My earliest memory is of a pot stand. It is set into a corner with a cupboard on one side and, on the other, a shallow step. This is where my head begins. The step leads to another room, and far on the other side of the room, there is a white-haired woman sitting in a chair.
Discussions with my mother lead to just one pot stand, in a seaside cottage the summer I was eighteen months old. It was, she says, made of black iron and it stood beside a real step and the white-haired woman must be her own mother who died when I was six. This image of her is all that I have, and even then it is not so much an image as a sense. She may have been asleep, but I think she was reading. And there was something very quiet and covert about the pot stand, which was a pyramid affair with shelves for four pots. I can remember a little saucepan on the top shelf. I am tempted to say that there was a big saucepan on the bottom one, but this is pushing things a bit. I would give anything to remember what the lino was like.
At nine months, the baby puts her head in a pot and says, Aaah Aaah Aaah. She says it very gently and listens to the echo. She has discovered this all by herself. By way of celebration, I put my own head into the pot and say, Aaah Aaah Aaah. Then she does it again. Then I do it again. And so on.
The rest of my family don’t believe that I remember the pot stand, on the grounds that it is a stupid memory and, anyway, I was far too young. It is the job of families to reject each other’s memories, even the pleasant ones, and being the youngest I am sometimes forced to fight for the contents of my own head. But my brother broke his elbow that summer. My mother had to take him to hospital in Dublin and my grandmother looked after us while she was away. This was the first time in my life that I was without my mother for any length of time. If she had stayed, then am certain that I would not have remembered anything at all of that house — not the pot stand, and not my grandmother either.
We pilfer our own memories, we steal them from the world and salt them away.
I first left the baby when she was four months old. Some of the days when I was away, she spent with my mother. I wonder what image might remain with her from that time: a colour, a smell, a combination of shapes perhaps, affectless and still — and in the distance, someone. Just that. Someone.
And in the foreground? The carpet perhaps. I hope she remembers my parents’ carpet, the one I remember as a child, with a pattern of green leaves like stepping-stones all the way down the hall.
I have another, possibly earlier, memory of pulling the wallpaper off the wall from between the bars of my cot. My mother is absent from this scene too, but though the Pot Stand Memory is neither happy nor unhappy, this one is quite thrilling. I almost certainly ate the paper. The plaster underneath it was pink and powdery, and I imagine now that I can remember the shivery taste of it. I also remember the shape of the tear on the wall, or I think I do. At any rate, I see it in my mind’s eye — a seam on the left, stunningly straight, with four gammy strips pulled away, like a fat raggedy set of fingers, on the right.
I know this memory is, in some sense, true, but when I try to chase it, it disappears. It exists in peripheral vision, and presents itself only when I focus on something else — like typing, for example. When I stop writing this sentence and look up from the screen to try to see the pattern of the wallpaper — a blank. Memories, by their nature, may not be examined, and the mind’s eye is not the eye we use, for example, to cross the road.
I wonder if this is the way that the baby sees things: vaguely and all at once. I imagine it to be a very emotional way to exist in the world. Perhaps I am being romantic — but the visual world yields nothing but delight to her. There are (it seems) no horrors, no frights. Tiny babies see only in monochrome. I imagine colour leaking into her head like a slowly adjusted screen — tremendously slow, like a vegetable television growing silently in the corner of the room. I imagine her focus becoming sharper and deeper, like some infinitely stoned cameraman adjusting his lens. ‘Oh,’ she says — or something that is the precursor to ‘Oh’, a shallow inhalation, a stillness as she is caught by something, and begins to stalk it: careful, rapt — the most beautiful sound in the world: the sound of a baby’s wondering breath.
Something pulls in me when she is caught like this. For months I am a slave to her attention. The world is all colour, light and texture and I am her proud companion. I have no choice. None of us do. In a café, three women look over to smile at her, and then, as one, they look up. ‘Oh, she likes the light,’ says one, and this fact pleases us all. Immensely.
The light, of course, is horrible, and this is one of the reasons mothers think they are losing their minds: this pride in the baby looking at the light, this pride in the light as they introduce it to the baby, ‘Yes, the light!’ There is a certain zen to it; the world simple and new as we all stop to admire the baby admiring a wrought-iron candelabra with peculiar dangly bits and five — yes, five! — glowing, tulip-shaped bulbs.
She is years away from knowing from what ‘five’ might be, but maybe she already gets the ‘fiveness’ of it. This is the way her eyes move: One, one more! Another one! All of them! The other two. The first one again, another one! Something else.
Sometimes she holds her hand up like the baby Christ, and looks as though she contains everything, and understands it all. I do not ask to be forgiven, but still I feel redemption in the completeness of her gaze. And I feel the redemption in her fat baby wrists and her infinitely fine, fat baby’s hand. The baby is a blessing, but sometimes she does, she must, also bless, which is to say that she simply sees, and lifts her hand, as a sign.
I pick the baby up and we look in the wardrobe mirror, which has always been for her a complicated delight: What is it? It’s a baby! She smiles, it smiles back! (Complication upon complication! It’s me! It’s me! she says, and all her synapses, as I imagine, going ping! ping! ping!) She sees me smiling at her in the mirror; she sees her mother turning to smile at her in the room, and oh, it’s too much, she lunges forwards to examine the knob on the wardrobe door.
There are actually two knobs on the wardrobe. One is wooden and the other, for some reason, is an amber-coloured plastic. The baby goes from one to the other and back again. One of the first confusions in her young life was when myself and Martin both looked at her at the same time: ‘Oh no, there’s two of them.’ It almost felt unfair.
As she grew older, there was nothing she liked more than to be held by one of us and to look at the other, in a somewhat haughty way. Older still, she is completely content when the two of us are with her, quietly in a room. She has travelled from one, to two, perhaps to many. I think of this as she goes from the wooden knob to the amber one — a fairy tale of sameness and difference. This one. That one.
Of course, the first difference between this and the other is not between mother and father, or even between baby and ‘baby in the mirror’, but between one breast and . . . the other! If women had five teats, then mankind might, by now, be living on the moon.
Yesterday, it was warm, and I took off her socks and stood her on the grass. She loved this, but maybe not so much as I did — her first experience of grass. For her, this green stuff was just as different and as delicious as everything else — the ‘first’ was all mine. Sometimes, I feel as though I am introducing her to my own nostalgia for the world.
In the meantime, grass is green and springy and amazingly multiple and just itself. It might even be edible. Everything goes into her mouth. This is the taste of yellow. This is the taste of blue. Since she started moving about she has also experienced the taste of turf, of yesterday’s toast, and probably of mouse droppings, because it was weeks before I realised we were not alone in the house. Paper remains her ultimate goal, and she looks over her shoulder now to check if I am around. That wallpaper looks nice.
I really do wish I could remember my own wallpaper, instead of just the tear I made in it. The baby sleeps in my cot now — the one my father made over forty years ago with some half-inch dowel, and a fairly ingenious sliding mechanism for the side to be let down. I sat beside it one night, feeding her, and I tried to remember what it was like to be inside; the view between the bars and the ripped wallpaper on the wall. Someone, over the years, had painted it nursery blue, but I remembered a green colour, I could almost recall chewing the cross bar at the top. The baby sucked, her eyelashes batting slowly over a drunken, surrendered gaze, and as my attention wandered I saw, under a chip in the blue paint, the very green I ate as a child. A strong and distant emotion washed briefly over me and was gone.
My mother, or someone, pulled the cot away from the wall and, in time, the wallpaper I do not remember was replaced with wallpaper that I do remember (flowers of blue, block-printed on white). Babies love pattern so much I have begun to regret my own attempts at tastefulness. Not a single curlicued carpet for her to crawl over, not a single flower on the wall. Even her toys are in primary colours and her mobile is from the Tate, cut-out shapes, like a Mondrian floating free.
Once I stop trying, I seem to remember my mother giving out to me about the ripped-up wall. She would have been upset about the wallpaper. Perhaps this is why I remember it. It was my first real experience of ‘NO!’
My own child thinks No! is a game. I say it once and she pauses. I say it twice and she looks at me. I say it three times and she laughs. The punch-line!
Tasteful as it is, she loves the mobile. It has a big red circle that spins slowly to blue, and a little square that goes from black to white. There are various rectangles that don’t particularly obsess her but, taken all in all, it is the thing she likes most in the world.
We moved when she was nearly eight months old, and it was another two weeks before I got round to stringing up the mobile for her again. When it was done, she shuddered with delight. It happened to her all in spasm. She realised, not only that the mobile was there, but also that it had once been gone. She remembered it. In order to do this she needed to see three things: the mobile in the old flat, the new room without the mobile, the new room with the mobile. Memory is not a single thing.
Martin says that his first memory, which is of one brother breaking a blue plastic jug over another brother’s head, is false. His mother tells him that they never did have a slender, pale blue plastic jug. He thinks he dreamt about the jug, and that the dream also contained the idea that this was his first memory, as he dreamt a subsequent ‘first memory’ of people waving to him from a plane while he stood in the garden below. He was convinced for years that this was real. This makes me think that we are very young when we search for our first memory — that single moment when we entered the stream of time.
My own mother, who is curator and container of many things, among them the memory of my pot stand, worries that she is getting forgetful. The distant past is closer all the time, she says. If this is true, then the memory of her own mother is getting stronger now; sitting in a house by the sea, surrounded by children who are variously delighted, or worried, or concentrating on other things.
When you think about it, the pots can’t have stayed there for long. I would have pulled them down. There would have been noise, though my memory of them is notably, and utterly, silent. Perhaps what I remember is the calm before a chaos of sound and recrimination. That delicious, slow moment, when a baby goes very, very quiet, knowing it is about to be found out.
The other morning, the baby (silently) reached the seedlings I have under the window, and she filled her mouth with a handful of hardy annuals and potting compost. I tried to prise her mouth open to get the stuff out. She clamped it shut. She bit me (by accident). She started to cry. When she cried, her mouth opened. She was undone by her own distress and this seemed so unfair to me that I left her to it. I hadn’t the heart. Besides, it said on the pack that the compost was sterilised.
But she will not let my finger into her mouth, now, even to check for a tooth (she is very proud of her teeth), and when she clamps it shut and turns away she is saying, ‘Me,’ loud and clear. ‘Oh,’ a friend said, when she started to crawl, ‘it’s the beginning of the end,’ and I knew what she meant. It is the beginning of the end of a romance between a woman who has forgotten who she is and a child who does not yet know.
Until one day there will come a moment, delightful or banal, ordinary or strange, that she will remember for the rest of her life.
Anne Enright, 'Time' in Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, London: Vintage, 2005, 65-72.
我最早的记忆是关于一个锅架。它被放置在一个角落里,一边是一个衣柜,另一边是一个浅台阶。这里就是我记忆开始的地方。台阶通向另一个房间,在该房间的另一边一个白发女人正坐在椅子上。
跟我母亲聊着聊着就聊到了那个仅有的锅架,那是我18个月大的夏天在海边的一个小屋里。我母亲说,那个锅架是黑铁制成的,它真的放在一个台阶旁,那个白发女人一定是我外婆——她在我六岁时去世了。外婆的这个形象就是我关于她的所有记忆,甚至于与其说是一种印象不如说是一种感觉。外婆或许已经睡着了,但是我认为她一定是在看书。锅架上有一个非常安静且隐秘的东西,那就是一个金字塔形的东西,可以放四个锅的架子。我能记起在顶层的架子上有一个带柄且有盖子的小平底锅。我很想说在底层架子上有一个大平底锅,但这已经是记忆的极限了。我怎么也回忆不起来那个亚麻油地毡是什么样的。
在九个月大的时候,婴儿把头伸进锅里,然后说:“啊啊啊。”她说得非常温柔,听着回响。这都是她自己发现的。作为庆祝,我把我的头伸进锅里,然后说“啊啊啊。”然后她再做一遍,我再做一遍,如此往复。
我家人不相信我记得那个锅架,理由是那是一个愚蠢的记忆。反正,我就是太小了,不该记得。家人的任务就是否认彼此的记忆,哪怕是愉快的记忆。我年经最小,有时被迫为了自己脑海里记忆的内容而抗争。那个夏天我哥哥摔破了肘部,我母亲不得不带他去都柏林的一家医院。她不在期间,我外婆照顾我们。这是我生平第一次有那么一段时间妈妈不在身边。如果她留下来了,那么我可以肯定的是我就不会记得那个房子里的任何事情,不会记得锅架,也不会记得我外婆。
我们窃取自己的记忆,我们从世界上把它们偷来,然后储存起来。
我第一次离开我的婴孩是在她四个月大的时候。我不在的那些日子,她和我母亲待在一起。我想知道那时她会记得什么呢?是一种颜色,一种气味,或许是一组形状,冷漠且静谧,还是远处的某个人。仅是如此,某人。
记忆的中心物体呢?或许是地毯。我希望她记得我父母的地毯,我小时候记得的地毯。它有绿叶子图案,就像是垫脚石一样,一直通向大厅。
我可能有一个更早的记忆,我记得我把我婴儿床夹缝处墙上的墙纸拉下来了。当时,我母亲也不在现场,但是虽然锅架记忆说不上开心也说不上不开心,可是这个记忆却相当惊悚。我几乎可以确定吃了墙纸。墙纸下面的灰泥是粉红色的粉末,并且现在我能记起灰泥那令人颤抖的味道。我也记得墙上撕裂的形状,或者说我觉得我记得吧。无论如何,我在我的脑海里看到它:左边有一条裂缝,惊人的笔直;右边有四条伽马式线条被拉开,像是一组粗壮破烂的手指。
我知道这个记忆在某种程度上是真实的,但是当我努力去追寻它时,它却消失了。它存在于我的边缘视觉中,只有当我专注于其他事情的时候,它才会浮现,就像是打字一样。当我停止写这个句子,把头从屏幕上移开向上看,努力去看墙纸的图案时,竟然一片空白!记忆,就其本质而言,或许不能被审视,而且我们心里的眼睛也不是我们所使用的眼睛,比如过马路时使用的眼睛。
我想知道是否这就是婴儿看待事物的方式:模糊且突然。我想这是存活于世的一种非常情绪化的方式。或许我这么说过于浪漫了,但是视觉世界只给她带来了快乐,(似乎)没有恐怖、没有惊惧。小婴儿只看到黑白两色。我想象着色彩就像缓慢调整的屏幕逐渐渗透到她的脑海,极其缓慢,就像电视上在房间角落里静静生长的蔬菜。我想象她的聚焦变得越来越犀利、深邃,就像是某个投石摄影师不断调整他的镜片一样。“噢,”她说,或者是“噢”的前兆的某个东西,浅浅的吸气,当她被某物吸引时的一种静止,然后开始追踪它:小心且专注。世界上最美妙的声音莫过于婴儿好奇的呼吸声。
当她像这样被吸引的时候,我也受到了吸引。几个月来,我的所有注意力都在她身上,似乎成了她的奴隶。世界充满了色彩、光亮和纹理,我是她骄傲的伴侣。我别无选择,我们谁都没有选择。在一家咖啡馆里,三个女人看过来朝她微笑,然后她们又一起向上看。“噢,她喜欢那个灯,”一个女人说,这个事实令我们愉快,极其地愉快。
那个灯当然是难看的,这就是为什么母亲们会认为她们失去心智的原因之一:她们骄傲地看着婴儿看灯,骄傲地把灯介绍给婴儿,“是的,灯!”灯具有某种禅性。当我们都停下来去欣赏婴儿在欣赏的一个熟铁制成的灯架,它有独特的悬垂碎片和五个——是的,五个!——闪闪发光的郁金香型灯泡。世界变得简单而又充满新奇。
她还要好几年才会知道“五”是什么概念,但是或许她已经知道了“五”的真谛。她的眼睛周而复始地移动着:一个,又一个!还有一个!这么多!还有两个。接着又回到第一个,又一个!如此往复。
有时她就像婴儿基督一样举起她的手,看起来就好像她拥有一切,也能理解一切一样。我没有要求她宽恕我,但是从她的凝视中我仍然感到救赎。从她胖嘟嘟的手腕,和那无比细腻白皙的手上我感到了救赎。婴儿本身是上帝的祝福,但有时她自己确实给予祝福,也必须给予祝福,她只需简单地看着,并把手举起来,做一个手势。
我抱起婴儿,我们看着衣柜上的镜子,这对于她来说一直都是一种难以描述的喜悦:那是什么?是个婴儿!她微笑,它也朝她微笑!(复杂又复杂!是我!是我!她说。我想象着,她所有的神经元都在砰!砰!砰!)在镜子里她看到我朝她微笑,房间里她看到她的母亲扭过头来朝她微笑。噢,太多了。她突然俯冲过去玩弄衣柜门上的把手。
实际上,衣柜上有两个把手。一个是木制的,另一个不知怎地是琥珀色的塑料。婴儿从一个把手到另一个,来回反复地摸着。她小的时候,第一个困惑就是当我和马丁同时看着她的时候:“噢,不,他们是两个人。”她几乎感觉到了不公平。
随着她慢慢长大,她更喜欢我们中的一个人抱着她,同时以某种傲慢的方式看着另一个人。更大一点,当我们两个安安静静地和她在一个房间时,她非常满足。她从一个移动到两个,或许移动到更多。当她从木制把手摸到琥珀把手,我想到了这一点:一个讲述同与不同的童话故事。这一个。那一个。
当然,在这个和另一个之间的第一个不同点不是在母亲和父亲之间,甚至也不是在婴儿和“镜子中的婴儿”之间,而是在一个乳房和...另一个乳房之间!如果女人有五个乳头,那么人类或许现在早已经生活在月球上了。
昨天,天气暖和,我脱下她的袜子,让她站在草地上。她很喜欢,虽然或许不像我那么喜欢——这是她的第一次草地体验。对她来说,这些绿色的东西和其他一切东西一样不同且美味——这个“第一次”都是我的。有时,我感觉就好像我正在向她介绍我自己对这个世界的怀念。
与此同时,草是绿色且富有弹性的,并且数目惊人,而且只有草本身。它或许是可以吃的。一切都进入她的嘴里。这是黄色的味道,这是蓝色的味道。自从她开始四处走动,她已经体验了草皮的味道,昨天烤面包的味道,或许还有老鼠屎的味道,因为就在几周前我意识到房子里并不只有我们。纸依然是她的终极目标,她从肩膀上往后看看看我是否在附近。那个墙纸看起来不错!
我真希望我能记得我自己的墙纸是什么样子,而不仅仅是我撕下后的样子。现在婴儿睡在我的婴儿床上——这是四十多年前我父亲用一些半英寸的木钉做成的,还有一个相当精巧的滑动机制,这可以让另一侧放下来。一天晚上我坐在婴儿床旁边,给她喂奶,我努力回忆待在里面是什么感觉,在木条和墙上撕下的墙纸之间的风景是什么样的。这些年来,有人把它涂成了蓝色,但我记忆中是绿色的。我几乎能够回忆起咬顶端横木的场景。婴儿吮吸着,她的睫毛在醉醺醺的要投降的眼珠上拍打着。当我的思绪四处游移时,我看到在蓝色漆碎屑的下面正是我小时候吃过的绿色。一种强烈而遥远的情绪短暂地袭卷而来,又很快消失。
我母亲,或者别的谁,把我的婴儿床挪离墙,最后,我不记得的墙纸取代了我记得的墙纸(蓝色的花朵在白色的印刷版上)。婴儿非常喜欢图案,我已经开始后悔我自己的购物品味。没有软软的地毯供她爬,墙上也没有一朵花。甚至她的玩具都是原色的,她的风铃来自泰特博物馆,剪切的形状,就像是蒙德里安的几何图案在自由飘动。
在我不撕之后,我似乎记得我母亲跟我讲过被撕毁的墙纸。她应该对墙纸非常的生气,或许这就是为什么我会记得它的原因。那是我第一次真正体验到“不!”。
我自己的孩子认为“不!”是一个游戏。我说一次,她就停下来。我说两次,她会看着我。我说三次,她就大笑。好玩!
不管我的品味如何,她喜欢那个风铃。风铃上有一个红色的环,可以缓慢的旋转成蓝色,还有一个小方块,可以从黑色变成白色。各种各样的矩形并没有特别吸引她,但总体来讲,风铃就是她在世界上最喜欢的东西。
在她大概八个月大的时候,我们搬家了。两周后,我再次给她挂上了风铃。当挂上之后,她高兴地抽搐四肢。高兴是以痉挛的形式表现的。她不仅意识到风铃在那里,而且也意识到风铃曾经不见了。她记得它。为了做到这一点,她需要看见三样东西:旧公寓里的风铃,没有风铃的新房间,以及有风铃的新房间。记忆不是单一的东西。
马丁说他的第一个记忆并不真实。这个记忆是关于一个兄弟把蓝色塑料壶打在另一个兄弟的头上。他的母亲告诉他,他们从来就没有一个细长淡蓝色塑料壶。他认为他是梦见的这个壶,并且他还认为“初次记忆”的想法也是梦中场景。他还梦到随后的一个所谓“初次记忆”,他站在花园里,飞机上有人向他挥手。这么多年来他始终相信这就是真的。这使我想到当我们搜寻我们的第一次记忆的时候,我们都还太小——那是我们进入到时间流的那一刻。
我自己的母亲擅长记忆并保管东西,其中就包含我的锅架记忆。她担心她变得越来越健忘。她说,遥远的过去总是越来越近。如果这是真的,那么她自己母亲的记忆现在变得越来越强烈。她坐在海边的房子里,被孩子们围绕着,他们或是高兴,或是忧虑,亦或是专注于其他的事情。
现在想想,锅不可能在架子上呆太久。我应该把它们拉下来了,应该会有噪音。不过我关于它们的记忆却格外地安静。或许我记得的是喧嚣和指责前的平静吧。那个美妙,很缓慢的时刻,那时婴儿非常非常安静,知道它即将被发现。
前几天早上,婴儿(静悄悄地)来到我放在窗下的幼苗那里,她把一把耐寒一年生植物和盆栽堆肥塞到嘴里。我想撬开她的嘴,把东西弄出来。但她紧紧抿着嘴,还(不小心)咬了我。她开始哭。当她哭的时候,她的嘴张开了。她被自己的痛苦瓦解了,我觉得这太不公平了,以至于我随她去了。我不忍心,更何况,包装上写着堆肥已消毒。
但是她到现在也不让我把手指伸进她的嘴里,即使是检查牙齿(她对自己的牙齿感到自豪)。当她紧抿着嘴转身离开时,她简直是在大声而清晰地说“我”。当她开始爬的时候,一个朋友说, “噢,那是结束的开始”。我知道她的意思。那是一个已经忘记自己是谁的妇女和一个还不知道自己是谁的孩子之间的浪漫时光的结束的开始。
直到一天,那个时刻到来,不论是快乐的还是平庸的,平凡的或是奇异的,她终生都会记住那一刻。
My earliest memory is of a pot stand. It is set into a corner with a cupboard on one side and, on the other, a shallow step. This is where my head begins. The step leads to another room, and far on the other side of the room, there is a white-haired woman sitting in a chair.
Discussions with my mother lead to just one pot stand, in a seaside cottage the summer I was eighteen months old. It was, she says, made of black iron and it stood beside a real step and the white-haired woman must be her own mother who died when I was six. This image of her is all that I have, and even then it is not so much an image as a sense. She may have been asleep, but I think she was reading. And there was something very quiet and covert about the pot stand, which was a pyramid affair with shelves for four pots. I can remember a little saucepan on the top shelf. I am tempted to say that there was a big saucepan on the bottom one, but this is pushing things a bit. I would give anything to remember what the lino was like.
At nine months, the baby puts her head in a pot and says, Aaah Aaah Aaah. She says it very gently and listens to the echo. She has discovered this all by herself. By way of celebration, I put my own head into the pot and say, Aaah Aaah Aaah. Then she does it again. Then I do it again. And so on.
The rest of my family don’t believe that I remember the pot stand, on the grounds that it is a stupid memory and, anyway, I was far too young. It is the job of families to reject each other’s memories, even the pleasant ones, and being the youngest I am sometimes forced to fight for the contents of my own head. But my brother broke his elbow that summer. My mother had to take him to hospital in Dublin and my grandmother looked after us while she was away. This was the first time in my life that I was without my mother for any length of time. If she had stayed, then am certain that I would not have remembered anything at all of that house — not the pot stand, and not my grandmother either.
We pilfer our own memories, we steal them from the world and salt them away.
I first left the baby when she was four months old. Some of the days when I was away, she spent with my mother. I wonder what image might remain with her from that time: a colour, a smell, a combination of shapes perhaps, affectless and still — and in the distance, someone. Just that. Someone.
And in the foreground? The carpet perhaps. I hope she remembers my parents’ carpet, the one I remember as a child, with a pattern of green leaves like stepping-stones all the way down the hall.
I have another, possibly earlier, memory of pulling the wallpaper off the wall from between the bars of my cot. My mother is absent from this scene too, but though the Pot Stand Memory is neither happy nor unhappy, this one is quite thrilling. I almost certainly ate the paper. The plaster underneath it was pink and powdery, and I imagine now that I can remember the shivery taste of it. I also remember the shape of the tear on the wall, or I think I do. At any rate, I see it in my mind’s eye — a seam on the left, stunningly straight, with four gammy strips pulled away, like a fat raggedy set of fingers, on the right.
I know this memory is, in some sense, true, but when I try to chase it, it disappears. It exists in peripheral vision, and presents itself only when I focus on something else — like typing, for example. When I stop writing this sentence and look up from the screen to try to see the pattern of the wallpaper — a blank. Memories, by their nature, may not be examined, and the mind’s eye is not the eye we use, for example, to cross the road.
I wonder if this is the way that the baby sees things: vaguely and all at once. I imagine it to be a very emotional way to exist in the world. Perhaps I am being romantic — but the visual world yields nothing but delight to her. There are (it seems) no horrors, no frights. Tiny babies see only in monochrome. I imagine colour leaking into her head like a slowly adjusted screen — tremendously slow, like a vegetable television growing silently in the corner of the room. I imagine her focus becoming sharper and deeper, like some infinitely stoned cameraman adjusting his lens. ‘Oh,’ she says — or something that is the precursor to ‘Oh’, a shallow inhalation, a stillness as she is caught by something, and begins to stalk it: careful, rapt — the most beautiful sound in the world: the sound of a baby’s wondering breath.
Something pulls in me when she is caught like this. For months I am a slave to her attention. The world is all colour, light and texture and I am her proud companion. I have no choice. None of us do. In a café, three women look over to smile at her, and then, as one, they look up. ‘Oh, she likes the light,’ says one, and this fact pleases us all. Immensely.
The light, of course, is horrible, and this is one of the reasons mothers think they are losing their minds: this pride in the baby looking at the light, this pride in the light as they introduce it to the baby, ‘Yes, the light!’ There is a certain zen to it; the world simple and new as we all stop to admire the baby admiring a wrought-iron candelabra with peculiar dangly bits and five — yes, five! — glowing, tulip-shaped bulbs.
She is years away from knowing from what ‘five’ might be, but maybe she already gets the ‘fiveness’ of it. This is the way her eyes move: One, one more! Another one! All of them! The other two. The first one again, another one! Something else.
Sometimes she holds her hand up like the baby Christ, and looks as though she contains everything, and understands it all. I do not ask to be forgiven, but still I feel redemption in the completeness of her gaze. And I feel the redemption in her fat baby wrists and her infinitely fine, fat baby’s hand. The baby is a blessing, but sometimes she does, she must, also bless, which is to say that she simply sees, and lifts her hand, as a sign.
I pick the baby up and we look in the wardrobe mirror, which has always been for her a complicated delight: What is it? It’s a baby! She smiles, it smiles back! (Complication upon complication! It’s me! It’s me! she says, and all her synapses, as I imagine, going ping! ping! ping!) She sees me smiling at her in the mirror; she sees her mother turning to smile at her in the room, and oh, it’s too much, she lunges forwards to examine the knob on the wardrobe door.
There are actually two knobs on the wardrobe. One is wooden and the other, for some reason, is an amber-coloured plastic. The baby goes from one to the other and back again. One of the first confusions in her young life was when myself and Martin both looked at her at the same time: ‘Oh no, there’s two of them.’ It almost felt unfair.
As she grew older, there was nothing she liked more than to be held by one of us and to look at the other, in a somewhat haughty way. Older still, she is completely content when the two of us are with her, quietly in a room. She has travelled from one, to two, perhaps to many. I think of this as she goes from the wooden knob to the amber one — a fairy tale of sameness and difference. This one. That one.
Of course, the first difference between this and the other is not between mother and father, or even between baby and ‘baby in the mirror’, but between one breast and . . . the other! If women had five teats, then mankind might, by now, be living on the moon.
Yesterday, it was warm, and I took off her socks and stood her on the grass. She loved this, but maybe not so much as I did — her first experience of grass. For her, this green stuff was just as different and as delicious as everything else — the ‘first’ was all mine. Sometimes, I feel as though I am introducing her to my own nostalgia for the world.
In the meantime, grass is green and springy and amazingly multiple and just itself. It might even be edible. Everything goes into her mouth. This is the taste of yellow. This is the taste of blue. Since she started moving about she has also experienced the taste of turf, of yesterday’s toast, and probably of mouse droppings, because it was weeks before I realised we were not alone in the house. Paper remains her ultimate goal, and she looks over her shoulder now to check if I am around. That wallpaper looks nice.
I really do wish I could remember my own wallpaper, instead of just the tear I made in it. The baby sleeps in my cot now — the one my father made over forty years ago with some half-inch dowel, and a fairly ingenious sliding mechanism for the side to be let down. I sat beside it one night, feeding her, and I tried to remember what it was like to be inside; the view between the bars and the ripped wallpaper on the wall. Someone, over the years, had painted it nursery blue, but I remembered a green colour, I could almost recall chewing the cross bar at the top. The baby sucked, her eyelashes batting slowly over a drunken, surrendered gaze, and as my attention wandered I saw, under a chip in the blue paint, the very green I ate as a child. A strong and distant emotion washed briefly over me and was gone.
My mother, or someone, pulled the cot away from the wall and, in time, the wallpaper I do not remember was replaced with wallpaper that I do remember (flowers of blue, block-printed on white). Babies love pattern so much I have begun to regret my own attempts at tastefulness. Not a single curlicued carpet for her to crawl over, not a single flower on the wall. Even her toys are in primary colours and her mobile is from the Tate, cut-out shapes, like a Mondrian floating free.
Once I stop trying, I seem to remember my mother giving out to me about the ripped-up wall. She would have been upset about the wallpaper. Perhaps this is why I remember it. It was my first real experience of ‘NO!’
My own child thinks No! is a game. I say it once and she pauses. I say it twice and she looks at me. I say it three times and she laughs. The punch-line!
Tasteful as it is, she loves the mobile. It has a big red circle that spins slowly to blue, and a little square that goes from black to white. There are various rectangles that don’t particularly obsess her but, taken all in all, it is the thing she likes most in the world.
We moved when she was nearly eight months old, and it was another two weeks before I got round to stringing up the mobile for her again. When it was done, she shuddered with delight. It happened to her all in spasm. She realised, not only that the mobile was there, but also that it had once been gone. She remembered it. In order to do this she needed to see three things: the mobile in the old flat, the new room without the mobile, the new room with the mobile. Memory is not a single thing.
Martin says that his first memory, which is of one brother breaking a blue plastic jug over another brother’s head, is false. His mother tells him that they never did have a slender, pale blue plastic jug. He thinks he dreamt about the jug, and that the dream also contained the idea that this was his first memory, as he dreamt a subsequent ‘first memory’ of people waving to him from a plane while he stood in the garden below. He was convinced for years that this was real. This makes me think that we are very young when we search for our first memory — that single moment when we entered the stream of time.
My own mother, who is curator and container of many things, among them the memory of my pot stand, worries that she is getting forgetful. The distant past is closer all the time, she says. If this is true, then the memory of her own mother is getting stronger now; sitting in a house by the sea, surrounded by children who are variously delighted, or worried, or concentrating on other things.
When you think about it, the pots can’t have stayed there for long. I would have pulled them down. There would have been noise, though my memory of them is notably, and utterly, silent. Perhaps what I remember is the calm before a chaos of sound and recrimination. That delicious, slow moment, when a baby goes very, very quiet, knowing it is about to be found out.
The other morning, the baby (silently) reached the seedlings I have under the window, and she filled her mouth with a handful of hardy annuals and potting compost. I tried to prise her mouth open to get the stuff out. She clamped it shut. She bit me (by accident). She started to cry. When she cried, her mouth opened. She was undone by her own distress and this seemed so unfair to me that I left her to it. I hadn’t the heart. Besides, it said on the pack that the compost was sterilised.
But she will not let my finger into her mouth, now, even to check for a tooth (she is very proud of her teeth), and when she clamps it shut and turns away she is saying, ‘Me,’ loud and clear. ‘Oh,’ a friend said, when she started to crawl, ‘it’s the beginning of the end,’ and I knew what she meant. It is the beginning of the end of a romance between a woman who has forgotten who she is and a child who does not yet know.
Until one day there will come a moment, delightful or banal, ordinary or strange, that she will remember for the rest of her life.
Anne Enright, 'Time' in Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, London: Vintage, 2005, 65-72.
我最早的记忆是关于一个锅架。它被放置在一个角落里,一边是一个衣柜,另一边是一个浅台阶。这里就是我记忆开始的地方。台阶通向另一个房间,在该房间的另一边一个白发女人正坐在椅子上。
跟我母亲聊着聊着就聊到了那个仅有的锅架,那是我18个月大的夏天在海边的一个小屋里。我母亲说,那个锅架是黑铁制成的,它真的放在一个台阶旁,那个白发女人一定是我外婆——她在我六岁时去世了。外婆的这个形象就是我关于她的所有记忆,甚至于与其说是一种印象不如说是一种感觉。外婆或许已经睡着了,但是我认为她一定是在看书。锅架上有一个非常安静且隐秘的东西,那就是一个金字塔形的东西,可以放四个锅的架子。我能记起在顶层的架子上有一个带柄且有盖子的小平底锅。我很想说在底层架子上有一个大平底锅,但这已经是记忆的极限了。我怎么也回忆不起来那个亚麻油地毡是什么样的。
在九个月大的时候,婴儿把头伸进锅里,然后说:“啊啊啊。”她说得非常温柔,听着回响。这都是她自己发现的。作为庆祝,我把我的头伸进锅里,然后说“啊啊啊。”然后她再做一遍,我再做一遍,如此往复。
我家人不相信我记得那个锅架,理由是那是一个愚蠢的记忆。反正,我就是太小了,不该记得。家人的任务就是否认彼此的记忆,哪怕是愉快的记忆。我年经最小,有时被迫为了自己脑海里记忆的内容而抗争。那个夏天我哥哥摔破了肘部,我母亲不得不带他去都柏林的一家医院。她不在期间,我外婆照顾我们。这是我生平第一次有那么一段时间妈妈不在身边。如果她留下来了,那么我可以肯定的是我就不会记得那个房子里的任何事情,不会记得锅架,也不会记得我外婆。
我们窃取自己的记忆,我们从世界上把它们偷来,然后储存起来。
我第一次离开我的婴孩是在她四个月大的时候。我不在的那些日子,她和我母亲待在一起。我想知道那时她会记得什么呢?是一种颜色,一种气味,或许是一组形状,冷漠且静谧,还是远处的某个人。仅是如此,某人。
记忆的中心物体呢?或许是地毯。我希望她记得我父母的地毯,我小时候记得的地毯。它有绿叶子图案,就像是垫脚石一样,一直通向大厅。
我可能有一个更早的记忆,我记得我把我婴儿床夹缝处墙上的墙纸拉下来了。当时,我母亲也不在现场,但是虽然锅架记忆说不上开心也说不上不开心,可是这个记忆却相当惊悚。我几乎可以确定吃了墙纸。墙纸下面的灰泥是粉红色的粉末,并且现在我能记起灰泥那令人颤抖的味道。我也记得墙上撕裂的形状,或者说我觉得我记得吧。无论如何,我在我的脑海里看到它:左边有一条裂缝,惊人的笔直;右边有四条伽马式线条被拉开,像是一组粗壮破烂的手指。
我知道这个记忆在某种程度上是真实的,但是当我努力去追寻它时,它却消失了。它存在于我的边缘视觉中,只有当我专注于其他事情的时候,它才会浮现,就像是打字一样。当我停止写这个句子,把头从屏幕上移开向上看,努力去看墙纸的图案时,竟然一片空白!记忆,就其本质而言,或许不能被审视,而且我们心里的眼睛也不是我们所使用的眼睛,比如过马路时使用的眼睛。
我想知道是否这就是婴儿看待事物的方式:模糊且突然。我想这是存活于世的一种非常情绪化的方式。或许我这么说过于浪漫了,但是视觉世界只给她带来了快乐,(似乎)没有恐怖、没有惊惧。小婴儿只看到黑白两色。我想象着色彩就像缓慢调整的屏幕逐渐渗透到她的脑海,极其缓慢,就像电视上在房间角落里静静生长的蔬菜。我想象她的聚焦变得越来越犀利、深邃,就像是某个投石摄影师不断调整他的镜片一样。“噢,”她说,或者是“噢”的前兆的某个东西,浅浅的吸气,当她被某物吸引时的一种静止,然后开始追踪它:小心且专注。世界上最美妙的声音莫过于婴儿好奇的呼吸声。
当她像这样被吸引的时候,我也受到了吸引。几个月来,我的所有注意力都在她身上,似乎成了她的奴隶。世界充满了色彩、光亮和纹理,我是她骄傲的伴侣。我别无选择,我们谁都没有选择。在一家咖啡馆里,三个女人看过来朝她微笑,然后她们又一起向上看。“噢,她喜欢那个灯,”一个女人说,这个事实令我们愉快,极其地愉快。
那个灯当然是难看的,这就是为什么母亲们会认为她们失去心智的原因之一:她们骄傲地看着婴儿看灯,骄傲地把灯介绍给婴儿,“是的,灯!”灯具有某种禅性。当我们都停下来去欣赏婴儿在欣赏的一个熟铁制成的灯架,它有独特的悬垂碎片和五个——是的,五个!——闪闪发光的郁金香型灯泡。世界变得简单而又充满新奇。
她还要好几年才会知道“五”是什么概念,但是或许她已经知道了“五”的真谛。她的眼睛周而复始地移动着:一个,又一个!还有一个!这么多!还有两个。接着又回到第一个,又一个!如此往复。
有时她就像婴儿基督一样举起她的手,看起来就好像她拥有一切,也能理解一切一样。我没有要求她宽恕我,但是从她的凝视中我仍然感到救赎。从她胖嘟嘟的手腕,和那无比细腻白皙的手上我感到了救赎。婴儿本身是上帝的祝福,但有时她自己确实给予祝福,也必须给予祝福,她只需简单地看着,并把手举起来,做一个手势。
我抱起婴儿,我们看着衣柜上的镜子,这对于她来说一直都是一种难以描述的喜悦:那是什么?是个婴儿!她微笑,它也朝她微笑!(复杂又复杂!是我!是我!她说。我想象着,她所有的神经元都在砰!砰!砰!)在镜子里她看到我朝她微笑,房间里她看到她的母亲扭过头来朝她微笑。噢,太多了。她突然俯冲过去玩弄衣柜门上的把手。
实际上,衣柜上有两个把手。一个是木制的,另一个不知怎地是琥珀色的塑料。婴儿从一个把手到另一个,来回反复地摸着。她小的时候,第一个困惑就是当我和马丁同时看着她的时候:“噢,不,他们是两个人。”她几乎感觉到了不公平。
随着她慢慢长大,她更喜欢我们中的一个人抱着她,同时以某种傲慢的方式看着另一个人。更大一点,当我们两个安安静静地和她在一个房间时,她非常满足。她从一个移动到两个,或许移动到更多。当她从木制把手摸到琥珀把手,我想到了这一点:一个讲述同与不同的童话故事。这一个。那一个。
当然,在这个和另一个之间的第一个不同点不是在母亲和父亲之间,甚至也不是在婴儿和“镜子中的婴儿”之间,而是在一个乳房和...另一个乳房之间!如果女人有五个乳头,那么人类或许现在早已经生活在月球上了。
昨天,天气暖和,我脱下她的袜子,让她站在草地上。她很喜欢,虽然或许不像我那么喜欢——这是她的第一次草地体验。对她来说,这些绿色的东西和其他一切东西一样不同且美味——这个“第一次”都是我的。有时,我感觉就好像我正在向她介绍我自己对这个世界的怀念。
与此同时,草是绿色且富有弹性的,并且数目惊人,而且只有草本身。它或许是可以吃的。一切都进入她的嘴里。这是黄色的味道,这是蓝色的味道。自从她开始四处走动,她已经体验了草皮的味道,昨天烤面包的味道,或许还有老鼠屎的味道,因为就在几周前我意识到房子里并不只有我们。纸依然是她的终极目标,她从肩膀上往后看看看我是否在附近。那个墙纸看起来不错!
我真希望我能记得我自己的墙纸是什么样子,而不仅仅是我撕下后的样子。现在婴儿睡在我的婴儿床上——这是四十多年前我父亲用一些半英寸的木钉做成的,还有一个相当精巧的滑动机制,这可以让另一侧放下来。一天晚上我坐在婴儿床旁边,给她喂奶,我努力回忆待在里面是什么感觉,在木条和墙上撕下的墙纸之间的风景是什么样的。这些年来,有人把它涂成了蓝色,但我记忆中是绿色的。我几乎能够回忆起咬顶端横木的场景。婴儿吮吸着,她的睫毛在醉醺醺的要投降的眼珠上拍打着。当我的思绪四处游移时,我看到在蓝色漆碎屑的下面正是我小时候吃过的绿色。一种强烈而遥远的情绪短暂地袭卷而来,又很快消失。
我母亲,或者别的谁,把我的婴儿床挪离墙,最后,我不记得的墙纸取代了我记得的墙纸(蓝色的花朵在白色的印刷版上)。婴儿非常喜欢图案,我已经开始后悔我自己的购物品味。没有软软的地毯供她爬,墙上也没有一朵花。甚至她的玩具都是原色的,她的风铃来自泰特博物馆,剪切的形状,就像是蒙德里安的几何图案在自由飘动。
在我不撕之后,我似乎记得我母亲跟我讲过被撕毁的墙纸。她应该对墙纸非常的生气,或许这就是为什么我会记得它的原因。那是我第一次真正体验到“不!”。
我自己的孩子认为“不!”是一个游戏。我说一次,她就停下来。我说两次,她会看着我。我说三次,她就大笑。好玩!
不管我的品味如何,她喜欢那个风铃。风铃上有一个红色的环,可以缓慢的旋转成蓝色,还有一个小方块,可以从黑色变成白色。各种各样的矩形并没有特别吸引她,但总体来讲,风铃就是她在世界上最喜欢的东西。
在她大概八个月大的时候,我们搬家了。两周后,我再次给她挂上了风铃。当挂上之后,她高兴地抽搐四肢。高兴是以痉挛的形式表现的。她不仅意识到风铃在那里,而且也意识到风铃曾经不见了。她记得它。为了做到这一点,她需要看见三样东西:旧公寓里的风铃,没有风铃的新房间,以及有风铃的新房间。记忆不是单一的东西。
马丁说他的第一个记忆并不真实。这个记忆是关于一个兄弟把蓝色塑料壶打在另一个兄弟的头上。他的母亲告诉他,他们从来就没有一个细长淡蓝色塑料壶。他认为他是梦见的这个壶,并且他还认为“初次记忆”的想法也是梦中场景。他还梦到随后的一个所谓“初次记忆”,他站在花园里,飞机上有人向他挥手。这么多年来他始终相信这就是真的。这使我想到当我们搜寻我们的第一次记忆的时候,我们都还太小——那是我们进入到时间流的那一刻。
我自己的母亲擅长记忆并保管东西,其中就包含我的锅架记忆。她担心她变得越来越健忘。她说,遥远的过去总是越来越近。如果这是真的,那么她自己母亲的记忆现在变得越来越强烈。她坐在海边的房子里,被孩子们围绕着,他们或是高兴,或是忧虑,亦或是专注于其他的事情。
现在想想,锅不可能在架子上呆太久。我应该把它们拉下来了,应该会有噪音。不过我关于它们的记忆却格外地安静。或许我记得的是喧嚣和指责前的平静吧。那个美妙,很缓慢的时刻,那时婴儿非常非常安静,知道它即将被发现。
前几天早上,婴儿(静悄悄地)来到我放在窗下的幼苗那里,她把一把耐寒一年生植物和盆栽堆肥塞到嘴里。我想撬开她的嘴,把东西弄出来。但她紧紧抿着嘴,还(不小心)咬了我。她开始哭。当她哭的时候,她的嘴张开了。她被自己的痛苦瓦解了,我觉得这太不公平了,以至于我随她去了。我不忍心,更何况,包装上写着堆肥已消毒。
但是她到现在也不让我把手指伸进她的嘴里,即使是检查牙齿(她对自己的牙齿感到自豪)。当她紧抿着嘴转身离开时,她简直是在大声而清晰地说“我”。当她开始爬的时候,一个朋友说, “噢,那是结束的开始”。我知道她的意思。那是一个已经忘记自己是谁的妇女和一个还不知道自己是谁的孩子之间的浪漫时光的结束的开始。
直到一天,那个时刻到来,不论是快乐的还是平庸的,平凡的或是奇异的,她终生都会记住那一刻。