Rabbit Island Read online

  She wants a black hijab. “You’re married to a Muslim,” says the man. It’s a statement not a question. “I’m a Berber,” he adds. She doesn’t answer, just tries to put on the hijab standing in front of the Berber, who by now has noticed her ear. The man jokes with a soap vendor across the street; she can’t work out how to wear the hijab and leaves the store without haggling over the price.

  Back in the hotel, she mulls over how to fictionalize what has happened. She wants to leave an explanation, a trace of her process. But why? Aren’t the words themselves enough? She finds it difficult to hold her pencil, as if, instead of her hand, it’s the paw hanging from her ear that is attempting to write. It’s all happening too quickly.

  That night, looking out over the bay, she’s surprised at how unmoved she is by the sight of the distant lights on the other shore, crystal clear after the fury of the storm. She feels nothing, not even the fear that might be expected given the uncertainty of the coming days or months. She has no idea how long her transformation will last. But what most astonishes her is that, even when she thinks about the people closest to her, it’s as though they belong in the memory of another person.

  4

  She wakes at eleven the following morning and notes that her ear feels heavy and painful; when she moves, she hears a squeaking noise. Repulsion is immediately displaced by the absolute precision of the things around her, which seem shinier than before and have a coarse, mobile texture that made her think they were covered in a layer of multicolored insects. The chair smells different from the tapestries on the wall. She identifies: dust, cat hair, ebony, tamarisk, dandruff, opium, and strychnine.

  The paw is now hanging below her breast. It’s larger than the span of a hand now and has sprouted toes with small mouths. The toes flex like spiders’ legs. When she sits at the desk, before her scant, numbered notes, the toes pick up her pen. The extremity squeaks; it’s covered in a viscous varnish. She doesn’t dare touch it. Her earlobe is red; blood is accumulating in the capillaries. She watches her new extremity move toward the scribbled writing on one side of her notes, a ballpoint pen between its toes. It adds to the scribbles. She attempts to make out what it’s writing with so much concentration and at such a furious pace, but when she tugs away the pen, the paw tugs back. It resists even more strongly when she ties it to her hair with elastic bands. The moaning of the toes changes to frantic mutterings and the extremity kicks out rather unconvincingly at her shoulder. Then it calms and she feels its relaxation spilling down her side. What would happen if she cut it off?

  She checks her cellphone. Why not call her mother and tell her what is happening? What use are these incomprehensible, numbered notes? She imagines a now huge paw creeping to the post office and putting them in an envelope. And her mother, dark circles under her eyes, trying to read those notes, doubly unintelligible due to the additional scrawls of the paw.

  She goes back to the desk. The flowers and geometrical motifs of the hangings covering the walls are hypnotic. They seem to move, although in fact it’s mites crawling through the threads of the old, moth-eaten fabric. She hears that mute army, distinguishes the nuances of its movements. The mites jump, stop, scuttle through the fine strands like tiny rats, like fleas through long hair. Seventy, eighty, a hundred years of dust has accumulated in those hangings, which to her eyes don’t look faded now. There are also microscopic particles that were once desert sand. Something so old that it can no longer be named pulses within the weaves.

  The next day the paw is ten centimeters longer. Since it’s impossible to tie it back, she decides to return to the headscarf store. Outside, the world radiates light. The paw swings back and forth, as if it too is enjoying the bright, cheerful morning, and passersby stare at the bulge wrapped in something that is neither Western nor Arab clothing.

  “I’d like three hijabs,” she says in bad French.

  The mannequins are more real than the vendor. She doesn’t hide the paw from him; his face pales as he watches it timidly reaching out its three toes toward him. He runs screaming out of the store. She races after him; her intention is not to frighten him, but to pay for the hijabs, although halfway into her flight she forgets the reason for the pursuit. All of a sudden the man seems like her prey. He’s thin, like a greyhound. But she can run faster.

  RABBIT ISLAND

  He’d built a canoe and wanted to try it out on the Guadalquivir River. Sports didn’t interest him, and he hadn’t made the canoe for regular use; once he’d explored the small river islands, it would be relegated to the junk room or sold. He thought of himself as an inventor, although the things he made couldn’t be called inventions. Yet he’d begun to categorize all the ideas he sketched out in that way because he never used instruction manuals. His method was to work out for himself what was needed to construct something that had already been made. The process took months, and he considered it his true vocation: inventing things that had already been invented. The pleasure he got from that activity was something like what Sunday hikers feel when they reach the summit of some mountain and wonder why personal fulfillment is such a strange sensation. In the mornings the non-inventor taught in an arts and crafts college without any sense of fulfillment, despite the fact that his students found his workshops useful.

  Since childhood he’d had the desire to travel to spits of land that extended into the sea, or to uninhabited islands. Once, when he was eighteen, his mother and father invited him to go with them to Tabarca, promising that it was a deserted island. He’d thought that it would be a wilderness, but what he found was seven streets of poor houses, a high wall, a church, a lighthouse, two hotels, and a small harbor. His parents had probably exaggerated the isolation of Tabarca to persuade him to spend the vacation with them—they didn’t like the idea of leaving him home alone; but it’s also possible they had never really understood what he meant by uninhabited places.

  It was no easy task to count the number of river islands on the stretch of the Guadalquivir that adjoined the city. Some could be mistaken for small isthmuses. One September morning he walked to the dock carrying his canoe and took to the water. He spent several days getting the hang of his vessel, but once he had, he started to explore. There had been no rain for weeks. The river was very low; the water was still and smelled really bad. He skirted the islands with a mixture of anxiety and astonishment, without ever managing to take the canoe ashore. He wasn’t confident in his ability to make rapid maneuvers, feared that the shorelines might be muddy, that he would slip and his canoe would drift away. And the thought of having to swim back with his mouth tightly closed to avoid swallowing the putrid water scared him, as did the lush, brightly colored vegetation buzzing with insects and the layer of bird shit on the ground. A landscape he’d believed to be beautiful was no more than trees deformed by the weight of birds—or perhaps some disease—colonies of bugs, and shrubs rotted by the filth.

  On his fifth day out in the canoe, he decided to explore beyond the bend in the Guadalquivir. Paddling south had the advantage of allowing him to keep the low rolling hills of the surrounding countryside in sight. The islets there were tiny, more rocky, and packed close together like a rash. He paddled laboriously around them; near the last one he found a dead body floating facedown in the reeds. It was a man, wearing only boxers; the skin on his back was covered in blisters the size of a hand. He didn’t know if they were caused by exposure to the sun, which was still scorching in September, or immersion in the water. The river stank. He called the civil defense unit and some officers arrived in a boat too big to pass through the reeds. They had a canoe onboard; while an obese officer was getting into it, he paddled over to the boat and asked for permission to leave. He didn’t want to witness that dead flesh being dragged out of the water. He shrank at the thought of turning around to see fresh entrails being nibbled by fish.

  The episode with the dead body kept him off the river for several days. When he recommenced his evening tours and, one day, found the courage to land on the island nearest the bank, he decided to inhabit it. He told himself that he’d had enough of urban life; the notion of doing something out of the ordinary was exciting. Those were just two of the harebrained ideas that sometimes accompanied him on his walks through the streets of his hometown, which seemed too self-obsessed, a spiral dragging him against his will to its core. But to be honest, he couldn’t identify any underlying reason for his decision to occupy that narrow, nauseating stretch of land that would surely make him feel even worse than he did in the city.

  Although it was the closest island to the riverbank, thick vegetation obscured the interior. He made a clearing in the center, cut down trees whose slender trunks looked more like lengths of rope. How did that spindly wood support so many branches, heavy with leaves? He decided to pitch a red tent instead of the usual khaki variety. The tent had good seals, but he was still panicked by the idea of waking up covered in insects. Maybe if he were to sleep higher up, he’d be safe from the maggots that blundered blindly along over the ground they desecrated, yet seemed able to sense their predators. The birds had no trouble catching them: they rootled in the sand with their beaks for that inexhaustible food supply. Perhaps, because those maggots were mostly water, and so insufficiently nutritious, the birds needed to hunt for more sophisticated insects to provide a richer diet. On a certain afternoon he examined one of the maggots. He placed it on his palm, where it reared up and danced. When he squeezed it lightly, it exploded like a tiny balloon.

  He didn’t sleep on the islet every night: that would have driven him crazy. It was enough to wake up there twice a week. When he did stay overnight on that tiny spot on the Guadalquivir, he’d hear only quiet murmers in the early hours. Except when the owls attacked, the birds were silent at night and the only sound was the occasional flapping of wings. They were tightly packed on the branches of the poplar trees, shielding their heads under their wings and puffing up their breasts, so the birds on the end would more often than not fall off. The noise that really bothered him wasn’t those nocturnal descents but the squawking of the birds at sunset as they vied for roosts in the trees; it was loud enough to make any calculation of how many of them had alighted on that wretched piece of land impossible. There seemed to be thousands. For an hour their squawking would drill into his ears, and not even putting on headphones and playing music at top volume could drown it out. He even tried leaving his tent and shouting to try to scare them away, but the flock took no notice. His cries made as much impression on them as a scrap of seaweed in the middle of the ocean; or the birds perhaps mistook him for some weird member of their own kingdom. Even though he’d end up with strained vocal cords, he was loath to admit to himself that there was something cathartic about screaming and making grotesque gestures. He often lost any sense of time and would continue raging into the night, after the birds had already settled down; on these occasions, any of the few people who strolled along the riverbank would have looked across to the island, believing that the sounds came from some animal.

  The birds came to the river island to sleep, breed, and die. The whole place was full of nests and excrement, and when the non-inventor returned home not even a shower got rid of the smell. Apparently those white birds were pests. That’s what an old man who fished from the pier said. He asked what they were called but the man had no idea. The non-inventor tried searching the internet and found nothing there either. He flipped through a guide to the fauna of the Guadalquivir; the birds on the island didn’t look like any of the egrets it described. That was as far as his research went; when you got down to it, discovering what species they were wouldn’t change his resolve to become, one or two days a week, a human who bellowed at creatures that took no notice of him, that slept through the hail of stones he hurled at them. They didn’t even deign to look at him when, in his rage, he shook the spindly trunks of the poplars. The treetops would sway violently; the rocking branches gave the impression of sturdy Andalusian festival-float bearers carrying the island on their shoulders.

  As the weeks passed, he became convinced that his occupation of the island was legal. Why should he have to ask permission to inhabit a place that was empty? He found it impossible to believe that the other islands were untouched by human hands, but for him that wasn’t the worst thing; what he couldn’t bear was the lack of curiosity of the residents of a city with a population of over three hundred thousand. Was he the only one among so many people to visit what was right under their noses?

  He started to leave money in his tent to see if anyone stole it. While the people whose work involved paddling canoes along the Guadalquivir weren’t necessarily thieves, there must be crooks on the lookout for a windfall, or hungry vagrants who would surely pocket a large-denomination bill. He checked on a daily basis, but the fifty euros remained in place. The bill never moved. No one ever took the money. No one else set foot on the island.

  When he wasn’t inventing things that had already been invented, the non-inventor made installations that he didn’t call art. For instance, he’d removed the plush skins of ten toy dogs whose front legs moved and eyes lit up when they barked. Then he placed the skin under the dogs’ paws and put the whole thing in a rabbit hutch. He devised a mechanism for remotely setting the de-plushed canines in motion. When friends came over, he’d press a button on the remote. Ten skinned toy dogs would bark and move their legs back and forth on their own hides, their yellow eyes aglow.

  But when those friends suggested that he should sell the installation to some campaign for the protection of animals he just shrugged. Hadn’t the idea already been used? At heart, he thought that if it had occurred to him, he must have already seen it somewhere. And so he refused to allow anyone to consider his installations art. He was terrified by the thought of having an exhibition and people commenting that his works were just copies of someone else’s work. He wasn’t sure why he was so frightened of that particular critique when he didn’t actually believe in the concept of originality and often argued the point at great length, even if he were incapable of remembering the origins of his appropriations. Some other of his non-art pieces were: a mechanical flea circus inside a closet; a sandwich toaster made from two irons that he used to melt queso añejo into his guests’ hands when he had a party; a pile of books with twenty years of accumulated dust whose importance lay in the fact that the dust—by then dirtballs—contained the dead cells of his deceased relatives.

  It was the hutch with its de-plushed dogs that gave him the idea of introducing rabbits onto the island to scare off the birds. He resolved not to stay overnight again: he was done with shouting. The tent could be left so he could observe the rabbits and take a nap. It was late fall, the clocks had gone back an hour, so it was no longer a wild idea to paddle to the island at four in the afternoon and enjoy the cool river air, although the water still stank as badly as it had in summer due to dry weather. He bought twenty rabbits—ten bucks and ten does—and they very quickly began to reproduce. Soon there wouldn’t be enough food for them on the island. The non-inventor had calculated that the new inhabitants would attack the nests at ground level when they had nothing else to eat. If the birds could no longer breed on the island, they would go to another one.

  The rabbits were pure white, with long fur and red eyes. They had been more expensive than the gray or brown ones, but he deemed it important that they were the same color as the birds. He told himself that using them to populate the island was his way of continuing to inhabit it. Eventually he even allowed them into the tent, which they seemed to like, no doubt because, since the ground wasn’t suitable for constructing warrens, it provided protection from the sun. Inside the tent they gave birth to hairless little bunnies that resembled rats.

  Once the rabbits had devoured the vegetation, nests began to be emptied of their eggs, a delicacy they seemed particularly fond of. On more than one occasion he witnessed them fight for the right to nibble the fine bluish shells. They didn’t, however, argue over the chicks, and it was clear to the non-inventor that eating the warm flesh was something the rabbits did from necessity, reluctantly, as though their little minds rejected that cruelty. Their attitude, he thought, was in accord with the humanity they represented: his, their owner’s, humanity. This is perhaps why he was surprised that, once their initial scruples were overcome, they didn’t even leave the bones, as any person would have. They attacked the birds’ throats with their sharp incisors, and a rim of blood the same color as their eyes would stain their wriggling noses and fine whiskers. Once they had eaten the meager flesh they would gnaw the skeleton clean; the sound was like the snapping of dry branches. They even ate the beak. Then they groomed themselves until their fur was white once again.

  While the feast was in progress, the birds would fly overhead emitting anguished squawks. They hung around the scene of the crime for hours, as if their offspring might reappear from behind a stone. The non-inventor found it curious that they never thought to attack the rabbits. It would have been easy for them to peck out their eyes with their sharp beaks, but that sort of group behavior didn’t seem to be instinctive to them.

  It didn’t enter into his calculations that the rabbits now being born on the island would only ever eat flesh and eggs, or that such an unnatural situation would have dire consequences. For a time, either from laziness or stupidity, the birds continued breeding on the island, but as the nests started to vanish the non-inventor realized that the litters of baby rabbits did too. One morning he witnessed the reason for this: they were being eaten by members of their own species. He found the spectacle horrific and renounced the idea that these animals were an extension of himself. In fact, he thought of them as pests, just like the birds, and if he continued going to visit them, it was simply because he felt guilty about abandoning creatures that he himself had debased.