And while my partner kept circling me I also knew what he was thinking and how he was responding to my thoughts and actions: I could almost say my ideas attracted his like echoes. At times his ideas invaded me with such irresistible force that I thought of him as an enemy as inexorable as fate. The force of these ideas was also that of the world and its habits, which made me sad in so many ways. Yet that morning I felt at peace with my partner. I had my own lot of sad habits, and although they might not agree with those of the world, I had to try to combine the two. Because I wanted to be let into the world I decided to adjust to it and allow some of my affection to spill out over everything and everybody. Then I discovered that my partner was the world — it was useless to try to shake him off. I had received my daily bread and my words from him. Besides, when he was representing only one person at a time — not the whole world as now — while I wrote down my memories of Celina, he had been a tireless companion who had helped me turn my memories, including those burdened with remorse, into writing — and that had been a great relief to me. So I can forgive him for smiling when I refused to enclose my memories in a grid of space and time. And I can forgive him for tapping his foot impatiently over my scrupulous insistence on unraveling the tissue of memory down to the last thread, until its last wisps melted into the water and the last breath of movement was nowhere in space and left the air undisturbed.
On the other hand, I have to thank him for the times he followed me at night to the edge of a river where I went to see the water of memory flow. When I drew some water in a jug and was saddened at how little and how still it was, he would help me invent other containers for it and comfort me by showing me its different shapes in the different vessels. Afterward we invented a boat in which to cross the river to the island where Celina’s house was. We would take along thoughts that fought hand to hand with our memories, knocking over or displacing many objects in the house. Some of the objects may have rolled under the furniture, and others we must have lost on our way back, because when we opened the bag with our hoard it was always down to just a few bones, and the small lantern we had been holding over the soil of memory dropped from our hands.
Yet the next morning we always turned what little we had gathered during the night into writing.
But I know the lamp Celina lit on those nights is not the same one that now lights up in memory. An immensity of time larger than the world separates her and the things lit up around her from me, blinding them to me. Caught in the air of that other time of theirs, under another sky, they have lost their memory, which is why they can’t remember me. But I remember them all and have lived with them and breathed them in the air of many different times, roads, and cities. Now, with my memories hidden in the dark air of the night and only that lamp on, I realize once again that they don’t recognize me and that their affection has become not only distant but oblivious of me. Celina and the other inhabitants of her room look at me sideways, or, when facing me, stare straight through me, as if there were someone behind me or I had never been in the room with them. Their looks are like the looks of mad people who have long forgotten the world. They are specters that don’t belong to me. Could it be that Celina and her lamp and chairs and piano are angry at me because I never went back to that house? Yet it seems to me that the child I was took them with him when he left and they are all still living together somewhere, and that must be what they are remembering. Now I’m someone else and when I want to remember the child I can’t: I don’t know what he looks like from where I am now. Something of him is still in me and I have kept many of the objects that were in his eyes, but his way of seeing and being seen by the “inhabitants” of the room is lost to me.
No One Had Lit a Lamp
Once years ago I was reading a story in the parlor of an old house. A bit of sunlight had been filtering in through one of the shutters. Slowly it had enveloped the people in the room and spread to a table with pictures of dead “loved ones.” I was having trouble bringing out my voice, as if squeezing notes from an instrument with a broken bellows. In the front chairs sat two widows, the ladies of the house. They were very old but still had thick hair done up in buns. I was reading listlessly, often raising my eyes. I tried not to look at the same person each time, but my eyes kept returning to the pale area between the collar and the bun of one of the widows. It was a settled face absorbed in a single memory that would still be with her for some time. At moments her eyes seemed like smoked glasses with no one behind them. Every now and then I remembered there were important people in the audience, and I did my best to breathe life into the story. One of the times my attention wandered I looked through the shutters and saw a statue with pigeons scrambling over it. Then, in the back of the room, I saw a young woman lean her head against the wall. Her wavy mane was spread out wide and I ran my eyes over it as if it were a plant growing along the wall of an abandoned house. It was too much of an effort for me to remember what I’d been trying to get across in the story, but sometimes the words alone and the habit of reading them in a certain way had an automatic effect and provoked unexpected laughter. I had already run my eyes a second time through the hair of the woman backed against the wall, and I wondered whether she had noticed. To avoid being indiscrete I looked out at the statue. While I went on reading I thought of the innocence with which the statue played a role it could not understand. Possibly it felt closer to the pigeons than to the self-important character it portrayed: it did not seem to mind having them flutter around its head or land on the scroll it held against its side. Suddenly I realized I was staring again at the head of the woman backed against the wall and that she had just closed her eyes. I struggled to recover the excitement I’d felt the first times I’d read the story: it was about a woman who went out on a bridge every night hoping to commit suicide but always met with some obstacle. The audience laughed when someone propositioned her one night and she was so frightened that she ran all the way home.
The woman against the wall was laughing too, turning her head right and left as if it lay on a pillow. By now I’d taught myself to shift my eyes from her head to the statue. I tried to imagine the character it portrayed but could think of nothing serious enough: perhaps he also had stopped taking himself as seriously as he used to in life and spent his time now playing with the pigeons. I was surprised when people smiled at my words again. I looked at the widows and noticed someone peering out the sad eyes of the one that seemed to be wearing smoked glasses. Once when I tore my eyes off the woman backed against the wall I didn’t look out at the statue but into another room where I thought I saw flames on a table. Some eyes in the audience followed mine, but it was just a vase with red and yellow flowers that had caught a bit of sunlight.