Why does she stop and look back?
Because it is human to do so.
What did she leave there?
A past.
Why salt, exactly?
Because salt has no memory. Nothing grows on salt.
In the Nuremberg Chronicle by Hartmann Schedel from the end of the fifteenth century, there is an illustration of this scene: In the foreground are the father and his daughters, led by a cheerful angel who is chattering to him. They are striding forward, leaving behind the burning Sodom and its collapsing towers. In the middle between the departing group and the burning city stands a woman in white. She has turned her face back. In fact, she is looking slightly off to the side. The past, just like fire, cannot be looked directly in the eye. Her face is peaceful. There is no horror, no fear, no pain. Only salt. While her daughters and old Lot, led by the chattering angel, don’t even notice her absence. They have already forgotten her.
29.
Do not store up for yourselves treasures in the present, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in the past, where neither moth nor rust destroy, and where thieves do not break in nor steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart also be.
—Gaustine, Apocryphal Versions and New Testaments
30.
Nothing calms you like neat rows of identical sets of encyclopedias from different continents—old cherry-red, brown, and black.
This mantra of titles can be used against evil spirits and times:
Enciclopedia general ilustrada del País Vasco
Enciclopedia de México
Nueva enciclopedia de Puerto Rico
Diccionario biográfico de Venezuela
Encyclopedia Britannica
The New York Public Library, Oriental Collection
The South in American Literature, 1607–1900
Poisonous and Venomous Marine Animals of the World
Nomenclator Zoologicus
Il grande libro della cucina italiana
The Cuisine of Hungary
Book-Prices Current (London), 1905/06
Subject Index of Books Published Before 1880
The Mother of All Booklists
A Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature of Great Britain
Dicionário bibliográfico brasileiro
Catálogo de la bibliografía boliviana
A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland . . . , 1475–1640
Catalogue of German Books, 1455–1600
Crime Fiction IV: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1749–2000
Bibliografía de la literatura hispánica
31.
Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you. It comes up from behind your back, surprising and unforeseeable, while the past is always before your eyes, that which has already happened. When they talk about the past, the people of the Aymara tribe point in front of them. You walk forward facing the past and you turn back toward the future. What would the parable of Lot’s wife sound like in this case?
We walk forward and enter the endless Elysian fields.
I walk forward and become past.
32.
I’m having that dream again. Somewhere, in the library of the world, in the main reading room with a high frescoed ceiling, wooden tables and lathe-turned lamps with the soft color of old gold, sits a man hidden behind an open newspaper. It’s a large newspaper, hence an old one, as newspapers used to be way back when. I walk toward him amid people’s faces (I see only the faces in the dream), which turn toward me. The faces of women and men, familiar from somewhere, but whose names have long been lost. I know (I don’t know but I can sense) that everyone is watching us, it is an important scene. On the front page, the headline is written telegraph-style in large letters . . . what, I still can’t read it.
It looks close, but in the dream the path lengthens on its own, my movements grow ever more difficult, as if I am wading through something sticky or I am simply afraid to reach him . . . My fear is twofold—first, I’m afraid of reading what is written there, even though somewhere inside myself I know what it says. (I know the whole newspaper by heart.)
My second fear is that when I reach him, the man will lower his newspaper and I will see my own face.
33.
There are days when everything seems to be okay, I can even write, I bring back the cities and rooms where I have been, my mind is clear like a bucket of rainwater, then everything gets muddled again, turns boggy . . . some people without faces show up, they stomp around the rooms, they speak, they threaten to make me happy, and afterward I don’t remember anything, I stare at some point and don’t have the strength to avert my gaze . . .
34.
A haircut in Brooklyn from Jani, a Tajik who hums Frank Sinatra, and when he flicks open his straight razor to shave my neck, I’m seized by that primordial fear of being slaughtered like a lamb. Then he pulls out an unbearably hot and moist towel, which he tosses over my face and presses down. And so, semi-slaughtered, semi-suffocated, doused in lavender-scented cologne as a finale, I open my eyes as if resurrected and give him a nice big tip, as if paying ransom for my survival. As soon as I’m back out on the sidewalk I add to my notebook the scent of barbershop cologne, which awakens memories of haircuts. Everyone has a memory and fear of that. Everyone has noted their own graying hair in the barber’s chair.
That peculiar scent of the New York streets, coming from the rotting fruit of the ginkgo biloba. I write that scent down as well . . . Ginkgo biloba in New York. What must its memory hold, that tree that remembers the end of the dinosaurs, those moving (and collapsing) skyscrapers from before the Ice Age. And alongside them, the collapsing of real skyscrapers as well—this is immeasurable, terrifying memory. Now do you understand why you have nightmares? I tell myself. Because you’ve been stuffing yourself with ginkgo biloba for years to fight forgetting, while it remembers terrible things.
I commute every day from Brooklyn to the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street. I gradually get used to all the details along the route. Coming up on the Manhattan Bridge, off in the distance the Statue of Liberty, the view of blind walls, chimneys, water towers, huge rooftop terraces with laundry hung out on them before the subway goes underground again. I get off at Times Square, I stand for a minute to read the billboards, as if glancing through the first few pages of the day’s newspaper. Billboards are the new newspapers. What’s written there—some monsters, going back to the future, blockbusters that scare us with the end of the world, clocks and loans . . . Clearly nothing good is on the horizon. I continue up Forty-Second, to the soundtrack of fire engines and police cars, like in a movie. I head into Bryant Park, past the green tables and chairs, passing beneath the tall plantains. I glance over at the Chrysler Building, that Secession in vertical, and sink into the cold cave of the library as if into another time, a time shelter.
35.
On the radio they’re reporting that it is snowing in the desert in July, drifts are piling up on the pyramids, and I imagine the Sphinx with a snowy stocking cap. The snow disfigures public statues, as Auden wrote. I wonder what the camels in this snowy desert are doing. They feverishly search back through some deep memory for what to do in such cases, but there are no records, the time capsule of genes do not contain anything of the sort.