It was in the course of that same evening, when I discovered I had been shut out of the world of innocence and its ceremonies, that I started to become someone else.
First I had realized the inhabitants of that world did not look at me because I was on the other side of memory, the one where you carried a load of remorse on your back, as firmly attached as a camel’s hump. Then I realized the two sides of memory were like the two sides of my body: I would lie on one and then the other, changing my position, as if I were having trouble going to sleep and couldn’t predict which side luck would favor. But until I fell asleep I was at the mercy of my memories, like a spectator obliged to watch two very different companies perform without knowing what scene or which memories would light up first, how they would alternate, or what the relations between the actors would be, because the theater and producer were always the same, usually the same author was involved and the main characters were always a man and a child.
Then, when it was clear I couldn’t do without the spectacle that, although vague and confused in its mixture of times, had such a lasting effect on the life I had to go on living into the future — then I started to be someone else, to change the present and the road leading into the future, to become the pawnbroker with nothing left in his hands to weigh, and to try to suppress the space where the performances took place. I had let my feelings languish: I was tired of suffering from those memories that treated each other like irreconcilable enemies. And since I had no feelings, I’d stopped being sad over myself and even over the uselessness of a stage emptied of its memories. I had also become as useless as if I’d been left guarding a fortress without soldiers, weapons, or supplies.
All that remained was my habit of pacing about and watching the thoughts arrive. They were like animals that kept returning to drink from a spot where there was no more water. None of them was burdened with feelings: they could be as sad as they pleased, they were only thoughts. Now I let them come as if I were lying under a tree and leaves were falling on me: I would see them and remember them only because they had fallen and piled on me. My new memories would be like a bundle of clothes piled on my head: as I walked I would feel their weight there but nothing else. I was like that stray horse I had seen in the street as a child. Now I was pulling a cart anyone could load with things: I wouldn’t be taking them anywhere and I’d soon be tired.
That night, after lying in the bed for a while, I opened my eyes in the dark, which emptied them. But there were already skeletons of thoughts stirring — I don’t know what worms had eaten the flesh off their ribs and calves. Meantime I seemed to be slowly, lazily unfolding an umbrella with no canopy.
That was how I spent the hours when I was someone else. Then I fell asleep and dreamed I was in a huge cage, surrounded by people I had known as a child. There were also a lot of calves going through a gate to the slaughterhouse. Among the calves was a little girl who was also headed for slaughter. The little girl kept saying she didn’t want to go because she was tired, and the people were laughing at the innocent excuse she gave to escape death: they saw no point in worrying over something you couldn’t get out of.
When I woke up I realized I had also seen the little girl in the dream as a calf. It was the feeling I’d had, as if her human appearance had been only a variation in form: that she was a calf and expected to be treated as such. Yet I’d been moved when she said she didn’t want to go because she was tired — and my face was bathed in tears.
The tide of anguish sweeping over me during my dream had almost drowned me. But now it was as if I had been thrown out on a beach where I felt a great relief. My sense of well-being increased as my thoughts became receptive to my feelings again and I gradually recovered myself. Not only was I no longer someone else but I was more attuned than ever to what I felt: the least thought, even the idea of a jug of water, affected me deeply. I loved my shoes standing there alone, unlaced, always so fondly side by side. I felt capable of forgiving everything — and of being forgiven, even by remorse.
It was not morning yet. Things were clearing up in me a little before daylight. I had decided to start writing. Then my partner reappeared: he had also survived, thrown out on another part of the beach. Somehow I’d known he would be back the moment I sat down to write my memories.
At first he had made himself felt in the usual way, as a presence, not physically there but threatening to walk in off the street disguised as some ordinary person from the world of everyday reality. Because, until that morning, I had been in one place and the world in another. Between the world and me there was a layer of dense air. On very clear days I could see the world through that air and also hear the noises in the street and the murmur people make when they talk. My partner was the representative of the people living in the world. But he was not always an enemy who had come to steal my memories and speculate with them. Sometimes he appeared almost in the guise of a mother warning me of a danger and awakening my instinct for self-preservation. At other times he scolded me for not going out into the world — and then, as if he were my mother scolding me, I lowered my eyes and didn’t see him — or he could appear as a friend advising me to write down my memories and appealing to my vanity. I felt closest to him when he evoked the presence of dear friends whose wise advice had helped me with my writing in the past. Sometimes I would even feel him put a hand on my shoulder. But at other times I didn’t want his advice or his presence in any of its forms. That was when I was sick with my memories, especially in the stage of the sickness when I was watching the specters of remorse in their dramatic performance and trying to glimpse my fate in the relations between different memories from different times. If I had touched lonely depths of suffering with my remorse, afterward I felt entitled to a more or less extended period of relief: suffering was the best food to appease the beasts of remorse. And my greatest pleasure was searching through different memories to see whether they shared any secret and whether their different events all expressed a similar sense of being. Then I would rediscover a forgotten childish curiosity in myself, as if I were returning to a house in a corner of the woods where I had once lived, surrounded by people whose furniture I was now going through, uncovering secrets I hadn’t suspected at the time, although everyone else may have known them. This was the task at which I most wanted to be left alone, because my partner would make so much noise coming in that he would scare off the silence that had settled on the objects in the house. Besides, my partner was a city man with city ideas: he would take many of the objects back to the city with him, changing their lives to make them serve those ideas; he would dust them off and dress them up in a new coat of paint, and they would lose their soul. But my greatest fear was for the things he would suppress, coldly wiping out their secrets until they had been stripped of all imprecision, like a dream emptied of everything that makes it fantastic and absurd.
That was when I ran from my partner — like a thief, deep into the woods, to be alone with my memories. When I thought there was no one near I would start going over the objects, trying to breathe an air of bygone days on them to bring them back to life. Then, having run all the way into the back of my mind, I had to push myself forward again. I wanted to make new sap flow through plants, roots, and tissues probably long dead or disintegrated. And the fingers of the mind delving down into itself not only found the old roots but discovered new connections, felt their way along new mosses branching out in new directions. But as the fingers sank through the waters in which the tips of the roots were submerged, it turned out they weren’t sensitive enough to perceive endings so subtle that they melted into the water, and the fingers lost their way. Finally, the fingers broke off from the mind that was guiding them and continued the search on their own. I had no idea what old connections there might be between the delving fingers and the lost roots — whether the roots, back in those days of the past, might not have arranged to grow the fingers capable one day of the twists and turns along devious paths with which they were now feeling their way back to them. I couldn’t think about this for long because I heard footsteps: probably my partner hiding in a tree, or behind it. Again I fled as if I were plunging deeper into the center of myself, shrinking from sight like a microbe contracting under a lens. But I knew I would never get away from my partner, who would soon be spinning around me, also changed into a microscopic body and drawn toward my center.