"What’s the fog like?" he asked.
"The fog on the bristling hills climbs drizzling up the sky, and down below the mistral howls and whitens the sea… What’s the fog like?"
"You put me at a disadvantage-I’m only a doctor. And besides, this is April, I can’t show you any fog. Today’s the twenty-fifth of April."
"April is the cruelest month."
"I’m not very well read, but I think that’s a quotation. You could say that today’s the Day of Liberation. Do you know what year this is?"
"It’s definitely after the discovery of America…"
"You don’t remember a date, any kind of date, before… your reawakening?"
"Any date? Nineteen hundred and forty-five, end of World War Two."
"Not close enough. No, today is the twenty-fifth of April, 1991. You were born, I believe, at the end of 1931, all of which means you’re pushing sixty."
"Fifty-nine and a half. Not even."
"Your calculative faculties are in excellent shape. But you have had, how shall I say, an incident. You’ve come through it alive, and I congratulate you on that. But clearly something is still wrong. A slight case of retrograde amnesia. Not to worry, they sometimes don’t last long. But please be so kind as to answer a few more questions. Are you married?"
"You tell me."
"Yes, you’re married, to an extremely likable lady named Paola, who has been by your side night and day. Just yesterday evening I insisted she go home, otherwise she would have collapsed. Now that you’re awake, I’ll call her. But I’ll have to prepare her, and before that we need to do a few more tests."
"What if I mistake her for a hat?"
"Excuse me?"
"There was a man who mistook his wife for a hat."
"Oh, the Sacks book. A classic case. I see you’re up on your reading. But you don’t have his problem, otherwise you’d have already mistaken me for a stove. Don’t worry, you may not recognize her, but you won’t mistake her for a hat. But back to you. Now then, your name is Giambattista Bodoni. Does that tell you anything?"
Now my memory was soaring like a glider among mountains and valleys, toward a limitless horizon. "Giambattista Bodoni was a famous typographer. But I’m sure that’s not me. I could as easily be Napoleon as Bodoni."
"Why did you say Napoleon?"
"Because Bodoni was from the Napoleonic era, more or less. Napoleon Bonaparte, born in Corsica, first consul, marries Josephine, becomes emperor, conquers half of Europe, loses at Waterloo, dies on St. Helena, May 5, 1821, he was as if unmoving."
"I’ll have to bring my encyclopedia next time, but from what I remember, your memory is good. Except you don’t remember who you are."
"Is that serious?"
"To be honest, it’s not so good. But you aren’t the first person something like this has happened to, and we’ll get through it."
He asked me to raise my right hand, then to touch my nose. I understood perfectly what my right hand was, and my nose. Bull’s-eye. But the sensation was absolutely new. Touching your nose is like having an eye on the tip of your index finger, looking you in the face. I have a nose. Gratarolo thumped me on the knee and then here and there on my legs and feet with some kind of little hammer. Doctors measure reflexes. It seemed that my reflexes were good. By the end I felt exhausted, and I think I went back to sleep.
I woke up in a place and murmured that it resembled the cabin of a spaceship, like in movies. (What movies, Gratarolo asked; all of them, I said, in general; then I named Star Trek.) They did things to me I did not understand, using machines I had never seen. I think they were looking inside my head, but I let them, not thinking, lulled by humming sounds, and now and then I dozed again.
Later (or the next day?), when Gratarolo returned, I was exploring the bed. I was feeling the sheets: light, smooth, pleasing to the touch. Less so the cover, which was a little prickly against my fingertips. I turned over and pounded my hand into the pillow, enjoying the fact that it sank into it. I was going whack whack and having a great time. Gratarolo asked me if I thought I could get out of bed. With the help of a nurse, I managed to stand up, though my head was still spinning. I felt my feet pressing against the ground, and my head was up in the air. That is how you stand up. On a tightrope. Like the Little Mermaid.
"Good. Now try going to the bathroom and brushing your teeth. Your wife’s toothbrush should be in there." I told him one should never brush one’s teeth with a stranger’s toothbrush, and he remarked that a wife is not a stranger. In the bathroom, I saw myself in the mirror. At least I was fairly sure it was me, because mirrors, as everyone knows, reflect what is in front of them. A white, hollow face, a long beard, and two sunken eyes. This is great: I do not know who I am but I find out I am a monster. I would not want to meet me on a deserted road at night. Mr. Hyde. I have identified two objects: one is definitely called toothpaste, the other toothbrush. You have to start with the toothpaste and squeeze the tube. Exquisite sensation, I ought to do it frequently. But at a certain point you have to quit-that white paste at first pops, like a bubble, but then it all comes out like le serpent qui danse. Don’t keep squeezing, otherwise you’ll be like Broglio with the stracchini. Who’s Broglio?
The paste has an excellent flavor. Excellent, said the Duke. That is a Wellerism. These, then, are flavors: things that caress the tongue and also the palate, though it seems to be the tongue that detects the flavors. Mint flavor-y la hierbabuena, a las cinco de la tarde … I made up my mind and did what everyone does in such cases, quickly and without thinking much about it: first I brushed up and down, then from left to right, then around the whole set. It’s interesting to feel bristles going between two teeth, from now on I think I will brush my teeth every day, it feels nice. I also ran the bristles over my tongue. You feel a sort of shudder, but in the end if you don’t press down too hard it’s okay. That was a good idea, because my mouth was quite pasty. Now, I said to myself, you rinse. I ran some water from the tap into a glass and swirled it around in my mouth, happily amazed at the sound it made. And it gets even better if you toss your head back and make it-gurgle? Gurgling is good. I puffed up my cheeks, and then it all came out. I spit it out. Sfroosh … a cataract. You can do anything with lips, they are extremely flexible. I turned around, Gratarolo was standing there watching me like I was a circus freak, and I asked him if it was going well.
Perfectly, he said. My automatisms, he explained, were in good shape.
"It seems we have an almost normal person on our hands," I remarked, "except that he might not be me."
"Very witty, and that’s a good sign too. Now lie back down-here, I’ll help you. Tell me: what did you just do?"
"I brushed my teeth; you asked me to."
"Absolutely, and before you brushed your teeth?"
"I was in this bed and you were talking to me. You said it’s April 1991."
"Right. Your short-term memory is working. Tell me, do you by any chance recall the brand of the toothpaste?"
"No. Should I?"
"Not at all. You certainly saw the brand when you picked up the tube, but if we had to record and store all the stimuli we encounter, our memory would be a bedlam. So we choose, we filter. You did what we all do. But now try to remember the most significant thing that happened while you were brushing your teeth."