My mother or my grandmother has asked her to play and she sits down at the piano. My grandmother must be thinking, “The teacher is going to play”; my mother, “Celina is going to play”; and I, “She is going to play.” It must be summer because her arms are bare. In the lamplight they and their flared sleeves look translucent. The arms move in waves that end in hands, keys and sounds. Summer is when I can taste the night best with its plant-shaped shadows and hints of the unexpected, its waiting for something to happen, its false alarms, reveries, nightmares, and good food. I can also taste Celina most, and not just in my mouth: all her movements taste of her, so do her clothes and the shapes of her body. Her voice must also have tasted of her in those days, but I have no direct memory of anything related to hearing — of her voice, of the piano, of the street noises — only of what was going on while the sounds were in the air. My memories are a silent movie: I can put my old eyes on to see them, but my ears are deaf to them.
Now, for a few moments, my imagination has flown out the window like a night bug, drawn to the tastes of summer over distances unknown, even to night and to the deep. Nor does the imagination know who the night is or who in its dark landscape chooses the spots where a digger turns over the soil of memory and seeds it again. At the same time, someone dumps chunks of the past at the feet of the imagination, who hastily sorts through them in the swaying light of a small lantern it holds over them, mixing earth and shadows. Suddenly it drops the lantern on the soil of memory and the light goes out. Then once more the imagination is an insect flying over forgotten distances to land again on the edge of the present. Now the present into which it has fallen is again Celina’s parlor, and at the moment she is not playing the piano. The insect flying in memory has gone back one more wingbeat in time and arrived just before Celina will sit down to play. My grandmother and my mother ask her once more to play, though in a different tone of voice than before. This time Celina says she is not sure she remembers the piece. She is nervous, and on her way to the piano she trips over a chair, which must make a noise — but we are not supposed to notice. She has gathered enough speed that the impulse carries her past the chair and the accident is immediately forgotten. She sits down at the piano: we are hoping nothing unpleasant happens to her. Before she begins, we have just enough time to imagine she will play something impressive which will make us recommend her to our acquaintances. She is so nervous, and so aware of being the teacher, that my grandmother and my mother both try to advance her a bit of success, willing their favorable expectations on her and anxiously awaiting the performance that will allow them to match their expectations with reality.
The things I have to imagine are very lazy and slow in composing themselves to come. It’s like when I’m waiting for sleep, and I soon grow accustomed to certain sounds and can go on imagining or fall asleep as if they weren’t there. But the sounds and small happenings with which those three women filled the room keep me tossing my head right and left.
When Celina performed for us that time I took in everything that reached my eyes and ears. Before that, I had been letting things become too familiar, until they had almost stopped surprising me and I no longer really appreciated what she did.
My mother and grandmother seemed to be halfway into a sigh from which they hung suspended, as if afraid that at the supreme moment, just when their effort to understand was supposed to take off, their wings would carry them about as far as useless hens’ wings.
I was probably very bored, after a while.
Here I’ve stopped again. I’m very tired. I’ve had to keep watch all around myself to make sure that he — my partner — doesn’t sneak in with my memories. As I said before, I want to be myself alone. But, to keep him out, I’m forced to think of him constantly. With a part of myself I’ve made a sentry who stands guard over my memories and thoughts, but that means I also have to watch the sentry so he won’t start listening to the story of the memories and get so caught up in it that he falls asleep. On top of everything, I’ve got to lend him my eyes — the ones I have now.
My eyes, now, are cruel, insistent: they demand a great effort from the eyes of the child, who must be old and tired by now. Besides, he has to see everything in reverse: he is not allowed to remember the past but obliged to perform the miracle of remembering toward the future. But how is it that, while still being myself, I suddenly see everything differently? Can my partner have put on my eyes? Can we be sharing the same pair of eyes? Can the sentry watching the street through the windows of my room have fallen asleep and my partner have stolen my eyes from him? Isn’t seeing through my windows enough for him that he now also wants to see through my eyes? He would not hesitate to pry open a dead man’s eyes to find out what’s inside them. He is after those child’s eyes, determined to pinpoint their mechanism as if the pieces of memory could be taken apart like a clock. The child stops in fright; his eyes blink on and off. He doesn’t know yet — and it may already be too late for him ever to realize — that his images are random and incomplete: he has no notion of time and must have fused many hours and nights into one. He has confused the movements of different people, attributed the feelings of one to another and stumbled on charming discoveries. The eyes I now have know these things, but there are many other things they don’t know. They don’t know that the images feed on movement and live only in the sleeping self. My partner stops the images and the sleeping self wakes up; he nails them down with his eyes as if he were pinning butterflies in an album. Even when the child’s images seem motionless, they feed on movement: someone makes them throb and pulse in the eye. And it is that someone whom the eyes I now have are betraying. When the child’s eyes seize a part of something, they think it is the whole thing. (And the child cares no more than a dream does whether his images are complete or similar to those of real life: he simply proceeds as if they were.) When the child looked at Celina’s bare arm he felt the whole of her was in that arm. The eyes I now have want to capture Celina’s mouth, but they can’t define the shape of her lips in relation to the rest of her face; they want to grasp a single feature and are left with none. The parts have lost their mysterious relationship to each other, they have lost their balance and natural proportion and seem disconnected, as if a clumsy hand had drawn them. If the hand tries to get the lips to articulate a word, their movements are as forced as those of a wind-up doll.
Only for a moment do the eyes I now have see welclass="underline" the fleeting instant when they meet the eyes of the child. Then the eyes I now have reach avidly for the images, thinking they are still in time to linger on them. But an invisible innocence in the air of the world shelters the child’s eyes. Nevertheless, the eyes I now have persist until they are tired. Even on the edge of sleep my partner tries to remember Celina’s face, and when he stirs the waters of memory the images under the surface are deformed, as if seen in a cheap mirror with waves in the glass.
I realize the memory is over only when I feel an immediate physical discomfort in my eyes: a stinging as of tears drying on my eyelids.
A few days ago, in the evening, a strange and unprecedented event took place in me. Before, I could always find a precedent for an event, however strange: somewhere in my soul lay buried the first germ of it, at some point in my life there had been the hint of a scene or a plot that was a rehearsal for this final performance. But a few days ago, in the evening, the performance came unannounced. I don’t know if the players were in the wrong theater, and whether it was by mistake or because they had deliberately broken in. If one were to call my condition that evening a sickness, I would say I didn’t know I was predisposed to it, and if the sickness was a punishment, I would say it had fallen on the wrong person. It was not that I felt my partner take over: for hours I myself, all of me, was another person — such was the condition my sickness imposed on me. I was in the situation of someone who has assumed, all his life, that madness was one way, and, suddenly in its grip, discovers that it is not only different from the way he’d imagined it but that the person suffering from it is someone else, or has become someone else, and that this someone else is not interested in finding out what madness is like: he is simply immersed in it, or it has descended on him, and that’s that.