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Back Loop Save as PDF
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

Not having the same kind of gravity, not being part of the average. Is it comedy or tragedy? Can genres be rewritten?

Why the fervent desire to be part of the norm? How to get away from it? What’s the most distant point? Where could I go on this wind, on these wings? Oh, the wind, I just love it. How it messes up my hair; how far it can carry me. But am I getting further away or am I getting closer? Where am I going?

Do these stairs go up or down?

I’d like to fly far away, by Jonás’ side. When I write I try to distance myself from here. But Jonás isn’t the furthest point. Nor is the past. Not even going back to the fall of Tenochtitlan and the foundation of New Spain would be very far. Imagination is all that can carry us far away, and the fewer pieces the jigsaw has the better. The furthest I can go for the moment is into the cat’s head. The sleeping cat, a dwarf panther, here by my side. The cat’s so charming when he’s asleep. For each battle embarked on by Telemachus, the cat yawns.

I once heard a novelist criticising people who write to the sound of their cat purring when people in the north of the country can hear gunfire. My cat, who sometimes chews books, wonders: aren’t books all a similar height?

Isn’t literature somewhat misshapen compared to the news? Isn’t a novel a kind of dwarf compared to a newspaper? A question of height, a novel next to a printed newspaper: one small, the other big. Then don’t writing and reading mean living on another scale without it mattering where you are when you write, with made-to-measure furniture, made-to-measure clothes, while some of the most common verbs in the headlines are abuse-torture-kill?

Literature in this country: a pot-bellied dwarf, red-nosed, in a little red hat. Books are so tiny compared to the horror. Literature in this country is only fit to decorate the garden. He’s so elegant, the dwarf on the block, and everything around him is so fucked up.

5

5

I was in a good mood until I read my horoscope: ‘You’ve realised by now that you’re not indispensable to anyone.’

Jonás is a Libra, and I’m a Gemini. Libra is my rising sign. I was told this by a woman wearing blue eyeliner. ‘Libra and Gemini are air signs,’ she said. The same woman did a tarot reading for me: ‘All the cards show you’re a double air.’ A double power. Wild is the Wind. Does that explain the way I drift from place to place?