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“Sometimes I think that I am already dead to myself for at least 95% of mypast. See how many books I have read,” he said, showing his library to a friend.“But I don’t remember anything or hardly anything about them. So it’s as if I hadnot read them. So what is the point of having read so much?”His friend said that it wasn’t really like that, and that he was exaggerating.“These books form part of you, old sport. These books are you.”Alberto thought the way he spoke was charming – and racked his memoryto remember who, among the hundreds of characters in the works that filled hisbook stand, spoke in that way.“Gatsby!”“See what I mean?” his friend added with a smile. “Not everything we don’tremember is dead inside us, old sport.”It was because of this and other things that Alberto liked Lunaris. Therewas always something interesting to remember there. Or to forget. Becauseforgetfulness is the hidden side of the memory, understand, old sport?Alberto walks around the city with his head lowered, immersed in his thoughts,with his hands in his pockets, but all the sounds (from cars, people, machinery,wind, birds and dogs) are unfamiliar to him. At those times, he is somethingwhich does not exist, which does not have a name. But he soon remembers thathe needs to go home – and finds himself once more, only to be lost later on,indefinitely.THE CHILDHOOD BEDROOM(A chapter from the unpublished book “Noites desertas”)Did the music play in the distance? See, it now seems like the sound of the sea,remember? It was a night sea, one that came from afar, from the depths ofdarkness, like a scream that broke into white foam on the shore. And you couldhear it really clearly, lying with your mother in the bedroom, which was the sameroom, a childhood bedroom but it was now in a different place: a seafront districtwhich still remains vivid in your memory, my friend, while you grip the bars onthe gate at this immense hospital which extends from here to the past. Imagine:you are with your mother, lying on the bed, looking at the tiled roof and wallsmade from whale oil, and your mother is singing a lullaby while you are thinking:where is my father? Where is my brother? And you are afraid for them becausehe you have already learned that life is like a large boy who plays with peopleas if they were marbles, which sometimes roll into the gutters, falling down thedark, underground drains and disappearing forever – and didn’t it happen likethat to the little boy who simply vanished and they just said that he had died butthat word did not explain anything, because nobody knew where he had gone,so he was present all the time, perhaps more than ever, as if he were behind aCARLOS RIBEIRO283