Don Cosquillas
Tales
(Freshly Spun on the Tickle Wheel)
Rhys Hughes
The first man in Spain to own a motorbike wasn't Don Cosquillas, as it happens, but he must be credited with the distinction of being the first to use one to search for water. He did this in a very singular fashion. The province of Almera contains Europes only desert and is sparsely populated as a result, and it occurred to our eccentric hero that anyone who discovered a reliable source of water there, an underground lake for example, stood a good chance of acquiring wealth by opening new lands to development. Not that he wanted money for its own sake, please understand, but several million coins would enable him to move out of his small house into a castle more in keeping with his romantic inclinations.
So down to Almeria he went, and when he reached Tabernas he made the final adjustments to his machine and set off into the barren scrublands, planning to spend a week in the desert before returning to that town. He carried plenty to eat and drink and a tent in which to huddle away the nights. A brief description of his water locating contraption is probably a sensible idea at this point, but Ive never cared much for sensible ideas, so Ill save it for the next paragraph. Like all men, romantic or otherwise, he had physical needs and paused periodically on his journey to fulfill them, meaning that he assuaged his hunger and thirst and did other things too, when necessary. Once, for example, he stopped to pick his nose.
His motorbike was in fact an old bicycle with a primitive engine crudely fitted to the back wheel. This was before he removed the engine to pedal up a mountain to confront a dragon but after he had cycled all the way to India to consort with fakirs. Anyway, its most original feature was the dowsing rod attached to the handlebars. When he passed over a reservoir of subterranean water, the rod would swing downward and pull a string that cut the engine. At that very spot he would begin to dig. At any rate this was his reasoning and who am I to pass derogatory comment on it? Im only me after all, and Ive never even been to the Almerian desert, though I plan to soon, and Im currently out of scorn. Come back tomorow.
Putting aside this metafictional nonsense for a moment, allow me to outline Don Cosquillas first day in general terms. He puttered into the sunrise and the dowsing rod remained unmoving, pointing straight out like the horn of a hazel unicorn. Don Cosquillas had always enjoyed comparing his bicycle to a horse: now he could go one better, or worse, depending on your view of unicorns. The desert is too hot a place for the wearing of frock coats but that was the standard garb of the age and our hero refused to remove his own example even when the sun attained its zenith. He sweated and drank deeply from a canteen and shielded his eyes from the glare. This is like the Wild West, he mused, minus the cowboys, saloon bars and poker games!
On and on he went until his discomfort was considerable. Just as he was on the verge of stopping of his own free will, the dowsing rod suddenly dipped. Water! There must be water directly below! The engine cut automatically as it was supposed to do and he dismounted and unpacked his spade from the bundle of objects lashed to the metal frame. So excited was he that he neglected his hunger and thirst and other physical requirements and began shovelling dirt, small stones and sand. Deeper and deeper grew his hole and before the day was over it was large enough for Don Cosquillas to stand upright in without being seen. But there was nobody to see him anyway, and he found not a drop of water, which was the more important thing. He stopped work one hour after sunset.
It was dark now, too dark to work, but there was just enough starlight to enable him to erect his tent and satisfy those aforementioned physical needs: he munched a piece of cake, sipped from a flask, did everything he had to do before falling asleep. His dreams were the normal dreams of fictional characters, lies within lies, which gives rise to the useless speculation that a falsity under another falsity may cancel all the untruth out, like two negative numbers multiplied together, but probably wont. And in this particular case it didn't. Perhaps he dreamed he was being tickled by an octopus or maybe his dreams didn't concern himself at all and were devoted solely to a young girl who wished to travel to the evening star. I don't know or care, and neither should you.
The following morning he woke and crawled out of his tent and was astonished to discover his dowsing rod back in its original position, thrusting straight ahead. There was no water here after all, the hazel wand had made a mistake! Somewhat grumpily he climbed into his saddle and slowly accelerated over the parched ground. The day wore on and his discomfort increased in exactly the same way as on the previous day. As before, he was about to stop of his own accord when the rod suddenly dipped. He jumped off, attacked the hard soil with his spade. Once again sunset overtook him and he satisfied his physical needs in a dusk that was cool but arid, seeking the security of his tent like a nude tortoise regretting its decision to pose for a magazine.
Dawn came and the rod was straight again and he growled off, scratching his head with first one hand and then the other. Was his apparatus faulty in some way? Was the dowsing rod playing a cruel trick on him at the instigation of one of his romantic rivals? Impossible! He had to take each day as it came, following his original plan of spending one week in the desert, not a day more nor less, in a vast ellipse that originated and terminated in Tabernas, as if that town was a planet in orbit around a non-existent star, but in fact Don Cosquillas was himself the star, the hero, the determined prospector, the indefatigable chancer, the human elephant, for it is said that elephants can smell hidden water, and his feet were rather large too.
But his third day passed the same way as his first and second...
So did his fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh days. The pattern was unchanged: at the point when he was most uncomfortable the rod abruptly indicated the presence of water and this indication ultimately proved to be false, but the following morning the rod would be found to have changed its mind. The answer to this riddle is simple and can be found in the allusions I have made to physical needs. I said nothing directly because Im shy, and if you haven't twigged yet, pun intended, Ill leave it to the barman of the Wild West style saloon that Don Cosquillas entered when his week was finally over to do the unpleasant task on my behalf. He scrutinised our hero, tugged his moustache and removed the cigar from his mouth before saying:
You look like a man who is about to go off into the desert to look for water. Im reminded of a fellow who did that with a dowsing rod. Didn't realise that when his bladder was full the rod would swing down and point at his lower regions. Wasted a lot of time digging tons of dry earth, that fool. Trust you won't do the same.
By no means, gasped a suddenly pale Don Cosquillas.