Exercises

December 16

It’s hard not to be frightened when you realize you can’t rely very much on yourself. I’ve played all my cards and lost, and now there are no more chances. Repeat my Buenos Aires adventure? Things aren’t so easy now (not that they were ever very easy), because the circumstances have changed and I have that first experience weighing on me. It was a good thing to do once, but it would be a terrible thing to repeat. Montevideo? Aside from the weather, there’s nothing appealing about that. And who knows what I’d do to pay the bills.

A couple of days ago I made a dangerous move, though now I’m glad I did: I sent a fax to the agency that buys crosswords from me, requesting a new rate. If it works out, the extra money might shake things up a bit. If it doesn’t work out … well, I’ll have to think of something else.

Really, the most difficult part of all this is making the drastic decision to separate from Alicia. If I could do it, cleanly and irreversibly, I know I’d immediately find a way to move forward. But I haven’t been able to make the decision. I speculate about it, but something very powerful—more powerful than fear—is still holding me back. I need to explore this more deeply. But I’m afraid of deceiving myself, or allowing her to deceive me. Everything can seem so clear, and then she makes another move, plays another trick, and suddenly it’s all muddled up again and shining with the lights of (false) hope. And so I decide to go on hoping, and every new hope exhausts me a little more, sucks a little more life from me, and dismantles my remaining self-esteem, until the only thing I have left is the pointless lucidity with which I passively observe the way I’m going under once and for all.

December 17

I think I’ve worked out why these exercises, which were meant to be about handwriting, are always so quick to deteriorate into other things. According to my theory, it’s because I have no direct communication with Alicia. When I started these exercises, I used to leave the pages on the nightstand so she could monitor my progress, or lack thereof, and as a result they naturally became a way of telling her things—hence the anxiety that makes me write too fast when I have something important to say. It’s a strange existence, to say the least, always living, and thinking, in relation to somebody else. Most of the time that person isn’t even there, and you don’t know when they’ll be back. So you go on writing, page after page, at first genuinely trying to focus on the handwriting, but all too often turning into a kind of shipwrecked sailor stuffing messages into bottles and sending them out to sea. In this case there’s no doubt about whether the messages will arrive, but the bottle image seems fitting nevertheless—as does the image of the exile, which is what I’ve been feeling like for a while now, even more so in Colonia than in Buenos Aires. Anyway, the point is to fill these pages with lines of script, trying to be patient and forming the letters with care.