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

by Agustín Fernández Mallo

  So involved in my writing was I, I simply didn’t notice her go.

  * * *

  I heard footsteps, someone running up the metal steps, second floor, third floor, fourth floor, and then the unmistakable sound of someone approaching at a run. She came in trembling, went over and sat down on the bed, I gave her water to drink, and, still panting, she said she’d been down in the kitchen, and had had a strong impulse to go looking around his living quarters. She was nosing around knowing that as long as she could hear the music coming from the studio she was safe. After looking through the many photos in the chests of drawers, and the books in the library—all of them, curiously enough, cheap editions of noir novels—she opened a wardrobe and found, in a neat pile, all of her dirty panties, all the panties she had been throwing in the trash during our stay, a pile of very neatly folded dirty panties; at that, she ran.

  * * *

  For me, the fact that he had been rummaging around in our trash didn’t change things very much. For her, it was the last straw.

  * * *

  “I’m leaving,” she said. “If you’re coming, good, if not, that’s fine, too.”

  I couldn’t go. I couldn’t leave it like this, abandon the Project.

  34.

  We decided she’d take the car. Not that there was much of a decision to make, as there wasn’t any other way out of there. We decided that when it came time for me to leave, I’d ask him to take me to the nearest village or town, and from there get a bus, or whatever there was, to the airport.

  * * *

  I don’t remember the exact date, but it was sometime in early September. In the morning I went with her as far as the last barbed-wire fence. We kissed. I stood watching the exhaust fumes until she was out of sight.

  35.

  I let a few days pass, but I had made up my mind: I was going to tell him exactly what it was he’d stumbled upon, and the enormous cost to us not just of coming up with the idea, but then of putting it in motion; that he had to give it all back to us, and that there was no way I was taking no for an answer.

  And so, the week after she left, I went down to his studio one evening. I knocked on the door. I heard him turn down the music, and then he was at the door:

  “Well, well. I saw the car had gone, I thought you’d left without paying.”

  He told me to come in.

  We sat facing one another, and he said nothing as I told him the story, how it was that the Gibson case had fallen into his hands, I even went into details about the bar that resembled a bar in the Azores, the dock we had walked along, how we had thrown the guitar case into the sea; I went so far as to mention the dead cat; I laid it all out for him, followed by my demand: it was time for him to return these things to us.

  When I had finished, he got up, poured himself some of the myrtle liqueur—I said I didn’t want any—and, without sitting back down, said:

  “I’m afraid that isn’t going to be possible. You, sir, are not the owner of this guitar case, or its contents, or this project. First of all, you say you’ve got the same name as me, Agustín Fernández Mallo. Well, I’m going to need proof of that. Either you are a madman, sir, or you are very barefaced.”

  Patting my pants pocket, I realized I hadn’t brought my wallet with me. In fact, I thought with a shudder, I’d left it in the glove compartment of the car; I had no way of proving my identity. My mobile phone was in the glove compartment, too, I realized, meaning I also had no way of calling anyone who could back up my story.

  “I see what’s happening here,” he said with conviction. “Who are you trying to fool? I’m Agustín Fernández Mallo, and this is some bad joke. The contents of that guitar case belong to me.”

  * * *

  I got up and went over to his table—he came with me. Everything concerning our Project was there, and I was picking things up and turning them over—as much as he would allow. I pretended to compose myself, thinking I’d grab it all and run as soon as the chance arose, or at least snatch up the indispensable things, the things without which the Project could never get off the ground. I began acting interested, and I did actually feel curious about what he was planning to do with it all. Gradually I drew him in, until he at one point said:

  “Look, here it is.”

  Extracting a sheaf of papers from a drawer, he handed it to me. 100 or so pieces of paper, typed up in a word processing program; I clenched them in my hands, I couldn’t believe this guy could have thought that the Project, our Project, consisted of coming up with a text, a simple text, the kind of thing any writer, even a quite ordinary writer, could have done. He clearly knew nothing, and certainly didn’t deserve to be the owner of that guitar case or the keys it contained to such a Project. While he poured himself another measure of the liqueur, I skimmed the first page:

  Part I: Automatic Search Engine

  True story, very significant, too, a man returns to the deserted city of Pripyat, near Chernobyl, a place he and the rest of the populace fled following the nuclear reactor disaster 5 years before, walks the empty streets, which, like the perfectly preserved buildings, take him back to his life in the city, his efforts as a construction worker here in the 1970s were not for nothing, comes to his own street, scans the tower block for the windows of his former flat, surveying the exterior for a couple of seconds, 7 seconds, 15 seconds, 1 minute, before turning the camera around so that his face is in the shot and saying, Not sure, not sure this is where my flat was, then gazes up at the forest of windows again and says, not to camera this time, I don’t know, it could be that one, or that one over there maybe, I just don’t know, and he doesn’t cry, doesn’t seem affected in any way, couldn’t even be said to seem particularly confused, this is an important story concerning the existence of likenesses between things, I could have stuck with this man, could have looked into his past, how he was living now, which patron saint’s day he was born on, his domestic dramas, the amount of millisieverts or gamma, alpha, and beta radiation his organism had been subjected to in the past

  I stopped, skipped a few pages, and began reading again at random:

  the same obsession that, we then found out, had its inception in Las Vegas, on those nights of mineral silence in which we had read a book called The Music of Chance by someone called Paul Auster before sparking up a Lucky Strike and listening to the sound of thousands of waiters mixing cocktails for thousands of people under the watchful lenses of thousands of CCTV cameras, yes, I mean to say that while we were watching all those films and TV series at home, eating those pizzas and drinking that chilled white wine, neither of us had the first idea what the other was planning, or about the immensity of the other’s incubation, a thing that was destined to change our lives, and all of this came out in our conversation that day in that bar on an island to the south of Sardinia that resembled a bar in the Azores, Strange, she said, that all this, all these things, can fit inside the case of a Gibson Les Paul, that something of such immensity can be reduced to a few cubic centimeters, to a

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. I skipped straight to the end:

  but I wasn’t thinking about any of this as I fell asleep that night in the Lancia with the final waking image of her breasts spilling from the overcoat, two fried-egg prints, a coincidence, maybe, I don’t know, I’m a great believer in coincidences, an American writer from the ‘40s called Allen Ginsberg wrote the following at the age of 17: “I’ll be a genius of some kind or other, probably in literature,” but he also said: “I’m a lost little boy, lost my way, looking for love’s matrix.”

  At that point he snatched the pages from me, saying, “That’s enough. And by the way, I’m still waiting for you to pay me. Maybe when you do, you’ll let me know your real name, too.”

  Putting everything back inside the guitar case, he shut it, and then kicked it a short distance away, positioning it under a piece of furniture. He took the text and went off to the toilet, which was to one side of the room. When I heard the sound of his parabola of u
rine hitting the water, I unplugged his laptop from the wall, picked it up, and ran; I failed to disconnect it from the small printer on one side, which fell to the floor, and I dragged it along behind me as well. I ran as fast as I could.

  He didn’t run after me, he didn’t call out. Not a word.

  36.

  I shut myself in, and this time I did begin hammering at the keys nonstop—a defense mechanism, I guess. I couldn’t think, and I didn’t want to think. His Neapolitan songs carried on playing, and I couldn’t understand how he could have written all these things, how he could possibly know, not about these details so much, but rather about my life as a whole, because of course there was no way he could have found out all this information, everything in the text, from the contents of the guitar case; in the month we’d spent in the eco-prison, he simply couldn’t have learned all these things, some of which touched on events in my life years in the past. It was just impossible. To top it off, when I turned the laptop on to see if I could find any clues, it turned out to be empty; no user files, no folders whatsoever, whether containing text, image, or sound, there weren’t even any programs, nor any word-processing software—nothing. It was an empty brain, empty like mine was, I thought, identityless, set up as if to prevent life from ever being written or constructed again. The only thing I found, some kind of seemingly macabre joke, was a succession of empty folders, one inside the other, named in sequence: Sing-Sing_1, Sing-Sing_2, Sing-Sing_3, Sing-Sing_4, etc., going all the way into the 200s, and effectively the most accurate representation possible of the infinite solitude inside an also infinite jail with a single man inside. I went along opening each of these in turn and, when I came to the last one, did find a piece of rudimentary image-processing software hidden inside. But what use was this? I now understood why he hadn’t bothered to follow me when I ran off with this pointless contraption.

  * * *

  I started having nightmares, and even on occasion woke up convinced that I had no identity, that I was the imposter, or, like in some cheap, straight-to-DVD movie, that it had all been a dream and since the day I’d been born I’d been dreaming his life, Agustín’s life. Gradually, and without realizing at first, anytime he came to mind that was how I started thinking of him, as “Agustín”—I began to designate myself as “I,” nothing more. In calmer moments I thought perhaps he might be a sorcerer, a seer, some prodigy of superlative genius, and that he was able to take the objects in the guitar case, our brain-children, and just by touching them, with a burst of some unknown energy, see everything that had happened in our lives, make them pass before his eyes like the frames in a film, and finally possess them. A hypothesis that got me nowhere. Looking around at the bed and the tables in my room, all of which were bolted down, I began to speculate about it being a cabin and the entire eco-prison part of an ocean liner now grounded on a desiccated seabed, formerly home to fish, seaweed, tides, ports, bars where the sailors pinned up messages for one another on a large corkboard that now also lay here, out on this hot tundra, formerly the very bottom of the sea; that those pieces of paper and the words that had gone to form those messages would now be dust, airborne molecules I was now breathing, as well as the molecules of the objects I touched and the green vegetables I was eating. Thoughts I found profoundly disturbing; a disturbance I could never get to go away.

  * * *

  I tried to work out some way of locking the room from the inside. I couldn’t just pile furniture up against it, everything being bolted down, so I removed 15 of the keys from the typewriter, levers and all, and jammed them between the door and the doorframe, like the bolts you get on domestic armored doors. He’d still be able to get in if he tried, but never to catch me off guard. It took me a long time to choose which letters to remove; it was a bit like removing part of the DNA that allowed me to write, survive. In the end I decided on the punctuation keys, the space bar, and the accents, and when I’d used those up I had to sacrifice the X and the W, too.

  * * *

  I felt a little calmer now, but after a few days I stopped writing, I was blocked, couldn’t do it anymore; the reality of my situation became apparent: I was inside a prison cell, I had no means of transport, my personality had been usurped, and I had let myself lapse into a state of extreme laziness. All day, watching the TV and drinking water. Human beings can last approximately three months without food, but no more than three or four days without anything to drink. The proximity of the sea made the tap water slightly saline, so it was the closest thing you can get to survival serum. I also knew that lack of sleep would sooner kill a person than not eating, that you can lose your mind from not sleeping, and so I’d shut my eyes at night in an attempt to forget, but was never able to sleep more than an hour at a time. I’d get up, wash my face, and when I dried it the dirt that transferred onto the white towel made me think that it now had an emblem or a logo: that of the sheer ignominy I was being subjected to. When I looked in the mirror, I saw before me an aged twin.

  I was gripped by a kind of Stockholm syndrome, I spent all day in front of the TV, taking in every single program, test card to test card, and this put me in mind of my time as a student, the time that he, Agustín, had now consigned to those slanderous sheets of paper, the time when I’d started writing, when I used to go out at 9:00 p.m. for cigarettes and come back up feeling godlike, sitting down at the typewriter with the TV on mute in the background, a muted TV that, like now in this eco-prison, served the function of a landscape, of a train window you simultaneously look out of and do not, a way of passing the time until your journey comes to a sudden stop. I hoped, in the same way, this journey would also end. The days passed, everything stayed the same.

  I had the idea of taking photos of the TV again—something I’d done in the past. Previously my attitude had been purely artistic, but I had different ideas now: I set down on paper any possible similarities between this prison, this ignominious situation, and anything else in the world, bearing witness to my time there via photos of the one place in which life still existed, the TV screen. If anything happened to me, here would be something someone might later find. I began taking photos of films, reality TV shows, game shows, news programs, news flashes, cartoons, everything, but the story of how we had come to that place, and everything concerning the journey, became my one obsession, and my goal now with these photos was altogether different: to recount, to the extent that it was possible, my life, as a way of regaining myself, of reconstructing my personality. I uploaded the photos directly from my camera to the stolen laptop, occasionally modifying them with digital streaks, drawings, collagistic overlays, and whatever fantasies seemed apt to the faithful reconstruction of the facts, printing it all out on the small printer, before feeding the sheets of paper into the typewriter carriage so I could add some brief remarks.

  I gradually forgot my initial objectives, and began doing whatever came to mind, adding in playful shapes, sublimations of the state in which I found myself, potential lifelines, like I was on holiday, or taking a long weekend; like I had entered a childhood state.

  I did a lot of these, certainly 500-plus. Here, as an example, are images corresponding with the days I spent there:

  I realized that in this last photo I had been pasted into this inverse world, I had seeped through. And that, quite clearly, my life was being televised. I wondered how many TV-seers might be watching me. Minutes later, I became aware of the ridiculous thoughts I was having, felt worried.

  37.

  I woke up one morning, morning number 20. The TV, as ever, was on. They were doing a rerun of the second series of Moonlighting, which drew me in for a minute. The camera was on the chair, a glass of water next to it, the illustrated towel hung in the bathroom, and out of the corner of my eye I saw that, over by the door, there was a piece of paper on the floor. I didn’t react at first. I sat doing nothing, suddenly feeling myself to be the target for this sneaking paper creature that had entered my space. It must have been there on the floor for hours.
I got up slowly, afraid to even touch it. I looked at it for a long time, down between my bare feet. Finally, crouching down, I picked it up:

  Agustín (or whoever the fuck you really are),

  I have thrown the contents of the guitar case into the sea.

  The guitar case itself I have buried on the path down to the beach.

  I am still at work on MY Project.

  As far as I am concerned, you, sir, can do as you please.

  Agustín Fernández Mallo

  I sat down on the bed. I reread the message a few times. Quite a few times. I put the note on the TV ventilation grille. I embarked on an unconscious peripatetic simulation, pacing the room, but soon found myself taking photos again, adding typed remarks beneath, musing, with no particular goal in mind, and with Neapolitan songs drifting up unceasingly from his studio. In some way I believe I just didn’t want to accept that this message meant the end of everything, of our Project—it simply didn’t exist anymore—or it did, but at the bottom of the sea, and that, along with it, I no longer existed. Not long after, with me trying to take another photo of the TV, a sudden flash filled the viewfinder. I looked up from the camera. The heat being given off by the TV had set fire to the note: it blazed for a few seconds, leaving a little pile of ash.

  * * *

  That was when I decided I had to go out: I had to check whether the note was true.

  I had neither flashlight nor candles. I waited for a full moon to rise.

  38.

  I pulled the typewriter keys out of the doorframe and padded barefoot down the stairs. Silence hung over the place as I came past the reception and out into the gardens, through the 3 barbed-wire gates, making my way along the track that led to the beach. I covered the 2 kilometers with the lights on the island turrets as my guide, and, to the right of the final bend in the path before the rice dunes, saw a rectangular hump in the earth, clearly recently dug.