With his arm immobilized, Argoitia is unbearable. He wanted an old-fashioned plaster cast (he has these fixations), but in the hospital they told him they were no longer in use and fitted one of those light synthetic splints. As he broke his right arm, he’s started a painting series of hideous canvases with his left, which he can’t even use to wipe his ass. The result leaves a lot to be desired, but I long ago learned not to tell him what I think of his art; better to avoid hard feelings. He’s convinced that these canvases will later form a period; he can almost imagine a collector obsessed with the idea of tracking down the last painting from his lefthand period. Poor man. Yet maybe his fantasy isn’t completely crazy: the mechanisms through which a person enters the canon in this country are so unfathomable there’s no point in trying to understand them.

If only he’d be as serious about the challenge of doing everything else with his left hand instead of asking for my help in carrying out the most basic tasks: making coffee in the mornings, dressing, taking a shower with a plastic bag around his arm. Luckily, the day after tomorrow he’s going to the opening of a retrospective of his work, organized by a gallery in San Miguel de Allende. He invited me along, but I told him I’d sooner be tried for witchcraft in seventeenth-century Sweden. He didn’t appreciate my sarcasm.

I took advantage of those solitary days to make a few sketches for the choreography of the performance in the Jardín Borda. I now have a provisional title: The Great Noise, which is the name given to the period of collective hysteria and witch hunts in Swedish history. It will be my personal tribute to the satanic rites on Blockula, to Mary Wigman, and to Frau Troffea, who sparked off the 1518 dance epidemic in Strasbourg.

Argoitia will most likely get mad at me about the piece. He’s never been to any of my performances and I guess he believes I’m a more or less conventional choreographer, like all the other prissy women that have done the CMA’s dance diploma. He might end up having problems with the minister of culture, but then I never asked him to get the lakeside stage for me.

The island of Blockula does in fact exist and is located in the Baltic Sea. Its real name is Blå Jungfrun, the Blue Maiden. Legend has it that witches would assemble there every Maundy Thursday. When Linnaeus visited the place in 1741, he used the occasion and his Enlightenment reasoning to ridicule the superstitions surrounding the island. But he also noted that it was a horrendous place, one of the harshest and bleakest landscapes on earth, and so it was unsurprising that those morbid tales had occurred to his compatriots.

When it comes to pioneers of scientific knowledge in Sweden’s Early Modern Period, I’m more of a fan of Olof Bromelius than the insufferable Linnaeus.

In Saducismus Triumphatus, Glanvill brings together a number of testimonies about Blockula. According to one of them, Satan gave the witches two animals; one the size of a young cat that they call the Carrier, and the second a “bird as big as a Raiven, but white.” The witches would send these creatures out to forage for provisions: butter, cheese, milk, and bacon. Whatever the albino crow found, they could keep for themselves, but all the food brought by the cat had to be given to the Devil, who stored it in Blockula to be distributed among his acolytes as he saw fit.

Sometimes, when I go to the supermarket, I imagine an enormous white bird and a young cat picking out bacon in the meat section.