Dinner

Начало книги

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?

Читать дальше →