Marina Núñez. Fin (2009)

Dear Marina Rafael Doctor Roncero 8

The Tough God Enrique Marty 16

Imago 2008 - 4 monocanal vIdeos - 2 min 30

The Fumigator Pilar Adón 42

monstruos de vitrubio 2009 - 8 monocanal vIdeos, sound - 1 min 50

Skin Diseases Estrella de Diego 58

Ciudad fin 2009 - infographic on canvas - black light 3.6 x 56.7 meters 66

The Fatsos Angélica Lidell 102

Los fósiles 2009 - instalaTiOn, 11 videos. sound, 3 min sound space: Iván Solano 104

Exhibition at Musac 116

JUNTA DE CASTILLA Y LEÓN CONSEJERIA DE CULTURA Y TURISMO

EXHIBITION

Councillor Dña. María José Salgueiro Cortiñas

FIN MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León

General Secretary D. José Rodríguez Sanz Pastor

Curator and General Coordination Tania Pardo

Vice-Councillor of Culture D. Alberto Gutiérrez Alberca

Comunication and Press Izaskun Sebastián Marquinez Paula Álvarez

General Director of Cultural Heritage D. Enrique Saiz Martín General Director of Cultural Promotion and Institutions Dña. Luisa Herrero Cabrejas

FUNDACIÓN SIGLO PARA LAS ARTES DE CASTILLA Y LEÓN General Director D. José Luis Fernández de Dios Visual Arts Director D. Rafael Doctor Roncero

MUSAC. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León Director Rafael Doctor Roncero Chief Curator Agustín Pérez Rubio General Coordinator Kristine Guzmán Exhibition and Projects Coordination Marta Gerveno Helena López Camacho Carlos Ordás Tania Pardo Eneas Bernal Registrar Koré Escobar Josefina Manzanal Press and Communication La Comunicateca Library and Documentation Center Araceli Corbo Education and Cultural Action Belén Sola ANDO C.B Olga Sánchez Pérez Administration Manager Andrés de la Viuda Delgado Luisa Fraile Restouration Pablo Bernabé Maintenance Mariano Javier Román Roberto Gómez Blanco Ibanoz Álvarez Gutiérrez

Installation Gruner, S:A Registrar Koré Escobar Josefina Manzanal Manrique Transport Artefacto Producciones SL Insurances HISCOX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Marina Núñez and Tania Pardo would like to acknowledge the trust, assistance, support and dedication of the following people, without whom this book and exhibition would not have been possible.

Rafa Doctor, Agustín Pérez Rubio, Carolina Díaz, Pedro Gallego, Galería Salvador Díaz, Carolina Díaz, Pedro Gallego de Lerma

PUBLICACIÓN This book is Publisher in conjunction with the exhibition FIN by Marina Núñez, organized by MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain.

31st January – 21st June, 2009 Editorial Coordination Tania Pardo Texts Rafael Doctor Roncero Enrique Marty Estrella de Diego Pilar Adón Angelica Lidell Translation Aitor Arauz Photographs Pedro Gallego de Lerma Design Reinhard Steger, Actar Pro Digital Production Oriol Rigat, Actar Pro Printing Ingoprint S.A.

Supporting Services DALSER S.L.

All Rights reserved

Acquisition Committee D. José Luis Fernández de Dios D. Rafael Doctor Roncero D. Agustín Pérez Rubio Dña. Estrella de Diego D. José Guirao Cabrera D. Javier Hernando D. Octavio Zaya

ISBN (ACTAR) 978-84-96540-38-5 ISBN (MUSAC) 978-84-92572-03-8

© 2008, ACTAR & MUSAC, for the edition © Los autores por sus textos y traducciones © todas las imágenes el artista

DL: B-XXXXX-2009 Printed and Bound in the Europen Union

ACTAR info@actar.com www.actar.com MUSAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses, 24 24008 León (Spain) T +34 987 09 0000 F +34 987 09 1111 musac@musac.es www.musac.es

DISTRIBUTION Actar D Roca i Batle 2-4 E-08023 Barcelona T +34 93 417 49 93 F +34 93 418 67 07 office@actar-d.com www.actar-d.com Actar D USA 158 Lafayette St, 5th Floor New York, NY 10013 T +1 212 966 2207 F +1 212 966 2214 officeusa@actar-d.com

As further commitment to supporting and promoting contemporary art through various monographic exhibitions, the MUSAC (Castilla y León Museum of Contemporary Art) presents the work of artist Marina Núñez, native of Palencia. This exhibition, produced almost entirely by MUSAC, was conceived specially for this occasion.

Marina Núñez (Palencia, 1966) is without a doubt one of our country’s most promising artists. Her work has revolved, from its inception, around a firm ideological position regarding gender discourse and the representation of the female body, and has clearly evolved toward one main focus of concern: the human being as a progressive corporal mutation ending in its eventual disappearance.

This remarkable exhibition entitled FIN (END), comprises more than 20 videos and an extensive pictorial installation. It reflects on posthumanisation as a consequence of a process in which certain human characteristics have ceased to have meaning. Through an aesthetic reminiscent of Bosch’s scenes, the artist transports the viewer to a devastated world populated by bizarre spectres, micro organisms, desolate seascapes – infernal pageants – offering us a futuristic world of posthumanisation, a glimpse of all that will remain when the world comes to an end. It becomes a profound reflection on death related to the human; the concept of transformation and disintegration of the body.

This publication completes the list of pieces in the exhibition; it is in itself an integral part of the project produced by Marina Núñez for MUSAC. The book features four short stories: one to accompany each of the four main pieces in the exhibition. These previously unpublished stories are written by Estrella de Diego, Enrique Marty, Rafael Doctor Roncero and Pilar Adón, respectively. This publication reiterates the Junta de Castilla y León’s dedication and support for contemporary art through MUSAC’s exhibition programming.

María José Salgueiro Cortiñas Councillor for Culture and Tourism of the Junta de Castilla y León

Dear Marina...

This is the second time I find myself writing a story for you. It is interesting that since you are one of the artists I‘ve always felt closest to, instead of writing theories and essays about you, what naturally comes out are stories. It could be that instead of analysing and articulating ideas, what we really enjoy is telling stories: stories that are always able to pierce the crust of our life images, the images we spend time surrounded by, interpretations and narrations – stories, really. At any rate, I am not one of those who looks for quotes and references to justify a piece of work. You know how I detest verbosity in art and in life in general. These are not times for raising barriers of confusion with rational arguments based on eloquence. So then, let us opt for the poetry of narration, for at least if these fail, if they falter, they can stay afloat in the waters of individual failure (they are not exempt).

We are living in strange times, perhaps the strangest of times, where visual arts are concerned. I’ve realised that lately in all of the lectures I give, I end up attacking the art world as one that is imprecise, one that continues to follow old parameters – and not willing to be aware of it – just as an old woman in a dance club who keeps up the rhythm although it takes an effort. There is a visible degree of strained composure, self-deceit, discomfort and affectation involved. I don’t know if this is coming from the exhaustion I’ve been feeling these last few months or my realisation that this art is in a truly fragile and vulnerable state that I am no longer willing to defend.

When this story is released, I hope I’m no longer director of MUSAC. I hope to remain associated in some way but be focusing on other things...Perhaps travelling, writing little novels – without a doubt healing things – and above all searching...Things have changed so much for me in these 12 years I’ve known you and you have been able to see that. I am not the same, I don’t even look the same...and sometimes I don’t even know who I am. That is why I have decided to move somewhere else, a change that will lead to internal shifts taking me to a state in which I can be who I want to be again. I hope that in doing this, I don’t internalise the same ceremony; if so, I will be lost.

Here is the story. I began to see your work in magazines in the mid-nineties and then, I remember an exhibition at the Buades gallery in Madrid I loved so much that it made me eternally hooked to your work.

For a young artist to latch on to Baroque iconography and update it in that fashion, without losing the traditional painting format, seemed spot on to me. You tried to speak of concepts associated with femininity throughout the history of

humankind and my reading of it, however, completely ignored the gender issue and focused on the timeless concepts of the fear and battering of the human being. It was not that I was not interested in what you had to say about women’s history, it’s that I had been lured into the trap of the beautiful elements you were using to tell all those stories and I opted for grasping on to the means rather than the cause. Excuse me for saying it this way, but I discovered that much later, when I found something was missing from your work and I didn’t know what it was.

It was around that time that I was chosen to create a new space within the Reina Sofía, a space for art being produced at that moment – art of the present as I like to call it – and I thought of you for the opening. That is how Espacio Uno was born, with a Baroque scene of a woman who had died and come to life again, a woman taken by her fascination with death, a dark space dominated by an antique chandelier, the only apparatus among images of fabric bits all over the walls. Following this prelude came a large room with mad women floating through the entire space, mad women wearing hospital gowns, expressions of pain and ecstasy. Their faces red, it seemed their bodies would burst from lack of understanding, rage and an overall anguish of being souls within bodies in a state of absolute emotional and rational contradiction. How marvellous those floating mad women were, greeting the viewer as soon as he walked through the space. Along side this, facing each other, where those red cloths where faces (now grey) held torture instruments. These always struck me as cabalistic elements because these women seem to express complacency rather than pain. That would have been sufficient, but as you and I are both excessive in many ways, we topped it off with some other crazies trapped in prehistoric fortresses...that is, mad women painted over photographs of Galician hill forts.

I remember Pepe Guirao warning me about overcrowding it and we chose, in the end, to fill it all up. For the opening, Estrella de Diego (always akin to a sweet and magical sensibility) created a fabulous list of rules for the Baroque world that you both shared then and now share again. Through a brilliant talk, she introduced a series of events and commentaries made by a range of thinkers from the art world on the work of new artists producing at the time.

The exhibition turned out to be a catharsis for a museum that was becoming disturbingly mired in the previously accepted contemporary art scene. So then, your mad women opened a new road that allowed me to carry out twenty-some exhibitions showing artists of our generation, ending with a grand project – already shown in the main rooms – by Pipilotti Rist. Through the efforts of many of us we were able to introduce a dialogue with fresher art into those magnificent spaces. All was lost, however, when the directorship changed, as our country’s politics would have us accustomed to.

That was a key era for me, after curating mainly photography exhibitions in the Canal Isabel II space in Madrid where I tried to prove something that seems widely accepted now but was not only a few years ago: that photography is another genre within contemporary artistic expression.

So, I focused on that duality: that which was specific to the entire history of photography and that of the fine arts of my time. I am a Gemini with Gemini rising and while astrologically agnostic, I always find myself in the natural position of treading in two streams at the same time. I have, then: two plans, two homes, two things to do, two people to love: I am not quite capable of making a rational decision. But that is another kettle of fish. In those years I was working at the Reina and the Canal and as always, following you closely. You lived next to my job and at that time, through my parties and other events, we were always meeting up.

I feel those were the most intense times I will ever live in the art scene and I always think they came to a head in Venice, when I was invited to create an exhibition in a warehouse in the Guidecca called Ophelias and Ulysses, (another duality). Here I counter-positioned the external pain of a person searching for his life through movement and travel (the immigration which was already lining our coasts with dead bodies) to the individual pain of the western artist: of Ophelia’s internal journey of feelings and lack of understanding at Ulysses’ unavoidable parting.

The exhibition was practically drowned out by the excessive noise of the grand Biennial, but it became for us a unique experiential space where various Spanish artists of the same generation coexisted in a hostile and stressful environment: everything having to do with that competitive biennial which merely echoed the prevailing atmosphere of the contemporary international art world. We and our events were removed from the rest, we hardly mingled; we were rarely invited to anything outside our own activities, but it turned into a period of time that some of us have not forgotten; something that made us feel we were part of the same generation for the first time in many years of working. Do you remember?

We spent several days hanging it. Nobody was there trying to catch the curator’s eye or had any other agenda except our exhibition. There at the door, with the Adriatic at our feet, we spent some incredible days. There was Carmen Cantón with her white lab coat and Enrique Marty showing me how to paint with watercolours there in the middle of the assemblage; Rogelio’s perennial calm and Moraza with his campaign furniture and his table of symbols; everyone’s acceptance of Pedro Mora’s dust cloud.

Even though we had all lived through an amazing working experience together two years prior at Villa Iris in Santander, this was really the high point of the few years’ work in which our divergent energies were almost always well combined and supported; where we became aware of something abstract, yet common to all. That is why I say generation; perhaps it’s something else – just empathy among the group – but in time this is what is usually termed generation. Maybe we don’t have good narrators to talk about us or maybe we don’t deserve them. In any case, I dare to say that the exhibition was fantastic on many different levels – although it had a small audience and was remote – those who truly went through it with interest gave it positive marks, even one of the most important Italian papers. I really can’t remember now which one it was but one of them called it the best parallel exhibition to the Bienale for many reasons we ourselves had used as a basis for its creation.

Anyway, that all came to an end and our own private party went back to the way it was. I had left the Reina simply because my criteria was no longer appreciated – that is, the new director imposed his own criteria exclusively – and I skipped off to the Casa de América.

By that time you had already had your first exhibition at Salvador Díaz with a black catalogue in which I published the story Carmen. It is a story containing many things I’ve never told you about. I wrote it all in one shot on a Friday night in January just before going out in Madrid. I still have the first draft that I printed: it has ink smears where the tears fell on it. It is not that the story made me cry, but one of the most gruesome chapters in my personal life was written that same night. I was completely devastated at that time because I was living through the disintegration of everything that I had built for 10 years with my first love (who had already left home) because I had fallen in love, at the same time, with somebody else...the circumstances are impossible to narrate. I was living through a hell comprehensible only to those who have been through something similar. It seems like something out of a dark legend or a Spanish bolero but it was a real place I inhabited for a very long time; one that 8 years later I am still coming out of. Yes, it’s true. The other day I saw a film entitled Silent Light whose story told of similar circumstances that took place in a current-day Lunar society. The film is a real jewel and although it is based on Dreyer’s Ordet, it’s really an updated version of the photography and script style. What really hit me was the story: a very religious man with a good wife and a whole slew of children falls in love with another woman.

His pain is overwhelming but he cannot escape from what he is feeling. When his wife finds out, she cries in the rain until her heart stops. At the wake, the other woman comes and stays with her until she starts to breathe again. Some of the first words the resuscitated wife pronounces are: ‘Poor Johan,’ because she had been to the other side and from there, could understand the intensity of this man’s pain who loved them both. The reason I am telling you this is to justify the fact that I really cannot separate my personal life from my work.

Life is only one emotionally and I cannot feel things in any other way. Although I have undoubtedly struggled to separate things, in the end the perspective of time certifies my beliefs. I understand that everything is mixed up and all is the same; we have only one space for comprehension and all emotions dwell in that same internal space. I want to tell you that since then, at the turn of the century – the millennium – my emotional life was cut short and although many things have happened since then, the end result is that today I am alone with little room for new emotional attachment. What I am telling you is quite unfortunate because I am only 42 years old and this is not where I had planned to be at this point.

But I really only wanted to talk about the short story Carmen and how important it was for me. Like I said, I wrote it in a flash. The important thing is not that, but the way I wrote. When I start a story I begin with an idea and allow the process of writing itself take a path toward a place that surprises even me.

This is why I enjoy writing. In this case the idea was very subtle and started with the fact that your sister Carmen was always willing to model for all of your experiments.

I started the story and immediately I felt irresistibly enmeshed in it; I could not stop typing – living to the utmost what I was inventing – sweating and feeling at the end really exhausted from being able to write; to live something in such a strange way. I was enthralled by that feeling and at that moment, I decided that I would really love to spend more time writing. I remember being high and dancing that night, thinking of the story. I remember an after hours party I went to and how I told the story to others. I remember going back home in the early hours and how, for the first time in my life I was beaten up...how I cried and how I soaked the paper the story was written on. If someone other than you or Tania (who will proof all of this) is reading this now, they will wonder what happened. I don’t find it necessary to tell more and even less, to accuse anyone after so many years or go on about my tribulations. The thing is that it was a key day in the entire process I was going through and the story about Carmen was a backdrop and literally a drain of tears.

The story (which I’ve not reread since) told how a person began losing her soul little by little each time someone else reproduced her image; how the model, while lending her image also lent a bit of her soul until it was finally situated in a different place. I built a story heavy with drama – even to the point of hysteria – to enter into dialogue with you, to tell you how I understood your paintings and your installations, how the world you showed me was translatable to me in this way. Well, the story was well-received and thanks to you, not only read by you and I but also your entire family and all your friends. That was glorious for me because I had already published a dozen small books and catalogues without any feedback (on the other hand this gave me free rein to experiment in story-making.)

And our lives went on, me with my magnificent year in Casa de América where I realised that ultimately, the best way to digest today’s art is through festivities, encounters, relations...you in your university with your business, your Pedro...everyday more involved in the Cyborg world and further away from that Baroque pictorial magic. This is where a certain conflict arose between us; you could tell how what you were doing was not reaching me in the same way.

I never did get into that world of yours and when I saw that you were coming back to the literal, mise-en-scène like the grand installation in the Casa de América, I realised it was a sporadic event after which you continued on and on, delving into your own research on bodily construction and identity.

You would not listen when I only wanted to tell you that you had forgotten the magic. Maybe I just never said it like that. Maybe it was something too privately mine.

I was entrusted with the MUSAC project and strangely enough, it was in your and Enrique Marty’s region: the two closest people to me artistically and emotionally. I phoned you both and had you involved from the onset. I wanted you to be there to build this dream and that is how it was until the project took flight – then the speed of it all didn’t allow for too many more revelations or voices. Nevertheless, that start-up was extremely significant. A few days after signing the project we arrived at an icy León to film a peculiar promotional spot to show at ARCO. There we were, me with a fever and everyone else working as extras in the film (they eventually got colds as well after spending hours outdoors among the foundations of the building.) That perspective of León has always coloured part of my stay there.

But at that time I felt strong; Ricardo was with me and, despite all my pain, I never felt alone. We returned to Madrid with the finished film in tow and a chill that I have yet to expel from my body.

In a few months, everything started up in such a powerful way that we were all taken aback. We had launched a project – the construction of a museum – whose concept precluded bowing down to existing historiography. This museum was shaped by the desire to become part of history in the making. We had posed the challenge of building the museum of the present, an exhibition space that would generate an important collection from art’s experiential front line: that is, from involvement, not from a removed stance taken when dealing with different eras and non-contemporary agents. The feat soon met with allies who paved the way and allowed us, in a little over two years, to inaugurate an institution that has been in the limelight for the reasons behind its very conception: the desire to be a perpetual witness to the present.

I won’t go into the whole philosophy of the project and its foundations. I just want to tell you that sharing in your vision was fundamental and that the support you gave me as one of the most important artists from that region, was essential. We had many, many things to accomplish and we did them the best we could.

But the work became more and more difficult. I was aware of what I had got into when it was already impossible to leave it. I put my heart and soul into pushing it forward. I always needed others in this endeavour, and they were always there: Agustín, Kristine, Octavio, Tania and many more. Halfway through that period my father passed away and I took another blow I felt I would never recover from. I remember the first outing I made from my village was to go with you and Pedro to Valladolid, to an institutional lunch. There I gave you the manuscript of the novel I had written the previous summer. It was important to me that you read it because I knew what a good reader you were.

Of course I couldn’t judge something I had produced, unwittingly, as a medium for expressing the guilt I felt for my emotional situation. The novel came out two years later and that in itself has given me as much satisfaction as the museum that we had set in motion.

All through that period we talked about creating our own project. We had lunch a couple of times with Estrella to find the right way to focus an exhibition of yours and how to approach it, but we always gave up because you were so involved in a world that neither Estrella nor I were sufficiently attracted to.

We would continuously bring up ideas that one by one would come to naught before the meal had finished. Since then, we spent three years experiencing this strangeness where you felt unloved and where we probably didn’t pamper you enough.

We have returned. You building worlds and me trying to tell you a new story that I think should have something to do with one of your installations – one that speaks of human stones or something similar.

I had already written a story about this some time ago. It describes a theory about how every human being becomes an atom when they die. So the world is full of an infinite number of atoms, coexisting specks. They are nothing more than the remains of a life previously lived. It could be a cockroach’s life, a mouse’s, a person’s or a protozoan’s. I never published it as a short story, but I had one of the characters of the novel Masticar los tallos... tell it. When I thought of writing another story for you, the first thing I thought of was bringing that story up to date. But I am no good at repeating things. I cannot do things that bore me because I end up transmitting my own boredom. So I decided to write you a letter that talked about you and me from a – shall we say – combined point of view: one in which professional and private life is blended, in order to welcome this new project at this museum we have all built together; one I must leave for heart-felt reasons.

This story (unlike the one about Carmen) is a true story and again, it is written especially for you. I don’t know if this time your friends or huge family will read it, but here it is just as you see it, since I found out some time ago that reality and fiction are the same thing just assembled from different angles. Now there is no drama or tension since I’m not looking for that at this point in my life. Perhaps now there is a need for order and peace to continue on into this era I have previously described as strange; one where there are all these gurus telling you that this is and that is not art, projecting futures, knocking down proposals, building up barriers against any ideas foreign to theirs. In these times when there are people who possess the truth, those of us who are free need to be strong. Dissidence and silence are some of the main weapons that allow us to think that art is a space for freedom in which all options are valid and value judgements should not go beyond individual assessments.

Here then, I leave you this story that talks about you and me.

I love you very much.

Rafael Doctor Roncero

Enrique Marty First of all, here’s a poem for you…

I’m God I swear, I’m God Vermin You Dust My only mistake

I feel awkward, because words are larvae and everything is false and bland.

Only I am solid. What to nations are momentous events, generations that are born and die, to me are just a game in my imagination. They last for a second and then vanish. I’m God and I’m telling you a speck of dust like you shouldn’t grant itself so much importance; just, at the very most, find its way up someone’s nose and make them sneeze.

No, I’m not really God. God is different to me; he’s an incompetent, ugly and boring old fart. I, on the contrary, see my reflection in the mirror and admire the most exciting being in creation – which, in fact, is my own doing… No… I wasn’t the creator, I gave God his orders, he’s a lazy labourer following my instructions: “God, get up now and do whatever I say this instant, create twelve universes and make some of them overlap, make parallel dimensions, dark matter to generate some mystery, fill it all with stars for a bit of light! Manufacture a couple million planets and make a human kind in my image to inhabit one of them! Then we’ll make up this fascinating story, we’ll pick a small group of them and tell them they’re the chosen ones just for a laugh. Better still, we’ll make lots of small groups believe that they are the only chosen ones, our favourites. We’ll make up a whole lot of names for you, you’ll give them daft contradictory instructions and you’ll threaten them constantly with the doom of an awful place full of flames and cauldrons. In the meantime, I’ll be in hiding, laughing at mankind all along.”

One of my funniest occurrences was nobility, and in particular monarchs, monarchs like you. I’ sorry, little speck of dust, I’m, sorry… But there you go, plodding along, unbearable in your crown and your dirty beard, dragging your ermine all the way to your wooden throne, surrounded by your court of dry rot.

A speck of dust like you shouldn’t feel that important, but rather remain silent and listen carefully, because a thousand billion years ago I was normal too.

I was a child. A shapeless conglomerate of atoms, carbon and what have you, bound together by an obsessive emulsion of ectoplasm. Like a cockroach that scurries around nervously towards a shoe just to be trampled on and gorges on cockroach poison on a daily basis ‘til it pops. I got fed up of being trodden on and of the poison they fed me from childhood. If you eat a little poison you die, if you eat lots you get fat. That was my childhood diet, poison for breakfast, lunch and dinner. At night, in bed, I could feel in my gums the throbbing of the cogs of the world, slowly turning, grating against each other. I would look out the window. The city was in total silence. No one would dare utter the slightest sound so as not to disturb the concert that the world was offering me.

Now I have hardly any thoughts to trouble me. Though there is one childhood memory that fills me with pain. My first fallen idol. I intend to be concise, tell you about it in a nutshell, cutting out the frills. Here goes. One morning I found an octopus on the beach, I took it home and made it comfortable in the washbasin. Little by little I started acknowledging it as a divine being and started to revere it. A couple of days later, while I was in the bath, I saw trough the shower curtain that something was dragging itself across the floor. A little repting chaos crossed the bathroom door and into the corridor. I finished my shower, excited because my god in the making had left its basin. I step out of the bathroom, call him, no answer, I can’t see him in the corridor, take a look in the living room. My family is gathered around the TV, eating him. One of my sisters asks me if I want a chunk, eyes glued on the screen and a little tentacle dangling out of her mouth.

I hated him more for having let himself be eaten than my family for eating him.

Weren’t you meant to be primeval, born of the sect of the seas? How could that come to be? A bunch of amalgamated atoms eating a minor god!

That very night, my sister got out of bed to throw up in the bathroom. Se saw a girl in white shoes flying down the corridor. Terrified, she woke up again and saw that the little girl was sitting next to her on the bed and that she was having these weird spasms. Se woke up again and crawled into bed with my other sister, who immediately turned soft and blubbery. Once again, she woke up and switched on the light and drank some water, but there was something foggy and ancestral floating in the glass. She dropped the glass, it smashed, the noise woke her up, the veins and the nervous system in the walls pounded and throbbed, she woke up, ran into the living room, the whole family was sitting

on the sofa withering fast, she herself was withering, and then she woke up, the furniture was floating in the air, the fish had huge fangs… Get used to it sister. Or do you want me to pull your plug? Slash you open and remove the tentacles of my god that have a stranglehold on your stomach? Do you want a little autopsy…?

In school I had studied Andreas Pesalius, the famous Renaissance anatomist who, upon opening a young girl’s ribcage after her sudden death, in the city of Karmakoma, heard her heartbeat and saw that… systole after diastole after systole after diastole… it was contracting and expanding, healthy and strong. Pesalius was charged with manslaughter, but the sentence was finally commuted for a pilgrimage to the city of Mazapaném. Where all sins are forgiven. (Did Pesalius make it there with all his teeth intact after the inquisitors’ questioning?) I couldn’t wait to go there myself, in the belief that, whatever I had done, it would all be forgiven on arrival at the holy city. As my intention was always to get up to as much mischief as possible, I decided to go to Mazapaném the sooner the better, confident that the pardon would also be retrospective.

Plus, life in my parent’s squalid hometown was becoming unbearable. For two years now a tall man with Egyptian features was trying to read my thoughts, which were primitive and chaotic. I would bump into him nearly every day, mostly in the evenings, on the same street in the old town that I had to go down every day on my way home. He used to carry a piece of apparatus in his hand that funnily no one seemed to notice but me. It was full of wires and knobs, and the main section was a basic bellows that allowed the instrument to breathe. An absurd and grubby Oopart that looked totally daft. A mind-reading machine that needed to breathe like a wooden Christ who had jumped off his cross and was running after the burglars who’d just stolen his glass eyes.

So the very day I turned 18 I ran away to Mazapaném.

There lived a man who, as a child, had been displayed in the papers as a fairground monster. He was the topic of everyone’s conversations. There were even university departments interested in skinning him in order to observe the phenomenon in detail. Instead of human internal organs, he was born with the innards of a jellyfish.

No, it wasn’t exactly that. In fact most of his organs were normal. But his intestines and his stomach, due to their peculiar nature, needed to be constantly softened with alcohol in order to stay alive: if they were not subjected to this maceration, they would stiffen and die. He had tried with all sorts of liquids, even water. He even tried injecting them, heating them and breathing in the vapours, bathing in them, rubbing them in as massage ointments. But none of these methods worked, aside from drinking alcohol in any of its varieties. I was keenly interested in getting in touch with

him, since a stupid prank by some demiurge has made us complementary beings: my red red blood had a huge alcohol content, far higher than any other high proof liquor.

My apprehension towards doubles or any form of symmetry made the prank even crueller and the need to take revenge of the damned demiurge even more pressing.

The jellyfish man was well known in a certain part of town, where he would spend his days, always needy and dependant, always drunk and sad, always begging for booze at the local bars, getting softer and softer. And once he’d tasted my blood he never wanted to go back to drinking anything else.

I became his sole supplier. When he got drunk with my blood he would get intimate and tell me he was obsessed over a girl he knew and was extremely attracted to: he would dream he got into bed with her, and that she lifted her skirt and removed her two false legs. What turned him on the most was the woman’s bravery in removing her prosthetics. It took some guts to go to bed with someone and not tell them beforehand that you had wooden legs.

He would sink his teeth into my neck and suck my blood until he could take no more, not caring how debilitating the whole operation was to me. Gradually the jellyfish man’s selfishness started filling me with a desire for revenge even greater than the one I felt against the dumb god who has connected us, and my hatred turned against him. In all that time that I let him suck my blood, I was feeding my own resentment with an unstoppable force. So I let myself be squeezed only as a long-term investment. One night his hunger overstepped the limit. I pushed him violently away from my neck when he was about to take all my blood. But a single drop left in my body was enough to survive. I felt strong and unforgiving. My hatred gave me peace. I asked him to step outside with me. He refused, he wanted more blood. But he was so weak that I had no trouble dragging him outside, into the darkest and most sinister stretch of the street. Into the toughest stretch. I was going to get something in exchange for all that blood, and the only bit of that bland guy I was remotely interested in was what stuck out of his gums. The only hard bit in him, as my neck well knew.

My idea was to make a necklace and send it, for the good of the world, to the Virgin of Montserrat.

Seconds later, with the beads for my necklace in my pocket, I went to a nightclub to recover some of the blood I’d lost. A few hours later I had gallons flowing through my veins again. My childhood diet based on cockroach poison had made me an addict to MDMA, which I would take daily in huge quantities for as far back as I can remember, and that really caused no other effect on me than a saintly mercilessness. In the club I could not take my eyes off a trannie with Asian features who was dancing to a hypnotically different beat to the music that was playing, which incidentally was atrocious. Black hair and black eyes with heavy black makeup. She was dressed in very short leopard skin. Arm bracelets on her arms and henna tattoos in the shape

of a snake. My heart beat to the exact rhythm of that supernatural creature’s movements. The strobe lights created an effect whereby her thousands of arms and legs moved in slow motion, dragging thousands of thoughts out of my head to follow the movements of each of her limbs, warping into impossible positions and blending into each other. There was nothing else around me. My thoughts were out of control, they came and went on their own free will, they danced and curled around that disturbing transvestite. Thoughts, memories, arm movements, two more arms, legs, light, thousands of arms lighting up and switching off, up, higher, just the centre.

Millions of simultaneous thoughts condensed into a split second; dress, teeth, red, blue, pentagon, c, h, no, hexagon, burning, copy, star, ufo, mercury, Venus, Vulcan doesn’t exist, exists, hollow earth, black sun, five wheels, Ezequiel, pharaoh, eternal flash………………nothing….. I watch her dance without making the slightest effort to focus my attention until the dance itself vanishes. It’s just me left… who the fuck am I? I need more time… everything is moving… light… I need to move… I want to get out of here… to another town… to Ojaxaca… Nietscher… I was thinking… cured… no… to Taronida… no… I also need to move... no… first I’ll go to… if I want to break… to Califragi… yes… superficial… made out of quantic pulp… the weirdest place…

Lenta… in the… and … sensually… world…

My hotel room in the strange city of Califragi, capital of Sardonia, was ridiculously huge. For a few days now, particularly after my arrival, I was unsettled by the fear of receiving a visit from somebody who, in a moment of weakness, I had invited to spend a few days with me. The very idea threw me into a state of terrible anxiety, so I spent as much time as I could away from the hotel in order not to be tracked down. I tried to leave my room as early as possible and to get back as late as possible to avoid bumping into my terrible guest in the hotel lobby. So I covered the whole town to the point of exhaustion. I visited all the museums. I even went back to the science one a few times, to see the anatomical wax models of human bodies that were pornographically spilt open like ripe fruit. I strolled in quaint silent gardens hung over the city from where you could see the sea, full of opium poppy plants with beautiful flowers.

And I found, at the end of a footpath, a near-miniature pagan temple, surrounded by statues of gods, pale gods, immobile, keeping entirely silent, looking at me with fear in their eyes, as if I were the only one who could make a noise and spoil it all.

The city of Califragi soon lost its excitement. I had sucked out its marrow and chewed on the bone, mashing it down to dust. Soon there was no one or nothing. Literally, the city evaporated. I could only see a pale blank expanse with a neon sign in the distance reading “Karmakoma”. As that was the only road to follow, I walked to Karmakoma, where I took a room in a downtown hotel.

I locked myself up in my room for the rest of the day, exhausted. The next day I woke up at eleven and came down for breakfast around noon. They only served breakfast until ten thirty. I was deeply offended that they were not willing to make an exception for me. So I decided to go for breakfast at the café across the street, opposite the hotel. The place was Café Sasafras. The two bartenders and all the clients looked like

they were straight out of a painting by Meroviggio. A man who was the spitting image of the portrait of Camaffeo Barberini was reading the paper next to me at the bar.

I noticed he wanted conversation. This guy obviously came to Sasafras every single day of his life and was curious to know who this new patron was. I did my best to ignore him for a while, until he turned towards me and started talking to me. “Are you here on holiday?”

“No, I’m here on business,” I answered.

“But I’m sure you’ll have some time to tour the city. Do you travel often?”

“All the time,” I retorted dryly.

“Oooooh, of course you do,” he soldiered on, smiling and flaying his hands. “But there’s all sorts of things to see in this town, I’m sure you’ll be staying for a while.

I’ve never been anywhere else. I have everything I need right here. You only need to take a deep breath and you’re breathing in the same air breathed by the creators of civilisation, the popes, the emperors. I know this city like the back of my hand. Far better, in fact, since I spend more time observing the city than the back of my hand.

And I know a great many legends and riddles that enclose secret wisdom,” he added mysteriously. “If someone need to know something about this town, they come to me and ask. Even learned academics have come to me to gather material for their writings. I myself have authored a book of riddles on the city of Karmakoma. Look, I’ll set you a very easy one: ‘Eight columns on the front, many more behind; unless you step inside, the answer you won’t find’”.

“Let me think it over,” I replied, just to get rid of the dull wanker. I paid my bill, said goodbye and left the café.

My idea was not to devote a single second of my thoughts to his riddle. But the more I wanted to forget, the more I caught myself searching in the city’s architecture for something that might match those eight columns that became many more if you stepped in between them. I came across a number of things that might solve the riddle.

The premise was too generic. I started hating the guy who had set the riddle; he had spoilt my day making me live in a world of eight columns. By evening I really resented him, furiously. I remembered him as a bag of flesh holding a bunch of misplaced organs. I walked back to my hotel, fuming and thinking I would go back to the café in the morning and beat him up. Or that I’d wait for him on his way out in the evening and smash his head in with a baseball bat from behind. Walking down the empty street, I saw a group of people at a distance, all very tall, perfectly still, backlit, standing right in my way. I counted them. There were eight of them, naturally. I kept walking faster and faster towards them, then I saw there were more, many more of them. A car drove up next to one of the figures, who got in. The car drove off. Now I could see in detail. They were women on huge heels. I walked towards them, you girls are going to get beaten up…

The following morning, ecstatic, I headed for the café to tell that miserable guy with the pot belly that I had solved his riddle. But he answered no, I was wrong, that the right answer was the Arnica Paniron, the famous ancient temple. The man, excited and spurred on by my mistake, set me another riddle. “Three scary ladies and an agreement fall into tedium”. My rage against him grew even greater. Not only had I not taken revenge, but I suddenly found myself with another riddle on my shoulders. Again I tried to forget, again to no avail. That day, in the afternoon, ten ancient and decrepit countesses attempted to sacrifice me in the black mass we were sharing.

The next day, I strode back into the bar, truly determined not to let him dump another riddle on me. But the minute he saw me, he said with a smile: “Under three columns and two pilasters, don’t tell me you’re dragging yourself”.

By the time I got up to where he was standing, I could already feel the riddle spilling over me as if he had tipped a barrel of honey over me. Sticky and sweet.

I took a slug of strong coffee and I dashed off to an appointment. I tripped and fell on a jutting curb stone right under the three columns and two pilasters of the Mason Lodge.

I decided never to go back to Sasafras. But, upon leaving the hotel the following morning, I found the bugger standing there, on the pavement opposite. He shouted out: “The good men laugh, standing in a pair, another says amen.”

A couple of hours later I was stopped by two plain-clothes policemen in high spirits who dragged me before the sheriff and the judge, I said amen so as not to betray the truth of the prophecy.

Day in, day out, for as long as I was in town, he managed to set me one of his sticky riddles. They exerted such an influence that they shaped my whole day irremissibly. But his interpretation of the riddles was always different to my own. “There are two arms open in an embrace at the end of the avenue; there our father still awaits you” according to him, was the Vataniri Basilica! But to me it became a priest intent on raping me in the public toilets.

The moment I decided I finally had to put an end to this business with the riddles was the day he suggested “In the little square the gods stand tall; you must give gold if you wish to return at all”. That afternoon I was taking a nap and a yellow stain the colour of honey and very bright entered my room. Two being steeped in next: one small and quiet, who left immediately; the other taller, muscular and all black, who announced that I was mortal but that, in exchange for the revelation, I should pay him a certain sum of gold. One second later, the tall muscular black man turned white, short and soft. There was a strong smell in the room; nasty, sour, unbearably unbreathable, that seemed familiar. I knew that smell, but I couldn’t trace it in my memory. So I ordered my subconscious to make me remember when the time was right.

During all this time in Karmakoma, whatever situation I found myself in, I felt an immense sense of calm that served to fuel a huge and authentic power welling up inside me. I don’t mean a metaphoric or poetic power. My power was perfectly measurable, weighable, definable, Satanic.

You’re a hero when you do what you please and not when you pride yourself on your sacrifice for others, striving for applause and social recognition. Don’t doubt it one second. A hero, a saint, a benefactor, only became what they are after a decisive moment in their lives, a moment when they made a choice.

They had to choose between being a hero or a dictator, a saint or a serial killer, a benefactor or a genocider. Having reached this point, I’m going to ruin your momentary glorious thought. The one you’re thinking right now. You feel praised by me. You find justification for your actions. You always do what you want and trample over anyone who get between you and your prize. But here comes the crux: doing what you feel like doing and screwing over everybody else in something far, far more mediocre still. You just never get it right, oh Lord, just never right…

What is really impressive is what I was about to achieve that very instant in my story. Something that, a priori, appeared as distant as the void between two atoms: that the will of the universe and my own were IDENTICAL. But keep reading this fascinating story about how I became a god.

I devoted my months in Karmakoma nearly entirely to terrorism, manufacturing immensely moving explosives using sulphur, tablets, empty cans and peeled wires. With them, I nearly razed the entire city to dust, and with it the riddle café and its patrons, the whole lot of them. Café Sasafras went up in smoke as I was leaving the town, due north.

At Torazo I booked into Hotel Des Macistes. I was childishly happy for two reasons. The first was how close the hotel was, barely two blocks, to the home of Fiedrick Nietsher, the famous protector of ill-treated horses. And the second and more important reason, was the torrential rain that fell nearly throughout my entire stay. I thoroughly enjoyed the worried faces on the people who can’t cope with the rain and the clouds and pray every day for a mediocre ray of sunlight.

But there was one thing damping my joy. I’d been suffering from a headache nearly every day for a few months. I was starting to worry, it kept obstructing my thoughts and making them lazy and forlorn. One night, while I was drifting through the city grid, the cold ceased and the rain gave way to snow. Marvellously, my headache began to recede. The fuzzy contours of Carigcanno Square started coming into focus. I could see snowflakes gently coming down, proudly

displaying the beauty of each of their crystals. The cowardly statues in the square shivered under the damp. I looked down to the floor and saw a number of red stains in the snow. It was raining blood, my life’s dream was happening there and then, in Torazo, it was finally raining blood on the snow! I laughed out loud at all the poets, conjuring up their poor metaphors and yet unable to turn them into flesh and blood. All the lousy saints hassling the world day and night, desperately seeking attention with their trances and their threats. It was raining blood at my feet. Screw you, mystics! Screw you, St. Juman, St. Marquise, St. Panciscus! Screw you artists, screw you Riviera, Prubens! Screw you Meroviggio! You’ve created nothing buy simulacra.

After a few hours’ euphoria, playing in the snow, I made my way back to the hotel. The guy at the front desk was dumbstruck, greeted me, sternly handed me my key, keeping his chin up very high, then immediately grabbed for the phone and dialled a number. He was clearly calling someone to tell them he’d seen me. Fine! They were starting to recognise me!

The key was huge, connected to a lead key ring shaped like a spinning top with the room number engraved on the widest side. I hadn’t previously noticed the shape and weight of the key ring. I reached my door, opened it, stepped inside, switched the lights on and when I raised my head I saw my reflection in the wardrobe mirror. I had a huge bloodstain on my coat, coming from my nose.

Things were just getting better, the blood shower had come from me! It was my alcoholic blood!

In the morning I accidentally cut my finger with the breakfast knife. I headed out into the city with a bandage on. I visited a bookshop run by a Jewish rabbi who refused to sell me the books I asked him for. In the afternoon I attended mass. Out of all those present, the priest appeared to be the least engaged in the ceremony, which he was managing to make stultifying. I walked out half way through the first reading and stepped into another church just opposite.

The two churches, which are identical, face each other symmetrically on a grand square. Youvarra, you’re a Satanist bastard! In that other church there was also a ceremony under way, which I joined at the precise same point as the other. At once fascinated and horrified by the symmetry of the ceremonies, I sat on a bench in the last row and rejoined the liturgy. It was cold outside and the church was crowded with people snoozing. The priest was also laying down all the possible obstacles for any of those present to pay attention to what he was saying for over a minute. He could well have said: “Brothers, all of you here are going straight to heaven because you’re an unbearable bunch of filthy rats,” and no one would have batted an eyelid. I was making a huge effort to listen because I felt an increasing probability that he was creating a mental mist in order to mock me, to insult me, to induce a deep sleep in order to defile me.

– “and that man shall be cut off from among his people to the end thatthechildrenofIsraelm aybringtheirsacrifices,whichtheyofferintheopenfield,eventhattheymaybringthemuntotheLor d,untothedoorofthetabernacleofthecongregation,untothepriest,andofferthemforpeaceofferi ngsuntotheLord…”

A fuzzy black parcel fell to the ground up near the altar, making a noise not unlike the sound of a giant walnut cracking open. The congregation needed a few moments to wake up. A woman in mourning was lying on the ground in a foetal position, in the middle of the central isle. She had fallen asleep at the end of the bench and had fallen over. Two people lifted her and helped her outside. A large puddle of blood was left in the isle, reflecting the priest’s face back like a red mirror. A bucket and a mop appeared, pushed along by an extremely old white-bearded brother. A woman insisted on cleaning up herself, clearly in sign of sacrifice, but the old brother, who was under an oath of silence, gestured her away.

If anyone was about to do something for the community that would be taken into account in heaven, that was him. In the meantime, the priest did not move a step away from the altar, nor did he say a word. With the floor finally clean and the red mirror removed, the priest, who had a finger down on the book pointing to the place where he had stopped his reading, resumed exactly where he had left it.

– “andthepriestshallsprinkletheblooduponthealtaroftheLordatthedoorofthetabernacleofthe…”

A loud peal of laughter ensued. Undoubtedly it was a miracle, sophisticated and theatrical, produced in order to liven up the ceremony.

That night at the hotel, I removed the bandage covering the wound on my finger. It was very clean, though still completely open. Opening up the cut, I could see all the way to the bone.

But there wasn’t a drop of blood. Obviously it was about to seal over. I left through the window and, like a black shadow, I flew down the streets. The entire city was transparent.

I woke up at exactly eight a.m. The sheets were stained with blood. The cut on my finger had bled profusely while I slept. I dressed and rushed outside. I couldn’t wait to get back to the place where two nights before I had mistaken a bleeding nose for one of the seven plagues. There were no traces of blood or snow. I had bled from two different places for unconnected reasons. Though I found the situation exciting, I went to a pharmacy and bought a bandage that I wrapped tight around my finger. That night I dreamt that I was flying through the city like a ghost again. Eating it up, taking my nourishment from it… A savoury flavour woke me up at exactly three in the morning. I sat up violently with blood gushing out of my nose all over the sheets. I groped for the light, knocked over the bedside lamp, got out of bed barefoot and felt a terrible pain in my foot. Probing along the walls I got to the bathroom. The blood flowing from my nose was covering nearly half my body, and a plinter of glass from the lamp had cut my foot. The wall and floor were covered in my bloodied traces. The room looked like an utter catastrophe. A sorry epiphany that was served up to me.

Should I perhaps eat myself?

The next morning I hurried out of the hotel door headed for the temple of the Great Mother. I felt the urgent need to piss on its walls. I wanted to blow my nose on the Holy Mantle, snuff out the funeral pyres, laugh at the saints, interrupt a speech by the Pope, pretend to be the Count Saint Termain and seduce a convent full of nuns, rape an abductee, eat steak at the table of King Sauloron, drink beer out of the Holy Grail, use the head of Baphomet the Baptist as a flowerpot, and the Planks of the Law as splinters for the fire. Savouring these desires, the day went by in a jiffy. I returned to the hotel in the evening. The manager greeted me with a forced smile; he was expecting me. After a few minutes’ petty conversation, he asked me bluntly and without losing his smile if I wouldn’t like to move to a different hotel. The idiot must have thought I was holding black masses every night in my room at the Hotel des Macistes. With a perfectly serious face, I formed a triangle putting my hands together at the thumbs and placed my eye in the angle, fixing my stare on him. “Do you understand?” I asked. The manager stretched his smile even wider. Wanker… I’m heading south in the morning.

The anxiety caused by that reflection won’t let me get to sleep. I pop a pill, it has no effect whatsoever, two, three, I’ll swallow the whole jar if I need to to get to sleep…!

The phone wakes me up. I haven’t given anyone this number. So I figure they’re calling from reception. Incompetent arseholes. “Hello,” says a woman’s voice.

“It’s me.”

“Hello,” I reply, not knowing who it is.

“Well, how are you?” she asks. I hesitate for a couple of seconds, still dopey and unsure whether to keep talking until I discover who she is. I suddenly feel bad, uncomfortable. I look around for a clock, can’t find one. I’ve been woken up in the middle of the night for a daft chat.

“Who is this?” I ask, truly annoyed.

“Don’t you know me? It’s…”

I arrive at Minervo well into the night. I’ve taken enough morphine to put a giant pig to sleep. I’ve grown my finger nails, sharpened them and painted them black. I ask at the hotel for a decent restaurant. The guy at the counter is a B-rate specimen.

He’s been abducted and hasn’t remembered yet. He feels self-assured and dominant, but one day he will begin to feel a huge sense of insecurity that will transform him into a slave of fear. He gives me some daft directions. He’s offended because I don’t want to have dinner at the hotel restaurant. I walk out on him half way through a sentence. I walk down the street in a slumber. There’s no one out. The fountains are making an awful noise, gods in an ongoing orgy. I show them my middle finger in a hugely powerful mudra and they shut up for a while. I spot a restaurant. Cagliastro’s Hideaway. I like the name. I step inside, I order two beef carpaccios and fall asleep on the table.

The following day I head for the Caputtano Catacombs. A bunch of skeletons ask me to help them get out of there. The say they’re pained by people’s looks, they think people are staring at them. A severe case of paranoia. One of them laughs behind my back as I walk past. What are you laughing at, you fucking skeleton…?

A split second before I heard her name I recognised her. And at the same time I remembered the scent of the black man who announced my immortality, the one who I hadn’t been able to track down that day. It was this woman who was giving it off. Her back was slightly hunched and I always had the impression that that’s where the smell was coming from, from her back. Everything surrounding her was catastrophic, all her acquaintances suffered unlikely accidents, the people around her felt sad and exhausted. I had started off fearing her and ended up hating her.

I suddenly get a sinister feeling. Is she calling from reception?

“I’m calling because I have to tell you about something really important, really, really important, but since you haven’t been wanting to talk to me for a while I didn’t know if you would answer the phone this time…” She was giving her whole speech a mysterious and pitiful tone. “Shall I tell you?”

“Tell me if you want.”

In the afternoon I visit an exorcist, Father Bassile Tagrua. He’s one hundred years old and he confides it’s been a long time since he last practiced an exorcism. To confront the evil one you need a great deal of strength, he says. I say that all I want from him is to take his picture. He poses coquettishly and gives me a book: a drama in three acts by the title of “McCain”. I get back to my hotel contented. I’ve bought a set of weights that I keep unused in my room that is, once again, ridiculously large.

A hallway, an anteroom with a sofa, table with six chairs, drinks cabinet, kitchen, two bathrooms, one bedroom and a master bedroom with a double bed. The wall opposite the bed is covered entirely with a mirror where I’ve been catching glimpses of someone’s reflection. But when I look straight at it, I’m on my own. It’s probably the bloody man in the mirror. The guy who only pops out when you’re not looking.

“Then I’ll tell you. I was asleep in bed. And since I can’t get to sleep if even the slightest light is coming in the room, in addition to using a sleep mask I try to get total darkness in my room. I don’t know if I ever told you that I’ve been scared of sticking my hands out from under the cover since my aunt told me about something that happened during the Civil War. Her brother was executed and his death had left the entire family with a sense of guilt. Had they only

insisted that afternoon that he didn’t go into town… they knew it was dangerous, those days. But he insisted on checking the state of a house they owned there, and never came back. One night, while she was praying her rosary in bed, in the dark, my aunt sensed an invisible hand holding her own. She cried out in sheer terror. It was her brother’s hand holding hers for a few seconds. But in his touch she did not feel hatred or remorse. Rather, it was a warm touch that felt like it was trying to say that everything was ok, that she was not guilty of his death. Ever since she told me that, every time I wake up and feel I have a hand out, I immediately hide it under the cover out of respect. A couple of nights ago, I woke up at an indistinct hour. I was well covered up, so everything was OK. But my mask had moved slightly. When I turned to adjust it I saw a tiny spot in the dark. I couldn’t make out the shape, but it appeared to be moving. I thought I was dreaming or imagining things. I was very tired, I turned around, pulled my mask into place and put my head under the covers, taking care not to expose a single toe. But I couldn’t get back to sleep; in my mind that thing was still there, mysterious. I looked again, slowly lifting my mask. Now it was bigger, but was still no larger than a walnut. It was moving in hypnotic undulations, as if it were breathing. I was mesmerised, staring for a long while. I wasn’t scared, but I wanted to turn on the light. I hit the switch of the lamp on my beside table but it didn’t come on. I tried the ceiling lamp that I could reach from the bed, but that didn’t work either. I didn’t find that particularly unsettling, in fact I wasn’t scared, but even so I wasn’t going to get out of bed for anything in the world. When I looked again, I saw it had grown. Now I could see it far more clearly. It was something… how would I describe it? it looked like it was made out of reflective material. It was no longer doing that breathing movement I had noticed earlier, but was revolving on its own axis. Its shape, the way its shine was projected on the surface, made me think of an organic movement. I couldn’t wait for it to get larger, as I was sure it would; I was sure that strange thing was growing bigger for me to see it. And so it did. By this time it was quite large, large enough for me to make out recognisable shapes on the surface.

Forms cropping out that reminded me of a spine on a back, followed by flat shapes and… suddenly new protrusions formed like a profile! The profile was a face turned towards the floor, a flat section and, again the face in profile! Now it turned again, and I could clearly see a face looking my way! At that point it was growing even bigger. But at that very moment I realised that in fact the thing wasn’t growing, it was actually coming towards me. I dared to pull an arm out from under the blankets and tried to touch it. It already seemed within hand’s reach, but it wasn’t, in fact it kept getting closer, faster and faster, and the bigger it got, the further away it appeared to be. Now I realised that it was actually huge and that it was a lot further away than I had imagined. I had thought it was within arm’s reach and in fact it was probably the size of a planet. I could see it rotating. It looked like it was made out of some hard material, a kind of metal polished like a mirror. It reflected light, though there was none shining on it. In one of its turns I discovered a huge eye reflected on the head planet, then another eye, a nose, a whole face. That’s when it all fell into place. It was reflecting your face! The head was your head! Now it was very close, I could hear a faint sound, a vibration every time one of the protrusions swung by, then I realised again that I was wrong. The head wasn’t moving towards me; I was moving towards

it at full speed! I was about to enter its atmosphere and impact its surface. It felt like I was in a sci-fi film, the typical scene of a space ship approaching a planet at top speed. The vibration was getting stronger, now it was right near me, it was spectacular. A sea of bronze reflecting your face!!! I was about to slam into the surface, one hundred metres, fifty, twenty, ten… now… luckily this must be only a dream… I went through the surface, your extreme hardness only an appearance, I found myself within a myriad reflections of your face… Someone’s knocking, I’ll just see who that is…”

Her last words really annoyed me. How can she get up to answer the door? You’re inside my planetary head! If that’s the way you saw it it’s only because, I swear, I feel it that way this very instant, gigantic, cold, hard, reflecting… and deformed … ………..………………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………… I’m in my bed, covered up to my neck, looking at the reflection of my head in the mirror in my room, with the phone receiver in my hand, sticking out from under the covers, pushed up against my ear. But all I can hear is an overwhelming silence.

Millions of years have lapsed. Now I feel like an engine made of cold, stiff flesh.

I recall that, at nighttime, as a child, I would lie on the sofa at my parents’ watching TV, covered up to my neck in a thick blanket. I felt invulnerable. One of those nights I was gripped by a crazy emotion and, biting hysterically into my index finger, I screamed in my thoughts “monsters, demons, come if you dare, I’m here waiting for you!” A second later, a procession of monsters and demons burst through the door and came straight towards me, taking cover under my blanket, where they grew strong. My protective blanket was full of monsters, I had to get rid of it, burn it. The protection was now outside, in the dark.

I fix my attention on the phone again. I can’t hear a thing, there’s only a massive vacuum, I can’t see a single monster. They’re still under the blanket, they’ve eaten up my body but my head is still sticking out, safe. I obsessively stare at my head reflected in the mirror, just my head. The mirror no longer reflects the bed, my shoulders, the arm holding the phone. Now there is complete darkness all around.

The world has vanished, it has finally fallen with all its deceit. Now there’s only my head, my thoughts, hard and opaque, that I perceive with full clarity. Huge, universal. This is the only existence that seems valid. The ultimate degree of perfection, and it feels entirely familiar. I’m on a stage where I’m performing and watching all at once. The silence……… I feel a huge need to shout. Paranoids of the world unite!

I salute you! I praise you!

What’s that beep? What are you laughing at?

igualar color con otros imagos

Pilar Adón 1 His nursemaid liked to light the lamp in the front porch and leave it burning throughout the night. That way, strangers would know that someone lived there, that the house was occupied. That was the only way to keep the ne’er-dowells from her and her little one, the only way to be truly safe.

‘I am a woman who defends herself,’ she used to say. ‘I cannot understand what kind of woman would not defend herself.’

His nursemaid’s voice enveloped Samuel’s each and every act, every thought, every intention. Sometimes just by listening to the particular inflections in her voice, he could tell she was in a state of such excitement that she could burst into a run, arms open wide; jumping and laughing, never wanting to stop.

He would stare at her with his eyes wide open, hands pressed together over his short blue trousers, anxious for her to tell him that story once again; the one about the empty wells, the one about the beautiful woman who asked the lonely one a favour, the story about the swallow that had lost a small egg while soaring high, or the one about the ice that melted in the train. She would then ask him with an extraordinarily luminous smile – how could her little boy be so curious? – and he would begin to laugh.

She would ask him what it was that awakened his wonder with such force that it would inevitably send him roaming about his room in search of a way to satisfy it. Why could he not accommodate himself in his bed, reading a book or contemplating his fingernails, humming some little song, repeating parts of those stories he knew by heart, imagining her face and voice? Why must he be

so inquisitive as to tip-toe silently out into the hallway and from there, creep to the edge of the stairway and take the steps slowly downward...downward to overhear an adult conversation that he would not understand; one he should not be hearing? Could he not stop for just one second? Just a short moment - so she could rest. Because she knew about fatigue. She knew. That infinite weakness in the fingers, the shoulders, the top of one’s head. Yes. She knew what fatigue was. She knew what it was to long for a rest more than anything else in the world. That is why, at times, she did not bear well the burden of constantly protecting a little boy; one who would scamper into the corners of the house – laughing hysterically when he got there – making everything suddenly so much more exhausting.

Little Samuel sat at her feet while she whispered to him, illuminated by the lamplight at nightfall. She explained to him that although nobody had realised it yet, he possessed an extraordinary, almost instinctive elegance. This elegance was not exactly congruent with the forest in which they lived; the slovenly way his father had dressed, nor the decidedly lazy behaviour he had shown at times. Samuel’s nursemaid said that her little boy knew how to be extremely friendly and would also know how to become extraordinarily rich.

Her child would know exactly how to behave amidst Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin’s 18th Century still lifes and how to conduct himself at an elegantly laid table, displaying careful manners at taking his seat and utmost diligence at using the cutlery.

In the mornings, at dawn, the nursemaid’s husband would go downstairs and snuff out the lantern light. It was daytime, so those who lived outside the house would not dare come close to them.

2 He had been fortunate and he should be aware of it. If he were not aware of it at all times, every day, how incredibly fortunate he was, he would be committing a ridiculous act of ingratitude. And Samuel could not be ungrateful. On the contrary, he should give thanks. He had grown up with lingering afternoons, when what seemed to be a spreading fire reflected in the visible areas of the clouds and he should feel grateful for that. He would fall asleep, lulled by the voice of his nursemaid repeating incessantly, once and again, that there – in the heart of the forest – they had anything they would find in any other corner of the world, be it China or Australia. The mountains and the sky, the watercourses, the wind...everything was exactly the same. There was nothing special. Nor was there anything special about human behaviour. It was always about the same things: love, ambition, fear, expectation, spite, curiosity, impa-

tience... And he should feel grateful for receiving this type of instruction. His nursemaid had built him an astonishing house designed so that in it, he would feel no fear. Never. Of anything. For this reason too, he should also consider himself the most privileged boy in the world.

His childminders believed from the very beginning that he should get used to the sound of the shadows, views of depth and the sudden appearance of creatures previously unknown to him. They decided that his room be made of glass. No one can be fearful of what they know – they thought. Only that which cannot be seen, the unknown, frightens and paralyses one with fear. The little boy’s room, therefore, had no opaque walls except those facing the interior of the home. The exterior walls were transparent. Consequently, Samuel grew up with the presence of abandoned dogs circling the house in search of the leftovers from supper. He grew up in the company of the melancholy shimmer of certain insects and the sudden flight of birds of prey. He learned to see beyond the deep blackness of the moonless nights and pay careful attention to the changes in the outlines and scents of the landscape produced by the emotionless succession of seasons. The trees of the forest, the slightest variations in the horizon; the offerings of momentary perfection (desirous it seemed, of waking for one instant only to expire the next) were all retained as sparks of bliss in the conduits of his memory. He knew – even though he really could not explain it through words, images nor through the gestures of his unusual body – that he should be thankful, just as he knew that the various lengths of a tree trunk would eventually lead it up toward the infinite.

His defenders were able to escape in order to protect him and now the three of them lived safely in hiding.

3 Next to the wooden door that led to the inside of the house, under a large tree, stood a white iron table surrounded by chairs of the same colour. Although they were covered with droplets of rain and fallen leaves, Samuel and his nursemaid used to sit there talking for hours about what had forced them to flee.

‘We all have a flawed image of ourselves. Sometimes it is an idealized image and sometimes a horrible one’ his nursemaid smiled.

‘I was sure that I was beautiful until one afternoon I understood that I was not.’

‘Can you just understand something like that all of the sudden, in one afternoon?’

‘Yes. Of course you can. And when I understood it, it changed me. Not physically, of course, because I stopped worrying about that. It changed the way I did things or did not do them. I changed my behaviour, I stopped smiling. I nearly stopped talking. And I certainly stopped pleasing people. Or at least, I stopped trying.

I decided that since I was not what I had thought I was – my external appearance had nothing to do with what I had imagined – I could behave with absolute freedom. I was no longer subject to the tyranny of an ideal image I had to maintain because I no longer had an ideal image.’

‘I do not want to disappoint people.’

‘I know’ she said, placing her cold, damp fingers over her eyes. ‘And we brought you here so that you would not have to scare anyone.’

Scare...He had not spoken about scaring. Samuel had not pronounced that word. He did know, however, that his strange body and his deficiencies had caused other people (beautiful and normal beings) to get up from wherever they were and run away; facing the wall to see no more. To not see the disorder. To not see the fragile extensions of his back poking upward toward the sky nor the brief smile on his lips.

‘Do you know what balance is? Harmony? Well, to other people, my dear boy, you have neither of the two,’ his nursemaid had said once. ‘They think you are out of proportion. You lack calm. They think you are not at peace with the universe.’ She was sitting on the steps, stretching her arm out to run her fingers through the handrails of the inside stairs.

Samuel remembered that she was wearing a perfectly clean blue dress that day – one that she had tied with a blue belt, as if trying to mark the lines of a waist that had once been thin.

‘You do not need to give me an explanation,’ he had responded, going down the hallway toward his room.

‘But the universe can be so sweet, so sweet...’she insisted, while Samuel could only think of being able to take a long shower; of remaining silent... feeling the hot water cover his stomach and down to his legs like an enormous veil, leaving his muscles and eyelids feeling weak and frail.

‘I am so proud of you both.’

‘Proud?’ she repeated as if she could not believe that Samuel had really chosen that word. ‘Proud?’

Maybe later she could proceed to tell him about that extraordinary elegance of his, almost instinctive; although no one had yet recognized he possessed it.

4 He heard about the fumigator for the first time one morning in October.

September had gone by almost unnoticed and autumn settled into his home with the death of an enormous insect. Samuel bent down to carefully observe how that amazing and perfect brown organism – segmented and tube-shaped – stretched out; starting from its head and ending in an abrupt triangular appendage. Its wings, two fragile, pale sheets speckled with brief reddish shadows, protectively covered its entirety. It must have

died that same morning and was now motionless, sunken in the mud with its legs futilely pointed toward the sky as if attempting to show that they still held strength in their rigidity and could still keep him upright at any moment.

Samuel sat on the floor, leaned in a bit further and studied the insect’s black, dull eyes on either side of its head and its velvety profile. He was sure that if he dared to touch it, he would find a certain softness in that inanimate being (that was not entirely beautiful). It seemed, at the same time, ready to move an antenna and take flight or at least wriggle itself away from the band of tiny ants that had flung into frenetic activity at its side. He thought he should pick up one of the wings of that unfortunate body between his fingertips and take it away. Avoid the decomposition.

The dismemberment. So he reached out his hand and moved it slightly. This caused the ants to divert their course and they immediately realised there was someone else there above them. Someone there who knew that, no matter where he left that insect: in the rain or shelter, in a tree or on the highest point of the highest rock, it would end up disappearing. It would be devoured by the other creatures who – with the cold of autumn and the progressive scarcity of light – would become increasingly slower... more and more invisible. Yet there they remained, prepared to continue their daily charge of finding sustenance.

He refused to conceive of himself as the future repast of countless underground beings. He refused to imagine absolute darkness, absolute stillness; nor was he about to fuel feelings of panic over the inevitable. He was not going to set off the terror that the end brought on; the terror of knowing you are a mortal being. He was not, however, going to remain stoic to the desolation. In some way, by removing the insect; by wanting to avoid that devastation, he intervened in the earth’s characteristic game of creation and destruction and rearranged (only in one specific way) the course of what was bound to happen...what he knew would ultimately happen. Just as men were so accustomed to doing, Samuel butted in, muddling up the natural flow of nature’s course.

‘What they have done with that bug is what they wanted to do with you.’ he heard.

His nursemaid had been observing the scene silently, without him knowing it.

‘Destroy me?’

‘That is what our fellow men do with those whom they consider dangerous and whose peculiar beauty they do not understand. If we had stayed in the city they would have come looking for you. The would have surrounded you – intent on their task – hungry to find you because that is just what they were meant to do, find Samuel. Finding Samuel would mean opening their eyes wide with every ounce of compassion a normal human being can have, arms outstretched and lips ready for that generous contact – precluding words – They would hold you at length and even sing to you softly: Are you well, little one? Does it hurt? Would you like to take some medicine?

And then,’ his nursemaid smiled, ‘they would call in the fumigator. Poor thing...my poor little thing.’

They would look for him. Inside the washing basket and behind the garden trees. Joking and repeating his name while his own father, locked into his bedroom, would begin whistling a slow melody.

‘But...they will not come here, will they? We are safe here.’

Removing the wooden panels to make sure there was nothing behind them.

With their hands on the windows, leaving little steam clouds on the glass, while they chimed in chorus: ‘Will you come out of your hiding place? Will you come out, little ogre?’

‘They will not come here,’ his nursemaid repeated. ‘They will not come as long as they believe this house is inhabited only by lucid, conventional beings that light little lanterns outside at night to frighten away vermin and unwanted creatures who inhabit the forest. No dear, they will not come here.’

5 Insects disappear in the autumn.

In the autumn, leaves fall from the trees and onto the ground forming vast, thick, ochre-toned carpets. Long, flat leaves... It is then that the games and the giggles become eclipsed. Autumn is the time when happiness dims slowly, the autumn monsters are usually the most wicked, most deformed and uncontrollable. They do as they please, their poor victims having lost all reasonable control, rendered lethargic and disorientated. They cannot be placated by coloured pills or lukewarm baths, trips to the east nor hours and hours of exposure to light. Anyone who had given birth to an autumn monster would know that there are no effective remedies nor long-lasting promises.

But autumn is also a time when, at certain moments of the day, even the tiniest plant can cast a long, harmonious shadow on the ground.

6 Samuel had been born in autumn, and on his birthday he gave long thought before posing the question. His nursemaid was reading a book on Roman mythology. He could feel – as he wavered between pushing ahead with his mission (voicing that perpetual apprehension) and not going through with it – how the fatigue set in over his eyes, weakening them so that they seemed to fill with sand at the least bit of effort. At times, when the skin surrounding them became almost transparent and two heavy lines dropped down into the lower rims, sinking his face into a look of deep despair, he wished he could talk and walk with them closed.

‘What is it that makes me so different?’ he was finally able to ask. ‘Why must we flee and why must we hide?’

‘You already know,’ his nursemaid’s eyes remained fixed on the pages of her book, ‘the fumigators.’

‘Yes... but why? Why me?’

‘My dear, you have always been too inquisitive,’ he heard her say after a few minutes. ‘Always succumbing to that pernicious curiosity that leads you to search and search, wanting to know it all. To be three places at once.’

‘Should we not talk?’

‘Sometimes it is better not to discuss things, leave them just as they are. If we try to explain, if we try to rationalise everything...’

‘Everything must be rationalised. I need to discuss.’

She beheld him with a hint of mistrust in her eyes.

‘Fine,’ she murmured, ‘Why not? I have already told you that your mother was as sensitive and fragile as a sigh, and that one morning a few days after your birth, she was found with her eyes wide open; looking at the shrunken sky of a white ceiling. That was when your father thought he would go mad. I suppose he could not cope with the glaring emptiness. I suppose he must have felt infinitely sorry for himself and for you – the unfinished baby she left behind – she would never be herself again...’

At times he thought he had died. Sometimes, when he heard his nursemaid speak of his origins – of the beginning of his very life – he felt how the darkness crept up; how it bourgeoned into totality and how, at the same time, the imminent faintness took on a life of its own; indifferent to his demands or desires.

‘We do not see anyone, closed in here. And no one sees us. That way, we must not worry about what others may think. We avoid the consequences by avoiding the risks, avoiding slip ups.’

His toes paralysed, his feet. His feet... Those distant, anonymous objects that moved away from his knees, from his shoulders until they disappeared, falling through the void of the hallway and into the living room to remain there; unalterable, remote. The only solid things were the words of his nursemaid, their insistent, neutral-toned repetition: ‘If you only knew what happened...if you knew...I never had children and you were alone...I could think of nothing else. I simply could not. I had always dreamt of a secluded house, where I could raise my own family. My own family...I do not know to what extent you understand that you have ruined my existence. You crumbled everything. I used to have things that were only mine.

Peace of mind, my truths...Now I can think of nothing else but you. You and your safety. You and your damned curiosity...’ she seemed to have to gather the strength necessary to finish each and every one of her choppy sentences. ‘You and the threat that you could disappear any day in search of a different home, of new beliefs. We brought you here to care for you. So that you would be with us. To protect you from the terrifying outside world, full of disasters.’

Stretched out on the floor, practically naked, Samuel fell into a deep abyss where there was neither pain nor cold nor the echoes of his own breathing nor

the trembling shooting up and down his defenceless, outstretched arms.

He remained unconscious, and inside that abyss, Samuel no longer existed.

‘You cannot leave now. Not after everything we have done for you.’

Only later, after a few brief seconds that seemed to him like years of inexistence and terror, would he open his eyes wide. The light returned with such intensity that it was unbearable.

‘Everything we have sacrificed for you.’

The sun held its autumn glimmer for a split second and then he understood what had happened. He realised that he was on the floor and that he had again glimpsed the reality of his situation.

‘I will not leave,’ he whispered. ‘Never.’

He tried to hide any external sign of what was happening to him. No cries for help, no loud protests nor tears that would softly dampen his face, weakening him even further. He knew that once he had heard that, all he had to do was forget. Stand up. Very slowly. And forget.

‘Luckily, dear one, that does not depend on you.’

Work out new strategies for not getting emotional, not getting excited, making time pass over him smoothly, hardly making contact with his skin.

‘I agree,’ Samuel answered.

After understanding that the most horrid abominations really dwelled within other beings – in the most undecipherable of the voracious, sordid behaviour of loved ones – the tyranny of the fumigators disappeared, giving way to the oppression of those near to him; the good ones.

So generous, so protecting.

igualar color con otros monstruos

Estrella de Diego

Seventy-four years. How rapidly they had passed, in spite of everything; how fast. Now that he was forced to review them, trapped as he was by a malicious café window, Don Michele, Professor Cercati – the famous specialist in Etruscan civilisation – the most knowledgeable in the language, customs, utensils and sarcophagi of that extinguished people, considered that he had been a happy man in his life; that is, if it had not been for that sharp and aggravating pain in his leg that had pursued him for months now. He did, however, remember some sad moments: it is true he no longer went on the excavations. But even that had happened gradually. He had a way of distancing himself from things with an unusual normality, a gift or skill granted by the years in waning.

Sometimes he joked with his colleagues saying there were no more Etruscan objects to be taken from the earth – he had taken them all – and they laughed each time, as is expected when a wise man repeats a joke.

And Don Michele certainly was a wise man. He was happy too, he mused contentedly as he observed his reflection in the glass just above the woman who – engaged in lively conversation with her invisible counterpart – continued smiling.

Luana had left and returned so many times that Professor Cercati had not taken notice of the obstinate length of her last absence until he returned that day from the hospital. But memory can play tricks on old people. He peered into the café window. As his eyes casually scanned the scene (as they do, without really seeing) they caught on the intense silhouette of a woman in a hat: an episodic character intently penning something on a white page, as if writing an important letter. There was something peculiar about her, as if she had stepped out of a film. Smiling as she was, she seemed to be conversing with an invisible being who lived inside her letter.

Yes, Professor Cercati was happy. One could even say he was very happy. With the passing of years, youth’s emotions lose their peremptory edge, and although extracting history from the earth had been his life – at least that is what he believed – maturity opened up a new window for reflection. Let others find the objects. He was content with seeing them, touching them surreptitiously, once they were cleaned and delivered to the museum to be catalogued.

And Don Michele Cercati, who never paid attention to anything postdating the 7th Century B.C.E., contemplated that cut-out image. Over it was superimposed his own serious face. He donned a hat, and his characteristic image of respected archaeologist – caught off guard like that, a reflection in a café window – suddenly seemed extremely fragile. Perhaps that day, for the first time in twenty years, he became conscious of the passing of time: he had acquired the ways of a seventy-year-old man.

‘Look at the mouth...do you notice the change in expression? Rome. Rome had come and swept away the smile. Rome erased this magnificent civilisation.

Rome and its inexplicable excesses...always Rome. Those wretched Romans should never have come.’ He became irritable at times, powerless against the lack of documentation available to reconstruct the language. ‘The laws remain.

No literature nor letters. Laws do not tell a thing; they only separate human beings.’

‘Professor Cercati,’ his young assistants would ask, ‘do you think this is from the high period?’

But later, facing the statuette, his anger would soften and the gentle hand that caressed the past would return. He would feel calm again, as if returning home – to the only true home one has: his memory. The home that is chosen outside, in the end; easier than one would believe.

‘Notice the slight crease in the lip, Cavallini. This absurd detail could cause us to err by a century. But they will not deceive me. No matter how they pretend, their smiles will not deceive me.’ And Cavallini, his disciple: efficient and acquiescent; selfless and hard-working, looked at him with a foolish smile – empty and plain – one that Professor Cercati always compared, irremissibly, to the enigmatic expression of the Etruscans. He was frequently exasperated by his disciple’s facial expression. Oftentimes when they worked long nights together on Don Michele’s complete works, he even wondered whether someone with such a banal facial expression could understand the tragic intensity of Etruria.

How happy he was, he thought as he observed himself in the glass. How happy, even after having retired from the excavations. Loved by his family, respected by his colleagues; an entire life’s work published. Six volumes full of his research. Yes indeed, an entire life’s work. A pleasant life, in spite of everything; in spite of that sharp burning whose origin was a mystery to everyone.

‘Don Michele...What are you doing just standing there? You will catch a cold.’

The authoritative voice of Maria Rinaldi – the revered curator of the Volterra Museum – had surprised him. He turned to her with the friendly gesture bestowed on his face by the years.

‘Don’t give up, Michele, one will arrive any day by post. What can I say? The Etruscans are full of surprises.’ Maria Rinaldi with her dry, distant humour, preferred to make light of defeat but Don Michele knew all too well that she shared in his sense of tragedy. He was very fond of his colleague. They shared that burning passion that could never completely be satisfied. ‘The worst thing is, even if the letter were to arrive, we may never be able to decipher it. Letters coming from another era can never be deciphered. Letters written by others should never be opened, nor read. Perhaps it is better that way, Don Michele.

Expectation gives meaning to our lives. If we were to find the letter, what would we have left to hope for?

‘Another one, of course, Maria. A second letter would compliment the first.

Many letters, one answering the next. An entire packet of letters.’

Dr. Rinaldi saw Don Michele’s enthusiastic expression – as exuberant as a child’s – brighten with the mere possibility. ‘I hope your Etrurian letters never do come. You would continue torturing us with new volumes, Professor. You write faster than most of us read. Don’t stand there any longer, you will catch cold. You are not a youngster anymore and the humidity in Venice chills one’s very bones. At any rate, I do not think you will be finding your Etruscan letter in Saint Mark’s Square.’

‘One never knows, Maria. They could have come this far.’

‘Doctor Rinaldi...what a fright you have given me. I was daydreaming...’

‘Ah, yes, inebriate with success you are, Don Michele. At last, your complete works are in the booksellers. There was talk of nothing more at the congress.

At least this way, when people go about calling you an erudite, there will be documentation to back it up.’

‘Come now, Maria, don’t give me trouble. You and I both know that I will not go down in history for my scholarly texts. We both know that scholarly texts are always incomplete. They only tell one part of people’s lives. Not even that, perhaps. So many years we have spent dedicated to deciphering the Etruscan language and here you have it: all we can talk about at the end of the day is an emptiness, a longing; a doubt. If we could at least find a letter... I would have given my life for a letter.’

‘I do not share that hypothesis, you already know that. If we continue on that line we will end up saying it was them that discovered America. You are starting to look like one of them. Did you know that? Stop staring at me with that foolish smile.’

‘Just keep that up and you will be the last to find out when I do receive that letter,’ Don Michele answered, laughing.

‘If it arrives, don’t tell me. I prefer to keep on waiting. What if, in the end, they weren’t as unique as we had imagined? You are going to catch a cold, I don´t understand what you are doing there. You need to take care of that leg.’

‘Stop scolding me, Maria. I was just on my way home.’

‘Thank you for your letter, Professor. I am not an Etruscan princess, but a Mesopotamian one. Luana’

The woman in the café must have got up because the table was empty and Michele, still smiling at his colleague’s jokes, allowed his mind to wander back to that trip. It was late and they had been enjoying a beer after a long day of excavation. He – who was much more guarded then, than now – for some strange reason, began telling Dr. Rinaldi his secret. She – a decisive, beautiful woman – used to scold him for everything, just as she did now. She was scrupulous, precise; professional. She handled every fragment of the past with compelling adoration, limitless dedication: a true archaeologist. His secret – the same one they had remembered this afternoon; the same standing joke at every encounter – was the impertinent determination to find, wherever it may be, an epistolary document from the Estruscans. This would be the way to know them better – through words: the most intimate tool for communicating among people – a place where the soul is bared, as Kafka used to say. The students that gathered around Steven Jones, the English expert, seemed to be on another level altogether, waiting themselves to be discovered. He had never been much interested in students. They did not truly understand the magic of archaeology, nor did they have the necessary patience...what did they know about a researcher’s yearning?

On returning home a few days later, he opened the letter-box and found it. The letter was brief.

‘Dear Professor Cercati: I apologise for writing to you directly but your reflections on the Etruscan letter have moved me considerably. Never had I heard a person speak of absence with such passion. You must truly long for that letter. I hope you receive it.

Someone who needs something so desperately must have it. Yours truly, Luana Simonetti’ Dr. Cercati was accustomed to receiving letters but for some unknown reason, this one seemed particularly special: just as concise as the Etruscan letters must have been, stating only the essentials. He tried to remember the students on the dig. Which one was Simonetti? He sat at his writing desk and answered the letter in the seductive tone he frequently used in his epistolary exercises.

‘Dear Etruscan Princess: Thank you for your letter. I had the brief illusion that it had come from another era. Succinct, precise. It is I who am moved. Sincerely, Michele Cercati.’

He had completely forgotten the episode when a brown envelope arrived a few weeks later, containing a postcard from Petra, with no return address:

He began to get used to Luana’s letters. She would write from any corner of the world. Always fleeing, thought Don Michele. Luana...always writing letters without a return address. Sometimes they were long and melancholic, as if composed by the hand of a Mesopotamian princess. Other times brief and to the point, like a caesar’s war missives. Letters so numerous they should not be answered. A whirlwind of letters that never, in the end, brought news of Etruria.

Luana...kaleidoscopic at each arrival at the museum office, bedecked in new bracelets from every new voyage: now smiling like the Etruscans, now vanishing like the Egyptians. Luana...many times full of the exasperating vitality of the Romans, crushing everything in her path; promising at every trip to begin a new thesis that always disappeared at each return; disregarding the Etruscans at times just to spite him, other times performing impeccable investigation on a minute particle engraved in a stone. Why was Luana not more consistent if her linguistic instincts were so precise?

‘Michele, your mission is absurd. This is a language for the insane.

I am leaving.’

And he would become exasperated with her, at least at the beginning. He would be stunned by her disappearance, as if an impossible promise had been broken: that of deciphering. But Luana always returned. Or sent a letter – long or short. Cercati began reading them without enthusiasm.

Every day there would be less enthusiasm, because they never brought the long-awaited news from Etruria.

‘I am leaving. This time for good. It is a pity, because no one will write your biography. You will be reduced to erudite annotations, emotionless like the Etruscan laws. No one will come to know the tragedy of your passion. Who will speak about your soul?’ she said one day, handing him a strange postcard – surely the work of a living artist – portraying a bizarre contemporary landscape. ‘Look, that is what the destruction of Babel must have been like.’

But Luana had left and come back so many times that it was only that winter morning – his face reflected in the café window on his return from the hospital – when Professor Cercati realised that the years had passed and that time was running out, although he did not know how or in what way. How absurd...it seemed that the sharp pain he felt in his leg made him suddenly conscious of so many things.

He realised that he was not young anymore and felt the weight of those volumes that had made him so happy but from which his soul was totally absent. He was sorry for not being able to express his longing, his emptiness; for having it be reduced to scholarly annotations, for reproducing in his own texts that which he most detested in life: words of law. A painful doubt washed over him suddenly; a suspicion. What if the letter had never reached him because of his very incapacity to decipher it?

The Etruscans loved surprises – Dr. Rinaldi was right! He knew at that moment, with the categorical certainty that sometimes seizes the aged, how Luana knew something essential about which he had been denied the knowledge. He was impatient to know why.

On returning home, Basanta was waiting for him solicitously. Basanta, the butler from Calcutta whom a colleague – a specialist in the Ajanta Caves – had recommended, had come into his life just after the skin disease appeared. He was a man almost fussy in appearance. He had smooth olive skin and was always well-groomed, highly attentive, efficient and resolute in his own subtle way. He waited for him on that cold morning, having prepared the soft leather sofa with a pile of cushions to prop up his leg. That leg...it got steadily worse, a pain no one was able to diagnose; the leg Basanta treated each day with the care only he was capable of. He would continue to treat it in the weeks to follow, in spite of the proportions the mysterious pain had taken on.

In fact, he would continue treating it even when Professor Cercati could hardly move anymore and his world had been reduced to those few objects he had at hand’s reach. Just a few: some books, a glass of water, fountain pen and notebook and – how strange – the postcard of Babel, Luana’s gift. Now, with all the time in the world, he was able to pore over it with the scrutiny he normally set aside for the Etruscans.

Long illnesses sometimes play dirty tricks on people, and his world slowly became more unsettled. The illustrious researcher’s existence turned into something different. It became dotted with other rituals

related to discerning, discovering and exhibiting...just as in the archaeological missions, only the subject transformed into something external to his own existence: someone else’s life, just like that leg that seemed it would acquire a separate existence from the body, submerged in an invasive pain.

Later that morning something unexpected occurred, making him comprehend the mimesis his life held with that postcard scene from Babel.

As Basanta brushed his forearm past Professor Cercati’s face – hardly touching it – he had the feeling (in contact with that soft, healthy skin) that it had a feminine smoothness. Just as the dehumanised fragments of the postcard belonged to everyone and to no one, Basanta’s thin arm suddenly turned into an indefinite yet insistent passion. Circati recalled Scheherazade, the storyteller whose advantage was knowing the end of the story. Because the skins – healthy and diseased, Basanta’s tanned skin, the silky contact of the sofa, his reddened leg, all mixed together without hierarchies: just like the unordered segments of the postcard.

Illnesses often play tricks too. It was within that diabolical mélange, that abrupt contrast of skins and touch, that he felt without a doubt, his life, as well as his diseased leg – detached from the rest of his body – formed part of the story told by the postcard: Babel in Babylon. Babel in Babylon.

Perhaps that is why, when the moment came (no one knew the reason, there was no clear diagnosis) he felt prepared; an integral part of his private window on destruction and ruin. He considered a moment what his last thought should be and was surprised it was not the Etrurian letter, not even for a minute. The memory of the feminine skin, the blind certainty that it belonged to the scene in the postcard, settled steadily into his anguish.

All of a sudden – as he tried to decide on a last thought, surprised that his passion for life would break his pre-established boundaries at such a crucial moment – he was overcome by a relentless blindness. So dying was this: a blanket is thrown over one’s face and everything remains in darkness; a diluted memory of the world in a postcard, an undecipherable letter like the one from Etruria.

Angélica Lidell

Five fatsos turned up, a family with three kids arrived doing their evil deeds, aggravating, as if the fat that bubbled in their bellies and bums were the scourge of truth, their language was foul and they plundered the earth they trod, wherever they set their fat feet they imposed their mediocrity and their meanness, ultimately asserting their fierce grasp all around. They bitched and made fun of everyone who was lying there sunbathing. The five of them were crass, rude, ignorant, the five of them together amounted to a loudmouthed, bawdy rabble. Nasty to the extreme, like tyrants they pushed their domineering, dribbling jeers. They talked of kicking anyone who dared stand between their bellies and their resting spot, but they did not realise they were the malaise of mankind. They lacked community, conviviality and respect for others, they slammed everyone else’s wellbeing, all were weaker in the face of such a mass of authority, bent on satisfying their elephantine appetite for a brawl. They would wrench out their slimy looks, maliciously tossing them at their neighbours as if they were chucking balls of cement blended with shit. One could well picture their tongues wagging inside their mouths like infested vermin, fat tongues like fermented burgers, tongues made of minced and filthy meat. The youngest son, the most obese, was endowed with the task of kicking sand (not without a considerable effort in raising his foot) into the snout of a

hound puppy who was frolicking in the vicinity, blatantly accompanying the gesture with a nauseating gargling, after which he had to wipe the frothing saliva from his lower lip. It was clear that the five fatsos wanted nothing to do with pets, they went back to talking about kicking, using verbs such as thump, bang and kill.

The five fatsos continued to enslave the earth, the sea, the peace, barbing it all with their boundless vulgarity. They thus secured the fear of all those who were near them, they took the lead, exercising a form of totalitarianism learned who knows where, from who knows what politics. They humiliated others before being humiliated themselves. They perpetrated unreasonable invasions just to earn respect. Naturally, they used their sheer bodily mass to demand the respect that their atrophied minds were not able to garner. They made up a fierce, crude, idiotic and above all selfish company, heirs to the brutality of their parents, the brutality of their grandparents, harmful, children of a time shaped by a combination of ignorance and prosperity, without a trace of love or intelligence, determined to live in passiveness, demanding rights whilst considering no one else’s.

Suddenly a head carved in stone dropped out of the sky, squashing one of the fatsos. When people gathered round, they discovered the stone head’s features were identical to the fatso’s.

And the head said: Think of Lucy. Lucy is made up of 52 little bones, she’s a young prehuman. Are we destined to become a different species?

Otherwise, what would be the point of prehistory? There is no distance between one fossil and another, no distance.

Thus spoke the head.

Harking back to their ancestors allowed them to gain awareness of their own contribution to the species’ evolution, to what extent their blundering intelligence was about to provide for the emergence of a slightly more complex superhuman species.

But of course, without callousness, mankind was something else; without moral ruin, mankind was something else; without its power to do ill, mankind something else. If evil were to vanish, we would cease to be human beings in order to become a different species.

And the second head fell, killing the second fatso, and the second stone head came up with some side thoughts on Schopenhauer: Today was a good day, was it not?

The first thing you need to know is that it’s the good days that feed our madness, our disease and our death.

All of that was prepared just for you today.

It’s strange that bodies don’t explode, We squander our emotions on just about anything.

I, for instance, burst into tears when I open a tap or fold a napkin.

But of course, for you it was a good day.

Life always works to the satisfaction of the dumbest.

And you get to the end and you realise that everything you know you learnt thanks to pain. Free will was an illusion, a fraud, a total hoax, to make us believe we were involved, that we could play a part in things.

The State demands we be optimistic Sociability demands we be optimistic I, on the other hand, want to convince myself that mankind should not exist.

If I have a right over my own life, why the hell am I still here?

Thus spoke the second head.

Each falling head killed a fatso.

And the third head said, stained in blood: “I’ve been working on the spinal chord for 33 years. Next I intend to retire and devote my time to growing worms. Worms are very valuable creatures for society.”

And the fourth head said, stained in blood: “Truckloads of livestock, Truckloads of liquid refuse, truckloads of onions, factories making materials for livestock, factories making canned meat, factories making bricks, making cement, greenhouses all the men who make the landscape work, those who fill the thousands of crates with their own hands, those who pick and package with their own hands, those who pluck the fruit in the greenhouse with their own hands, those who load a truck with bricks, those who transport them, believe only in work and rest, if one of those two things fails them they might die, and they fear death, like we all do.

Can we demand of them the love and intelligence required so as not to hate each other?

Is education possible in the realm of exploitation, of exhaustion?

Or does society merely depend on people being good or bad based on their nature?

One ideology or the other is not directly linked to decency.

And the fifth head, more concise, said stained in blood: We die because we are always guilty of something.

Clearly the end of the world was neigh.

exhibition AT musac 31.1–31.6.2009

PHotos BY pedro gallego de lerma