THE SHADOW OF MEMORY
BERNARD COMMENT
TRANSLATED BY BETSY WING
Contents
OTHER WORKS IN DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS’S SWISS LITERATURE SERIES
ROBERT, YESTERDAY
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
THE JOURNAL
ROBERT, WHEN?
About the Authors
Swiss Literature Series
Copyright
OTHER WORKS IN DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS’S
SWISS LITERATURE SERIES
Isle of the Dead
Gerhard Meier
Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta
Aglaja Veteranyi
With the Animals
Noëlle Revaz
Walaschek’s Dream
Giovanni Orelli
Modern and Contemporary Swiss Poetry: An Anthology
Luzius Keller, ed.
“It’s extraordinary and rather horrifying to remember nothing.”
Marcel Proust
ROBERT, YESTERDAY
“He distrusts what he knows;
what he does not know keeps
his spirit in a suspended state.”
Italo Calvino
Chapter I
So much reading, in vain. Whole afternoons spent raging, crying, sweating, locked into chasing after some scrap of memory, and the next day, nothing. A few crumbs, too weak; the rhythm falls apart, meaning evaporates. Impossible to make so much as the briefest paragraph, the least sentence stick inside my skull. So? Nothing to get upset about, I’ve heard that often enough. And yet, ever since childhood my one desire has been to get to know things just as quickly as possible. Learn, for that matter, everything from before in order to begin to think here, now. A question of mental aptitude, talent. I wasn’t gifted. But by working at it . . . Hope wasn’t necessarily forbidden, especially since it turned out that I had an astonishing ability to store up the most minute details of events I’d been through in real life, my own experiences or feelings, like a film in my memory, interminable reels that I was always coming into partway through. Mattilda was amazed to hear me describe past situations this way, so precisely: our first nights, a gesture, a fragrance. She’d joke about it: “You do pretty well for an amnesiac.” I didn’t dare tell her, this woman who’d been my friend since childhood, this lover, that it wasn’t that kind of memory that concerned me; rather it was remembering books, works, the heritage to which we were the potential heirs. Yes, the language of others, the one language that counts, language that is authoritative. The veins and nerves of thought.
I’d finally decided to start using a computer again, a reliable medium with guaranteed retention. This would become my main occupation and went like this: stuff the machine full, stockpiling data, filling in the blanks, one after the other, with knowledge, with history, until I’m back at the present. To do that I first had to make a decision and start the process from some predetermined point. I chose the Renaissance, specifically the Italian Renaissance, which would create a platform for me to get things going with genealogies that started there and continued through every proceeding current and movement. For two years now, soon three, I’ve made innumerable entries, opened countless files in order to learn how to see, how to sustain my gaze. I was not even trying to understand, weave a fabric, or attempt a synthesis. But, above all, was browsing assiduously, in order to accumulate my material. A massive amount of material.
It’s this, my desire for the past, a past no longer eluding me, one I’d be able to use in the present, that I’d have liked to tell Robert about, as an introduction, the day we met. But I’ve never been able to talk to anybody—an incurable speech impediment. I stammered, desperately trying to construct a few coherent sentences. Ideas became tangled, I forgot what was to come next, no words came. With the result that the old man, perhaps, understood none of my explanations. But he’d sensed that the problem was memory. A pathological obsession. He smiled, rather tenderly, I think, and kindly.
Yes, Robert. On a Saturday, of course. The only day that, because of my work, I could go to the Bibliothèque nationale. In addition to the classes at the university, which I attended less and less, I’d taken a job in an office, working with computers, word processing, indexing capital and transactions. It had the advantage of giving me access to all the equipment at the end of the afternoon after the office closed. Lots of keyboards, juxtaposed screens, accelerated printing. Sometimes I’d stay there until late at night, running out for a sandwich after saving what I’d typed in. I was buzzing with information, dizzy in the face of the vast array of characters that were going to flow, invisible but definitely real, into their little plastic medium. On Saturdays, however, the offices underwent their weekly cleaning; I took advantage of this to go to the source, to feed my memory, or at least the machines’ memories. I was working my way through the Bibliothèque nationale using a method that was simultaneously thematic, alphabetical, and chronological. For the fifteenth century an alphabetical search wasn’t always sufficient; I had to venture into places that were very hard to reach; specifically, the lair of the monks. Damned Benedictines, you had to show them your pure white paws and justify your desire to read. They probably thought I was a little too young and healthy to have access to their carefully sequestered knowledge, so seldom exposed to the air. No question of using a computer, of course. I remember their frightened eyes; they really found me repugnant and, when they discovered my little laptop, thought they were in the presence of the devil himself. Their new crusade! From that point on they never stopped watching me, rummaging repeatedly through my briefcase, as well as my jacket, my raincoat, probably imagining that even tinier gadgets of that sort had been made to spy on them on behalf of the Franciscans, the libertines, the philistines, the Americans, or perhaps the Japanese or other Asians, to violate their treasure, their memory, and divulge their archives to the world. Luckily, when I reached to the sixteenth century those expeditions became less frequent, thanks to Gutenberg.
So it was at the Bibliothèque nationale on a cold, rainy morning. Just by chance. It could equally well not have happened. Which in some ways, in some sense, would have been better. I was sitting at a table, a little off to the side, my favorite place despite the lack of light. An old man came up to me, impatient, nervous, as I was reading my books for the day.