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.