"And what's your name?"

"Wait, it's on the tip of my tounge."

That is how it all began.

I felt as if I had awoken froma long sleep, and yet i was still suspended in the milky gray. Or else I was not awake, but dreaming. It was a strange dream, void of images, crowded with sounds. As if I could not see, but could hear voices that were telling me what I should have been seeing. And they were telling me that I could not see anything yet, only a haziness along the canals where the land-scape dissolved. Bruges, I said to myself, I was in Bruges. Had I ever been Bruges the Dead? A Gray city, sad as a tombstone with Chrysanthemums, where mist hangs over the facades like a tapestries...

My soul was wiping the streetcar windows so it could be drown in the moving fog of the headlamps. Fog, my uncontaminated sister.... A thick, opaque fig, which enveloped the noises and called up the shapeless phantoms.... Finally I came to a vast chasm and could see the colossal figures, wrapped in a shroud, it's face the immaculate whiteness of snow. My name is Artur Gordon Pym.

I was chewing fog. Phantoms were passings, brushing me, melting. Distance bulbs glimmered like will-o-the-wips in a graveyard....

someone is walking by my side, noiselessly, as if in bare feet, walking wihtout shoes, without sandals. A patch of fog grazes my cheeks, a band of drunks is showing down there, down by the ferry. The ferry? It is not me talking, it is the voices.

The fog comes on little cat feet... There was a fog that seemed to have taken the world away.

Yet every so often it was as if I had opened my eyes and we're seeing flashes. I could hear voices: "Strictly speaking, Signora, it isn't a coma.... No, Don't think about flat encephalograms, for heaven's sake... There's reactivity...."

Someone was aiming a light into my eyes, but after the light it was dark again. I could feel the puncture of a needle, somewhere. "You see, there's withdrawal..."

Maigrat plunges into a fog so dense that he can't even see where he's stepping... The fog teems with human shapes, swarms with an intense, mysterious life. Maigrat? Elementary, my dear Watson, there are ten little Indians, and the hound of the Baskervilles vanish into the fog.

The gray vapour was gradually losing its grayness of tint, the heat of the water was extreme, and it's milky hue was evident that ever...And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us.

I heard people talking around me, wanted to shout to let them know I was there. There was a continuous drone, as thought I were being devoured by celibate machines with whetted teeth. I was in the penal colony..I felt a wieght on my head, as if they had slipped the iron mask onto my face. I thought I saw Sky blue lights.

"There's asymmetry of the pupillary diameters."

I had fragments of thoughts, clearly I was waking up, but I could not move. If only I could stay awake. Was sleeping again?

Hours,days, centuries?

The fog was back, the voices in the fog, the voices about the fog. कोहरे में घूमना अजीब है! What language is that? I seemed to be swimming in the sea, I felt I was near the beach but was unable to reach it . No one saw me, and the tide was carrying me away again.

Please tell me something, Please touch me. I flet a hand on my forehead. such relief.Another voice: "Signora, there are cases of paitents who suddenly wake up and walk away under their own Power."

Someone was disturbing me with an intermittent light, with the hum of a tuning fork. It was as if they had put a jar of mustard under my nose, then a clove of garlic . The earth has a odor of mushrooms.

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Other voices, but these from within: long laments of the steam engine, priests shapeless in the fog walking single file toward San Michele in Bosco.

The sky is made of ash. Fog up the river, fog down the river, fog biting the hands of the little match girl. Chance people on the bridges to the Isle of Dogs look into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging under the brown fog... I had not thought death had undone so many. The odor of train station and soot.

Another light, softer. I seem to hear, through the fog, the sound of bagpipes starting up again on the heath. Another long sleep, perhaps. Then a clearing, like being in a glass of water and anisette...

He was right in front of me, though I still saw him as a shadow. My head felt muddled, as if I were waking up after having drunk too much. I think I managed to murmur something weakly, as if I were in that moment beginning to talk for the first time: "I ask, I ask, I demand- do they take the future infinitive? Whose country is its religion...is that the Peace of Augsburg or the Defenestra tion of Prague?" And then: "Fog too on the Apennine stretch of the Autosole Highway, between Roncobilaccio and Barberino del Mugello...

He smiled sympathetically. "But now open your eyes all the way and try to look around. Do you know where we are?" Now I could see him better. He was wearing a white-what is it called? coat. I looked around and was even able to move my head: the room was sober and clean, a few small pieces of pale metal furniture, and I was in bed, with a tube stuck in my arm. From the window, through the lowered blinds, came a blade of sunlight, spring on all sides shines in the air, and in the fields rejoices. I whispered: "We are...in a hospital and you...you're a doctor. Was I sick?"

"Yes, you were sick. I'll explain later. But you've regained con sciousness now. That's good. I'm Dr. Gratarolo. Forgive me if I ask you some questions. How many fingers am I holding up?" "That's a hand and those are fingers. Four of them. Are there four?"

"That's right. And what's six times six?"

"Thirty-six, of course." Thoughts were rumbling through my head, but they came as if of their own accord. "The sum of the areas of the squares... built on the two legs...is equal to the area of the square built on the hypotenuse."

"Well done. I think that's the Pythagorean theorem, but I got a C in math in high school..." "Pythagoras of Samos. Euclid's elements. The desperate lone

liness of parallel lines that never meet."

"Your memory seems to be in excellent condition. And by the way, what's your name?"

That is where I hesitated. And yet I did have it on the tip of my

tongue. After a moment I offered the most obvious reply.

"My name is Arthur Gordon Pym." "That isn't your name."

Of course, Pym was someone else. He did not come back again. I tried to come to terms with the doctor.

"Call me... Ishmael?"

"Your name is not Ishmael. Try harder,"

A word. Like running into a wall. Saying Euclid or Ishmael was easy, like saying Jack and Jill went up a hill. Saying who I was, on the other hand, was like turning around and finding that wall. No, not a wall; I tried to explain. "It doesn't feel like something solid, it's like walking through fog."

"What's the fog like?" he asked.

"The fog on the bristling hills climbs drizzling up the sky, and down below the mistral bowls and whitens the sea... What's the fog like?"

"You put me at a disadvantage-I'm only a doctor. And be sides, this is April, I can't show you any fog. Today's the twenty-fifth of April."

"April is the cruelest month."

"I'm not very well read, but I think that's a quotation. You could say that today's the Day of Liberation. Do you know what year this is?"

"It's definitely after the discovery of America..."

"You don't remember a date, any kind of date, before...your reawakening?"

"Any date? Nineteen hundred and forty-five, end of World

War Two."

"Not close enough. No, today is the twenty-fifth of April, 1991. You were born, I believe, at the end of 1931, all of which

means you're pushing sixty."

"Fifty-nine and a half. Not even."

"Your calculative faculties are in excellent shape. But you have had, how shall I say, an incident. You've come through it alive, and I congratulate you on that. But clearly something is still wrong. A slight case of retrograde amnesia. Not to worry, they sometimes don't last long. But please be so kind as to answer a few more ques tions. Are you married?"

"You tell me."

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"Yes, you're married, to an extremely likable lady named Paola, who has been by your side night and day. Just yesterday eve ning I insisted she go home, otherwise she would have collapsed. Now that you're awake, I'll call her. But I'll have to prepare her, and

before that we need to do a few more tests."

"What if I mistake her for a hat?"

"Excuse me?"

"There was a man who mistook his wife for a hat."

"Oh, the Sacks book. A classic case. I see you're up on your reading. But you don't have his problem, otherwise you'd have al ready mistaken me for a stove. Don't worry, you may not recognize her, but you won't mistake her for a hat. But back to you. Now then, your name is Giambattista Bodoni. Does that tell you anything?"

Now my memory was soaring like a glider among mountains and valleys, toward a limitless horizon. "Giambattista Bodoni was a famous typographer. But I'm sure that's not me. I could as easily be Napoleon as Bodoni."

"Why did you say Napoleon?"

"Because Bodoni was from the Napoleonic era, more or less. Napoleon Bonaparte, born in Corsica, first consul, marries Josephine, becomes emperor, conquers half of Europe, loses at Waterloo, dies on St. Helena, May 5, 1821, he was as if unmoving."

"I'll have to bring my encyclopedia next time, but from what

I remember, your memory is good. Except you don't remember who

you are,"

"Is that serious?"

"To be honest, it's not so good. But you aren't the first person something like this has happened to, and we'll get through it." He asked me to raise my right hand, then to touch my nose. I

understood perfectly what my right hand was, and my nose. Bull's eye. But the sensation was absolutely new. Touching your nose is like having an eye on the tip of your index finger, looking you in the face. I have a nose. Gratarolo thumped me on the knee and then here and there on my legs and feet with some kind of little hammer. Doctors measure reflexes. It seemed that my reflexes were good. By the end I felt exhausted, and I think I went back to sleep.

I woke up in a place and murmured that it resembled the cabin of a spaceship, like in movies. (What movies, Gratarolo asked, all of them, I said, in general; then I named Star Trek.) They did things to me I did not understand, using machines I had never seen. I think they were looking inside my head, but I let them, not thinking, lulled by humming sounds, and now and then I dozed again.

Later (or the next day?), when Gratarolo returned, I was exploring the bed. I was feeling the sheets: light, smooth, pleasing to the touch. Less so the cover, which was a little prickly against my fingertips. I turned over and pounded my hand into the pillow, en joying the fact that it sank into it. I was going whack whack and having a great time. Gratarolo asked me if I thought I could get out of bed. With the help of a nurse, I managed to stand up, though my head was still spinning. I felt my feet pressing against the ground, and my head was up in the air. That is how you stand up. On a tightrope. Like the Little Mermaid.

"Good. Now try going to the bathroom and brushing your teeth. Your wife's toothbrush should be in there." I told him one should never brush one's teeth with a stranger's toothbrush, and he remarked that a wife is not a stranger. In the bathroom, I saw my self in the mirror. At least I was fairly sure it was me, because mirrors, as everyone knows, reflect what is in front of them. A white, hollow face, a long beard, and two sunken eyes. This is great: I do not know who I am but I find out I am a monster. I would not want to meet me on a deserted road at night. Mr. Hyde. I have identified two objects: one is definitely called toothpaste, the other toothbrush. You have to start with the toothpaste and squeeze the tube. Exquisite sensation, I ought to do it frequently. But at a certain point you have to quit that white paste at first pops, like a bubble, but then it all comes out like the dancing snake. Don't keep squeezing, otherwise you'll be like Broglio with the stracchini. Who's Broglio?

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