XXI
When we think about the past, it’s hard to resist both dividing it up into blocks in accordance with the pattern of events that have made most impression on us and attributing powers to it that it does not have, allowing ourselves to believe that the arrival of a particular date had the ability to work some radical transformation on us. Until the death of my father, we say, I was like this or like that, when we should really say that on such and such a date, something that already existed inside us began to make itself manifest or visible. Such nonsense is merely the reflection of a still greater error of thinking, the belief that we change suddenly rather than gradually, as if we could not possibly be influenced by opposing but simultaneous impulses.
As it appears in my memory now, the impression I have when I look back at the era that began with the return of my mother, the recommencement of our life together, is one of change and permanence; as if when travelling along an old provincial road relegated to premature neglect by the creation of a highway or by steady depopulation, we suddenly emerged, after a bridge or a turn or a particularly tight bend, onto a stretch rather different from all the previous ones, different enough to be noticeable, but in such a vague, indefinite way that we could easily be mistaken — it’s no wider, the surface is no better, and yet, nevertheless, there’s something different about the quality of the tarmac and the paint used on the road markings. Throughout those years, right up until now, really, the direction of travel has remained the same, as have the passing landscape and my fellow passengers, but there’s a tenuous, unpindownable shift in the quality of my memory, as if it had grown denser, with diverse, hitherto foreign elements battling to get into it.