Sometimes I’d like to know this story from start to finish, but I don’t know anything from start to finish. Even my handwriting, on the page in front of me, looks like a film I’ve walked into once the screening’s already begun. It used to be big, and now it’s smaller, but that’s still not the beginning. Does it look like my father’s handwriting, my mother’s, my grandparents’? One good thing about narratives in the past tense is that you can synthesise and select, because you know the story from start to finish. If this were written in the past, if a divine narrator were talking, like he whose voice is borne afar, we could have epithets the way they do in The Odyssey. It would make things easier. The qualities, the defects, would be obvious, and there would be clues. Since I don’t have any clues, since this is the present and it looks more like an annotated margin, I can offer some epithets that only depict an instant. I could be she of the small handwriting, and Julia could be she who shyly plays guitar. And then there’s landline-calling Tania, golden-shoed Carolina. Or some obvious adjectives: Guillermo the intelligent, Tepepunk the tall, Antonio the sharp, Luis Felipe the divine.
They say we look like one or the other, that either the maternal or paternal features are dominant. I look more like my mother, and my brother looks more like my father. Jonás looks like his mother and Marina looks like their father. Ana was an attractive woman, with black hair, light-coloured eyes and dark, full eyebrows. Those dominant features in Jonás attracted me the day we met. I feel drawn to The Odyssey, and perhaps the literature I like the most shares its qualities.
They respond, they agree. Proust, Wilde, Pessoa, Borges and Lispector love The Odyssey. Juan Rulfo, Jorge Ibargüengoitia and Josefina Vicens say they do too, that they’re big fans. Oh, the Ouija notebook.
I said just now that this is a margin. In fact, that’s what I do and what I’ve been doing all this time: I make notes in the margins of books. It’s hard to make notes when the margins are too narrow: that’s why I buy notebooks. This notebook is also one long margin of everything I like to read.
And isn’t sitting in an armchair a way of reading life?
As a teenager, I didn’t put up posters in my bedroom. Something keeps me from that kind of celebrity worship. Besides, I worship the margins, the secondary, the useless. And in an age when a pet can become a celebrity, an age of epic stories, of tales that have to be grand and flashy to capture a child’s attention, an age when preference is given to speed and usefulness, what’s a good reason to fly that flag?