BooksBarbecue
Back Loop
Chapters (33)
  1. Loop
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. 4
  6. 5
  7. 6
  8. 7
  9. 8
  10. 9
  11. 10
  12. 11
  13. 12
  14. 13
  15. 14
  16. 15
  17. 16
  18. 17
  19. 18
  20. 19
  21. 20
  22. 21
  23. 22
  24. 23
  25. 24
  26. 25
  27. 26
  28. 27
  29. 28
  30. 29
  31. 30
  32. A note on the text
  33. Copyright

In my life as the A4 Saint, the Virgin of Stationery, the Xerox Madonna, an office-worker would ask me: ‘You used to be an ordinary person, how did you come to be transformed?’ I’d answer: ‘Look inside your briefcase, my child, and there you will find the miracle.’ He’d find Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He’d be taken aback. With a flash of light, I’d appear before him in a dream and say in an angelic voice: ‘Read the book, my child, and you too can undergo a transformation.’

Why this fixation on metamorphoses? Even if we don’t turn into animals, we turn into other things. I think that’s why Jonás and I are together now, and not sooner.

I can’t believe I wrote that someone would pray to me every morning before putting on his tie. But I’m not going to get rid of it. I like the pilgrim life of the Xerox Madonna. Her sandals. Her white dress. Her clasped hands. Her skin as pale as paper. Her blank silence.

Jonás left today, and Marina and his father leave tomorrow. I went with him to the airport. Today I wrote nothing. When I took my pen out of my bag just now I found some receipts. I lined them up in chronological order on the table. The story of my day in receipts.

Today I read nothing. And this, in the whole day, is all I’ve written.

Third night without Jonás. I feel sleepy. I’m lying in bed. The cat’s in the living room playing with the pencil I dropped; I’m feeling sleepier and sleepier. It’s like the cat and I are working shifts on an office reception, taking it in turns behind the desk. I don’t know what that means, of course, but it’s the kind of thing I write, as if I’m playing with this pencil. Writing is my way of being a cat and shedding fur, or phrases, onto the armchair.

It occurs to me as I’m dozing off that a monument to the dwarf would be no bad thing. A handy reminder of people who live life on another scale. Should it include me? It’s true that I go to an office, but do writing and reading exist on another scale in relation to so-called productive life?

I wonder what someone’s life would be like if they’d never reached, if they’d never seen, if they couldn’t imagine their own depths. Those depths where only pain can take you.