The photograph that illustrates this text is the only known image of Isidoro Magaux. His legend has it that he lost his family very young in a blizzard. This is the only uncertain piece of information in his biography. Everything else bears the iron stamp of invention. The first is his name, which he traced over the wreckage of his shipwreck. The second is his origin, which he conceals beneath a prodigious polyglossia. The third is that, after his tragedy, he spent many years watching life go by. He would sit in a park, in any city, and watch. No one paid any attention to him because he was insignificant — he had no face yet. By a natural progression, his gaze became a book and turned to seek them in a library. He wandered everywhere in search of one that suited him, and could not find it. He read thousands of books without telling them apart, philosophy as if it were a novel and novels as if they were science. In truth, he read everything as poetry. As he read, his curiosity grew about where all of it had come from, and it seemed to him obvious that the answer could not lie in the very object of his curiosity. He then became a prodigious conversationalist. He went to every place where people gathered and spoke with them all. And since he knew everything, while knowing nothing, his fame grew until it overflowed into the void. No one knew who he was; no one ever found out. He did not aim at anonymity, but it was undoubtedly convenient for what he discovered in his investigations: that the written and the writing self are separated by an abyss. Nothing can be done. Either to wallow in the mud, or to vanish like a shadow with no refuge under the sun.
When I met him, his expression was already deformed. He would strain his eyes as though everything blinded him, and he would speak in a whisper capable of making itself heard in the loudest tumult. He told me he lived with a large and dangerous dog that put his life at risk, but which was docile with strangers. He struck me as one of those unsettling figures who are beyond madness. Later, with time, I came to understand that he was simply a man whose experiences were too distant to be told. That was his strangeness. A few months passed until, at a new encounter, he confessed to me that he wanted to publish poetry, but did not know what a publishing house was, nor what else might be required: he had only the will, not even a body of work. He asked me for help, and I gave it. I designed his will and laid out his books — as I have continued to do ever since. Faced with his absence of texts, I offered my own, and he made do with the few brushstrokes he gives in the introduction to his website — https://magaux.es. This is his only philosophy; there is little more to add. The other remaining trace of him is in the introduction to the Anthology of the Discarded. I cannot say where he found the poets and the poems that compose it — I can only speak of my own contribution. Whoever wishes to know its origin should read his introduction. What is told there cannot be doubted, just as nothing in the life of Isidoro Magaux can be doubted — except that he lost his family very young in a blizzard.