The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (2 page)

That must have been what fascinated us. The elegance. The irony. Although we didn’t
know it at the time. Why would we have needed to know?

My earliest memory of Miguel dates back to when I was six: between a week and two
weeks after my sixth birthday. The reason I can be so precise is that my birthday is
near the end of February, and the school year begins at the start of March, and this
happened on the first day of school. It was my first day ever (there was no
preschool in Pringles back then), and my parents were taking it all very seriously.
The teacher had given us homework, practicing downstrokes or something like that.
After class, or maybe the next morning, they sat me down at a desk in a room facing
onto the street, with my exercise book and pencil . . . Just then, Miguel’s face
appeared at the window, as it always did when he came to fetch me so we could go and
play. It was quite a high window, but he had worked out how to jump up; he was very
strong and agile (there was something feline about him), and tall for his age. My
father went to the window and sent him packing: I had work to do, I had
responsibilities, my days of going out to play at all hours were over . . . He
didn’t say it in so many words, but that was what he meant. And there was something
more as well, beneath (or above) the words he did say: I was beginning the
middle-class journey that would turn me into a professional, and indiscriminate
fraternizing with the kids on the street was no longer appropriate (Miguel was very
poor—he lived with his parents in a single room in a sort of tenement). The
second part of the prophecy was not fulfilled, because we went on being inseparable
friends all through primary school, and the time I spent playing was hardly reduced
because, given my natural brilliance, I could finish my homework in a flash and
didn’t need to go over my lessons.

I don’t need to be reminded that every memory is a screen. Who knows what this
memory—one of my earliest—conceals. It has been with me, perfectly
vivid, all these fifty-six years, and, within it, Miguel’s round smiling face on the
other side of the glass. He wasn’t offended by my father’s abruptness; he just
dropped back to the ground. And I wasn’t bothered either; no doubt I was fascinated
by the novelty of the exercise book and the pencil, and pleased, perhaps, by the
fuss being made of me at home, and convinced, deep down, that I’d be able to go on
playing in the street as much as I liked, because, timid and unassuming as I am,
I’ve always ended up getting my own way.

It’s strange: in the days that have followed Miguel’s death, that fleeting vision of
his face in the window has seemed like the last time I saw him: a farewell. Strange,
because it wasn’t the last time but the first. Although not really: it’s just the
first sight of him I remember. That’s what I had in mind when I began to recount
this memory. The reason my parents and I were so quick to interpret his presence was
that he came to fetch me every day. That first memory, while still the first, is
also a memory of what happened before, of what has been forgotten. Forgetting
stretches away, before and after; my memory of the first day of school is a tiny,
solitary island. There are a few other childhood memories, also discrete and
isolated, erratic and inexplicable. Nevertheless, I treasure them, and I’m thankful
for the screening mechanism that has preserved them for me. All the rest has been
lost. This so-called “infantile amnesia,” the total oblivion that swallows up the
first years of our lives, is a remarkable phenomenon, and has been explained and
understood in various ways. Personally, I subscribe to Dr. Schachtel’s explanation,
which runs, in essence, as follows:

Small children lack linguistic or cultural frames to put around their perceptions.
Reality enters them torrentially, without passing through the schematizing filters
of words and concepts. Gradually they incorporate the frames, and the reality that
they experience is stereotyped accordingly, becoming linguistic and therefore
retrievable in so far as it has adapted itself to being consciously recorded. That
initial phase of immersion in brute reality is totally lost, because things and
sensations have no limits or set formats. The immediate absorption of reality, which
mystics and poets strive for in vain, is what children do every day. Everything
after that is inevitably an impoverishment. Our new capacities come at a cost. We
need to impoverish and schematize in order to keep a record, otherwise we’d be
living in a perpetual present, which would be completely impractical. Even so, it’s
sad to realize how much has been lost: not only the capacity to absorb the world in
its fullness, with all its riches and nuances, but also the material absorbed during
that phase, a treasure that has vanished because it wasn’t stored away in
retrievable frames.

Dr. Schachtel’s book, so persuasive in its dry, scientific eloquence, avoids what, in
this context, could only be a false poetry. It also avoids giving examples, which
would lead inevitably to poetic falsification. Poetry is made of words, and every
word in a poem is an example of that particular word in its everyday use. To give a
truly adequate example, every word would have to be accompanied by a chaotic
enumeration encompassing, or at least suggesting, the entire universe. We see a bird
flying, and at once the adult mind says “bird.” The child, by contrast, sees
something that not only does not have a name but is not even a nameless thing: it is
(although the verb
to be
should be used with caution here) a limitless
continuum involving the air, the trees, the time of day, movement, temperature, the
mother’s voice, the color of the sky, almost everything. The same goes for all
objects and events, or what we call objects and events. It could almost be an
artistic project, or the model or matrix from which all artistic projects are
derived. What’s more, when thought attempts to examine its own roots, perhaps it is
trying, unwittingly, to return to a time before it existed, or at least trying to
dismantle itself piece by piece, to see what riches it conceals.

This would change the meaning of nostalgia for the “green paradise” of childhood:
perhaps the object of longing is not so much (or not at all) an innocent state of
nature, but an incomparably richer, more subtle and developed intellectual life.

It is my belief that all the lost memories of my early years are recorded in the two
thousand films I saw in that time. I will try to illuminate the nature of that vast
archive by describing an invention that Miguel and I came up with. I said that
North by Northwest
—or
International
Intrigue
, as we knew it—made an impression on us, no more perhaps
than many other films, but in a different way. The day after seeing it, we decided
to create a secret society dedicated to international intrigue. Now that I think of
it, the sound of those two words might have been what triggered our initiative:
intrigue
, an intriguing word in itself, which could refer to just about
anything; and
international,
indicating importance, the world beyond
Pringles. Without secrecy, of course, there would have been no point. Secrecy was at
the center of it all.

We were possessed of the easiest and safest means of keeping secrets, simply by being
children and letting the adults think, rightly, that there was no need to
investigate our games because they belonged to a sphere apart, separate from their
reality. We must have known—it was obvious—that nothing we could do
would be of the slightest interest to adults, which devalued our secrecy. In order
for a secret to be a secret, it had to kept from someone. Since we had no one else,
we would have to keep it from ourselves. We had to find a way to split ourselves in
two, but that was not impossible in the world of play.

We named our society the “ISI” (for International Secret Intrigue), and its
operations began immediately. The principle rule, as I said, was secrecy. We weren’t
allowed to talk to each other about the ISI; I wasn’t supposed to find out that
Miguel was a member, and vice versa. Communication was to take place via anonymous
written messages placed in a “letter box” to be agreed upon. We agreed that it would
be one of the cracks in the wooden door of a derelict house on a corner. Once we had
established these rules, we pretended to have forgotten all about the ISI and
started playing another game, although our heads were buzzing with plans for
conspiracies, investigations, and stunning revelations, which we were scripting in
advance. Both of us were itching to go home and write the first message, but we had
to hide our impatience, so we went on playing more and more distractedly as the
texts took shape in our heads, until nightfall. Only then, with some plausible
excuse (“I have to do my homework” or “I have to have a bath”), did we go our
separate ways.

The rules, as you can see, were purely formal. We didn’t worry about the content: it
would take care of itself. And as it turned out, there was no shortage of material.
On the contrary, there was an excess. Writing and drawings filled up the sheets of
paper; sometimes we needed two, and the folded wad was so thick we had trouble
wedging it into the crack. We tore pages from our school exercise books: it was the
only paper we had, and in those days of abundance they made it thick and tough to
resist the assault of erasers. We learned the art of folding, and may even have
discovered for ourselves that a piece of paper cannot be folded in half more than
nine times.

What did we write? I can’t remember how we began, no doubt by inventing some imminent
danger, or giving each other instructions for saving the world, or indicating the
enemy’s whereabouts. It became more intense when we started accusing each other of
blunders, denunciations, and betrayals, or simply of being dangerous enemy agents
who had infiltrated the ranks of the ISI. Threats and death sentences were frequent.
Meanwhile, we went on playing together, going to the movies, building tree houses,
organizing stone-throwing battles in the vacant lot opposite the school (this
dangerous game was a favorite among the local kids), and doing target practice with
our slingshots. We never mentioned the ISI, of course. We were leading parallel
lives. And we didn’t have to pretend; it was something that came naturally. We had
split ourselves in two.

Children quickly tire of games, and we were no exception. Even the games that excited
us most were abandoned after a few days. The ISI lasted because of its peculiar
format, though I’m not sure whether it was the splitting or the secret that made the
difference. I should say that it wasn’t entirely exempt from the general tendency,
and the initial frenzy died away after a week or two, but the system of written
communication guaranteed a continuity that was, in a way, independent of us.

We started forgetting to go to the old red door to see if there was a new message,
and if by chance I passed and saw a folded sheet of white paper wedged into the
crack, I would pull it out, only to discover, more often than not, that it was my
last message, written and left there so long ago I couldn’t remember what it said,
so I would read it with interest before putting it back.

Or else the old message would be from Miguel. In any case, all the workings of the
game would come rushing back into consciousness, and arouse a real enthusiasm in me
(or him), a feeling of responsibility and loyalty, and admiration for the mind
(whose mind?) that had invented such a brilliant source of fun. Development is rapid
at that age, and although we were still children, we regarded the already distant
creators of the ISI as infants with scant intellectual resources and were amazed by
their precociousness; we couldn’t have come up with it, in spite of our age and
education. We couldn’t believe it, our past selves seemed so remote and primitive .
. . Nevertheless, we’d quickly write a reply, of course, whichever one of us it was,
pleased to have the chance to display what we had learned in the meantime. We’d put
it into the crack, and for a day or two, we’d go back every half hour to see if
there was a response, not realizing that the ISI was as far from the other player’s
mind as it had been from mine or Miguel’s before he or I happened to see the
message. And this preoccupation would soon be displaced by others and lapse into
oblivion.

It’s no exaggeration to say that these interruptions became extremely long. It was as
if they corresponded to successive phases of our lives, as if all the body’s cells
had to be replaced before one of us could pass the peeling, weather-beaten door,
notice a thin white strip in one of its cracks, and ask himself what it might be.
Say it was me. Out of pure idle curiosity, and only because I wasn’t in a hurry, I’d
pull it out, with difficulty, because time and rain had lodged it firmly. It was a
ragged, discolored wad of paper. It came apart along the creases when it was
unfolded. There was something written on it, the ink had faded and run, but the
message was still legible; the handwriting was childish, interspersed with maps and
sketches, and warnings in stern capitals, with underlinings and exclamation marks.
For a moment, and this would provoke a certain flutter of excitement, there seemed
to be a possibility that it was about something serious like a kidnapping or a
denunciation . . . In that case, it would have to be shown to the police. But no, it
was too absurd. And suddenly the memory would return, as if from very far away: The
ISI! The dear old ISI . . . That game we invented . . . So many memories, so much
nostalgia! But then I’d think: It’s my turn to reply. He’ll be so surprised to find
that I’m still checking up, still ready to play!

Could it be true, as I seem to remember, that this scenario was repeated over and
over? Maybe I’m mistaken. If it had really happened like that, my childhood, and
Miguel’s, would have lasted thousands of years, and we’d still be alive today.