12

A long phone conversation with Jonás. It’s Friday night, my slippers are on and I’ve just watered the plants. I’m curled up in the armchair. The cat’s curled up here too, purring, like a miniature soul in slippers as well. Oh, I love spending Friday nights like this so much. I’d put some music on, but the cat’s just dozed off. I don’t dare wake him. A sleeping cat, that domestic dictatorship.

I wonder if Jonás has slept with anyone. Is a French girl removing her hairband even as I write and placing it by Jonás’ watch? Or is a Spanish girl sitting in bed beside him, lighting a post-coital cigarette? I’d better stop, this is making me horribly anxious. I like questions, but not all of them.

The old watch, the wind-up watch his father gave him. The watch that belonged to his grandfather, his father’s father. Jonás takes it off every night before going to sleep. I miss the presence of that watch on the nightstand.

I saw Carolina, whose belly is getting bigger and bigger. Julia called from Canada, she’s at a film festival. She’s happy because she bought a new guitar after a meeting. Tania called to say that books with tiny print make her feel like she’s on a treadmill, wearing jogging bottoms, and getting nowhere. ‘It’s awful, you just don’t move.’ Julia said she desperately needed to come home, to have a drink and a chat. Carolina said Lila was very fidgety this afternoon, but I didn’t get to feel her kicking.

I had lunch with Philippe and Luis Felipe. I realised Philippe is responsible for Vila-Matas encountering Emmanuel Bove. This means he’s also responsible for my spending all this time hunting for a copy of My Friends, which Vila-Matas mentions in his book dedicated to Robert Walser, one of my favourite writers. Oh, it’s wonderful when one book leads you to another. A novel I’ve been trying to track down for ages, like a kind of savage detective. In the university library there was a copy of another book by Bove. ‘It’s his last novel, but I prefer Mes amis, the first one,’ said Philippe. I have Bove’s last novel photocopied on my bookshelf, a kind of adopted sibling to its out-of-print brothers and sisters.

If I wrote about my friends, I’d dedicate chapters to Tania, Julia, Carolina, Guillermo, Tepepunk, Antonio and Luis Felipe. Jonás would appear too. I’d like to write a novel called My Friends. The chapter about Luis Felipe could be a long sentimental conversation over mezcal and cigarettes, and include the self-help verses and passages that come up as we talk. The chapter could end in a karaoke bar in the early hours, the two of us singing pop songs with our arms around each other. For the chapter about Tepepunk, I’d choose five or six emails in which he describes his days in Tokyo, the city as he discovers it with Nina. The constant comparisons with Mexico City from his point-of-view. I’d alternate the texts with the photos he sends of their walks. I could include the one he sent me recently, accompanied by this note: ‘Can you believe I stole these 3D glasses from a museum without realising? I walked out with them on, just like that, casual as anything.’ For Guillermo’s chapter I could choose a long night in a cantina, his sense of humour a magnet attracting stories like iron filings. Our long conversation would end just before sunrise; we’d be walking through a park, Guillermo would stop and chat to a street-sweeper, and at the end of the chapter he’d give the street-sweeper a hug. I think Antonio’s daughters would provide a good portrait of their father, so his chapter could be a dialogue between them. The novel about my friends would be like a love letter. I’d make a character sketch of each of them. Come to think of it, I don’t know how I’d talk about Jonás, since it’s through him I’ve discovered what separates me from my friends. And what makes me closer to him than to anyone else.

It’s not that things didn’t work with Ernesto. They were good years for both of us. Living with him was one of the best things I’ve ever done. I’ll always love him. The loss of his father was a loss for me, too. But I think we always tend to look on the bright side of misfortune. The accident happened not long after we broke up, and not long after that I met Jonás. By then, there was a before and an after. An equator, a kind of phantom line. Maybe afterwards, at my lowest, I found a power, a strength. And the way we relate to everything, especially when it comes to love, changes after we hit rock bottom.

If this notebook had an ideal ending it would be a trip to the beach with Jonás. In the final lines I’d turn into a swallow, everything I’ve written would turn into a song and the notebook itself would take flight. Feathers would begin to sprout from Jonás’ arms, his feet would gradually leave the sand and he’d start to fly. We’d be able to see our shadows on the water and together we’d hold a ribbon in the air that proclaimed THE END.

But no, it’s not the end yet. And all this is too long to turn into a song. Jonás hasn’t come back, this is a time of waiting and I’m Penelope. I weave, unravel, weave and unravel again. Will the day ever come when the waiting stops? Is there anyone who isn’t waiting for something?

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 art, 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.