My Documents by Alejandro Zambra was the first book I read once the pandemic was announced. I sat on the garden wall outside of the house I grew up in, as my sister in leggings star jumped in front of me. I was in a bra and pants, and it was mid-March, as we all know, and though it was cold I just wanted to feel bare, having been fenced in by walls and central heating and artificial light. I bought My Documents in a Blackwells in Oxford a month before, after interviewing in a blue suit for a role as a bookseller. The manager called me on the phone to say that I had secured the job, and despite spending only twenty minutes in the bookshop that year, I was paid for six months of work from then on. I spent the money on books, and felt it was a worthy exchange.
In My Documents, Zambra tells multiple short stories about computers and his, his relatives and his lovers’ relationships with these machines. I don’t remember enough to recount the stories properly, but I do remember being led by his narratives as I continued fusing relationships with my own friends in distant countries throughout isolation. Importantly, I was led most by his stories as I spent those early months heartbroken, digging through the online traces of the lives of women across the world who I, through deep research, knew were connected to a man from my past, in present tense. My computer was my accomplice. We were inseparable. As I slept, he slept in the same room. When I woke, I would turn him on.
One night, I decided to leave him switched on as I slept, listening to music, monitor whirring. I chose Frank Ocean’s Blonde album and played it on a loop all night, lulled by the echoing vocals and whim. Then, at around three in the morning, I was woken by an email notification, and slumped over to see who it was from. I recognised her name immediately. I knew all about her, her friends, her university degree. Her ambitions to become a teacher. I even knew where she lived – her family home, her high school. I had scrolled down her road from the desk chair in my room.
She had sent me an email to tell me that she, too, was struggling with the same person I had been left by a few months prior.
I remember respecting her brazen display of vulnerability. That she was fine with showing quite how much she knew about me, and contacting me to tell me that we were tied in some interpersonal, pixelated way. I also remember thinking that this bold expression of vulnerability would usually result in me wanting to be friends with someone, and that I could like her if I hadn’t spent hours at my computer hating her.
I filed the email unanswered, and left the album as it played Ocean’s Facebook Story into my soft-edged room. A conversation about technology and trust, disconnection through feigned connection, and proximity.
We were too similar, Isabel. I hate you. I’m sorry. I love you.
I got this girl before
And we was together since 3 years
And uh, I was not even cheating on her or what
And Facebook arrived and she wanted me to accept her on Facebook
And I don't want it because I was like in front of her
And she told me like, "Accept me on Facebook"
It was virtual, made no sense
So I say, "I'm in front of you, I don't need to accept you on Facebook"
She started to be crazy
She thoughts that because I didn't accept her
She thought I was cheating
She told me like, uh, "It's over"
I can't believe you
I said, "Come on, you're crazy" because like, yeah
I'm in front of you, I'm every day
Here in your house
That's, it means like it's jealousy
Pure jealousy for nothing
You know
Virtual thing
A few years before, I recognised the face of a woman I knew a boyfriend of mine had been talking to on an online dating app. I knew because I had been given his old phone and he had forgotten to wipe his applications from the device. I read through reams of messages between him and women within ten miles of where I was living, flirting with the idea of difference and distrust. This woman, whose name I knew, was looking at a trough of lemons in the Sainsbury’s local by my apartment and had no idea who I was. I stood beside her, looking at a trough of mangos. I smiled at her and she didn’t smile back. She was American, was in the city on a university exchange. Had come from a sorority. Her friends had very straight white teeth and she tilted her head to the side for photographs. She had blonde hair.
The only thing that stopped me from following her around was that my boyfriend would have found out. Trust is best kept intact from at least one side, I remember thinking. I would rather be the righteous and wronged, than the caught. There are fewer questions.
According to reality TV the only thing worse than being cheated on, is not knowing you’re being cheated on. I think the limitations of monogamy may be the problem, and that our limitless access to information through technology is incompatible with those rigid restrictions. Maybe.
Two strangers sit at a canteen table. They are each married but not to one another. They choose to sit together at lunch each day, between the stolen glances made at one another through the gaps in their computers. Over their trays of food, they ask one another questions about their childhoods, because their childhoods happened without their spouses. Their wife, their husband, need not come up. They need not be mentioned. Instead, the pair talk about holidays, cereal, music. They, for this hour, are in love in the way their lives and limitations allow. The love exists without trace or trust challenged. It is just as important as it is made out to be.
At some point over the hour, these unmentioned spouses, separately, have taken themselves over to this office, with a coffee or a birthday present in hand, or just because they are in the area. They ask the colleagues of their spouses where their spouse is, and then they watch through a window as their husband laughs, asks questions, stirs nervously. They knowingly recognise the meaning behind the facial expressions their wife is giving to this stranger, and so they retreat, eyes turn, wiser. Nothing is mentioned. It need not come up.
I'll be the boyfriend in your wet dreams tonight
You cut your hair but you used to live a blonded life
Wish I was there, wish we'd grown up on the same advice
And our time was right
Keep a place for me
I'll sleep between you all
It's nothing
I made you use your self-control
And you made me lose my self-control
I know you’ve got to leave
give up, just tonight
I know you’ve got someone coming
I know you’ve got to leave
I know you’ve got someone coming