Memory is a funny thing. There have been specific moments in my life when I thought, “I’ll never forget this” — and yet, I forgot. But it is all coming back to me now, in a blurred motion. The chronology cannot be right; I am sure some things happened before some others, but in the biographic records we keep of our journey through life, the pieces are sometimes rearranged to build a more coherent story.
For example, I had forgotten the moment I fell in love with Las Palmas. And now that I remember it, I recall the exact feeling I experienced at the time. Some say that falling in love is a beautiful thing, but I disagree. Falling in love is like jumping from a cliff at the end of a race; it is a leap of faith that you take because it’s the only possible conclusion to your own voyage. It reorganises the way you see the world and it leaves you a little different from who you were the second before. It makes you helpless and weak, and desperately happy.
I am standing in Plaza de Cairasco. The building that hosts the Gabinete Literario stands tall in its colonial splendour on the corner of the square. There is something I cannot quite pinpoint in the air — not now, at least. The African sun is already setting in the distance of a late February evening. The light is not quite the same once you approach the Tropic of Cancer. It’s not brighter, but the colour seems to wander further up the chromatic scheme, imposing stronger contrasts on everything it caresses.
I have been preoccupied with all sorts of things, from the new flat to the phone calls I am still receiving from someone I no longer love, and I am not paying much attention to the world around me. It’s been hard, coming here and leaving everything behind. I am not sure I will like Las Palmas. The first few days haven’t been great. I am a bit homesick, and a bit distracted. I pause because something catches my attention. Maybe the fairy lights in the trees. Maybe the music. It must be the music.
Over the noise of the traffic and the laughter of the children in the nearby playground, I am hearing a faint melody, which is growing stronger as the seconds pass. A cello. I love the cello; I think the strings of cellos are tuned so as to resonate with our souls. My mind goes blank. I look around, and time seems to be slowing down. My world is being turned upside down.
The musicians are playing Air on the G String by Johann Sebastian Bach, from his Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068. It couldn’t be more apt, really. The melody has been with me forever, bringing me the comfort of knowing that whatever happened, two beats of it would give me perspective, through adventures, heartbreaks, laughter and inner journeys. Which is the exact combination of all the things that Gran Canaria is going to bring me, but I don’t know it yet, as the square spins around me and the world looks like a brand new place, full of people to meet and stories to hear.
I fall in love. Irremediably. Definitely. Hard. I fall in love with the island the way you fall in love for the first time, when you are too young to know. Everything is all right, and painful, and sublime, and absolutely perfect. It all falls into place.
Call it luck, or fate, or serendipity, but it’s been twelve years this week. I didn’t even think of it at all. I hadn’t thought of it in a long time — at least not consciously. But there must have been something going on in the back of my mind, like some sort of software running in silence, because last weekend I felt the need to dig up the hard drive on which I had stored the pictures of my Erasmus. It was in a cardboard box that I had archived upstairs, in my father’s house, and hadn’t bothered to take with me when I bought my own home. I hadn’t looked at those pictures for at least ten years.
And then Adriano reached out to me. We had been good friends there and then, and have been silent observers of each other’s life ever since. I felt I had to plug in the hard drive. I looked at the pictures in complete disbelief at how young I once was until I noticed a folder called “Videos”. And there it was: a very short clip of that February evening in Plaza de Cairasco, and packed with it, myriads of memories I had consigned to the outermost areas of my memory.
A heart can be broken in many different ways, but the nostalgia imposed by the ineluctable passing of time has the capacity to reopen wounds in places you forgot you even had scars. The tiny video doesn’t do justice to the feelings that struck me, twelve years ago, on the edge of an island floating in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The melody is fainter, and the noise of the city, louder. It all seems smaller, less magical as if I had been under a spell at the time and it had finally vanished. Or maybe we idealise the moments we loved, even when they are made of Bach’s music and fairy lights. Memory is a funny thing.