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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
A landmark in contemporary Spanish literature, Agustín Fernández Mallo's Nocilla Trilogy – made up of the novels Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Experience and Nocilla Lab – is a project for our time. Reading takes the form of literary channel surfing: we flick through an audacious network of chopped-up stories, recycled texts and mixed-media collages, and try to find the signal in the noise, reflecting the dizzying search for meaning that characterizes life in our digital age. The globe-spanning narratives that explode across the trilogy take us from a lone poplar tree in the Nevada desert to a barnacle-covered cliff in Galicia, Spain, through scientific treatises and film-editing manuals, personal journals and comic strips. The books are full of references to indie cinema, theoretical physics, conceptual art, practical architecture, the history of computers and the decadence of the novel. And yet, for all the freewheeling, fragmentary swagger, a startling order emerges and takes hold. Peerless in its daring, Nocilla Trilogy charts a hidden and exhilarating cartography of contemporary experience.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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3‘An encyclopedia, a survey, a deranged anthropology. Nocilla Dream is just the cold-hearted poetics that might see America for what it really is. There is something deeply strange and finally unknowable to this book, in the very best way – a testament to the brilliance of Agustín Fernández Mallo.’
— Ben Marcus, author of The Flame Alphabet
‘The most original and powerful author of his generation in Spain.’
— Mathias Enard, author of Compass
‘By juxtaposing fiction with non-fiction … the author has created a hybrid genre that mirrors our networked lives, allowing us to inhabit its interstitial spaces. A physician as well as an artist, Fernández Mallo can spot a mermaid’s tail in a neutron monitor; estrange theorems into pure poetry.’
— Andrew Gallix, Independent
‘Nocilla Experience is the best novel I read in 2016. Thrillingly, incandescently brilliant.’
— Stuart Evers, author of If This is Home
‘Fernández Mallo occupies something of a similar position in the Spanish literary sphere as David Foster Wallace.’
— Jorge Carrión, 4Columns
‘Like having multiple browser windows open, and compulsively tabbing between them.’
— Chris Power, Guardian
‘A wonderful work of avant-gardist fiction – in the line of David Markson, Ben Marcus.’
— Germán Sierra, Asymptote
56
Nocilla Trilogy
Agustín Fernández Mallo tr. Thomas Bunstead
Contents
Nocilla Dream
11‘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, Writing12
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 37°C 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 37°C asphalt. He’d left San Francisco almost a month earlier, 15having 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 19of 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, 21beyond 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.
7
One of the biggest problems faced by hotels is the theft of small objects. It’s estimated that, annually, the large hotel chains lose over half a million towels, a loss they simply have to factor in, as they do with the disappearance of pens, ashtrays, shampoo, sewing kits, toothbrushes and all manner of bathroom supplies. But dinnerware and cutlery also disappear, and door knockers, towel rails, mirrors, bedding sets, designer lamps, flower arrangements that make excellent last-minute presents, plants and their pots, rugs and telephones. In exchange, clients forget watches, parrots that speak various languages, urns containing the ashes of loved ones, earrings, necklaces, high-quality lingerie, orthopaedic braces, contact lenses, inflatable dolls, books of all kinds, an array of adult toys, reports on the secret services of various nations, and even live crocodiles inside crocodile-skin suitcases. The Houses of America chain, after calling an amnesty on everyone who in the company’s 62-year history had left with some object in their suitcase, have decided to try recovering their property peaceably, and to that end have created the first Museum of Found Objects, with headquarters in Los Angeles and Chicago, though the catalogue can also be found online. There, a permanent exhibition is held of all the objects forgotten by their clients, so that those who might have some stolen object or other in their houses may choose what they want from the catalogue and in this way permute the one for the other. But, and the sun began to set in the reception of the hotel. Until the penumbra [synthetic repetition of night only accessible by interior phenomena] united the emptiness of the vestibule with the bodies of the people coming in and going out. It took the bellboys by the hand. It procured death. The death of the novel.
8
Deeck is an internet-user from Denmark. Not that this matters, internet-users belong to no country. Born and brought up in Copenhagen, at the age of eighteen he moved to an industrial town on a peninsula further to the north, a place supplying manpower to the largest biscuit factory in the country. He does the late shift, spending the rest of his nights online or designing websites for himself – with nothing in mind beyond his own amusement and satisfaction. To him it’s very serious. He lives alone. Now that the smoking ban has come in, he’s become an enthusiastic smoker. He set up one site as a place to exhibit the pictures he makes by sticking masticated pieces of chewing gum onto a canvas. His work divides along two aesthetic lines:
1. Nordic landscapes: snow-capped scenes featuring, at most, the archetype of a city, or a figure in the far distance. The best thing for this, according to him, was technological chewing gum, flat, almost abstract it’s so completely flat, sugar-free, such as mint-flavoured Trident, which once masticated turns near-white, with a slight cream tinge for the dirty snow of the high plateaus, and mint-flavoured Orbit, pale green after 3 minutes’ mastication, for the grass clumps that stipple the snow or the evergreens in the background. Or the special spearmint-chlorophyll-flavoured Trident, which after 4 days’ mastication goes a shade of brownish green; the way it turns granular is also perfect for figures that require texture, such as human figures or the cities suggested in the far distance.
2. Explosive blondes: for these a thick kind of chewing gum does the trick, the kind you buy at a newspaper stand, the 24very sugary kind, for kids [herein the secret of young boys’ liking for blondes, he thought one day before bed]. Thus, among the primary materials used most frequently were: the banana-flavoured Bang-Bang, hardly masticated, for the blonde hair; the Sour Strawberry Chew, much masticated, for the skin on the chest; both together, barely placed in the mouth, taken out almost as soon as the saliva reaction has begun, for the most crimson of legs; and the Coca-Cola flavour for the lips, eyes and nipples.
A Technical Data link on the site where he exhibits the pieces provides access to all of this information. But this and all the other sites he’d made he gradually began to abandon in favour of what has since then become the only thing he spends his free time on: found photographs. People from around the world send him pictures over the internet, anything as long as they feature human figures, and as long as they are found photographs, specifying their names and where they came across the photographs. He gets out of bed, it’s 2 p.m. He skips the shower so as not to be late for his shift, which starts at 3 p.m. He sits in the kitchen, the Formica of the chair is freezing; he’s already put the coffee on. He looks at his boots. He didn’t even like them when he bought them. He takes them off and throws them onto the fire in the hearth. After a time all that remains are the bents bits of metal that keep the soles rigid. He pulls apart one of the biscuits they make on the chain, and dunks a layer in the coffee; they’re so buttery a floating archipelago of mirrors appears on the surface. He closes the tin. The lid is marked with an enbaubled Christmas tree. He lights a cigarette.
9
The binary system of numbers, 0 and 1, is employed as a means of calculation in digital computers and as a means of controlling a considerable variety of machine tools. [...] Its precursors were Francis Bacon (1561-1626), and Joseph Marie Jacquard (1752-1834), who designed a system of binary-coded punched cards for operating looms. [...] The great value of the binary system is in operations that are binary by nature: on or off, open or closed, true or false, go or no-go and so on. A given electronic component of a computer is either on or off [...] That is why the binary system lends itself so effectively to the rapid calculating done by computers. [...] Binary code means that the fabrics that commonly go to make up the clothes we wear, and electronic circuits, share certain similarities. In woven fabrics, the binary element is the warp/weft: the warp threads run lengthwise, the weft threads crosswise; the binary relation at a given point is whether a horizontal thread or a vertical thread is on top. The binary relation in the electronic circuit is whether a given area of an element is conducting or not.
F. G. Heath
10
Now she finishes making the beds, and as she clears the breakfast table she keeps on glancing at the clock in the kitchen. She’s put on matte red lipstick to match the print on her dress. Her high heels, brown, recently purchased, pinch her feet. She sits down in the vestibule and waits. Paul shows up half an hour late in the company GMC. He drives two blocks further along and waits for her, engine idling; the town development is in its third phase there. This is the best place to wait for you, the bricklayers aren’t working today, he says as they pull away. Like every Sunday, they go and eat at a city on the Nevada border called North River, where you can get the best trout in the West. With a mound of fried fish before them, eating with their fingers, they tell jokes, anecdotes from the week, and neither of them laments not being able to live together. Afterwards they kiss and the grease on their lips is a reminder that for her will last the whole week and for him until he uses the serviette. They’ve driven a different way today and instead of following the meal with a trip to the small hotel on Washington Street, they decide to go a number of miles south to take a look at a spectacular canyon on the outskirts of the town of Ely and soon Paul exclaims, Look! The shoe poplar! They pull over. They try counting how many there are but the sheer quantity, and the tangle, makes counting impossible. Get me down those movie star shoes, she says, or even better, those ski boots, for when we go skiing. If you want, says Paul, I’ll get you these ones down, they’re nearer. No, she says, not more climbing boots, no thanks. He looks at her and asks, How’s little Billy doing. Really good, she says, he’s such a joy, even more as he gets older.
He and his dad have gone to Boulder City for the rock 27climbing competition. A familiar silence between them descends. Then he slaps her on the back, by the clasp of her bra, and with a Let’s get out of here! he takes her by the hand and leads her to the car, and they carry on to the canyon. With the windows down and the radio on, says Paul, lighting a cigarette, the GMC’s like the spaceship out of Star Trek. Sure, she says, with a bad-tempered flick of the hand: she’s got blisters from her shoes, she’s undone the straps. Reclining the seat, she thrusts one leg out of the window. The wind hits her foot and carries away the shoe. They both laugh. Out in the middle of the asphalt, like a rabbit without a litter, the brown high heel is lost almost immediately in the desert dust; neither 2, nor 4 nor 6, but 1, the odd number par excellence. She stares at Paul for several minutes as he hums a version of a version of another version of a Sinatra song.
11
To the south of Las Vegas Boulevard, as you cross the several-mile stretch above the casino part of town, just when you look back and see the last casino glimmering on the horizon in the rearview mirror, like in The Green Flash, you find yourself in front of a two-storey building, a Budget Suites of America aparthotel. A poster announces discounts for anyone staying a week or longer, sheets not included, and there’s also the news of a teenage girl from Puerto Rico who had to have three toes amputated from her right foot after they froze the previous winter; it seems she was made to regret having used a very expensive varnish to paint her nails the previous day, one she’d bought in Puerto Rico with the idea of looking radiant at her job interviews. Had she been Japanese, this attenuation of the foot would have signified divine intervention, the kind only Geishas have access to. Had she been a New Yorker it would be a sign of immense wealth, like that of the 5th Avenue ladies who maim their own little toes so they can fit into an extremely pointy pair of Manolo Blahniks [placing the results of the mutilation in formaldehyde, or something similar, to show off to any visitor upon whom they want to impress particularly clearly their socio-economic status]. There’s a scattering of station wagons and mobile homes in the car park. It’s turned into a small settlement by now. Every day poses new challenges to the promise that all these people, one way or another, made when they arrived here: that they would prosper in Las Vegas. The welter is equivalent to the wagon trains of those pioneers and dreamers that would draw together and form a circle at nightfall. In the last five years this place has become the real frontier: beyond this point you’re in the promised land. The whole place is so saturated with 29dreams that it’s turned magical. Rose looks after her three children in a 30m2 bunker. Each day she goes around the church food halls and the cut-price casino buffets. The utensils they eat with, and the assortment of items that goes to make up the dinner set, were found in bins. One of the boys, Denny, was working in a photocopying shop for sex trade flyers, but got the sack for masturbating too much on the job; the others haven’t got jobs. The oldest sister Jackie had done alright for a while, when she was living with an ex-boxer called Falconetti. He’d blown in from San Francisco, having just been discharged from the army, and was taking a chimerical route on foot, inverting Columbus’s expedition. He stayed with Jackie for a couple of months and before he left she gave him a tatty pair of Nikes as a memento of the day they met, when she’d been wearing them; they’d both been hitchhiking on opposite sides of the highway and began talking because no-one was coming by. In this, the definition of a postmodern city, where, as is obligatory in everything that is post-, even time is unanchored from history, the percentage of adolescents involved in crime, drug addiction and sex has risen to 30.75 per cent in the past three years. At Las Vegas Boulevard the roads break off in a hundred different directions, flourishing outwards arborescently into the desert, and, as they unfurl, those magical aparthotels sprout along them like a sort of fruit. They’re watching TV and Denny reaches a hand into his pocket and takes out a small newspaper package he found in a bin. His mother and siblings look on as he opens it and lays three toes out in the pool of lamplight, a sparkling, opalescent purple hue to them, and nails painted red.
12
Augmented Reality: via the appropriate combination of the physical and virtual worlds, the missing information can be obtained, as happens in the recreation of the view of an airport that a pilot would have if it weren’t for the snow.
Luis Arroyo
13
A long time ago [so long it seems like centuries] there was a very important and famous author called Italo Calvino who invited us to imagine a very beautiful city formed solely of water pipes. A mess of snarled piping which [according to Calvino] rises vertically where the houses should be and spreads out horizontally where the floors should be. At the ends of the pipes white bathrooms can be glimpsed, showers and bathtubs where women luxuriate in the water. The reason [according to Calvino] is that these women are nymphs and these pipes were for them the optimum means of getting from place to place so as to live free and unobstructed in their natural aquatic realm. What he did not invite us to imagine was that within each of us another, even more complex city exists; the system of veins, vessels and arteries around which blood circulates; a city with neither taps, nor apertures, nor drainage pipes, only an endless channel whose constant return consolidates the ‘I’ we hope might save us from the fatal scattering of our identity across the Universe. We all bear inside ourselves a desert, something immobile; a period of time that has mineralized, is at a standstill. Hence the ‘I’ may consist of an immovable hypothesis, one assigned to us at birth and that, until the last, we’re seeking to demonstrate, unsuccessfully.
14
The true identity of a certain Polish, Chicago-based musician, still unknown, is hidden under the alias of Sokolov. He came to the U.S. at the age of 10 to be raised by his grandmother. Following the death of his parents in a gas explosion in their building in Tarnów, near Kraków, this was the easiest way for his Polish aunt to rid herself of the boy. The reason he survived was that, at the moment of the explosion, he found himself, as usual, down in the basement making recordings of all kinds of exciting sounds to add to the on-tape cosmogony of his childhood. Hitting a spoon on the table while breathing heavily, turning the drill on and simultaneously reading aloud, without understanding a single word, fragments from the copy of Das Kapital he found lying forgotten among his father’s tools – these are the kinds of things he liked to tape on the old KVN recorder. They pulled him out after 3 days, 3 days without food or water, by which time he’d already been announced among the dead. In Chicago he grew up fitting in easily, like all musicians, to a civilization like the American one, where time predominated over space. His own grandmother was surprised at how easily he adapted. After several years studying electronica and playing synth in local post-rock groups, he became interested in the same things he’d been drawn to in childhood, like abstract music and noise, and with this reversal, this ramification, he was soon to be seen frequenting different Chicago neighbourhoods, going around armed with recording equipment and field mics, discovering all manner of textures in unexpected urban instruments: from the classic clack clack of cars driving across imperfectly fitting manhole covers, to the gushing sound emitted by a graffiti artist’s spraycan. He’d then remix and sample these 33sounds among other recordings – his own or other people’s – and thus began making his first CDs, which he then distributed around shops and local markets, this in turn generating a certain renown for him as a vanguardist musician. Miraculously enough, when the accident in Poland took place, he had a recently recorded tape in his pocket, one he’s conserved. He often uses it, extracting from it and inserting parts into his current sound pieces, pieces that would otherwise never have existed in North America.
15
At 6 p.m. Falconetti pitches up at the poplar that found water, halting in the shade, dropping the green backpack and using it for his pillow as he lowers himself to the ground. He gazes upwards. Finding the swaying of so many shoes hypnotic, he begins to doze off. Night has fallen, practically, by the time he wakes. Not a single light on the whole radius of the horizon, save the camping stove he uses to heat a powdered jerky soup. It seems it was past its sell-by-date when the man in the supermarket sold it to him. He dumps it. Inside his sleeping bag, he goes to sleep gazing at the shimmer and sparkle of so many buttonholes above his head. He’s woken by the sun. He takes a pair of small Nikes out of his backpack, ties them together and throws them up into the tree. They catch against a pair of blue and red ski boots. As he goes through a round of his morning exercises he notices, on the currently shaded portion of the trunk, a used condom.
16
The words organization and organism aren’t actually very closely related. An organism is an entity, sea mineral, animal, vegetable or socio-cultural, which lives and develops independently, according to complex dictates that are internal to them, and almost always spontaneous; in all cases an organism can be considered a living being. An organization is a bureaucratic entity, sea mineral, animal, vegetable or socio-cultural, and it depends on external agents to dictate its development; never is an organisation a living being.
17
Of all the manias, without a doubt the most widespread is morning lovemaking. Men always want to at this hour, and end up persuading women. Not a problem if one lives sheltered within the four walls of a house. So let’s imagine a homeless couple that sets up on some parcel of open ground or out in the desert; for them the act requires taking cover under the shade of a tree or a bush or a wall. In time the mechanical thrusts and shoves will inevitably begin to mark on the ground, and in the end there will always be some person devising theories that link these marks with spacecraft landings. This is what happened with Kent Fall, the mayor of Ely, who on a morning in 1982 saw very deep marks in the shade of the poplar that found water, deep and gestural and arithmetic, bored into the earth. Above, hanging from one of the branches, he found two pairs of shoes.
18
For a time, Sherry was the only girl available at the Honey Route. The regulars weren’t spending so freely, and it was down to guys who stopped by, passing custom, the kind who, once they’d come in and got a beer in hand weren’t going to blink. Every Monday a trucker named Clark, the spirits guy, called in. A while back he’d said to her, It wouldn’t take you a minute to pack your bag – it isn’t as if you’ve got much stuff – and you could come away in the truck with me. The delivery drivers do their rounds before dawn, and so the sun still hadn’t come up when Sherry put her bag in the truck, while Clark cracked open a beer. He started telling her about a friend of his, an Argentine who worked in a club in Las Vegas, and Las Vegas being pornstar central, he’d be sure to find her some work, they’d enquire. He felt the impulse to kiss her just at that moment, for the first time, but didn’t. Sherry had been up the whole night and went through into the back of the cab to lie down, picking up a book she found among the beer cans and skimming before putting it to one side again, of all the books I have had printed none is, I believe, as personal as this collective and disorderly compilation. J. L. Borges. Buenos Aires, 31 October 1960. The sun was up by now and Clark opened another beer and handed it to Sherry, followed by another and another until they were onto their eighth, at which point they stopped for a rest, pulling up next to a poplar covered in shoes. Sherry had heard a lot of talk about the tree, and of the supposedly extraterrestrial origin of some marks on the shady side of the tree at dawn, but she’d never seen it for herself. Maybe all the shoes are an offering to the aliens, said Sherry, hopping down from the cab. From here to California all you got is cults. One time a bunch stopped at the Honey Route, and they fucked 38without fucking, it was weird, all they did was watch me, but they swore they were doing it, and they had me there for hours, beats me, but anyway they paid. They were lying beneath the tree now, he had his arm around her and was fixating on the rise and fall of her large breasts, made all the larger by the combination of the silence and the beer, but he still hadn’t kissed her. Then, visibly moved, he spoke of a book by Jorge Luis Borges that he’d been given by his Argentine friend. I’ve got it in the back of the cab, he said, I’ll show it to you later, it’s called The Maker.
19
A spy wants to send a message saying, ‘The nuclear weapon is situated in…’ To make a secret code of it he switches letters out at random: e’s instead of h’s, l’s for k’s, a’s for v’s, and so on. The message ends up as: ‘hkb vjtvhbil bñwkhvj…’ Now, if the enemy were to intercept the message, would they have any chance of decoding it? The answer is yes, if the message is sufficiently long. The reason being, in every language, the frequency with which each letter appears is fairly fixed. You only need to count the number of times each letter repeats in the coded message, and make it correspond with the letter that, in the normal language, repeats with the same frequency.
Jerome Segal
20
Jorge Rodolfo Fernández is Argentinian, living in the Budget Suites of America aparthotel at the point where the last casino on Las Vegas Boulevard glimmers on the horizon. His room, situated at the front of the building, though built from demolition materials, is one of the most decent; it belongs to the series that was built with horizontal windows and a rationalization of space in the style of Le Corbusier – The International Style, as it came to be known. The window looks out across the parking lot, its caravans and mobile homes forming a sort of chromatic crossword of magic and misery, he thinks; the thing is, though his job is collecting empties in a club, really he’s a poet. Unlike his neighbours, who fill their rooms to bursting with all manner of useless detritus and colourful plastic objects they find in bins and at derelict theme parks or hotels, his room is the closest thing in the whole of the U.S. to a monk’s cell. Painted a light grey suggestive of concrete, it has a rickety metal frame bed, a night table which also serves as his dining table, a stripped-down cooking range, a cupboard he made from some leftover plywood, and a wooden chair. Above the night table hangs a framed photograph of Jorge Luis Borges. He doesn’t work Mondays, so he got up this morning to boil rice for the week, which he divides between Tupperware containers, and he’s sitting reading by the window, making the most of the single bit of sunlight he’ll get, because of his hours, all week. Some of his neighbours walk by; they’re carrying buckets and have their dogs with them. Hey, they say. He reads the same Borges passage he reads every day at midday before going to work, happy in the certainty that he’s found the perfect spot in which to pass his days, Borges’s secret location, because, as well as being a poet, 41he is (as he himself will attest) ‘a seeker of Borgesian fiction-places’… In this empire, the art of cartography was taken to such a peak of perfection that the map of a single province took up an entire city and the map of the empire, an entire province. In time, these oversize maps outlived their usefulness and the college of cartographers drew a map of the empire equal in format to the empire itself, coinciding with it point by point. The following generations, less obsessed with the study of cartography, decided that this overblown map was useless and somewhat impiously abandoned it to the tender mercies of the sun and seasons. There are still some remains of this map in the western desert, though in very poor shape, the abode of beasts and beggars. No other traces of the geographical disciplines are to be seen throughout the land. With the last light of the last casino of the Empire in view, Jorge Rodolfo shuts his eyes and gives thanks to the Maker for allowing him to inhabit the ruins, to him alone revealed, of this map.
21
It’s getting warm in the station wagon, that’s what makes these old ones such a drag, says Kelly, pointing to the bag on the right of Christina, who’s driving, so she can take another look at the bikini. She bought it at a service station in Santa Barbara, and isn’t convinced: she tried it on in the bathroom in front of a mirror barely 30 × 50cm2 and eaten away at by the gases that ferment the moment they contact the salty humid air blowing in off the Pacific. The other two girls, surfers like her, are asleep. All four are blonde, two of them bleached-blonde. None of them is wearing shoes, surfers don’t need shoes. As they pass mudflat after mudflat, power line succeeding power line, a sense of deferred conviction is generated inside Christina, who accelerates: in the distance, at the end of all these power lines, it must follow that a person will be there. Kelly strips from the waist up and fastens the bikini catch; her modest 22-year-old breasts weigh down the elasticated fabric. She considers herself in the mirror of her sunglasses, which magnify her breasts, Like Pamela Anderson, she says to herself. The TV lifeguard responsible for transmitting the Californian surfing bug since the beginning of the 90s. They pass a sign for a detour onto U.S. Route 50, she takes the bikini bottoms in her hands, slips her fingers inside, pressing on the Lycra and, against the light, on top of the greenish-blue of the print, her hands resemble seaweed under water, she thinks, the rhizomey, arborescent structures which, when she fell from her board, she’d observe until forced up to the surface for air. Not nowadays, she’s turned into a very good surfer now, and for a moment, as she shifts her gaze towards the roadside gutter, she feels a pang for those beginnings. What her hand really resembles beneath the Lycra is a surgeon’s glove, but she doesn’t 43know that yet. The sun’s been up for a while and the sky’s starting to cloud over, dark spirals of air forming in the distance. Kelly thinks the successive power lines that stretch from post to post are like the waves of a now skeletized, seaweed-less, ocean; nobody knows what caused the drying-out. The CD of Radiohead’s ‘Karma Police’ is playing. She imagines herself catching waves in the Indian Ocean, and falls asleep holding the bikini bottoms. Her breasts turn softer.
22
At the time that Niels’ and Frank’s destinies were joined in a University of Arizona laboratory, neither of them could have known that their alliance would take them all the way to Mozambique. Niels, a Danish zoologist specializing in animal behaviour, studying with support from an intercollegiate scheme, was looking into ways of training miniature dogs to sniff out anti-personnel mines. Progress was scant. According to the computer simulations of the problem, the dogs always exploded. Too heavy. Frank, a DHL deliveryman at the time, was the one bringing items to the lab. Their relationship was limited to the signing of Niels’ signature on Frank’s delivery sheets. Until one day Frank said to Niels, I’ve got a way to solve your problem, it’s rats you need not dogs, come over to my place and I’ll show you. Niels made the near 150-mile trip to Nevada, where Frank lived with his wife and three children in a robust, well-put-together wooden house, complete with a lawn. He was taken down to the basement, and there witnessed the rat spectacular Frank had assembled for his family’s entertainment. Joined together by long enough pieces of string, and being made to pass through all manner of balance tests, they never pressed down more than was safe on any of the levers, and could smell perfectly the decoy: gunpowder from a cartridge. They’re ideal, he said: Cheap, easy to come by, once they’ve got a scent they just won’t give up, plus they weigh under 1.2 kilos – which, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I read that’s the minimum weight to set off one of those gizmos of yours? From then on they worked so closely together that Niels arranged for Frank to be given a role as an assistant at the University. Now they’re in Mozambique.
The second the sun comes up they’re out there with 45their 15 Gambian rats, which make their way frenetically out into the prairielands attached to pieces of 50-foot long string; when they pick up the scent they start squeaking, and once they’ve found the supposed spot where the mine is, they stop by it, sit down, and settle down. One day a letter was wrongly delivered to their improvised field tent and Frank, who to this day hasn’t recovered from the tic of needing to deliver items as quickly as possible, decided to redirect it himself. Seeing as it wasn’t far, he decided to walk, and Niels said he ought to take a couple of rats along as a safety system. Not long after he set out, the animals became extremely unsettled and began to emit the squeak: mine. They tugged and tugged and wouldn’t stop until they reached the foot of a tree, and when they settled again, they each stopped and cast their snouts upwards. From the branches of the tree, held there by lianas of some kind, hung a multitude of bones belonging to an animal that was never identified.
23
It was ultimately decided that this project was not to be the one they were going to use to separate uranium. We were told then that we were going to stop, because in Los Alamos, New Mexico, they would be starting the project that would actually make the bomb. We would all go out there to make it. There would be experiments that we would have to do, and theoretical work to do. I was in the theoretical work […] Well, when we arrived, the houses and dormitories and things like that were not ready. In fact, even the laboratories weren’t quite ready […] So they just went crazy and rented ranch houses all around the neighbourhood […] When I got to the site the first time, I saw there was a technical area that was supposed to have a fence around it ultimately but it was still open. Then there was supposed to be a town, and then a big fence further out, around the town. But they were still building […] When I went into the laboratory, I would meet men I had heard of by seeing their papers in the Physical Review and so on. I had never met them before. ‘This is John Williams,’ they’d say. Then a guy stands up from a desk that is covered with blueprints, his sleeves all rolled up, and he’s calling out the windows, ordering trucks and things going in different directions with building material. In other words, the experimental physicists had nothing to do until their buildings and apparatus were ready, so they just built the buildings – or assisted in building the buildings.
Richard P. Feynman
24
So, we’re in agreement with the idea that Heine is an Austrian journalist, a correspondent for the Kurier in Vienna, and that he’s lived in Peking for the last six years married to Lee-Kung, a Chinese woman. Their block of flats looks made of concrete, but no. It’s only a conglomerate of sand and iron shavings extracted from low-grade Turkish mines, later pressed and solidified with the use of a glue called SO(3). Inside this structure, the marriage collapsed long ago. He’s fascinated by the boom that China has experienced following the freeing up of markets. The reports he sends back to Vienna are almost all analyses of the future power of the markets here. For instance, Chinese enthusiasm for purchasing cars has debilitated the automotive industry worldwide, with a knock-on threat to oil reserves. The same with washing machines, video games and Tampax. There’s no keeping up. Lee-Kung, unemployed, spends a great deal of time cutting out photos from the free North American magazines Heine receives. She scans the images and saves them onto her Apple Mac before beginning with her modifications, copying and pasting in Chinese motifs. She’s had a chat relationship for the past year with someone called Billy, an American citizen from the state of Nevada who, it turned out, was an expert in rock climbing, a sport she knew nothing about. When they write they always talk about one day seeing each other. Heine’s favourite pastime, after paedophilia and betting at the clandestine rat races out the back of the Versace store that opened the previous year just a stone’s throw from his office, is going out and filming what he calls ‘Pekinese road movies’, using a small camcorder; these, as we know, bear no resemblance to their North American namesake. The most important element in any 48road movie is the horizon; it has to feature sooner or later, signifying something in and of itself; a far-off point that comprises the spirit of the film in question. As any number of studies have demonstrated, in European cinema the horizon signifies loss or melancholy; in North American cinema, it’s hope, the magnetizing element for pioneers; and in Chinese and Japanese films it means death.
25
Description: all materials, all objects, everything we see, are clots – catastrophes that took place on the neutral, two-dimensional, isotropic plane coterminous with The Beginning. These are the so-called 1st Order Catastrophes. When a foreign agent alters the equilibrium of one of these objects, it then breaks off in unpredictable directions, dragging along other objects – whether near or far – in a kind of domino effect. This we call 2nd Order Catastrophe. The desert, given its flatness and isotropic nature, is the least catastrophic place. Except when the silence is broken by a scarab beetle dragging a stone along, or when in some fold in the land a blade of grass emerges, or when a poplar finds water and grows. Then, a husband, looking for ways to aggravate his wife, throws her shoes to the top of this tree that, like an attractor point, has been gathering hundreds more shoes besides. And, it goes without saying, this also counts as a 2nd Order Catastrophe.
26
The first poem that Hannah, a native of Utah, wrote, was this:
The content of this poem is invisible:
it exists but can’t be seen.
Not even the author knows it.
27
Lee-Kung, as always happens in Chinese movies, as well as in all marriages that have fallen apart, has relatives who grow rice in the countryside, and two years into the marriage she had begun spending long periods with them so she wouldn’t have to be constantly dealing with the concupiscent face of Heine (now serving a life sentence in Chao province). At the family house Lee-Kung was always able to go online and not worry about being discovered by Heine. Her grandparents, who spend their time either working or asleep, never had a clue. Today Billy told her about coming second in the XV Rock Climbing Competition in Sacramento and sent some photos. Beyond the computer screen, the sweeping view across the paddy fields makes her heart seem to shrink. It turns to lead. Small but dense.
28
The truck crossed the border at El Paso without any problems; in fact the consignment of black beans it carried was already well known to the U.S. officers who saw Humberto at regular 37-day intervals. He came from a place called Monterrey in northern Mexico, and his destination was the Central Market in Salt Lake City, which served as a fruit and veg distribution point for Utah and the surrounding states. Having hit U.S. roads, each time he stopped for the night or to refuel he’d usually open up the trailer and take a look at the state of the merchandise; if anything was damaged from all the bumping about, or because the load hadn’t been secured correctly, he’d have to pay for it out of his own pocket. But not this time; at some of the stops he felt very tired, and at others he just found too many interesting things to look at, and forgot all about the beans. For example the new amusement park just after coming through San Antonio, or the splendid vista from the highway, also new, linking the incredibly high bridges in a canyon-dotted stretch of New Mexico, or the conversation of a hitchhiker named Bertrand who was headed as far north as he could get, and whom, after buying him a meal, Humberto left at a bus stop near Ely. So it was that, driving along not really thinking about what was in the trailer, after four days he came to the market, an industrial polygon where the goods were stored in the wholesaler’s units. No one had imagined that when they opened one of the doors at the back of the trailer they’d find a dead man up on the top crate, lying face down with his back grazing the roof. The right door, open, afforded a view of the man’s legs and waist, which half-dangled in space. When they opened the left door, which when shut had hidden the face and the upper half of the body from 52sight, the cadaver tumbled down on top of them. It hit the ground with a sound like an empty eggshell breaking. It’s a Mexican, said the ashen Humberto, We have to call Immigration! No one said anything for a few moments. Suffocated, someone murmured. No doubt, another. Not wanting to lose the merchandise, they decided to take the beans the young Mexican had been lying on and mix them into other crates, that way they could say they’d thrown them away and not have to deal with paranoid or scrupulous future buyers. If we assume that the body of the late youngster was of average proportions, 5’8’’ in height and 1’7’’ wide, we’re looking at a surface area of 2’10’’ of beans, scattering, going around the world covered in the saliva, sweat, tears, urine and excrescences of that man who crossed the border. One more body in negative, a double devaluation then distributed among window displays, veg sections, shopping trolleys, stomachs and saucepans. A broken map, 0.875m2 in circumference, of which perhaps some certain fragment might have returned home, being that there’s a charity store in Salt Lake City that periodically sends shipments of vegetables to the poorest parts of Mexico.
29
Not many people know about the small community of North Americans living in Tsau-Chee, a province in south-east China. This is globalization’s great plus point, the fact you can have a Tex-Mex in China and a bamboo soup in a town in Texas. About two dozen families have created a simple, carefree environment for themselves, but also based on great wealth. Basically, they’re executives from American companies who, in their day, came and worked in the region. Now that conditions are sufficiently favourable, due to the intriguing mysteries of the free market and its contract relations, they’ve been given early retirement, all of them on full salaries. Free of the moral pressures of North American society, and on the other hand in a position to enjoy everything an artificial North American society has to offer, theirs is a happy lot. The eyes of south-eastern China are trained on these several hundred square feet. It’s the kind of life desired by any self-respecting Chinese person on the path to modernity. But the main thing, the most well-known thing about this Little America, is that a nucleus of surfers, the best surfers in all of the Yellow Sea, has joined together there. Initially this nucleus was made up of the children of the North Americans, but now multitudes of Chinese people have been drawn in too, with the peculiarity that it isn’t the younger surfers who can really ride, but the elder statesmen of the region. Their grandchildren aren’t a patch on them. The explanation lies in a dangerous local tradition, one that only the older members of society are allowed to take part in: kwai muk collecting. The kwai muk is a citrus fruit that grows on a tree of the same name, and it is gathered by means of a tightrope walk along ropes slung from treetop to treetop – at times 80 feet off the ground. The 55day these grandmothers and grandfathers stepped into neoprene suits and onto surfboards, they swept all before them.
