Like Sand Through Fingers

Have you ever been told a piece of family lore so vividly that even though you weren’t there, you paint yourself into having been there? It happened to me when I was reading Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, up came a memory I had falsely absorbed as my own. In the opening pages, Lerner describes waking to noise from the Plaza Santa Ana, then rising to walk down the Calle de las Huertas and crossing El Paseo del Prado. I’m reading it thinking: I know this place, I’ve been there. But my memory is like smoke, hazy and indistinct, and I must dig deep. The smoke clears, and I find what I’ve been searching for, only to realise the memory isn’t mine, it is my father’s, a story he told me many times, and he was such a good storyteller that I placed myself in the story with him. I was not there, yet I was there.

He was at Alvaro McNichol’s wedding. After the wedding dinner, an older lady – small, dressed in black, seated quietly at a corner table – was cajoled into dancing, a performance. ‘She was a flamenco champion in her day,’ someone whispered to him, and my father, he looked at her and thought: ‘This woman is in the autumn of her days, why are they encouraging her?’ But she rose from the table, walked slowly to the floor, her ear cocked to the guitar music, and he swore he could see a bolt of energy course through her from the ground up. Into her feet it came, up along her body, out through her outstretched arms, pulsing into her hands and her twisting, moving fingers. She became a conducting rod possessed by music and movement, she became sensual with rhythm and clicks and clacks and flicks and swishing frilled skirts and glances and twists and rolls of the head the like of which he had never seen. And could see her, I too was there watching. Except I wasn’t. Then my father told me about walking home at dawn (the Spanish know how to throw a wedding), and he and his friend John (the wives had not lasted the course) were trying out their ten words of Spanish on the early-morning street cleaners in their lime-green jumpsuits, and this same detail – the early-morning street cleaners in their lime-green jumpsuits – is in Ben Lerner’s book. I nod at the page and thank him for loosening a Madrid memory that is not mine.

I have, however, been to Madrid. The memory is locked in concrete. I sit very still and try to chip it free. It is 2005 and I am with that man from Dublin whom I should never have been with. It is the May bank holiday weekend, and we are staying in a hotel near the Atocha Station. Atocha had been blasted the year before in a terrorist bomb, and I remember blessing myself as I walked past it and him seeing me and saying nothing. There was a lot of saying nothing. On the Monday, everything was shut because the Spanish take the May holiday seriously, which would have been fine had we had things to say to each other, whispers to share, but we hadn’t, and we wandered disconsolately. My Spanish wasn’t good, so I couldn’t talk to strangers the way I do, the way I did when, with the same man, I went to New York; at least there I could sidle off and talk to someone in a shop, a bar, a hotel lobby. That was how it was with him: the more I got to know him, the less we had to say to each other. Because everything closed on Labour Day, we ended up in the Retiro Park, watching people row boats on a pond, me sipping bottled water, wishing the time away, wishing myself on a flight home, wishing it were all different. And were it not for Ben Lerner’s book, that trip to Madrid, of which I have no photographs, would have stayed buried in the sludge of my mind, which may have been a good place for it, as there is nothing agreeable leaping from it, apart from the flamenco dancer, and she is a stolen, re-purposed memory, a vision from someone else’s Madrid.

And so, I spend a quiet Sunday morning fixating on memories: buried ones, neglected ones, stolen ones, half-remembered ones, mis-remembered ones, joyful ones, upsetting ones, better-off-forgotten ones. And what of those to come? What of the memories not yet made? Which will be worth remembering and why? Or – perhaps the better question is – when shall we remember them? When we read something, see something, hear something; when a story, place, person, sound, smell dislodges a domino and out slips an image, it slides and shifts and replays and mutates, and that moment in time, that handful of memory, falls like sand through fingers.