Loop

by Brenda Lozano

  Walking down the street today I came across this Post-it note: ‘Marta, a ham and chicken sandwich with no onion. Miguel, a milanesa sandwich, all the trimmings, no mayo.’ The man who wrote that Post-it probably doesn’t like Shakira. Which is a shame, because that song is another great reminder.

  Jonás leaves for Spain with his family soon, and I’m staying here in the apartment. With our black cat, our Telemachus.

  I said I’d discovered sex with Jonás. Does it relate to what I’ve been through, or to what he’s been through, or to a combination of both? Does it relate to no longer fearing death? Or to our age? What does it relate to, this fact of two people deciding to experiment in ways they haven’t before?

  Is it possible to stop being afraid of death? I mean, is it possible to stop completely?

  This time I searched online for ‘an ideal notebook’. I found this question on a forum: ‘What would your ideal notebook be?’ And the response from a teenager: ‘One with a hard cover, and dividers for eight subjects. It would come with coloured pencils, a calculator, a rubber, a pencil sharpener, a ruler etc. You could stick photos on it or leave the cover blue (like the sea).’

  I liked this marine parenthesis so much that I brought it over here, like a dog carrying the neighbour’s ball in its mouth. And tell me, isn’t Mexico located in a kind of marine parenthesis?

  You know, Jonás, I was thinking about our conversation at dinner the other night. Phrases and their animal nature. Maybe we could start a zoo, and catalogue the different species of lines.

  Lines on the furniture. Invisible lines. Lines of the novels we like and the novels we don’t like (yes, in separate cages). Blue lines in school exercise books. Perpendicular and parallel lines. Lines, rows, queues (did I mention that a woman queueing at the bank told me her twins experience all the same things, and that if you hit one the other suddenly gets a bruise?). Metro lines (remember when we were on the metro and you told me how as a boy you tried to run away from home by climbing through the bathroom window?). The line of the equator (this kind of line doesn’t exist, but it it’s not invisible either. It’s a strange category; what do we do with this phantom line?). Bloodlines, paternal, maternal.

  Chuy is the woman who cleans the apartment once a week. She’s worked for me since before I moved in with Jonás. This afternoon she left me a Post-it on the table: ‘Just to say you forgot to buy my bleach again. Kindly buy me my bleach and my green scourers, not the yellow ones because you know the sponges on those don’t work, I don’t like them. Thank you.’

  This morning I read something strange. From my taxi, I read in the window of an occult shop: ‘Love makes the ideal real’. I disagree with that window: love doesn’t make the ideal real. On the contrary, reality sends us in search of ideals. There’s no reverse gear, no opposite direction.

  You know what? The government of this country isn’t ideal. Today I read a strange fact about Ancient Greece: the statue of Zeus at Olympia was twelve metres tall. The Lighthouse of Alexandria was one hundred and thirty-four metres tall. A building in Mexico City would easily be that tall, or taller. So how tall should the statue be of the president who’s left this country with such a horrific death toll?

  A call from my friend Antonio. He told me he’d kicked the pavement so hard he hurt his foot. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because someone’s car was blocking mine outside my friend’s funeral,’ he said.

  Are there ninety thousand pavements to kick throughout the length and breadth of the country?

  Another thing I feel like saying to the window of the occult shop. I’d like to be a tarot card. If I were a tarot card I’d be the lady of pencils, pens and notebooks. Now everything’s done on computers, perhaps I could be a saint. The Paper Saint. The Holy Virgin of Stationery. The Xerox Madonna, they’d call me in some offices. Someone would pray to me every morning before putting on his tie.

  In my life as the A4 Saint, the Virgin of Stationery, the Xerox Madonna, an office-worker would ask me: ‘You used to be an ordinary person, how did you come to be transformed?’ I’d answer: ‘Look inside your briefcase, my child, and there you will find the miracle.’ He’d find Ovid’s Metamorphoses . He’d be taken aback. With a flash of light, I’d appear before him in a dream and say in an angelic voice: ‘Read the book, my child, and you too can undergo a transformation.’

  Why this fixation on metamorphoses? Even if we don’t turn into animals, we turn into other things. I think that’s why Jonás and I are together now, and not sooner.

  I can’t believe I wrote that someone would pray to me every morning before putting on his tie. But I’m not going to get rid of it. I like the pilgrim life of the Xerox Madonna. Her sandals. Her white dress. Her clasped hands. Her skin as pale as paper. Her blank silence.

  Jonás left today, and Marina and his father leave tomorrow. I went with him to the airport. Today I wrote nothing. When I took my pen out of my bag just now I found some receipts. I lined them up in chronological order on the table. The story of my day in receipts.

  Today I read nothing. And this, in the whole day, is all I’ve written.

  Third night without Jonás. I feel sleepy. I’m lying in bed. The cat’s in the living room playing with the pencil I dropped; I’m feeling sleepier and sleepier. It’s like the cat and I are working shifts on an office reception, taking it in turns behind the desk. I don’t know what that means, of course, but it’s the kind of thing I write, as if I’m playing with this pencil. Writing is my way of being a cat and shedding fur, or phrases, onto the armchair.

  It occurs to me as I’m dozing off that a monument to the dwarf would be no bad thing. A handy reminder of people who live life on another scale. Should it include me? It’s true that I go to an office, but do writing and reading exist on another scale in relation to so-called productive life?

  I wonder what someone’s life would be like if they’d never reached, if they’d never seen, if they couldn’t imagine their own depths. Those depths where only pain can take you.

  Not long ago I heard a writer discussing death in an interview. He was smoking and laughing sarcastically, with a glass of red wine in his hand. Positively beaming, he said to the interviewer through purplish lips: ‘This novel is about death in every respect, and my God, writing it is killing me!’ I didn’t believe him. You can just tell that the worst thing to happen to this writer in his thirty-something years – aside from a split condom one of the times he’s probably cheated on his wife – is missing a flight.

  And what if we put up a monument to the writer with a grant?

  Holy Child of Grants, look at this glorious procession of grant-holding Young Creators carrying you in a shrine above their heads. So many young people, so many flowers, so many colours. The town orchestra playing the first notes based on one of their projects.

  I miss you, Jonás. I know I’ve told you so many times, but I love your smell, I love your taste. I miss you so much.

  I forgot to say that I gave Jonás a notebook like this one so it has a twin. One notebook in Mexico City, another in Madrid. Like the twins of Syracuse. An Ideal notebook I bought for Jonás, identical like a second drop of water, a twin who knows nothing of the other twin’s adventures. Perhaps if mine falls over, the other will suddenly get a bruise.

  I’m falling asleep. I’ve gone to bed. I’m more there than here. This isn’t very comfortable, let me rearrange the pillow. You know what? If I fold it, it’s better. Why am I writing this down? Because this, folding a pillow to make myself more comfortable, is part of the waiting.

  3

  So is this the story of waiting? Waiting for Godot , waiting for Jonás? The difference between Godot and Jonás is that my love really is coming back. Let the music play on!

  A family meal. My aunt Eva was visiting from Lisbon. If Jonás were here we’d talk about it in the kitchen, I’d tell him how I planted a lemon tree in Lisbon as a girl. ‘Now you have the book and you have the tree, you just need the child,’ said my aunt, who never misses a
chance to say that by my age she already had two alfacinhas . Why are people from Mexico City called chilangos and why are people from Lisbon called alfacinhas , little lettuces? What do lettuces have to do with Lisbon?

  Watch out: I ask questions that aren’t real, like plants made of fabric. I’m not looking for answers – questions are more my thing. After all, I like waiting. I like artificial plants like the ones you get in waiting rooms. Not to mention artificial flowers: so pretty. No, Aunt Eva, I’m not going anywhere. This feels a lot like a waiting room, look at these artificial plants and all these artificial flowers. I have a question for you: at what point did poetry become associated with love and rhyming?

  At what point did two opposing ideas of poetry – the best and the worst – lie down together in the same bed? Why does the same word mean two very different things? When I say that two words lie down together in the same word-bed, I’m straying into the very worst kind of poetry. There’s nothing else for it: I should take up trova music.

  Oh, trova , the bohemian bars. The cafés in neighbourhoods like Coyoacán, Condesa and Roma. A man walks in with his guitar, interrupts the conversation, sings: ‘We’re two ideas who lie together in the same word, my love; kiss me, take off your dress.’ You see the trovador ’s shoes and imagine his bedroom. You imagine his faded bamboo blinds, his ashtray, his mountain of cigarette ends, his cheap wine in a mug with no handle.

  As I’m writing, a plane flies overhead. Planes in the background could be seen as a kind of poetic metre. Planes are also a metronome. And as I write this I look at my shoes and see the shoes of a trovador . I ought to buy myself a cape. Pass the guitar.

  A miracle: it’s started to rain. Plus, less miraculous, the neighbour is hammering on the wall. Storm and neighbour. Is the neighbour a domestic version of the storm? Storm, neighbour. Two words in height order, from largest to smallest.

  Today I thought about buying wool and knitting needles so I can knit and unravel while Jonás is coming back from his trip, but then I thought that writing in this notebook is a bit like wool, because the lines are baby blue and the words, added in cross-stitch, could even become socks or a scarf or a doily, and maybe I could unravel it all and then knit it and unravel it again while Jonás is coming back from his trip.

  I love you, Jonás. I know you know that, but I wanted to remind you, like with a Post-it note.

  At work today I accidentally typed alphabert instead of alphabet. If we have a child, we can call it that. As my Aunt Eva says, now I have the tree in Lisbon and the books I publish at work, all we’re missing is Alphabert.

  My Aunt Eva can be a bit much, but it’s true, I did plant my lemon tree with her when I was a girl. I’d forgotten that. Three or four times when I was a teenager she sent me photos of the tree, which was growing taller and taller, with little notes written on the back. I remember one time she wrote in the voice of the tree. ‘Look how big I am,’ it said on the back of the photo, as if the tree itself had sent me a postcard.

  Another plane flies over.

  This week I didn’t see the dwarf on the block. This week I thought how my notebook is like an armchair and I’m like a cat curled up in it. And this week I forgot to write that on Sunday, before Jonás left, we were driving to the cinema and saw a shop selling tiny furniture. Made-to-measure furniture, the sign said. And in the window there was indeed some made-to-measure furniture. A living room on a smaller scale. ‘Look, my love, it’s like the seven dwarves’ living room,’ Jonás said.

  I want to kiss you now.

  Here come some fabric flowers: it’s not that Cato was in favour of lost causes; he himself was a lost cause. Is this something he shares with Kafka? In that sense, Cato is the father of notebooks, and Kafka is one of his brilliant children.

  Speaking of Kafka, have I told you he’s one of the authors I read for self-improvement? Today I underlined this phrase, which I could repeat every morning: ‘He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.’ In fact, the genre people call self-help literature sounds tautological to me; I read all literature as self-help.

  In the car on the way to the airport, we heard a song on the radio. Jonás turned it up. ‘This is so good,’ he said. I managed to find it later, and I’ve listened to it quite a bit this week. Now I’m going to turn it up. I hope the neighbours like this song as much as I do.

  My dear friend Tepepunk gave me The Alienist , by Machado de Assis. I’ve been reading it all afternoon. There’s a minor character who nowadays seems hard to imagine: the rattle man. Before the internet, before the printing press, there was rattle man, who was hired to roam the streets of the town with a rattle in his hand. ‘From time to time, he would shake the rattle, townspeople would gather, and he would announce whatever he had been instructed to announce – a cure for fever, plots of arable land for sale, a sonnet, a church donation, the identity of the nosiest busybody in town, the finest speech of the year, and so on.’

  If I instructed the rattle man to announce something, it would be a soppy poem. A love poem, with rhymes and flowers, preferably wild flowers. Dedicated, obviously, to Jonás.

  Oh, I’m just like all the literature I most despise. Although I do own good books, any bad poem resembles me better.

  A seven-hour time difference and the sea in between keep me from sleeping at his side. My ideal notebook, which can do anything, will let me sleep by his side in the land of dreams. By the side of the golden tree which isn’t the one I planted as a girl, though it looks a bit like it.

  I’m writing this to make it official. My notebook: my guitar.

  You carry a notebook identical to this one, you jot down numbers, addresses, the name of a restaurant, the title of a song. I know because, when we don’t have them open, your notebook communicates with mine; they’re connected by a string like two styrofoam cups.

  What made Jonás do a PhD in maths? Was it something to do with his parents, with their jobs – she’s a chemist, he’s a physicist – or with the fact they met in the seventies, at the piano recitals in the university physics institute? I feel like Jonás is following proudly in his parents’ footsteps. Now, for example, he’s in Madrid, perhaps walking down the very streets where his mother used to walk. I feel like I’m wandering aimlessly, or in the opposite direction to my parents’ footsteps. My parents begot two children: No and No.

  My brother lives in London. He’s twenty-seven, the age some rock stars died. Jonás’ sister lives with their father. She’s thirty-three, the age The Rock Star died. I’m in between their ages, but I’m with you in Rockland.

  An ideal notebook should be waterproof, like the books children read in the bath. You can’t have a notebook getting wet as you wash, like Ulises Lima’s books do when he reads in the shower. An ideal notebook should be able to go underwater. Whether it floats like a rubber duck or swims in the deep like a whale, it needs to be waterproof.

  Is this glass of water the dwarf-scale sea between us?

  4

  The dwarf on the block has a three-piece suit, a black bowler hat and a cane. Black shoes polished until they gleam. You could say he’s also the most elegant man on the block.

  The dwarf, who’s a different height, who can sit in a chair and not touch the floor with his shoes. Who lives on a different scale. Who lives in a strange sort of margin. Who has the same abilities as you. Who walks down the same pavement as you. And yet.

  Are there dwarf animals? Dwarf giraffes? A panther, a hippo, a bird? A dwarf landscape? There are dwarf planets. You told me that, Jonás. Maybe now I can tell you a story.

  Once upon a time there were seven dwarves who sang in the forest. Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy and Dopey. The seven dwarves in a row, from Doc to Dopey. Dopey is a little dwarf. Maybe he’s just a little dopey.

  Meanwhile, deep in the thick, dark forest, a voice thunders from the top of a castle: ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?’

  The seven dwarves arrive home and ask i
n unison who’s asleep in the bedroom. They think a monster has got in. The monster is sleeping across three beds. They want to kill it before it wakes up. Grumpy says: ‘Ha, she’s a female and all females are poison! We have to get rid of her.’ She wakes up, and the seven dwarves duck out of view. ‘I wonder if the children are back,’ says Snow White. She’s scared when she sees the seven little faces. ‘Why, you’re little men!’ ‘We’re as mad as hornets,’ one replies. ‘Can you make dapple lumplings?’ ‘Apple dumplings!’ the other six shout back at him. ‘Yes,’ says Snow White, ‘and plum pudding and gooseberry pie.’ ‘Gooseberry pie?!’ the dwarves cry in unison. ‘She stays!’

  Not unlike tramps in a stage play, with that jolly little dance as they walk, draped in rags, the smudges on their faces meticulously added with make-up: that’s how they are in the cartoon. The seven dwarves have hats, white beards and red noses. They’re tubby, they sing in unison. The dwarf on the block has a cane, a sober demeanour. Grumpy’s anarchy consists of not washing. I imagine the dwarf on the block has voted for the left for as long as he’s had a voting card, in the hope that the path we’re on might change.

  What would the ideal politician be like?

  Instead, we’re stuck with cartoons. And they do so much harm.

  I remember there’s a point in Waiting for Godot when the characters swap hats again and again. A bit like politicians.

  I wonder. What do I wonder?

  I miss you, Jonás. I’d sleep with you tonight on those three little beds.

  Today, among other things, I bought a kilo of red apples at the market, thinking of Snow White. I thought I spotted the same Fernando Pessoa I saw a while ago at the fruit stall.