Memories Change Their Meaning

This essay begins with the episode Renate, but it neither continues it nor attempts to explain it completely. It is concerned above all with the way an event whose facts remain unchanged can, after decades, acquire a different meaning.

It Is Not the Past That Changes

We tend to imagine memory as an archive. We believe that events are stored somewhere in the form in which they occurred, and that from time to time we return to bring them back intact into the light. But human memory is not an inert storehouse. It does not preserve the facts exactly, but rather the way the person we were understood them at the time; and that understanding changes as the person we have since become looks back upon what the person we once were experienced.

In reality, the facts do not change. An encounter either took place or it did not. A letter arrived or it did not. Two people promised to see each other again, or they parted without promises. What changes is the connection between these facts. A detail that seemed insignificant at twenty may become, at eighty, the key to the whole event. A silence once attributed to the other person may later appear as a silence built by both.

Memoirs, therefore, are not merely a reconstruction of the past. They are also a confrontation between the successive interpretations we have given to our own life.

One Summer and Two Silences

For a long time I viewed my story with Renate through a simple pattern. We had met, drawn close enough to become intimate, lived through a few intense days, and promised to write to each other. Her letter never came. To the person I was then, the conclusion seemed obvious: she had forgotten me, or the encounter had meant less to her than it had to me.

I experienced her silence as a betrayal, although the word may be too strong for so brief a relationship. Yet brief relationships can leave disproportionate wounds precisely because they have no time to explain themselves. They remain suspended between what they were and what they might have become.

Only much later did I understand that the silence was not hers alone. I was waiting for her to take the first step. But I had her address, I remembered the way she looked at me, and I wanted to understand why she had chosen me. What I lacked was the courage to expose myself to possible rejection. Pride supplied a convenient explanation: if she had not written, then she did not deserve to be sought.

The formula with which I tried to close the episode was simple: “It was a summer diversion.” It was not a lie, but neither was it the whole truth. It was a defensive sentence. I diminished the importance of what had happened so that I would not have to admit how deeply it had affected me.

When the Erotic Becomes Affectionate

For years, the memory remained associated above all with erotic pleasure. That was natural. The encounter had been unexpected, intense, and flattering. A woman of my own age had chosen me with a decisiveness I had never experienced before. For the insecure young man I was, this had also been a form of confirmation.

With time, however, the erotic lost its primacy. It did not disappear from the memory, but it ceased to be its centre. What remained was the need to see the person again, not her body; to understand, not to repeat. Erotic regrets gradually became emotional regrets.

I no longer wished to recreate the story or to alter anything in her life or mine. I only wanted to know what had happened after that summer and, above all, to ask her a question my youth had not had the courage to formulate: why did you never give me another sign? What had displeased you in our relationship?

The question was not an accusation. Or at least it was no longer only that. It also contained an admission: I had given no sign either. By then, her answer would probably have become a question addressed to me.

The Search

When I began looking for her, I was not pursuing a romantic ghost, but a real person. I contacted the publishing houses that had issued the books of a music teacher whose unusual first name bore a striking resemblance to that of the Renate I had known. Editors had changed, archives were incomplete, and the name remained in catalogues even though no one knew anything about the person behind it.

The fact that she had not returned for new editions suggested that she had withdrawn or could no longer continue. Her last book, moreover, had been published when she had already reached an advanced age, beyond the usual retirement years. I gradually became accustomed to the possibility of old age, illness, and even death. These were not what frightened me most. At the age I had reached, death was no longer an abstract impossibility, either for her or for me.

Through a friend, I eventually contacted a private detective. He identified beyond doubt the author I had been seeking and told me that she had died eleven years earlier. He was unable, however, to establish the decisive detail: her place of birth, which would have proved that the author and the young woman from Reșița were the same person.

Logically, the investigation remained open. The identity had not been fully established. Emotionally, however, something had ended. Memory does not operate like a legal case and does not always wait for final proof before producing a sense of loss.

A Question Without an Addressee

The news of her death disturbed me not only because of what it said about her. It disturbed me because of what it took away from me. Until then, however unlikely a reunion might have been, my question still had a possible addressee. Suddenly, it no longer did.

It was no longer a question of resuming a relationship, but of the final impossibility of illuminating an area of my own life. Some questions seem to concern the other person, but are in fact questions about ourselves. I wanted to know what I had meant to her so that I might better understand what that encounter had meant to me and, in truth, what I had lost.

Perhaps the answer would have been ordinary. Perhaps she had written and the letter had been lost. Perhaps she had changed her mind. Perhaps her family had intervened. Perhaps she had met someone else. Perhaps the episode had been for her exactly what I had tried to pretend it had been for me: a summer affair.

None of these possibilities could any longer be verified. For that very reason, the question grew more intense. As long as an answer remains possible, a question is a problem. When the answer becomes impossible, the question becomes part of memory.

What I Would Tell the Young Man I Was

I would not ask the young man I was to be wiser. Retrospective wisdom is one of the cheapest forms of superiority; as a father, I learned that long ago. Nor would I ask him to love more or to suffer less. Let him do both in his own way and not lie to himself. I would tell him only not always to wait for the other person to take the first step.

In youth, pride appears to be a form of dignity. You tell yourself that you must not insist, humiliate yourself, or risk ridicule. Only much later do you discover that pride is often a mask for fear: fear of rejection, of failure, of learning that you loved more, of losing the image you wish to preserve of yourself.

Perhaps our meeting had occurred before two people who desired one another had learned how not to lose each other. I do not know whether this formula explains the story. I know only that it expresses the meaning the story has acquired now.