Chapter 1
Esteban Fernández is an Argentine writer who works in a fixed and strange way, despite constant complaints from those around him.
He writes a rough chronological draft of the screenplay, then tears out passages, folds them, and puts them in green glass bottles, which are sealed with cork stoppers. When all the fragments are bottled, production assistants toss the bottles into the sea. Then, everyone waits an hour and a half before sending fishermen to retrieve them. The final screenplay is then pieced together in the order the bottles are found.
This method leads to all kinds of artistic challenges. For example, a scene meant for the end might show up at the beginning, forcing Esteban to invent transitions or use flashbacks. Perhaps that’s the reason his writing is regarded so surprising and unique.
The production company, however, is growing tired of the whole ordeal. Tomás González is the head of the production company. He always works on multiple projects. To sooth his nerves he eats a lot of Italian food. He has a black beard, golden glasses, and wavy hair he tries to comb backwards. Once, he attempted to get people to call him “Coppola”, after the director he idolizes, but the nickname never stuck. Everyone just calls him Mr. González, which irritates him as much as almost everything in the world. When he took the position, he promised the board he would cure Esteban of his nonsense. Tomás has asked more than once: why must the notes be thrown into the sea? Why not into a bathtub? Why not just crumple the notes and shuffle them on a desk in the office? Despite the endless complaints, Esteban insists this is his source of inspiration.
Sometimes, bottles are lost and whole minutes go missing from an episode. Esteban is then forced to write new material at the last moment, and this creates great pressure on the production team. To Tomás’s frustration, the bottles are strictly for a single use. As soon as Esteban pulls a slip of text from a bottle, he smashes it.
In an in-depth interview with La Nación, Esteban tells the journalist about his writing routine.
It’s like the neighborhood of La Boca: buildings painted in bright colors. Not everyone knows it was painted by the poor using leftover paint from ships. Green until the paint ran out, next to yellow patches framing an old red wooden door, and light blue above.
At first glance, it all looks cheerful and optimistic. Maybe I’m among the few who notice the black stains, fallen plaster, and the rusty bars of small windows. The creative inspiration for this tourist attraction arose from hardship. I create hardship for myself too by tearing up passages of script and shuffling them.
A good friend of mine is a poet. He torments himself with alcohol. Others have faced troubles in abundance. I wasn’t so lucky, so I play with bottles”.
The journalist asked, “Speaking of hardship, Is it true that Horacio Quiroga has influenced your writing? I have to say, you even look a little like him”.
“Oh yes”, Esteban answered. “I like that I resemble him: the huge forehead that narrows, the eyes that seem to belong to another person, a strange look indeed. His father died when he was about two years old; mine is still alive. His wife committed suicide; I never married. So I need bottles in the sea”.
“And how does the production company feel about this whole bottle procedure?” Asked the reporter.
Esteban replied, “It drives them crazy, especially that fake ‘Coppola’ whose beard looks glued on and who probably doesn’t even need glasses. A pretender not an artist, just a stingy, angry accountant”.
He paused for a moment, watching her writing something down. She was dressed like a criminal lawer and he suddenly felt trapped.
“Actually, delete that answer”, he requested. But the journalist did not comply and turned the quote into a big red headline.
After the article was published, Tomás ate a lot of cannelloni and minestrone soup. It didn’t calm him and he decided to replace the glass bottles with plastic ones. He kept the notes in order and copied them before putting them into the bottles. Tomás printed the script and gave it to the crew two weeks before shooting, instead of the usual two days. Everyone praised him. The episode was filmed without Esteban ever knowing, while the bottles were left to drift at sea.
When Esteban called Tomás, the secretary told him that he wasn’t in, even though Tomás was standing right beside her. She said, “He’s busy”, and Tomás nodded in approval. He loved to tell people he was busy; it made him feel his time was worth more.
He was after all, “Argentina’s Coppola”.
“The bottles must be taken out of the sea!“, Esteban shouted.
The secretary muttered to herself that it is not a sea but a river delta.
He demanded to pull Tomás out of the meeting.
She repeated: “I’m sorry, Mr. González is busy”.
Esteban called the port and was shocked to learn that the expedition was cancelled. He rented a small boat, and navigated along the vast Río de la Plata, searching for the bottles that held fragments of his creation.
He hated the brown water. Once, he wrote a book that was never published, The Great Sin of Water. Esteban kept a single copy of that manuscript in a locked drawer. It was full of rage at the pollution of the rivers in Argentina. Over the course of the book, the poor died after drinking from the poisoned streams. He took a breath and recalled one explanation for the name Buenos Aires. Aire bueno, “good air” in Spanish. How false it sounded. Perhaps once, long ago, it was true.
Now fragments of that book returned to him, and he decided to sail deeper until he will reach the ocean. Like the hero of his novel, he dipped a finger into the river, tasted it, and spat it out at once. Beyond the hint of salt, there was mainly a stench of mud. In the book, the poor tried to filter the mud. The result was death. They searched the Uruguay River for drinkable water.
A hopeless quest.
From his small boat, he called again to Tomás’s secretary and said: “The water of the river can’t be drunk. What a waste”.
She waited silently, as he ended the call, and threw his phone into the river. For a moment, he cursed himself for polluting the water, then recalled some of the contaminants: sewage, industrial waste, fertilizers and pesticides.
He tapped twice on a small compass to test its accuracy and kept steering east. Slowly, the water grew bluer. He dipped his finger again and touched the center of his tongue with the tip of the wet finger. The taste was saltier now. He spat again and hoped that these “literary tests” would not make him ill.
In the novel, each of the hero’s family members died of a different disease: the son from cholera, the daughter from typhoid, the wife from dysentery. One rejection letter from a publisher accused the book of promoting hatred towards the rich, who enjoyed clean water, while the poor drank straight from the river. The book ended in 1935 with a triumphant mayor’s speech about the San Martín purification plant: “everyone drinks wonderful water, everyone lives wonderful lives”; while, in parallel, the pages described the brown, undrinkable water in the rivers surrounding them.
His girlfriend at the time read the book and despised it. In one argument, she said: “Where there are people, there will be people shitting and pissing. What do you want? Sew their asses?”
He argued that “sewage should be treated, but…”He never finished the sentence. She slammed the door and never returned.
He often wondered whether she left because of the book, or if it was the critical and passive side of him that she could not bear.
He could study chemistry and purify water, or join the municipality and make decisions that mattered, but no. He only stood by, observing, and complaining. As an observer by nature, he realized they never truly fitted. She was fifteen years younger. A groupie turned lover. He was already in his forties, astonished that dating a twenty-eight-year-old could be considered as “’hanging out with a young woman”. I’m getting old, he thought.
