Loop

Jonás said he broke up with his ex because she didn’t like him not having an office job. ‘But you teach, you’re doing a research project at the university, doesn’t that count?’ ‘It wasn’t really about the office,’ he went on. ‘It was her way of implying she wanted to be with a different sort of person.’

  Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?

  In the first months of our relationship, I was plagued by the idea that they might get back together. That she might turn up again, that he might want her back. I had no basis for thinking it, I just didn’t want things with Jonás to end. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever got on so well with anyone. You could say that, as well as the sex, I’ve discovered a good friend. I don’t know if one is more important than the other. I don’t think so.

  I like you so much, Jonás, that if you give me the first letter of your name I’ll do a magic trick. Pass it over; I’m going to shrink the first letter of your name. Look. A small letter in the world of capitals, and yet it’s still a capital. In small caps, a capital letter the same size as the small letters – a dwarf letter?

  It’s five in the morning. I’ve just come back from Tepepunk and Nina’s. They’ve been awarded a residency in Tokyo and we were celebrating. We started in a cantina. Now I’m wasted. We were drinking mezcal. Damn mezcal, that cursed happiness. I want to whisper in your ear that I love you. I don’t want to go to sleep. I’ll give you a letter of the alphabet. Whichever one you want. Kiss me. I love you, choose any letter you like: dkrisncpolñsmciryaxnlñpqoesj.

  I’ve realised that the ideal notebook, like a 7-Eleven, never closes its doors.

  I’ve also realised that when I talk about you, the things I write are like a craft project. I could write this with glue and alphabet pasta. Will it be long before you come back? I hope not. I hope the whale lets you go soon, my Jonah, because I miss you. I’ll say it with blue glitter.

  Jonás and I are about the same height. Our notebooks are the same size. This makes it easier for the notebooks to have sex.

  Tall people who need made-to-measure clothes. Fat people who need double seats. Neurotic people who need positions of power. Stupid people who need someone even more stupid next to them. Insecure people who need the approval of strangers. Loyal people surrounded by traitors. People who don’t fit, people who live on another scale.

  So what would be a normal scale? What’s the median, what’s the average, what’s 1:1?

  A job, an apartment with a mortgage, a car with a payment plan, a family, two boxes of cereal (one high-fibre for mum and dad, and one with chocolate for the kids). A dog needs a lot of looking-after, a kitten would be better and never mind if it gets run over, honey, because we have each other, now go on, put the dwarves to bed because there’s school in the morning.

  Meaning that being thirty-one and waiting for Jonás to come back from his trip, plus a cat, some plants, some books and an apartment aren’t the average.

  Let’s open the phonelines instead. The ideal notebook is inclusive, with you, and you as well, sir. In this gameshow, A Hundred Mexicans Said , here in my ideal notebook. Good evening, we asked a hundred Mexicans if they’d prefer reading or a hamper containing two bottles of cooking oil, tins of tuna, rice, beans, packets of soup, a good selection of biscuits, four bottles of table wine, a delicious cake and none other than the Golden Membership: a year’s supply of free food.

  If you’re one of the hundred people surveyed who don’t feature in the most popular response, don’t worry – I hear there are biscuits at the end of book launches.

  Biscuits. So do we all like biscuits? Biscuits are our unifying thread. We live in the biscuit brotherhood.

  Here in Mexico City there’s a monument called the Estela de Luz. The Suavicrema, it was nicknamed, because it looks like a Suavicrema wafer. The biscuit elevated into a monument, a biscuit costing 1,575 million pesos. There’s no need to do the calculations, the biscuit encapsulates the situation: the millions are shared between a select few, while the snake eats its own tail for money.

  And what about education, man?

  I can’t hear you, man, the music’s too loud.

  State education, what about it?

  What? I can’t hear you, man, speak up, the music’s amazing. It’s wicked, what track is this?

  Wild is the Wind. A country shaped like a leaf, about to fall from the tree.

  I got distracted. That’s what happens when I leave the windows open. But I wasn’t distracted enough. You can always go further. Fall out of bed, fall off the Earth, fall into space, into a planetary model, a smaller scale, a styrofoam Pluto. Because Pluto is a dwarf planet. What’s a dwarf planet, Jonás? ‘Dwarf planets have different characteristics, for example they don’t orbit like other planets because their gravity doesn’t work the same way. Pluto used to be considered a planet, but not any more. So the science is being rewritten, and now it’s considered a dwarf planet. Science has always been like that; it’s constantly being rewritten.’

  Not having the same kind of gravity, not being part of the average. Is it comedy or tragedy? Can genres be rewritten?

  Why the fervent desire to be part of the norm? How to get away from it? What’s the most distant point? Where could I go on this wind, on these wings? Oh, the wind, I just love it. How it messes up my hair; how far it can carry me. But am I getting further away or am I getting closer? Where am I going?

  Do these stairs go up or down?

  I’d like to fly far away, by Jonás’ side. When I write I try to distance myself from here. But Jonás isn’t the furthest point. Nor is the past. Not even going back to the fall of Tenochtitlan and the foundation of New Spain would be very far. Imagination is all that can carry us far away, and the fewer pieces the jigsaw has the better. The furthest I can go for the moment is into the cat’s head. The sleeping cat, a dwarf panther, here by my side. The cat’s so charming when he’s asleep. For each battle embarked on by Telemachus, the cat yawns.

  I once heard a novelist criticising people who write to the sound of their cat purring when people in the north of the country can hear gunfire. My cat, who sometimes chews books, wonders: aren’t books all a similar height?

  Isn’t literature somewhat misshapen compared to the news? Isn’t a novel a kind of dwarf compared to a newspaper? A question of height, a novel next to a printed newspaper: one small, the other big. Then don’t writing and reading mean living on another scale without it mattering where you are when you write, with made-to-measure furniture, made-to-measure clothes, while some of the most common verbs in the headlines are abuse-torture-kill?

  Literature in this country: a pot-bellied dwarf, red-nosed, in a little red hat. Books are so tiny compared to the horror. Literature in this country is only fit to decorate the garden. He’s so elegant, the dwarf on the block, and everything around him is so fucked up.

  5

  I was in a good mood until I read my horoscope: ‘You’ve realised by now that you’re not indispensable to anyone.’

  Jonás is a Libra, and I’m a Gemini. Libra is my rising sign. I was told this by a woman wearing blue eyeliner. ‘Libra and Gemini are air signs,’ she said. The same woman did a tarot reading for me: ‘All the cards show you’re a double air.’ A double power. Wild is the Wind. Does that explain the way I drift from place to place?

  If Jonás were here we’d have dinner in the Japanese restaurant a few blocks away. One of our customs, one of our favourite restaurants. The things we like. Oh, it feels so good to hear it in his voice, to hear that plural, which, along with the bed, is too big for me now he’s away.

  By the way, I listened to another version of ‘Wild is the Wind’ as I was doing the washing-up. It’s great. A good song is so flexible, you can make endless new versions.

  Tania called. After a while she said our phonecalls could be an AM radio show in the early hours.

  I asked Jonás about scales in science: ‘For example, the nanometric scale makes things more reactive than they are at
a normal scale, because the atoms it reveals can be used in more ways. Nanotechnology is exciting because it gives things more attractive properties than the properties we’re used to.’ In other words, today I ate a red apple, but on a nanometric scale the apple would taste better. I asked him some questions about that. Later, I got this message: ‘Forget it, my love, you couldn’t have a planet revolving around you because of the mass. One mass attracts the other mass, think of Newton’s second law. Forget the example I gave of the Smurf revolving around Gargamel.’

  Meaning that something on another scale has different characteristics. Its gravity changes. This applies both to the dwarf on the block and to literature.

  The ideal is always bigger or smaller than reality. The ideal is on a different scale.

  Example: Jesus Christ is the notebook, God is the ideal. Because Jesus Christ came down among men, but we conceive of God as an idea.

  Am I the idea I have of myself?

  One advantage of the ideal notebook is that it can come with me in the taxi. This is one of its nanometric properties. The taxi driver, an old man with a hearing aid, must think I’m making a note of something for work, something I have to do, something I want to remember in the airport. He watches me in the rear-view mirror. But no, mister, it’s not that. I like you, that’s what I’m writing. I wish I could tell you. But because I don’t dare talk to you, I’ll tell you here that the radio station you have on, which is playing bolero songs, is the same one my granddad used to listen to. Maybe your shared musical tastes would have given you something to talk about. I don’t dare interrupt now you’re singing under your breath, but I wish I could tell you that I’m happy you’re singing, I like your eyes behind your thick lenses in the rear-view mirror, and how you drive with both hands on the wheel; you’ve also made me like this song even more. Science is right: notebooks that are smaller in size have more attractive properties than the properties we’re used to.

  We drove past a bakery called Esperanza . Hope. My notebook’s name is better than the bakery’s. How deep can you swim in the word hope? I think it’s a word you can see to the bottom of, like the bottom of a swimming pool.

  Opposite me in the waiting area, a fat woman in pink jogging bottoms takes an equally fat pink wallet out of her bag. If that woman were to turn into an object, it would be that fat pink wallet.

  Through the aeroplane window I watch as night falls, and it looks so similar to the dawn. In the same way as elderly people end up behaving like children.

  So, do the stairs go up or down?

  Mexico City from a height. Clarice Lispector says the mirror is the only invented material that’s natural. I was born in Mexico, in that word reflected over and over: in Mexico, in Mexico City, in the Hospital de México, and when they were younger my parents lived in an apartment on Calle México. The plane is taking me to a conference for publishers and writers from Mexico.

  The organisers ask us not to leave the hotel: ‘Please, everyone, things are very dangerous at the moment. We don’t want anything to happen to you. All the conference activities will be in the events hall, on the ground floor, next to the lobby. Breakfast, lunch and dinner will be in the buffet, don’t forget.’

  We’re having beers on the balcony of room 401. We’re a bit drunk, and meanwhile one girl is sipping fizzy grapefruit juice with no ice. She talks about the thesis she’s writing. She mentions Alberich. I move closer, trying to be casual, and hear: ‘a chapter on Alberich the dwarf, the one who guards the Nibelung treasure under the water’.

  This morning, in the hotel restaurant, a waitress was humming that Shakira song, the one I think of as a kind of Post-it. That reminder, always so timely. Hearing it put me in a good mood.

  From the whole afternoon at the conference, I have three sad postcards. A poet with a centre parting and limp eyelashes blinks slowly, putting on a deep voice to read one of his recent poems. A charmless fiction-writer who reveals his insecurities – that feverish pursuit of acceptance – with everything he says. And Robin syndrome: someone always wanting to be next to Batman (the acclaimed writer or the festival organiser or the superstar publisher).

  I asked Jonás over the phone if he thinks poets in all languages put on a different voice when they read their poems out loud. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but it reminds me of that poem you showed me once, by the poet who made lines, zigzags, waves. There are some poems you can’t read out loud, my love, and those ones are the most like certain conclusions of physics. The points where poetry and science meet. Science often reaches Dadaist conclusions, you know. Poetry and science at those twin points can’t be read out loud.’

  There are various signs in the hotel foyer. One of them says it’s forbidden to enter with balloons. No smoking, no pets, no inflated balloons. A friend points that sign out to me, puzzled. ‘It’s not what you think,’ says one of the organisers. ‘If a balloon bursts in here, we all fall to the floor thinking there’s a shootout.’

  Drinking beer on the same balcony, with the good news that someone’s got hold of some mezcal and plastic cups. We’d all been at a terrible reading, of a terrible book. Someone produces the book. Another person reads passages out loud, imitating the author’s voice. We revel in the endless stream of sexual metaphors. It’s like the fount of all bad poetry, a great feast of it, or something.

  Jonás has gone to Lisbon with his sister, and their father has stayed in Spain with a cousin of their mother. This morning I got a text message: ‘Luckily we ran into your granddad, he says what are you on about, you’re wrong, the bookshop you recommended isn’t there any more. He took us to eat those famous custard tarts, which were really good, by the way.’

  Now that I think about it, sexual metaphors are astonishing. Especially bad metaphors, astonishing like the bearded lady’s circus act. Bad poetry is astonishing because it’s so monstrous. It has all the features we recognise, and yet that hypertrichosis too.

  Today I talked to two poets, one bad and one good. Maybe some company is better indoors and some is better outdoors. A bad poet might be good company in the street, but in a living room what you want is a nice long conversation. There are exceptions. My friend Luis Felipe is a good poet, and you can talk to him both in the street and at home. So the previous assertion should be taken as another artificial plant and my comment about Luis Felipe as an artificial flower.

  I came back to my room to read for a bit. I found this from William Hazlitt: ‘All that part of the map that we do not see before us is a blank.’

  Is the violent part of the map a blank?

  Mexico City, seen through the aeroplane window, is bigger than the ball of plasticine a child has just squashed onto the map of Mexico this evening. We make the world to the measure of our hands. But everything has a scale.

  Violence has scales.

  Any drawing, painting, photograph, lithograph, any picture of a bird, small or large, however rough the likeness, conveys the idea of freedom. Birds are a symbol of freedom.

  An open notebook is also a symbol of freedom.

  There’s a bird on the Mexican flag. The eagle devouring the serpent. I wonder if the flag contains any clues.

  ‘Fly away with me.’ If I could turn into any bird I’d choose a swallow. Have you noticed that swallows normally form pairs, Jonás?

  Now I’m one of those planes we hear from the apartment on Sunday nights, now I’m flying over the city. From up here it doesn’t seem like Wild is the Wind. Instead, Mexico City looks so docile. And the country looks so docile, too, on the map on the aeroplane screen.

  6

  We argued on the phone.

  It’s hard for me as well, Jonás. Believe me. I never met her. I’m trying to support you from here. Through you, through your dad and Marina, I love her too. Believe me. If I could do something I would. Believe me.

  I’m going to try something. Let’s see if this notebook works. Ana? Ana, can you hear me?

  Ana. Ana, dear Ana. I love your son. I would have liked
to meet you, to call you on the phone, to chat. Really? Me too. Of course, I would have brought you a book. Yes, absolutely, we’d be in the kitchen. Jonás tells me it’s the place you like best. I like being there too, it’s beautiful when the afternoon light comes streaming in through the big windows. We had lunch in there last Sunday. Yes, Rosario has it all under control. There are often containers of food in the fridge from the day before. I’ve learnt some of your recipes from Rosario. By the way, the Catalan cr è me brûlée we had last Sunday was delicious, how do I make it? Thanks, I’ll have a look in the drawer. The house is tidy. Marina’s really well. Relaxed and well. Yes, all good with him. Jonás – Jonás? Honestly, I don’t know. I think he’s afraid of being abandoned. But how can I explain that you didn’t abandon him? How can I explain that I’m not about to leave him, that I don’t want to leave him?

  Do you think I could go anywhere?

  Where?

  Am I getting closer or am I getting further away?

  Do these stairs go up or down?

  7

  This evening, walking down the grassy central reservation with my headphones on, I listened to the David Bowie version of ‘Wild is the Wind’ and had a metamorphosis. I started to sing, and all of a sudden my voice faltered. I felt an itching in my shoulders. Feathers were sprouting from my arms, my feet stopped touching the ground and at the same time I got smaller. I turned into a swallow. I flew over the grass and across the road. I looked down at the trees and the traffic lights; I saw the office windows and power cables from above. I flew over the park. I looked down at the patios, the cars, pedestrians dotted here and there. I flew over the trees and through the branches, I saw a parked rubbish truck, I paused on a nearby cable. And what if tomorrow I wake up transformed into a person? I love flying. It doesn’t mess up my hair, and my feathers suit me perfectly. It feels so good to fly. And oh, I can go so fast. I love being a swallow, I really do.

  8

  I like this notebook because it’s lined. Now and then I think the blue lines are like shelves in a grocer’s, somewhere to display all the words heaped haphazardly on the floor. It’s eight a.m., time to raise the shutters of this shop. Good morning.