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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In the middle of the Nevada desert stands a solitary poplar tree, covered in hundreds of pairs of shoes. Further along U.S. Route 50, a lonely prostitute falls in love with a collector of found photographs. In Las Vegas, an Argentine man builds a peculiar monument to Jorge Luis Borges. On the run from the authorities, Kenny takes up permanent residence in the legal non-place of Singapore International Airport. These are some of the narrative strands that make up this arborescently structured novel, hailed as one of the most daring experiments in Spanish literature of recent years. Full of references to indie cinema, collage, conceptual art, practical architecture, the history of computers and the decadence of the novel, Nocilla Dream finds great beauty in emptiness and reveals something essential about contemporary experience.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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‘With this bitter-sweet, violently poetic dream, Agustín Fernández Mallo establishes himself as the most original and powerful author of his generation in Spain.’ — Mathias Enard, author of Zone
‘Imagine an intellectual roadtrip flick with cameos by the likes of Thomas Bernhard, Jorge Luis Borges, and Chuang Tzu, projected in a desert nightscape against a multi-fabric’d patchwork – then think again. A melodious ode to the intentionally lost and the carelessly defeated, this one’ll keep you dreaming on your feet long after it’s consumed you.’ — Travis Jeppesen, author of The Suiciders
‘Composed of 113 fragments, some narrative, some lyrical, some descriptive and some purely meditative, Nocilla Dream also brings together a wide array of writings on science and technology. Characters emerge, disappear and reemerge later in the book, allowing us glimpses of the outlines of several different lives and stories, an experience somewhat akin to channel-hopping on TV.’ — Lluís Satorras, El País
‘How wonderful for a fiction writer to be as ambitious as a poet. The regeneration of language depends on this kind of brio. Agustín Fernández Mallo’s brilliance is to show that the future is already happening.’ — Gabi Martínez, Qué Leer
‘A publishing phenomenon that gave rise to a new generation of writers … has landed in Brazil and makes its author a possible successor to Roberto Bolaño.’ — O Estado de S. Paulo
‘Surprising and astonishing … Nocilla Dream evokes the arborescent structure of the world, appearing like a disconcerting tree of knowledge, bearing strange fruits.’ — Sabine Audrerie, La Croix
NOCILLA DREAM
AGUSTÍN FERNÁNDEZ MALLO
Translated by
THOMAS BUNSTEAD
‘Have you reread any of Raymond Carver’s books?’ ‘Read? No, no, I don’t read. [He bursts out laughing.] I watch a lot of DVDs.’
——Interview with Daniel Johnston, Rockdelux, 2005
‘To write is to attempt to know what we would write if we were to write.’
—— Marguerite Duras, Writing
Contents
1
Digital computers are superb number crunchers. Ask them to predict a rocket’s trajectory or calculate the financial figures for a large multinational corporation, and they can churn out the answers in seconds. But seemingly simple actions that people routinely perform, such as recognizing a face or reading handwriting, have been devilishly tricky to program. Perhaps the networks of neurons that make up the brain have a natural facility for such tasks that standard computers lack. Scientists have thus been investigating computers modelled more closely on the human brain.
B. JACK COPELAND & DIANE PROUDFOOT
2
Indeed, technically its name is U.S. Route 50. It’s in Nevada, and it’s the loneliest highway in North America. Passing through semi-mountainous desert, it links Carson City and the town of Ely. A highway in which, it ought to be stressed, there is precisely nothing. Nothing. A 260-mile stretch with a brothel at either end. In conceptual terms, only one thing on the entire route vaguely calls to mind the existence of humanity: hundreds of pairs of shoes have been hung from the only poplar that grows there, the only one that found water. Falconetti, an ex-boxer from San Francisco, had decided to walk the length of it. He’d filled his green army rucksack with several gallons of water and a tablecloth to spread on the kerbside when it came time to eat. He went into a shop in Carson City, a supermarket with five foreshortened, ridiculous shelves. A stump, he thought, if these five shelves were fingers. He bought bread, a large number of freeze-dried sachets of jerky, and some butter cookies. He set off, passing through the city limits, leaving them behind; the silhouetted plateau rose up before him in the distance. The asphalt, fleshy, sank down in the 37ºC midday heat. After a time he came past the Honey Route, the last brothel before the desert commenced, and Samantha, a dyed brunette who was doing her toenails in the shade of the porch, acknowledged him in the same way she always acknowledged passing cars, trucks and pedestrians, simply wishing them luck, though on this occasion she also said: If you see a guy on his own in a Red Ford Scorpio, and he’s going to New York, you tell him to get back here! Falconetti pressed play on his Walkman and pretended he hadn’t heard. He instinctively quickened his pace, his feet sinking further into the 37ºC asphalt. He’d left San Francisco almost a month earlier, having been kicked out of the army. There, when he was still in the army, he’d read the history of Christopher Columbus, and, captivated by his audacity, had the idea of doing the same as him but in reverse: going from west to east. He’d never been outside of San Francisco before.
3
As soon as he saw it he felt sure that it wasn’t a good thing, though it didn’t necessarily seem bad either. Strange. It was a shoe, a shoe thrown into the middle of the asphalt expanse. Neither 2 nor 4 nor 8, nor any other even number, but the odd number par excellence: 1. Billy the Kid, making the journey from Sacramento to Boulder City with his professional mountain-climber father, was used to travelling in the back bed of the truck among the 11-millimetre ropes, the Petzl harnesses and the large assortment of carabiners. The father, just Billy, had improvised a harness for the child, cinching carabiners tight on either side of the belt so he wouldn’t go flying on the bends. Billy the Kid was beaming. They’d left early that morning to be in time for the 3rd Boulder City Rock Climbing Competition: his father was taking part. They had breakfast at the first gas station they came to – the classic, deep-fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and coffee – and Billy the Kid, swirling the dregs of his decaf coffee, pictured his mother a few hours earlier when, at the entrance to the town, and possessed of a beauty that to the child seemed definitive, she had drawn his head to her breast before giving him a kiss. Like every Sunday, Drive safe, she’d said to his father after also kissing him. Billy the Kid slept in the back and when he woke, in the distance, stock-still on the asphalt like a rabbit without a litter, paralysed by the uncertainty that is a magnet to solitude, he saw it, a high-heeled shoe, brown perhaps from the desert earth, or perhaps actually brown. Neither 2 nor 4 nor 8, nor any other even number.
4
Love, he thought, like trees, needs tending to. He couldn’t understand, then, why the stronger and sturdier the poplar grew in its 70.5 acres, the worse things became in his marriage.
5
It’s logical that in a brothel there are all different kinds of women, and even more so here in the Nevada Desert, whose monotony, the most barren in the whole of the American Midwest, makes necessary certain exotic palliatives. Sherry’s having make-up applied in the ad-hoc backstage out back, beside the now dry well. She doesn’t trust the lightbulb-frame mirror they provided her with and, as when some client shows up unexpectedly, she glances in the rearview mirror of a rusted, broken-down Mustang. The sun and snow have been eating away at the vehicle since a man who was never seen again left it there. His name was Pat, Pat Garrett. He showed up one November evening, just as the temperature was about to drop, asked for a girl, the youngest they had, and Sherry stepped forward. Pat’s thing was collecting found photos, anything as long as it was found and featured a human figure; he went around with a suitcase full of them. When they were lying in bed together, as he gazed up at the wall he told her how he’d worked in a bank in L.A. before unexpectedly coming into an inheritance, at which point he’d quit. His penchant for the photos came from his time at the bank, from seeing so many people; he always found himself imagining what their faces would be like, and their bodies, in a context beyond the teller window – itself somewhat akin to the frame of a photograph. But after receiving the inheritance money, his other penchant, gambling, had seen him lose almost the entire sum. Now he was headed east, to New York, in search of more photos. Here on the West Coast, he said, it’s all about landscapes, but there it’s all portrait. Sherry didn’t know what to say. He opened the suitcase and began passing her photos. Picking one from the deck she was confronted with the unmistakable visage of her mother. She was smiling with her arm around a man who, Sherry understood, was the father she had never met. Her head subsided onto Pat’s chest and she held him tight. He stayed on for several days after that, during which time she stopped charging him, cooked his food, and neither of them set foot outside the room. The night Pat left he couldn’t get the Mustang started, but he managed to thumb a truck headed for Kansas. The next day, having discarded the possibility that he had fallen down the well or gone to Ely for cigarettes, she sat and waited until nightfall with her sight fixed on U.S. Route 50’s last divisible point. When she couldn’t take it any longer she wept, sitting on the bonnet of the Mustang. She checks her lips in the rearview mirror and the make-up artist gives her the call, 1 minute ’til we’re on air! Nevada TV are doing a special programme on freeway prostitution. Into the microphone they ask: What are you proudest of, Sherry? Love is a hard job, she says, loving is the hardest thing I’ve done in my entire life.
6
At the moment when the wind gusts in from the south, the wind that arrives from Arizona, soaring up and across the several sparsely populated deserts and the dozen-and-a-half settlements that over the years have been subject to an unstoppable exodus to the point that they’ve become little more than skele-towns, at this moment, this very moment, the hundreds of pairs of shoes hanging from the poplar are subjected to a pendular motion, but not all with the same frequency – the laces from which each pair hangs are of different lengths. From a certain distance it constitutes a chaotic dance indeed, one that, in spite of all, implies certain rules. Some of the shoes bang into each other and suddenly change speed or trajectory, finally ending up back at their attractor points, in balance. The closest thing to a tidal wave of shoes. This American poplar that found water is situated 125 miles from Carson City and 135 from Ely; it’s worth the trip just to see the shoes stopped, potentially on the cusp of moving. High heels, Italian shoes, Chilean shoes, trainers of all makes and colours (including a pair of mythical Adidas Surf), snorkelling flippers, ski boots, baby booties and booties made of leather. The passing traveller may take or leave anything he or she wishes. For those who live near to U.S. Route 50, the tree is proof that, even in the most desolate spot on earth, there’s a life beyond – not beyond death, which no one cares about any more, but beyond the body – and that the objects, though disposed of, possess an intrinsic value aside from the function they were made to serve. Bob, the owner of a small supermarket in Carson City, stops a hundred feet away. From the nearest to the farthest thing, he enumerates what he can see: first the very red mudflat, followed by the tree and the intricacies of its shadow, beyond that another mudflat, less red, dust-bleached, and finally the outline of the mountains, which appear flat, depthless, like the pictures they had in the Peking Duck Restaurant across from Western Union, which shut down, he thinks. But above all, seeing these overlapping strips of colour, the image that comes most clearly to mind is the differently coloured strata formed by the horizontally layered produce on his supermarket shelves. There’s a batch of bacon fries halfway up that comes in with a little gift-like offering of round Danish butter biscuit tins strapped on with sticky tape, the lids of which feature a picture of a fir tree with baubles on – a detail he is unaware of – just as he’s therefore unaware that both trees are beginning to stoop.
