It’s the music. It’s the neighbour’s music, the bus driving by, the aeroplane in the distance, a dog barking here, a car horn over there. I’d like to be a sound so I could contribute to the night. If I were a sound I could be independent from reality. If I were music I could travel further.

I didn’t tell you something when we talked just now. The other day I had lunch with Carolina and some of her friends. One of them took a notebook out of her bag and put it on the table. An Ideal notebook. ‘I call them Mexican Moleskines,’ she said. I picked it up and had a look. It was a bit smaller than the ones I found in Oaxaca. I asked her where she’d bought it. She gave me the address of a stationer’s in the centre which had – she said – a green Ideal notebook in the window: ‘But don’t get too excited, I thought they had them in green, which is my favourite colour, but no, it’s just faded in the sun. Really they only sell navy-blue Ideal notebooks, but since the man in the shop’s always in a bad mood he won’t show you any. If you look at the spine you can tell it was blue once upon a time.’ I thought about that Ideal notebook as a kind of mummified father, the Tutankhamun of notebooks. An Aztec deity, perhaps. The Aztec deity of the notebook in the city’s historic centre, along with some of the other stones that gave us our country: Idealnotl, green jade. The Green of Moctezuma’s headdress, the green of the Mexican flag, Lorca’s green how I love you green. Green like the top of the tree which is the headdress of the deity of paper. That single example, the pre-Hispanic god of everything small.