- Loretta is arriving in an hour and we’re going to talk. We’ve agreed that I’m going to tell her a secret and that she’ll tell me a secret too. Then we’ll have a clarifying conversation. We’ll speak calmly, hopefully in a conspiratorial tone that becomes affectionate. Until then I’ll just make a few notes, to clear out some of the rubbish that’s in my head.
- My first instinct was to write these notes by hand in my notebook. I’m in a coffee shop in Oslo, where I’ve just paid seventy kroner for a watery americano, and have three notebooks (beige covers, A5) in my bag. (There are hundreds more in my suitcase).
- I also have the slim Parker pen that I like to think of as my mother’s pen, even though I bought it from Rymans three years after she died. But I think her pen was similar.
- But if I start writing in these notebooks I never get anywhere. I end up with a chaotic series of disconnected sentences and fragments, a few half-finished short stories, quotations, outlines and ideas. Mostly outlines. Which is fine, that’s what a notebook is for. But when I try to type them up like the good boy I want to be, and flesh them out into something more substantial, with a shape and form, one of two things happens:
(i) My eyes start glazing over, I feel ill, anxious, and I give up almost straight away.
(ii) I end up falling into a kind of mania, forget what I’m supposed to be copying, and end up typing away for hours, as if I’m a malfunctioning (or extremely well-functioning) machine.
- This isn’t good for me. This is why I stay in the notebooks, in the realm of private and provisional literature. But that’s not good for me either, since I’ve become addicted to privacy and provisionality. Maybe to a provisional form of privacy.
- If I want these words to lead anywhere, they need to go directly into the screen.
- This morning on the bus I swiped through my Kindle and opened a book at random. I read a few lines from ‘Why I’m So Clever’ from Nietzsche, a writer I don’t like but who sometimes makes me laugh. I don’t remember the exact quotation, but he wrote something like: swallowing words gives you a bad stomach. This didn’t make me laugh.
- I also remember that picture of him on the front of a tattered version of Thus Spoke Zarathustra that I got from a charity shop as a teenager, and which reminded me of my dad. Mainly it was the moustache. There’s a lot of writing about the moustache in one of the notebooks, but I’ve only managed to copy up a paragraph in another document, provisionally called Notes on a Moustache, which begins with its disappearance. The first line is: ‘One afternoon I got home from school and there was a strange creature in my dad’s armchair. It looked like an inflated, grotesque baby, with a pale face, blurry features, and incredibly thin lips, which looked as though they’d shrunken into the creature’s pock-marked face.’
- I’m also thinking of Munch’s portrait of Nietzsche. When I first saw it, I thought Munch painted him on the same bridge that’s in The Scream, and that there were obvious philosophical affinities I could sketch out in one of the notebooks. (I didn’t do this). It turns out it was a commission.
- I’ve been in Oslo for a few days and have barely slept. I have a headache that seems to have its own voice. It’s saying strange things like: the abyss isn’t where you think, don’t lose your will. It’s possibly Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice, or Werner Herzog’s.
- I’m not going to lie in these screen notes but I can leave things out. I’m tempted to leave out the fact that I think I read Nietzsche this morning to give me courage and improve my self-esteem. Or that when I have a bad stomach I sometimes think I’ve accidentally woken up with Nietzsche’s intestines, deranged by too much fruit.
- Somewhere in the back of one of the notebooks there’s a post-it note where I’ve copied a line from Gombrowicz’s Diary: ‘I’m not a serious person.’
- I don’t want to speculate about what Loretta’s secret is. I think it might be to do with something she’s remembered from her past, or my past. She has a suspicious mind.
- The problem with the screen is that I delete and skip ahead. And even though I’m a bad typist (and only use my middle and ring finger on each hand) I type too quickly: still behind the sentences in my head, but at a speed that feels like I’m trying to catch up with them. When I write by hand, even though I usually write quite frenetically and scruffily, it’s still slow enough that there’s no hope of catching up with the sentences. Some (maybe most of them) get lost, and it’s these lost sentences that possibly contain the truth, and the secret I should share with Loretta.
- Before Loretta insisted that we meet this afternoon for our secret conversation, my plan for the day was to copy up a story I have in another notebook, called Extraction. The premise is that a guy who lives as a shut-in wakes in the middle of the night with an unbearable toothache, which he believes he’s contracted from Thomas De Quincey, who first took opium as an attempted cure for a toothache. This is a true story, which I don’t want to say too much about for now.
- Inside the screen, I also have a document called Neverending stories. It’s a list of all the titles of stories I’ve started, and sometimes convince myself I’ve finished. The list is currently 247 items long.
- I feel like I should have bought Loretta some flowers. I’m not sure I’ve ever bought her flowers. She’s interested in them, but I don’t know which ones she likes.
- I’ve tried to give up writing in the notebooks many times. It feels a bit like I’m giving up smoking, even though I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life. It’s truer to say it feels a bit like I’m trying to give up pretending I live inside Zeno’s Conscience. It’s also true to say that the list is helping me to remain on an even keel in these screen notes, so I don’t end up imitating Italo Svevo’s style, which is supernaturally ironic but somehow manages to sustain itself. But I want to be serious here, a little bit serious.
- I did end up copying Zeno Cosini by trying psychoanalysis for a while. At first I read about it, or tried to. I don’t think I ever finished a paper, or the executive summary of a paper, never mind a book. (I agreed with Zeno’s summary of psychoanalysis: it’s very easy to understand, but it’s very boring.) Then I went to speak to someone, an old man who sat in a creaky desk chair, and spent all of our sessions turning gently from left to right. I think he had back issues. For weeks I didn’t say anything. Then I said a lot, and made some nasty discoveries. Eventually, in one session, I told him that his constant fidgeting was really irritating. He shouted: it is, isn’t it? Fucking infuriating, actually!
- Actually, I did smoke once. There was a strange period when a few of my friends started playing tennis. We went to the courts at the university, which you were supposed to pay for, but we never did. We played a few bad games of tennis, joked around, and then smoked. I just pretended to smoke, until one of the boys said: you can’t fake it, you have to inhale. Then I smoked, I inhaled deeply, until my throat started itching and I coughed like mad. I haven’t played tennis again, even though Loretta really wants to.
- I remember reading somewhere that Nietzsche’s friends called him Fritz. I also remember Borges’s friends called him Georgie.
- I also remember a line from Alan Pauls’s diary: ‘So tired of being a man. Could there be a girl inside my body?’ I wonder the same. I also wonder why I imagine I’m a little girl when I’m writing in the notebook (which I have an answer to) and why all the stories that I’ve written and half-written that are any good, and tend to be very autobiographical, are from the perspective of women.
- When I’m in a certain mood, when I fantasise about being pummelled into a little pile of dust and put away in Loretta’s jewellery box, I copy down a few lines at random from Clarice Lispector.
- Loretta has just messaged: delayed, I’ll still be another couple of hours. Perfect. I haven’t gotten anywhere yet, but I’m enjoying myself.
- I’m trying to give up other people’s words, which will never run out.
- I note the words of Sofia Samatar: ‘Now I feel more intensely than ever the desire for an endless text. It’s the only solution to the problem of literature.’
- When Pauls asks if there’s a girl inside his body, he goes on to say: ‘I’ve no idea.’ I think he has an idea.
- As a child I used to like going to the tip with my dad. I don’t even know what we threw away. I think he probably liked looking at those huge mounds of rubbish, in the same way that other people like looking at wrecked sculptures in galleries. I liked it too.
- I try not to copy Perec. But I remember reading A Man Asleep in Paris, a book which depressed me, and allowed me to pretend my depression was someone else’s. I was there for a couple of months with a friend, staying in a grotty twin room. We were allegedly there for an intensive French course, but I think we went to two classes. I spent a lot of time at the cinema, watching the same film three times a week, which I won’t name either. About halfway through the trip, my friend disappeared. I assumed he’d met a woman or been abducted. He messaged me a couple of days later, saying: sorry, I had to leave. I didn’t reply, and I never heard from him again.
- Several of the notebooks are dedicated to my mother’s dying and death. About twenty in total, I think.
- I remember the section in A Man Asleep when the narrator suddenly remembers Bartleby: ‘Long ago in New York, a few hundred yards from the groynes where the last Atlantic breakers wash ashore, a man let himself die.’ Despite growing up by the sea, I didn’t know what a ‘groyne’ was and had to look it up. (For obvious reasons, I didn’t mention this to the psychoanalyst.)
- In these screen notes I’m not going to get into Bartleby, probably the most over-interpreted figure in the history of literature (rivals: Hamlet, Faust, Madame Bovary, Jesus Christ). But I will mention that I think Bartleby’s problems derived from being screened off in the office straight away, and that if he’d just been given a morning to observe the others, not necessarily interact with them, he might have learned how to behave and have a good time.
- Last night we met Loretta’s friend, Emilia, who is considering divorcing her husband (I almost wrote boyfriend). He’s getting into weird stuff, she said, he’s joined a reading group at work, they were reading Schopenhauer and then Nietzsche I think. I didn’t say anything, but she could read what I thought on my face. Which was something like: you can’t read Nietzsche seriously at this age, you need to get it out of the way early. Later is too late.
- One of the notebooks, I’m ashamed to write, is a complete transcription of A Man Asleep. (Nota bene: I typed too quickly and ‘transcription’ was auto-corrected to ‘conscription’.)
- I really should just send Loretta a link to my Google Docs account, and make her the editor. That would also render this exchange of secrets unnecessary.
- After my conversation with Loretta, I’m thinking about going to the Munch Museum and staring for a few minutes at The Sick Girl. If we make it in time, they have free tickets this evening.
- I have no idea what Loretta’s secret is. It might be something like: I was just joking about moving to Oslo, we can go back to Barcelona. It might be something I already know, but that she isn’t aware I know (for example, that for a brief period she was in love with my brother, Eduardo). Maybe she wants to let herself die, maybe she’s bought me some new trainers. As I said, I don’t want to speculate.
- My mother didn’t die yesterday, or maybe today. It was a few years ago, not long after Loretta and I met at a lecture by Javier Marias. We always say ‘a lecture by Javier Marias’, even though Javier Marias wasn’t there. It was a lecture about Javier Marias. It was given by an old man who spoke very slowly. I remember him as having a ‘cadaverous bearing.’
- I don’t know when I conscripted myself to the notebook. I only had the idea of writing anything at all beyond essays for university when I turned thirty, which is way too late. Usually people who want to be writers get started early. As kids they scribble away under the covers, and as teenagers write diaries and fake novels, even creating their own pretend literary magazines, with mastheads and everything.
- I remember that Rilke was Rodin’s secretary for a year or so in Paris. And also that when he was a child, his mother dressed him as a little girl and called him Sophie. I don’t have a headache any more.
- For a split second in the cafe window I can see the silhouette of Robert Walser, lingering outside the Copyists’ Office for the Unemployed in Zurich, hoping there might be some work going.
- I think my first idea for a novel was to write a fictionalised version of the life of Robert Walser. And then I found out that Enrique Vila-Matas had already done something similar, in a style I couldn’t hope to emulate. For a few minutes I was furious and despondent. Then I was happy that I didn’t have to write a novel.
- I also think two or three of the notebooks about my mother are specifically about her corpse, which we found in her bedroom. She’d been there for a few days. It was rotten, yellow and cold.
- Now I’m always glad when I find out my ideas aren’t really mine and have already been written. My ideal is to be a writer whose books have already all been written by other people.
- These notes aren’t cleaning up my head at all. I’ve almost completely forgotten how I was planning to work out what to confess to Loretta. I’m sure it’ll be in one of the notebooks.
- The other document I have open is quite a portentous little story which I don’t like. I’ve just read it back and it embarrasses me. It’s to do with secrecy, but I don’t think it’s related to the secret I’m supposed to tell Loretta. I’ll paste the opening here: ‘For years (maybe the most important years) J organised his life around the secret thing. The secret thing involved mixing up different feelings with each other; it involved obsessive control; it involved realising that there was no point hiding from his mother, who he didn’t realise also wore a disguise.’
- Why was I writing like that? Who the hell is J?
- I really should be sitting outside but I forgot my sunglasses. Also, I don’t think I’ll be able to see the screen very well.
- I’m starting to wonder about the glimpses of my family in these notes. In my head I have the idea of writing either (a) subtle, slim, associative books about each of my family members, or (b) a huge, neverending family saga. Obviously, I won’t manage either of these. I know this because I haven’t written titles for them in Neverending stories.
- The other options, if I can’t get a free ticket to the Munch Museum: the library that overlooks the Oslofjord, to read the latest issue of Sight and Sound (which costs 200 kroner to buy). Or I could go to the National Theatre, buy an ice cream, and sit on a bench and stare at the statue of Ibsen. Specifically, Ibsen’s beard.
- There’s not much time left to consider these options. Loretta is here.
- She’s sitting on the bench outside. She looks ill, much worse than me, but also beautiful. She’s just stood up. But she’s not moving. It’s not clear to me yet if she’s going to come inside or walk right past.
- A line from Edvard Munch’s diary, which always makes me want to laugh (though I never do): ‘from my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.’
- In fact she looks elderly. She has a little wheelie suitcase with her. She’s just taken out a notebook. It could be one of mine, but maybe it’s an empty one.
- I remember last year we visited Wittgenstein’s house in Skjolden, about five hours north. There was more or less no information about Wittgenstein in the house, which I liked. I remember there was a clarinet in his bedroom, which he kept in an old sock. It was possible to rent the house, and Loretta and I joked about going to live there and freezing to death together in the winter.
- I hadn’t realised until now, but I really need to go to the bathroom. It’s occupied and there’s a queue.
- Loretta is writing in the notebook now. She writes easily, she doesn’t even need a table.
- I need to close the screen, I need to get out of here. There are toilets in the Munch Museum. I just need to get there in time to pick up a free ticket.
- Maybe Loretta will be happy to forget about all this and come with me to the museum. We can walk in silence, holding hands, looking at paintings we’ve seen hundreds of times before. But she hasn’t looked up yet, not once.
- I’ll have to be the one to make a move. I have nothing else to write (to type) anyway: just an endless text of rubbish, nonsense, the usual…
*