The Musical Brain: And Other Stories Read Free

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