---
A man’s corpse: the thing the police struggled most with
was the Barbie figure they found in the stomach dressed in a
Jackie Kennedy outfit. The investigations were also derailed by the fact that the dead man’s teeth were all rectangular, and that they were his milk teeth. This according to a TV documentary.
---
Sometimes I am sitting on the rice-beach and the wind picks up and some pieces of paper are blown from my hands. And from my hands into the sea. They speak of a man and a woman who travel to Sardinia. I watch them fly through the sky, and when they come down on one of the small waves I think: Let them go, they are but the tenth part of some squalid bonsai tree, a bonsai tree that doesn’t even have any roots.
---
The Coca-Cola I opened yesterday has already started turning gummy.
I went to the window that overlooks the garden today; there was electric light.
Verification of the fact that plugging something in is quicker than a word.
---
Something strange in the entrance to the inner courtyard today. There’s a bulge in the ground—the ground bulges, I mean. The protuberance is fairly large, 2 meters long and a foot or so high. Because the earth is plastic, there aren’t any big cracks, it just looks taut. There are some minuscule cracks, like when you stretch the arm of a rubber Fantastic Four figure and the whole thing doesn’t break, just that part changes color.
---
There are things that don’t have any skin, like
a bar of soap: though it can be rubbed away it is automatically
bare anyway. But
this isn’t normally the way of things. I found close to one hundred bars of soap in the bathroom, unused, piled up in the shape of this building which was once an ecotourism place, and a prison before that, and before that a monastery, and before that perhaps just an idea, a project.
---
Found among Agustín’s notes:
“It is to be supposed that the day
when more plastic surgery operations take place
than appendectomies,
planet earth will ascend
to the status of fashion object.
There are ceilings in Las Vegas
with thousands of CCTV cameras,
but don’t believe them, they surveil nothing.”
(Together the long grass and time are performing a very curious kind of surgery on his corpse.)
---
The bulge in the entrance to the inner courtyard has stopped expanding, but two further bulges, much the same, have appeared elsewhere in the garden. I went out for some air tonight, sitting in the chair outside the old reception. I heard, over the sound of the sea, a succession of cracking noises. I got up and followed them—over to these two new bulges in the ground. But saw nothing unusual. Also came across a small room off to the side of the garden, hadn’t previously noticed the door, inside was an array of gardening tools, pruning shears, rakes, wheelbarrows, fertilizer, et cetera, which made no sense to me in a plastic garden.
---
I make web pages by hand. Paper,
scissors, and sticks of glue.
Then I cut them up and use the small pieces
to start a new one.
---
Now I make 3-D web pages, also by hand. I take objects that I find in the living room and make a mound of them, however they happen to stack up, beside the chimney. When I think there’s enough, I kick the stack or mound into the hearth, where it goes up in flames. During my contemplations of the flames, not a single tear has emerged from my eyes, not one.
---
A change in the bulges in the garden: they’ve broken through the plastic simulation-soil and -lawn. Tiny roots have sprouted from them—of a kind: white, and both fibrous and gelatinous. Given that the garden is populated with purely plastic trees and shrubs, I have no idea which tree these roots can possibly belong to. The nearest actual tree is approximately 1 kilometer inland.
---
To do: Climb the watchtowers on the main wall. From there get over to the main arch—straddle the top of the wall and shimmy along, taking care not to fall. Take pliers, screwdriver, and hammer from pants back pocket. Take down SING-SING: ECOTOURISM sign. This will need only a few blows to make it come off. Throw, hard, applying horizontal force. It will strike the ground and skim along a little, like a stone hitting a lake, until pitching upright and lodging vertically in the soft dry soil. It will quiver for a few seconds and then it will be still …
I’ve just come back from doing this. It went exactly as described above.
---
“Residue”: from the Latin “resedeo”: that which prevents progress, that which puts a wrench in certain works intrinsic to life. I have wondered whether Agustín is a residue or not.
---
The colored bulbs in the rear courtyard have been blown down in strong winds.
There is a thick, blood-red line on the floor of my studio, like a bit of Chinese calligraphy I cannot read, like something done with a mop.
Today I thought about my head being like an empty mop bucket.
---
I am in a prison cell showing signs of recent habitation. I have turned on the TV, a woman’s face fills the screen, she says that if Manhattan had the same population density as Sardinia
there would only
be 25 inhabitants.
I see the lights on the island turrets blinking.
I write the word “Delete.”
---
New discovery: the TV in Agustín’s living room works.
New discovery #2: it doesn’t pick up any channels.
New discovery #3: the screen is on top of a video recorder. New discovery #4: no videos in the house.
My head: an empty mop bucket again.
---
Today, a luminous thought: if a machine gave birth, the baby would not have
an umbilical cord. But
every umbilical cord goes into an empty
can of Coca-Cola. That’s it.
---
Found out today that the nearest tree is not 1 kilometer inland but 3 kilometers away and in the direction of the coast.
The roots in the garden continue to grow, more horizontally than vertically, but, as is logical, not just horizontally. It had never occurred to me to see what they smell like. Got down today and put my nose up close, horrible smell, very unpleasant, but also unlike anything I could compare it with; maybe, at a stretch, burned plastic, and/or old shoes.
---
Experiment: Have someone sit inside one of the crenellations of the outer wall, where there is a kind of gun turret. The horizontal aperture cut into the curved wall means only this person’s eyes can be seen.
He meanwhile has a view of the entire horizon.
It’s me in the gun turret. Agustín’s corpse is the one looking in.
---
Most of us live off the back of one glorious day in our lives; all the subsequent days are the fashionable outskirts that follow, they are the sweet propagation of that time. I already know when Agustín’s day of glory was. Even thinking about it frightens me, let alone writing about it.
---
The Shining: Every object, if you look carefully, is an animal
silently laughing at us. This silence, in its most ascetic form, is its bar code, which in turn is the ingredient that alchemists were trying to find in the material world. This occurred to me today when I found a small pair of dirty women’s panties between the pages of one of the big books in Agustín’s library.
The days pass by like seconds. But each second lasts an eternity.
---
I’m on my own in the cell, it’s me and the TV. A light rain outside. Sparks from the TV, and on the screen an architect, who says his name is Rem Koolhaas, talking about seeing a vast, smoking rubbish dump in Nigeria—he saw it from above, flew over it in a small aircraft: “The rubbish dump is t
he lowest form of spatial organization. Pure amorphous accumulation, its locality and outer borders both uncertain. Fundamentally unpredictable.”
Couldn’t agree more.
What happens when this dump is a body? (Come back to this.)
---
The roots in the courtyard garden are half a meter high now. Have asked myself if they are really roots and not the outgrowths of a creature shedding its skin beneath the ground. Every time I see some skin that’s been shed, I think of dirty panties, and I think about Agustín’s corpse. Haven’t been to visit it for a week at least.
---
It strikes me that worldwide reading statistics are wrong: there’s all the writing on the side of packaging and wrappers to take into account.
This has led me to see trash cans for what they really are: libraries. I walked past Agustín’s corpse today. Time is performing a very strange kind of surgery on him: time is an artist, constantly experimenting, never failing.
---
The TV in the cell is broken. It isn’t that you can’t see anything, but rather that all the different programs are playing at once, all superimposed. This led me to come up with the following test, a way of verifying how much trust I can put in a particular TV: the idea is to position a number of different TVs alongside one another, each with the screen facing up, looking at the sky, and each of them playing the same channel so that they give off the same amount of light and heat. Then crack an egg onto each screen, like they were frying pans. Start the timer, see how long it takes each screen to fry its respective egg.
Over time, more and more of the land slips into the sea.
I decided to make a record of all the books in the library today. I opened them one by one. After six hours, I’d covered only a tenth of all the books.
---
Not sleeping well here. There is a special intensity to the roar of the sea in the distance. I get up. I pour away the dregs of the red wine from supper, I look at the toxic-rubber Fantastic Four on the chimney breast, which don’t move at all, and I ask myself how it can be possible that some things in the world never change position.
---
Discovery #5: there are videotapes here. I found them hidden behind a pile of dirty panties that Agustín kept in his wardrobe; there are dirty panties everywhere. The first tape I put in threw up something strange: it was a recording of me and a woman. Well, not me exactly, but someone who looks a lot like me. They seem to be living in one of the cells. The strange thing is that the filming is taking place from ground level, as though there were some transparent material between this cell and the one beneath. It doesn’t have any sound. Recordings nocturnal and diurnal. Them talking, writing, taking showers. Not sleeping, because the bed gets in the way of the shot; you therefore also can’t see if anything sexual took place. Just as strange, the camera moves with them, as though attached to their feet. Doesn’t have any sound.
---
I go down to the coast. I spend a long time looking across at the turrets on the island, some of the lights on which never go out. I lie down, facedown, with my arms out wide, as though trying to embrace the grains of quartz, every single one. From this position, using my head, I scrabble and clear away the rice beneath me, trying to see if it’s transparent under here, too. If I’m now being filmed from below as well.
---
The roots in the garden are up to my chest now. The original three bulges have multiplied, even more obstacles for me to pick my way through. And there are bulges outside the complex as well now, sending roots up the sides of the walls. I believe that Agustín’s corpse has also been lifted up from where it was among the clumps of long grass, the climbing roots have raised it up. I caught sight of it the other day in the distance, went over, and it turns out that the roots or climbers have also ended up destroying the perfect surgery time was performing on the body. Either that or they’re putting the finishing touches to it. I don’t know.
---
This is how it seems to me: the reason we humans sit down and eat together every day is because the raw material, when we buy it in a shop, comes to us dead. Cooking it, serving it up, and enjoying the way it tastes is the same as resuscitating it. This suggests an awareness of time as being marked by a death and a resurrection.
I eat alone. I know I’m still alive because of the smell of my armpits. I also know I’m still alive by comparison: I see Agustín’s corpse every day; that clearly is death. But in spite of this, when I sit down to eat, the food on the plate still seems a circumference more alive than me.
---
Looking through the writings Agustín left, writings that speak of a journey to Sardinia with a woman and of an immense Project, I’ve found something new, discovery #6–or, rather, a deduction: Agustín Fernández Mallo never existed, there was no such person, but a lot of people still paid tribute to him. Agustín Fernández Mallo might even be a pseudonym for a collective of frustrated writers, or it might be that certain great literary works have been concocted simply in homage to him. But in homage to whom? To someone specific? To this secret collective? Or neither, in fact, but a universal archetype instead—of which Agustín Fernández Mallo is a fictitious representative? Many famous books, it has become clear to me, are little more than things written “in the style of” Agustín. In my library alone there are quite a few, for example:
This:
I have told my story on television and on a radio program. I’ve also told it to my friends. I told it to an elderly widow with a huge photograph album who invited me to her home. Some people tell me this story is a fantasy. And I ask them: if it is, then what did I do during my ten days at sea?
This is Gabriel García Márquez, after Agustín Fernández Mallo (The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, trans. Randolph Hogan)
This:
October 15, 1914.
Quiet night. Now masturbate approximately once every 10 days. I am doing little work with my hands, but all the more, therefore, with the spirit; I go to bed at 9 p.m. and am up at 6 a.m. The current commander and I hardly speak.
This is Ludwig Wittgenstein, after Agustín Fernández Mallo (Secret Diaries, translated via the Spanish)
This:
One does not find solitude, one creates it. Solitude is created alone. I have created it. Because I decided that here was where I should be alone, that I would be alone to write books. It happened this way. I was alone in this house. I shut myself in.
This is Marguerite Duras, after Agustín Fernández Mallo (Writing, trans. Mark Polizzotti)
This:
He lay on the sand with the rusty bicycle wheel. Now and then he would cover some of the spokes with sand, neutralizing the radial geometry. The rim interested him. Hidden behind a dune, the hut no longer seemed a part of his world. The sky remained constant, the warm air touching the shreds of test papers sticking up from the sand. He continued to examine the wheel. Nothing happened.
This is J. G. Ballard, after Agustín Fernández Mallo (“The Atrocity Exhibition”)
This:
Now, therefore, I am in the house, which means questions being asked of me that I dare not hope to resolve. I have already spoken of the singularity of the material with which it is made, and that it certainly cannot come from what I see in the swamp. This is what I see, but I know nothing of what lies beneath the surface of the swamp; there must doubtless be underground rivers, lakes, and maybe mountains, and maybe mines, and maybe forests. This house, I believe, was not built; for that men would have been needed, a good amount of time, places to get materials: all things that are incompatible with the swamp. This is Giorgio Manganelli, after Agustín Fernández Mallo (The Definitive Swamp, translated via the Spanish)
The list of related texts I’ve found is very long. I’ll stop there.
---
Walking through the forest of roots in the garden–they are almost at head-height now–I have come to an understanding of something that strikes me as important: these are the roots of a tree that
can be found only in another part of the world, perhaps the Antipodes, I don’t know, but certainly somewhere very far away. Certainly its roots have traveled through the center of the earth before emerging in this garden.
The sea grows louder all the time. No sleep.
---
The roots devour anything in their path, they have also broken through the floor in the building, they are growing up the walls, have begun splitting furniture apart, they are all the way up to the cells on the top floor, their tendrils pierce the metal gates of the gangways, they are forming a solid mass, its final shape as yet undefined, I can’t use the little remaining food in the kitchen out of fear that the gas cooker might set fire to the roots and then the whole place goes up, the other day I took a machete from the garden-tool room and hacked a circular space in the roots invading the kitchen, this at least means I can sit at a table, this at least means there’s a space for making fire, there is now a curvature to the walls of the kitchen, it’s like a wooden bubble, I’ve had time to create another space, also spherical, in the living room, not huge but it works, I’ve watched the videos of the ground-camera recordings again, it’s all of me in one of the cells, well, someone who looks like me at least, with the young woman, she’s not bad, though it’s difficult to say precisely how not bad because of the perspective, she wears a bikini, you can see it when she leans down to pick something up off the floor, daisies on the bikini top, sometimes she leans so close to the floor it’s like the daisies are going to break the lens, the soles of her feet are curious, practically no lines on them, though perhaps that’s just how they look pressed down against the floor, I’m now working on making another hole so I can get out of the building because during these last few days, while I’ve been making these other holes, the roots have grown across the main door, barring my escape, I’m also on the videos alone at certain points, well, someone who looks like me at least, he paces back and forth while the woman sleeps in an armchair, it’s night, the lamps are on, and at other points there’s no one in the cell, hours of that, a comprehensive nothing, this until Agustín comes in, always smelling bad, it’s like I can smell him through the screen, that bargain-basement Kusturica mop, I’m not sure exactly what he’s doing, he isn’t doing anything, he sits in a chair and looks out the window, a rectangle, a window, this repeats for the entire duration of the tape, which lasts days, the date of the recording is some time 5 years ago, this shows on the lower part of the screen, the time and date must have been set wrong on the video camera, but he is older, and this I find disconcerting, the roots are already there on this recording, you can see them quite clearly through the cell window, Agustín seems to have had the same idea as me and has been hacking at them with the machete so that he can see out, I also see he’s excavated the cell, its walls are made of roots, this dark and fibrous woody mass can be seen quite clearly at the corners of the screen, this video is blank (because all future videos are necessarily blank videos, of this I am in no doubt).
The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab Page 32
