Pau Valls
"Are you an alien?"
"No, I'm just here working."
-Already.
Like them.
That's what Francisco says in his notebook: that the aliens are here at work.
In their own interests, of course, and nobody seems to notice.
Francisco speaks of a silent invasion but in full view of all, and very evident if you look at the signs.
For example: do you know this store franchise that grows like mushrooms all over town?
Well, no shops, they are actually outposts of alien invaders.
Hence its name, Niela, an anagram for "alien."
Yesterday afternoon I went to buy sunscreen at one of these stores and took the opportunity to ask his clerk if he was an alien. When I told him why, he told me that, well, if you mess up Niela's letters, you also get «read» and «line», something that I don't know if Francisco noticed, but if he did, he didn't get to write it down in his tiny notebook .
What he did write down were all his theories about the strange phenomena that have been happening in the town for a long time. Francisco believed in all this, of course. In fact, according to what Tomás told me when he called me, if they let him go to the newspaper's archive, it was because they already knew him well: a lot of those alleged sightings of those who have written in the newspaper have had him as the main one and —the most of the time — the only spectator, from his privileged view of the island there, atop the lighthouse.
You know how skeptical I have always been about these things, but that does not mean that I have not had a good time reading all his theories, at least all the ones that I have managed to understand because the notebook is a real gibberish. As I did so, I imagined him on the day of his death there, up to the lighthouse and looking up at the sky, trying to find more evidence of the invasion, although reading him gives the feeling that he already had enough. It seemed to me to understand that he saw something on August 27, and going through old newspapers to compile all the strange events that are known, he discovered a lot of issues from different years, all from August 28, in which they talked about other unexplained cases that occurred the day before. So that's why he traveled with all those newspapers off the island:to share his discovery, because here on the island he stopped trusting everyone because who knew who was alien and who was not.
I have to tell all this to the greatest alien expert I know.
He will love it.
His name is Mario and he is eight years old.
See complete series
Letters from the island
