Loop

  We’re all waiting for something.

  There’s nothing like writing at midday on a Saturday while wearing slippers. It’s a state very close to happiness. I’d be completely happy if I were also drinking a coffee and smoking a cigarette. We always need to be a few steps away from happiness. The transience of the state, the euphoria that can’t last. Happiness is high-pitched. Like a woman talking in a high-pitched voice and everyone turning to look. It’s such a good thing I stopped smoking, my slippers reassure me. My slippers are my state of mind, the embodiment of my soul.

  I dreamed about sleeping with a stranger. When I woke up I didn’t understand why the hell I’d gone off with him. As if my dream-life were a teenager running away from home. Who is that person I slept with?

  I ask some questions about the future. Tepepunk answers me from Tokyo: ‘In the future there’s a pitch-black crow who makes a racket just before dawn each morning from his perch on a lamppost. His lamppost. Autumn’s here at last, with its ochre-coloured winds. It really is pretty to see how the leaves crisp as the temperature drops, and how little by little a crunchy carpet covers the wide avenues. I don’t want to sound cheesy, but I’ve been pondering the meaning of the seasons, the significance of the weather. Change, phases and movements. It makes me think about repetition and cycles, too. Things can never be the same, and yet that eternal return, clichéd as it is, marks out a rhythm in the series of variations that structures our experience of life. Here the seasons are clearly defined, signs of what’s been and gone and what’s yet to come. But they’re not just beautiful landscapes; the present is also, as its name suggests, a gift. It doesn’t suggest longing or loss. It’s just a present, a gift, a time with no strings attached which is totally ours, to use however we want, however we please. There are days when I find the future overwhelming, with all the bright lights and commotion. The shops are the best museums, the best galleries and the Miyake or Yamamoto dresses are real works of art. As if that weren’t enough, all the shops I go to are playing the music we listen to at home. Are we getting old? Becoming contemporary adults? Or does it just mean we have commercial tastes? Maybe when we’re old we’ll listen to the music they play in waiting rooms all over the world.’

  My notebook is my waiting room. I write with background music. Maybe I should make an imperceptible playlist, like wallpaper, and turn all this into a proper waiting room. Perhaps lay out a few society magazines in this paragraph, with their stiff, wavy pages. A business weekly missing a cover, a gossip rag from a few years ago. So many people have flicked through these magazines. Maybe life is more like the waiting room than the doctor’s surgery.

  We talked about it last time, Jonás. If words behave like animals, stories can be divided into different kingdoms. Perhaps notebooks are a bit like dried butterflies on pins. I remember how in the waiting room at the dentist’s I went to as a girl, there were some butterflies in a frame. A frame, some glass, protecting butterflies of different sizes and colours. The waiting room is a concentration of useless things. All the things we do to waste time. The paraphernalia of uselessness, of lost time.

  Is it possible to lose time?

  An average of forty-one violent deaths a day in Mexico. On the bloodiest days, sixty-nine. Sixty-nine names. Sixty-nine stories. How many orphans, how many partners, how many relatives? Each person’s friends. Each person’s grief. The repercussions of the loss in their daily life. The effects, the fears it unleashes. Sixty-nine stories a day that set off, stampeding, kicking up dust, for the red kingdom. Meanwhile, a politician tells his children – while they’re eating their bedtime cereal in the kitchen – that he’s had a tough day at work. The story of that politician, one of the stories that belongs to the insect kingdom.

  This is a country that’s waiting. Waiting for peace on the streets, peace at bedtime. Here people are waiting for safety – is that too much to ask?

  Waiting, you say? Waiting for what, man?

  Yeah, what are we waiting for, man?

  What was that, man?

  I was asking you, man – what are we waiting for?

  But that’s what I asked you.

  Don’t mess with me, man, I asked you.

  I was hoping to be out of there as quickly as possible. In the first stage of the recovery process, I had a tube in my mouth that stopped me from speaking. I wrote on a little pad of paper to communicate simple things like ‘Tell me about your day, go on’. For a couple of weeks I couldn’t say anything. One of the few decisions I made was not to let people turn the TV on. I didn’t want to watch the news, or series, or anything like that. I wanted to know about the people who came to visit me, how they were, what they’d been up to. So all I could do was listen, think and write brief notes as a way of interacting. I couldn’t physically read, and I didn’t want to either, I wasn’t even interested in reading. To hell with all that. During those days it was as if, despite all the reading and writing I’d done before, I was having the most beautiful linguistic experience of my life. A relationship beginning anew. Turning thirty, never questioning it, and then all of a sudden, right there in front of me: words in the full splendour of their everydayness, which can be used to sing a Shakira song, or so someone can tell you about their day. Words there, for listening to, for singing and telling. Listening; what bound me to those people and to everything else. Telling; what binds us together.

  I’ll tell you something, Jonás: today I went to the supermarket. They don’t stock your favourite granola any more. It’s true – I checked with the manager. I thought I’d take the opportunity to try something new. I bought a local brand of granola, in an eye-catching packet. It looks really delicious.

  Tonight Guillermo came round with a shoebox to read me part of a novel he’s writing on index cards. We drank beer and talked about a writer who promotes himself at every available opportunity. To a hilarious extent. We had fun going over some of his latest exploits. We agreed that the only thing left is for him to interview himself and then give himself a hug at the end.

  It’s eight-thirty a.m. I read the new granola packet. It’s horrible, Jonás, a woman telling her story, in the first person, all about why she started making granola at home. The brand is named after her son, who disappeared in this pointless so-called War. A mother trying to raise money, through homemade granola, to fund a private investigation. I felt powerless, I lost my appetite. What the fuck is happening here?

  It’s eleven a.m. and Guillermo sends me an email with the subject ‘Let’s name the dwarf hippopotamus’, and a link to an article: ‘Lowry Park Zoo has organised a competition to name a pygmy hippo, which as the name suggests is much smaller than a normal hippo. It weighs 4.5 kilos and is 50 centimetres tall. It’s estimated that globally, there are only around three hundred left in the wild. At present, the zoo is considering various names for this pygmy hippo, although the current front-runner is Greaseball.’

  Juan José Arreola says hippos are like pensioners. Lounging placidly in their swamps, chewing slowly, wearing Hawaiian shorts and with cameras dangling around their necks. Guillermo suggests calling the pygmy pensioner Roberto.

  Why this tendency of nature to make the same thing on different scales? If there’s an average, then the variations, the bigger and smaller scales, are all different from one another. The further from the norm they are, the more misshapen.

  Dwarf things. Small things. Little things in relation to the norm. Insignificant things. Things with different dimensions. Curiously, the stories I like the most are made up of trivialities. Details. Trifles. These days, people look to what’s big. The big picture, big sales figures, success. Bright lights, interviews, breaking news. Whatever’s famous. Importance judged by fame. Maybe small things are subversive. Living on a modest scale compared to the norm. Maybe the dwarf is the hero of our time.

  On that short trip north, I talked to the girl who was writing a chapter of her thesis about Alberich. In Nordic mythology, dwarves were the creators of artifice. ‘The origin of a
rt, no more, no less,’ she said with a smile.

  The small as a bastion of the big. Perhaps that’s how something might change. Especially in this country.

  I’d like to go to the sea. I’d like the blue lines of this notebook to break, suddenly, like waves. To hear waves when I open this notebook, as if it were a music box.

  13

  This morning I walked past a café. I imagined Pessoa ordering five different drinks, one for each of his heteronyms. The girl would write the different names and specifications on each cup with a marker pen. I thought about that today. I suppose there are people who made better use of their time in that café. People with their computers, people chatting. Finalising editorial copy, studying, talking about work. A woman with wet hair sending messages from her phone, no doubt pulling the strings of an office.

  Useful things. Useful work, useful thoughts, useful phrases. Stories in which everything happens. A society that worships the verb. The famous concept of utility, the pursuit of usefulness. The old story of separating the wheat from the chaff. If everything is divided into two, I’m on the side of the chaff. And oh, it smells so good.

  I’m writing this by hand, but I wonder if fonts are facets of character. If Times New Roman says something about the people who use it, if Comic Sans would reveal something else. It suddenly seems like a lot of things fall within the semantic fields of fonts, and that we choose them because they resemble us in some way.

  Jonás writes in Georgia, and I prefer Garamond. I have no reason for thinking this, but these fonts seem compatible, like the music we listen to. That’s one good thing about living together – we’re into more or less the same things. As I make myself something to eat, I’m going to listen to some Georgia-style music.

  Listening to music has the power to dissolve tension. I wonder if this also applies in politics, if music can dissolve any kind of tension.

  Misfortune, difficulties and obstacles have value. Difficult times make you look inside yourself. Make you listen and observe. Hardship can be transformed into strength. I wonder if this applies to politics too, if disaster can become social strength.

  I ate in the Japanese restaurant with Carolina. I saw another dwarf; she was having dinner with a man. I smiled at her.

  This evening I went for a walk in the park with Luis Felipe. He’s so good to talk to. In his opinion, Jonás is trying hard to be ‘the good son’ in the wake of his mother’s death.

  I wish I’d met Jonás at a different time. Grief has a protagonist and a host of minor characters. The protagonist is the one who suffers, like Jonás. Deep down, he thinks he’s misunderstood. He shares part of it with his sister, and part of it with his father, but there’s something he doesn’t know how to express, and he keeps that from everyone. He’s the protagonist, and I’m secondary. That’s why his return is being postponed.

  Sometimes I wonder if being with me is, for Jonás, a kind of betrayal of his mother. On a basic level, perhaps it’s not such a crazy idea. If he does feel that way, it explains why he’s putting off coming back. I don’t know. Still, here I am, Jonás, and maybe I’m thinking all this like a cat getting tangled in a ball of wool.

  Instead of the ball of wool, I should pick up an actual ball. The texture of objects that bounce: one of my favourite stories is about the first ever writing. Ovid’s Metamorphoses contains the first writer and the first writing. Io is the daughter of the Inachus river. Juno turns Io into a beautiful white cow. When she wants to complain to Argus – who watches her with his hundred eyes – all she does is moo. She’s terrified by her own voice, by that moo. She realises she can’t speak. She can’t communicate with her father, the Inachus river. Instead of words she uses letters, tracing them with her hoof in the sand to explain how her body was transformed. The father realises it’s his daughter and laments.

  The first thing ever written down is a lament. The first writer writes the lament of her transformation. The first writing is on sand, on the banks of a river; words that soon become indistinct, that don’t last. Io, a woman transformed into a cow, writes her misfortune. Io is also, in Italian, ‘I’. The first person. The first person wrote her misfortune. With a woman’s cry of distress, that’s how writing began.

  Before Cervantes, the first novel was written by a woman in Japan in the tenth century. A cry of distress in Japanese in an age when Chinese was the high language, that’s what Murasaki created. The Tale of Genji is the first novel. Love in the time of Genji could transform love today. Sor Juana also wrote in that strange and newly-minted language of New Spain. Io wrote for the first time in sand. Three women transformed the word.

  If I had an AM radio show, I’d talk about them more. If I had a show in the early hours, I’d read something by them. It was Tania who said we should have a radio show, the AM kind where the words sound fuzzy. We’d introduce a few songs, make long phonecalls live on air. Not much music, but all love songs. Like the one I’m humming now, my friends.

  I’m so comfortable that I’m going to get a book. Now I’m back, with who else but Little Flower, the smallest woman in the world, from Clarice Lispector’s story: ‘ In the Central Congo he indeed discovered the smallest pygmies in the world . And – like a box within a box, within a box – among the smallest pygmies in the world was the smallest of the smallest pygmies in the world, obeying perhaps the need Nature sometimes has to outdo herself. ’

  Today I saw the other dwarf again, walking down the street. I saw her go into a pharmacy. The one who was in the Japanese restaurant the other day. I noticed her flowery dress. A very feminine look. A modest neckline, but it left her collarbones visible, and the beginnings of her breasts. The cut showed off her figure, she looked very beautiful. A woman’s dress but in a small size, a child’s size?

  As a girl I never wanted a dog; I was more into cats. I remember waiting ages until I was allowed to have a cat at home. I had to wait until everyone agreed, until my brother was on board, until the vet would let us adopt one. The whole thing took so long that, by the time the cat arrived, I had a list of names ready. My first cat had three names.

  It feels like we’re always waiting for something. However small, however trivial it might seem. An endless wait, the carrot always ahead of us. And the names ready for when it comes. If it comes.

  While I’ve been waiting, perhaps Jonás, like the dwarf, has stopped looking like Jonás. Perhaps now he’s an idea. An ideal. Which is what they both are for me, what everything is for me.

  Waiting. It never starts, never ends. We never arrive. We arrive somewhere, somewhere like Lisbon, but never at a conclusion. Or we arrive, no matter what, at these words: ‘All is truth and way.’

  Everything begins once something else has already begun. My name and my story don’t begin with my birth. A story doesn’t end with death or a farewell. The other people are still there, the ones from before, the ones who carry on, the ones who are here now. Like Jonás, like me, the two of us on the way, at the end of something and the beginning of something else.

  Like me, now, waiting for Jonás to come back from his trip. But even if he does come back, it’s possible his journey will continue. Charon clearly doesn’t just take the chosen one; for every trip to Hades, several planes take off from the airport. That journey in search of someone, of something that’s not there. Or that journey without flying. Like this one here, in the chair.

  I wonder what the planets are like that the cat visits in his sleep. Like a box within a box, within a box, where does the cat travel to?

  I’d live with you on any of those nine little planets, Jonás. The black cat could be the emperor of one of them. On that planet, there’d be a garden decorated with different-size pieces of quartz, in different shades of green, with a small pale-blue frozen lake we’d like to visit. The emperor Cat would learn that we enjoy strolling among the huge rocks of quartz, that black cat who watches us from his throne; he’d lick his paw and flex it to order the garden’s closure. ‘It’s mine,’ he’d say to hi
s subjects. ‘No one else may walk between my rocks of quartz,’ he’d decree. We’d obey the orders in his kingdom, just as we obey them at home. We’d look for another place. It wouldn’t have different-size pieces of quartz in different shades of green, or a pale-blue frozen lake, but it would be a place we’d like to go to on the little planet the cat might visit in his sleep.

  Maybe all this could be put another way, but if there’s no ideal person there are no ideal words. So there can be no ideal story.

  14

  A message from Ernesto, inviting me for lunch. Nothing out of the ordinary, though we don’t see each other very much. The only thing that really was out of the ordinary today was my doughnut sliding across my plate. I don’t know what effect, what optical illusion or law of physics allowed it, but it happened: the doughnut slid across the plate. I wonder if things like that happen on one of the planets the cat visits in his sleep, something like a planet where things move of their own accord. In keeping with the laws of that planet, the notebook would levitate now. On one of those planets, objects would have a mind of their own. Objects would have a voice.

  A long phone conversation with my brother. He said he’d like to have a cat but he can’t because his girlfriend is allergic, and then he took a different tack: ‘And if you had seven lives like a cat, what would you want to be? If I had seven lives I’d divide them into seven months, one month for each person. First I’d be a shaman from Chiapas, can you imagine? Then I’d be a country singer from Kansas, and sell cowboy hats – I have a flannel shirt that would be just perfect. And a teenager in Tokyo. I’d have so many friends, you wouldn’t believe, and I’d be shit-hot on a skateboard. And a kid on a beach in Michoacán, preferably drinking from a coconut through a straw while sitting at a plastic table; and a children’s party magician in Buenos Aires; and an old Scottish man no one would understand a word of when he spoke; and someone selling coffee in the market in Oaxaca. Have you smelt the freshly ground coffee in that market? Wouldn’t it be amazing? Seriously, sis, I want to come back to Mexico soon. Did you notice I chose various people in Mexico?’