The Things We've Seen, page 1
‘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 sk
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.
