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The new story of Marcelo Birmajer: The castaway

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Pacheco Komahue distances himself from his novel like someone who breaks off a romantic relationship. After a year and a half of trying to move the plot forward, without adding more than thirty pages, she decided on what would be a euphemism for a couple: to take some time.

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He had never gotten bogged down in a novel.

He took the first plane leaving for Southeast Asia. Landed in Kandel. He bought a ticket for a flight to Vietnam. But during that trip the fuel tank ruptured. One in three passengers managed to disembark and get into the lifeboats. Except Pacheco Komahue: for a mathematical reason, or because he was the only Westerner, he only received a life jacket. Naturally: phosphorescent. The tide dragged him to a desert island. In Buenos Aires I wasn’t accompanied much anymore.

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He found coconuts, mangoes, papayas. Also some strange earthly fruits similar to lamb meat. Crabs and mussels stuck to stones. Some mica boulders reflected the sun and, by applying the ray against a certain flat rock, cooked crustaceans and molluscs as if on a stove.

Coincidentally, leaving some dried herbs on that same stone, to vary the flavor of the crab meat, a fire was lit.

One day Nunu appeared, a corpulent, tall, naked, rarely tanned woman with Asian features. Pacheco Komahue never knew if the young she had appeared by spontaneous generation, if she had been there for decades, or if she was part of a contingent that remained hidden.

But the first night confirmed that she had not met a man.

The days that followed were silent company for Pacheco Komahue. Nunu barely made a sound. He cooked, he prepared a fresh, spongy bed for Pacheco Komahue: he slept outdoors, on the grass or on the shore, depending on the weather; I bathed him and combed his hair.

He prepared heavenly breakfasts, frugal lunches and austere dinners. He shaved him with a sharp stone and taught him to fish in the depths of the sea. Pacheco Komahue also tried to serve it. He would have liked to cook for her in turn, wash the dishes, invite her to sleep in a bed prepared by him. But Nunu sternly refused: those were the only times she, even without saying a word, seemed offended.

Although all his life Pacheco Komahue had considered the dream conditions unnecessary for writing a novel or any other text – free time, a room by the sea, guaranteed subsistence – he had to recognize that his existence with Nunu on the island had inspired him .

One night, involuntarily, under the stars, he told Nunu chapter 7, where page 30 was interrupted. He had nowhere to write. He only told her, like Scheherazade to the sultan. Maybe she wanted to give her something even if the woman didn’t want it. And absorbed in her words, apparently incomprehensible, on that occasion Nunu fell asleep in the bed he had built for Pacheco Komahue.

The man spent that night sleepless.

The next day not only opened with a new chapter, but also witnessed shocking evidence: Nunu had memorized the entire chapter in Spanish. Komahue didn’t know if she understood it, but she could recite it in pure Spanish, without any recognizable accent, just a mix of the sound of the sea and the cadence of the background noise of shore snails.

Every night, Pacheco Komahue told Nunu a new chapter, which she played when the man requested it. There were evenings when he asked her number and she answered exactly.

One night he hugged her and kissed her with a gratitude he had never felt before in his life. At sunset, on certain days, which Pacheco did not calculate but assumed were the same, Nunu expressed a certain melancholy, very different from the fury she continued to show when Pacheco Komahue tried to replace her in some task or job for her. Pacheco Komahue thought it was because she had no children. But Pacheco himself wasn’t looking for them.

One morning a boat full of drunken, drug-addicted men and women, members of the jet set, ran aground on the island. Nunu was sleeping in bed after the final chapter, which was particularly touching for Pacheco Komahue; not only for the content itself, but also for being the latest, correct and ready. He had put an end to the novel.

He pondered the implications of taking Nunu with him. They didn’t even ask him why he was boarding. He set sail at the first light of dawn, almost threatening the helmsman. At CABA, He didn’t remember a single line of what he had dictated.. The novel remained within its thirty pages. He returned to the counter of his pharmacy. He has forgotten his desires as an inventor. Many years later he wrote a story recounting those five exotic years. He never published it.

Source: Clarin

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