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 itgurgle? 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.»
«When I ran the brush over my tongue.»
«Why?»
«Because my mouth was pasty, and after I did that I felt better.»
«You see? You recorded the element most directly associated with your emotions, your desires, your goals. You have emotions again.»
«It’s a nice emotion, brushing your tongue. But I don’t recall having ever brushed it before.»
«We’ll get there. Now, Signor Bodoni, I’ll try to explain all this in plain language, but it’s clear that the incident has affected certain regions of your brain. And even though a new study comes out every day, we don’t yet know as much as we’d like to know about cerebral localizations, especially as regards the various forms of memory. I’d dare say that if what has happened to you had happened ten years from now, we’d have a better idea how to manage the situation. Don’t interrupt, I understand, if it had happened to you a hundred years ago you’d already be in a madhouse, end of story. We know more today than we did then, but not enough. For example, if you were unable to talk, I could tell you exactly which area had been affected…»
«Broca’s area.»
«Bravo. But we’ve known about Broca’s area for more than a hundred years. Where the brain stores memories, however, is still a matter of debate, and more than one area is certainly involved. I don’t want to bore you with scientific terms, which in any case might add to the confusion you feel-you know how, when the dentist has done something to one of your teeth, for a few days afterward you keep touching it with your tongue? Well, if I were to say, just for instance, that I’m not as concerned about your hippocampus as I am about your frontal lobes, and perhaps the right orbital frontal cortex, you would try to touch yourself there, and it’s not like exploring your mouth with your tongue. Endless frustration. So forget what I just said. And besides, every brain is different from every other, and all brains have extraordinary plasticity, so that over the course of time yours may be able to assign the tasks that the injured area can no longer perform to some other area. Do you follow, am I being clear enough?»
«Crystal clear, keep going. But first are you going to tell me that I’m the Collegno amnesiac?»
«You see? You remember the Collegno amnesiac, which is a classic case. It’s only your own, which isn’t classic, that you don’t remember.»
«I’d rather have forgotten about Collegno and remembered where I was born.»
«That would be more unusual. You see, you identified the toothpaste tube immediately, but you don’t recall being married-and indeed, remembering your own wedding and identifying the toothpaste tube depend on two different cerebral networks. We have different types of memory. One is called implicit, and it allows us to do with ease various things we’ve learned, like brushing our teeth, turning on the radio, or tying a tie. After the toothbrushing experiment, I’m willing to bet that you know how to write, perhaps even how to drive a car. When our implicit memory is assisting us, we’re not even conscious of remembering, we act automatically. And then there’s something called explicit memory, by which we remember things and know we’re remembering them.
But this explicit memory is twofold. One part tends nowadays to be called semantic memory, or public memory-the one that tells us a swallow is a kind of bird, and that
