Читать книгу Loop - Brenda Lozano - Страница 9

4

The dwarf on the block has a three-piece suit, a black bowler hat and a cane. Black shoes polished until they gleam. You could say he’s also the most elegant man on the block.

The dwarf, who’s a different height, who can sit in a chair and not touch the floor with his shoes. Who lives on a different scale. Who lives in a strange sort of margin. Who has the same abilities as you. Who walks down the same pavement as you. And yet.

Are there dwarf animals? Dwarf giraffes? A panther, a hippo, a bird? A dwarf landscape? There are dwarf planets. You told me that, Jonás. Maybe now I can tell you a story.

Once upon a time there were seven dwarves who sang in the forest. Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy and Dopey. The seven dwarves in a row, from Doc to Dopey. Dopey is a little dwarf. Maybe he’s just a little dopey.

Meanwhile, deep in the thick, dark forest, a voice thunders from the top of a castle: ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?’

The seven dwarves arrive home and ask in unison who’s asleep in the bedroom. They think a monster has got in. The monster is sleeping across three beds. They want to kill it before it wakes up. Grumpy says: ‘Ha, she’s a female and all females are poison! We have to get rid of her.’ She wakes up, and the seven dwarves duck out of view. ‘I wonder if the children are back,’ says Snow White. She’s scared when she sees the seven little faces. ‘Why, you’re little men!’ ‘We’re as mad as hornets,’ one replies. ‘Can you make dapple lumplings?’ ‘Apple dumplings!’ the other six shout back at him. ‘Yes,’ says Snow White, ‘and plum pudding and gooseberry pie.’ ‘Gooseberry pie?!’ the dwarves cry in unison. ‘She stays!’

Not unlike tramps in a stage play, with that jolly little dance as they walk, draped in rags, the smudges on their faces meticulously added with make-up: that’s how they are in the cartoon. The seven dwarves have hats, white beards and red noses. They’re tubby, they sing in unison. The dwarf on the block has a cane, a sober demeanour. Grumpy’s anarchy consists of not washing. I imagine the dwarf on the block has voted for the left for as long as he’s had a voting card, in the hope that the path we’re on might change.

What would the ideal politician be like?

Instead, we’re stuck with cartoons. And they do so much harm.

I remember there’s a point in Waiting for Godot when the characters swap hats again and again. A bit like politicians.

I wonder. What do I wonder?

I miss you, Jonás. I’d sleep with you tonight on those three little beds.

Today, among other things, I bought a kilo of red apples at the market, thinking of Snow White. I thought I spotted the same Fernando Pessoa I saw a while ago at the fruit stall.

Jonás said he broke up with his ex because she didn’t like him not having an office job. ‘But you teach, you’re doing a research project at the university, doesn’t that count?’ ‘It wasn’t really about the office,’ he went on. ‘It was her way of implying she wanted to be with a different sort of person.’

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?

In the first months of our relationship, I was plagued by the idea that they might get back together. That she might turn up again, that he might want her back. I had no basis for thinking it, I just didn’t want things with Jonás to end. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever got on so well with anyone. You could say that, as well as the sex, I’ve discovered a good friend. I don’t know if one is more important than the other. I don’t think so.

I like you so much, Jonás, that if you give me the first letter of your name I’ll do a magic trick. Pass it over; I’m going to shrink the first letter of your name. Look. A small letter in the world of capitals, and yet it’s still a capital. In small caps, a capital letter the same size as the small letters – a dwarf letter?

It’s five in the morning. I’ve just come back from Tepepunk and Nina’s. They’ve been awarded a residency in Tokyo and we were celebrating. We started in a cantina. Now I’m wasted. We were drinking mezcal. Damn mezcal, that cursed happiness. I want to whisper in your ear that I love you. I don’t want to go to sleep. I’ll give you a letter of the alphabet. Whichever one you want. Kiss me. I love you, choose any letter you like: dkrisncpolñsmciryaxnlñpqoesj.

I’ve realised that the ideal notebook, like a 7-Eleven, never closes its doors.

I’ve also realised that when I talk about you, the things I write are like a craft project. I could write this with glue and alphabet pasta. Will it be long before you come back? I hope not. I hope the whale lets you go soon, my Jonah, because I miss you. I’ll say it with blue glitter.

Jonás and I are about the same height. Our notebooks are the same size. This makes it easier for the notebooks to have sex.

Tall people who need made-to-measure clothes. Fat people who need double seats. Neurotic people who need positions of power. Stupid people who need someone even more stupid next to them. Insecure people who need the approval of strangers. Loyal people surrounded by traitors. People who don’t fit, people who live on another scale.

So what would be a normal scale? What’s the median, what’s the average, what’s 1:1?

A job, an apartment with a mortgage, a car with a payment plan, a family, two boxes of cereal (one high-fibre for mum and dad, and one with chocolate for the kids). A dog needs a lot of looking-after, a kitten would be better and never mind if it gets run over, honey, because we have each other, now go on, put the dwarves to bed because there’s school in the morning.

Meaning that being thirty-one and waiting for Jonás to come back from his trip, plus a cat, some plants, some books and an apartment aren’t the average.

Let’s open the phonelines instead. The ideal notebook is inclusive, with you, and you as well, sir. In this gameshow, A Hundred Mexicans Said, here in my ideal notebook. Good evening, we asked a hundred Mexicans if they’d prefer reading or a hamper containing two bottles of cooking oil, tins of tuna, rice, beans, packets of soup, a good selection of biscuits, four bottles of table wine, a delicious cake and none other than the Golden Membership: a year’s supply of free food.

If you’re one of the hundred people surveyed who don’t feature in the most popular response, don’t worry – I hear there are biscuits at the end of book launches.

Biscuits. So do we all like biscuits? Biscuits are our unifying thread. We live in the biscuit brotherhood.

Here in Mexico City there’s a monument called the Estela de Luz. The Suavicrema, it was nicknamed, because it looks like a Suavicrema wafer. The biscuit elevated into a monument, a biscuit costing 1,575 million pesos. There’s no need to do the calculations, the biscuit encapsulates the situation: the millions are shared between a select few, while the snake eats its own tail for money.

And what about education, man?

I can’t hear you, man, the music’s too loud.

State education, what about it?

What? I can’t hear you, man, speak up, the music’s amazing. It’s wicked, what track is this?

Wild is the Wind. A country shaped like a leaf, about to fall from the tree.

I got distracted. That’s what happens when I leave the windows open. But I wasn’t distracted enough. You can always go further. Fall out of bed, fall off the Earth, fall into space, into a planetary model, a smaller scale, a styrofoam Pluto. Because Pluto is a dwarf planet. What’s a dwarf planet, Jonás? ‘Dwarf planets have different characteristics, for example they don’t orbit like other planets because their gravity doesn’t work the same way. Pluto used to be considered a planet, but not any more. So the science is being rewritten, and now it’s considered a dwarf planet. Science has always been like that; it’s constantly being rewritten.’

Not having the same kind of gravity, not being part of the average. Is it comedy or tragedy? Can genres be rewritten?

Why the fervent desire to be part of the norm? How to get away from it? What’s the most distant point? Where could I go on this wind, on these wings? Oh, the wind, I just love it. How it messes up my hair; how far it can carry me. But am I getting further away or am I getting closer? Where am I going?

Do these stairs go up or down?

I’d like to fly far away, by Jonás’ side. When I write I try to distance myself from here. But Jonás isn’t the furthest point. Nor is the past. Not even going back to the fall of Tenochtitlan and the foundation of New Spain would be very far. Imagination is all that can carry us far away, and the fewer pieces the jigsaw has the better. The furthest I can go for the moment is into the cat’s head. The sleeping cat, a dwarf panther, here by my side. The cat’s so charming when he’s asleep. For each battle embarked on by Telemachus, the cat yawns.

I once heard a novelist criticising people who write to the sound of their cat purring when people in the north of the country can hear gunfire. My cat, who sometimes chews books, wonders: aren’t books all a similar height?

Isn’t literature somewhat misshapen compared to the news? Isn’t a novel a kind of dwarf compared to a newspaper? A question of height, a novel next to a printed newspaper: one small, the other big. Then don’t writing and reading mean living on another scale without it mattering where you are when you write, with made-to-measure furniture, made-to-measure clothes, while some of the most common verbs in the headlines are abuse-torture-kill?

Literature in this country: a pot-bellied dwarf, red-nosed, in a little red hat. Books are so tiny compared to the horror. Literature in this country is only fit to decorate the garden. He’s so elegant, the dwarf on the block, and everything around him is so fucked up.