Lines on the furniture. Invisible lines. Lines of the novels we like and the novels we don’t like (yes, in separate cages). Blue lines in school exercise books. Perpendicular and parallel lines. Lines, rows, queues (did I mention that a woman queueing at the bank told me her twins experience all the same things, and that if you hit one the other suddenly gets a bruise?). Metro lines (remember when we were on the metro and you told me how as a boy you tried to run away from home by climbing through the bathroom window?). The line of the equator (this kind of line doesn’t exist, but it it’s not invisible either. It’s a strange category; what do we do with this phantom line?). Bloodlines, paternal, maternal.

Chuy is the woman who cleans the apartment once a week. She’s worked for me since before I moved in with Jonás. This afternoon she left me a Post-it on the table: ‘Just to say you forgot to buy my bleach again. Kindly buy me my bleach and my green scourers, not the yellow ones because you know the sponges on those don’t work, I don’t like them. Thank you.’

This morning I read something strange. From my taxi, I read in the window of an occult shop: ‘Love makes the ideal real’. I disagree with that window: love doesn’t make the ideal real. On the contrary, reality sends us in search of ideals. There’s no reverse gear, no opposite direction.

You know what? The government of this country isn’t ideal. Today I read a strange fact about Ancient Greece: the statue of Zeus at Olympia was twelve metres tall. The Lighthouse of Alexandria was one hundred and thirty-four metres tall. A building in Mexico City would easily be that tall, or taller. So how tall should the statue be of the president who’s left this country with such a horrific death toll?

A call from my friend Antonio. He told me he’d kicked the pavement so hard he hurt his foot. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because someone’s car was blocking mine outside my friend’s funeral,’ he said.

Are there ninety thousand pavements to kick throughout the length and breadth of the country?

Another thing I feel like saying to the window of the occult shop. I’d like to be a tarot card. If I were a tarot card I’d be the lady of pencils, pens and notebooks. Now everything’s done on computers, perhaps I could be a saint. The Paper Saint. The Holy Virgin of Stationery. The Xerox Madonna, they’d call me in some offices. Someone would pray to me every morning before putting on his tie.