The Things We've Seen

‘There are certain writers whose work you turn to knowing you’ll find extraordinary things there. Borges is one of them, Bolaño another. Agustín Fernández Mallo has become one, too. This novel, which ranges across the world and beyond it, is hugely ambitious in scope. It’s a weird, recursive, paranoiac, funny, menacing and thrilling book.’

— Chris Power, author of A Lonely Man

‘Charmingly voracious and guided by fanatical precision and wit, Mallo ties the loose threads of the world together into intricate, charismatic knots. This is the expansive, omnivorous sort of novel that threatens to show you every thought you’ve ever had in a new and effervescent light, along with so many others you couldn’t have dreamed.’

— Alexandra Kleeman, author of Intimations

‘Some great works create worlds from which to look back at ourselves and recalibrate; The Things We’ve Seen takes the world as it is and plays it back through renewed laws of physics. Rarely has a novel left me with such new eyes, an X-ray view of the present.’

— DBC Pierre, author of Meanwhile in Dopamine City

‘The most original and powerful author of his generation in Spain.’

— Mathias Enard, author of Compass

‘The Things We’ve Seen confirms Fernández Mallo as one of the best writers in Spanish, with an absolutely unique style and fictional world.’

— Jorge Carrión, New York Times in Spanish

‘A strange and original sensibility at work – one that combines a deep commitment to the possibilities of art with a gonzo spirit and a complete absence of pretention.’

— Christopher Beha, Harper’s

THE THINGS WE’VE SEEN

AGUSTÍN FERNÁNDEZ MALLO

Translated by

THOMAS BUNSTEAD

‘It’s a mistake to take the things we’ve seen as a given.’

— Carlos Oroza

‘Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.’

— The Wizard of Oz

Contents

TITLE PAGE

EPIGRAPH

BOOK I: San Simón Island (Fossil Fuels)

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

BOOK II: USA (Mickey Mouse grew and grew and turned into a cow)

BOOK III: Normandy (Masters of the Night)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

COPYRIGHT

BOOK I

San Simón Island (Fossil Fuels)

PART ONE

Invitation and first day

There’s so much we take for granted. On the morning of 15 September 2014, as I sat down to write after breakfast, the noise from the road works out in the street made me forget what I was writing about, and something I’d seen on television the previous day came to mind instead: a news item about the fact that one tenth of the earth’s surface has been constantly on fire, through no fault of human beings, for more than two hundred years. A look at a dynamic map of all the fires currently raging on the planet would reveal a multitude of these expanding red zones being carried forth by surface winds, in Africa especially, the continent referred to by experts in the field as the Heart of the Inferno. I found it startling to consider that our human modernity had developed side by side with this incandescent presence.

Some years ago, a musician friend told me about a long stint he’d once spent in an African jungle. Wanting to make recordings of instances of silence in nature, he had travelled to Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania, the second largest and second deepest lake on the planet. ‘So deep,’ he said, ‘that there’s no oxygen in the waters at the very bottom. They’re fossil waters.’ A helicopter had dropped him off in a clearing in the surrounding jungle with nothing but a tent, a change of clothes and some survival snacks, plus the necessary gamut of recording equipment, all manner of tapes and ambient microphones. He saw no fires burning, or if he did, he didn’t mention them to me, but he did say that, after a month and more of wandering those jungles, what struck him most was the utter absence of silence. The way in which the sounds of the natural world got inside his head day and night was something he recounted with genuine unease, and not because the sounds were strident or clashing in any way, but because of their unerring persistence. In the following months, during trips he sought to undertake as consecutively as possible, the same experience played out in the jungles of Brazil, the forests of Alaska and at a polar station a long way south of Patagonia, leading him to the conclusion that silence does not in fact exist in nature; rather it’s a fantasy fabricated by our culture, a concept we’ve simply dreamed up. And this was something my friend couldn’t understand. Or, he understood it, but he refused to accept it. The last I heard, his search for a piece of silence on Earth was still ongoing.

On that September morning, these and other thoughts were interrupted when I got an email containing the first mention I’d ever come across of San Simón, an island situated in the Vigo estuary in Galicia. The sender was someone who went by the name Rómulo, and I was being invited to take part in the third instalment of a programme called Net-Thinking, the aim of which, from what I understood, was to reflect on digital networks by bringing together both communications professionals and artists who, like me, sometimes use the internet as a space, and a tool, in our work. I had to read the message a couple of times before I remembered where I’d met Rómulo: at the launch of a mutual friend’s book, at which we’d exchanged only a few words. The people participating in the programme, the email explained, would stay in a hotel on the island – attached images showed some fairly smart facilities – and there was mention too of another participant, Julián Hernández, whom I knew both in his capacity as a member of the punk band Siniestro Total and through his literary involvements. Rómulo wanted the two of us to take part in a panel discussion. I wasn’t sure at first, but what finally won me over was mention of something that struck me as unusual: the idea was for there to be no audience present, only people watching a live stream that was due to be broadcast on various online platforms. In previous years these live streams had apparently attracted large viewerships, in Spain and Latin America especially. I was at the end of a period of intense work, during which I had barely left Mallorca; a few days on a different island, I said to myself, might do me some good.

A few hours later I realized I had in fact heard of San Simón before; it was a mystery how I’d managed to forget. In 1995, the journalists Clara María de Saá, Antonio Caeiro and Juan A. González had made a documentary called Aillados, which is Galician for Isolated, along with an accompanying book, both concerned with the years in which this collection of craggy rocks, no bigger than three football stadiums laid end to end, had served as a prison camp, with inmates drawn particularly from people in Pontevedra province who’d opposed the coup that precipitated the Spanish Civil War. I still owned the book; in fact, it had travelled with me from my native La Coruña to Mallorca, accompanying me every time I’d moved house – at least five times – since 1996. The house I now live in is organized in such a way that I can see all of my books at a glance. I keep none in boxes, none stowed away in wardrobes or back rooms, but there are so many of them now – two bookcases, each holding more than three thousand volumes – that it still took a while to lay my hands on it. Remarkably, it hadn’t fallen to pieces, and there were only one or two damp stains on it. I flicked through its collection of photographs and survivor testimonies. San Simón was described variously as a place of severe hunger, where people were routinely tortured or lined up against walls and shot, and as actually being easier on inmates than other penal institutions of the day. I went back to Rómulo’s email. The island is currently run by a foundation named Island of Thought. It had a ring to it. Island of Thought vs. Island of Repression, I said to myself. With that, the idea of fifteen people getting together to talk about the opposite of isolation – social networks – struck me as more suggestive still. Fifteen people transmitting ideas across the world from a place of isolation. I went on Google Earth and took a look at the island. It has an unusual shape, like two balls, one large and one small, joined by what in the images appeared to be a bridge spanning a rocky formation covered in green algae. On further inspection, I was reminded of the ground plan of Roma-Fiumicino airport. A connection that filled me with satisfaction, since the full name of Roma-Fiumicino is the Intercontinental Leonardo da Vinci Airport, which in some way bestowed upon the island a Renaissance air. Frankly, I went to bed that night excited about the trip. As always, I fell asleep attempting to conjure four white dots behind my eyelids, four dots that were once upon a time a permanent presence, but that at some point in my life vanished and never came back.

I took a flight from Mallorca to La Coruña one morning in October, staying in my parents’ house for a few days – only occupied now in summer – before the transit to San Simón. A taxi took me to the town of Redondela, whose docks are the launching point for boats going out on the Vigo estuary. On board, I looked back towards the coast, letting my thoughts drift over it, until, after nearly three hours, San Simón suddenly appeared in the water up ahead. The lush greens of the island showed silver under the midday sun. A few minutes later an old, white building with stone foundations came into view, protruding among all the vegetation. Drawing closer to the dock, we saw that a shore boat had been sent out to collect me; I was the last in the group to arrive. A young sailor with blonde hair and sunglasses was at the helm and he gestured for me to pass my suitcase across. We skipped over the waves to shore. The sun was out but the wind remained biting, and I wrapped a heavy raincoat around myself. The island grew in size as we approached, as did the looming white building, some four storeys tall and set on stone foundations, its back wall crumbling directly into the sea. ‘That’s it,’ said the boatman, ‘the hotel.’ I don’t think anywhere in Galicia was better connected to the world at that moment than this island, given the state-of-the-art satellite receivers that had been brought in for the occasion.

Rómulo was there at the jetty to meet me. The boatman lifted my suitcase out and set off back the way he had come. I wheeled my suitcase behind me along the stone jetty, which was covered in seaweed and still wet from high tide, and we embarked on the climb up some granite steps with restored walls and geometric brakes of shrubs on either side. This brought us out at a gravel esplanade with buildings all around it. One of them, formerly one of the prison’s principal wings, they told me, was to be the location for the Net-Thinking meeting. Next to that was a dining hall with high French windows; inside, two waiters and one waitress, all quite young, were putting chairs out and laying a large table; the waitress was clearly pregnant. There was a chapel on the opposite side of the esplanade. Its door was open, giving a view of the room inside, bare save for a stone altar set into the wall, atop which stood a life-size wooden saint. Saint Roch, I was told; he was missing both hands, someone having either snapped or sawed them off, I don’t know which. We were on our way to the hotel, but stopped to take in the conference room. It was quite small, and with its fifteen chairs arranged in a circle it reminded me of a room in a driving school. At the back were three professional video cameras on tripods and two large screens on which messages were going to be shown in real time from people following proceedings on Twitter. ‘We’ve got thousands of followers,’ said Rómulo, ‘people sometimes tweet from the US and Australia, you’ll see. Not to mention the messages on Facebook and other platforms. They come flooding in.’ We returned to the esplanade and went along an avenue of eucalyptus and myrtle shrubs to the hotel, where the room keys had been placed in their respective pigeonhole-like compartments. ‘Help yourself,’ said Rómulo, pointing to my key, which was for room 486. ‘It isn’t a hotel, then?’ I said. ‘It was once, but it went under. Not enough people came.’ ‘So, it’s just us here?’ ‘That’s right,’ he nodded. ‘Nobody will be coming to the island over the next three days and, barring an emergency, nobody’s going to be leaving either.’ A young man with blonde hair came over, and Rómulo introduced him as Javier, the director of the foundation. It was a beautiful place, I said; I’d noticed how well tended the gardens were, while at the same time they’d succeeded in leaving them wild. I asked why the place was so underused – why no residencies for artists, writers, musicians, historians or even scientists? It was the perfect place for all kinds of projects. The money wasn’t there, he said. I see, I said to myself: the political will wasn’t there, is what he meant.

I went up to my room with my suitcase. There was no lack of mod cons, but that did nothing to change the monastic air of the place. My room overlooked the rear of the island. In the far distance you could see Rande Bridge on the mainland, not so dissimilar to Brooklyn Bridge, though in its case steel is outweighed by concrete. A trail commenced below my window and led down to a small stone bridge across the narrow strip I’d seen on Google Earth, connecting San Simón to the other, smaller island. I saw a building on the smaller island, modernist-looking and stuccoed light blue, a single storey high and surrounded by towering eucalyptus trees. In the farther distance a security guard was checking the perimeter, picking his way between some rocks; he had a gun at his belt as well as a truncheon, a detail that always draws my eye. He moved in the direction of the chapel and disappeared down a track. I stepped back from the window and opened my suitcase, not taking my clothes out though; I’ve never seen the point of unpacking when I’m on a trip. From one of the side pockets I took a small chunk of black basalt rock with red mottles on it, like flecks of paint or blood. I’d found it in a ditch next to a road in the north of France years before, and kept it with me ever since as a kind of amulet. I took Aillados from another of the pockets and put it on the table. Knowing my tendency to get bored at conferences, I immediately came up with a way of killing time: I would seek out the locations of the photographs in the book – all of which were from around 1937 – and take my own photos of them as they now were in the present day.

Everybody was there when I went down, sharing anecdotes from previous iterations of the conference; I was the only one, it turned out, who hadn’t taken part before. We set off for the dining room a little before 1 p.m. I asked Javier if the island was inhabited all the year round. When he said that it wasn’t, I said, ‘What, not even the security guard?’ ‘In winter he comes during daylight hours,’ he said. ‘The boat comes to take him back to the mainland at night.’ ‘Who looks after the place at night then?’ Javier, giving a lop-sided smile, said, ‘It doesn’t need looking after at night. It isn’t the kind of place where anyone would want to spend a winter’s night, I can assure you.’

It was during lunch – octopus empanadas, grilled sea bass and a choice of red or white wine – that I first saw them: a table with fourteen people sitting at it sending out tweets. Every now and then one would look up and say something, but to no reply from any of the others, and they’d instantly go back to tweeting. Next to my napkin was a map of the island split across three panels, with notable places marked along with historical explanations and descriptions of the locations in the current day. This was something that had been apparent from the moment I arrived, that everything on the island was explained by way of a before/after binary. At the first opportunity, I excused myself and got up from the table. I had nearly two hours before the panel discussions were due to start, at 4.30 p.m.

I grabbed my copy of Aillados and took one of the paths at random, going along with one eye on the book, trying to identify the places depicted in the photographs. It all looked very different now. It was no use trying to orientate by the trees, which had either been chopped down or grown considerably. Similarly, some of the tracks and paths had been cleared, while others were so overgrown as to have disappeared from sight. I decided to change tack: I would focus on one photo at a time, and simply walk until I came to the place in question. I passed two of the prison wings, the doors of which I tried but found locked. I hopped over a wall onto the bay, made my way between the rocks I’d seen the security guard navigating earlier on, small crabs scattering and hiding away at my approach. There were no signs of human activity recalling any culture this side of the 1960s, only the remnants of a few boats and pieces of scrap metal, all worn down by sand and sea, and which could just as easily have passed as being five or five thousand years old. I left the coastline and went back towards the interior of the island, coming past a large number of abstract, semi-anthropoid sculptures, which gave me something of a fright. Plaques detailed the names of the sculptors and the construction dates; they were all from the 1990s, when it appeared a concerted effort had been made to renovate the island. I reached the stone bridge that led to the smaller island. A bronze plaque here revealed that although it was part of San Simón Island, it had its own name – San Antón – and had served as a lazaretto in the nineteenth century; during the civil war, any prisoners who fell ill would have been held here. The hinges to the doors at either end were still there, but not the doors themselves. I hurried across, and went on, stepping over inch-high foundation blocks; it was like a to-scale plan of the former installations. I walked around the light blue-stuccoed building: a plaque by the main door informed me that it now housed historical archives. I looked in through a window. Inside, a neat draughtboard of Formica tables and chairs, with cobwebs hanging between them. Each of the tables had a computer on it, and by my calculations these would have been from around 1997, since I was able to make out ‘PC Intel 486’ on the sides of the machines. I turned and went down a faint track that brought me out at a seawall, which I followed as far as a clearing with a series of what were undoubtedly graves: rectangular granite slabs of different sizes, tinted green and light orange by lichens, and unmarked. I saw one that was particularly small, seemingly for an infant, though it too bore neither name nor date. Everything on the island had its corresponding information plaque, I said to myself, everything but the graves; the before/after binary didn’t apply here. The wall was pocked unmistakeably with bullet holes, though whether or not from stray firing-squad bullets I didn’t know. I checked my watch: not long left. I hurried back. Crossing the bridge, I leaned over the railing and looked down at the water flowing by. Silvery fish drifted slowly along, not as a unified shoal but each giving the impression of following its own course; they criss-crossed and surfaced singly, and there was no way of telling whether the laws of nature went with them; they looked like sardines to me, but I know nothing about fish so doubtless they weren’t. Crossing the bridge and approaching the buildings I had walked straight past before, I saw that I had come to one of the places in the book. I opened it and found the photograph. Taking out my mobile phone, I lined the picture up and took it.

I felt like I was looking at two identical rivers, each flowing past me at a different rate.

The talks threw up nothing unexpected. The ideas proposed, most of which were to do with managing the online aspect of businesses, didn’t interest me. Thousands of people did indeed send in messages via Twitter. I remember thinking that people ought to have some idea what they’re talking about before deciding to tweet about it. Thinking my silence might be making the organizers uncomfortable, I decided to offer something up about times when communities, whether human or animal, are isolated for long periods – though not long in the evolutionary scale of things – and a tendency that has been observed whereby the larger animals shrink in size and, by contrast, the smaller animals, everything up to rabbit-size, grow larger. This is what had happened on Flores Island, near modern day Java: the resident humans and elephants had shrunk over time, while the various rodents had begun to grow far larger, gigantic in fact, eventually reaching sizes we in the present day would find shocking. The reason being an innate survival mechanism that’s shared the world over and results in the balancing out of different species. The most disconcerting thing to the anthropologists who found the fossils on which these discoveries were based, I continued, was that though the humans’ brains had shrunk, this did nothing to diminish their intellectual capacities; only their will had been affected. A point came when they began to neglect the most basic aspects of survival, coitus included, ultimately paving the way for the group’s extinction. Everyone listened as I spoke, but when I finished, they sat saying nothing, as though expecting me to go on. A tweet appeared on the screens, written in unmistakably Argentinean Spanish: ‘Go, chavón! So with you on all of that.’ I said all of this, I added, with regards to the isolation that sometimes occurs in certain networks, for example in private groups on Facebook, or on networks used exclusively by the military or financial corporations. I think this was my only contribution to proceedings that afternoon. The truth is, I found it intimidating being watched on the internet in that way. Speaking in front of an invisible audience is not something I’m used to. There’s a golden rule: eye speaks with eye (with screens intermediate or not), voice speaks with voice (telephone), text speaks with text (letters, other kinds of written messages), but the mixing and crossing over of different channels is not a thing to be entertained. And in that place, everything was mixed and crossed over. There was a view through the window of the estuary and the mainland beyond. The boats moored there were a single, indistinguishable mass of colour; the one that had left us on the island would have been among them, I thought – phrasing it to myself, I noticed, as though the boat were never coming back. I spent the rest of the time studying the other participants’ faces; I could discern no sign of plastic surgery, either on lips, cheeks or elsewhere, or indeed any of the habitual characteristics you’d expect to find in a sample of twenty-first-century humanity chosen – as this one supposedly was – at random.

There was still a little daylight, and it wasn’t yet time for dinner, so I decided to take the book on another walk round the island. This time I went in the opposite direction. Leaving the complex, I climbed a steep slope, bisected by what was referred to as the myrtle path: an avenue not more than a hundred yards long, overhung by the myrtles, the tops of which joined overhead, though the early evening sun broke in at ankle height and lit the way. I became aware of layers upon layers – dozens of layers – of matter beneath my feet. I knew there were hundreds of bones and hundreds of teeth below me, hundreds of knives and forks, items of clothing and photographs and weapons, and a great many more objects besides that I’d never set eyes on – some that anyway would be unrecognizable to me – but the sensation I had was not of each of those objects singly, but rather the sum of them, a rusty, incandescent magma, a kind of San Simónian earth’s core, a generator of its forward propulsion, or something along those lines, anyway. The myrtle path brought you out at a bandstand whose circular platform led to a set of granite steps, which in turn wound down to a path that sloped away to eventually skirt the edge of the island. Descending the steps, I opened the book and found another match. I took my phone out and took the photograph. I went back to the hotel. It was almost time to join the others for dinner, but I went on my blog and uploaded the photo from the book alongside the one I’d just taken, supplying each with the same caption: ‘Flesh.’

And I don’t know why I put that. What I really wanted to say was: ‘The disappearance of flesh.’

The subject of the disappearance of flesh was on my mind during the dinner, most of which I spent not saying anything to anybody, while everyone else, fewer geeks among them now than at lunch, put down their smartphones from time to time and spoke to one another. I looked at the menu: vegetable tart, veal cheeks with potatoes, fruit salad, red wine, coffee – a list that led me to reflect on the special nature of eating, a process through which it was as though the food, dead when you bought it at the supermarket, came back to life in being cooked. A kind of ritual in which, by the act of eating, we made something sacred disappear forever. I went outside to smoke. I marked out a circle with my toe in the gravel. Through the high windows, I saw the others drinking wine, lifting forks to mouths, gesticulating, checking Twitter, and all this that I now see, I said to myself, will also disappear in a matter of minutes, never to return again. When I went back to my seat, they had already brought dessert. Picking up my cutlery, I noticed a folded piece of paper poking out from under my plate. Opening it, I found something written inside: ‘I need help.’ Instinctively I glanced around: nobody seemed to have noticed. I looked behind me. One of the male waiters, quite fat, hair cropped almost to a zero and a trace of the indigenous Latin American about his features, nodded in such a way that I knew for certain it was from him. I neither smiled nor returned the nod, glancing along the table: a heated discussion was taking place about trolls on social media. I put the note in the inside pocket of my jacket and went on eating. When the waiter came over with the coffee, neither of us made any allusion to the note’s existence.

After dinner, everyone went back to the hotel. Somebody, I don’t remember who, had gone to the effort of bringing gin, tonic and lemons, and gin and tonics were being prepared in the former cafeteria. I was too tired to start drinking, and just had tonic water. To one side, a group was discussing the internet. I said to them that in my view the important thing about the internet was its bodilessness – the fact of it being, in a manner of speaking, one gigantic brain that drifts around the planet without ever encountering the fat, muscles and bones that would tether it to the earth, and that as it drifts it projects all manner of different shadows, which, paradoxically, don’t come about through contact with any kind of body either. Hence the confusion, I continued, concerning everything to do with the net: it’s a primitive organism, still only half-finished, in a phase similar to that of the microorganisms that one day clambered out of the water, millions of years before they became the amphibians that were the precursors of the humans of today. Judging by the group’s silence, I don’t believe my intervention convinced anyone in this case either.

I decided to go for a walk. The breeze carried hints of eucalyptus and the sea. I went in the direction of the chapel, and once I got there kept on going. I soon came in sight of a small prison building, three storeys high. I was approaching it over a rise, putting me at eye-level with the third floor, two of the windows in which had lights on. I was surprised to find myself creeping forward as quietly as I could, before stopping and squatting down. At the nearest window to me, one of the waiters and the waitress were locked in an embrace by the bed, her very large belly hindering their proximity. She closed the curtain, and a moment or two later the shadow play showed the man taking her from behind. In the next bedroom along, the waiter who had left the note for me was sitting on his bed gazing down at the floor, head bowed, elbows on his knees; his head, with the very short hair, resembled the surface of the moon – I looked up at the sky, the moon was full up there as well. I stayed put for several minutes, nothing changed. The sex proceeded so quietly it seemed like a scene from a silent movie; I got up when everything was over. Thinking to go on past the building, I started down the steep slope that led to it. Turning towards the main entrance, I found the waiter I’d seen sitting on his bed moments before, in the same posture but on a small stone bench, and still as porcelain. This stopped me in my tracks. I said hello; I could hardly just ignore him. He offered me a cigarette, which I refused. He apologized for the note, saying that I struck him as a person to be trusted, the only one on the whole island, he said, and that he had to tell someone, had to tell someone that he couldn’t take it any more, it was driving him mad, and that if he were to end up doing something he regretted, I could always say he’d warned me, and the note would be my proof. I asked him to be a little clearer, what did he mean exactly, and he pointed at the building behind him, again saying he couldn’t take it any more, that if they went on like this he’d end up doing something he regretted. ‘She’s my wife. You’d be hard-pressed to tell at the moment, but we are married. The very first chance she had, she got it on with that guy. We’ve been here over a week, making the place ready for you lot, and she and him have been at it constantly.’ He started telling me how much he liked his job, serving the food, laying tables, checking dishes, cleaning the limescale off the glasses before putting them out, and cooking and making bread; in Uruguay he had been a first class baker, he knew how to make all different kinds of breads, he said, and at this calmed down somewhat, before coming out with certain things I found unsettling, such as: ‘Life is a layer of soil no bigger than a dirty napkin,’ and ‘God is a dishwashing machine, the big dishwashing machine,’ then adding that in Argentina he’d worked as a pastry chef, and that ‘intelligence is the final barrier to be demolished,’ and that he sometimes felt afraid, very afraid, and that at that particular moment he was ‘on the very cliffs of fear,’ and even these latter statements, though including no mention of dirty napkins or God or dishwashing machines, unsettled me all the same, and then, suddenly addressing me more formally, he said he’d seen my remarks on the Net-Thinking panel, well, he hadn’t seen them directly, but in the kitchens while watching the talk on his tablet as he cooked dinner. ‘It was me who sent the tweet, "Go, chavón! So with you on all of that. Remember, mister? I thought you really hit the nail on the head there. I never knew that about large animals in isolated communities shrinking, and smaller ones growing gigantic, and all because of survival, you could have said getting bigger but you said growing gigantic and that’s just perfect, perfectly put, the exact same thing’s happened to me, back in Argentina my wife and I had a very active social life, we were always going out with friends, going to dinner, family barbecues, but when the crash happened and we had to emigrate to Spain, leaving all our friends and family behind, we came to form a kind of island together, a big island, because as you know when it comes to people, the smaller an island, the harder it is to inhabit, and in the end, just as you, sir, said during that talk, the strong grow weak and the weak grow gigantic. In the same way, my wife, who was the weak one back in Argentina, is gigantic now, while me, I’m wasting away. The things you said during the talk, sir, made everything clear to me. I’m sorry, I’m crying now, I just don’t know how it’s come to this, would you like a cigarette?’ Again I said no. ‘I met my wife in Uruguay, in Cabo Polonio, which is this beautiful place by the sea, I was twenty-two and had a summer job in a hotel, the only hotel still going there, I was trying to put a little money aside. Paula – that’s her name – who can’t have been more than sixteen at the time, showed up one day with her parents and her younger brother, great little guy he was; I remember taking their bags up to the suite on the top floor, and then seeing Paula go straight through to the living area, picking up the remote control and flicking through till she came to the Savage Nature channel, at which point she takes out a box of felt-tip pens and a sketch pad buried at the bottom of a holdall with their swimming costumes in it and, leaving the TV on, she goes down to the pool, finds herself a lounger and puts her headphones in. I go over to her, ask if I can bring her a soft drink, and she, without a word of reply, opens the pad – a big one, A3 – shoves her little brother away, who’s been tugging on her bikini bottoms non-stop to get her to go in the water with him, takes the lids off the pens and starts drawing the hotel. I ask her what she’s drawing, and she doesn’t answer at first, but then, taking out the right headphone, says to me she draws whatever she feels like drawing, and what she feels like drawing at this particular moment is a dream, an eternal dream, that’s how she puts it, I’m drawing an eternal dream, and I, having had express orders from the boss to look after these people because they happen to be relations of his, decide to bring her a soft drink, and then Paula goes on to spend the whole rest of the morning and afternoon not moving an inch, immersed in her drawing, and when it comes time for supper and I go up to take their orders, the mother says to me that Paula still hasn’t come back, she must be down by the pool still, and that I should take her a sandwich, and on the TV in the living area I see some animals, similar to reindeer, and they mate very briefly before going their separate ways, and I take Paula her sandwich and see she hasn’t touched the drink, I don’t know what she drank that whole day, nothing I suppose, the pens are scattered all around the lounger with the lids off and her fingers are covered in ink, and I step on one of the pens, a red one, it splits but this doesn’t faze her in the slightest, I know it was red because the ink went all over the sole of my shoe and I spent the next few days going around leaving red marks on the hotel floors, one of the cleaning ladies pointed it out to me and the boss made me go and buy new shoes, the hotel only gave you one pair of shoes with your uniform, you had to just get on with it, and so, like I was saying, I take the sandwich out to the pool, music’s still blaring out of her headphones, I don’t know what she’s listening to, something light and very orchestral, probably one of those Sinatra knock-offs, where I come from they’re everywhere, and, taking the plate and putting it on the low table next to her, she smiles at me and, taking out her headphones, says: I’m going up to watch the birds migrating on the Savage Nature channel," and leaves her sandwich right where it is. That night the mother calls down to reception asking for a light breakfast to be brought early the next morning, at eight, and so there I am the next morning at eight sharp, and I go in, and the parents and the brother are asleep but not Paula, Paula’s in the living area, sitting in the dark watching TV, the Savage Nature channel, face bathed in the metallic-blue light you get from old Uruguayan TV sets, she looks like she hasn’t been to bed, and some birds, says a voice off-screen, are undertaking a transcontinental migration, they migrate without knowing why they do it, the experts don’t understand it either, there are disagreements over whether climate change is to blame, in reality nobody understands anything, and Paula doesn’t notice me come in, I go away again and not long after that she’s out by the pool once more – see what I’m saying? – she was always out by the pool, there on that same lounger, drawing with all those different felt-tips, and she goes on drawing the outside of the hotel, an ‘eternal dream’, as she’d called it, and inside each of the windows she draws these intricate scenes, but when I take a closer look I see they aren’t domestic scenes, and they aren’t your usual kind of summer scenes either, they’re set exclusively on the moon: each and every one of the rooms has the surface of the moon inside it, and an astronaut, the same one, hitting a golf ball, and that’s all, and I say to myself this girl is lo-co, and off I go again, and come evening, when I take them their supper, they’re all sitting together at the table and I witness a family fight, the mother tells Paula she doesn’t want her watching the Savage Nature channel any more, there’s been quite enough avian migrations for one holiday, and that the title itself says it all, that channel is for sa-va-ges, and Paula bursts out crying and runs out of the suite, I finish serving them, it’s a few more minutes before I’m all done, and then I go out and find her on one of the landings, the one between second and first floor, she’s sitting there crying, I ask if she’s okay, though she obviously isn’t, and she tells me she can’t stand her mother any more, calls her a tyrant and says that on top of that she’s had breast implants, more than anything in the world she hates these new breasts of her mother’s, she had nursed at a pair of breasts that didn’t exist any more, they were simply something else now, it was like those new breasts had been a way of blotting her out, the daughter, forever, like a way of blotting out her birth, her first words, her first steps, and, in short, everything that made her the person she was today, and that, truth be told, her mother had done it because she hated her daughter too, and I have no idea what to say to this, the things she’s saying are hardly normal but that doesn’t mean they don’t make sense, eventually I get her to come down to the kitchens with me, I cook a steak for her, one of the staff steaks, not quite the same quality as the food we served guests but, you know, acceptable, and she wolfs it down before asking for a glass of milk, drinking milk with your dinner is for gringos or little children, I say, but that’s what she wants, a glass of milk to wash her steak down, fine, no problem, I go get the milk, and then pull up a stool and sit next to her, behind us the frying pan is sizzling, there’s smoke coming off it, I tell her it’s steam dropping into the oil from the extractor hood though in fact it’s cockroaches clambering up the side of the pan and then having no way to get back out again and getting fried, and when she finishes eating I say why doesn’t she come down to my room in the basement, nobody’ll bother us there, and she says, Okay, and the first thing she does when we get there is to turn the TV on, again hammering at the remote until she finds Savage Nature, she then asks me to turn the light off, and we sit in silence watching the birds migrate across the screen, and she says: See, these birds don’t get it either. Don’t get what? I say. They don’t get why they migrate, she says, but they do it all the same, and then she says that what she wants to do is leave, go away, away from her family, and then we kiss; it’s intense, her initiating the whole thing, and we spend the rest of the night making plans for our joint getaway, like the birds, she says, and keeps on saying, like the birds, and this all happened four years ago now, and look,’ he gestured to the building once more, ‘now here I am on this island, getting smaller all the time, shrinking while she and that other rat are growing gigantic, and,’ he says, ‘she’s pregnant, to top it off she’s pregnant, we’re due to have a baby girl in just over a month’s time.’

He stopped there. Neither of us said anything else.

I had noticed previously the way people, when at a loss for what to do, take their phones out and start amassing screens with their fingertips. I did this now, while he lit and made short work of another cigarette. Then, as the silence between us began to grow thin, I told him I ought to be getting back.

When I made it back to the hotel everything was in darkness. I took my key from my pigeonhole and glanced into the cafeteria before going upstairs. On the bar, balloon glasses and half-melted ice cubes. The chairs arranged in echoes of the various groupings. For some reason, one I can’t now explain, it felt wrong to go on surveying this empty scene. I went up to my room, opening the shutters as soon as I went in. The swaying branches of the palm tree outside, natural megaphones, amplified the wind. Darkness had swallowed the small bridge and the light blue of the former lazaretto building. I thought about the Intel 486’s on their respective desks, and about their hard disks, deep in a dream that might or might not have been eternal but certainly had no defined end: birds that could no longer migrate, or were dead. In my bed, I leafed through a book I’d brought with me, Physics at the Residencia de Estudiantes, produced by the publishing arm of that institution. After reading ‘Stellar Universe’, a talk given by Arthur