The child quickly learns to recognize a car or a dog, and to form general categories, so that if he once saw a German shepherd and was told it was a dog, then he’ll also say ‘dog’ when he sees a Labrador. It takes the child longer, however, to develop the second type of explicit memory, which we call episodic, or autobiographical. He isn’t immediately capable of remembering, when he sees a dog, say, that a month earlier he saw a dog in his grandmother’s yard, and that he’s the person who has had both experiences.
It’s episodic memory that establishes a link between who we are today and who we have been, and without it, when we say I, we’re referring only to what we’re feeling now, not to what we felt before, which gets lost, as you say, in the fog. You haven’t lost your semantic memory, you’ve lost your episodic memory, which is to say the episodes of your life. In short, I’d say you know all the things other people know, and I imagine that if I were to ask you to tell me the capital of Japan…»
«Tokyo. Atom bomb on Hiroshima. General MacArthur…»
«Whoa, whoa. It’s as though you remember all the things you read in a book somewhere, or were told, but not the things associated with your direct experience. You know that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, but try to tell me the name of your mother.»
«You only have one mother, your mother is still your mother… But as for my mine, I don’t remember her. I suppose I had a mother, since I know it’s a law of the species, but… here again… the fog. I’m sick, doctor. It’s horrible. I want something to help me go back to sleep.»
«I’ll give you something in a moment, I’ve already asked too much of you. Just lie back now, good… To repeat, these things happen, but people get better. With a great deal of patience. I’ll have them bring you something to drink, perhaps some tea. Do you like tea?»
«Maybe I do and maybe I don’t.»
They brought me tea. The nurse had me sit up against my pillows and placed a tray in front of me. She poured some steaming water into a cup with a little bag in it. Go slow, she said, it burns.
What do you mean, slow? I sniffed the cup and detected the odor, I wanted to say, of smoke. I wanted to see what tea was like, so I took the cup and swallowed. Dreadful. A fire, a flame, a slap in the mouth. So this is boiling tea. It is probably the same with coffee, or chamomile, which everyone talks about. Now I know what it means to burn yourself. Everybody knows you are not supposed to touch fire, but I did not know at what point you could touch hot water. I must learn to recognize the threshold, the moment when before you couldn’t and after you can.
I blew mechanically on the liquid, then stirred it some more with the spoon, until I decided I could try again. Now the tea was warm and it was good to drink. I was not sure which taste was the tea and which the sugar; one must have been bitter and the other sweet, but which was the sweet and which the bitter? In any case, I liked the combination. I will always drink my tea with sugar. But not boiling. The tea made me feel peaceful and relaxed, and I went to sleep.
I woke again. Perhaps because in my sleep I was scratching my groin and scrotum. I was sweating under the covers. Bedsores? My groin is damp, and when I rub my hands over it too energetically, after an initial sensation of violent pleasure, the friction feels very unpleasant. It’s nicer with the scrotum. You take it between your fingers-gently I might add, without going so far as to squeeze the testicles-and you feel something granular and slightly hairy: it’s nice to scratch your scrotum.
The itching does not go away immediately, in fact it gets worse, but then it feels even better to continue. Pleasure is the cessation of pain, but itching is not pain, it is an invitation to give yourself pleasure. The titillation of the flesh. By indulging in it you commit a sin. The provident young man sleeps on his back with his hands clasped on his chest so as not to commit impure acts in his sleep. A strange business, itching. And my balls… You’re a ballbuster. That guy’s got balls.
I opened my eyes. A woman was standing there. She was not all that young, over fifty I would guess, with fine lines around her eyes. But her face was luminous, still youthful. A few little streaks of white hair, barely noticeable, as though she had had them lightened on purpose, coquettishly, as if to say, I’m not trying to pass for a girl, but I wear my years well. She was lovely, but when she was young she must have been stunning. She was caressing my forehead.
«Yambo,» she said.
«Iambo who, Signora?»
«You’re Yambo. That’s what everyone calls you. And I’m Paola, your wife. Recognize me?»
«No, Signora-I mean, no, Paola. I’m very sorry, the doctor must have explained.»
«He explained. You no longer know what’s happened to you, but you still know perfectly well what’s happened to others. Since I’m part of your personal history, you no longer know that we’ve been married, my dear Yambo, for more than thirty years. And we have two daughters, Carla and Nicoletta, and three wonderful grandchildren. Carla married young and had two children, Alessandro who’s five and Luca who’s three. Nicoletta’s son, Giangiacomo, Giangio for short, is also three. Twin cousins, you used to say. And you were… you are… you will still be a wonderful grandfather.
You were a good father, too.»
«And… am I a good husband?»
Paola rolled her eyes skyward: «We’re still here, aren’t we? Let’s say that over the course of thirty years there have been ups and downs. You were always considered a good-looking man…»
«This morning, yesterday, ten years ago, I saw a horrible face in the mirror.»
«After what’s happened to you, that’s the least you’d expect. But you were, you still are, a good-looking man, you have an irresistible smile, and some women didn’t resist. Nor did you-you always said you could resist anything but temptation.»
«I ask your forgiveness.»
«Well, that’s a bit like the guys dropping smart bombs on Baghdad and then apologizing when a few civilians die.»
«Bombs on Baghdad? There aren’t any in A Thousand and One Nights.»
«There was a war, the Gulf War. It’s over now. Or maybe not. Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Western nations intervened. You don’t recall any of it?»
«The doctor said that episodic memory-the kind that seems to have gone tilt-is tied to the emotions. Maybe the bombing of Baghdad was something I felt strongly about.»
«I’ll say. You’ve always been a devout pacifist, and you agonized over this war. Almost two hundred years ago Maine de Biran identified three types of memory: ideas, feelings, and habits.
You remember ideas and habits but not feelings, which are of course the most personal.»
«How is it you know all this good stuff?»
«I’m a psychologist, that’s my job. But wait a second: you just said that your episodic memory had gone tilt. Why did you use that phrase?»
«It’s an expression.»
«Yes, but it’s a thing that happens in pinball and you are… you were fanatical about pinball, like a little kid.»
«I know what pinball is. But I don’t know who I am, you see? There’s fog in Val Padana. By the way, where are we?»
«In Val Padana. We live in Milan. In the winter months you can see the fog in the park from our house. You live in Milan and you’re an antiquarian book dealer. You have a studio full of old books.»
«The curse of the pharaoh. If I was a Bodoni and they baptized me Giambattista, things couldn’t have turned out any other way.»
«They turned out well. You’re considered very good at what you do, and we’re not billionaires but we live well. I’ll help you, and you’ll recover a little at a time. God, if I think about it, you might have not woken up at all. These doctors have been excellent, they got to you in time. My love, can I welcome you back? You act as if you’re meeting me for the first time. Fine, if I were to meet you now, for the first time, I’d marry you just the same. Okay?»
«You’re very sweet. I need you. You’re the only one who can tell me about the last thirty years.»
«Thirty-five. We met in college, in Turin. You were about to graduate and I was the lost freshman, roaming the halls of Palazzo Campana. I asked you where a certain classroom was, and you hooked me immediately, you seduced a defenseless high-school girl. Then one thing and another-I was too young, you went off to spend three years abroad.
Afterward, we got together-as a trial, we said, but I ended up getting pregnant, and you married me because you were
