greater monster would think to place a mirror in the ceiling, creating an endless bird’s-eye copy of us all, making us into maps, mere mobile X’s floating above the center of the earth, turning us into trapped and lifeless light? But mirrors have had their moment now, no one is interested in copies any longer; “morphing” [computer-processing of faces and distortion but not total disfigurement of factions] has triumphed. Artaud said it: “The human face / is an empty power, a / field of death. / … / But that means / the human face, / such as it is, is still in quest of it- / self … / In effect after the countless thousands of years / that the human face has spoken / and breathed / one still has the impression / that it hasn’t even begun to / say what it is and what it knows.” And so to date, Frankenstein, Tetsuo, Mr. Spock, Mortadelo, and Barón Ashler are no more than timid, if light-sensitive versions of what is to come—of a time when the light will catch each and every one of our faces and mirror images will no longer be needed. Scientists at Berkeley have just announced in Nature that they have already apprehended this light.

  91

  The weather reports were wrong: when Antón arrives at the breakwater the sea is calm. He has 2 large Zara bags containing hard drives, each attached by a fishing line to a stone. He approaches the cliff edge. The combined bulk of his large, bald head, large beard, and large, broken nose blocks out the sun. He stands at a certain point [the same point he has been coming to for years], holds his arm out at precisely 90° and lets one of the hard drives drop; the stone carries it down and under the water. Another follows, and another, and on until the 2 bags are empty. Years of repeating this operation. He hears the echo of the impact on the seabed, nearer and stronger every time. His hope is that one day the pile of hard drives, stones, and ultramuscular barnacles will emerge from the water, a single, compact thing, the “informatine” by then transferred to the barnacles’ genetic code, and a network of lichens binding together and giving solidity to this new natural formation. He crumples up the bags and goes home to see if The Omega Man’s final 0.2 megabytes have downloaded, first stopping by the ant’s nest to see how that is getting on.

  92

  Q: Do you find this obsession with “novelty” excessive?

  A: No, I don’t think so. “Novelty” is what pushes pop forward, what it thrives on. It’s good to be aware of the history of popular music, but it is always refreshing to listen to someone who brings something completely new.

  DAVID GEDGE, LEAD SINGER OF THE WEDDING PRESENT AND CINERAMA, INTERVIEW BY PABLO GIL

  93

  Anyone who knows about the market for motorcycles also knows that the 75cc Primavera Vespa is a marvel of engineering and performance, considering the price. Helmet with visor, dark glasses, full tank, Astrud on the iPod, Josecho passes the southern outskirts of Madrid, the brick blocks of the Usera barrio, the tower blocks of Orcasitas. Once he gets beyond the M40 ring road, the Vespa devours roads lined with densely populated towns [the kind that if you flipped the photo over you would have no idea they were upside down], as a camera taped to his helmet films the passing horizon. The engine humming, he passes children playing soccer, washing lines largely bare of clothes, dogs chained to fences, small soccer fields fringed with vegetable patches, huts with satellite dishes on top, dismantled cars with children sitting inside, clandestine spots for dumping trash. Then, unexpectedly, a long way now from the city center, Josecho comes in sight of a billboard that bears his own face and the words HELPING THE SICK: NOW IN SHOPS, and stops, cuts the engine, and dismounts. Without removing helmet or glasses, he hops over a barbed-wire fence and walks across the short stretch of ground separating the ditch from the billboard, its steel frame set in a field of artichokes, or at least what look to him like artichokes. He glances around, detects no animal or human presence, looks up, and, from this perspective, sees that he looks quite ugly in the photo, but—and this is the first time—the advertising billboard also makes him feel impervious to solitude. “Bad Poets” was playing on his iPod and it shook him because, as he turned to leave, he noticed a rusty cast-iron plaque set into a flagstone on the ground, peeking out between the plants. It bore an inscription: Miguel Redondo Villacastín [1902–1937], Falangist, poet, and illustrious son of San Jerónimo, shot dead on this spot. Your friends will not forget you. September 1976. And Josecho saw that, indeed, of the 6 stanchions supporting the billboard, one was not metal but the trunk of an old oak riddled with bullet holes. The sun was setting. He had another look around before leaving. There was no one there. Back on the roof of the Windsor Tower, Pavofrío turkey sandwich and Mahou in hand, he pressed play on the video of the day and watched it over and over, focusing particularly on that final section: there still wasn’t anyone there. And then to bed.

  94

  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 different 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. We know that there is still a café in New York with a chewing gum dispenser giving out the 4-colored gumballs, we know that there was a man who said the list of names mentioned in the Book of Revelation corresponded with his city’s Yellow Pages, we know that organic life is finally being extracted from its inorganic equivalents, we know that Ramón Sampedro was making it up and that Aviador Dro sang, “She’s made of Plexiglas and that’s why I like her best,” we know you go shopping and when you come back your car is gone, we know that Eraserhead was made of plastic and that a man operated it from behind, we know that the weapons of mass destruction have been found, and that there was only one, inside the body of the dictator floating faceup, with only one eye, his right eye, open and apparently unharmed, we know that he was found in the Alaskan lake in which, 28 years ago now, the body of Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente was also found.

  95

  Look, Sandra, do you like it? J pushes a rectangular package across the bed. For me? she says. Yes, he says, it’s our 6-month anniversary, right? Sandra takes it and rips off the paper, revealing a large book entitled The Bible in Manga. Whoa! How cool, J, what is it? It’s your Bible, he says, but illustrated Japanese-comic-style, and with some Manga characters included as well, quite the tome, it just came out. Sandra flicks through the colorful cartoons of doe-eyed men and women, and in the evening, to celebrate, brings back Scandinavian trout caviar and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. They gorge themselves while lying in bed, with wrestling on the television—a small portable set on a Formica chair at the far end of the room. After that, J dresses up, putting red underwear on over his thick winter pajamas, a balaclava with the colors of the Peruvian flag, a towel around his neck for a cape, before performing many body splashes on Sandra [who, on the improvised ring of the bed, defends herself resolutely] while shouting, Super J attacks! After a long session of lovemaking they fell asleep with the television still on. Sandra was woken at 7:00 a.m. by the buzz of the television, and blearily got up to make some coffee. With the dressing gown on, her body seemed to shrink back from the cold as she looked out at the sun rising over Tate Modern. She took the cup back to bed and, sitting up against the pillow, took The Bible in Manga off the floor—displaced by the wrestling session—and began to read slowly. In several of the New Testament illustrations she found what were surely pictures of her, striking her most ostentatious poses, even wearing her clothes, her Louis Vuitton handbag, her sunglasses with the 212 anagr
am on the sidepiece, and her very own All Star trainers. It was a woman offering water to Jesus during the Stations of the Cross while a pimp, clearly taken from Akira Number 2, threatened to murder her. A little farther on she found J in a crowd, dressed as a Roman. She took a sip of the coffee. She listened to J’s slow breathing, laid her hand on his neck, and felt the pulse of the main artery where it intersected with the lines on her palm. She stared at the snow on the TV screen for a long time before tucking herself back under the sheets; they still smelled of semen. She left the Bible on the floor and, lying down on her back, fell into a deep sleep.

  96

  For the last couple of months, at dusk, the time of day when the pigs become unruly and begin to squeal [a sound that travels unechoingly across the Armenian steppe], Vartan Oskanyan has been seeing the silhouette of a man in the environs of the building. Usually walking in the same way, neither approaching nor going away, and moving in circles though not very precise circles, before sometimes sitting down between the clumps of grass so that only his head can be seen above them; he sits still, doing nothing other than being there, looking sometimes at the building and sometimes off toward the horizon. As he sits he also eats what seems to be a sandwich and drinks some sort of liquid that Vartan cannot make out. And always at such a distance that he remains no more than a moving patch, a smudge, a Bélmez face without the wall. The old man Arkadi has suggested that Vartan might have brought this upon himself by keeping that record sleeve in the pig farm, the one with all those faces of people neither fully alive nor fully dead. They discuss the idea at length.

  97

  One morning, finally, the sun comes up over Ulan Erge. And then on successive mornings, one week, two: the thaw begins. People go out onto the streets, motorcycles begin to circulate. The meltwater flows down the light incline of the city to a dip in the land, where it passes through a kind of drain and underground. Though the snow may be disappearing the days remain intensely cold, with winds continuing to blow in off the steppe. The old but not very old man who lives on the 6th floor, Staircase 4a, in Block P, opposes the removal of the sheets from the building; he says there is nothing to see outside and that he would rather keep his gallery of stains. No one in Block P shares his view: arguments break out. In these first days of the thaw people have begun going down to the drain in large numbers and putting out nets to catch previously snow-trapped objects; there is an understanding that the end of winter signifies the beginning of a new era and, in line with this, anyone can claim ownership of the things that reemerge. Dolls are found, 4-colored pens, boots, pieces of metal later sold as scrap, the odd video, pornography if the finder is lucky. The day the council removes the sheets, the old but not very old man who lives on the 6th floor, Staircase 4a, in Block P, thinks: If people knew that a molecule inside one of their kidneys might once have been part of a dinosaur eye, or that the tiny bit of zinc in one of his neighbor’s bloodstreams had previously flowed through the urine of Alexander the Great, or that a particle of milk-whey currently fermenting in one of their stomachs was once suckled by a lamb in the Saharan mountains, they would not now take his gallery of human marks from him.

  98

  It is not obvious where a hole would need to be made to provoke a flow of energy and light that would pass through us. Harder still to establish or accurately intuit what object or entity would be required to make this miraculous hole, allowing in new air and, sometimes, changing our lives. For some it entails turning on the computer screen, for others going on an unplanned trip, and others, like the anchorite in the film, throwing messages in bottles down the toilets of their homes, or kissing someone in a specific time and place, or, like Marc, making a window at the back of his hut, on the wall bearing a metal Parchís board he rescued from the local youth club after it shut down. There it is, vertically fixed to the wall, riveted against a section of a Cepsa oil drum and to part of a can that had once held 250 frankfurters. After careful consideration of the pros and cons of a hole in just that spot, he concluded that every one of the bits of consumer objects that made up his wall were already in themselves windows connecting him with the complex world of humankind because on the far side of each logo and trademark there unfolded, cascaded, the vast and rich genealogy of developed societies, all of it, but the only thing on a Parchís board was a 4-colored cross, a diagram, something akin to the plans for a symmetrical city attractive to him, it is true, in its perfect solitude, though at the same time disgusting him, provoking the revulsion of any person who sees in that icy solitude the very shortcoming that is sure to mean his or her destruction. And so he took up a saw and made the opening he now looks through from time to time, watching the cars going down the street toward the sea; he knows none of them can come back along it. Nor can he unmake this hole.

  99

  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. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger. Each time I looked around the walls moved in a little tighter. Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one.

  APOCALYPSE NOW, FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA

  100

  During the days after the night Ernesto crossed the Brooklyn Bridge with Kazjana in the wooden car, and the following morning when he went downstairs to buy donuts and coffee for breakfast and tried, without success, to lower the strap on her top, and then her leaving and not coming back, during the days that followed all these events he could not stop thinking about what she had told him. As the steam drifted up from the coffee and across her Soviet face, and as she tore pieces from the donut and literally devoured them, she told him she was not Chechen but Alaskan, and that as a child she and her father, a deep-sea fisherman, had become lost while fishing in the Bering Strait, and that the next morning they had found themselves at the coast of what was in those days the USSR, and had never gone back. Nor could he stop thinking in those ensuing days about how he had let her go without asking about it, had let her bid him farewell with 3 kisses, and then watched from the window as the wooden car passed that last overhead cable of the Brooklyn Bridge. Almost immediately he took out some fish to defrost because it was already 12 o’clock. Then it occurred to him that life is an advertisement on a home shopping channel with no product being sold. This seems to be the landscape.

  101

  Some men went to Woolsthorpe, which is in Lincolnshire, England, and climbed a fence into the gardens of Isaac Newton’s former home. They identified the apple tree [a Flower of Kent variety] from which the apple fell, itself fenced in and indicated with a sign calling it the most important tree in the world, and they took a small cutting. Back in the laboratories of BioArt & Co. they made a clone of it, and the replica is currently housed in the Science Museum in Coruña, Galicia, Spain. Impossible to see it and avoid asking oneself: Why was it this and not some other tree that, hundreds of years ago, prompted Newton to ask why the apple fell when the moon did not? Touch the tree trunk, and it is impossible to avoid wondering whether there might be sweat particles from the hand of the genius, there in solid form. The seismographs on Project Apollo have begun to detect seismic activity on the moon, earthquakes, tremors between 800 and 1,200 kilometers beneath the surface—halfway between the surface and the moon’s core. Much deeper, that is, than any earthquake ever recorded on our planet. The impression being that anything significant or strange takes place near the core, far below that cold, gray skin we see through our telescopes. The apple also falls and breaks on the ground, revealing a core that provides an account of its own making, of its cloning. The strange t
hing is that these earthquakes have been shown not to register on the far side of the moon, but only on the side we can see.