*
One night I had a strange dream. I was in Celina’s dining room. There was a family of blond furniture: the sideboard and a table with its chairs around it. Then Celina was running around the table. She looked a bit different and skipped along, like a little girl, and I chased her, holding a stick with the tip wrapped in a piece of paper.
II
Something unexpected has happened and I’ve had to interrupt my story. For days now I’ve been at a standstill. Not only am I unable to write, but it’s a great effort for me to live in the present, to live forward. Without meaning to, I had started to live backward, and there came a moment when I couldn’t even live many of the events of that past time but could only concentrate on a very few, perhaps a single one, and I preferred to spend night and day just sitting or lying here. In the end I had lost even my desire to write. And, as it happens, this desire was my last tie to the present. But before this tie came loose, the following occurred: I was quietly enjoying one of those nights of the past. Although I had been stepping slowly, like a sleepwalker, suddenly I tripped over the wisp of an idea and fell into a moment full of events. The place into which I’d fallen was like an irresistible center of attraction, where a number of muffled secrets lying in wait for me seized and tied down my thoughts, and it has been a struggle ever since. My first impulse, after recovering from my surprise, was to give the secrets away. Then I started to feel more relaxed and to find a certain cozy pleasure in dwelling on those secrets, watching them silently at work, and I let myself sink into the pleasure without bothering to free my thoughts. That was when my last ties to the present gradually came undone. But at the same time something else happened: among the thoughts tied down by the muffled secrets there was one that broke loose on its own after a few days. What I was thinking just then was, “If I spend much longer in the past I’ll never get out again and I’ll go mad: I’ll be like one of those unhappy souls trapped by a secret in his past for the rest of his life. I’ve got to row with all my might back to the present.”
“Up until a few days ago I was in the present because I was writing. Now I’ll do the same, even if the only land in sight is the island with Celina’s house and I have to keep returning to it. I’ll look through it again in case I missed something.”
Then, preparing to go back over those same memories, I came on a lot of strange events. Most of them had occurred not back in the days of Celina but quite recently, while I was remembering and writing and perceiving the obscure or only dimly understood links between those events of the past and the ones that occurred later, during all the years I went on living. I couldn’t quite recognize myself or make out what moods or impulses those distant events and the more recent ones had in common, or if they were equivalent in some way, or whether they might not all disguise the same mystery.
So now I’ll try to tell what was happening to me a short time ago, while I remembered those days in the past.
One summer night I was walking home to my room, tired and depressed. I had let myself sink under the dead weight that thoughts take on when you feel the perverse need to pile them up for no particular reason other than to make yourself even more miserable and to convince yourself that life has lost its charm. Perhaps my disenchantment showed in my willingness to play with danger and risk having things become as bad as I thought they were, or maybe I was preparing for the next day’s imaginings, and the feeling of spent hope was in itself a charm. Perhaps while I foundered in despair I was clutching the last few coins in the bottom of my pocket.
When I got home you could still see the white shirts of the neighbors who had come out to sit in the cool evening air under the crooked old trees, which hadn’t been pruned yet. Later, in bed, with the light out, it felt good to complain and be a pessimist, stretching your legs out in sheets that were whiter than the neighbor’s shirts.
It was on such a night, when I was running past times through my mind, carelessly, the way you let coins slip through your fingers, that the memory of Celina visited me. I was no more surprised than I would have been by the visit of an old friend who was in the habit of dropping in every once in a long while. No matter how tired I felt, I could always manage a smile for such a visitor. The memory of Celina returned the next day and for several days after that. By then I was accustomed to having the visitor around and I could leave him there, attend to other matters, and come back to him later. But while I was gone he was up to things I didn’t know about. I can’t say what small changes he made in my room or whether he was in touch with other people now living nearby. Once, when he came in and greeted me, I even thought he was looking past me, as if addressing someone in the back of the room. But he and other memories weren’t the only ones who looked beyond me: certain thoughts also went through me and beyond, after accompanying me for a few minutes in my sadness.
And then one night I woke up in anguish when I became aware of another presence in the room. It must be a friend — or perhaps not exactly a friend: a partner. It was distressing suddenly to realize that you had been sharing your work with someone else and that the one in charge was the other person. I didn’t have to look far for proofs: they were plainly visible behind my suspicions, like shapes behind a veil. As they burst into the present and took it over, I was thinking the “someone” in the back of the room communicating over my shoulder with my memories must have been this partner of mine, who was speculating with those memories as if they belonged to him: he was the one who had written my story. No wonder I distrusted the precision the story took on whenever Celina appeared in it: it was nothing like what I myself was really going through. So then I tried to be myself alone, to find out how I myself remembered things — and I waited for the events and memories to recur.
On the last night of my theater of memories there is a moment when Celina comes in and I don’t know I am remembering her. She simply comes in — all my senses are aware of her. The fleeting moment is long enough for me to realize I have felt a shiver of pleasure because she has come. My soul settles down comfortably to remember, the way my body does in a seat at the movies. I can’t tell whether the image before my eyes is clear, whether I am seated too far back, who my neighbors are, or if anyone is watching me. I don’t know whether I am working the projector myself or even whether I came on my own or someone prepared the memory for me and brought me to it. I would not be surprised if it had been Celina herself: all these years, ever since I left her side, I may have been on threads stretching into the future but still controlled by her.
Celina does not always come to mind the way she came in the door of her parlor: sometimes she comes already seated next to the piano or in the act of lighting the lamp. I don’t remember her myself, with the eyes I have now: I remember the eyes that saw her then. The images that come to me now are transmitted by those other eyes, and so is the feeling that moves them. It is the original feeling I had for Celina. The eyes of the child in me stare in amazement but unsteadily. Celina may be caught in motion or just after she has moved, but her movements displace no air in space: they are the movements of remembering eyes.