Loop
Page 9
One Saturday, not long after we moved in together, Jonás went for a run in the park. Completely unexpectedly, he heard the song he’d been trying to work out on the piano that afternoon. He took his headphones out and started crying right there in the park. The first time he’d cried since Ana’s death. He came home. After a while, leaning against the fridge, he told me what had happened: ‘Crazy, right? It’s only hit me now that my mum’s not here any more. Don’t you realise, darling? She’s not here. My mum’s gone.’ He described that afternoon to me in detail, one of his last afternoons with his mother. By the end we were both in tears.
My mum, so as not to cry, so as to dispel that memory, to shake off that moment at which she’d felt so loved at the age of sixteen, described her shock when, not long after getting married, while listening to the radio in that little cream-coloured car they used to have, she heard the news that John Lennon had been killed.
16
I was left with a scar. I think telling stories is a way of putting a scar into words. Since not all blows or falls leave marks, the words are there, ready to be put together in different ways, anywhere, anytime, in response to any fall, however serious or slight.
17
We don’t have a TV, but we do have a neighbour who takes it upon herself to share the evening news with us all at full blast. Through the wall, I learn that ninety-five per cent of cases involving murdered journalists are unresolved.
Are we getting closer or are we getting further away?
I had dinner with Julia. Calmly, while eating a salad, she said that we usually want something and think we’re heading towards it, when really we’re walking in the opposite direction. I think it’s a powerful claim. Could it be what’s happening to this country? Could it be what’s happening to me?
Am I getting closer or am I getting further away?
I forgot to say that yesterday this notebook came in useful for turning off the light. I stretched out my arm but couldn’t reach the switch, and yet thanks to the notebook’s solidarity we managed it together, in a true bilateral partnership. As you can see, the notebook, reproduced and widely distributed, could serve as political discourse. And thrown at the right moment it could be an anarchist gesture.
My father is a private person. I find talking to him quite tough. He can be difficult to approach, and he doesn’t like to open up. His younger brother is seriously ill, and it looks like he won’t live much longer. A horrible shock. My brother phoned; he said our cousin had called him to pass on the news. He sent me on ahead, like when we were children, to test the waters. I called just now. ‘How are you?’ I asked. After I’d put the same question to him several times, he answered: ‘Oh, fine, love, just working as usual. Nothing to report, except my brother Ricardo’s not doing so well, so why don’t you tell me about your day?’ Talking to him reminded me of his illegible handwriting.
Tania is having relationship problems: ‘It’s a mess. And you know what? The cold doesn’t help. I don’t think we’ll last much longer. Plus, I’m sure the weather has a lot to do with it. Always, with everything. I bet if we were at the beach we wouldn’t be arguing so much. Plus, if we were at the beach, instead of fighting we’d have made a ceviche or maybe sat on the porch and played cards. Have you seen that? Doesn’t it look tempting? A couple in flip-flops, chatting away on plastic chairs outside their house, the hundred-watt bulb, the bag of water hung up to scare off the flies. That’s how my life would be if I lived by the beach. Today I’d have said to him, “Give me a hand moving the hammock,” instead of hanging up on him. I don’t remember where I heard that things have a tendency to end in winter. Statistics, percentages that prove things end more often in winter than in summer. And we all think we’re different, but we’re part of the statistics. Even though no one wants to be part of the statistics.’
Maybe the winter, the cold, the leaves on the ground, are related to the end. Like a leaf clings to the tree. But please don’t let it end, Jonás. With your kiss my life begins .
The doctor said I had to go for walks and get some sun. ‘Like an old person, walking round the block?’ I asked. The doctor, who’s in his seventies, smiled: ‘Plants, and you, and everyone else, get strength from sunlight. You’re just nicer-looking than a plant, so you might as well go outside. If you were ugly I’d suggest only going out at night so you don’t scare people, but I think it’s ok, you can go out during the day. You’ll recover in no time, just you wait. The day you stop to buy some sorbet, that’ll be it, the next day you’ll be going for a run.’
I’d just moved in with Jonás. We went to a party with his friends. We were kissing. The music was terrible, like at the end of a wedding. When I say we were kissing I mean that from there we went home, that we weren’t embarrassed and that if any of his friends had seen us at home they would have seen the same thing as at the party. It never used to be like that. Before, being around friends, around other people, seemed to alter the situation. But with Jonás it was different. Something changed. Living together made us feel more comfortable. The setting doesn’t matter. The trip, the distance, doesn’t affect that. I don’t think there’s any embarrassment or shyness between us, although, now I think about it, perhaps silence is a kind of shyness. It’s strange, at home I never thought there was any embarrassment or shyness between us.
The first time I cooked for Jonás in the apartment we’d soon be sharing, he was anxious, wanting to help. I asked him not to, to let me cook for him, to talk to me about something while I cooked. In the end he started chopping next to me. It’s rare for Jonás not to help me in the kitchen. It sounds silly, but that minor gesture encapsulates a lot of things about him, on a larger scale, and it’s part of what made me fall in love with him. Jonás can’t be in the same place as someone without helping, without offering some kind of support. He enjoys working as a team, like when he brings crosswords home for us to solve together. The very thing that made me fall in love with him is also what’s keeping us apart. Now he’s by his mother’s side. How can I bring him back?
Sometimes we do crosswords. He introduced them, I’ve never bought any of those publications. One Sunday, visiting his father and sister, I learnt something. ‘I don’t like them,’ Marina said in their living room while Jonás and his father were taking things out of the car boot. Ana liked doing crosswords, and Jonás used to help her ever since he was a boy. ‘I was never part of that, crosswords bore me to death,’ Marina said.
It feels like the sun is making things better, like the warm weather is helping. Summer in Mexico City doesn’t go in a straight line. The same day can switch between baking heat and a storm. The next morning can be the other way around, or take a different course altogether. The same day can tie the two ends of the rope together. I was born in summer, and if I had to choose a static horoscope, a single defining statement, I’d choose this description from Shakespeare of the summer in Mexico City: ‘Welcome. A hundred thousand welcomes! I could weep, and I could laugh; I am light, and heavy. Welcome!’ From one extreme to the other, everything can change in a flash. Just like after an accident, and just like when I met Jonás. One day you’re here, and the next you’re over there. Because, oh, Wild is the Wind.
Could night and day be a dwarf model of winter and summer? It seems more plausible for a relationship to end at night than at midday. I imagine it’s easier to get into an argument in the middle of the night. For the leaf, hanging from the tree, to fall in the cold. Perhaps death also has something wintry about it. It looks like a family winter is on the way, but I have a feeling my father will stay standing. If he breaks like a branch I’d like him to lean on us, on my brother and me, but for that he’d have to be open with us, which I can’t imagine. Sometimes I wonder if men’s emotions are like a closed box somewhere in the distance, so far into the distance that the distance is where they are. I wonder if they’re illegible. But if you can’t stop the winter, can you delay the following summer? Oh, tell me, Jonás, when will the sun come out?
Yesterday I realised I’m coming to the end of this Ideal notebook and went out to look for some more. Needless to say, I didn’t find any. In an old stationery shop in the Escandón I found a notebook from around the same time. The name of the brand is Atlántida. It has the figure of Atlas on it, along with the slogan ‘Guarantee and quality’; those words, in rounded text, form a world that the person is carrying on his back. One good thing about Ideal notebooks is that they don’t have slogans. Ideal things are ideal in the eye of the reader, like a mirror-word, a natural word that reflects us. In another, even older stationery shop, I found some notebooks that are similar to Ideal ones. I bought two. I wonder which one is the imitation of the other.
I had some mezcal with Philippe and Luis Felipe. Mario turned up; he was on his way to another table, but he sat with us for a while. According to him, the other, similar notebooks are older than the Ideals. ‘How do you know?’ ‘Because a man in a stationery shop in Roma told me,’ he answered. I described the conversation with the old lady in the stationer’s in Oaxaca. We swapped stories about things we’ve been told by people in stationery shops. I gave him one of the notebooks I had in my rucksack.
I also bought an old-style pen with a fine tip. This pen feels more comfortable to write with than the last one. Like a pair of made-to-measure shoes. I can run – see? And I can write more quickly, look how well I’m doing at this speed. I’m running. Oh, look, I’m messing up my hair. And I can write whatever I want without stopping because this nib suits the size of my writing. Oh, it’s amazing, I’ve found my ideal pen.
18
It’s a Sunday evening, my very favourite time to listen to the radio, but I’m going to turn it off. The neighbour’s listening to some pretty good music, turned up pretty loud, so I’ll leave the playlist to him. I’ve just been to see Jonás’ father and sister; they invited me over for dinner. In amongst all the joking around, they tried to justify his behaviour, like they were asking me to be patient. The truth is, it’s stopped mattering how much time goes by. This armchair is getting more and more comfortable, and it’s even better now the neighbour’s playing such good music.
After all, we’re both on a journey. But I prefer to travel by armchair. Although I could argue from here, I don’t like arguing, I prefer the journeys I can make sitting down. Oh, those two big themes, the poems that produced us: the poem of war, and the poem of a journey. The Iliad and The Odyssey . Maybe everything can be divided like that, into the Iliad side and the Odyssey side. The Iliad was named after a city. The Odyssey was named after a character. The horizontal poem like a postcard, the vertical poem like a full-length portrait. I prefer The Odyssey . We both look more like our mother, The Odyssey . Me like Penelope, and you like Odysseus.
Odysseus, he of the many twists and turns. Penelope, she of the many twists and turns without moving from her armchair. Weaving the notebook by day and unravelling it at night. Our Telemachus is the black cat stretching on the floor. He doesn’t seem about to go looking for Jonás. Our Telemachus yawns, licks one paw with his eyes closed and it’s all the same to him whether Jonás comes back or I leave. If only someone, like he whose voice is borne afar, could tell the cat that he does matter to us, that we love him.
The neighbour has just played that song I love again. Because of his good taste and his tendency to repeat things, I offer him some questions as if they were biscuits: what would have happened if Odysseus had been a dwarf? Would it have changed The Odyssey , the course of the West?
Does our height determine our destiny? Do scales determine history?
If our scale determines the role we play in history, it must mean something that Jonás and I are the same height. Face to face, in similar circumstances, interaction is easier. At similar points, as if what we’ve been through matches up. After all, his travels in Spain and my travels in the armchair run parallel.
Sometimes I’d like to know this story from start to finish, but I don’t know anything from start to finish. Even my handwriting, on the page in front of me, looks like a film I’ve walked into once the screening’s already begun. It used to be big, and now it’s smaller, but that’s still not the beginning. Does it look like my father’s handwriting, my mother’s, my grandparents’? One good thing about narratives in the past tense is that you can synthesise and select, because you know the story from start to finish. If this were written in the past, if a divine narrator were talking, like he whose voice is borne afar, we could have epithets the way they do in The Odyssey . It would make things easier. The qualities, the defects, would be obvious, and there would be clues. Since I don’t have any clues, since this is the present and it looks more like an annotated margin, I can offer some epithets that only depict an instant. I could be she of the small handwriting, and Julia could be she who shyly plays guitar. And then there’s landline-calling Tania, golden-shoed Carolina. Or some obvious adjectives: Guillermo the intelligent, Tepepunk the tall, Antonio the sharp, Luis Felipe the divine.
They say we look like one or the other, that either the maternal or paternal features are dominant. I look more like my mother, and my brother looks more like my father. Jonás looks like his mother and Marina looks like their father. Ana was an attractive woman, with black hair, light-coloured eyes and dark, full eyebrows. Those dominant features in Jonás attracted me the day we met. I feel drawn to The Odyssey , and perhaps the literature I like the most shares its qualities.
They respond, they agree. Proust, Wilde, Pessoa, Borges and Lispector love The Odyssey . Juan Rulfo, Jorge Ibargüengoitia and Josefina Vicens say they do too, that they’re big fans. Oh, the Ouija notebook.
I said just now that this is a margin. In fact, that’s what I do and what I’ve been doing all this time: I make notes in the margins of books. It’s hard to make notes when the margins are too narrow: that’s why I buy notebooks. This notebook is also one long margin of everything I like to read.
And isn’t sitting in an armchair a way of reading life?
As a teenager, I didn’t put up posters in my bedroom. Something keeps me from that kind of celebrity worship. Besides, I worship the margins, the secondary, the useless. And in an age when a pet can become a celebrity, an age of epic stories, of tales that have to be grand and flashy to capture a child’s attention, an age when preference is given to speed and usefulness, what’s a good reason to fly that flag?
Kafka, come here: ‘There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.’
I spoke to Antonio the other day. He has some new nicknames for a person we both think is awful. So funny. It put me in a good mood and I went out to buy something for dinner. On the way, I ran into Luis Felipe. We had tacos at a place by the park.
What would become of a person with no friends?
My neck hurts. If my notebook had a detachable page that I could use as a heat patch, it would be ideal.
Wait. I love this song. The neighbour has such good taste. It’s true, writing is more like unravelling than weaving. Unravelling involves having woven something already and there’s always so much to unravel. But I won’t take out the part about the neighbour. What great choices. I’m singing along.
The Odyssey has a happy ending. But I wonder what’s in store here, what’s in store here for the two of us. Come back, so everything can carry on happily. We’ll resume our domestic life. Since they stopped making the granola you used to like, we’ll see which one we like now.
I read, in an essay, that one of Flann O’Brien’s Irish Times columns described a strange service for the owners of unopened books: ‘For a given sum the books would be handled; passages would be underlined, the spines would be damaged or words would be written in the margins such as “Rubbish” or “Yes, but cf Homer, Od., iii, 151” or “I remember poor Joyce saying the very same thing to me”, or inscriptions would be added to the first page along the lines of “From your devoted friend and follower, K. Marx”.’
Marginal, useless work. In fact, I’m drawn to the very idea of uselessness because there’s something almost fictional about it. A piece of work, an object, the more ridiculously useless it seems, the more fascinating I find it. All those objects, all those services that serve no one seem to me like the triumph of fiction. How I’d like to offer the book-underlining service, write in the margins, add false dedications, drink coffee, and now and then leave marks on the covers with my mug.
The more useless something is, the more subversive.
Let me unravel that.
The more useless something is, the more independent it is from reality.
It’s the music. It’s the neighbour’s music, the bus driving by, the aeroplane in the distance, a dog barking here, a car horn over there. I’d like to be a sound so I could contribute to the night. If I were a sound I could be independent from reality. If I were music I could travel further.
I didn’t tell you something when we talked just now. The other day I had lunch with Carolina and some of her friends. One of them took a notebook out of her bag and put it on the table. An Ideal notebook. ‘I call them Mexican Moleskines,’ she said. I picked it up and had a look. It was a bit smaller than the ones I found in Oaxaca. I asked her where she’d bought it. She gave me the address of a stationer’s in the centre which had – she said – a green Ideal notebook in the window: ‘But don’t get too excited, I thought they had them in green, which is my favourite colour, but no, it’s just faded in the sun. Really they only sell navy-blue Ideal notebooks, but since the man in the shop’s always in a bad mood he won’t show you any. If you look at the spine you can tell it was blue once upon a time.’ I thought about that Ideal notebook as a kind of mummified father, the Tutankhamun of notebooks. An Aztec deity, perhaps. The Aztec deity of the notebook in the city’s historic centre, along with some of the other stones that gave us our country: Idealnotl, green jade. The Green of Moctezuma’s headdress, the green of the Mexican flag, Lorca’s green how I love you green. Green like the top of the tree which is the headdress of the deity of paper. That single example, the pre-Hispanic god of everything small.