Memory Loss

Lauro Palomba

They wheelchaired her out punctually enough, wizened in a multi-colored smock, like the next item on the auction block though he was that Sunday morning’s lone bidder. They opened the sun umbrella over them and departed. Her house sold, its phone number expunged— two affable avenues for decades leading to welcome and hospitality, now dead-ended—there she sat, by appointment. The virus restrictions relaxed; he’d finally been allowed to see her.

He identified himself, via his father, her late brother. Her face stood by. Contrary to the facility’s rules, he briefly lowered his mask. She smiled, childlike at his game of peek-a-boo rather than from recognition.

In cap, sunglasses, and mask, he felt decked out more for combat than companionship and removed the two that were permitted. Through the mask, he placed his lips on her hollowed cheek. The outdoor supervisor, a student, fixated on his mobile phone, distracted from the need to intervene.

“Hello,” she said to a taciturn fellow resident, stepping out to no visitors, and proceeding to the gazebo. She looked lively, her facial expressions changing, and aware of movement around her: a nearby woman noisily eating chips, attended by her daughter; three family members making a fuss over another.

His simple questions set her off. Chatty and soft-spoken as always, she started to narrate an epic whose words he knew but forming a language he did not. She’d salvaged the chuckles from her lucid days and these too she interspersed into the tale she was relating.

His attention pretended to understand it all.

But the passing traffic beyond their enclosure paved over her quieter phrasing, and someone dialing up the music from the apartments next door made most of the rest inaudible.

The last time he’d visited the core of her message, stripped of much of its meaning, had emerged in strands. Like the mass of seasoned pork, she’d once hand-cranked through the meat grinder and encased into tangy sausages she later donated to eager relatives.

Only months earlier, she could still receive. Haphazardly. She recalled her parents’ names though not her son-in-laws’. He purposely mistook her upcoming birthday. She corrected it to October with the exact date. Then she’d also smiled, as if wise to his game.

“Hello,” she broke off, to greet a woman being brought out, stiff and horizontal, to waiting children, and when she returned her gaze to him she couldn’t tell he was listening mainly to his own voice.

Under her dusting of hair the archives of his aunt, an immigrant like himself, were being sectioned off. Floor by floor. Aisle by aisle. File by file. Sealing her knowledge of their native village. Taping shut his ancestry; a village settled a thousand years before, swelling and then contracting into the modern world. He’d been soaking it up as a child when he left and now could only dip into it as a tourist.

His aunt, his father, and uncle—his mother born and raised in a nearby valley—used to gush its contents, inherited and lived. They loved words the way carpenters loved wood and, like wood, planed them to build and sometimes batter, in contention and in accord. Enriching a treasury of the village’s characters, incidents, rituals, rumors, scandals, and myths, vitalizing the anatomy of a place, without which progeny are little better than plants. She, the closest survivor, could call up, on request or on her own, the rigid mores and who’d flouted them. The vendettas and the outcomes, extraordinary acts of kindness or cruelty, arrogance and humility, shameful acts and secrets long covered up. She retained knowledge of people’s connections, through blood or behavior, that were invisible to latecomers. In short, she was a manual on how the human soil had been tilled, the soil of the village’s story, the soil from which they had all sprouted.

Until her mind had begun its solo journey, she could still be counted on to update who lived where, the deaths, marriages, and births of the village diaspora. She was the hub by which news continued to radiate to him.

So much left unexplored through reminiscence or inquiry. She the last custodian he might consult when memory welled random snatches that he needed her to verify or anecdotes whose details, like falling plaster, required her restoration. Now her rare volumes were piecemeal and permanently falling under lock and key. Or worse, for the flame still in her eyes put him in mind of a great library burning down, its irreplaceable scrolls forever forfeited. Either way, her loss migrates to his. “Two minutes,” the student gently notified. The half-hour already expired.

Just as this September morning had failed to replicate July’s heat, their session had unfolded less dispiritingly than he’d feared. The fountain pumps had rusted but there might be more of her gabby monologues before she fastened the shutters wholly on bygone times. Perhaps they could hold hands at their next meeting and imply, by touch rather than thoughts, how far they’d traveled together.

The student hovered.

He replaced the cap and sunglasses on his head and kissed her again, his mask poor armor against the sadness of frailty.