And what if the three nights Jonah spends inside the big fish are the equivalent of three years? I hope not. The apartment feels too big for me when you’re not here, just like the days do.

After our phone call, I think you might be having a better time. Less guilty, less anxious, less afraid. I hope you’ve calmed down a bit, I want to listen to you better. Before I go and have a shower, I can tell you that I wish you’d been at that party with Guillermo and me last night, but I don’t know what else I can tell you. Sometimes you trap me in these alleyways, and I don’t know how to get out.

This afternoon I bought some earrings. Two swallows. I’m wearing them now, one swallow on each side.

I’m listening to the end of the national anthem, during the National Hour, which is my favourite time on a Sunday. Although I don’t normally listen to this programme and I don’t know these verses, I’m not going to change it. Like when people used to think the world was flat and boats would fall off the edge into the abyss, it’s as if nothing comes after the final verses of the national anthem on a Sunday evening. My brother has a catchphrase for when he forgets something: ‘The maps!’ It comes from a moment one Sunday evening when he remembered he had to buy maps, or cardboard, or something like that from the stationer’s.

There’s a strange verb in the national anthem. Here, under the microscope: osare. To dare in the future subjunctive, a verbal tense that’s now extinct, like the dodo. Those verbal contortions that used to exist and can now only be found in glass cabinets, displayed in songs from other eras like museum exhibits. At the same time, there are so many kinds of music, and so many new songs born every hour, that perhaps nine words are born into the world every day.

Don’t ask how I got here, I don’t know how I got here, but when the film Snow White won an award, it wasn’t given one statue but seven miniature versions: one for each dwarf. Oh, I just love this limbo time on a Sunday evening. The seven days setting off into the distance in single file, whistling the same tune.

I love listening to the radio, especially on Sundays. Just like in the street, there’s less traffic, less noise. Today they played a Beatles song I didn’t know, and I listened to it with my mother in the living room at home. Now I remember that Ana also liked The Beatles. I wonder if my mother and Ana stood in the same queue at the university library, if their paths crossed, if they exchanged the odd phrase, greeting or glance in their student days.