Loop

by Brenda Lozano

  We haven’t talked about it, but I’m not going to put up a Christmas tree. In your house, they did talk about it. Marina will buy the tree, and your dad will polish up the baubles your mum kept in the cupboard. They’re in what used to be your room, in the third drawer down, Marina said to your dad. Although last year we didn’t have a tree, this time I’d ask you, maybe you’d like us to have one. Can I tell you something? The other afternoon, walking along the pavement, I saw a woman putting up a Christmas tree in her living room. I could see her from head to foot through the large window. A woman alone, hanging coloured baubles on a plastic pine tree. I felt a longing to be living that life, a longing to be her. Why? I imagined two people talking about their day, the little bulbs flashing on and off, on and off. So far from our reality. Like a story I’d have liked to visit with you today.

  The power’s just gone. I lit the candles you bought the last time there was a blackout. Six little candles on the table. Let’s hope the power comes back soon, because it looks like the notebook’s holding a spiritualist meeting, only without the paranormal effects.

  19

  Last night I met a young guy in a bar who was identical to Proust. Identical. I couldn’t think of a good excuse to take a photo, but I chatted to him. He had a black eye. He said he’d been beaten up buying cocaine in the Doctores neighbourhood. Someone tried to mug him as he was leaving the building, and he wouldn’t hand over his wallet and phone. ‘I wasn’t giving that stupid kid anything, and the fucker smacked me one because I didn’t,’ said the twenty-four-year-old Mexican Proust with the black eye. A sociology student at the university, from a family in which everyone has read Marx. ‘Even my granddad’s read Marx. So have I, obviously, but that’s not the most hardcore thing I’ve ever done. You want to know what the most hardcore thing I’ve ever done is? Something I’m really fucking proud of. I read all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time . All seven of the bastards, from start to finish. And you know what? Proust’s the fucking man . A total dude. Every character, even the seriously unimportant ones, turns up again later in the books. And all of them, every single one of the fuckers, has a past, a family and a shitload of stories. Over the seven volumes you get millions of these endless scenes, packed with sentimental details. He’s seriously sentimental, I’m telling you. All those characters are seriously sentimental. And just think, the whole crew from all seven volumes wouldn’t even fit into this bar, let alone a club. There’s fucking millions of them, I’m telling you. And another thing, they all have their dramas, their purpose, their part to play, they’re not just hanging about for no reason. Plus the guy spends an insane number of pages on everything. He’ll go on for fifty pages about any old crap. Proust, man, I’m telling you. He’s a fucking dude.’

  We chatted at the bar. Julia saw someone she knew and went to sit at their table. Proust’s friends got bored by the conversation and went out to smoke. In the toilets, heady with the alcohol and the hallucination, I wondered if there’d ever been another young guy who looked so much like Proust. We swapped numbers. He said he was having a barbecue on his balcony the next weekend, that he lived with two friends he was sure I’d get on with – one girl who’s a tattoo artist and another who’s a poet from Chiapas – and that he wanted to invite me to the barbecue so we could talk more, because they, the people he was with, wanted to go to a party in the Narvarte neighbourhood. I kept his number and his name: Proust, twenty-four years old.

  In Sweden, in Japan, in Holland, could there be a young woman identical to Clarice Lispector? A girl identical to Virginia Woolf on the streets of Palermo in Buenos Aires, or a young Jorge Luis Borges riding the tube in London? A teenager on a skateboard, listening to reggae, who’s the spitting image of Ibsen?

  Probably.

  I ran into your friend Marcos. We talked about you, and about your dad and Marina. He told me your mum used to take you and Marina for bike rides in the park when you were children. I told him I’ve given up on counting the days, since they’re all the same. Marcos said: ‘It’s good for Jonás to have you in his life. He’s a gentleman, he never tells me the details of your relationship, but even though he’s away, I can tell you he’s a better person now. It’s much better that you’re with him than that you’re not. I hope you stay together.’

  Maybe there isn’t another twenty-four-year-old Proust with a black eye in a bar. Maybe there isn’t another Oscar Wilde in the supermarket queue. Maybe there isn’t another Fernando Pessoa eating a slice of orange dusted with chilli, which the guy under the pink awning in the market offers him on the tip of a knife. But please let there be a teenager on a skateboard, listening to reggae, who’s the spitting image of Ibsen.

  In primary school, a teacher read us a story by Oscar Wilde. I read it again as soon as I got home. It was a story about a giant and it captivated me. And that night, something began. For my fourteenth birthday, my uncle, the husband of my aunt Eva, posted me a book of Fernando Pessoa’s poems. Reading the first pages of the book, I forgot all about my party. My granddad asked me to come down for the cake. Later that night, in my bedroom with the light on, reading the book again, something began. So much has happened since I read those books for the first time. I disagree with so many of the things I’ve done and said since then, but some books are like dots that form a line. Maybe it’s to do with books and doors being the same shape. Proust opened one for me when I was seventeen. A big door, I know. And something else happened that was equally big. At that age I discovered reggae and hip hop. It was that combination, and my skateboarding boyfriend, that showed me the cosmos.

  It’s time to say it: I love my slippers. Especially on a Friday night, like now. I think you can do everything in slippers: open doors, discover planets, travel the Milky Way. An armchair and slippers are just right for a cosmic voyage.

  This morning I looked for Ideal notebooks in a stationer’s near Parque México. They didn’t have any, but I chatted for a bit with the Spaniard at the counter. He was listening to opera, and had a blunt pencil behind his ear. A faded Madrid accent, like the globes in the window that had faded in the sun. His shirt sleeves were rolled up, and a packet of Camels was wedged under his right cuff. A gruff voice, a fatherly tone. Dusty dissertations, styrofoam solar systems in dirty plastic bags, pens, pencils, abacuses. A stationery shop with the objects my brother and I used to buy all that time ago. Maps. Those maps he remembered he needed late one Sunday evening. All those objects that were once called ‘classroom essentials’ and now hardly seem essential at all. I liked that man and his stationery shop, so resistant to the passing of time, as if in denial about the present, listening to opera, enjoying his cigarette behind the counter, under a white light that gave character to the smoke. I asked him about Ideal notebooks; he said he knew of them but hadn’t had any in stock for years. As if rummaging in the bottom of a drawer, he eventually remembered he had a red Ideal diary in his storeroom at home, left over from a set a while ago. If I wanted to come back during the week, he could bring it for me. ‘For now, can I offer you a cigarette?’ he asked in his solemn, gruff voice. Standing in that stationery shop, with that man, would have been an excellent time to take up smoking again.

  See? I’m like the notebook detective. A whodunnit that opens with a blank notebook lying motionless on the floor. You have to gather up the clues, solve the mystery of the twin notebook which lives, oblivious to the other’s exploits, on a different continent. A thriller on a small scale. Everyday life where very little happens: the crime of the epic.

  Today I realised: Parque México and Parque España are very close together. Walking from one park to the other, I felt like I was getting closer to you. The two parks are about four or five minutes apart, just a few blocks. That short distance, like the words that separate Iberian Spanish from Mexican Spanish. But I find it reassuring to know that someone this evening – a man on a bicycle, a woman pushing a child in a pram, a teenager on a skateboard – is connecting Parque México with Parque España, as if th
ose journeys were silently connecting us.

  I had dinner with Guillermo. At one point he said: ‘Ah, yes, my twenty-four-year-old friend Proust, with the black eye.’ I enjoyed hearing that, it was as if he’d given me a toffee. I never buy them, but I like it when people give them to me.

  I dreamed Jonás was sick. My mother was looking after him. When I entered the scene, Jonás, lying in bed, was furious, and my mother, who had a little towel in her hand, was upset. I wanted to understand what had happened, but Jonás was saying something hurtful to my mother. She responded in kind, handed me the towel and left the room. I didn’t recognise Jonás, there was even something strange about his voice. And my mother would never have reacted like that. They get on well, my mother’s fond of Jonás. My whole family’s fond of him. I woke up feeling like I was holding the towel, convinced I was a long way from reality. I thought the beach looked further away than before.

  Am I getting closer or am I getting further away?

  I saw the dwarf on my block going into the bakery. Well-dressed, as always, talking on the phone, picking up the metal tray and tongs in his other hand. The king of small things, the lord of everyday life, the hero of the notebook thriller. Him so elegant, and the bigger stories so badly dressed.

  On the way home, I thought about him. Blind people develop sharper hearing; deaf people learn a sophisticated system of signs. There are ways of compensating for disabilities. Being a dwarf isn’t a disability, and yet those centimetres that separate them from other people need to be compensated for. If the dwarf were tall, would he dress so elegantly? Perhaps the attention to detail in his outfits is like a kind of animal fur. Just as animals with no fur find a means of covering themselves, and animals that can’t attack find a means of camouflage, and strong animals seek to kill, the small ones, those who live on a smaller scale, have detail as their weapon. The marble tip of the miniature cane of the dwarf on the block, for example.

  The days all look so similar to one another, like waves. And so, if not through details, how else can daily life be defended?

  Don’t be alarmed if this isn’t going anywhere. Don’t expect theories, reliable facts or conclusions. Don’t take any of this too seriously. That’s what universities are for, and theses, and academic studies. Personally, I like cafés, bars and living rooms. Not to mention comfortable cushions. So nice and cosy.

  I’m so much like the cat. Now, batting around a little ball with a bell inside. My little ball: what’s the relationship between voices and silence? No, the bell isn’t ringing yet. Let me try again. Is silence the absence of the voice? Maybe they’re family, and silence is the mother of the word. And maybe the word, when it was born, was music and poetry at once. The day the birds sang. Something like the day the voice was born.

  Today is Christmas. The city is empty, there’s almost no one in the park. I went for a bike ride and cycled around it a few times. The winter light projects the treetops onto the ground; the leaves move in the breeze and their shadows move on the concrete. You could see it as a film where nothing happens. I rode around the park a few times, as if watching, over and over, the film of the leaves’ shadows moving on the ground.

  On the way home, a stranger smiled cheerily at me. It brightened up my afternoon.

  Sometimes I miss talking to my granddad. What would he say about this? Am I getting closer or further away?

  Sometimes I feel sure I’m getting further away.

  But do these stairs go up or down?

  I had a good time at dinner. We ate, we drank. I chatted to everyone. In the early hours, my brother and I booked flights to the beach for a few days. The sea, at last. Perhaps there I’ll manage to work out if I’m getting closer or further away.

  20

  Tania on the phone: ‘I feel so guilty, honestly. I’ve been sitting in this armchair all day. I read a few pages, watched a film and then fell asleep. Maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life like this.’

  A while ago, Jonás put the Beckett questionnaire to Antonio and Olivia when they came over for dinner. They’re here on a visit now, I just met them for breakfast. They gave me three little stones their daughters found in the sea. One white, one grey and one black: ‘When they brought us these stones, which look like sweets, we thought they’d be perfect for someone to keep in their pocket and suck on now and then, like a Beckett character.’

  Carolina and I arranged to meet in a café to edit a text. The background music gradually took centre stage. At first it was annoying and we couldn’t concentrate. After three or four songs, Carolina started to dance in her seat, moving with difficulty, holding onto her belly. She raised one hand, took off her glasses and said: ‘This is great, it’s the kind of song we should be dancing to at three in the morning, wasted.’

  I don’t know what having a child is like, but if this notebook were a dwarf planetary system, the planets’ centre of gravity would be the mother. Jonás’ mother who took him far away, my mother to whom I’ve got closer, my friend who’s about to give birth, and us, the children. Including our parents and siblings, Jonás.

  A shooting star: a mother taking out her anger on a taxi driver who insulted her recently-deceased mother.

  The black hole: the mystery of femicides and violence against women.

  A headline in today’s paper: ‘Daughter of journalist decapitated’.

  What’s your worst nightmare?

  In the earliest nightmare I can remember, my mother’s voice disappeared. It was fading, becoming impossible to hear. I was running through the forest, the supermarket or the park. The plot doesn’t matter, the point is her voice was gone by the end. And what scale is that on, compared to a daughter who dies before her father?

  Ernesto’s parents lost a child before he was born, a cot death. In one of the most profound and beautiful conversations I had with his father after dinner, he said: ‘A natural death, but if that’s nature, then the cruelty of it really makes you think. How do you explain a child dying first? You never get over it. It’s the worst possible tragedy and it shouldn’t happen to anyone.’

  Have we got used to cruelty?

  Changes in the cabinet, a change of president and the numbers don’t change. I wonder what would happen if each parent, each child, each person who’s lost someone in the last few years picked up the microphone to talk about their loss, more or less like Ernesto’s dad did at the table or like in the early hours of the morning when Jonás told me the details of his mother’s death. Every single one of those stories out loud.

  What are we doing?

  Come on out of the whale’s belly now, you can’t escape. Come away with me.

  We edited the text at Carolina’s. She specialised in seventeenth-century literature at university and almost always has some surprise, some verse, some titbit of information or point of comparison that she offers up with a smile, as if she’s telling you the time or paying you a compliment. It comes naturally to her, it’s part of how her mind works. Last night she told me about Diego de Mexía’s translation of the letter Penelope wrote to Odysseus: ‘Since I used it in my thesis I know all the gossip. It’s from 1608, and I think it’s the best translation. The book has an incredible history. He was Peruvian and he did the translation for a project called Antarctic Parnassus , an anthology designed to present the best poets from his country in Spain. A kind of introduction of Peruvian literature to Spanish society. Translating Ovid for the motherland: a symbol of poetic validation. But the gossip, as always, is better. In the prologue, Diego de Mexía included a text called “Discourse in Praise of Poetry”, which is pretty bad and very boring. Really crap, actually. An anonymous text that for a long time people thought was written by a woman. One of the final theories about that prologue is that it was written by Diego de Mexía pretending to be a woman, which makes sense because all the letters in the book were written by women; his and the ones by heroines of classical mythology. He was feeling very Ovidian, I think. Anyway, the translation is wonderful. Penelope’s letter
to Odysseus is a gem. Look, it’s up there, if you stand on the stool and get the book down, I’ll lend you a recent translation and the one by Diego de Mexía to compare.’

  I found an interesting verse. I’m going to put pins through the two translations, although the second butterfly is the one that will decorate this living room. In the contemporary version: ‘Love is a matter filled with worries and fears.’ In Diego de Mexía’s version: ‘For love is ever filled with fear’.

  The letters Greek heroines write to men who aren’t there. Ovid imagines what a woman would say to a man who wasn’t there. Ovid, mon amour . ‘ These words your Penelope sends to you, O Ulysses, slow of return that you are; writing back is pointless: come yourself!’

  It’s three fifty-two a.m. We went to a cantina, and then to Tania’s house. Did Penelope masturbate while she waited for Odysseus? Because I’ve just taken off my shirt.