«Yesterday evening… in the hospital, I was bored, and I started humming a tune to myself. It was automatic, like brushing my teeth… I tried to figure out how I knew it. I started to sing it again, but once I began thinking about it, the song no longer came of its own accord, and I stopped on a single note. I held it a long time, at least five seconds, as if it were an alarm or a dirge.
I no longer knew how to go forward, and I didn’t know how to go forward because I had lost what came before. That’s it, that’s how I am. I’m holding a long note, like a stuck record, and since I can’t remember the opening notes, I can’t finish the song. I wonder what it is I’m supposed to finish, and why. While I was singing without thinking I was actually myself for the duration of my memory, which in that case was what you might call throat memory, with the befores and afters linked together, and I was the complete song, and every time I began it my vocal cords were already preparing to vibrate the sounds to come.
I think a pianist works that way, too: even as he plays one note he’s readying his fingers to strike the keys that come next. Without the first notes, we won’t make it to the last ones, we’ll come untuned, and we’ll succeed in getting from start to finish only if we somehow contain the entire song within us. I don’t know the whole song anymore. I’m like… a burning log. The log burns, but it has no awareness of having once been part of a whole trunk nor any way to find out that it has been, or to know when it caught fire. So it burns up and that’s all. I’m living in pure loss.»
«Let’s not go overboard with the philosophy,» Paola whispered.
«No, let’s. Where do I keep my copy of Augustine’s Confessions?»
«In the bookcase with the encyclopedias, the Bible, the Koran, Lao Tzu, and the philosophy books.»
I went to pick out the Confessions and looked in the index for the passages on memory. I must have read them because they were all underlined: I come then to the fields and the vast chambers of memory… When I enter there, I summon whatever images I wish. Some appear at once, but others must be sought at length, dragged forth as it were from hidden nooks… Memory gathers all this in its vast cavern, in its hidden and ineffable recesses… In the enormous palace of my memory, heaven, earth, and sea are present to me… I find myself there also… Great is the power of memory, O my God, and awe-inspiring its infinite, profound complexity. And that is the mind, and that is myself…
Behold the fields and caves, the measureless caverns of memory, immeasurably full of immeasurable things… I pass among them all, I fly from here to there, and nowhere is there any end… «You see, Paola,» I said, «you’ve told me about my grandfather and the country house, everyone’s trying to give me all this information, but when I receive it in this way, in order really to populate these caverns I’d have to put into them every one of the sixty years I’ve lived till now. No, this is not the way to do it. I have to go into the cavern alone. Like Tom Sawyer.»
I do not know what Paola said to that, because I was still making the chair rock and I dozed again.
Briefly, I think, because I heard the doorbell, and it was Gianni Laivelli. We had been desk mates, the two Dioscuri. He embraced me like a brother, emotional, already knowing how to treat me. Don’t worry, he said, I know more about your life than you do. I’ll tell you every last detail. No thanks, I told him, Paola already explained our history to me. Together from elementary school through high school.
Then I went off to college in Turin while he studied economics and business in Milan. But apparently we never lost touch. I sell antiquarian books, he helps people pay their taxes-or not pay them-and by all rights we should have each gone our separate ways, but instead we’re like family: his two grandchildren play with mine, and we always celebrate Christmas and New Year’s together.
No thanks, I had said, but Gianni could not keep his mouth shut. And since he remembered, he seemed unable to grasp that I did not. Remember, he would say, the day we brought a mouse to class to scare the math teacher, and the time we took a trip to Asti to see the Alfieri play and when we got back we learned that the plane carrying the Turin team had gone down, and the time that…»
«No, I don’t remember, Gianni, but you’re such a good storyteller that it’s as if I did. Which one of us was smarter?»
«Naturally, in Italian and philosophy you were, and in math I was. You see how we turned out.»
«By the way, Paola, what did I major in?»
«In letters, with a thesis on Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Unreadable, at least to me. Then you went off to Germany to specialize in the history of ancient books. You said that because of the name you’d been stuck with you couldn’t have done anything else. And then there was your grandfather’s example, a life among papers. When you came back, you set up your rare book studio, at first in a little room, using the little capital you had left. After that, things went well for you.»
«Are you aware that you sell books that cost more than a Porsche?» Gianni said. «They’re gorgeous, and to pick them up and realize they’re five hundred years old, and the pages still as snappy beneath your fingers as if they’d just come off the press…»
«Take it easy,» Paola said, «we can start talking about his work in the next few days. Let’s give him a chance to get used to his home first. How about a scotch, kerosene-flavored?»
«Kerosene?»
«It’s just something between me and Yambo, Gianni. We’re starting to have secrets again.»
When I escorted Gianni to the door, he took me by the arm and whispered to me in a complicit tone, «And so you haven’t yet seen the beautiful Sibilla…»
Sibilla who?
Yesterday Carla and Nicoletta came with their whole families, even their husbands, who are friendly. I spent the afternoon with the children. They are sweet, I am beginning to get attached to them. But it is embarrassing; at a certain point I realized that I was smothering them with kisses, pulling them to me, and I could smell them-soap, milk, and talcum powder. And I asked myself what I was doing with those strange children. Am I some kind of pedophile? I kept them at a distance and we played some games.
They asked me to be a bear-who knows what a grandfather bear does. So I got on all fours, going awrr roarr roarr, and they all jumped on my back. Take it easy, I’m not young anymore, my back aches. Luca zapped me with a water pistol, and I thought it wise to die, belly up. I risked throwing my back out, but it was a success. I was still weak, and as I got back up my head was spinning. «You shouldn’t do that,» Nicoletta said, «you know you have orthostatic pressure.» Then she corrected herself: «I’m sorry, you didn’t know. Well, now you know again.» A new chapter for my future autobiography. Written by someone else.
My life as an encyclopedia continues. I speak as if I were up against a wall and could never turn around. My memories have the depth of a few weeks. Other people’s stretch back centuries. A few evenings ago I tasted a small nut. I said: The distinctive scent of bitter almond. In the park I saw two policemen on horseback: If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. I knocked my hand against a sharp corner, and as I was sucking the little scratch and trying to see what my blood tasted like, I said: Often have I encountered the evil of living.
There was a downpour and when it ended I exulted: For lo, the rain is over and gone.
I usually go to bed early and remark: Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure.
I do fine with traffic lights, but the other day I stepped into the street at a moment that seemed safe, and Paola managed to grab my arm just in time, because a car was coming. «I had it timed,» I said. «I would have made it.»
«No, you wouldn’t have made it. That car was going fast.»
«Come on, I’m not an idiot. I know perfectly well that cars run over pedestrians, and chickens too, and to avoid them they hit the brakes and black smoke comes out and
