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 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 extend into the sea, or to uninhabited islands. Once, when he was eighteen, his parents 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 in order 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 that 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 adjoining 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 calm 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 of 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 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 bushes rotted by the filth. On his fifth day out in the canoe, he decided to explore beyond the curve 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 closely 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 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 find fresh entrails nibbled by fish. Excerpted from Rabbit Island by Elvira Navarro All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
