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.
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