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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

I saw a boy in the street wearing a Pinocchio T-shirt. I remembered the time in the Japanese restaurant when we talked about the origins of our names. You told me you saw Pinocchio with Marina and your mother in a cinema that doesn’t exist any more – the one with the façade like a castle, where my brother and I used to be taken as well, and which was knocked down to make way for a shopping mall. And I remember you saying your mother liked the name’s biblical history. ‘But how awful,’ you said, ‘to be trapped inside a big fish.’

Is mourning like being trapped inside a big fish?

Let’s read the Bible like it’s a horoscope for names. Let’s see, let’s see. Yahweh speaks to Jonah, tells him to go to Nineveh, a big city, to announce its impending destruction. Jonah doesn’t want to go. He runs away. He wants to go to Tarshish instead, to escape Yahweh. He gets onto a boat to travel far away. Tarshish is far away, it’s at the end of the world. Jonah, in the boat, wants to escape as far away as he can, and Tarshish seems like a good place to escape to. But Yahweh unleashes a storm at sea, so violent it looks like the ship might sink. Jonah is sound asleep, the sailors are afraid. From the storm and the rocking of the ship, they deduce that Jonah is running away from Yahweh and they blame him for the storm. They wake him up. How can they calm the sea’s rage? Jonah tells the sailors to throw him overboard: they do it and the waters settle. Yahweh makes a big fish swallow Jonah up. Inside the belly of the fish, Jonah realises he can’t escape. Jonah spends three days and three nights in the fish’s stomach. From the heart of the sea, he speaks to Yahweh. The deep closed around me, weeds were wrapped around my head, the earth closed behind me forever, says Jonah from the stomach of the big fish. Jonah repents and Yahweh orders the fish to vomit Jonah out.

Can you swim?

15

15

Last night I went to a party in a big house. The Most Important Artist in Mexico showed up in a tiny Coca-Cola-coloured car. Every so often, his driver came in with bottles, food and other bits and pieces, which he placed decorously on the table. While the artist was talking to a woman in a sequinned dress, the driver passed him a little packet of cigarettes and something that, from where we were, looked like a yellow bath sponge. Guillermo, mezcal in hand, made up a conversation in which the artist convinced the woman how useful and how thoroughly appropriate it was to have a sponge at a party.