While I hadn’t quite ceased being who I was in order to become who I was meant to be, I was put through some very peculiar agonies. The person I had been and the man I was becoming would always have something in common: their memories. But as the memories were transferred to the man I was becoming, even while they remained within the same visual range and seemed factually unchanged, they were taking on a new soul. On this new man’s face there was the hint of a moneylender’s smile as the memories were appraised before being pawned. The moneylender’s hands weighed the memories, not for their personal value, loaded with private feelings and associations, but for their intrinsic worth.
Then came another stage: the smile turned bitter because the pawned memories no longer weighed in the moneylender’s hand: they were made of sand, suggesting age, that was all — the memories and times stolen by the moneylender were worthless. But there followed an even worse stage: when the moneylender had smiled his bitter smile over his useless theft he still had a soul, but now he reached total indifference. His smile faded and he finally became what he was destined to be: an empty railway car, detached from life.
At first, that evening, when I started remembering and being someone else, I saw my past life as if it were in the next room. I had once been in that room, I had lived there; more than that: it had been my room. And now I saw it from another room, the room where I lived now, without quite knowing what distance separated the two rooms in time and space. In that room next door I saw my poor lost self in the days when he was innocent. And I saw him not only seated at the piano in the lamplight with Celina, his mother and grandmother looking on, never suspecting his unrequited love, but with other loves as well. From all times and places I saw persons, furniture, feelings gather for the ceremony organized by the “inhabitants” of Celina’s parlor. For a moment they were all jumbled and confused, as if bits of old movies were being mixed together, but then those that belonged in the same room recognized each other and began to form a separate group for each room: they seemed to have an unerring instinct for picking each other out, even if on reflection they proved to have been wrong. (Some nevertheless refused to regroup, but had to in the end, while others stonewalled and managed to stay together even if they were in the wrong place, and still others vanished as lightly as papers blown off a table by the wind. Some of those that blew off flitted around uncertainly, drawing our eyes after them, until they settled in some other familiar spot.) With these exceptions, I can say that all the places, times, and memories attending the ceremony, no matter what subtle threads or sympathies united them, were totally oblivious to others not of their same lineage. When a particular lineage was rehearsing its memories, it remained for some time in a spot next to the one from which I was observing it. Suddenly the performance would stop and the players would repeat a scene or go back to one that had happened long before. But the stops and abrupt changes of scene were muted, as if the missteps occurred in silk slippers. The players were never ashamed of having made a mistake and could repeat the same smile a thousand times before it wore out or looked strained. In the search for some scene’s lost detail there was always a longing that brought everything back to life. When an extraneous detail introduced its own lineage, the previous lineage vanished, and if it reappeared in a while it showed no resentment toward the intruder.
The sympathy uniting these various lineages that totally ignored each other, never exchanging so much as a look, hovered over them: it was the innocent sky under which they all breathed the same air. In addition to being in the same room, at about the same time, to rehearse their memories, they had something else in common: the measured pace provided by the spectator’s breathing. It was as if a single orchestra were playing for different ballets. But the spectator — me, in other words, just before I became someone else — sensed that the inhabitants of those memories, although directed by him and magically obedient to his every whim, were also capable of exercising a hidden but proud will of their own. It seemed as if on their way down the road in time between their first performance — when they were not yet memories — and now, they had run into someone who had turned them against me, and since then they had acquired a certain independence; and now, although they could not help being under my orders, they accomplished their mission in a distrustful silence. I could tell they weren’t fond of me, that they wouldn’t look at me and that, while resigned to the fate I was imposing on them, they did not even remember my appearance: if I had entered their sphere they probably would not have recognized me. In any case, their different mode of existence made it impossible for me to touch them, speak to them or be heard by them: I was condemned to being the person I now was, and if I tried to repeat those events they would never be the same. They were the events of another world and it would be useless to chase after them. But why couldn’t I be happy watching those events live in their world? Could it be that my breath clouded or harmed them now because I was sick in some way? Might those memories be like children with a sudden instinct to reject and despise their parents? Would I have to renounce those memories as a bad father disowns his children? Unfortunately, something of the sort was going on.
The room I now occupied also contained memories, but they had no innocent sky overhead nor the pride of belonging to some lineage: they were inevitably attached to a man “with his tail between his legs,” whose accomplices they had become. These memories did not arrive from distant places or know any ballet steps: they came from underground, loaded with remorse, and slithered around under a heavy sky, even during the brightest hours of the day.
The painful and confusing story of my life separates the child I was in the days of Celina from “the man with his tail between his legs.”
Some women have seen Celina’s child in the man while talking to him. I hadn’t known the child was visible in the man until the child himself noticed it and told me he was visible in me, and that the women were seeing him and not me. Moreover, he was the first to attract and seduce them. The man later seduced them by appealing to the child. The man learned deceit from the child — who had much to teach him in that area — and practiced it the way children do. But he did not take into account his remorse or the fact that, although he practiced his deceit only on a few persons, they would multiply in the events and memories that haunted him night and day: which was why, fleeing his remorse, he wanted to be let into the room that had once been his, where the inhabitants of Celina’s parlor were now gathered for their ceremony. And the sadness of being rejected and even totally ignored by those inhabitants increased when he remembered some of the persons he had deceived. The man had deceived them with the wiles of the child, but had then, in turn, been seduced by the child he had just used, when he had fallen in love with some of his victims. These were late loves become mythical or perverse with age — and that wasn’t the worst of it. Worse still was the fact that the child had been able to attract and seduce the man he later became because his charms were more powerful than those of the man, and because life held more charm for him.