Out of Nowhere

By who knows who

Photo by Prakriti Khajuria on Unsplash, rendered black & white by me

Childhood memories are often made up of small, seemingly insignificant details that come from nowhere. And when these details materialize, they always carry with them connections to be made, pieces of a puzzle to find, mysteries to unravel. These memories almost never have a beginning or an end. Instead, they are flashes of images and gestures, voices and scents, all laid out before my eyes like little pieces of paper with brief notes on them, or photographs, in the hope of finding a common denominator and reconstructing their linearity.

One of the recurring memories from when my age was still in the single digits is an image of Mom and us three walking toward the beach, from our home. She is carrying all sorts of bags. The day is sunny and hot, the sky a perfect blue. There are two long streets to walk down, something I know but don’t remember us doing. One, our street: from the front door of our building, we’d turn right and walk on a narrow pavement all the way to the traffic light; we’d pass the post office, the house and office of our family doctor, a green and ugly one-and-a-half-story building with a black iron gate, Nerina’s grocery store, and go up a light slope. The other, a street perpendicular to ours: at the light, we’d cross the street and continue eastward on another narrow pavement past the elementary school that takes the entire block; on our right, a small river divides the town in two. All these details I know, because it's my hometown and things have stayed the same pretty much since then. But I don’t have the slightest recollection of us four actually taking the walk. All I remember is us crossing the railway through a small tunnel that goes right underneath and pops out onto the promenade, just steps from the beach.

I also remember two individuals who used to frequent our home. Two friends of our family. The first one, Ennio, was tall, semi-bald, and always wore blue. Everyone seems tall when you’re eight, I suppose. And the other, whose name escapes me, was a man with a large head of curly hair and a mustache, who used to perch his elbow on the top of our fireplace in an elegant pose while he spoke. They both were very friendly and patient with us kids, often bringing little somethings when they came over. I remember a children's book about chess, and a frightening red-haired doll that my sister named Sofia. They stayed over for dinner, sometimes. Who were they? What was their connection with us? I know they weren’t relatives. One of them, I forget which one, once told us a story about a man who, whenever he felt a little down for lack of energy or enthusiasm or joie de vivre, would go sit all by himself at a neighborhood café that stayed open until late at night, and the noise, the conversations he overheard, and the comings and goings helped him overcome those down moments and feel better. But then at some point, he discovered that simply looking out of his study window at a tree planted in the courtyard of the adjoining building he could regain tranquility without needing to go to the café. It was a large tree, a sycamore perhaps. 

I never understood why he told that story, or what prompted it. There might have been a deeper meaning behind it, like a parable. Who knows. I also don’t know why my memory chose to preserve it, among the many details and situations that could have easily taken its place. This came back to me when I recently read a Modiano book, in which the protagonist, while at home alone late in the evenings, often experienced ‘momentary flaggings’. To overcome these moments, he too would visit a neighborhood café but eventually realized that all he needed was to look at the large tree in the courtyard of the building next to his. “He had been told that it was a hornbeam, or an aspen, he was not sure. He regretted all the lost years when he had not paid sufficient attention to either the trees or the flowers.” He then recalled a passage from the memoirs of a French philosopher, who had been shocked by what a woman had said during the war: After all, the war doesn’t alter my relationship with a blade of grass. “She probably reckoned that this woman was frivolous or indifferent. But for him, the phrase had another meaning: in periods of disaster or mental anxiety, all you need to do is look for a fixed point in order to keep your balance and not topple overboard. Your gaze alights on a blade of grass, a tree, the petals of a flower, as though you were clinging on to a buoy. This hornbeam -- or this aspen -- on the other side of his windowpane reassured him. And even though it was almost eleven o’clock at night, he felt comforted by its silent presence.” 

I read somewhere that memories aren’t actually stored in the brain, that the metaphor of the brain functioning as a computer, which is the predominant narrative, might not be appropriate. In other words, if one were to crack open a skull, extract the brain, and look into its cells, one wouldn’t find anything stored in them. If they were, each tiny detail of each memory would be preserved intact, ready to be retrieved at will in its entirety and perfection. But this isn’t the case, evidently. If memories aren’t in the brain, where are they? And are they really memories, or moments lived and re-lived in an infinite number of parallel universes, each on their own timeline, each playing out in a loop? Maybe memories are streamed into us from somewhere else. Maybe dreams, too, are streamed into us from some remote place. Maybe even the reality that we see and touch and perceive is streamed into us from who knows where. By who knows who. 

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In a short story I wrote a couple of months ago, which, as often happens, I left unfinished, an antique chest of drawers sits at the intersection of memory, dream, and reality. I will put my hands on it properly, at some point. Or maybe I’ll just have to wait for the rest of the story to be streamed into me from some other distant dimension. But for the time being it might continue like this:  

Out of breath from running up the stairs, I stood there, frozen, at the entrance to the living room, as if something prevented even the slightest movement. The shutters were all closed, and only a sliver of light was filtering in. In front of me, a strange glow seemed to be coming from inside the open drawers of the antique chest. A weak, pulsating glow. Much like when a TV was on in a dark room and you were about to enter, and from the outside you could see the irregular light emitted by the screen spilling out of the room, crashing against the walls like a wave in a sea of light hitting the dark shore. I regained composure and started walking toward it, slowly.

When I was halfway between the entrance and the open drawers, the glow stopped, and the room fell dark. When I got into the apartment, it was early afternoon, and now no light came in from the closed shutters. How long had I been there, unable to move? With the help of the phone’s torch, I saw that two of the three drawers were empty. The bottom one, though, contained a black and white photo. 

In it, Mrs. Fontana was holding three-year-old me, radiantly smiling at the camera.

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