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5

I was in a good mood until I read my horoscope: ‘You’ve realised by now that you’re not indispensable to anyone.’

Jonás is a Libra, and I’m a Gemini. Libra is my rising sign. I was told this by a woman wearing blue eyeliner. ‘Libra and Gemini are air signs,’ she said. The same woman did a tarot reading for me: ‘All the cards show you’re a double air.’ A double power. Wild is the Wind. Does that explain the way I drift from place to place?

If Jonás were here we’d have dinner in the Japanese restaurant a few blocks away. One of our customs, one of our favourite restaurants. The things we like. Oh, it feels so good to hear it in his voice, to hear that plural, which, along with the bed, is too big for me now he’s away.

By the way, I listened to another version of ‘Wild is the Wind’ as I was doing the washing-up. It’s great. A good song is so flexible, you can make endless new versions.

Tania called. After a while she said our phonecalls could be an AM radio show in the early hours.

I asked Jonás about scales in science: ‘For example, the nanometric scale makes things more reactive than they are at a normal scale, because the atoms it reveals can be used in more ways. Nanotechnology is exciting because it gives things more attractive properties than the properties we’re used to.’ In other words, today I ate a red apple, but on a nanometric scale the apple would taste better. I asked him some questions about that. Later, I got this message: ‘Forget it, my love, you couldn’t have a planet revolving around you because of the mass. One mass attracts the other mass, think of Newton’s second law. Forget the example I gave of the Smurf revolving around Gargamel.’

Meaning that something on another scale has different characteristics. Its gravity changes. This applies both to the dwarf on the block and to literature.

The ideal is always bigger or smaller than reality. The ideal is on a different scale.

Example: Jesus Christ is the notebook, God is the ideal. Because Jesus Christ came down among men, but we conceive of God as an idea.

Am I the idea I have of myself?

One advantage of the ideal notebook is that it can come with me in the taxi. This is one of its nanometric properties. The taxi driver, an old man with a hearing aid, must think I’m making a note of something for work, something I have to do, something I want to remember in the airport. He watches me in the rear-view mirror. But no, mister, it’s not that. I like you, that’s what I’m writing. I wish I could tell you. But because I don’t dare talk to you, I’ll tell you here that the radio station you have on, which is playing bolero songs, is the same one my granddad used to listen to. Maybe your shared musical tastes would have given you something to talk about. I don’t dare interrupt now you’re singing under your breath, but I wish I could tell you that I’m happy you’re singing, I like your eyes behind your thick lenses in the rear-view mirror, and how you drive with both hands on the wheel; you’ve also made me like this song even more. Science is right: notebooks that are smaller in size have more attractive properties than the properties we’re used to.

We drove past a bakery called Esperanza. Hope. My notebook’s name is better than the bakery’s. How deep can you swim in the word hope? I think it’s a word you can see to the bottom of, like the bottom of a swimming pool.

Opposite me in the waiting area, a fat woman in pink jogging bottoms takes an equally fat pink wallet out of her bag. If that woman were to turn into an object, it would be that fat pink wallet.

Through the aeroplane window I watch as night falls, and it looks so similar to the dawn. In the same way as elderly people end up behaving like children.

So, do the stairs go up or down?

Mexico City from a height. Clarice Lispector says the mirror is the only invented material that’s natural. I was born in Mexico, in that word reflected over and over: in Mexico, in Mexico City, in the Hospital de México, and when they were younger my parents lived in an apartment on Calle México. The plane is taking me to a conference for publishers and writers from Mexico.

The organisers ask us not to leave the hotel: ‘Please, everyone, things are very dangerous at the moment. We don’t want anything to happen to you. All the conference activities will be in the events hall, on the ground floor, next to the lobby. Breakfast, lunch and dinner will be in the buffet, don’t forget.’

We’re having beers on the balcony of room 401. We’re a bit drunk, and meanwhile one girl is sipping fizzy grapefruit juice with no ice. She talks about the thesis she’s writing. She mentions Alberich. I move closer, trying to be casual, and hear: ‘a chapter on Alberich the dwarf, the one who guards the Nibelung treasure under the water’.

This morning, in the hotel restaurant, a waitress was humming that Shakira song, the one I think of as a kind of Post-it. That reminder, always so timely. Hearing it put me in a good mood.

From the whole afternoon at the conference, I have three sad postcards. A poet with a centre parting and limp eyelashes blinks slowly, putting on a deep voice to read one of his recent poems. A charmless fiction-writer who reveals his insecurities – that feverish pursuit of acceptance – with everything he says. And Robin syndrome: someone always wanting to be next to Batman (the acclaimed writer or the festival organiser or the superstar publisher).

I asked Jonás over the phone if he thinks poets in all languages put on a different voice when they read their poems out loud. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but it reminds me of that poem you showed me once, by the poet who made lines, zigzags, waves. There are some poems you can’t read out loud, my love, and those ones are the most like certain conclusions of physics. The points where poetry and science meet. Science often reaches Dadaist conclusions, you know. Poetry and science at those twin points can’t be read out loud.’

There are various signs in the hotel foyer. One of them says it’s forbidden to enter with balloons. No smoking, no pets, no inflated balloons. A friend points that sign out to me, puzzled. ‘It’s not what you think,’ says one of the organisers. ‘If a balloon bursts in here, we all fall to the floor thinking there’s a shootout.’

Drinking beer on the same balcony, with the good news that someone’s got hold of some mezcal and plastic cups. We’d all been at a terrible reading, of a terrible book. Someone produces the book. Another person reads passages out loud, imitating the author’s voice. We revel in the endless stream of sexual metaphors. It’s like the fount of all bad poetry, a great feast of it, or something.

Jonás has gone to Lisbon with his sister, and their father has stayed in Spain with a cousin of their mother. This morning I got a text message: ‘Luckily we ran into your granddad, he says what are you on about, you’re wrong, the bookshop you recommended isn’t there any more. He took us to eat those famous custard tarts, which were really good, by the way.’

Now that I think about it, sexual metaphors are astonishing. Especially bad metaphors, astonishing like the bearded lady’s circus act. Bad poetry is astonishing because it’s so monstrous. It has all the features we recognise, and yet that hypertrichosis too.

Today I talked to two poets, one bad and one good. Maybe some company is better indoors and some is better outdoors. A bad poet might be good company in the street, but in a living room what you want is a nice long conversation. There are exceptions. My friend Luis Felipe is a good poet, and you can talk to him both in the street and at home. So the previous assertion should be taken as another artificial plant and my comment about Luis Felipe as an artificial flower.

I came back to my room to read for a bit. I found this from William Hazlitt: ‘All that part of the map that we do not see before us is a blank.’

Is the violent part of the map a blank?

Mexico City, seen through the aeroplane window, is bigger than the ball of plasticine a child has just squashed onto the map of Mexico this evening. We make the world to the measure of our hands. But everything has a scale.

Violence has scales.

Any drawing, painting, photograph, lithograph, any picture of a bird, small or large, however rough the likeness, conveys the idea of freedom. Birds are a symbol of freedom.

An open notebook is also a symbol of freedom.

There’s a bird on the Mexican flag. The eagle devouring the serpent. I wonder if the flag contains any clues.

‘Fly away with me.’ If I could turn into any bird I’d choose a swallow. Have you noticed that swallows normally form pairs, Jonás?

Now I’m one of those planes we hear from the apartment on Sunday nights, now I’m flying over the city. From up here it doesn’t seem like Wild is the Wind. Instead, Mexico City looks so docile. And the country looks so docile, too, on the map on the aeroplane screen.