Loop

by Brenda Lozano

How can I know if it’s love or the complication of love that attracts me?

  The taxi’s here. The doorbell made me jump, and I’ve forgotten how I was going to answer that last question.

  In the airport bookshop I saw the cover of a book called The Principle of Happy Families . A typical stock image: a man giving a child a piggy-back, a woman leading a girl down the beach by the hand. All four are smiling. The smiles are obviously at the photographer’s request. It’s clear they’re not blood relations.

  There are a lot of children on this flight. The parents have a kind of camaraderie; they lend each other toys, share food, chat across the aisle. Perhaps in a different place this wouldn’t happen. I wonder if these young couples, these families on their way to the beach, also long for a moment or a life like the cover of that book. Is that their idea of happiness? I’d like to know.

  No, not really. They’ve just given me some savoury biscuits and I’m reading a really good book. I’ve learnt that Saint John of the Cross was so short that Saint Teresa of Ávila called him half a friar. Like Lautrec, whose short stature meant he introduced himself as ‘half a bottle’. The dwarf on the block could be half a bottle of absinthe, especially when he wears a top hat.

  There’s a Mexican wrestler who has a sidekick, a dwarf in a colourful costume. That half-wrestler apes his companion’s moves, like a kind of comical shadow. I feel like the worst of this country’s political class are a comical shadow. A half-bureaucracy, a half-bottle unable to contain the violent sea.

  21

  We’re on a beach near Tulum. We went for a long walk; I haven’t had a conversation like that with my brother for ages. I’d really missed it. The sea, at once both deep and light, seems to encourage extremes. The sea that sinks ships and the sea that tosses a nappy on its surface is the same. The same as ever. And yet, there are no two identical combinations of waves or two identical moments. It’s the repetition, like a ritual of waves. And that old melody in the background. Oh, I love how its whistling messes up my hair.

  We talked about Jonás, and Ana, and our friends. About his girlfriend and the problems they’re having. About work, about the things we’d like to do. We remembered a trip to the beach when we were children. We talked about some things I remember, and some things he remembers, as if we were playing cards. I told him, in detail, about the accident. He told me, in detail, how it was for him, being so far away, the phone calls to our parents, what was going through his head. We cried on the beach, and we laughed, then we went to a palm-roofed shack for some beers.

  I love what Shakespeare wrote from the point-of-view of the sea: ‘A hundred thousand welcomes! I could weep, And I could laugh; I am light, and heavy. Welcome!’

  The sea is the most musical of landscapes.

  Walking along the beach last night, my brother said he’d turn into a fish because he likes swimming. I’d rather turn into a bird, so I could sing as I look down at the waves.

  I wish you were here, Jonás.

  I wish you were here.

  I wish.

  I weave.

  I unravel.

  Am I getting closer or am I getting further away?

  I realise how good it is to reach the bottom. Accidentally or on purpose. Down where the ship sinks, down where there’s no light. Where it’s cold and dark, and there are only words. Then emerging, seeing the nappy tossed this way and that on the surf. A nappy or anything else that sullies the expanse. A reminder. A Post-it for the ordinary. Like one nurse singing a Shakira song to another. Or the bell for the rubbish truck announcing its arrival, so you hurry to tie a knot in the plastic bag or do whatever else reminds you how good it is to be on the surface. Being here is so good.

  Shall we do a crossword or do you want to play cards with us?

  I didn’t tell you, but one advantage of the ideal notebook is that it can record the sound of the sea, so you can listen when you get back.

  That ebb and flow.

  Listen, I want to tell you something. There was once a sea that was horrible in the daytime and beautiful at night. The wind was confused. It didn’t understand why, if it always blew in more or less the same direction, the sea could be horrible and beautiful on the same day. Perhaps what’s horrible can also be beautiful, thought the wind.

  Perhaps what’s horrible is also beautiful, Jonás.

  Then what could pain turn into?

  Maybe the same stairs that go down also go up.

  22

  Back at work, back at home and back to writing in pencil. I’ve realised that some pens bring out the worst defects of handwriting, and others emphasise the best. A pencil, however, shows the writing for what it is, with no filters, as if lit by natural light. But the notebook seems to argue in favour of the pen, as if the pencil were making it uncomfortable, as if the blue lines were supposed to be the background. The lines and the pencil have the same tone, neither of the two stands out. The notebook, unconvinced, seems to say: ‘Let the pens come unto me, for theirs is the kingdom of permanence.’

  And so the notebook proverbs begin.

  The word was brought forth when there were no depths, when there were no fountains abounding with water; before the mountains were settled, before the hills were formed, before the day and the starry night, the word was brought forth. And so, notebooks, hearken unto it, for blessed are those that keep words.

  And so the cedar and gold doors to the ideal notebook’s proverb collection swing open.

  Pencils and fountain pens can be erased, but biros last forever.

  When the whirlwind passes by, the story is no more, but gossip has an everlasting foundation.

  Those who speak on the phone grow tired of themselves; those who tell stories escape themselves.

  Those who talk too much reject themselves; those who listen carefully accept themselves.

  The beginning of a story fears and departs from mistakes, but the end is arrogant and self-confident.

  The story is brought down by its mistakes, but publication shelters them in the passage of time.

  Planning is an abomination to the omniscient narrator, and improvising is her delight.

  The man in a suit walks to work, but the omniscient narrator describes him.

  The omniscient narrator’s wrath is a premonition of death, but the minor character can soothe it.

  The pursuit of literary fame comes before disaster, and texts are its flames.

  Literary fame will be diminished, whereas one word after another will increase.

  The writer’s silver-haired head is a crown found in the way of readings; so is the writer’s alopecia, but for halitosis there is no excuse.

  A friend loves at all times, but some phrases are born for adversity.

  Seek words, and there are none; no longer seek them and they shall come.

  The bad writer says ‘There is a critic outside! I shall be slain in the streets!’ because he thinks he deserves attention.

  ‘It is good for nothing!’ says the young critic. But when he has gone on his way, then he embraces himself.

  Better to dwell in the wilderness than with a writer in receipt of a grant.

  The first person hates heavy things, because she has to carry all the pages; meanwhile, the omniscient narrator loves long stories because they show off her strength.

  Disorder is the nature of stories, but an orderly bookshelf is the honour of booksellers.

  The minor character thinks his behaviour is notable, but the omniscient narrator barely mentions his name.

  All stories are a deep ocean and a puddle at the same time.

  23

  The word, then, contains both the real and the imaginary in equal amounts. The word pulls you to the bottom and lets you swim comfortably on the surface. The word can be a sea or a puddle. Phrases can contain anything, like these delicious coconut biscuits I’m eating.

  As I dip a coconut biscuit in my coffee, I see Odysseus is in despair because he can’t get out: ‘now I’ve crossed this waste of water
, the end in sight, there’s no way out of the boiling surf – I see no way!’

  So we still don’t know how to swim diagonally.

  Did I tell you I’ve never had an electric pencil sharpener? As a girl I thought they were like a symbol of adult life. There was one on my father’s desk and one on my teacher’s desk. One of those emblematic objects from the world I didn’t belong to, the world of things that were too sharp or too heavy or too high. Like the flag of another country, where there were different objects, a different language, a different system. The foreign country of adult life. Mine was the world of flat things, plastic things that didn’t break, cheap things like the pencil sharpener I had. Manageable on my scale, now so distant in time. I never had an electric pencil sharpener but, like a sailor with an anchor tattoo, I could tattoo a blue pencil sharpener onto my arm. The anchor to a past which now seems made up.

  Do you realise the pencil sharpener is like a nappy you lose sight of in the waves, which then suddenly pops up somewhere else?

  We’re getting nautical now, so Bartolomé de las Casas enters the scene, picks up the microphone, taps it a few times and then announces who the star navigator was in days gone by: ‘Juan de la Cosa, from Biscay, the best pilot there ever was on those seas.’

  Poseidon worked against Odysseus. He prevented his passage, whipped the sea into a frenzy, shipwrecked him time and again. Odysseus could be seen as a mediocre sailor because it took him ten years to get home. In contrast, Juan de la Cosa travelled with Christopher Columbus. On returning to Cadiz, Juan de la Cosa produced a map of the world for the Catholic Monarchs; the oldest map to feature the American continent. There’s an inscription in the margin: ‘Made by Juan de la Cosa in the Port of Santa María in the year 1500’.

  Juan de la Cosa put Latin America on the map for the first time.

  Tania on the phone: ‘But wait, the coolest thing is that you can’t tell what’s sea and what’s land on Juan de la Cosa’s map.’

  The sea and the land get mixed up. Juan de la Cosa left an inconclusive ending, opening his map up to double readings: the sea merges with the land and we don’t know if the continent continues. The mother of all ambivalences, which is also the mother of us.

  Cuba is clearly shown as an island. Christopher Columbus described arriving in Cuba, and Severo Sarduy says in an interview that Christopher Columbus began Cuban literature when he described the birdsong before anything else. That’s how Sarduy explains the musicality of the speech, of the poetry in Cuba. In other words, the literary history of Latin America began not with text but with birdsong.

  Oh, I just love that Juan de la Cosa has the word cosa in his name. Juan of the Thing. It’s like a present I don’t want to open. What thing is it? Is the Thing something like the mother of all things? The man who put the American continent on the map was called Of the Thing.

  Tania on the phone: ‘You know, Juan de la Cosa could be the patron saint of artists.’

  The music makes the ambivalence bearable. Not knowing if it’s land or sea. Not knowing if it carries on or stops. Not knowing if I’m swimming onwards or getting further away. But the music is so good.

  Did I tell you I saw a waiter with a swallow tattooed on his arm? I asked him why he’d got that tattoo and he said he searched for ‘tattoos’ online and it was one of the first designs he saw in the results. Guillermo, tracing circles with his finger around the rim of his whisky glass, said when the waiter had left: ‘I once read that sailors had tattoos of birds because they were a sign land was near.’

  Did Juan de la Cosa have any tattoos?

  Miguel de Cervantes put the novel in Spanish on the map. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz put New Spain on the map. Cervantes and Sor Juana put the language on the map. The map to which Borges gave so many names. But we can’t sanctify the map, we have to get it dirty, toss in a nappy, a fizzy-drink bottle, a plastic bag. The map of the language is spacious and has room for infomercials, the latest literary releases and the day’s terrible news. Words live together as equals on that map.

  The Word continues to be real and imaginary in equal amounts. The Thing could be real or imaginary. The word and the thing are ambivalent, like the land and the sea on the map from 1500.

  Penelope has something of Odysseus about her. Odysseus has something of Penelope. The roles in a relationship tend to go back and forth, to swap over. The bed, that site of domestic ambivalence.

  Am I getting closer or am I getting further away?

  A text message. Carolina has just given birth.

  This morning, we talked about the text we edited. At one point she said she misses smoking, that she associates editing with smoking: ‘And just think, in the old days we’d go out and buy cigarettes no matter what time it was. Do you think your niece Lila will ever nag anyone the way I used to nag you to go to the corner shop?’

  You know what, Lila? I think we need another map which marks the corner shops, stationers’, hairdressers’, little restaurants and independent businesses in this city. I’d give you the map as a present. I could make a fake biography of Juan of the Useless Thing. His achievements would be as useless and extravagant as his hat. Juan of the Useless Thing would show you the map of the corner shops, stationers’, hairdressers’ and places like that, and all the unofficial, makeshift businesses that constitute day-to-day life in this city, to welcome you.

  24

  Jonás is coming back soon.

  I found an A4 Ideal notebook in the city centre. This notebook is about to run out. Maybe I won’t use the next one, because it’s very big and Jonás will be back soon. It feels important to add that I still haven’t found a notebook like this one, a triplet for our pair.

  Just as love songs are all alike, gossip magazines are all alike and waiting rooms are all alike. Instead of making us unique, waiting makes us ordinary. And a wait for a lover is the most ordinary kind. Maybe that’s its appeal.

  I saw the dwarf from my block at the supermarket. He was wearing a navy-blue three-piece suit and holding hands with his daughter, a little girl. They were in the queue next to mine, the queue for fifteen items or fewer. He had a litre of milk in one hand, and his other hand was holding the girl’s. She was wearing pink pyjamas, a red sweater and white shoes. I remembered something, and it struck me that a mystery was being solved. One time when we had an argument, before you went away, I saw the dwarf in the street with a cane. I felt like him, like I needed a cane myself. I don’t know why I thought he was single, but in fact the dwarf on the block has a beautiful diminutive daughter who goes shopping with him in pyjamas. The girl asked him to buy her a chocolate, and he did, affectionately, letting go of her hand to pick up a chocolate bunny rabbit wrapped in gold foil. I felt like I was seeing something I hadn’t known about in that action, a side I hadn’t imagined, a scene that seemed to ground him in the here and now. The elegant, solemn man, who looks like he’s from another era, the man who some time ago smiled at me in the street with an almost novelistic air about him, was the same man who was passing a chocolate bunny rabbit to his daughter.

  The dwarf’s navy-blue suit, the same colour as the sweater I had in my plastic pencil sharpener days. A sweater printed with the face of an English soldier, the classic helmet covering more than half of his face, leaving only his mouth in view. My father at the wheel of the beige Beetle. The white, red and yellow lights in the streets. Sharp pinpricks of colour in the sky, stripes of light flashing past at speed. The music he hummed, as if singing would expose him too much. I bought a chocolate bunny rabbit for my father.

  The health of my uncle, my father’s brother, is declining rapidly. He told me when I called just now to invite him for dinner.

  Jonás usually wears plain cotton T-shirts and shirts. His T-shirts are navy blue, white and grey, and some are stripy. Since he left, I’ve been using his T-shirts as pyjamas. Although we’re more or less the same size, my clothes don’t fit him. And I’ve been waiting so long to take yours off you, Jonás. I wish we could have one
of those Saturdays of getting up at one p.m., eating in the Japanese restaurant then going back home again. Oh, the smell of the bed on a Saturday evening.

  I have three words, three tiny stones to suck: come back, Jonás.

  That plea is what ends Penelope’s letter to Odysseus, as imagined by Ovid. But I’m still here, in this waiting room. Did I tell you I like artificial plants? Maybe I should buy one for the house, like a souvenir of this journey, a reminder, a Post-it note. I still haven’t left and something good has just happened, I’ve just found a magazine with a horoscope from three years ago.

  Maybe it’s not about swimming diagonally. Maybe it’s about floating, parting my hair at the side, combing my fringe to the right and now the left, sweeping my hair back, pretending I’m moving forwards and ending up in the same place. If being here is so nice, why do I need to get there?

  I’m restyling my hair while it’s wet. And I move my left shoulder up and then down again. I lift my right shoulder and lower it. I stretch out an arm, stretch out the other. One, two three. I move my arms up and down, one, two, three, one, two, three. It looks like I’m dancing.

  The Wizard of Oz is so insipid behind his shower curtain. A real let-down. But then, isn’t the yellow-brick road what makes it all worthwhile? Are the blue lines of the notebook like the tiles of the blue-brick road? If so, you know what song David Bowie could sing at the end of this film.

  And so, like the line in that Simone Weil book, seawater can be life-sustaining for fish and deadly for humans. That ambivalence makes the blue-brick road more appealing.

  Oh, I just love being here. I’m not moving forwards, I’m floating. And floating is so different when you’ve lost your fear of drowning. Unhappy are those who remain within their grief, when the here and now is so good. Although, you know what? I could leave any minute, Jonás. But, look, here I am. It’s easier to do my hair when it’s wet. I’m going to part it in the middle to welcome you back, listen: ‘A hundred thousand welcomes! I could weep, and I could laugh; I am light, and heavy. Welcome!’

  Suddenly I think about that Shakira song. Such a good reminder of the here and now.