Nocilla Lab Read online

  Praise for the Nocilla Trilogy

  ‘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

  NOCILLA LAB

  AGUSTÍN FERNÁNDEZ MALLO

  Translated by

  THOMAS BUNSTEAD

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  I. AUTOMATIC SEARCH ENGINE

  II. AUTOMATIC ENGINE

  III. ENGINE FRAGMENTS

  Notes & Credits

  Acknowledgements

  Current and forthcoming books by Fitzcarraldo Editions

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Everywhere is noise. At any temperature higher than absolute zero atoms vibrate with thermal energy.

  This sets in motion a deep sort of buzzing, one that impregnates matter entirely.’

  — Philip Ball, Critical Mass (2008)

  ‘Like in a documentary, this was our part in the same documentary.’

  — ‘Con las vainas olvidadas’, Sr. Chinarro (2002)

  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, the mutation of his body tissues, even, or probed his involuntary impulse to erase his own footsteps, which has led him both to forget the location of his old flat and not to feel any urge to go in and look over his old belongings, like the slice of Russian cow there in the pan, the table laid for dinner, the unmade bed, the TV off though the power button is ON, the alarm clock still going strong because he’d put alkaline batteries in it, the nuclear-waste container being used as an ashtray, everything precisely as he left it 5 years before, yes, I could carry on tracking this man, but I’m not going to, the truth of the matter is I’ve never been a follower of men, any men, it’s only women I’m interested in, ‘women’ in every sense of the word, the only men I’ve ever been interested in are those who have struck me as both entirely different from and better than me, those I consider ‘cases’, ‘clinical cases’, as the writer Emil Cioran had it when discussing a class of pathologically brilliant person, and it’s in this regard, the ‘clinical case’ regard, that I have always hoped to find in someone those same things that set the Replicant apart, the perfect being, existing on the edge of humanness, not beyond that edge but certainly not this side of it either, exactly on the biological frontier, such thoughts are absurd given that in the end we are all more or less identical, not identical in the way, for instance, that 2 photons are identical, physics tells us photons are indistinguishable, but in the sense of ‘very much alike’, and this is why aspiring to such difference, any hope of ever becoming a ‘clinical case’ oneself, turns out to be an infantile stance, though a desire to be different from other people can still help you to take action, to progress, to work through stress and anxiety, to be, that is, alive in a sense quite different from the ‘being alive’ idea peddled by the bland Eastern philosophies, because stress promotes entropy, disorder, life, and one travels to different countries and sees there very different things flora- and fauna-wise, customs- and appearances-wise, all the things that distinguish races and cultures, and yet, sooner or later, one comes to the undeniable conclusion or formulation of what might even be a law, namely that everything, looked at in sufficient detail, is identical to its counterpart on the far side of the world: zoom in and the leaf of a scrub plant in Sardinia is the same as that of an Alaskan pine tree, the skin pores of a Sudanese person are identical to those of an Inuit, and there really is nothing between a Buddha figure in Bangkok and a statuette of Christ in Despeñaperros, Jaén, and so it is with everything, because of another law both general and true: the tourist goes abroad and identifies with the things he or she finds there only because they call to mind something familiar, something that, without being exactly the same, is somewhat the same, the Replicant from Blade Runner, and all of this has a great deal to do with what we understand by the word frontier, by the overlapping of surfaces, because it would be monstrous to happen upon something absolutely new, it would be nightmarish and unbearable, just as two absolutely identical beings would be, and so we look for arguments to take us beyond this paradox, I love paradoxes, or I don’t love them, that’s stupid, it’s just that without them life wouldn’t exist and the planet would be a wasteland, so, simply, paradoxes are, they exist, full stop, they create conflict between any 2 or more systems, whether living, mechanical or symbolic systems, and this, according to an eminent scientist named Ilya Prigogine, gives rise to what we understand by life, the disequilibrium that pertains in certain places: a paradox is also a form of disequilibrium, we were in a port on a small island to the south of another island named Sardinia, a seafaring village we had come to in the heart of the Mediterranean after three months constantly on the move, constantly looking for the right place to mount the Project, our Project, as we liked to call it, this immense thing that hadn’t so much kept us busy as held us hostage, for years, and all of a sudden I was struck by the resemblance between this place on this island to the south of another island named Sardinia and a Portuguese fishing village, an unremarkable village, but certainly Portuguese, certainly somewhere on the Atlantic, its low houses painted blues and oranges, with faint baroque motifs on the façades, and there next to the dark-wood pier stood a bar-pizzeria with a tavernish sort of look but also a neon
sign with a Moby Dick-like galleon being battered by waves, the kind of galleon that features in the kind of epic you know it’s sure to come through unscathed, and she and I went into this bar-pizzeria for something to eat, to watch the ships go by, to watch the bits of paper blow around between the cars parked along the pier, to nothing, sat at a table made of planks easily long and wide enough to seat 20 people, walls covered in ship flags, various instruments of navigation too, all quite strange to me, to both of us, parts stripped from old galleons, the only people who could possibly comprehend such ornaments were specialists, and I said to her then, just as we were sitting down at the varnished pine tables and just as she moved a glass a little to one side to make space for her Marlboros, that I just had a feeling like I was in the Azores, and this surprised her greatly, she did not remove her sunglasses, preventing me from observing the surprised dilation of her pupils, but I know she was very surprised, people like her (from the Mediterranean) have a very deep-seated idea of their native sea being unlike any other sea due to the fact that it gave birth to what we understand as civilized beauty, the Occident, but, though the Mediterranean was certainly the broadband wiring of classical antiquity, even assuming that this was the case its overratedness as a body of water is undeniable, but she and I didn’t talk about this overratedness as we sat down in that bar on that island to the south of Sardinia, rather we talked about what I had said, ‘I just had a feeling like I was in the Azores,’ though the truth of the matter is we didn’t talk about the implications of what I had said, either, because she merely responded with a curt ‘Yes,’ and though she had never been to the Azores she knew the comparison was apt, accurate, I had never been there either but just then, just in that moment in that bar on that small island to the south of Sardinia where we had gone to eat and to watch the ships go by and gaze upon tumbling bits of paper in the pier car park and to nothing, just then an article by the writer Enrique Vila-Matas came to mind, a short newspaper article I had read many years before, a piece about a bar in a port in the Azores, and I now formed my own association between our current location and that place, a bar in which wood perhaps also predominated, I don’t know, a bar, according to the writer, in which sailors who worked transatlantic vessels left messages for one another on a corkboard in the entrance or, when there wasn’t any space left on the corkboard, carved their missives into the wall using penknives, messages not intended for the locals but for other sailors who, they knew, would be stopping in the Azores at some point, years, sometimes, after the messages had been written, as though the true addressees of all these words were not the people but rather, static postman, the Atlantic itself, which acted as real-time sender, recipient and custodian, or so I had thought when reading that newspaper article written by a man named Enrique Vila-Matas, an Azores story and an Azores bar I had recently, randomly, been reminded of by a friend who had been employed to sail a boat from the Caribbean to Mallorca and who, on arrival in the Azores, had called us to say he’d made it that far, that the crossing had gone well ‘to date’, emphasizing the fact that it was the first time he had sailed that route, indeed the first time he’d ventured very far beyond the Bay of Palma, and I remember the line was terrible that day, I asked him about the bar, the bar referred to in an article by a writer named Enrique Vila-Matas in which he said sailors left messages that would take whole years to be read, and my friend said that the bar had been washed away in a storm, then neither of us said anything for a few moments, both waiting with our phones pinned to our ears, I don’t know exactly why he paused like that before launching into his nautical tales again but there was a silence, I’m sure there was, I still can’t explain it, and when I hung up I thought about the messages carved into the very wall of that Azores bar and how, now, they were at the bottom of the sea, but more troubling was the thought of the paper messages pinned to the big corkboard, I imagined first the ink that made up the words and next the paper itself dissolving, how it was happening in that very moment, and how the words written there would make sense on reaching their final destination, the sea, and this came like a revelation to me, the corkboard and all the words it bore taking on a different meaning entirely, a previously unseen meaning, a meaning that breaks through the frontier of that sometimes insipid feeling between us which suddenly, upon disappearance, becomes essential, a dividing line both imperceptible and deep: all of which is to say, on that day in that village on that island to the south of Sardinia, the memory of the article I had read years before about a bar in the Azores, a bar that according to our friend the sailor no longer existed because it had been washed out to sea, had the effect of immortalizing – in a sense singularizing – a bar-pizzeria on an island to the south of Sardinia where we’d gone to eat, to watch papers blown about on the pier, to nothing, because there are objects, things, that act upon other, faraway things like magnetic poles and in so doing confer meaning on them, as Italo Calvino had it: one has to be very careful about the objects one places inside a text because they affect the story like magnetic poles, they attract the plot, become potential focal points for our attention, and the same happens in life, like for example when you go to a country and a tree branch reminds you of another tree branch in some far-off place, or when you look in detail at the skin pores of a Sudanese person going past you on a bus and they seem identical to the skin pores of an Inuit man who passed you the salt in a spaghetti joint in San Francisco once, because in the final reckoning everything, humans included, is or are made up of electrons, quarks, amoral forces that are the only thing stopping us from flying off in all directions, and nothing else, but that day, the day she and I entered that bar on that island to the south of Sardinia for something to eat, to watch ships go by, to watch paper tumbling along in the wind, to nothing, something else happened, something important: we had nearly finished our second course, a local speciality tuna salad, though it seemed like Azores tuna to me, cooked 7 ways and tossed together with green beans, tomatoes and croutons, and my phone vibrated in my pocket, and it was the friend who was watering our plants at home for us, looking after the cat too, a creature he was going to put dried food down for every 2 days, he was calling for a very specific reason, to tell us he’d found the cat dead on the floor outside the bathroom that morning, and I then pretended we were talking about something else before hanging up, I didn’t know how I was going to break it to her, really the cat was hers, it had been her constant companion for 15 years, after a moment I decided it was best to tell her straight, There’s been a problem with the cat, I said, a problem that can’t be solved, I’m sorry but she’s dead, these were my words, and she fell silent for the rest of the day, and though I’d never got on that well with the cat I also felt quite affected, I’ve never liked interfering more than is strictly necessary in whatever an animal happens to be up to, I like to observe them and really just leave it at that, let them get on with it, though a time would surely come when I was going to have to give consideration to phrases like ‘observe them and really just leave it at that’ and ‘get on with it’ – what did that mean – but I was upset and I surprised myself by beginning to reflect on death in general, on my own death to come, the death of people I’m fond of, and thence reflections on thinkers who have turned their minds to death, and the writing they have left behind on the subject, I even thought about the fate of the universe, how ridiculous, thinking about the fate of the universe, come on, followed by my memories of the cat, the way she moved, the look on her cat face when she chased a fly, the way she’d bat the water bowl a few times to check it had water in it, and a photo I once took of her by mistake when I had actually meant to take a photo of a broken window in the kitchen for an insurance claim, everything took on a special significance, for the first time the cat became an entity of its own, she had a personality now, plus a lifestyle [it’s important to construct a lifestyle for oneself], her own autonomous cosmos and her own magnetic pole that began drawing other objects in, endowing them with life, objects heretofore as ano
dyne as her animal existence, in the same way that those notes on a corkboard in a bar in the Azores held in place by drawing pins had been part and parcel of daily life, were nothing special, and then suddenly, as seawater began to dissolve them, became very different, special [all those drawing pins, as I now imagine them, surely remained embedded in the corkboard, constituting an accidental underwater geography, a kind of map of drawing-pin routes], and when we got home, many months after this trip to Sardinia, the cat’s litter tray was still there, scattering of final poos, its final act, I remember thinking at the time, death – that combustion with its twofold ramifications, the smoke that departs and the ashes that remain – is a mystery, and sets in motion its own special series of coincidences, a couple of years ago, before moving into our current home we lived in a third-floor flat in a very noisy neighbourhood and the woman below us worked in a clothes shop, she was short and had quite a few belly-button piercings that were always on view, rain or shine, and she just loved talking, really, she could talk, I couldn’t bump into her on the stairs without being assailed, 30 minutes minimum and still I’d come away with no clear information about anything, she was married to a guy called Paco, also young and also quite short, quite thin, too, who never said a word but always smiled nicely if you happened to bump into him, the smile of a docile man but possibly tinged with bitterness, too, he was after all someone with a very bad heart, he’d had operations, quite a few, and as a couple they enjoyed watching trashy TV, listening to Mónica Naranjo, that kind of thing, they were happy together, and then one day I stopped seeing him around and soon found out that his cardiac problems had come back and he was very ill, barely 28 and couldn’t leave the flat, couldn’t get out of bed, and one day, in the middle of the day, just after the Tele 5 show El Tiempo had finished, he asked his partner to go down to the local hamburger place, El Perro Loco, to get him a Big Crazy, the works, he said, plenty of everything, which insane request she flatly refused, especially as they’d only just eaten, and he persisted, even cried a little, but no way, she wasn’t budging, and he died that afternoon, and the next day, as though to make up for having not granted him his final wish, she went down to El Perro Loco dressed in black and asked the boy at the till for a Big Crazy, the works, plenty of everything, and as she stood waiting her eye came to rest on the boy’s name badge and it said PACO, just the kind of coincidence I mean when I say I believe in the coincidences generated by death, and when after several months of traipsing around on that island we returned home to the litter tray and the final poos it struck me that, just as the cat had left its final act for us, we had left something important and irretrievable on that island to the south of Sardinia, an island we’d gone to in search of the perfect enclave, the necessary place, for the Project, our Project, as we liked to call it, because the fact that everything resembles some other thing is a universal law, it is the principal on which mimesis rests as has all artistic creation ever since humankind first began interpreting and making the world anew, and if this is true it also holds that all artistic creation is autonomous and even the form that supposedly tacks closest to the real, the documentary, is not real but a kind of realism: it may emulate reality but remains no more than a cut-and-paste job, the product of an edit, a construction, such that it could be said that ‘no creation is reality, but rather a representation of reality and, like all such representations, is a fiction,’ and here we have the very churning mess that art has been thrashing around in for centuries, initially art on its own, until TV talk shows and politics and advertising got in on the act – that said, there are special cases, cases that break the mould, singularities in a sense, things and objects that resemble no thing and no one but themselves, I was 18 when I first worked this out, living in Santiago de Compostela, first year of a physics degree, victim of a certain late punk aesthetic, going around in tight black jeans, my colourful socks on show, red or violet depending on the day, a belt with two rows of silver-stud pyramids and a black leather jacket and a pink Mickey Mouse watch and creeper shoes or ‘buggies’ we’d had sent from London, thick soles on them and buckles, this whole slew of Movida paraphernalia, I also had a black Vespa and a blonde girlfriend, which meant the post-punk spirit as it manifested in me shared tics with both the mods and the rockers, and perhaps it was this that made that deeply artificial postmodern moment so fascinating and so heated, I was living with my older sister, 14 years older than me, I’d go to classes in the morning and study in the afternoons and evenings and I remember marking the passing of my study hours with a histogram I had fashioned to represent the days of the week, and at night I’d go down to a bar in a nearby arcade, the Bergantiños, ill-lit, brown Formica tables and matching chairs, always full of flies, and, for lack of anywhere better in that working-class neighbourhood, a long way from the city centre, and also due to the law of survival that obliges us to adapt our fantasies and hopes to whatever we happen to have at hand, I’d begun to experience the place as homely and special, I’d already read Richard Feynman’s autobiography by this point, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, in which this brilliant physicist talks about a teaching stint at Caltech, and how he decided to ask for the same dessert every day, crème caramel, in order to avoid the unending bother of having to choose a dessert every day, a decision both trivial and maddening, and I, in a humble attempt to imitate this brilliant physicist, this legend, every time I went to the Bergantiños would order a 33cm3 bottle of Coca-Cola, complete with a well-squeezed slice of lemon inside, and I would drink it straight from the bottle, keeping my eye on the pocked yellow of the lemon rind as the Coca-Cola washed over it, and this meant, having resolved the decision of what to drink once and for all, that I could focus completely on the TV or on the conversations going on at the tables around me, practically all of them occupied by toothless solitary old men who mumbled away, sometimes making other sounds, too, all the tables were peopled by such individuals, all except one at the back that was even less well lit and occupied each night by students older than myself, students who were repeating years and still read Workers’ World and talked about the revolution that was always just around the corner, and while I remained impassive in the face of their indelicate aesthetic and theoretical positions, they looked at me as if I were some creature from outer space, just touched down inside their Gulag, but there was still a mutual respect, and the reason they frequented that old man’s bar was simple: the metaphysical communism or communist metaphysics propounded by the landlord, big Xoan, a man in his late seventies who wore a James Dean-style toupee, and who among other things claimed to have been in Berlin in ’71 and that the Wall was a figment of someone’s imagination, and wore a gold hammer-and-sickle sovereign ring on his left hand, and whom I remember asking once whether a hammer and sickle in gold wasn’t a bit of a contradiction, to which he, in his usual tortured tone, said, No, boy, do you understand nothing?, and no more was said on the matter, and who on a different occasion remarked, at length, about the education system going to hell, this being evidenced by the fact that nowadays they referred to water as H2O, and another time, months later, when I had nearly finished my degree, and wanted to know what was coming up on TV one day and saw a newspaper on the table of my peers the neo-revolutionaries, I went over to ask if I could look at it, only to realize – but too late – that the newspaper in question was the Workers’ World, and there was no turning back by this point and I just came out with it, Has that got the TV listings in it? and one of them, glaring at me in my black eyeliner, apparently trying to establish whether perhaps I was making a joke at his expense, exhaled a lungful of filterless Celtas cigarette smoke in my direction and, before the fug had cleared, said, No, brother, no telly listings here, and it was quiet for a moment then, and I went back to my table, back to Miami Vice on the small Grundig set and sips of Coca-Cola, and this was the day, as I sat considering my drink, the dark liquid and the submerged lemon submarine inside, that the thought came to me: this mix of flavours, the flavour inside my mo
uth at that moment, was unlike anything known to former civilizations, it was unlike any other refreshment, which would always have carried an echo of some fruit or spice, would always be mimetic of something, but not Coca-Cola, it really wasn’t like anything except itself, thus broke with mimesis, the principle that had so utterly dominated in art, in advertising, in talk shows, in the way I dressed, in the way those Workers’ World-reading insurrectionists dressed, indeed it (Coca-Cola) was like something born out of a symbolic void and this struck me as a definitive evolutionary shift, a giant leap, the first truly fictitious alimentary product, and this (Coca-Cola) was the special case I mentioned earlier, the first consumer product produced out of nothing, out of the very need to consume a truly new, wholly unaffiliated object, a nowhere object, pure unadulterated consumerism, like the thing that happens with couples, when you fall for someone and you consume that person and that person consumes you, and then you move on to someone else, and that’s the way it is, madness to try and place it inside some kind of moral framework, especially in an artistic milieu, I’m constantly amazed when artists claim the moral high ground for their work, it takes a really quite remarkable level of arrogance to believe yourself to be the only person in the world who can tell right from wrong, I have always tried to write totally amorally, like Coca-Cola, moral roots unmanifest, maybe this is why I like the US, because, like me, its inhabitants are uncouth, unconnected, unweighed-down by any historical backpack, constantly tourists in their own lives, this is also why I am 100% with the artist John Currin when he says he only needs 10 minutes in MoMA before he’s had his fill, any longer than that and his own progress as an artist is going to be stunted, History’s like a huge supermarket, that’s the way it ought to be viewed, yes, that’s got a ring to it, History as supermarket, I’d get a tattoo of that if I didn’t hate tattoos so much, and this method of telling stories amorally, documentarily, is not something I’ve taken from literature but from a film I happened across in the early ’90s, Japanese director Takeshi Kitano’s Hana-bi, a form of narration in which the only imperative is to follow the way its own language breathes, an idea I then came across soon after in Giorgio Manganelli’s fascinating book Centuria and that was corroborated for me, quite a long time later, the night I met the woman now sitting across from me in a bar on an island to the south of Sardinia that bore a resemblance to a bar in the Azores, when I put a stethoscope that a doctor friend had left in my house to her chest and heard noises in her lungs that I could have sworn were voices, voices issuing out of the void, out of the noise-chaos of her breathing, voices that, I knew, gave me a very clear indication of how to tell a story, without roots, rhizomatically, True enough, I said to her in that bar on that island to the south of Sardinia that bore a resemblance to a bar in the Azores, there are some things that can’t be put inside a story with a plot, sex for instance, I never write about sex, I mean I never write a sex scene in the hope of making a reader feel the most intimate aspect of this sex scene, and not because of any moral imperative, not out of an aesthetic one, either, but just, I said, because it seems absurd to me, sex is like dreams, it cannot be ported into a representational mode, it never comes out well on the page, or on-screen, in either place it ends up being untrue, ridiculous, or naff, or trivial, or laughable, or childish, whichever way you look at it both things are impossible to render in a story for the simple reason that they, sex and dreams, sit at the very border of human experience, places in which we are no longer ourselves, which makes them the most important things we can do as humans as well as the most distant and incomprehensible, this is what makes any attempt to recreate them ridiculous, they can be described, yes, as porn movies do, with a tried and tested integrity, or like a person recounting dreams on the psychoanalyst’s couch, but not recreated, I said, and in this way they’re very much like Coca-Cola, they resemble nothing but themselves, and at that point she, in that bar that bore a strong resemblance to a bar in the Azores, without removing the pop-star sunglasses covering her eyes, said, That being so, it means that Coca-Cola does resemble something other than itself, it resembles sex and dreams, it has this thing you’re saying in common with them, no?, and I, hoping to come up with a more or less convincing counter-argument, changed the subject and, hoping to avoid talking about our Project as well, our great Project, the whole reason we were there, on that island to the south of another island named Sardinia and, as chance had it, in that bar that resembled another in the Azores, the Project we had each been avoiding since the moment we disembarked, this in spite of having thrashed it out very precisely already, in spite of the fact this Project had been the centre of gravity for our lives throughout the entire preceding year, all summer and winter, a centre of gravity around which we merely orbited, drawn this way and that, as a way of not talking about our Project I said something about the days that had preceded this day or, in fact, the months preceding this day, this bar, so similar to one in the Azores, because soon after arriving on the island we had rented a car and gone in search of the perfect spot for our Project, the ideal location for setting our plans in motion, this incredible and sprawling Project that had eventually somehow brought us to this place, so I mentioned something about the place we’d gone to straight after setting foot on the island and picking up the car, a typical summer location, a modest peninsula with a nature reserve along one side frequented by egrets and herons, and, on the other side, beach umbrellas and jet skis and snack bars playing loud music, we’d rented an apartment, offensively decorated and altogether functional, everything you needed, the floors worn away by all the salt and sand, we spent 6 days swimming in the mornings and drinking chilled white wine by night, and not mentioning our Project even once, our whole reason for being on the island, some very intense force field had made us take the easy option, basically lounging about, the horizon was truly calm, like some inverted augur of the Project, our Project as we liked to call it, a project we really were going to have to get to grips with – at some point – but what a time we were having, like birthdays and Epiphany all rolled into one, we made love everywhere, slept late and ate at strange hours, like the days were a succession of moments edited out of a Venezuelan fotonovela, or like something out of a video game, we’d become teenagers all of a sudden, children even, back in the one possible paradise, childhood, when time, yet to impinge on reality, is infinite, that same paradise which as adults we reconstruct every time we have a day off, every holiday, the unruly children we become, this is what we work 11 months a year for, to be children again come month 12, but this regression, so intense, was nothing new for us, we’d been there before, we’d been to Thailand 4 years earlier, a country I hadn’t wanted to go to, quite the opposite, like every country with its own flag it seemed absurd and lacking in interest, and we’d spent a few days in Bangkok before making the 12-hour journey by bus to Chiang Mai, a city of some 200,000 inhabitants in the north of the country, and then, against all expectations and indeed, on my part, conviction, the whole thing had been delightful, a paradise, though this was then followed by another unforeseeable turn, namely a disaster that in one way or another changed how I looked at the world, or certain aspects of it, and that gave rise to a further chance occurrence that outdid the disaster itself, I – I’ve said it before – I’m a great believer in chance occurrences, over time I’ve come to believe that everything important in life happens by chance, for example when, the year after this Thailand trip, I was asked to take part in the launch of a book called La brújula (The Compass), by a writer named Jorge Carrión, and here is an extract of what I read at that launch: