I began digging manically with my hands and feet—my sore-covered feet from the walk—and, half a meter down, came to the case, opened it, nothing inside. I could have taken it with me, but what for? Then, in an act of genuine exorcism, of pure mourning—at least that was my intention—I put it back in its pit, filled in the pit, picked some nearby wildflowers, and used the stem of a shrub to tie them to a stick I found, which I then thrust in as a headstone.
This was perhaps the strangest, most innocent thing I had done in my life.
* * *
Then something changed.
39.
He moved into his studio full-time: the music began to play day and night.
Initially I went down to the industrial kitchen only for the odd utensil I might be missing in the cell, a can opener, matches, this kind of thing. As the days passed I felt an unavoidable urge to go down to his living quarters, and would there take a seat in one or another of his armchairs and begin reading a book; a need to begin ingesting his library, taming it to my own ends. And a day came when, savoring some gin I had rescued from the depths of his wine rack, I felt there was now no way back. I understood that a change of tactics was necessary—if, that is, there’d been anything tactical about my approach until now: the time had come to expel Agustín from the eco-prison, and to take the reins myself. If he were me, if he knew everything about my life, if he even had it written down in the first person, by the same token it meant that he was the customer, the guest, the intruder even, and I, stripped of my past, was entirely justified in reinventing myself as the new hostel owner.
From there to assuming total control of the place required something as simple as doing up one’s top button at the first chill of winter.
* * *
So it was that I began to lock his living quarters at night, enjoying the feel of his bedsheets, dressing in his clothes, getting drunk on his liqueurs, playing with the Fantastic Four. Now that I had a home of my own, it was within my power to use my new telephone, I could have called for help, but I saw that this would make no sense; what did I need help with if everything here were mine? What kind of assistance might I request if no crime had taken place? It was up to me now to keep Agustín, the intruder, away from the telephone.
* * *
There was a range of clothes for me to choose from each morning, it couldn’t have been easier, simply open the wardrobe and take out what I wanted. Magic really did exist. I enjoyed going up to a small balcony on the second floor at dusk for my last Lucky Strike of the day, dressed in some satin pajamas I’d found in their box, completely new. I couldn’t now stop myself from doing things in a new way, acts of self-sufficiency, aloofness, and distance—the kind of things he did—the kind of actions you might expect from some solid kind of man, one who looks the world in the eye, troubles and difficulties included, and never flinches. I couldn’t help but imagine myself seen from above, a bird’s-eye view of me, my dirty hair combed back with water; such details added to the verisimilitude of this usurpation, and even helped bring it about. I used these moments, as I stubbed out the cigarette, to take the measure of the garden beneath me—both static and ecstatic in its plasticity—more real than reality itself: hyperreal, like me. I even came to imagine that I would soon take up position in one of the original prison watchtowers. Each night before going to bed I would open the wardrobe in which he had placed the dirty panties, let myself take in a tantalizing lungful of that perfume, and stand appreciating the two piles or columns they formed, like two identical towers.
40.
Now that I could see it from above, from the balcony at the back of the complex, I saw that his studio was intermittently pulsing with light, beams or pulses streaming from the cracks and keyholes. Astonishingly, something the shape of a starfish or sea urchin was being projected onto the night. I imagined him hovering a hand over the computer keyboard, him weighing his act of plagiarism, and it amused me to think of his studio as though it were part of a great digester, breaking down both subjects from antiquity and our Project, philosophically opposed ingredients that must spell his inevitable end. Even on the stormy October nights, or when I was having trouble digesting my dinner and got up to go to the toilet, on went his Neapolitan songs, like an extra point to his star, a star that I knew would soon be extinguished, finally to become his black hole.
* * *
It wasn’t long before I heard him climbing into the kitchen through the ground-floor window below. I’d get up the next morning and find something missing, some can of food, or there would be the dregs of some milky coffee, or cookie crumbs, or a plate bearing an uneaten fried-egg yolk. I, in an attempt to avoid all parallels, would make myself breakfast from more subtle ingredients, things found in the larder, but a little jam would always end up on my sleeve, or a runnel of tea would spill down my chin, and then I’d think perhaps today would be the day we were going to cross paths, and that his silhouette would have become more substantial by now, and, this being the case, that there would be no further moral obstacles to my usurpation. I’d get up from the table with a burp—which the flies around the butter didn’t seem to notice, and neither was there any kind of ripple in the dust-mote-filled shaft of sunlight coming through the window, nor, it must be said, did I feel lessened in any way—and, having washed the dishes and crossed out the day on the wall calendar, I checked the ledger in reception for which of the cell windows needed opening, including in what order, to keep the whole place ventilated. The large folder at the end of the ledger contained the rubric that gave legitimacy to my daily tasks.
41.
Now, assured of my admittance to this second life, and perhaps as a folk ritual reminiscent of the very first folk rituals, my visits to the grave began, my visits, in other words, to the last memento of the Project. I usually set out first thing, taking the track that led directly to the beach, by the light of the moon if there was any, and with the flickering lights from the island up ahead. I picked plants as I went, a local kind of lilac and a yellow chamomile that also grew there, offset by the intense greens of the stems: discreet little bunches that seemed to me like fitting epitaphs, and that once I got down there I would stand in the soil at the head of the grave.
Nothing happened at first, but after a few days I came back and found my flowers gone, replaced by another bunch, also of wildflowers, which I would then take away, replacing it with a new one. 3 or 4 times this happened.
I was on my way back one morning when our paths did cross. I saw him stopping and bending down as he came toward me: also picking plants. It was the kind of encounter that is so charged with nervous energy, it’s only afterward you realize you should have made a little more of your good fortune, and you kick yourself. And, by the way he was constantly scraping his hair back, from the sidelong glances he cast in my direction, I could tell he was feeling apprehensive, that I could have afforded myself something—an insult in his direction, a kick, maybe even spit in his face. But we kept our distance. A small bunch of flowers trembled in his hand.
From then on he started going down at night, and I’d respond with a trip in the afternoon, then he’d go at dawn, and so on in a continuous rotation; my normal grip on the unfolding of the days grew slightly tenuous. It went on like this for a week, and progressively the bunches of flowers became less pretty, little more than bundles of weeds. The day came when we had picked all the flowers along the track. I had thoughts of a dead person’s tongue, licking at their eternal repose; I wasn’t feeling unwell. To my final bundle of myrtle and thistles he made no reply. Or he did, but only in the shape of turning up the volume on his studio stereo.
42.
In my old cell, which I now went up to only rarely, I started to see things being moved around—I went and stood in a field outside the prison, and observed the movements from there. And it was true, there were nights when Agustín went up and installed himself among my things, maybe he was messing around with the typewriter, or the laptop, or perhaps having a la
ugh at my typewritten bits of A4. It’s possible he even tried on my clothes or, worse than that, drank the dregs from the cans of Coca-Cola that had piled up during my seclusion, during which I had drunk my way through the reserves in the cold storage room. The only substantive change was that the desk chair at which I’d previously sat was turned toward the window on the south side, the side the sea was on. Then I began going up, too. I waited till I saw him coming out, that would be my signal. The seat cushion would still be warm, still held the impression of his body, and I sat and looked around, though there was nothing to see except the land stretching away into the distance, and the ruffled sea, and, farther off, the military island. Coming out of the cell one day, I left the chair in a different place, as a way of letting him know I’d been in, too. He started going up at different times, and my schedule changed accordingly. That was when I started finding notes on the typewriter. Incomprehensible things about the Project, clusters of barely intelligible words; he was clearly trying to drive me mad. I never so much as laid a finger on these notes; I wasn’t going to play along. Sometimes the same note would be there for days, sometimes two new ones would appear in the space of an evening. I then decided to block up both the cell and the windows to the living quarters, using some joists I found in the garage. Lastly, I reinforced the doors. I had the only keys.
43.
Signs gradually emerged of his unmistakable defeat: the music growing louder and louder, or his coughing as he walked by beneath my window, the fact that his proximity no longer worried me, the stench around his studio, the charred remains of rabbits and birds outside his door.
But no changes of any real substance. He went in and out of his studio in a laissez-faire sort of way, like he didn’t care, like he knew he’d turned into someone else now, that none of this belonged to him. But he didn’t leave, and the signs of his unmistakable defeat soon became unmistakable signs of resistance, of my defeat. Something or other would change, seeming to suggest that I had the upper hand, only to be reabsorbed via some invisible mechanism, restoring the former state of affairs. There were still no visitors to the eco-prison, and increasingly it resembled a kind of animal, one wholly unaware of its fate, a fate that Agustín could do with as he pleased.
* * *
Sometimes, not long after going to bed, I’d begin hearing noises on the ground floor, floorboards creaking, nails being pried up, even footsteps in the kitchen. I’d jump up and run downstairs, but the place would be empty. So I’d stand guard, stay up all night monitoring the sounds inside and out, prowling around constantly till the sun came up. This meant sleeping during the day, half an eye always open, watchful for the footsteps and breaths that never came. On the rare occasion I did manage to fall completely asleep I had nightmares, and would wake with a start, hearing—surely now—the unmistakable sound of Agustín’s hammer at one of the boarded-up windows; down I’d dash, throwing open the front door, but again there would be nobody around. The only time I caught sight of him bodily was out among the clumps of grass, sunning himself like a lizard; in such surroundings, removed from the context of the studio, he seemed very alien, like a mannequin clambering out of its display and sitting down on the pavement to watch the passing cars.
44.
I think I can use it now without wasting it: “I’ll always have a clear memory of it because it happened so simply and without fuss.”
It happened at sunrise one morning.
I was having breakfast in the kitchen after a night spent chasing noises the length and breadth of the building. I was clearing the table when, still holding the French press, and without stopping to think, I said to myself there was an easy answer to this, something well within my power; in reality, it always had been, I just needed to reach out and take it.
* * *
And so it was that I entered Agustín’s studio that morning. The music was so loud he didn’t notice me opening the door, nor when I walked up behind him and stopped, pausing for a moment as though to further draw out a long-awaited coronation. He sat huddled over a laptop, and he stank. Scattered on the floor around his chair were all the objects concerning the Project, everything he’d supposedly thrown in the sea. All this dross—the useless books, all the other flotsam and jetsam—didn’t bother me in the slightest. I put my hand on his shoulder and gave a squeeze. Then I squeezed harder, and swiveled the chair around myself. Only when our eyes met did he seem to really notice I was there. I plunged the knife into his chest, blood spattering onto me. I kept on bringing it down until his hot blood on my pajamas became too much for me to bear. I got the body onto the floor, blood still spurting out, huge gouts of the stuff. I dragged him by the feet over to the door, his mop of unkempt hair leaving a red trail. Down the stairs I pulled him, his skull bouncing on the steps, putting me in mind of a deflated soccer ball. And over to some rushes in the orchard, next to one of the side walls.
* * *
I went back to the living quarters. My nervousness soon dissipated, I felt a strange, calm sort of contentment descend; no hint of euphoria. I’d committed, for the first time ever, a primitive act, something not meant as publicity. For once I had allowed myself to be carried along by the fascism of nature. I felt, then, that a crack had opened in the world of advertising, and death had entered in. Good, I thought. I went into the larder and took the last 2-liter bottle of Coca-Cola out from behind some expired cans of beans, squeezed 3 lemons into it. I sat down in Agustín’s leather chair and, taking the bottle in both hands, took a long, slow, appreciative swig. It resembled no known thing or person, and now neither did I: nothing and no one except myself.
3
ENGINE (FOUND FRAGMENTS)
I go to the beach a lot.
Today I remembered a film called The Warriors, which features gangs fighting in New York—after night-long skirmishes, they come out onto the beach at Coney Island. The waves are no higher than a foot, and this tells the warriors that death is of no consequence. I go to the beach a lot. The grains of sand are the shape of grains of rice. Across the water is a small island with turrets on it. They light up at night. In the daytime, too. I walk past the corpse of Agustín. It moves, but not of its own accord, rather due to some external force, the wind perhaps.
---
The fascination of humankind with beaches goes to the heart of a time that has the form of a Rubik’s Cube. All the defining battles seem to take place on beaches. This isn’t because of the beach itself, but because every coast is a border, the last border before the setting sail of a ship destined to sink.
---
The small kitchen in Agustín’s house is very homely. I heat water in a pan with a flower design on the sides. As the water boils, the surface becomes another geography, a moving, shifting map.
---
The first person ever to use a credit card to pay for something must have felt like they were journeying to the center of the earth: must imagine this.
That entire sea behind fridges.
---
Things that appear to us suddenly, like an image, for example, or a memory, or a flesh-and-blood person, it isn’t that they weren’t there before, it’s that they hadn’t been switched on: somewhere in the world a switch was off. Sometimes the switch is the simple blink of an eye, other times it’s a complex process that involves great piles of rubbish being shifted around. I’ve seen the lights on the island turrets blinking. Sure sign that the army over there is expecting an attack of some kind.
---
Thought today that there are two kinds of objects. Those that are condemned to give up their contents, like a can of Coca-Cola, for example, and those for which such a forfeiture can only be an accident, for example the hard disk of a computer. The bar codes for the first group tend to be things of sadness. With the second group it depends on the intrinsic temperature of the system. I believe that the entire contents of this building have been forfeited. Agustín’s corpse, I don’t know. I took a good look inside his mouth. The teeth, I de
cided, were his personal bar code.
---
In the studio today, playing a CD of old Neapolitan songs full-blast, I decided to make an inventory of everything in the bottom drawers of my library. I found a small but select grouping of LPs in one. I don’t remember ever acquiring these records. A lot of them had been cut very neatly in half and then stuck to the half of a completely different record. Like a personality swap. I tried them on a record player I also found there, also something I could never remember having bought. The first one I tried, at random, was half an Adriano Celentano record and half the Beatles’ White Album. This didn’t really move me. Then there was a half Boney M., half “Essential Speeches of Il Duce,” more powerful.
Others were the union of 4 records, 4 perfectly symmetrical pieces. The final effect of this one was far more interesting, as every 90° rotation meant a new sound and in the microseconds between one quarter and the next a landscape of micro-noises rose up, without the music ever fully dropping away. Other records were the recombination of 8 pieces, pizza-style. And so on with the sections getting smaller, to the point where I couldn’t even make out the cuts on one LP, it might have been more than 100 different LPs joined together. This one I played a lot, over and over. It was like a noise that wasn’t noisy. It reminded me slightly of the sound that comes out of casinos when they are closed, when they stop, but casinos never stop.
---
Farther along the coast, not very far away, there is a supposedly fascist building, all of us on the island know about it. A failed theme park, the last one built by Walt Disney before he died, his own design, in collaboration with Salvador Dalí. The Red Brigades burned it to the ground the year after it opened. I hope my eco-prison doesn’t suffer the same fate.
The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab Page 31