This morning I looked for Ideal notebooks in a stationer’s near Parque México. They didn’t have any, but I chatted for a bit with the Spaniard at the counter. He was listening to opera, and had a blunt pencil behind his ear. A faded Madrid accent, like the globes in the window that had faded in the sun. His shirt sleeves were rolled up, and a packet of Camels was wedged under his right cuff. A gruff voice, a fatherly tone. Dusty dissertations, styrofoam solar systems in dirty plastic bags, pens, pencils, abacuses. A stationery shop with the objects my brother and I used to buy all that time ago. Maps. Those maps he remembered he needed late one Sunday evening. All those objects that were once called ‘classroom essentials’ and now hardly seem essential at all. I liked that man and his stationery shop, so resistant to the passing of time, as if in denial about the present, listening to opera, enjoying his cigarette behind the counter, under a white light that gave character to the smoke. I asked him about Ideal notebooks; he said he knew of them but hadn’t had any in stock for years. As if rummaging in the bottom of a drawer, he eventually remembered he had a red Ideal diary in his storeroom at home, left over from a set a while ago. If I wanted to come back during the week, he could bring it for me. ‘For now, can I offer you a cigarette?’ he asked in his solemn, gruff voice. Standing in that stationery shop, with that man, would have been an excellent time to take up smoking again.

See? I’m like the notebook detective. A whodunnit that opens with a blank notebook lying motionless on the floor. You have to gather up the clues, solve the mystery of the twin notebook which lives, oblivious to the other’s exploits, on a different continent. A thriller on a small scale. Everyday life where very little happens: the crime of the epic.

Today I realised: Parque México and Parque España are very close together. Walking from one park to the other, I felt like I was getting closer to you. The two parks are about four or five minutes apart, just a few blocks. That short distance, like the words that separate Iberian Spanish from Mexican Spanish. But I find it reassuring to know that someone this evening – a man on a bicycle, a woman pushing a child in a pram, a teenager on a skateboard – is connecting Parque México with Parque España, as if those journeys were silently connecting us.

I had dinner with Guillermo. At one point he said: ‘Ah, yes, my twenty-four-year-old friend Proust, with the black eye.’ I enjoyed hearing that, it was as if he’d given me a toffee. I never buy them, but I like it when people give them to me.