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 detail in his biography. Everything else bears the iron stamp of invention. The first thing 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 him any heed because he was insignificant — he had no face yet. Naturally, his gaze became a book and turned to seek them out in a library. He wandered everywhere in search of one to his taste, 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 it all as poetry. As he read, his curiosity grew about where all of this had come from, and it seemed obvious to him that the answer could not lie in the very object of his curiosity. He then became a remarkable 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 had not aimed at anonymity, but it suited him for what he discovered through his investigations: that the written and the writing self are separated by an abyss. Nothing can be done about it. 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 spoke in a whisper that could make 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 lie 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 fresh encounter, he confessed 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. That is his entire philosophy; there is little more to add. The other trace left by him is in the introduction to the Anthology of the Discarded. I cannot say where he found the poets and 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.