About Memory

He found it hard to think about it. Memory, he often said to himself, cannot be a thing of this world. Indeed, in so far as everybody was concerned, it belonged to a certain mystery of the past. A certain recollection of unforgettable moments, each in its own way very similar to another, fastened to it by some urge to remember the ghostly chain of events. This moment, this very moment, he imagined as he glanced at the uniform geometry of clothed tables, was just another feast of past time memories, silently drawing a garland of square windows, heavy drapes, and wine glasses stenciled with the fine prints of alcohol, teeth, lips, and fingers. As he pondered, he came to the conclusion that nothing could be said of such a moment. Nothing at all. And he was quite certain of his muteness. He knew why certain impressions had flashed at him rather selfishly, dallying with his aroused senses in the most perfect calm. Why his heart sank and suddenly chimed on its own in the gear of his chest, turning inert beneath the flesh scales of age. His shoulder blades shrunk immediately after, as if insensible to him or anyone else in the world. They fled inwardly and almost cracked while he sat there, unable to articulate a single word of what he felt. Nor could he anticipate or make himself conscious of any sort of intuition. He coughed and chose to linger on, servile to the habit of smoking as if to some chronic ache of his own lack of judgment. So swift a sensation, though! So dark, too. Right there, choking him in the shade, while it seemed to be yielding for something or perhaps someone who had been forgotten long time ago. It seemed, indeed ...

Well, yes, it did. Even though to him it appeared to have been nothing extraordinary, nothing palpable to respond to the moment but the dark thread of an illusion flickering vaguely in his mind. He was sure there were no candles around. He had remarked their absence as he came in, slowly unwinding from the stroll. There were no fresh flowers in the little vases set on the tables either, but their absence did not prejudice him, things like that were meant to be observed and naturally forgotten. The cool shaft of air, the waitress' skirt, the smoke ... These were the things that mattered! They formed the living memoir of being there: seated, thirsty, anxious, quiet, and unprejudiced, perhaps, in so many other ways ... This pale memoir of being here, he thought, was all he needed to remember. All he liked about life as it leered by, unhindered. It whispered and then groaned, and whispered again, unabated. It laughed and shouted and moistened his lips in the chilled bitterness of a glass of wine. But that was another memory altogether: the wine. Half a glass of Cabernet, tasting ever more enticingly of ferments and chemicals, seeds, vines, barrels, and soil, from which he could easily retrieve the image of a sun dried valley or a moon polished hill that might have caught his breath as he toured the country sides of Europe. For what was worth! For in truth, truth be true!, it no longer mattered. The flavor of the wine vanished from his tongue as soon as he got lost in reminiscing about it, giving in to the whiff of purple vapors (with a slightly inept jerk). For he knew, alas!, he knew that none of his senses have been so thoroughly defeated as the romantic marvels of his own eyes and ears. All the other senses fumbled restlessly as substitute ranks of superficial perception, turning vague, empty, sorrowful, even implicit, while his own consciousness seemed to him to have been put to sleep. His own thoughts bewitched him, as it were, while massive crests of dark metal, etching glass, flesh, dirt, noise, and clouds were fastening their grip on the morning's horizon.

Half a step away from the margin of the table, there, outside the window!

NO, of course he did not mind the view. He was not even looking at the pierced walls and windows. His heart began to shudder just at the thought of it. It shuddered, sure thing, even though the waves of perception failed to stir him. His mind was perfectly at anchor with his body, following each and every notch of feeling to the smallness and rapt insignificance of random impulses ... Ash flakes, he mused as his thoughts strayed off to some eerie edge of apprehension, leaving him nothing to rely on but the toxic sentiment of unrest that stretched from bone to bone inside his body. As he tuned himself to the unstirred ballast within, he found nothing better to do than lean against the chair's back and give in, sip by sip, to the quiet Now. He found himself thus moored, waiting for something to appear, perhaps as the negative of his own absent mindedness, perhaps only as a trace of lusting angst, but surely as unfeigned as a childish emotion, or at least as unprejudiced as he happened to be musing, smoking, blinking, drinking, in no precise order of movements and ideas.

He waited so, ordinarily. Indeed, he would have liked to wait so indefinitely, until there might have etched something else there beside the alchemy of waiting. A feminine umbra in place of a shade perhaps, a living thing instead of the prints on the wine glass, the whiteness of the table cloth, or his hands grabbing and gliding to and fro in quiet shifts of their own. In fact, he would have persevered long enough for something to gain pulse beneath the storm of memory, something not of this world, nor of any other, but simply and inexplicably something else. This something (else) he would have liked to place aside. Dusted in an armor of its own, faceless, tacit, complete, and no less lonely, immaterial, vivacious. Something, indeed, unexpected, frosted, dejected, blind, and yet, feminine. He thus found himself pondering. Relinquishing his own mood as plain being there, enticed by the furtive rhythm of things and no less by the wine and the fraps of solitude that settled him into thinking, once more, about, in such and such a way, deliberately, leisurely, perhaps even sheepishly, and no less closer to the things that have always preoccupied him. The living mien ... of being there! Wrested by the waitress' plump hip, by her pale cheeks vexing quietly on and off the servile grids of deception, scantily smiling, noting, bowing, arching over, and scurrying to the back kitchen, to bring the next order. Scarcely a living soul and yet, so flagrantly bound to her flesh, so appetizing to a man's egos, a thing, and yet, a woman, a silhouette, a face splendidly casting its makeup in the crock of a mirror before vanishing into the kitchen.

As for the rest ... There seemed to be no one there for the moment. No one. And yet, perhaps there was. A woman sitting alone, hued in thoughts just like he was. Her body dyed in some colorless tint, gray, beige, or simply damask dye covering the caps of her knees and her slender torso. He could spy the arches of her breast, her hair blazing with the sparks of brass chandeliers, her fingers dancing lavishly on the clutches of a zipper, and yet, he could not help thinking she might have been different than other women. Perhaps less beautiful, less fashionable, less amiable, but nonetheless a woman – sitting alone, hued in...