It’s a Sunday evening, my very favourite time to listen to the radio, but I’m going to turn it off. The neighbour’s listening to some pretty good music, turned up pretty loud, so I’ll leave the playlist to him. I’ve just been to see Jonás’ father and sister; they invited me over for dinner. In amongst all the joking around, they tried to justify his behaviour, like they were asking me to be patient. The truth is, it’s stopped mattering how much time goes by. This armchair is getting more and more comfortable, and it’s even better now the neighbour’s playing such good music.

After all, we’re both on a journey. But I prefer to travel by armchair. Although I could argue from here, I don’t like arguing, I prefer the journeys I can make sitting down. Oh, those two big themes, the poems that produced us: the poem of war, and the poem of a journey. The Iliad and The Odyssey. Maybe everything can be divided like that, into the Iliad side and the Odyssey side. The Iliad was named after a city. The Odyssey was named after a character. The horizontal poem like a postcard, the vertical poem like a full-length portrait. I prefer The Odyssey. We both look more like our mother, The Odyssey. Me like Penelope, and you like Odysseus.

Odysseus, he of the many twists and turns. Penelope, she of the many twists and turns without moving from her armchair. Weaving the notebook by day and unravelling it at night. Our Telemachus is the black cat stretching on the floor. He doesn’t seem about to go looking for Jonás. Our Telemachus yawns, licks one paw with his eyes closed and it’s all the same to him whether Jonás comes back or I leave. If only someone, like he whose voice is borne afar, could tell the cat that he does matter to us, that we love him.

The neighbour has just played that song I love again. Because of his good taste and his tendency to repeat things, I offer him some questions as if they were biscuits: what would have happened if Odysseus had been a dwarf? Would it have changed The Odyssey, the course of the West?

Does our height determine our destiny? Do scales determine history?

If our scale determines the role we play in history, it must mean something that Jonás and I are the same height. Face to face, in similar circumstances, interaction is easier. At similar points, as if what we’ve been through matches up. After all, his travels in Spain and my travels in the armchair run parallel.