The love of forgetfulness

PalmaAnne Carson, in the book Types of Water, talks about when she used to visit her father in the hospital. He had dementia, a disease that strips the mind and body of faculties. Carson recalls the verbal current that emanated from her father's lips, a babbling that neurologists call 'word salad' because it dissolves into the air, without possible comprehension. My grandmother has been speaking this foreign language for a while now. She doesn't tell me things directly, she throws them into the world, in case someone can catch them. Her words, like arrows from a distant tribe, graze me, impossibly. Could I ask her, Tita, what do you want to tell me? What were you thinking those times you only offered me silence? Have you been happy, Tita? I would like to remind her of how I have always loved her, without demands, with an elegant complicity. Like hands that grip tightly under a table.

On the bedside table she has the book by Lorca that I gave her a while ago. I am convinced that saying someone's name is like a spell in which some affections and some fears are inherited. My grandmother has always loved reading very much. Bearn, Rayuela, The Gypsy Ballads, One Hundred Years of Solitude awakened passions in her that were contagious. For as long as I can remember, we have smuggled books and secrets. She used to leave little papers and napkins hidden in the pages, jotting down names and occurrences that made me laugh. I used to choose editions with large print for her, so that her sight would last her many years. Also the transport of plants, which arrived at my house radiant and returned to her home when they needed to float. Or the devotion to cats and the generous laughter, like a blooming garden even if it wasn't spring.

For a few years now, she has the look of a child, full of confusion, who knows if, at times, full of rage. Sleepless nights are no longer filled with reading or series. For a while now, she has been unable to feed on the stories of others, her memory is like a sacred temple with its entrances closed. Even so, Anne Carson argues that dementia goes hand in hand with sanity. The door of the mind does not close suddenly, there are open cracks through which light passes. Perhaps that is why she smiles at me with such tenderness, and caresses my father's beard as if she knew for sure that he is her son. Who knows if this lucidity, minuscule, but persistent, makes her repeat softly, two or three times, when I mention Lorca, “to sorrows, daggers”.

Upon taking the joker's book, I have opened all the marked pages, like one searching for the tracks of an ancient treasure. I stop at page 149, the verses “Neither you nor I are in a position to meet” are marked. Perhaps what Carson says about anthropology is true, that it is the knowledge of mutual astonishment. And to be astonished, memory is not needed, nor even the solid identity that makes us slaves to vanity, or pursuers of reason. To be astonished by others, we only need true encounter, like two wild beasts that, under the open sky, sniff each other out. Without the railings of prejudice, without the red threads that weave the inventory of expectations and demands, only with the hunger for connection with the other.

Who knows if this is the difference between paradise and hell. I would say they are two antagonistic fictions, because in paradise neither memory nor identity are needed to love each other and, on the other hand, in hell, the cult of the 'self' makes love impossible. It astonishes me to hear the way my godmother and I love each other. Orphans of years, we conjugate in the present.