Dinner

I

My friend was home alone, but he invited us over for dinner anyway; he was a very sociable man — liked to talk and tell stories, though he wasn’t any good at it; he’d get the episodes mixed up, leave effects without causes and causes without effects, skip over important parts, and drop anecdotes right in the middle. This didn’t bother my mother, who at her age had reached a level of mental confusion equivalent to what my friend had been born with; I think she didn’t even notice. In fact, she was the one who most enjoyed the conversation that evening — it was the only thing she did enjoy — because the names of the town’s families were being constantly mentioned — magic words that distilled her entire interest in life. I listened to the names drop, as one listens to the falling rain, whereas for her, each was a treasure full of meanings and memories. Mother was enjoying something that was lacking in her daily conversation with me; in that respect, and in that one alone, she and my friend were perfectly in sync. He was a building contractor, and for decades he’d been building houses in Pringles, so he knew the configurations and genealogies of all the town’s families — one name conjured another, driven by the townspeople’s lifelong practice of pursuing their entire intellectual and emotional education by talking about one another. It would have been difficult to do this without names. It’s true that things get lost with age and arterial sclerosis, and they always say that names are the first to go. But names are also the first things to be found, for their search is carried out through other names. They started to talk about a woman, “the daughter of… what was her name? Miganne, who lived in front of Cabanillas’ office…” “Which Cabanillas?” “The one married to Artola’s daughter?” And they continued in this vein. Each name was a knot of meaning into which many other chains of names converged. The stories crumbled into a hailstorm of names and were left unsolved, like old crimes, swindles, betrayals, or scandals involving these families had also been left unsolved. To me, the names meant nothing, they had never meant anything, but that wasn’t why they didn’t sound familiar. On the contrary, they did sound familiar; I would say they were the most familiar things in the world, because I’d been hearing them since my earliest childhood, from before I could talk. For some reason though, I had never been able, or had never wanted, to associate those names with faces or houses; perhaps this was my way of rejecting the life of the town where I had, nonetheless, spent my entire life, and now, age and the loss of names, had created the curious paradox of losing what I had never had. Even so, when I heard them on the lips of my mother and my friend, each rang out like a chime of memories, empty memories, sounds.

It wasn’t as if I were devoid of real memories, full-fledged memories, a fact I ascertained after dinner when my friend showed us an old windup toy, which he removed from a glass display cabinet. It was small, barely larger than the palm of his hand, and was a pretty faithful miniature of an old-fashioned bedroom, complete with a bed, a bedside table, a rug, a wardrobe, and a door at the foot of the bed, which, without a wall to open out from, looked like a second wardrobe and was outfitted with a rectangular box, which I assumed hid one of the characters. Another character was in plain sight, lying on the bed: a blind old woman, partially reclining against some cushions. The floor of this room was neither tile nor parquet but rather made of smooth, dark planks, like the floors of the houses in Pringles that I remembered from childhood. I took special notice of it because it made me think of the house of two seamstresses where my mother used to take me when I was little. I have one very strange memory associated with that house. Once, when we went there, the floor was missing from the room where the seamstresses were working, that is a large part of it had been removed for renovations, or had caved in; the entire room was one great big pit, very deep, with dark gullies full of crumbling dirt and rocks, and water at the bottom. The seamstresses, and their assistants and customers, were all around the edges. Everybody was laughing and talking about the catastrophe and offering explanations. It’s one of those inexplicable memories that remains from early childhood. I don’t think it was as extreme as I remember, because nobody can live or work in a place like that, but I was very small — maybe that’s why the pit looked so big to me. I once asked Mother if she remembered it because it is still so vivid. Not only didn’t she remember the pit in the seamstresses’ room, she didn’t even remember the seamstresses. I was irrationally annoyed that she didn’t remember, as if she were forgetting on purpose. The fact was, she had no reason to remember such a trivial event from sixty years before. But she was intrigued, and she turned the subject over in her mind for an entire day. I had only one fact that might have helped her: one of the seamstresses had a finger that was hard and stiff, like wood. Based on this finger, which I could picture very clearly, I thought I could recall its owner, an old woman with dark brown hair in a stiff hairdo, tall and skinny, with strong bones; her finger was enormous. Needless to say, this detail didn’t help at all. My mother asked: Could they be the Adurizes, the Razquines, the Astuttis? It exasperated me that she’d try to get at it through names, which didn’t mean anything to me. My “names” were the pit, the finger, things like that, which didn’t have names. I didn’t insist. I kept the memory to myself, as I had so many others. My first memory, the first memory in my life, is also of an excavation: the street we lived on was dirt, and then they paved it, and to do so they had to dig up a lot of dirt and rocks; I remember the whole street divided up into rectangular pits, like graves, I don’t know why, because I don’t think you have to make a grid like that in order to pave a street.

These recurrent memories of pits, so primitive and maybe purely fantastical, had maybe come to symbolize “holes” in memory, or rather holes in stories, ones that not only don’t exist in the stories I tell but that I am always filling up in stories others tell me. I find fault in everybody else’s narrative art, almost always with good reason. My mother and my friend were particularly deficient in this respect, perhaps because of their passion for names, which prevented the stories’ normal development.

It was truly magical: names came to their lips with enormous facility and in abundant quantities. Did so many people now live or had so many people ever lived in Pringles? Any excuse would suffice for them to conjure up a whole new bunch of names. Those who’d lived on the block. Those who’d moved away from the block. Those who’d lost money on their houses. Those who grew aromatic herbs. These last came up after my friend began to praise the meal, which led to the story of how he had obtained the fresh sage for the rice. Packaged sage wasn’t any good — it lost most of its aroma during the drying process. And his own sage plants had been accidentally destroyed a few days before during one of his frequent house renovations or additions. So, that afternoon he had gone out to pay visits to some acquaintances whom he knew had herb gardens. He had no luck at the first place: their sage had been contaminated with toxic dust; maybe he could wash it well and use it but it wouldn’t be worth it if anyway he’d have to worry about it being poisoned. I asked if they’d used some kind of insecticide. No, something much worse! Delia Martínez, that was her name, never used any chemicals in her garden. The name, which didn’t mean anything to me, roused my mother out of her silence. Delia Martínez, the one who’s married to Liuzzi? The one who lived on the Boulevard? Yes, that’s the one. I noticed that habit of calling women by their maiden names: it was like constantly bringing up people’s histories. Mother said she had run into her the day before and had heard all about her agonizing ordeal with the statue… My friend interrupted her: that was precisely what had contaminated her sage plants, and her other herbs, and the whole garden. They explained — taking for granted that I didn’t know — that this woman lived in front of the small plaza along the Boulevard, where for months a sculptor had been working on a monument commissioned by the city. The marble dust blew toward her house, forcing her to live with her doors and windows hermetically sealed, and covered every last leaf in her garden, which was her great passion and her life’s masterwork. She’d complained to the mayor and on the local radio and television stations. Looking worried and peering down at her half-eaten dinner, Mother said that marble dust was very bad for your health. That was news to me, and it sounded like nonsense, so I started to say something, anything that would serve as an excuse for my friend in case he had used that sage, but he was already emphatically agreeing with her: it was the worst thing in the world, a poison, it could even kill you. And he should know, because of his profession. Of course he hadn’t taken sage from Delia’s garden! Anyway, she never would have given him any under those conditions. No, the sage that flavored the rice we were eating came from elsewhere. Delia Martínez herself had referred him on. The person with the sage was Mrs. Gardey, the owner of Pensión Gardey. A beauty! my mother exclaimed, and then she began, willy-nilly, to praise the woman, who, according to her, was still beautiful at ninety; in her youth she had been crowned Miss Pringles, and she was beautiful on the inside as well as on the outside: so good, kind, sweet, and intelligent — a real contrast to all the mean women in town. My friend nodded distractedly and ended the story by saying that when he went to see her, the old woman had greeted him by saying that she didn’t have any rooms available, that she was very sorry but the wedding of some French landowners had brought many people to town (some from France), and she was fully booked; when he explained why he’d come, she went to get some scissors, led him to her garden in the back, and cut him some sage, not without first offering him a “guided tour” of her establishment. My mother: the pension, it’s so beautiful, so well cared for, so clean, when she was young she always went to the carnival balls the late Mr. Gardey would organize. My friend corrected her: it wasn’t the same building… But Mother was sure of what she was saying, she argued with him forcefully, and enthusiastically elaborated upon her memories. But it simply wasn’t so, my friend knew exactly what he was talking about and silenced her with his own more precise information: the old Pensión Gardey, one of the most prominent buildings in town, had been demolished, and the current one — a much more modest and architecturally dull building — had been built on the same site. There was no question about the accuracy of what he was saying because there had been a trial that had reached epic proportions. It all happened when the owner of the adjacent lot, which was vacant, wanted to build. When he examined the maps in the lands registry, he discovered that the people who had built the pension had made a mistake and erected the dividing wall beyond the legal boundary, four inches into his — the neighbor’s — property. This was a serious problem: Gardey was not allowed to purchase that strip, usurped inadvertently, for land couldn’t be partitioned into plots less than a yard wide, and any offer of monetary compensation was contingent on the good will of the one accepting. There were arguments, misunderstandings, and the whole thing ended up in court; the neighbor was intransigent, and since the law was on his side, the pension, that fantastic Beaux Arts palace, the pride of the town and the site of the most wonderful memories for those who’d attended the grand carnival balls, had to be torn down — all because of four lousy inches! At this point, in the middle of the story, my friend stretched out his hand and held his thumb and index finger apart (four inches apart). This had been the ruin of Gardey, who was a good man; the neighbor was the bad one, all of Pringles blamed him. Gardey died soon thereafter, a bitter man, and it was his wife who rebuilt the pension and had been running it for the last several decades.

But to return to the toy with the blind doll, which he showed us after dinner: there were two cranks on the platform, one on either side. Did it still work? My friend said it did, perfectly, he had taken it out of the glass case so we could “watch the show.” It was almost a hundred years old, made in France; he wound it up every once in a while — not often because he cherished it as one of the crown jewels of his collection — setting it in motion so it wouldn’t rust. There were basically two mechanisms that had to function at the same time, that’s why there were two cranks. One was for the music box; the other controlled the automatons. A spring-loaded button in front guaranteed simultaneity. He pressed it, then proceeded to turn both cranks. They were two very small bronze “butterflies,” which he turned with the skill acquired through a lot of practice. His thick, rough fingers seemed unsuitable for such tiny devices, but they managed without a hitch. His hands were swollen and looked worn — the hands of a bricklayer. He had once told me that if he ever committed a crime, he wouldn’t have to worry about leaving fingerprints because working with bricks and mortar had erased them. I noticed that my mother was following these manipulations only out of politeness and with poorly disguised impatience. It’s not that she was a stickler for decorum, but she might have felt a bit intimidated. With a collector’s typical lack of sensitivity, my friend would never notice that she was wholly indifferent to his toys, and his pictures, and his objects. Perhaps even more than indifferent. Mother found them inexplicable, useless (they were, eminently), and therefore unwholesome. I realized that the lighting, which had been decreasing throughout our dinner, contributed to this feeling. We had eaten by candlelight, but afterwards, while wandering through the showrooms, I saw that the whole house was dimly lit. A few standing lamps in the corners, others on small tables and shelves, cast shrouded glows through their shades. My mother, my whole family, had always lived in interiors brightly lit either with bare bulbs, the strongest they had in the shops, or fluorescent tubes. I sensed that she found this system of discreetly and artistically placing lamps around the rooms somewhat suspect, like some kind of questionable symbol of social class. My friend, who, unlike us, came from the coarsest stratum of the proletariat, had embarked on a long and gradual process of refinement thanks to his contact with rich clients, whose houses he’d built. His antiquarian passions had done the rest.

Also, he traveled. Not on cultural trips or to study, but something must have stuck from his visits to the Old World. Like so many Italian immigrants, he had returned to visit his family as soon as he had the means to do so. His parents, who’d brought him to Argentina when he was an infant, had left a lot of relatives behind in Naples. He first went back when he was quite young, shortly after his parents died, and then he returned many times, accumulating vast European experience, from which he never stopped extracting facts and stories to spice up his conversation. During our dinner — not to go too far afield — he regaled us with several odd anecdotes. One of them came up in connection with diseases (my mother had mentioned, I don’t remember apropos of what, a neighbor’s health problems): his Neapolitan cousins, and perhaps, he deduced, all lower-class Neapolitans, concealed illness as if it were something shameful. One of his visits coincided with one of his aunts having minor surgery. They devised thousands of tricks to conceal it from him, which turned out to be not so easy. The closed doors, the sudden silences, the absences, the obvious lies (these people were very naïve), the conversations that stopped short whenever he entered, intrigued him, and in his efforts to figure out what was going on, he reached the conclusion that the Mafia had something to do with it. What else would entail so much secrecy? They had to get him out of the house on the day of the operation, and they did so on the pretext of taking him to see a cactus exhibition nearby, though not too nearby because the excursion had to last all day. He drove with his cousin and his whole family. The children, trained in finessing the deception, spent the whole trip babbling on and on with feigned excitement about cacti, as if going to see them was the fulfillment of their deepest longings. He wasn’t, of course, particularly interested in cacti, and the whole time he was thinking about how he was taking part in a Mafia operation that would leave a string of dead bodies in its wake. Even so, the exhibition turned out to be interesting. He remembered one of the cacti, very small and shaped exactly like an armchair, with many spines: it was called “mother-in-law’s rest.”

Once our host had wound both keys, he pressed the button and the toy started up. My friend placed it on his palm facing us so we wouldn’t miss a single detail. The door to the bedroom opened and a fat young man entered, took two steps along an invisible rail to the foot of the bed, then started to sing a tango, in French. In spite of the toy’s age, the music box worked well, though the sound quality was considerably deteriorated. The fat singer’s voice was high-pitched and metallic; it was difficult to make out the melody, and the words were unintelligible. He gestured with both arms, and threw his head back histrionically, fatuously, as if he were on stage. The old woman on the bed also moved, though very discreetly and almost imperceptibly: she shook her head from side to side, effectively imitating the way a blind person moves. And, by observing closely, you could tell that she was picking crumbs or fuzz off the bedcover with the thumbs and index fingers of both hands. It was a true miracle of precision mechanics, if you take into account that those tiny movable porcelain hands measured no more than one-fifth of an inch. I had once heard that this action of picking up imaginary crumbs was typical of the dying. The makers of the toy must have wanted to show that the old woman’s death was close at hand. Which made me think that the whole scene was telling a story: until that moment I had only admired the prodigious art of the toy’s mechanics, without wondering what it meant. But its meaning, buried in a superior strangeness, could only be guessed. Perhaps it was about an old woman, bedridden and on the verge of death, whose son came to entertain her with his singing. Or maybe he was a professional singer, whom the old woman had hired. Supporting this hypothesis was the fat man’s black suit, and his elegant bearing and self-confidence. Against it was the modesty of the small room, a modesty that was highlighted with very deliberate details. However, the myth of tango made it more appropriate for it to be a son and his “old mother,” in which the man, disappointed by womankind, proclaims that she was the only good woman, the one who never betrayed him. He might have returned to live at his mother’s house after his wife, “that battle axe,” left him, and then he let himself go, got fat, wore pajamas and flip-flops. But every afternoon at the same time, he put on clothes, and spruced himself up (purely for the sake of ritual because his blind mother couldn’t see him), and showed up in his mother’s room to sing her a few tangos, with that voice and those feelings through which she felt the essence of the life she was departing… But if it was a French toy, why tangos? That was strange, and it wasn’t the only thing that had no explanation. What happened next was even stranger.

As soon as the tiny fat automaton began to sing, the second mechanism kicked in. As my friend had said, there were two simultaneous mechanisms; until now, the gears of the “music box” had activated the device — conventional though very sophisticated. What made this one original was its second set of accompanying movements. The edges of the bedspread hanging over the sides began to move (they looked like fabric but were made of porcelain), and large birds crawled out from under the bed, cranes and storks, very white, moving across the floor and flapping their spread wings; though they were birds, they didn’t take flight but remained fixed on the floor. They kept emerging from under both sides of the bed, ten, twelve, an entire flock, until they covered the bedroom floor, all while the fat singer was belting out his mechanical tango in French. At the end of the song, he retreated without turning around, until he had passed the threshold and the door closed behind him, the birds returned to under the bed, and the old woman to her immobility, all very quickly, in a single instant, surely due to the action of the springs. My friend, laughing, placed his small marvel back into the glass cabinet, while I complimented him on it. The whole show hadn’t lasted more than two minutes, and its speed must have been the reason my mother didn’t understand anything, what the story was about or what that thing even was. I knew that due to her age her perceptions were slower and more labored than ours, and that for her to appreciate something as odd as that toy, I would have had to prepare her and give her more time. I didn’t say this to my friend because it wasn’t worth the trouble: no matter what, Mother would have found the whole business futile and reprehensible. From the moment we entered the house, she had been growing increasingly hostile. There was some understanding between them only when the names (family names) of people in town were mentioned; otherwise, she was very withdrawn. My friend might have thought that his antique toys would amuse her or bring back old memories, but this wasn’t the case. She, who had spent her entire life devoted to reality, could not have been further away from feeling any admiration for such expensive, useless objects. After all, my friend and I were grown-ups, mature men, almost old (my friend already had grandchildren); childishness was an unwholesome intrusion, from my mother’s point of view. The fact that I had remained single, that I’d never held down a decent job, worried her, though she continued to see me, in her own way, as a child, and she clung to the hope that at any moment I would begin to live. I knew that she believed that my friend had been a bad influence on me, that I had seen him as a role model, and that this was the reason for my failure. But he’d never seen himself as a role model. In spite of his oddities, he’d made a life for himself, he had a family, he’d gotten wealthy, whereas I was still waiting. That his childish side had prevailed over me like a condemnation… In reality, I think that wasn’t true. He hadn’t really influenced me. Though I must admit, I was drawn to him. That’s why I kept seeing him, or better put, listening to him. Even though he didn’t know how to recount his adventures (he didn’t have any natural talent as a storyteller), these contained elements of fables, which I mentally reconstructed and placed in sequential order. There was something magical in the way the most peculiar characters and events stuck to him. Nothing like that ever happened to me. There was always something fairy tale — like about the things that happened to him, which he didn’t seem to notice; he confused them with reality… because they were his reality. His prosaic way of recounting them — without nuances — highlighted how objective the emergence of fable was in his life. In that sense, his house was a self-portrait, his cabinet of curiosities.

All the stories he told us during dinner could have been illustrated with pictures out of storybooks — even those he told in parentheses or as digressions, as when he explained why he couldn’t use the sage he grew in his own garden for the meal. It turned out that an eighty-eight-year-old dwarf had fallen on the planting bed from a great height and had crushed his delicate herbs. Wasn’t that astonishing? Coming from someone with imagination, you would have suspected that it was invented, but he didn’t have any imagination. You could say that he didn’t need any because reality supplied it.

Nevertheless, the incident obeyed an average story’s most humdrum causality. He was always making repairs or improvements on his house — whether out of inherent perfectionism or as an occupational hazard, he simply couldn’t resist the temptation. In this case, he had discovered that the gutter on the kitchen roof wasn’t draining properly, that is, at the speed necessary to cope with end-of-summer downpours, and he decided to increase its slope. He hired a bricklayer from his team to do the job, and since it was a very small job (three bricks), he could make do with “Mr. Phophsene.” This man was actually a former bricklayer, who had worked with my friend on many projects before retiring, which he did when he was already in his eighties. He’d never risen higher than an assistant bricklayer; he was no whiz, maybe even below average, and he was as tall as a dwarf, without being a real dwarf. My friend continued to hire him for small jobs around his house and garden, and he appreciated him for his optimism and honesty. He’d been given his nickname years before by his fellow workers to mock his faith in a remedy he’d been prescribed once in the Hospital, and that he kept taking and recommending to others for years, something like “phosphene,” which in the cheerful ignorance of the town’s bricklayers became “phophsene,” and it stuck. Anyway, after he’d laid the bricks on the roof and was on a ladder plastering the side that was visible (the house had a very high roof), Mr. Phophsene fell and landed on the sage. Amazingly enough, he wasn’t injured. For a few minutes, he was a little stunned, but then he brushed the dust off his clothes and was soon climbing back up the ladder to finish the job. Mother, who’d recently broken a rib after slipping and falling on the sidewalk, expressed her gratitude to Providence, though I knew that inside she was ruing the fact that “the old goat” hadn’t died. My friend finished off the story with general words of praise for Mr. Phophsene’s character. He would wake up in the morning to the sounds of him singing in the garden, and when he asked him where he found so much joy, Mr. Phophsene answered: “Sometimes I wake up feeling bad, my soul sorrowful and my body aching, and I get up, get dressed, and walk to the Cemetery, there and back, and it all goes away, because walking releases endorphins.” Quite a role model, and at his age. The fact that the destination of this therapeutic stroll was the Cemetery had no special meaning: the three long walks near town were to the Cemetery, the Station, and La Virgen (a sanctuary), and all three were about half a mile from downtown. However, the most traditional one was to the Cemetery.

In my family, we always drove to the Cemetery, except once when we walked, like poor people do. It must have been a Sunday my father was away. In general, Pringlesians don’t walk very much, they drive everywhere, that’s why that half mile seemed so long. For about half the way, there were eucalyptus trees lining the paved road, but the final stretch passed through open country, past empty fields. I always thought I’d planted one of those eucalyptus trees, but this could have been a false memory; I know that it’s a vague, confused one. One year, shortly after I’d started school, the students celebrated Arbor Day by planting trees, and they took us to the Cemetery road. As the top student in my class, I got to plant one, and I assume they placed me, maybe with a couple of classmates, in front of a hole that had already been dug, and I stuck in the little tree… It’s all blurry, but there’s one detail that is very clear, so clear that I wonder if it was the only thing that really happened and that I invented the rest to fill out the story. They made us learn a poem by heart to recite during the event. The poem was in a book, and I remember a two-line passage from that poem perfectly (more than remember, I can see it, see how high it was on the page):

I plant a seed

in this lil’ole*

There was a little “superscript” asterisk on the last word, which referred to a footnote at the bottom of the page where there was another asterisk and the words: “little hole.” Because of the meter, and maybe to make it more natural for a child to recite, the author had written the words as they were pronounced colloquially. But because it was a school book and the correct form had to be indicated, they used a footnote. In any case, trees aren’t planted from seeds but rather as “saplings,” or whatever they’re called. Fifty years later, the eucalyptus trees on the road to the Cemetery were enormous and old, and I would never know which, if any, was “mine.”

To return to my friend and the picturesque events of his life: the story of Mr. Phophsene had its equivalent in a display case. It was a tiny automaton, a wall with peeling paint on top of which sat an egg with legs (crossed), little arms, a face (it was all face), and a feathered hat. Its owner wound it up and set it in motion. The drama was enacted to the rhythm of incoherent music: the egg rocked violently then fell, slipping along a rail hidden in the wall: it fell on its head, or rather on its hat, because it was all head, and when it touched the ground, it “broke” into several pieces; it didn’t really break but rather opened, simulating breakage, along zigzagging lines that had been invisible until that moment. At that point discordant notes played, notes of doom. With the last turn of the cog, the egg closed up, a spring made it jump back up onto the wall, and there it sat where it had begun. As opposed to the previous toy, this one acted out the well-known story of Humpty Dumpty. The original had been made by Fabergé for the children of the Czar. My friend’s was a tin replica made in Argentina around 1950 to promote a children’s magazine supposedly run by a very nice journalist egg, our national version of Humpty Dumpty, who was called Pepín Cascarón. The toy’s use as publicity was spelled out in the verses written on the open pages of the miniature tin magazine leaning against the bottom of the wall:

Pepín Cascarón sat on a wall.

Pepín Cascarón had a great fall.

All the kings horses, and all the king’s men,

couldn’t put Pepín Cascarón together again.

Along came an Argentine with special skill,

and fixed up that egg out of simple goodwill.

Pepín again whole, gives girls and boys

this wonderful magazine for all to enjoy.

On the page facing the poem was an illustration that showed Pepín Cascarón at the moment he falls.

I noticed that my mother, who appreciated this toy even less than the previous one, was impatient to leave, so I pointed to the gallery door that led into the living room, and we turned in that direction. But my friend guided us through the living room toward the large dark dining room (we’d eaten in a more intimate one, at the other end of the house) and turned on a lamp in the corner, shaped like a large duck and made of translucent white plastic; its glow, very dim, did not manage to penetrate the cavernous depths of the room, but there was enough light to see that this dining room was never used. It was much too full of furniture and objects. The wood paneling was dark, and it was lined, all the way around the perimeter, with display cabinets, coat stands, bookcases, paintings, statues. A large sideboard occupied most of the lateral wall; we saw ourselves reflected in its mirror as small figures lost among the furniture. We had to walk all the way around the table, which was very large and piled high with boxes and antique optical instruments and machines. Hanging from the walls, high up, were puppets on strings. The dining room was huge, and the numerous objects filling it were very small. The collections my friend had amassed throughout his life tended naturally toward the miniature, even though there were almost no miniatures per se. Toys, automatons, dolls, puppets, dioramas, puzzles, kaleidoscopes: everything tended toward reproduction, and the reproduction tended toward a diminution of scale. However, at that stage of the evening, there was a turn toward gigantism. With a complicit smile, my friend opened a small door and invited me to take a look inside. What I saw looked more like an illustration from a children’s book than anything else I’d seen so far. This door opened onto a tiny room, surely meant to service the dining room; it was entirely filled with one doll, which barely fit (the first thing I wondered was how they’d managed to get it in there). It was enormous; standing, it must have been thirteen-feet tall. It was sitting on the ground with its head touching the ceiling, leaning against the wall, its legs bent, and its knees touching the opposite wall. It looked like a seven-year-old blond girl wearing an enormous chiffon dress with red tulle, her eyes wide open in her large head. My mother peaked in between us and then immediately withdrew, her face expressing disgust bordering on terror. Just moments before, I’d followed her gaze, which kept returning, uneasily, to an atlas on the table. It was a Larousse atlas from the nineteenth century. I thought that finally she’d found something that would interest her; she was keen on maps and atlases, and she had more than one at home to consult when she did crossword puzzles. I leaned over the table and opened it in the middle, with considerable difficulty. But she refused to look at it up close; on the contrary, she turned away, mumbling: “But why is it so big?” It really was; it must have been more than three-feet high and two-and-a-half-feet wide, and since the paper the maps were printed on was so thin, it was quite awkward to turn the pages. I felt a current of frightened bewilderment emanating from my mother, and in a way I understood her, and even shared it. The atlas’s inordinate size was a little scary. My friend, busy looking for something, hadn’t seen or heard our brief exchange when his search led him to the small door, he remembered the gigantic doll that he wanted to show us, opened the door, and called us over.

Afterwards, he resumed his search until he found a digital camera that he wanted to use to take some pictures so we’d have souvenirs of the evening. For Mother, it was just one more torture, but she must have thought, now definitely confused, that it was a procedure we were obliged to undergo in order to be able to leave. It lasted a while because my friend, who hadn’t mastered the use of the camera, took the shots over and over, wanting to try different focuses. As he got more and more excited, he wanted us to try on some masks, of which he had an endless supply. His childish side came out with every flash of the camera. The climax came when he took out a rubber elephant mask that fit over the entire head like a space suit; it was almost the size of a real elephant’s head, and amazingly realistic. He put it on, then I put it on, and many photos were taken.

Then he walked us outside and offered to drive us home. I preferred to walk (we lived very close), and Mother said the same thing; the chilly night air had revived her. She placed her hand on his front door and caressed it, saying, “My door, my beloved door.” Her tone spoke less of nostalgia than reproach, of feelings long coveted and repeated whenever she had the chance. The very tall double doors, were truly magnificent, a masterpiece of old-fashioned woodworking, carved with serpents and flowers that flowed in symmetrical patterns and opened out into wide, harmonious waves that swept around the bronze handles. They had been the front doors of the house where my mother had spent her childhood. About ten years before, that house, which had changed ownership several times and ended up as government offices, was demolished, and my friend, who was in the real estate business, kept the doors and installed them in his house. My mother hadn’t forgiven him, though in reality she should have thanked him because otherwise the doors would have been lost, and she forgave him even less for having painted them black and the flowers in bright colors, a monstrosity, according to her, a lack of respect for this valuable relic.