(Juan Ignacio has come to interrupt me. There’s no shortage of interruptions in this house, as I think I may have mentioned before. He’s asking for his mother. I tell him she’s not here.) (But I’m not going to write about interruptions, despite the fact that at this very moment someone is ringing the doorbell.) (Juan Ignacio comes in and asks about his mother again, not for himself this time but on behalf of the man who rang the bell, as if my answer were going to be any different. “She’s not here.”) (But as I was saying, I’m not going to discuss interruptions now. They affect me directly and are the main cause of my sorry psychological state, which makes them an interesting topic, and I resolved at the beginning of today’s work to avoid interesting topics. Although uninteresting topics also conspire against my handwriting—but for a different reason, of course.)

October 28

On I go, trying to write about uninteresting things, perhaps heralding a new era of boredom as a literary movement. Today I started out with very big writing, which after just two lines has already reduced considerably in size. Why was that? Because I began thinking about how to finish my sentence, wanting to be sure it made sense. Conclusion: I’m incapable of paying attention—what little attention I have—to more than one thing at a time. Here, the priority is the handwriting and not the prose, which means that making no sense is perfectly acceptable. So stop worrying and start forming those letters, boy: nose to the grindstone. It’s not easy to get used to the idea of not making sense. Although, really, sense is nothing but a complicated social construct. I suspect that last sentence is entirely untrue, but I can’t let myself start philosophizing now, about that or anything else. I have to concentrate on my handwriting; that’s the point of all this. I have to let my inner self change and grow under the magical influence of graphology. Big writing, big me. Small writing, small me. Beautiful writing, beautiful me.

November 2

It’s been a few days since I last did these graphological exercises, but there are good reasons for that: whether because of circumstances or because the exercises are working, lately I’ve been feeling motivated to do other things. The most important of these things, at least in my eyes, is the half-dreaming, half-waking, and almost subterranean task of trying to revive my imaginative abilities and therefore my writing. In practice, this has simply meant making the final revisions to a short story I wrote some years ago, putting it in an envelope, and sending it off to see if anyone wants to publish it. I’ve also been busy in the field of international relations, catching up with some correspondents abroad, and this involved the far-from-easy (in Colonia) task of getting ahold of some good-quality photocopies. What would have been wrapped up within a couple of hours in a civilized place, here required three days.