But I’m getting increasingly carried away by my narrative urges and forgetting about my handwriting. Now I’m paying more attention to the writing, but my hand’s rushing nervously to form the letters without leaving my thoughts any time for reflection. The buzzing has gone, and the room where I’m working is reasonably cool. But Alicia is calling me.

March 23

Yesterday I skipped these exercises. Today I’ve decided to come back to them, in spite of the weather conditions, which are even worse than they were yesterday. At least right now there’s no noticeable buzzing—except in my own ears, where there’s a high-pitched humming sound I often hear inside my head when I’m not sleeping enough. Speaking of which, ever since the buzzing from the substation next door began, my sleep’s been terrible: I have trouble nodding off and wake up constantly throughout the night. This puts me in a bad mood and makes me irritable, demotivated, and unable to do even the simplest things. I’ve also had to make do with sleeping on the fly, as it were, seizing my chance whenever somewhere free of buzzing also happens to be free of people. This is all very bad for my health. My main comfort is reading, for the most part books I’ve already read more than once. Reading is a way of distancing myself a little from the buzzing and from my awareness of my own discomfort. I also need to distance myself from the bustle and mess of this house, which, in part because of my low morale, is no closer to being sorted out. The other people who live or work here haven’t done anything either. Yesterday I dreamed I lived day and night on a longdistance bus, which isn’t a bad image to describe my instability and the feelings of insecurity this situation is causing me. And now it’s almost Holy Week, or Tourism Week, and of course all the activity in the country has come to a halt. So the search for solutions to my problems has also been called off for the time being.

March 25

Today is a strange day in many ways. For example, the weather conditions are very mixed-up and volatile, as if summer were happening at the same time as autumn; it’s cold and hot, with changeable air pressure, all of which disturbs the body and leads to a vague feeling of unease. What’s more, today I woke up to the news that there’s been a murder in Colonia, in one of the pleasant spots we often visit. A murder in a detective novel is one thing, but it’s something else entirely in so-called real life. It’s not nice to think of living in a small, trusting, and very unprotected town with a murderer on the loose. Or more than one by now, since the victim was a woman and there are also suspicions of rape. Today is also strange because of the news that one of my books is probably going to be published in Belgium, and the even stranger news that they might pay a considerable advance for the rights.