Nocilla Experience

Agustín Fernández Mallo, Agustin Fernandez Mallo, Thomas Bunstead

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781910695258
• eBook ISBN: 9781910695265
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Somewhere in Spain, Marc, an avid reader of the Philips Agricultural Guide, pegs mathematical formulas to clotheslines on the roof of an 8-storey building. In London, the artist Jodorkovski spends hours painting tiny vignettes on chewing gum stuck to the pavements. In Miami, Harold spends his days devouring every box of Corn Flakes with his ex-wife's birthday as its sell-by-date. Meanwhile, in Corcubion, Spain, Anton is working on an audacious theory about the shared properties of barnacles and hard disks. These are some of the narrative strands that make up this arborescently structured novel, the second instalment in the Nocilla Trilogy, hailed as one of the most daring experiments in Spanish literature of recent years. Featuring walk-on parts for Julio Cortazar during the writing of Hopscotch and Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, and full of references to indie cinema, collage, conceptual art, practical architecture, the history of computers and the decadence of the novel, Nocilla Experience picks up where Nocilla Dream left off, presenting us with a hidden and exhilarating cartography of contemporary experience.

1

How could I have been the one to come up with the Theory of Relativity? I think it must have been because I was a late developer.

 

Albert Einstein

2

Then they found a body floating face up in the lake, and the right eye, the only one it had left, was open and showed no sign of trauma. The volume of the body, due to the water it had absorbed, and to the high density of chemicals in the lake and the different fauna and flora that had formed inside the intestines and other passageways of the deceased, had multiplied by almost 2. Body-sponge. Teabag. In life we absorb the past and we take in air; when we die, we are entered instead by chemicals and organisms, and by things breeding, and by the future – though a future worthless to us now. And then nothing. From the rooftop terrace, the backs of cars can be seen as they advance down the wide one-way street to the waterfront shipyard. They cannot come back along it, nor will they be able to – not one.

3

Sandra flies from London to Palma de Mallorca. Barely 1 hour, the orbit of the Earth on pause. She flicks through the in-flight magazine, British Airways News. Reports on wine production in Ribeiro and Rioja, the latest high-tech architecture in Berlin, mail-order Majorica pearls. A tear falls onto a photo of a Caribbean beach, but the beach has not pricked it from her, and neither has the Caribbean, nor the gravity to which all tears are subject. She looks out the window, looks ahead, sees neither clouds nor earth. Here, the verification of something she already knew: on aeroplanes, there is no horizon.

4

Marc studies the book with care, Philips Agricultural Guide: 1968. An old possession of his father’s that he kept. He glances out at the roof terrace through the door of the hut in which he lives. A shed at the top of an 8-storey building which he has assembled over time using sheets of corrugated iron, oil drums, pulverized cardboard and asbestos offcuts. All put together in such a way that the 4 walls have become mosaics of chopped-up words and icons – La Giralda oil, Repsol lubricants, Drink Pepsi, sanitary ware by Roca. Sometimes he looks at them and, from this welter of logos and brands, tries to discern maps and itineraries, as yet undiscovered traces of further artificial territories. The roof area, which none of the tenants comes up to any more, is criss-crossed by a series of clothes-lines made of wire. Rather than clothes, however, they have pieces of paper pegged to them, each with mathematical formulas handwritten on a single side. When the wind is up [it’s always up] the pieces of paper, seen front-on, form a kind of sea: a tumult of theorems in ink. Seen from behind, the blank sides of the A4 sheets seem closely symbolic of a desert – the closest symbol possible. Watching as they flutter in the wind he thinks, What a fascinating theory. He shuts the Philips Agricultural Guide: 1968, places it on the table, and goes out to take down sheets from the wires numbered 1, 4 and 7. Before going back inside he rests his elbows on the guardrail and thinks about the World Cup we’ve never won, about the fact the flattest things on Earth are train tracks, about the score to Battleship Potemkin which, studied correctly, is a version of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’. Then he goes back inside the hut, which shakes when he slams the door.

5

Finally, they’ve found the weapons of mass destruction. The dictator hid them inside his body. And there was only one, neatly sown into the lining of his stomach – a capsule, 1cm³, connected to a micromechanism that he could activate via a remote control in his mind. Indeed, by simply focusing on this very precise point in his stomach, and by directing all his pulmonary and intestinal force there through an ancient yogic breathing technique, he could activate that micromechanism, releasing a poison that would kill him instantaneously. As for the mass destruction, that would ensue in a ‘cascade effect’: the wave of chain-immolations prophesied in the Alt Koran to take place at such a juncture, exactly like that other chain reaction known as ‘nuclear’. Christianity, Buddhism, Islamism and techno-secularism: gone in a flash.

6

On the parched brown steppe at the south-western edge of Russia, a huge glass dome reaches into the sky, intended to house all the things a person can imagine as long as the things the person imagines are related to Parchís, an adaptation of the Indian board game Pachisi, the ancestor of Ludo. A block of glass, gleaming supra-photographically, sturdily mounted among immaculate snows and scatterings of rocks. A mirage, it seems. Training areas, lodgings for people taking courses and for the course leaders, spaces for video screenings, computer programming laboratories for sketching out games, gyms for relaxing/focusing before the game, 1 library stocked solely with books about the red pieces, another stocked solely with books about yellow pieces, another with books solely about blue pieces, another with books solely about green pieces, a restaurant and specific diets for the students, 1 canteen for visitors and 2 libraries dedicated to the history of Parchís. The palace is situated on the outskirts of Ulan Erge, a city in the Russian Republic of Kalmykia – north of the Caspian Sea and directly between the recently formed republics of Ukraine and Kazakhstan: a corridor of land shaped like a strangulated tongue. 300,000 Russian men and women live in poverty around this great complex dedicated to Parchís. The outer edges of the palace grounds segue into an expanse segmented by semi-concrete paths, leading to a horizon busy with unconnected telephone masts. The area is often visited by stray mules, which might sleep in an old hut meant for electric transformers, or graze among the radio and television masts placed there long ago. This skin of antennae describes an irregular circle a little over a mile wide around the Parchís palace, though it is unconnected with Parchís; the excellent elevation, the lack of interference and the privileged Eurasian borderland situation simply recommended the region to the Russian government as a place to install antennae, lots of them. The president here, a man named Iluminizhov, came up with the idea of the palace; his passion for the game led him to pour huge sums of his own money bringing the fantasy to life – his own money as in state funds, plus the odd windfall from alliances with Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. Such is the depression in the region that even refugees from the Second Chechen War do not linger. The water is not drinkable, and many who avoided death on the battlefield perish here. The peoples native to the steppe were nomads, and aspects of that way of life still pertain; when they find themselves excluded in some way or ejected from a place, or if they run out of ways to provide for themselves, they dismantle their homes, leaving only the foundations, pile the bricks, windows, kitchens and bathrooms into trucks and carts, and move on. But the immaculate Parchís palace has lain empty since it was built, 10 years ago now. No red ribbon was cut, and far less has it seen any use or inhabitation. From inside all you can hear is the battering wind outside. The books line the shelves, programmes are loaded on the computers, the plates in the kitchens are clean and neatly stacked, the meat in the walk-in refrigerators remains intact, the board games are in the display cabinets, the counters and the dice shakers encode hypothetical games. Somewhere a radio plays. A labourer left it switched on.

7

Saigon… shit; I’m still only in Saigon… Every time I think I’m gonna wake up back in the jungle.

 

Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola

8

4-year-old Mohamed Smith was conceived and born in Basra during the US occupation of Iraq. He attends the Anglo-Muslim college which was recently set up by his father John Smith, an ex-marine who tells him war stories, for example about the time they rappelled down from a roof terrace into an apartment where a Sunni fundamentalist cell was alleged to be operating. Sending a low explosive grenade through the window, they hurried back up the ropes to the roof terrace; the blast, lasting a couple of seconds, registered as a light tremor on the flat roof, a vibration beneath the soldiers’ feet that they compared to the sensation an ant would experience if it crossed the skin of a drum that had just been struck. The day was very cold and John had been the one to throw down the rope, which as it unspooled resembled an animate labyrinth. 7th floor, 6th floor, 5th floor, 4th, he smashed the window with his gun and took out the grenade. He was confronted with the sight of a young Iraqi woman cooking on the living room floor; their eyes met, and she didn’t cry or implore him but merely looked at the soldier as one who, aboard an aeroplane, can no longer see the sky, or clouds, or birds, or the sun, only the metallic extension of the 747’s wing shaking under a force that can only be supplied by oneself because there’s no horizon out there, there isn’t anything.

9

Q: Imagine you hear a song for the first time, one you fall in love with straightaway, it’s amazing. Wha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• 15
• 16
• 17
• 18
• 19
• 20
• 21
• 22
• 23
• 24
• 25
• 26
• 27
• 28
• 29
• 30
• 31
• 32
• 33
• 34
• 35
• 36
• 37
• 38
• 39
• 40
• 41
• 42
• 43
• 44
• 45
• 46
• 47
• 48
• 49
• 50
• 51
• 52
• 53
• 54
• 55
• 56
• 57
• 58
• 59
• 60
• 61
• 62
• 63
• 64
• 65
• 66
• 67
• 68
• 69
• 70
• 71
• 72
• 73
• 74
• 75
• 76
• 77
• 78
• 79
• 80
• 81
• 82
• 83
• 84
• 85
• 86
• 87
• 88
• 89
• 90
• 91
• 92
• 93
• 94
• 95
• 96
• 97
• 98
• 99
• 100
• 101
• 102
• 103
• 104
• 105
• 106
• 107
• 108
• 109
• 110
• 111
• Epilogue
• 112
• Clarifications
• Credits
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright