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

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.