Loop

  30

  The book Catalina lent me is called Classifying the Thousand Longest Rivers in the World . Boetti and his wife, Annie Marie Sauzeau, took seven years to complete the project, and the book was published in 1977. The rivers contained within its red covers are ordered from longest to shortest. It begins with the Nile-Kagera, which is 6,671 kilometres in length. Some rivers meet along the way, like characters, and others, like pedestrians in different cities, never cross paths. It ends with the Agusan River, which is 384 kilometres long. All the rivers flow into the sea.

  Rivers have a source, a life, a youth, an old age. Some have longer trajectories than others; some are abruptly cut off, while others follow a peaceful path to the end. The book only classifies the longest rivers. A grey box describes each one: its name, where it begins, where it ends and how long it is. Footnotes at the bottom of each page give the sources consulted, along with other measurements. Comparing one river to another, you see how slight the differences are in their lengths. In other words, it’s obviously impossible to classify them exactly. That desire to classify them, like the desire to write accurately about the past, is based on a fiction. The book of rivers is like a silent novel. The trajectories are so similar despite being in different places, and yet the rivers, ordered from biggest to smallest, lie side by side. Impossibly side by side. They may not all meet along the way, but all the rivers are part of the same book.

  Do stories, like rivers, all flow into the same place?

  After the first sentences spoken by the woman on the radio, I parked so I could listen to her properly. I cried. I went and walked around a nearby park, I sat down by a tree. I cried for my parents, I cried for them both. I cried when I relived the accident and when I relived the nights that followed. I remembered the hell, the sweat, the smell. I cried for those nights when it seemed as if everything was beginning again. I cried for Ana’s death. I cried because Jonás wasn’t with me. I cried for that woman’s story, for the situation she’s in, which is the situation we’re all in. I cried for the situation as a whole and maybe I also cried for the day I was born.

  I wonder if stories can be classified like rivers, from biggest to smallest. I also wonder if, in that case, stories could be part of the same book. Passages placed impossibly side by side. So they make another story.

  It’s a good thing you’re coming back tonight, Jonás. The black cat and I want night to fall so you’ll arrive. What a strange life we lead day to day, and what a good thing you’ll be here soon.

  I haven’t yet said that Guillermo gave me My Friends by Emmanuel Bove this week, the book I’ve been trying to track down for so long. It’s not the first time Guillermo’s given me a book I really care about, he’s given me so many, but this one arrived at the perfect moment. I read it in a night. It was a nice surprise. At one point, Victor, the main character, calls in at a pharmacy. There’s a man sitting next to the weighing scales. He’s so small that the nape of his neck is resting against the back of the chair and his legs are dangling like a pair of tights on a washing line, the toes pointing down. Victor finds him strange; he’s taken aback by this man sitting next to the scales. A woman explains: ‘Everybody knows him in this district. He’s a dwarf. Real unfortunates have pride; they don’t draw attention to themselves. There’s nothing remarkable about that man: he drinks.’ The dwarf on the block, in contrast, was interesting from that first casual smile in the street.

  The stories in the ideal notebook may not cross paths any more than rivers do, and yet they’re still contained between two red covers.

  Maybe I’m not in the middle of the sea, swimming onwards and getting further away, like I thought. Maybe it’s the journey, that journey made up of moments. What happens between one instant and the next. What doesn’t happen. All those stories, stories that meet and stories that never cross paths. All those moments between two covers. These covers.

  This is the ending of My Friends by Emmanuel Bove: ‘Some strong men are not lonely when they are alone, but I, who am weak, am lonely when I have no friends.’ That is, without Carolina, Guillermo, Tania, Tepepunk, Julia, Antonio and Luis Felipe.

  I still haven’t left because I’d like to tell you here, before you come back tonight, that maybe I won’t turn into a bird. It’s not the ideal ending, but what can we do. I won’t turn into one in the future either, because, however profound or superficial the journey may be, what’s transformed is the way we recount it. If that’s transformed, then everything is transformed. Misfortune, pain, tragedy all ought to be transformed into something else. Maybe that’s why we have to look over our shoulder, to turn back so we can be here. Looking at tragedy in order to transform it, so we can be here. Not only be here, but be here properly. Here, in this country. Here, in the apartment.

  Change. Unlearning yourself is more important than knowing yourself.

  No, I won’t turn into a bird. Even though Wild is the Wind, I’m sitting on the same wooden chair as when I began. But then, you can never sit down twice on the same chair twice. No, there’s another reason why I won’t turn into a bird: I’m not the one that has to be transformed. The transformation happened to this story.

  A note on the text

  Whenever possible, references to quoted texts were taken from existing translations. Here are the bibliographical details of this cited material, in order of allusion within Loop :

  Alexander Vvedensky, The Gray Notebook , trans. by Matvei Yankelevich, New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2002.

  Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks , ed. Max Brod, trans. by Ernest Kaiser & Eithne Wilkins, Cambridge: Exact Change, 1991.

  Machado de Assis, ‘The Alienist’, The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis , trans. by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, New York: Liveright, 2018.

  Clarice Lispector, The Foreign Legion , trans. by Giovanni Pontiero, Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1986.

  John Cage, Transcript of story 1: Indeterminacy... Ninety Stories by John Cage , in Die Reihe No. 5, ed. by H. Eimert and K. Stockhausen, London: Theodore Presser Co., 1961.

  Ovid, Heroides , trans. by Grant Showerman, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914.

  Clarice Lispector, ‘The Smallest Woman in the World’, Complete Stories , trans. by Katrina Dodson, New York: New Directions, 2015.

  Fernando Pessoa, ‘A morte é a curva da estrada’, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe , trans. by Richard Zenith, New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.

  Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet , trans. by Richard Zenith, New York: Penguin Classics, 2002.

  Emmanuel Bove, My Friends , trans. by Janet Louth, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1986.

  Homer, The Odyssey, trans. by Robert Fagles, New York: Penguin Classics, 1997.

  Director & Editor: Carolina Orloff

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  Copyright

  First published by Charco Press 2019

  Charco Press Ltd., Office 59, 44-46 Morningside Road, Edinburgh EH10 4BF

  Copyright © Brenda Lozano 2014

  First published in Spanish as Cuaderno ideal by Alfaguara (Mexico)

  English translation copyright © Annie McDermott 2019

  The rights of Brenda Lozano to be identified as the author of this work and of Annie McDermott to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by the applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and t
hose responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-9164656-4-0

  e-book: 978-1-9993684-1-8

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  Edited by Fionn Petch

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