Agustín Fernández Mallo / Photo by Iván Giménez

Perhaps, as readers of Agustín Fernández Mallo, we admire a book that features the image of one of Pink Floyd’s most underrated albums or the memory between its pages, where an idealization of the trivial resides. Through music, we can rise far away, between the figurative and the abstract, to reconstruct places where memory becomes a mythology of fiction that crosses the senses. From that place, we discuss the twists and turns of his most recent works.

Claudia Cavallin: In Madre de corazón atómico (Seix Barral, 2024), fabrics appear on the body of a country animal, similar to Atom Heart Mother, the album cited in the book. There, the narrator explains that Pink Floyd owes the album title to a disability because it is inspired by a woman who carried a pacemaker containing a radioactive isotope. She was pregnant and would soon become “the mother of atomic heart.” In your work, how does music emerge through the memory of two covers that ultimately become yours?

Agustín Fernández Mallo: In my case, I tell the story of my father, who was a veterinarian, which makes it an anecdote. When I was little, my father saw the record, and he didn’t care about Pink Floyd’s music, but he did care about the cover, which is a photograph of a cow. He took his time to explain to me, from a veterinary perspective, what breed it was, what grass it ate, why it didn’t have horns, where it came from, and what its dairy and meat qualities were. Without me realizing it, that was a first-class literary lesson: my father was observing what others overlooked and told me that the B-side of the record’s reality was like a treasure. That, and nothing else, is the mission of the poet—and the scientist—to notice more, to see something where others see nothing. 

That, and nothing else, is the mission of the poet—and the scientist—to notice more, to see something where others see nothing.

Over time, I’ve realized that all my literature is based on that: my mind naturally fixates on trivial things, objects, or conceptual details that go unnoticed. From there, I try to build an entire world—a door to the universe. You don’t need to travel to distant galaxies to marvel at worlds that, though fantastic, speak of us and help us understand our reality. In my book, as the title suggests, my mother is important; in fact, the last page, where my mother and father appear together for the first time, is the most significant one I’ve written. It goes beyond mere autobiography; it raises big questions about death, life, and identity. In the beginning, it states that death does not exist—that everything dead begins to reawaken in our minds in different ways. 

Cavallin: You start with your father, witnessing things for the first time, and see technical progress as the core of all advanced morality. His reflection is accompanied by being, along with metaphysical objects that seemed alive, just like us. They broke the timelines and could die, be forgotten, or replaced. How can we “recycle” ourselves as objects that have stopped functioning and yet continue to exist in this world?

Fernández Mallo: We continually recycle ourselves every moment; that and nothing else is the essence of the passage of time. Heraclitus already said it: “A man cannot step into the same river twice.” Additionally, complete and total recycling occurs at death, when we begin to become Other in the eyes of those who remain here, the living. It is a very mysterious and powerful process. I had already written about this in an essay in Teoría general de la basura (General theory of waste) and La forma de la multitud (The form of the multitude). The idea that everything humans put on planet Earth never truly disappears—fire, the wheel, the computer, AI, Marxism, capitalism, feudalism, dogs, tomatoes, or spaghetti—doesn’t matter; in one way or another, all of it will be with us. 

We continually recycle ourselves every moment; that and nothing else is the essence of the passage of time.

But I had never thought of that process applying to humans, and that’s exactly what happened to me in the realm of narrative with Madre de corazón atómico: I thought about my deceased father and realized he was resurrecting in my mind dynamically, since the deceased change in your mind as new memories, interpretations, and stories are activated. Therefore, as Deleuze said, memory is never an archive or a file; memory does not record what happened. Memory is a construction made in the present and, therefore, speaks of the present of the body experiencing it. 

Cavallin: In your novel, “Memory is literature, or it is not,” words are filled with everything or nothing. The question that asks, “What is in you?” in the face of existence contrasts with another that starts from origins and bodies: “Who is there?” Taking these points as context, what is in your authorship and who remains in Madre de corazón atómico?

Fernández Mallo: I am the author, but I am not exactly myself; we are all eccentric in the sense that we lack a stable and fixed center; we are rather clouds of probability—to use a physics metaphor. In Madre de corazón atómico, not even the characters truly remain; they are flesh and blood, they live, they evolve—except for my father and my mother, both deceased—but somehow they are present, they are resurrected. 

Let me tell you an anecdote, important to me, that my mother died at age one hundred, a month after this book was published. Since my mother is the “atomic heart mother,” as the title suggests, it was meaningful to me that she got to see it. She couldn’t read it, but she could hold it and know its material existence. At that moment, I felt that, beyond literary value, I already had an infinite existential value—as an invisible chain of life, not biological but cultural. 

Returning to your comment, I tell in the book that when my father, due to his cognitive illness, no longer recognized me, I looked into his eyes and it was him: his face, his skin, his voice, his gestures—everything—yet at the same time, it was not him. In my mind, the key question arose, one that caused a vertigo I had never experienced before: “Who is there?” That is, who is in there? That mystery is perhaps what my book aims to solve. The fact that your father doesn’t recognize you is the most intense feeling I’ve ever experienced; it’s as if they told you that everything you’ve ever seen and experienced was a set, a stage, an invention, and now they lower the curtain and raise it again, revealing a completely different performance. That’s why I say that, since then, two ideas have dominated my life: reality is not truly reality, but a desire; and reality is an ego hallucination.

The fact that your father doesn’t recognize you is the most intense feeling I’ve ever experienced.

Cavallin: I want to revisit your music and your project with Pilar Rubí, Revinientes, from the third album, El último reino, where you explore themes of wandering bodies. From the unusual textures to the accompanying photographs, how do you live with the strange? And, in doing so, how does it connect with the essential quality you mention in your mother’s story?

Fernández Mallo: We live with the strange from the moment we are born; we simply get used to it. Living involves an internal strangeness that becomes part of everyday life and routines—the tranquility of the law of large numbers. Daily life is filled with small disasters that we accept as normal and inevitable. Because everything is in motion, from microscopic to macroscopic scales, everything is constantly colliding. Arts and literature, if they truly exist, rebel against this flatness and reveal, here and there, the anomalies of everyday life; this is what we were discussing before looking at the flip side of daily life. 

And the same applies when you make music. Pilar Rubí and I, through our homegrown musical project Revinientes—you can hear it on our website or SoundCloud—try to highlight these anomalies of coexistence, transforming them into musical notes and words. It stems from our purely domestic life as a couple, recorded entirely in our living room in Palma de Mallorca, using only a few instruments and a simple laptop. Our only rule is to compose without aesthetic prejudices; anything can be part of a song if we find it relevant. It’s a low-fi project with no pretension other than to share it online so everyone can listen. Sometimes, we joke that we’re like two monks in a medieval monastery, revealing ourselves to the world from our cells. We’re not interested in live performances but in creating intimacy in the studio and then sharing it. The idea that someone might be listening to one of our songs right now—whether in China, Mexico, or an apartment on our street—and not know it fascinates us. Maybe that invisible, anonymous connection at a distance more accurately reflects the heartbeat of our era than performing in front of thousands.

Maybe that invisible, anonymous connection at a distance more accurately reflects the heartbeat of our era than performing in front of thousands.

Cavallin: Returning to your work, you reflected on the coincidences between light and death, and beyond that, between bodies and cities. In the hospitals of the figurative city, the one we can observe is hidden in an abstract city. A few years ago, you mentioned that “the lack of love in the world is erasing the senses and the cities.” How can we rebuild the city from the depths of our feelings? 

Fernández Mallo: Well, I don’t know, to be honest, and I don’t think anyone does, but I imagine that, to start, we should avoid letting certain political populisms fill our heads with ideas that, absurdly, only lead to hatred of others. For example, the nationalist tendencies of all kinds, which are spreading around the world, and I consider almost a pandemic, seem to me the biggest obstacle to building a genuine sense of nonexclusive and—beware—intelligent brotherhood. Or, for example, the anti-Enlightenment and antiscientific movement that is also spreading easily, based not on rationality or critical thinking but on submission to a whole set of new faiths, true superstitions—what anthropology calls magical thinking—which, of course, makes humans more manipulable and more enslaved to their own animal nature.

Cavallin: I would like to conclude this interview by examining a map, an X-ray, and a portrait frame; reminiscing about an unfulfilled pact with Mario Bellatin; and navigating through his personal belongings, photographs, archives, and time. How can we preserve our memory as invisible signs of life beyond tangible objects?

Fernández Mallo: Undoubtedly, objects are the strangest entities in our existence; Baudrillard understood this well when he ascribed to them a whole range of active behavior resembling true personality, or Barthes when he analyzed their semiotics, or Marx when he attributed to them a dimension of fetishes because of their status as commodities. Objects seem to be the most fascinating things around me, perhaps even more than people; they are nothing and everything. A photograph of a dead relative is nothing—a piece of paper—but at the same time, someone could kill to defend or possess it. Objects are like ghosts; you don’t see them, but they act like living beings once they are activated. Sometimes that ghost remains dormant; other times, someone awakens it, and it becomes a whirlwind.