Loop

  Last night, before setting off, I spoke to Antonio: pure gossip, tabloid gossip about everyone we know. My friendship with Antonio is based on occasional phonecalls, long conversations in amongst the emails and texts. He lives abroad, with his wife and two daughters. Talking to him is a lot of fun. Our conversations are a closed circuit of in-jokes and nicknames – everyone has a nickname, we stopped calling people by their names and surnames long ago. I feel like whenever I see my friend Antonio’s name flash up, no one will get out alive.

  I’m in Chicago. Since the event organiser didn’t have much money, she said I could stay with one of her friends. I’m in the home of a girl who’s away on a trip; I don’t know her, but I like her based on her apartment. If this apartment were an object, it would be a hand-knitted blanket. She seems like a sentimental girl. Sweet, kind-hearted. There’s a lot of colour here. She has family photos, plastic figurines in the plant pots, plants. And a Shakespeare quote on a fridge magnet: ‘A hundred thousand welcomes! I could weep, / And I could laugh; I am light and heavy. Welcome!’

  If someone asked me for a full-length portrait of myself, I’d show them that Shakespeare quote. Why does a girl I don’t know, who’s let me stay in her apartment for a few days, have that quote on her fridge? Maybe if we went into strangers’ houses and snooped around in the drawers we’d be surprised by how much we have in common.

  I’m in the kitchen. I can hear the hum of the fridge and the water dripping in the sink. They’re familiar sounds, a strange way of feeling at home even when you’re in the home of a total stranger. In this kitchen there are two Mexican lotería boards in frames, with the usual pictures instead of numbers. I see there’s no dwarf among the images, no sea or notebook, but there is a bird. The lady and the hand are next to each other. If I had to sum up the history of the world for an alien I’d use those two images from the Mexican lotería : the lady and the hand. A good synthesis, from Helen of Troy to the woman walking into a 7-Eleven; and the hand which destroyed and built everything, including that 7-Eleven.

  I flick through a magazine in the bathroom. I half-read an article: ‘The carpet mafia in Pakistan’. There are no photos. I imagine the leader of the carpet mafia. If I could form a mafia, I’d form the useless things mafia. It would be a mafia with no power. We’d traffic in the best kaleidoscopes on the market.

  Halloween is a good time of year in the States. Fancy dress, parties all over the place. I could seize my chance and dress up as a swallow. Or dress up as Proust in order to turn into a swallow halfway through a conversation. Let go of my beer, just like that, and start flapping my wings in the middle of the party. Fly out through the window.

  I know that the mother of the girl whose apartment I’m staying in died, and I know she’s now at her father’s wedding to another woman. A very young woman, the same age as the daughter, the event organiser told me. Meanwhile, Jonás, Marina and their father are travelling around Spain. I don’t think Jonás’ father will marry again. It doesn’t seem to matter to him that he could. When he talks about his wife, it sounds like she was the first, and will be the last and only, woman in his life.

  Looking closely at someone else’s apartment is a way of putting on someone else’s shoes. Here you can feel the loss in every corner. She lives alone. There’s a magnet from a hospital on the fridge, and photos of her mother at different ages in the living room. In the bedroom there’s an affectionate message of condolence, tacked to a noticeboard with colourful pins. Next to the wardrobe there’s a little black-and-white photo of her mother. Jonás has a photo of his mother in the study we share. A big photo, in black and white, of his mother as a young woman in the seventies, when she was studying chemistry at university. Jonás wanted to put it in the bedroom, and I suggested putting it in the study. ‘Help me choose a place for it in the study,’ Jonás said. Now I wonder if we should have put the photo of his mother in the bedroom.

  Suddenly I’m afraid of my mother dying. It’s a fear I’ve had on and off since I was a girl. It doesn’t change, it feels the same as it did when I was seven. Nevertheless, when I turned thirty it settled in a different place. Last year, when the two nurses opened the door to the room and the first thing I saw was the relief on my mother’s face, I realised the story had to be the other way around. In other words, the story goes like this: a child doesn’t want to cause their parents that amount of pain. When the time comes, the child has to bury the parents, not the other way round. It’s the desirable order.

  How similar are the desirable and the ideal?

  In the first nightmares I can remember, my mother would disappear. Meanwhile, it wasn’t in dreams that my father disappeared. He spent most of his time at work and was hardly ever at home, and as a result his absences felt normal. My mother’s absences meant something else. In the nightmares, I’d be following my mother’s voice – running through a forest, down endless staircases, searching a square; I followed her voice, but it grew fainter and fainter until I could no longer hear it. Shouting for my mother woke me up more than once. I’d go and peer round the door to my parents’ bedroom to make sure she was still there. If she wasn’t, I’d ask my father questions until he managed to calm me down. As well as a favourite bird, the other thing I share with Proust is this dependence on our mothers. Mothers equally loving, pretty, quick-witted. I think I’ve just made my Proust costume.

  The day after the accident – that is, when I’d opened my eyes and was beginning the recovery process – my mother had a diabetic attack. Like when a burnt-out office-worker succumbs to the flu as soon as his holidays begin. My father came in to reassure me: ‘The doctor says it’s normal, it was the shock, but it’s not serious, darling. She’ll stabilise again soon, you’ll see.’

  So the journey to the bottom of the notebook is also the journey to the bottom of loss. Being here makes me see Jonás’ loss differently. Being in this apartment has changed my point of view, as if I’d shifted a few centimetres to look at Jonás’ loss from another angle. The third person is sometimes a place you have to travel to.

  My mum took ballet classes as a girl. She was skinny, with freckles on her face and shoulders and she wore a pink tutu. I have that photo in the study, near the photo of Jonás’ mother. When Jonás tells me something about Ana, or when his father or Marina have told me things about her, that’s the image in my head. I’ve seen other photos, but that’s the image I see every day and the one I usually multiply and animate, as if I’m making a film and it doesn’t matter when the action takes place: Ana is always twenty-three and a smiling university student. My mother looks nothing like the girl in the pink tutu. She has a strong character, she’s proud of her grey hair and her age, she has a keen intuition and a good sense of humour. As if the Spanish frankness and Portuguese melancholy had been added together, rather than subtracted to leave the pessimism they sometimes leave. I think Jonás’ mother and mine would have got along well. I imagine them drinking coffee together in the kitchen at home. In our apartment, I mean.

  You have to travel a long way to get close to the person you sleep beside. And perhaps I’ve also had to travel this far to get close to myself.

  ‘I dreamed about my mum, love, a weird dream that’s been in my head all day. I’ll call you later,’ the text message from Jonás said.

  Last night, on the way out of a bar, a stranger gave me two lollies. The only idea I’ve had all day is that the zombie lollies – heads made of toffee – should have bubble-gum brains. Then you’d feel like a zombie eating the zombie lolly. A meta-zombie.

  My friend Luis Felipe wrote a poem about zombies, which alluded to the obscene number of violent deaths in Mexico. I’m going to keep a lolly for him, like a souvenir of his own poem.

  I see a framed photo in this café and wonder if the person in it is dead or alive. The uncertainty of framed photos. Frames are like names: the people they contain might be dead or alive, but at that precise moment they’re in the photo, in that gerund. That name which goes on, that conti
nuous present, that frame, those static letters forming our name. Disconcertingly immortal.

  Yesterday evening I bought some records. Not a very common practice these days. You might even call it eccentric. Hardly anyone buys records. I know they’re clumsy and not very practical, and that nowadays music is free. But I like buying records. One of the ones I bought was Station to Station by David Bowie, which includes ‘Wild is the Wind’.

  In Search of Lost Time . When I buy records, when I watch the laundry spinning in the machine, when I spend ages in the shower, when I go the long way home from work, when I watch the cat sleeping, when I deliberately waste time on the computer, I feel like Proust’s title is a miniscule monument.

  In this café, to my right, there’s a brass globe. An antique. I look at the distance between the United States, Spain and Mexico and see a lopsided triangle. Jonás, the black cat in the apartment and me.

  Drinking beer in the kitchen last night with people from the event, something reminded me of when we used to live in the States. My parents unpacking boxes, talking in the kitchen, smoking and drinking beer with the neighbours while my brother and I chatted in the garden. Something about that instant familiarity. But this time I felt further away. I know it’s a simple observation, but the electric pencil sharpener – that distance I thought I could see between adult life and childhood – seems like a recent invention, something I wrote about not long ago. As if that whole time we spent living in San Francisco, that night I remember when the neighbours came round, were also things I’d invented. Childhood is so uncertain, so distant. It’s almost like childhood is the origin of fiction: describing any past event over and over to see how far away you’re getting from reality.

  I’ve been invited to a party. I don’t know whether to stay in and read instead. I like what I’m reading so much that if Proust were a madeleine I’d dress as a cup of tea. In fact, if Proust were alive and in Chicago, I’d invite him to the party. I bet it would be fun to go to a party with Proust. He’d be the first on the dancefloor.

  I expect my Proust looks more like a piñata by now than like someone who really existed. Words carry us far away, always so far away from reality.

  At the party I told one of the guests about my ideal notebook. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘Nothing happens? A waiting room?’ What she didn’t say: the work in progress, the story with no beginning or end, useless things. Studying communication, buying books and records. Watching films. Going to La Lagunilla to browse the second-hand furniture, going to a flea market, a garage sale. Buying a vase and some artificial flowers. Buying an ashtray to keep the house keys in. Making things useless. Taking the hands off the watch, wearing it as a bracelet to make it useless. Writing, reading. I’ve done all these things. This is more or less how I spend my days.

  Am I getting closer or am I getting further away?

  Oh, I have so many questions. All unusable. I prefer questions to answers. Being on the way is better, you can open the windows and let the wind mess up your hair. I love messing up my hair. I could hold a garage sale with all the questions I’ve accumulated here – I have so many, piled up like pieces of junk. I also have freezing hands. I’m in a park. It’s cold and very windy.

  Yesterday the organiser held a goodbye party. We stayed up drinking until late. I had the Bowie record I’d bought in my rucksack. It was a nice surprise to find that the guests knew ‘Wild is the Wind’ so well, and we even sang it all together. An excellent goodbye party. I remembered the musical, Chicago . Wild is the Windy City.

  At the American Airlines counter, I was served by a woman of around sixty who was dressed as a witch. ‘Where’s your broom?’ I asked her. ‘Oh, we modern witches travel by Thunderbird. The next time you see a Thunderbird, watch out: there’ll be a witch like me inside it,’ she said, handing back my passport.

  On the plane, I catch a potent whiff of BO from the woman two seats away. I wish I could open the window. We’ve just gone through some turbulence. The pilot’s turning circles, or so it seems. Sharp bends and turbulence, what terror is made of. I remember that Bolaño character, the pilot who writes poems in the air.

  Stopover in Dallas. At the airline counter, I got the costume of the man who served me wrong. I thought he was a black rabbit, but actually he was a bat. A man of fifty, I’d guess. ‘Let me show you what I really am,’ he said, stepping out from behind the counter and stretching his arms to display his purple satin wings. He flapped them a few times.

  Now I’m going to write something important: bats have smaller ears than rabbits. And Halloween allows the United States a childlike breathing space, a playful interlude. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the president of the United States dressed as a pumpkin in the middle of a government meeting.

  In Mexico, despite La Catrina and sugar skulls, death is a sensitive subject. The facts mean we can’t be flippant about it. If the Mexican president put on a fancy-dress costume, for example, he’d be dragged out of his office feet first.

  I don’t understand people who are scared of flying. The plane’s instability is what appeals to me. I don’t mean the turbulence; I mean the act of flying along calmly, thinking that if everything has to end, you could be in the air, in a cinema or lying in bed. Lying in bed, which is where I was just before I learnt that the accident had caused the problem with my gallbladder, a kind of domino effect. And now I think it’s a good thing I went through that, because to travel more lightly, to lose your fear, you don’t even need to leave the house. Afraid of what, why or to what end? From one moment to the next everything can change. You have to relax when travelling by plane, vulnerability is everywhere because the vulnerability is us. Plus it’s nice to see the clouds from above. Oh, that false omniscience. What I really love is seeing the clouds move. A film of moving clouds is a good way to waste time. And it’s even better if I listen to José José singing: ‘Even the swallow emigrated, foreseeing the end.’

  10

  Jonás has decided to postpone his return. His plan is to go to Trévago and then visit a couple of friends in Paris who’ve just had a baby, since Marcos can stand in for him at work. His father and sister came back on Friday. Marina called to say that Jonás sent a few things for me, and that I can go over for dinner whenever I want. ‘My dad and I brought you something, too,’ she said.

  Tania on the phone: ‘How do people unwind? For example, people who don’t read think reading is unwinding. But if you read, drink coffee and pace around your office and that’s part of your job, how do you unwind at the weekend? Pace around your apartment in slippers until it’s Monday again? No, my dear: that’s work!’

  Someone in the office read me a news article and suddenly writing seemed like making a watery soup. And I don’t like watery soup. Perhaps this, an anecdote I like from John Cage, will give the soup some flavour: ‘One evening when I was still living at Grand Street and Monroe, Isamu Noguchi came to visit me. There was nothing in the room (no furniture, no paintings). The floor was covered, wall to wall, with cocoa matting. The windows had no curtains, no drapes. Isamu Noguchi said, “An old shoe would look beautiful in this room.”’

  Maybe one of your shoes, in the middle of this blank page, would look beautiful.

  It’s Sunday. I like Sunday nights, and this particular time always puts me in a good mood. It’s the National Hour on the radio. The airport hour, Sunday from ten to eleven p.m. A transition into Monday, a waiting room. Normally, when Jonás is here, at this time we’re watching a film, having dinner or driving home in the car.

  Today I was wondering what my metamorphosis would be. What my true metamorphosis would be, I mean, if such a thing were possible. I’d like to turn into a swallow, I know that, but I wondered what I’d really turn into. What if I became a duck or a rock?

  Daphne, for example, turned into a tree. Her metamorphosis wasn’t a punishment. She wanted it so much and so deeply that in the end it happened. Her words granted her the transformation. Metamorphosis is the continuation o
f a character’s story: it can be a punishment or a gift. I wonder if the written word has the same power, if words can change us like that. If writing and reading transform us into something we have yet to discover.

  During the weeks I spent recovering in hospital, and then in the apartment where I lived briefly before moving in with Jonás, I remember it was raining. Hours, days, weeks of rain. I watched it fall. First lying down, then sitting up. Anyone who’s been in that kind of situation knows how the physical pain presses you up close against the present. This hurts, that’s injured, I’m cold, I’m hungry, I need the bathroom, I’m falling asleep, are the kinds of thoughts that subject each moment, each second, to being there. There in the present, which lasts longer the more painful it is. When the recovery begins, when you’re gradually getting better, there’s a window, a small frame through which you can project yourself into another time – into the future. In spite of the rain, during that period I thought about what I wanted to do when the sun came out. At the end of the day, that’s what low points are for: to open that window. I thought a lot about doing everything I’d been too afraid to do, and that was the window I had. When I met Jonás I flung myself through it, with all my weight.

  11

  This afternoon I heard a man in an ice-cream parlour say to his wife: ‘We can leave the dwarves with your mother, darling.’ It struck me as a sentence with cruelty at its core. Children as dwarves, dwarves as children. Evidently a question of height.

  I haven’t seen the dwarf on the block for a while. I wonder what he’d turn into. Perhaps a lynx. If the cat turned into a person I think he’d like to be my boyfriend. He’d be jealous, unreasonable. Right now he’s lying on top of me, with two paws in my lap and the other two on my shoulder. His eyes are closed and he’s purring. It even seems like he cares about me.

  I dreamed about Ernesto, my ex-boyfriend, and his dad. The three of us were in a restaurant, having lunch with a strange character. This person wasn’t very entertaining, but he was making all kinds of efforts to win our favour; an unpleasant, obnoxious man, all in all. Ernesto’s father, through facial expressions, gestures, movements and comments, delicately shielded us from him. Ernesto got up suddenly to go to the toilet and didn’t come back. I felt comfortable and protected by his father. Just like when he was alive, I thought when I woke up.