I’m unable to forget the young Montano as I write now with the shawl around my shoulders and the heater’s silent company and tell myself that the constant presence of mountains in recent hours may be a sign indicating that it might be very good for me to accept the invitation to climb Matz Peak and read there excerpts from my diary, read them in the open air at midnight, in the Alps’ great silence, as a tribute to Renata.
In short, at eight, when the alarm sounds and Rosa turns it off with her customary smack, I shall answer the e-mail and at the same time — now that I remember — I shall send the critic Stanisław Wiciński a letter, the last I send him. I’ve decided to stop sending letters to this character I invented one day, perhaps to compensate for the fact that I’ve not been the great literary critic I wanted to be; I’m not going to send him any more letters to which I then have to reply, the game of writing to myself is over, but above all — I hope I don’t forget — I shall answer the e-mail, I shall agree to travel to the Swiss mountains and once there to listen to the wind that they say, as it stirs the leaves of the great trees, mimics human voices, the voices of unknown people that up on Matz Peak, in a great high climate, tell the world’s secrets.
The alarm rings, it’s eight o’clock, end of snores, the day awakens and with it its poetry, I hear the almighty smack.
DECEMBER 25 OR LE RICCORDANZE
The memories of various lay anniversaries dance today.
On such a day, forty-five years ago, in 1956, Robert Walser died. After lunch at the sanatorium, he decided to go for a hike in the snow, to climb to Rosenberg, where there are some ruins. From the top there was a wonderful view over the mountains of Alpstein. The hour was soothing, it was midday, and outside there was snow, pure snow, as far as the eye could see. The solitary hiker set out and began to fill his lungs with the clear winter air. He left Herisau Sanatorium behind. He climbed through beeches and firs up the side of Schochenberg. Two children found him where he dropped down dead in the snow, in perpetual ecstasy over the Swiss winter.
Walser, or the art of disappearing.
In one of his novels, The Tanner Siblings, there are some lines that presage his own death in the snow; in the mouth of one character he places an elegy to Sebastian, the poet found dead in the snow. “With what nobility he has chosen his tomb! He lies among splendid green firs covered in snow. I don’t want to inform anyone. Nature bends down to contemplate her deceased, the stars sing softly around his head and the night birds caw: it is the best music for someone who cannot hear or feel.”
Walser, or the art of disappearing at Christmas, of knowing how on such a sentimental date to leave the writing room, the room of phantoms.
On such a day, thirty-nine years ago, on December 25, 1962, the Great Snowfall took place over Barcelona. It is one of the most important memories of my early years. That morning the patio of my parents’ home appeared covered in snow and I couldn’t believe it. To start with, I thought it was part of my mother’s Christmas decorations. I remember that December 25th very well. Me with a scarf inside the house, listening to my mother say that for a city like Barcelona, so abandoned by the hand of God, it was a blessing that, even if it was only the once, He should have remembered us and brought us snow on the most appropriate day, Christmas Day, with divine punctuality.
For me, Christmas Day will always be the day of the Great Snowfall. Wrapped in two jerseys and a scarf inside the house, I switched on the radio and suddenly we heard a message of peace and Christmas goodwill from Salvador Dalí, a few emotional words from the Ampurdán painter telling us that, from that day on, he planned to orient all his life toward Franco’s Spain and the family: “Isabella the Catholic, consecrated hosts, melons, rosaries, truculent indigestion, bullfights, Calanda drums and Ampurdán sardines. To sum up: my life must be oriented toward Spain and the family.”
We listened to that message in respectful silence mixed with some astonishment. The snow fell stealthily on the patio outside, as at the beginning of a Christmas tale.
“Dalí’s turned into one of us,” said my father.
On such a day, forty-five years ago, in 1956, W. G. Sebald’s grandfather died, having gone out for a walk in the snow and collapsed on top of it at almost exactly the same time as another walker, Robert Walser, was also struck down on the snow, in a similar landscape.
Two dead for a single Christmas Day.
Eleven days ago, last Friday, December 14th, the writer W. G. Sebald died while out driving. He always seemed to have just emerged from another age: a slightly ancient man who, in sight of solitary landscapes, came across traces of a past in ruins that referred him to the wholeness of the world.
I am seated next to the Christmas tree in my home, and I remember the Great Snowfall of my childhood and that speech by Dalí, and I begin to listen to Vittorio Gassman reciting Leopardi’s Le ricordanze, and I let the memories, mine and others’, invade me, and I tell myself that without them and without those memories’ ruins, without memory, life would be even more distressing, though it may be even more distressing to realize that the more our memory grows, the more our death grows. Because man is just a machine for remembering and forgetting, heading for death. And I don’t say this with sadness because it’s also true that memory, disguised as life, turns death into something subtle and tenuous.
The memories dance for me and I adhere to the indispensable fabric of my memory and my identity — in this case, that reached with my double odyssey — and I tell myself that I am somebody only because I remember, which is to say that I am because I remember; I am the one memory has always helped, preventing him from falling into absolute distress, has helped during years with flashes and luminous sparks in which every day, in a ray of sun, charming and tragic, the tragic dust of time has danced for me.
There are two of me. I have a double odyssey’s identity. One is lurking in the Chinese wall and the other, more Christmassy and sedentary, listens to Gassman at home: “Viene il vento recando il suon dell’ora / dalla torre del borgo …”
The detective’s patience to trap a memory can verge on the ridiculous. One is satisfied with a cake dunked in tea; another, with a drop of perfume at the bottom of an empty bottle; another, with il suon dell’ora, a peal of bells swept by the wind from the village tower. Tastes, minimal smells, sounds of the past. I’m ashamed to say so, because it’s not very poetic, shall we say, but this is how it is and I can’t change it: my dunked cake, my drop of perfume, my music of the wind is a prosaic and vulgar mouthful — as brief as childhood — of a Catalan beverage called Cacaolat, a mixture of milk and cocoa that I used to drink daily during morning break at school.
I only have to taste that beverage for the memories to return. But this word, Cacaolat, could not be more ridiculous and less poetic, which may explain why I have spent half my life hating writers who work with their memories, and instead defending those who without the dead weight of memories are in a position to reach their maturity more quickly. I have spent half my life defending those writers who do not live off the rents of the past, and who can demonstrate an up-to-date imagination, an imagination capable of inventing out of the present, out of nothingness itself.
Half a life boasting of finding hardly anything in my tedious childhood, just a scarf, a patio covered in snow, and not much else. Half a life congratulating myself on never having had to resort to childhood to be able to write, congratulating myself on not becoming emotional when I examined a situation from my early years. And yet all this suddenly collapsed a few months ago in Barcelona’s Rovira Square, the approximate geographical center of my childhood; it collapsed when I visited this square recently to witness the filming of a sequence from Shanghai Nights, Juan Marsé’s novel that Fernando Trueba was making into a film. The set designers had turned Rovira Square into what it was fifty years before. It was as if I had pressed the time machine’s exact switch. Suddenly everything was the same as fifty years ago; even the posters for the double bill showing at the long-since-disappeared Rovira Cinema were the same; even the atmosphere of the air in the square struck me as identical to that of fifty years ago. I immediately understood — as when I took LSD in my formative years — that Time does not exist, everything is present.