Читать книгу Loop - Brenda Lozano - Страница 8

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So is this the story of waiting? Waiting for Godot, waiting for Jonás? The difference between Godot and Jonás is that my love really is coming back. Let the music play on!

A family meal. My aunt Eva was visiting from Lisbon. If Jonás were here we’d talk about it in the kitchen, I’d tell him how I planted a lemon tree in Lisbon as a girl. ‘Now you have the book and you have the tree, you just need the child,’ said my aunt, who never misses a chance to say that by my age she already had two alfacinhas. Why are people from Mexico City called chilangos and why are people from Lisbon called alfacinhas, little lettuces? What do lettuces have to do with Lisbon?

Watch out: I ask questions that aren’t real, like plants made of fabric. I’m not looking for answers – questions are more my thing. After all, I like waiting. I like artificial plants like the ones you get in waiting rooms. Not to mention artificial flowers: so pretty. No, Aunt Eva, I’m not going anywhere. This feels a lot like a waiting room, look at these artificial plants and all these artificial flowers. I have a question for you: at what point did poetry become associated with love and rhyming?

At what point did two opposing ideas of poetry – the best and the worst – lie down together in the same bed? Why does the same word mean two very different things? When I say that two words lie down together in the same word-bed, I’m straying into the very worst kind of poetry. There’s nothing else for it: I should take up trova music.

Oh, trova, the bohemian bars. The cafés in neighbourhoods like Coyoacán, Condesa and Roma. A man walks in with his guitar, interrupts the conversation, sings: ‘We’re two ideas who lie together in the same word, my love; kiss me, take off your dress.’ You see the trovador’s shoes and imagine his bedroom. You imagine his faded bamboo blinds, his ashtray, his mountain of cigarette ends, his cheap wine in a mug with no handle.

As I’m writing, a plane flies overhead. Planes in the background could be seen as a kind of poetic metre. Planes are also a metronome. And as I write this I look at my shoes and see the shoes of a trovador. I ought to buy myself a cape. Pass the guitar.

A miracle: it’s started to rain. Plus, less miraculous, the neighbour is hammering on the wall. Storm and neighbour. Is the neighbour a domestic version of the storm? Storm, neighbour. Two words in height order, from largest to smallest.

Today I thought about buying wool and knitting needles so I can knit and unravel while Jonás is coming back from his trip, but then I thought that writing in this notebook is a bit like wool, because the lines are baby blue and the words, added in cross-stitch, could even become socks or a scarf or a doily, and maybe I could unravel it all and then knit it and unravel it again while Jonás is coming back from his trip.

I love you, Jonás. I know you know that, but I wanted to remind you, like with a Post-it note.

At work today I accidentally typed alphabert instead of alphabet. If we have a child, we can call it that. As my Aunt Eva says, now I have the tree in Lisbon and the books I publish at work, all we’re missing is Alphabert.

My Aunt Eva can be a bit much, but it’s true, I did plant my lemon tree with her when I was a girl. I’d forgotten that. Three or four times when I was a teenager she sent me photos of the tree, which was growing taller and taller, with little notes written on the back. I remember one time she wrote in the voice of the tree. ‘Look how big I am,’ it said on the back of the photo, as if the tree itself had sent me a postcard.

Another plane flies over.

This week I didn’t see the dwarf on the block. This week I thought how my notebook is like an armchair and I’m like a cat curled up in it. And this week I forgot to write that on Sunday, before Jonás left, we were driving to the cinema and saw a shop selling tiny furniture. Made-to-measure furniture, the sign said. And in the window there was indeed some made-to-measure furniture. A living room on a smaller scale. ‘Look, my love, it’s like the seven dwarves’ living room,’ Jonás said.

I want to kiss you now.

Here come some fabric flowers: it’s not that Cato was in favour of lost causes; he himself was a lost cause. Is this something he shares with Kafka? In that sense, Cato is the father of notebooks, and Kafka is one of his brilliant children.

Speaking of Kafka, have I told you he’s one of the authors I read for self-improvement? Today I underlined this phrase, which I could repeat every morning: ‘He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.’ In fact, the genre people call self-help literature sounds tautological to me; I read all literature as self-help.

In the car on the way to the airport, we heard a song on the radio. Jonás turned it up. ‘This is so good,’ he said. I managed to find it later, and I’ve listened to it quite a bit this week. Now I’m going to turn it up. I hope the neighbours like this song as much as I do.

My dear friend Tepepunk gave me The Alienist, by Machado de Assis. I’ve been reading it all afternoon. There’s a minor character who nowadays seems hard to imagine: the rattle man. Before the internet, before the printing press, there was rattle man, who was hired to roam the streets of the town with a rattle in his hand. ‘From time to time, he would shake the rattle, townspeople would gather, and he would announce whatever he had been instructed to announce – a cure for fever, plots of arable land for sale, a sonnet, a church donation, the identity of the nosiest busybody in town, the finest speech of the year, and so on.’

If I instructed the rattle man to announce something, it would be a soppy poem. A love poem, with rhymes and flowers, preferably wild flowers. Dedicated, obviously, to Jonás.

Oh, I’m just like all the literature I most despise. Although I do own good books, any bad poem resembles me better.

A seven-hour time difference and the sea in between keep me from sleeping at his side. My ideal notebook, which can do anything, will let me sleep by his side in the land of dreams. By the side of the golden tree which isn’t the one I planted as a girl, though it looks a bit like it.

I’m writing this to make it official. My notebook: my guitar.

You carry a notebook identical to this one, you jot down numbers, addresses, the name of a restaurant, the title of a song. I know because, when we don’t have them open, your notebook communicates with mine; they’re connected by a string like two styrofoam cups.

What made Jonás do a PhD in maths? Was it something to do with his parents, with their jobs – she’s a chemist, he’s a physicist – or with the fact they met in the seventies, at the piano recitals in the university physics institute? I feel like Jonás is following proudly in his parents’ footsteps. Now, for example, he’s in Madrid, perhaps walking down the very streets where his mother used to walk. I feel like I’m wandering aimlessly, or in the opposite direction to my parents’ footsteps. My parents begot two children: No and No.

My brother lives in London. He’s twenty-seven, the age some rock stars died. Jonás’ sister lives with their father. She’s thirty-three, the age The Rock Star died. I’m in between their ages, but I’m with you in Rockland.

An ideal notebook should be waterproof, like the books children read in the bath. You can’t have a notebook getting wet as you wash, like Ulises Lima’s books do when he reads in the shower. An ideal notebook should be able to go underwater. Whether it floats like a rubber duck or swims in the deep like a whale, it needs to be waterproof.

Is this glass of water the dwarf-scale sea between us?