Note to Self
by Dominic Hilton
April 2022
The perils of a lifelong addiction to note-taking.
There were sixteen of us in total, wilting on foldable lawn chairs in the sweeping grounds of a family estancia one hundred and twenty kilometres north-west of Buenos Aires. Heavy sunbeams pressed through a copse of tall and slender trees supposedly shading us, the pitiless rays roasting my forearms and making me wish to God I hadn’t worn starchy, cotton-twill trousers.
Long, cool drinks were being served by a sixty-year-old woman in a floaty cerulean summer dress, but the ice cubes melted instantly, leaving a foul taste on my tongue. The post-lunch conversation was flagging as everybody strained to stay conscious. Earlier, we’d feasted on huge platters of home-grilled thymus gland and small intestine stuffed between pillowy balls of bread. A lissom mother with black plaited hair was now breast-feeding her lethargic new-born son as she monologued about growth mindset in adolescent boys.
I interrupted her to ask, “What’s the bird perched on the fence post over there?”
The nursing woman glared at me. Our host, a skilled horseman and former airline pilot named Enrique, lifted his sunglasses from his small, mischievous eyes. “That?” He squinted across the scorched meadow, waving a leathery hand. “It’s nothing. Just a low-quality eagle. Pay it no attention.”
Next to me, someone started snoring. I turned to face Enrique, pulling my Ray-bans down to the tip of my rapidly reddening nose. “What did you say?”
“I said, ignore it,” he repeated, with a drowsy sigh. “It’s nothing to write home to England about. Why don’t you admire my fine horses instead? Just look at them now, over there. Forget about that eagle. It’s low-quality.”
The baby stirred at its mother’s swollen breast, and I dug a hand into my damp trouser pocket, pulling out my iPhone.
Enrique wagged a disapproving finger. “You won’t get a signal out here, I’m afraid.”
“That’s fine,” I told him.
“Are you going to take a photograph?”
“Maybe. In a minute.”
“Locus of control,” said the mother, holding court again. Enrique mumbled to himself in unintelligible Spanish as I created a new note on my phone, writing, “Low-quality eagle”.
“I’m not being rude,” I say, when forced to explain myself. “I’m just writing down the ridiculous thing you said.”
For as long as I can remember, I’ve jotted down scraps of things I hear, or see, or read, or occasionally even think. Smartphones are a problem because people always assume that I’m messaging somebody better, or updating Twitter, when I should be living in the moment, enjoying their company, disregarding low-quality eagles. “I’m not being rude,” I say, when forced to explain myself. “I’m just writing down the ridiculous thing you said.”
“Why?” they ask, and I don’t know what to tell them.
I mean, sure, it’s chiefly to make them look quirky or foolish in something I’ll maybe write one day. But it’s also an addiction, born of having a brain fried by university, where I spent long, thoughtful weekends huddled with my sophisticated classmates in underground caverns, abusing amyl nitrite. Experience has taught me that if I don’t write something down, ten or fifteen seconds later it’s erased forever from my memory. “For fuck’s sake, man, is it really necessary for you to write down every tiny fucking thing that I say?” a cranky magazine editor once barked at me during a staff meeting.
I peered up from my legal pad. “You mean me? Yes, I’m afraid that it is. I’m…”
“You’re what? What are you?” The editor swung an irate arm towards a gaggle of interns quivering over in the corner. “Go ahead, enlighten us!”
“I’m… not as smart as you think.”
That job didn’t last long.
Years later, now self-employed, I was driving alone on a deserted motorway in central Portugal, singing along to a local radio station, when all of a sudden something went off in my cranium. Out of nowhere, I knew precisely what I thought about every philosophical, political and metaphysical conundrum I’d ever faced; what I’d always thought but had never before been able to intelligibly articulate. My entire worldview hovered right before me in the sharpest possible focus. Like Archimedes in his bath, I’d seamlessly connected the dots to form a spontaneous understanding of a previously unsolvable puzzle. Only, there was nowhere to pull over, so instead of yelling “Eureka!” I jerked the volume down on the radio and had a panic attack.
“You can’t do this to me!” I screamed to no one in particular, slamming my clammy palms against the steering wheel of the rental car over and over again.
Then, like a miracle, a great shiny petrol station appeared in front of me out of the shimmering Iberian air. At first, I thought it was a mirage, and my fury only increased. But when I swung a desperate right, screeching to an emergency halt in the garage’s gleaming forecourt, a pint-sized attendant in blue overalls darted for cover behind one of the pumps, and I knew the miracle was real. Fumbling madly for my phone—“Come on! Come ON! COME ON!”—I unlocked its home screen on the fourth try and created a new note, only to draw a complete blank. My once-in-a-lifetime epiphany had been replaced by the theme song to Fraggle Rock, a TV show I hadn’t watched or even thought about in thirty-plus years.
*
Last summer, I told that anecdote to a friend here in Buenos Aires. What annoyed me most was that I could recall the entire devastating scene in forensic detail, without the aid of a single note.
“Why is that?” I ranted to Marianela at the time. “What use is a brain that remembers not remembering something, but doesn’t remember the thing it didn’t remember? Who needs a brain that forgets its own guiding philosophy and principles, but effortlessly calls up the lyrics to ‘Down in Fraggle Rock’?”
“You’re right,” Marianela said with a cool shrug—and for some reason this annoyed me even more.
We were drinking coffee outside a family-run Colombian café in her barrio. At the table next to ours, a teenage couple were groping each other over their lavender lattes. I watched as the young man inspected, stroked, and then proceeded to lick his girlfriend’s exposed forearm. She was much prettier than him and I wondered if that had something to do with it.
“You’re writing that down?” Marianela said, eyeing me as I typed a note.
“Of course.”
“What for?”
I pocketed my phone. “I don’t know. I might use it one day.”
She looked over at the teenage couple. “OK...”
Silently reassessing our friendship, I turned my attention back to my espresso, and thought about something Joan Didion once wrote. (Or was it Susan Orlean? I’d made a note of it, somewhere.) A writer’s ability to jot a note at the crucial moment, she’d insisted, is the difference between being able to write and not being able to write.
I’d never forgotten that.
A year or so previously, I’d been sitting in another café, in another barrio, with a different companion. Her name was Flavia and I was labouring to interview her for a piece I was working on about the haphazard architecture of Buenos Aires. My abysmal Spanish was letting me down and the whole ordeal was already pretty awkward when all of a sudden loud sex noises started to echo around the café. At first, I tried to ignore them, but as I stared like a madman at my notepad, the amatory grunts and groans got progressively louder. Then a woman’s breathy voice started to repeat the line, “I want you to fuck me.”
I glanced up at Flavia, smiling uncomfortably, but she continued to just sit there, po-faced, her hands clasped tidily in her lap, and I wondered if maybe she didn’t understand the lyrics. That can’t be it, I thought. Everybody in the world knows what “I want you to fuck me” means—don’t they? And what about all the moaning and heavy breathing? That hardly leaves a great deal to the imagination. What is wrong with this wo—
“¿Todo bien?” asked the waiter.
He too appeared entirely oblivious to the porn movie soundtrack filling the space around us and I began to wonder if it was just me, if this was all perfectly normal, and I was just a massive prude.
The waiter floated away, and I flipped open a fresh page in my notebook as one of the lovers audibly climaxed.
“What are you writing?” Flavia asked.
“Nothing important,” I lied, forgetting all about our interview.
*
Before I started taking notes on my phone, I was all about notebooks. I filled hundreds of them, spanning nearly thirty years. Some were expensive and leather-bound and bought by people who cared for me while wishing I would pull my finger out. Others were cheaper and emblazoned with the cheery logos of my favourite sports teams. I’d carry one with me wherever I went. So long as I never looked at the crap I’d scribbled inside, they made me happy.
Now, all of those private notebooks are stored in hermetically sealed boxes bound in gaffer tape seven thousand miles away. If there’s gold hidden between any of their pages, I have no way of accessing it. I tell myself this is for the best, which it probably is. I never got around to organising or indexing any of the trivial observations, incomplete thoughts, half-cocked ideas and random names. And in an effort to cover life’s diverse themes, I’d taken to carrying around several notebooks, thereby multiplying the very problem I was attempting to overcome. Weirdly, pocket notebooks never seemed to fit into my pockets, convincing me that I had a wardrobe problem, too.
Then there was the inevitably cryptic nature of the jumbled and erratic notes I’d scrawled in haste. “Man with grapefruit” read one I still remember. The mind boggled—the same way it did for “Grieving penguin” and “Dog shit Mars bar”.
I filled hundreds of them.
As a student, I’d been inspired by an anecdote I’d heard about the filmmaker Emeric Pressburger. A Hungarian Jew by birth, Pressburger had fled the Nazis and ended up in Britain. Unable to speak English, he took to riding the London buses and eavesdropping on his fellow passengers’ conversations, which he’d copy verbatim into his notebook. This, so the story went, was why his scripts always sounded so authentic: he’d bothered listening to how ordinary people actually talked.
“That,” I said to my girlfriend, who was a novelist, “is my ticket. Instead of spending all of my time in the company of boffins, quaffing sherry in ivory towers as we deconstruct Kant, I need to get out there, amongst the hoi polloi, and record some of the bollocks they bang on about.”
“Go on then,” she said, shooing me out the door. “Be away with you.”
We were on holiday in North Yorkshire at the time, staying in a cottage she owned. That night, I took myself down to the seafront and sat in the shabby village pub, notebook at the ready. While I struggled to understand anything anyone around me was saying—“Wae”; “Tha’ sen”; “Si’ thi’”—I felt confident that if I could somehow get it right phonetically, like the notes Henry Higgins took snooping on Eliza Doolittle, it was only a matter of time before I won my first Booker Prize.
Unfortunately, the two burly fellas at the table next to mine got wise to my scheme.
“Wahr are thee writin?” asked the man in an orange fisherman’s cap.
“Are thee spyin on us?” asked the other, making fists with his tattooed hands. He shouted across the pub. “Ar fink this nancy be spyin on us!”
I slipped my notebook into the pocket of my coat, professing my innocence through a spineless grin.
“Clear off thee snoopin ponce!” said the landlord, seizing my half-full pint glass, and I made haste for the exit, my tail firmly between my legs.
*
Years later, when I first arrived to start a new life in Buenos Aires, I sat wide-eyed in the back of a speeding taxi from the airport, wondering what I’d got myself into. My notes from the time make informative reading.
Customs: automatic doors malfunction, trapping everybody inside arrivals hall. After what seems like hours, nonagenarian security guard shuffles through crowd. He attempts to hold open the defective doors, revealing a gaping hole in the armpit of his uniform, then collapses operatically onto the floor.
Dozens of workers stand around doing nothing as two plane loads of suitcases are crushed and flattened by a defective baggage carousel.
Crumbling buildings, filth. Men squatted around makeshift charcoal parillas on the hard shoulder. Communist graffiti everywhere.
Old-fashioned newspaper kiosk selling picture books of Mao Tse-Tung and Generalissimo Franco.
Everyone looks like they’ve just rolled out of bed. Taxi driver rubs his sleepy eyes as he controls steering wheel with his knees while travelling at 160kmh between two lanes.
Bearded man on grassy knoll at side of motorway having wank.
Nearly five years later, I’ve developed a bit of a reputation in my adopted city: one I’m not entirely ashamed of. There’s always an anxious moment when I’m talking to someone and I reach for a notebook or my phone, saying, “You of course don’t mind if I…?” But it’s usually broken by someone else who’s previously fallen victim to my habit. “Don’t talk to him!” they warn. “He’ll quote you in one of his essays and make you sound like an idiot!”
I’ll roll my eyes, pulling a face that says, “Don’t listen to that nut. I’m just trying to understand this endlessly fascinating country—which is why I’m so interested in all the insightful things about it that you have to say!” Then, with a shake of my head to disguise my delight, I’ll jot down the peculiar remark they’ve just made, thinking, Who says that?
I absolve myself in the knowledge that if it wasn’t for my notetaking, all those meaningful moments would be lost in time, like low-quality eagles that spot you admiring them on fence posts and soar away into the infinite oblivion of the Pampas. If it wasn’t for my notes, I wouldn’t remember any of it. Not the jaded German businesswoman who, clutching her brow over a skillet of grilled cheese one day, told me, “To do business in Argentina, you need to be—what’s the phrase?—fucked in both earholes.” Not even the teenage paperboy who, handing two different newspapers one morning to the headmaster of a Buenos Aires bilingual school, said, “Here’s today’s newspaper. And because of the general strike tomorrow, here’s tomorrow’s newspaper.”
*
When we were children, my sister Sophie and I formed a gang with two of our friends, Persephone and Tamara. We called ourselves “The Fab Four”, a name which embarrassed me even back then. In lieu of roaming treacherous inner-city hoods hunting for rivals to shoot or stab, we’d hide behind dark panel doors, under mahogany dining tables and inside antique armoires, armed only with miniature pencils. The solitary mission of the Fab Four was to eavesdrop on our parents as they sprawled together in pastel casuals on their plush leather sofas, spilling their fashionable drinks whilst gobbling platters of hors d’oeuvres and crudités. Being adults, they’d gossip and guffaw for hours on end about things we didn’t understand—but somewhere, unseen, in the shadows, the Fab Four would be listening.
Upon their initiation, each new member of the Fab Four was assigned a secret notebook, into which he or she pledged to record all the shocking things we were convinced our parents said whenever they thought we were out of earshot. Whole afternoons and evenings were thus spent dotted around lowly-lit living rooms, tucked and squatted in uncomfortable hiding places, busting for the loo, the tang of musky French perfume and cheese fondue filling the air as our miniature pencils scratched feverishly at lined pages.
“They talked for ages about Out of Africa,” Persephone moaned one evening as we lay around her bedroom, comparing notes.
Tamara hung her head backwards off the end of the bed, the ends of her hair tickling the carpet. “I got that,” she said, tapping her notebook with the blunt end of her pencil.
“Me too,” said Sophie, who’d stood behind a floor-to-ceiling curtain in the living room for three and a half hours. “Are we moving to Africa?”
Slouched in the window seat, I said I’d heard regular mention of A Very Peculiar Practice and again, my fellow gang members concurred, worrying what it meant.
“Your dad said the word “breasts” four times,” Tamara added, tallying her notes, and we all agreed that this information alone proved the Fab Four would never ever die.
It did, of course. In due time, two separate incidents precipitated its hapless demise. The first of these involved a bright idea of Tamara’s to hide inside a wall-mounted drinks cabinet. After half an hour or so, the cabinet could no longer support the extra weight of a nine-year-old girl, and detached itself from the wall, crashing into a heap of rosewood and glass on the carpet and giving our parents the fright of their lives.
“What the hell were you doing in there?” they asked, and spread-eagled amongst the ruins, Tamara had little option but to confess all.
The second, more serious incident involved my sister, who by that time had become obsessed with recording everything that she purposely overheard. One night, as I was tucked under my Star Wars sheets, pretending my sleigh bed was the fastest spaceship in the galaxy, I heard a distinctive creak and Sophie slipped into my bedroom without knocking.
“Can’t you read the sign?” I shouted, before untangling myself from my duvet and noticing that she was in floods of tears. “What is it?” I asked, sitting up against my pillows. “What’s happened?”
“Mum and dad,” Sophie spluttered, waving her little notebook at me. “They’re…”
“What? Just say!”
“They’re… getting a divorce.”
Or so my sister tells me. It’s amazing, really, but I have absolutely no recollection of the entire episode. I’m going on what Sophie, who now has two kids of her own, never stops reminding me. “How can you have wiped it from your memory?” she scolds. “It was a formative moment of my childhood. Meanwhile, you’ve forgotten the whole sodding thing. Seriously, what’s the matter with you, you freak?”
“I guess I didn’t take any notes,” I tell her with a shrug, and she huffs, rolling her eyes at me.
Apparently, we sat together for hours on the stairs, me in my too small Mr. Men pajamas, Sophie in her billowing frilly nightgown, listening through the banisters to our parents fight in the living room about their imminent separation. If I close my eyes and force myself to imagine hard enough, I can feel my sister’s arm through mine, her heart-shaped head bobbing against my neck as hot tears and snot flow down her cheeks, dropping into the lap of my flannel bottoms. I can even picture her little notebook sitting idle beside us on the carpeted stairway, waiting to be opened.
