Loop. Brenda Lozano

      Loop

      Brenda Lozano

      Loop

      Translated by

      Annie McDermott

      For Diego, Emiliano and Patricio

      ‘For love is ever filled with fear’

      Letter from Penelope to Odysseus,

      Heroides, Ovid

      ‘Sea, oh sea, you’re the homeland of waves,

      the waves are sea-children.

      The sea is their mother

      and their sister’s the notebook.

      It’s been that way now for many a century.

      And they lived very well.

      And prayed often.

      The sea to God

      and the children to God.

      And after, they resettled in the sky.

      From where they sprayed rain,

      and on that rainy spot a house grew.

      The house lived well.

      It taught the doors and windows to play

      shore, immortality, dream and notebook.

      Once upon a time.’

      ‘The Song of the Notebook’, Alexander Vvedensky

      ‘A hundred thousand welcomes! I could weep,

      And I could laugh; I am light, and heavy. Welcome!’

      The Tragedy of Coriolanus, William Shakespeare

      1

      Today a dwarf smiled at me.

      As a girl I thought the electric pencil sharpener was what separated me from adult life. Between the blue plastic pencil sharpener and the electric pencil sharpener – in my father’s office or on the teacher’s desk – stretched the distance between childhood and adult life.

      At a dinner party when he was twenty-one, Proust was asked some questions. Among them, what his favourite bird was. The swallow, he replied. Proust didn’t invent the questions known as the ‘Proust questionnaire’, but his answers were so good they made the questionnaire famous. Proust responded to the questionnaire on two separate occasions. He was fifteen when he was asked his favourite colour. ‘The beauty is not in the colours, but in their harmony,’ he said.

      At fifteen I still thought the electric pencil sharpener separated me from adult life. If I’d been asked my favourite colour I would have said the colour of my blue pencil sharpener, but Proust’s favourite bird is also my favourite bird.

      If I could turn into any bird, I’d choose a swallow.

      Change. Unlearning yourself is more important than knowing yourself.

      Jonás and I did a crossword together this evening. We made a good team. It was a kind of crossword with lots of blank numbered squares. You had to work out which letter of the alphabet corresponded to each number, and then work out the title, the author and the text underneath. He outlined the three-letter words in red, and I outlined the four-letter words in blue. It was a passage from First Love, about the love between the character’s parents. It took the two of us more than an hour to solve it. Crosswords are a good demonstration of how we function as a couple, in this apartment. A model, on a dwarf scale. His maths PhD came in useful for solving the puzzle. My degree in communication helped me remember the author’s surname. From the surname, we were able to work out the rest of the text thanks to Jonás’ usual methodical approach to things. Significant that the word ‘mother’ appeared so many times. Jonás’ mother died a week before we met and this very day, Sunday, would have been her birthday. Every time Jonás read the word ‘mother’ out loud I felt a pang.

      Today I saw the dwarf again, the same one who smiled at me in the street a few days ago. This time he was sitting with his back to me, in a little diner. He was checking something on his phone; I think he was reading the news. His feet, the soles of his shoes, weren’t touching the floor, and his knees weren’t bent. Straight, the legs of the dwarf sitting on the plastic chair.

      Tonight we listened to different versions of ‘Wild is the Wind’ as we lay in bed. Out of David Bowie and Nina Simone, I’d go for Bowie and Jonás would go for Nina Simone.

      I’ve found my combination: a Scribe notebook for a diary and an Ideal notebook for fiction. This is my married couple. Gemini at last become one. Today is a happy day, a day when I came across some dusty, forgotten Scribe and Ideal notebooks in a stationer’s on Calle Alfonso Reyes. They were the last ones. Scribe and Ideal notebooks are very difficult to find, but Alfonso Reyes’ passion for fictions is reflected in his street. I feel like Alfonso Reyes should intersect with Borges. The two writers would spend the whole time joking around between their streets, but what paranormal phenomena would take place in the stationer’s then?

      ‘The Song of the Notebook’. That’s the title of the poem Alexander Vvedensky wrote in a notebook with a grey cover between 1932 and 1933. The collection of poems is called The Grey Notebook, simply because of the colour of the cover.

      A concert of trees and bushes. The wind in the branches: the song of the notebook in its original version. Silence. Listen to that song.

      If Jonás turned into a bird I could ask him to let me fly by his side, like in ‘Wild is the Wind’.

      I’d like to have dinner with Jonás, but today he won’t be home. ‘I’m having dinner with my dad,’ the message says. I called him. We argued on the phone about something stupid. He’s going to spend the night there. I wish I’d never said anything.

      The dwarf on the block. Today he was wearing a three-piece suit and carrying a tiny cane. In the evening we exchanged glances. I felt a lot like the dwarf, on another scale of life and needing to lean on a tiny cane.

      The dwarf, yes, is a dwarf. He’s a neighbour. Probably with a voting card. With a love life and a credit history. But then, the dwarf is also an idea. Of someone who lives on another scale, someone who lives among objects that are too large, too heavy or too tall. Someone who lives in a system, a routine, in everyday life. And yet.

      Today I went for coffee with my friend Tania. In the Escandón neighbourhood, Calle de la Prosperidad crosses Avenida Progreso. I read the intersections of streets like they’re fortune cookies.

      Where am I? In a chair, yes, but it feels like the middle of the ocean. I swim on and get further away. I swim forwards, but I go backwards. The beach seems more distant than before.

      This evening Tania, sipping her beer, said casually that according to her cousin from Acapulco, if you don’t want to drown in the sea you have to swim diagonally. Wait for the tug of the waves and swim not forwards but diagonally.

      How do you swim diagonally in life?

      I long for the morning when I wake up transformed into a swallow. Now I imagine two swallows holding a ribbon in the air. On the ribbon, the words ‘Ideal Notebook’ can clearly be distinguished. The swallow on the left is me, and the swallow on the right is the dwarf on my block.

      Two people metamorphosed into animals take on the same proportions. The best time to form a relationship with someone is when they change form.

      If a metal band metamorphoses on stage at the Foro Alicia, they’ll end up as a group of foxes dressed in black. If the university orchestra metamorphoses in the Nezahualcóyotl concert hall midway through a performance, they’ll end up as foxes dressed in black. It’s a simple equation: x equals metamorphosis. You need to find x to know which animal you’d be.

      One thing I don’t like about felt tips is their felt tips. I write by hand, and I have small writing. You can imagine how annoying it gets.

      On Saturday afternoon Jonás and I went to a gallery