Читать книгу Loop - Brenda Lozano - Страница 7

2

‘When will you be back, Jonás?’ ‘I’m not sure,’ he answered. I was about to get up. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me back to bed, and yes, we did it in the morning. Not another line without saying it, I’m going to say it right now: last year I had an accident I almost didn’t come back from and not long afterwards I discovered sex with Jonás. Good sex, I mean. In that order.

Sex and love. That order. The death of Jonás’ mum. My non-death. That disorder.

I turned thirty. I came early to one thing, and late to another. And now here I am, writing grand words in this little notebook, words like death and sex. But there we go. Later I’ll probably explain in more detail. I’m announcing it now like the bell for the rubbish truck.

Shall I tell you something I haven’t told you yet? My handwriting is shrinking with time. And now the notebook has shrunk as well. This notebook is smaller than the last one. If there’s a miniature scale for people and for notebooks, is there a miniature scale for stories?

I met Jonás through Tania. They were good friends at secondary school. They hadn’t seen each other for a while, but Tania was there for him when his mother was dying. A few days after the funeral, Tania invited Jonás round for a coffee. The doctor had said I should go for a walk every afternoon as part of the recovery process. As I strolled along on that sunny afternoon, I thought about how good I felt, how I was completely cured. I decided to buy some mango sorbet and ring my friend Tania’s doorbell. Over the intercom, she invited me up. That afternoon, the three of us chatted. Jonás loved the mango sorbet. We moved in together one month later.

Nobody knew if I was going to wake up. I didn’t know either. The first thing I heard when I did wake up was one of the nurses singing a Shakira song. One of the nurses pushing my trolley was singing a Shakira song to the other. This can’t be death, I thought. I knew I’d come back. Back to life. Back to life and its magnificent vulgarity. Awesome, I thought, here I am. I opened my eyes.

Walking down the street today I came across this Post-it note: ‘Marta, a ham and chicken sandwich with no onion. Miguel, a milanesa sandwich, all the trimmings, no mayo.’ The man who wrote that Post-it probably doesn’t like Shakira. Which is a shame, because that song is another great reminder.

Jonás leaves for Spain with his family soon, and I’m staying here in the apartment. With our black cat, our Telemachus.

I said I’d discovered sex with Jonás. Does it relate to what I’ve been through, or to what he’s been through, or to a combination of both? Does it relate to no longer fearing death? Or to our age? What does it relate to, this fact of two people deciding to experiment in ways they haven’t before?

Is it possible to stop being afraid of death? I mean, is it possible to stop completely?

This time I searched online for ‘an ideal notebook’. I found this question on a forum: ‘What would your ideal notebook be?’ And the response from a teenager: ‘One with a hard cover, and dividers for eight subjects. It would come with coloured pencils, a calculator, a rubber, a pencil sharpener, a ruler etc. You could stick photos on it or leave the cover blue (like the sea).’

I liked this marine parenthesis so much that I brought it over here, like a dog carrying the neighbour’s ball in its mouth. And tell me, isn’t Mexico located in a kind of marine parenthesis?

You know, Jonás, I was thinking about our conversation at dinner the other night. Phrases and their animal nature. Maybe we could start a zoo, and catalogue the different species of lines.

Lines on the furniture. Invisible lines. Lines of the novels we like and the novels we don’t like (yes, in separate cages). Blue lines in school exercise books. Perpendicular and parallel lines. Lines, rows, queues (did I mention that a woman queueing at the bank told me her twins experience all the same things, and that if you hit one the other suddenly gets a bruise?). Metro lines (remember when we were on the metro and you told me how as a boy you tried to run away from home by climbing through the bathroom window?). The line of the equator (this kind of line doesn’t exist, but it it’s not invisible either. It’s a strange category; what do we do with this phantom line?). Bloodlines, paternal, maternal.

Chuy is the woman who cleans the apartment once a week. She’s worked for me since before I moved in with Jonás. This afternoon she left me a Post-it on the table: ‘Just to say you forgot to buy my bleach again. Kindly buy me my bleach and my green scourers, not the yellow ones because you know the sponges on those don’t work, I don’t like them. Thank you.’

This morning I read something strange. From my taxi, I read in the window of an occult shop: ‘Love makes the ideal real’. I disagree with that window: love doesn’t make the ideal real. On the contrary, reality sends us in search of ideals. There’s no reverse gear, no opposite direction.

You know what? The government of this country isn’t ideal. Today I read a strange fact about Ancient Greece: the statue of Zeus at Olympia was twelve metres tall. The Lighthouse of Alexandria was one hundred and thirty-four metres tall. A building in Mexico City would easily be that tall, or taller. So how tall should the statue be of the president who’s left this country with such a horrific death toll?

A call from my friend Antonio. He told me he’d kicked the pavement so hard he hurt his foot. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because someone’s car was blocking mine outside my friend’s funeral,’ he said.

Are there ninety thousand pavements to kick throughout the length and breadth of the country?

Another thing I feel like saying to the window of the occult shop. I’d like to be a tarot card. If I were a tarot card I’d be the lady of pencils, pens and notebooks. Now everything’s done on computers, perhaps I could be a saint. The Paper Saint. The Holy Virgin of Stationery. The Xerox Madonna, they’d call me in some offices. Someone would pray to me every morning before putting on his tie.

In my life as the A4 Saint, the Virgin of Stationery, the Xerox Madonna, an office-worker would ask me: ‘You used to be an ordinary person, how did you come to be transformed?’ I’d answer: ‘Look inside your briefcase, my child, and there you will find the miracle.’ He’d find Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He’d be taken aback. With a flash of light, I’d appear before him in a dream and say in an angelic voice: ‘Read the book, my child, and you too can undergo a transformation.’

Why this fixation on metamorphoses? Even if we don’t turn into animals, we turn into other things. I think that’s why Jonás and I are together now, and not sooner.

I can’t believe I wrote that someone would pray to me every morning before putting on his tie. But I’m not going to get rid of it. I like the pilgrim life of the Xerox Madonna. Her sandals. Her white dress. Her clasped hands. Her skin as pale as paper. Her blank silence.

Jonás left today, and Marina and his father leave tomorrow. I went with him to the airport. Today I wrote nothing. When I took my pen out of my bag just now I found some receipts. I lined them up in chronological order on the table. The story of my day in receipts.

Today I read nothing. And this, in the whole day, is all I’ve written.

Third night without Jonás. I feel sleepy. I’m lying in bed. The cat’s in the living room playing with the pencil I dropped; I’m feeling sleepier and sleepier. It’s like the cat and I are working shifts on an office reception, taking it in turns behind the desk. I don’t know what that means, of course, but it’s the kind of thing I write, as if I’m playing with this pencil. Writing is my way of being a cat and shedding fur, or phrases, onto the armchair.

It occurs to me as I’m dozing off that a monument to the dwarf would be no bad thing. A handy reminder of people who live life on another scale. Should it include me? It’s true that I go to an office, but do writing and reading exist on another scale in relation to so-called productive life?

I wonder what someone’s life would be like if they’d never reached, if they’d never seen, if they couldn’t imagine their own depths. Those depths where only pain can take you.

Not long ago I heard a writer discussing death in an interview. He was smoking and laughing sarcastically, with a glass of red wine in his hand. Positively beaming, he said to the interviewer through purplish lips: ‘This novel is about death in every respect, and my God, writing it is killing me!’ I didn’t believe him. You can just tell that the worst thing to happen to this writer in his thirty-something years – aside from a split condom one of the times he’s probably cheated on his wife – is missing a flight.

And what if we put up a monument to the writer with a grant?

Holy Child of Grants, look at this glorious procession of grant-holding Young Creators carrying you in a shrine above their heads. So many young people, so many flowers, so many colours. The town orchestra playing the first notes based on one of their projects.

I miss you, Jonás. I know I’ve told you so many times, but I love your smell, I love your taste. I miss you so much.

I forgot to say that I gave Jonás a notebook like this one so it has a twin. One notebook in Mexico City, another in Madrid. Like the twins of Syracuse. An Ideal notebook I bought for Jonás, identical like a second drop of water, a twin who knows nothing of the other twin’s adventures. Perhaps if mine falls over, the other will suddenly get a bruise.

I’m falling asleep. I’ve gone to bed. I’m more there than here. This isn’t very comfortable, let me rearrange the pillow. You know what? If I fold it, it’s better. Why am I writing this down? Because this, folding a pillow to make myself more comfortable, is part of the waiting.