My mum took ballet classes as a girl. She was skinny, with freckles on her face and shoulders and she wore a pink tutu. I have that photo in the study, near the photo of Jonás’ mother. When Jonás tells me something about Ana, or when his father or Marina have told me things about her, that’s the image in my head. I’ve seen other photos, but that’s the image I see every day and the one I usually multiply and animate, as if I’m making a film and it doesn’t matter when the action takes place: Ana is always twenty-three and a smiling university student. My mother looks nothing like the girl in the pink tutu. She has a strong character, she’s proud of her grey hair and her age, she has a keen intuition and a good sense of humour. As if the Spanish frankness and Portuguese melancholy had been added together, rather than subtracted to leave the pessimism they sometimes leave. I think Jonás’ mother and mine would have got along well. I imagine them drinking coffee together in the kitchen at home. In our apartment, I mean.

You have to travel a long way to get close to the person you sleep beside. And perhaps I’ve also had to travel this far to get close to myself.

‘I dreamed about my mum, love, a weird dream that’s been in my head all day. I’ll call you later,’ the text message from Jonás said.

Last night, on the way out of a bar, a stranger gave me two lollies. The only idea I’ve had all day is that the zombie lollies – heads made of toffee – should have bubble-gum brains. Then you’d feel like a zombie eating the zombie lolly. A meta-zombie.

My friend Luis Felipe wrote a poem about zombies, which alluded to the obscene number of violent deaths in Mexico. I’m going to keep a lolly for him, like a souvenir of his own poem.

I see a framed photo in this café and wonder if the person in it is dead or alive. The uncertainty of framed photos. Frames are like names: the people they contain might be dead or alive, but at that precise moment they’re in the photo, in that gerund. That name which goes on, that continuous present, that frame, those static letters forming our name. Disconcertingly immortal.

Yesterday evening I bought some records. Not a very common practice these days. You might even call it eccentric. Hardly anyone buys records. I know they’re clumsy and not very practical, and that nowadays music is free. But I like buying records. One of the ones I bought was Station to Station by David Bowie, which includes ‘Wild is the Wind’.