One advantage of the ideal notebook is that it can come with me in the taxi. This is one of its nanometric properties. The taxi driver, an old man with a hearing aid, must think I’m making a note of something for work, something I have to do, something I want to remember in the airport. He watches me in the rear-view mirror. But no, mister, it’s not that. I like you, that’s what I’m writing. I wish I could tell you. But because I don’t dare talk to you, I’ll tell you here that the radio station you have on, which is playing bolero songs, is the same one my granddad used to listen to. Maybe your shared musical tastes would have given you something to talk about. I don’t dare interrupt now you’re singing under your breath, but I wish I could tell you that I’m happy you’re singing, I like your eyes behind your thick lenses in the rear-view mirror, and how you drive with both hands on the wheel; you’ve also made me like this song even more. Science is right: notebooks that are smaller in size have more attractive properties than the properties we’re used to.

We drove past a bakery called Esperanza. Hope. My notebook’s name is better than the bakery’s. How deep can you swim in the word hope? I think it’s a word you can see to the bottom of, like the bottom of a swimming pool.

Opposite me in the waiting area, a fat woman in pink jogging bottoms takes an equally fat pink wallet out of her bag. If that woman were to turn into an object, it would be that fat pink wallet.

Through the aeroplane window I watch as night falls, and it looks so similar to the dawn. In the same way as elderly people end up behaving like children.

So, do the stairs go up or down?

Mexico City from a height. Clarice Lispector says the mirror is the only invented material that’s natural. I was born in Mexico, in that word reflected over and over: in Mexico, in Mexico City, in the Hospital de México, and when they were younger my parents lived in an apartment on Calle México. The plane is taking me to a conference for publishers and writers from Mexico.

The organisers ask us not to leave the hotel: ‘Please, everyone, things are very dangerous at the moment. We don’t want anything to happen to you. All the conference activities will be in the events hall, on the ground floor, next to the lobby. Breakfast, lunch and dinner will be in the buffet, don’t forget.’