He built a
canoe and wanted to try it on the Guadalquivir. He was not interested in
sports. Nor had he made the canoe to use it often; He knew that as soon as he
explored the islets, he would leave it in the storage room or sell it. He
defined himself as an inventor, although the things he made could not be called
inventions. However, he had begun to qualify as such everything he designed,
since he did not use an instruction manual. His method was to discover for
himself what was necessary to elaborate what was already done. The process took
him months and he considered it his true vocation. He invented what he was
invented. He got a pleasure similar to that of hikers who go to the mountains
on Sundays and reach a summit, and he wondered why personal fulfillment was so
strange. In the mornings, the false inventor worked as a teacher in a school of
arts and crafts without feeling fulfilled, despite the fact that his teachings
were useful to his students.
Since I was
a child I had wanted to go to the tongues of land that penetrate the sea, or to
the islands that no one inhabits. On one occasion, when he was eighteen, his
parents invited him to Tabarca with the promise that it was a desert island. He
thought they were going to tread mere bush, but he found seven streets of
humble houses, a wall, a church, a lighthouse, two hotels and a small port. His
parents probably exaggerated that there was nothing in Tabarca to convince him
to go on vacation with them -they did not like him to stay alone at home-;
However, they may never have understood what he meant when he spoke of
uninhabited places.
It was
difficult to count the melejos of the part of the Guadalquivir that bordered
the city. Some were confused with small peninsulas. One morning in September he
walked to the dock with his boat and jumped into the water. He spent several
days taking the pulse of the ship, and after mastering it, he began to explore
the river. It had not rained for weeks. The flow was low, calm, stinky. He
walked around the perimeter of the islands with a mixture of uneasiness and
stupor, unable to bring the canoe to the shore. He doubted his ability to
maneuver quickly, feared that the ground would not be firm on the margins, that
he would slip and that the canoe would escape him. Besides, he was frightened
to swim back, pursing his lips so as not to swallow miasmas, and seeing so much
nature together, the variegated vegetation vibrant with insects, the layer of
bird droppings, the mud. What he had thought beautiful were nothing but trees
crooked by the weight of birds, or perhaps by some disease, as well as colonies
of bugs and shrubs eaten by filth.
On the
fifth day of wandering with the canoe, he decided to travel the curve of the
Guadalquivir. Paddling south allowed him not to lose sight of the gentle hills
of the countryside. Over there the islands were tiny, rougher, and close
together, like a rash. He laboriously surrounded them; in the last one, the
body of a man was found floating among the reeds. The dead man lay face down,
in his underpants; The skin on his back rose into blisters the size of a hand.
He didn't know if the blisters were due to the sun, which was still scorching
in September, or because the body was so full of fluid that it had become
deformed. The river stank. He called civil protection and the agents arrived in
a dinghy with which it was impossible to make their way through the reeds. In
the dinghy they carried a canoe; As a fat policeman climbed into it, he
approached the boat and asked permission to leave. I didn't want to witness how
they dragged the cold cut. He was intimidated that he turned around and
discovered some raw entrails, devoured by fish.
The episode
of the dead man kept him away from the river for several days. Then he took his
evening walk around the islands again, and one day, after having dared to set
foot on the one closest to the pier, he decided to inhabit it. He told himself
that he was tired of living in the city, and also that he was excited to do
what no one else did. Those were nothing more than two strange ideas with which
he sometimes walked the streets of his city, which seemed too obsessive, a
spiral that abducted him towards the center. In truth, he could not give any
reason for his decision to occupy this narrow and nauseating piece of land,
which would make him feel even worse than in the city.
Although it
was the island closest to the shore, the thickness prevented us from seeing its
interior. He cleared the center of scrub, cut down trees whose trunks were so
thin that they looked like ropes. How did that puny wood hold a glass of a
plethoric greenness? He decided to set up a red tent instead of military green.
The tent was well insulated, but he did not avoid the panic of waking up
covered in insects. He thought that, by sleeping aloft, he would take shelter
from the larvae that swarmed the ground blindly, obfuscated by the desecration
of the earth, and that seemed to intuit their predators. The birds caught them
easily: they stuck their beaks under the sand and rummaged. They constituted an
inexhaustible source of food; however, birds did not always feed on them.
Perhaps they were not food enough because they were made only of water, and
more sophisticated and nutritious insects had to be sought. One afternoon he
examined one. He put it in his hand, where the little animal danced on itself. When
I squeezed him a little with his forefinger, it burst like a tiny balloon.
He did not
sleep on the islet every night; That would have driven him crazy. It was enough
for him to wake up there a couple of times a week. When he spent the night on
that spot of the Guadalquivir, he heard a buzzing sound during the early
morning. Unless the owls attacked, the birds remained silent, and only the
flapping of those who were expelled from some poplar tree could be heard. They
were very tight; when the head was hollowed under the wing and the crop
widened, those who occupied the ends of the branches fell. The buzzing that
tortured him was not due to these death rattles of sleep, but to the shrieking
of the birds at sunset as they sought a place in the trees, so brutal that it
was impossible to make an approximate calculation of how many came to that
miserable land. It seemed to him that there were thousands. They chirped in
such a way for an hour that the sound stayed inside, and not even plugging in
their headphones with the volume at maximum mitigated it; he even came out of
the tent to scare them away with shouts, but the pack did not notice his
presence. It was like a piece of seaweed in the middle of the ocean; the birds
perhaps mistook him for a ridiculous bird. His throat was sore from screaming,
and he didn't want to confess to himself that something in him was releasing as
he screamed and grimaced grotesquely. He often lost track of time and continued
to howl in the middle of the night, when the birds were already silent; Then
the few passers-by on the shore looked towards the island believing that the
screams were from some animal.
The birds
went to the countryside to sleep, to breed, to die. Everything was full of
nests and, and when the fake inventor returned home, he could not get rid of
the smell of excrement, not even by showering. Apparently, those white birds
were a plague. An old man who was fishing on the jetty had told him so. He
asked the old man for the names of the animals, but he could not tell him. He
was looking for information on the internet and found nothing. He glanced at a
guide to the fauna of the Guadalquivir; the birds on his island did not
coincide with any of the egrets described. He did not investigate further;
After all, finding out which species they belonged to did not change his
decision to become, for a couple of times a week, a being who roared against
creatures that ignored him, that fell asleep despite the fact that he threw
furious stones at them. Nor did they deign to look at him when his anger made
him shake the weak trunks of the trees. The cups moved from side to side, and
sometimes this movement became violent; The swaying of branches conveyed the
impression that some burly costaleros carried the island on their shoulders.
As the
weeks passed, the fake inventor became convinced that his occupation was an act
of justice. Why did he have to ask permission to live in an empty place? He
thought it incomprehensible that the rest of the islets were still virgin, but
that was not what seemed worse to him; What was intolerable was the lack of
curiosity of the inhabitants of a capital where more than three hundred
thousand people lived. Among so many people, only he bothered to visit what was
in front of his nose?
He started
leaving money in the tent to see if anyone would steal it. Although the
canoeists rowing along the Guadalquivir did not have to be thieves, there must
have been thugs lurking, some hungry vagabond who would undoubtedly steal his
generous ticket. He checked daily to see if the fifty euros were still there.
And so it was. No one ever took that money. No one set foot on his island.
When he was
not inventing what was already invented, the false inventor was making
installations that he did not call art. For example, he had removed the cloth
skin from ten barking toy dogs as they moved their front paws and lit up their
eyes. Then he had placed the skin on the paws and put the dogs in a rabbit
cage. He devised a mechanism to operate the dogs with a remote control. When
his friends went to his house, he hit the button on the remote. Ten skinned toy
dogs barked as they moved their paws backwards on their own skin, lighting up
yellow eyes.
His friends
suggested that he sell that facility to some campaign for the protection of
animals and he shrugged his shoulders. Wouldn't others have already exploited
his idea? Deep down, he thought that if it had occurred to him, it was because
he had seen her somewhere, even if he didn't remember. That is why he refused
to allow anyone to consider his installations art. He was terrified of
exhibiting and being told aloud that his works were nothing more than a copy.
He did not know why he was afraid of this criticism, if after all he did not
believe in novelty and argued at length about it, even if he could not remember
where his appropriations came from. In addition to the cage full of toy dogs,
his included a mechanical flea circus inside a cupboard, a sandwich maker made
from two irons of clothing with which he melted aged cheese on the hands of his
guests when he celebrated a party, a pile of books on which dust had
accumulated for more than twenty years – what covered the books were already
balls of filth. and whose importance lay
in the fact that this powder contained dead cells of all his relatives, now
deceased.
It was the
rabbit cage where he kept the toy dogs that led him to the idea of releasing
rabbits on the island to scare away the birds. He resolved not to stay
overnight any longer. He had shouted enough. I would keep the tent to go watch
the rabbits and take a nap. Autumn was late, they had put the hour back; It was
no longer absurd to row at four in the afternoon and receive the cool water in
the river, whose flow was still as stinking as in summer due to the drought. He
bought twenty rabbits, ten males and ten females, which would reproduce at
great speed. On the island there would soon be no food for them. The false
inventor assumed that the new inhabitants would attack the nests on the ground
when they had nothing to eat. If the birds could not breed on the islet, they
would go to another.
The rabbits
were very white and had long hair. They had red eyes, they had cost him more
than if he had bought them gray or brown, but he thought it necessary that they
should share the same color as the birds. It was said that populating the
island with them was their way of continuing to inhabit it. He finally allowed
them to enter the tent, where they preferred to be, no doubt because it kept
them sheltered from the sun and because the earth was not suitable for
burrowing. In the store they began to give birth to hairless kittens that
looked like rats.
As soon as
the rabbits devoured the bushes, the nests were emptied of eggs, a delicacy
that they seemed to like especially, since on more than one occasion they
witnessed fights to gnaw on the thin bluish shells. They did not fight,
however, over the chicks, and it was clear to the false inventor that eating
that newborn meat was something they did in spite of themselves, with a certain
sadness, as if their obtuse intelligences were reacting to this cruel
situation. Their attitude, it was said, was in accordance with the humanity
they represented, which was none other than his, their owner. Perhaps that is
why he was surprised that, despite the initial scruples, they did not even
leave the bones, as anyone would have done. They attacked the creatures' crops
with their incisors, and a circle of blood was blackened, the same color as
their eyes, their trembling snouts, and the fine hairs of their whiskers. When
they had finished with the frugal flesh, they spent long minutes gnawing on the
skeletons, making a peculiar noise, of dry branches breaking. They even ate the
beak, and when they finished they groomed themselves until the fur turned white
again.
While the
feast was taking place, the birds flew around with anguished squawks. They
waited for hours at the scene of the crime, as if their offspring were going to
appear behind a stone. The fake inventor was curious that it didn't occur to
them to attack rabbits. It would be easy for them to gouge out their eyes with
their sharp pickaxes, but those group maneuvers must have been alien to their
instincts.
He did not
calculate that the kittens born there would never have eaten anything but meat
and eggs, and that this denaturation would have some disastrous consequences.
For a while longer, the birds were foolish enough, or daring, to continue
nesting on the island, but when the nests began to disappear, the fake inventor
realized that so did the litters of rabbits. One morning he witnessed why they
disappeared: their peers ate them. He was horrified by the spectacle and got
rid of the idea that these animals were an extension of his person. What's
more, he fancied them to be a plague, just like the birds, and if he continued
to visit them, it was because he felt guilty for abandoning those beasts he had
debased.
One day he
tried with feed. The rabbits just sniffed at it, and then indulged in sexual
encounters that had a morbid edge. They had learned to reproduce to eat, and
that multiplied matings. The false inventor said to himself that necessity
accelerated gestation. They all fed every time a female gave birth; When the
silent birth took place, the rabbits stalked the parturient as if there was
also the possibility of eating her. Since they no longer showed interest in the
birds' nests, they returned to nesting.
The tent
could be seen from the shore. He didn't care. What was on that piece of land
was not too different from the camps that Romanians and beggars built under the
bridges of the ring roads. As long as they did not disturb, no one forbade them
to sleep there. His island was far from the monumental complex that could be
seen from the other side of the river. I had in front of me the end of the
city, where, in addition to new and ugly apartments, there was only a shopping
center next to a stadium that was never important. He was also visible when he
was in the distance, and some children greeted him from the parapet and shouted
for him to take them in their canoe. The false inventor answered them by
shaking his head enigmatically. The attention of the children made him conceit
and worried him at the same time. I didn't want them to know what was happening
with the rabbits, which could be seen from the viewpoint; They were like little
white balls bumping into each other. At night, if there was enough moon, the
glow of their fur would blend in with that of the birds, and it would seem that
the birds were sleeping on the ground.
The rabbits
never ate their young outside the store. They seemed to know that they were
breaking a law. And although seeing them feeding on their descendants shrunk
the soul and made them abject, when they stood still it became clear that there
was something hypnotic, majestic about them, which increased with the passage
of time, and which perhaps had to do with acting against nature. Maybe they had
stopped being rabbits, he thought, or somehow they knew that they were starring
in what had never happened in that way in their race. At times the false
inventor was troubled by their disappearance, and then he forgot about the
circumstances by which those beings had ended up eating his children. The event
shone like a pure fact, without causes; an event called to inaugurate a new
world. All this happened quietly, because there was still no language for a
reality that was beginning to take its first steps. The false inventor limited
himself to continuing to go to the islet and to answer with suspicion the requests
of the infants to be taken in their canoe. At night, in the mansion inherited
from his grandmother where he lived, he dreamed of the parents of these
children, he heard their voices as if they were a mob that crushed him while
the rooms were filled with water and the blue color of the pools. It was said
that this was a vulgar obsession from which he would emerge when he decided to
abandon those creatures, and only by some attitudes of his body, suddenly
static next to his rabbits, it was possible to conclude that he began to feel
like one more among them. Perhaps his hair, suddenly graying, would achieve the
fabulous white of those now sacred animals, and his eyes, bloodied by small
effusions that the eye doctor attributed to a persistent conjunctivitis, would
eventually heal when they turned completely red.
One day the
fake inventor dismantled the tent and stopped going to the island. The
inhabitants of the riverside flats wondered what had become of this madman
dedicated to raising rabbits that died a few weeks after their disappearance,
and whose corpses formed a beautiful white blanket.
END
