THE ISLAND OF RABBITS

 

 

 

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