The office was almost empty now that I’d returned the books to the library, and there was nothing on the shelves but old notices for symposia and conferences, memos, brochures from the Modern Language Association, university press catalogs, one magazine (New German Critique) that the previous occupant of the space had subscribed to, three or four volumes of German literature, and several dictionaries. There were also filing cabinets full of old exams, thesis projects, dossiers, photocopies of articles that no one read now, and course summaries. Years and years of work had accumulated in this office that several generations of literature professors had occupied before me. But one evening as I was about to leave, when I turned off the overhead lamp, the radiance of the lights from the hallway reflected off the red jacket and yellow oval of the Penguin Classics edition of Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. It had been there, invisible yet so distinct on a low shelf, and I never would have seen it if not for the tiny, precise concurrence that allowed this reflection of light on the sheen of the cover. Ida was using it in her seminar and had left it for me on that fateful night.
Why had she left me the book? I turned the matter over while nervously eating some nuts and suddenly recalled the time at an organic shop in the Village when Ida had bought half a pound of Caribbean Mix, a blend of almonds, walnuts, dried fruit, and raisins.
Memories possess no order and often come to distract us from the things we want to think about. This unexpected memory mattered little to me; I considered it a factory defect, a design flaw. The absurd flow of forgotten memories troubles the soul, distracting us from our true obsessions. Yes, we’d eaten almonds and walnuts as we lay in bed that weekend in New York. But I wanted to reconstruct that moment when Ida, standing in the middle of the hallway, her mail in her left hand, her bag over her shoulder, and several papers in her right hand, saw me appear and turned toward me with a strange expression of happiness and also of vexation.
Maybe she wanted to tell me something about the book, but I interrupted her with the imminence of our date on the following night (Hyatt Hotel). Oh, the urgency of passion, always experienced in the present tense. She asked me to hold her papers while she looked for a pencil, but why? I can’t remember, I only recall her gesture as she searched through her bag, and then her smile as she said yes, of course, but right now she had to run. And why did you leave the meeting? she had asked. (It was to give her the number of the room I’d reserved at the hotel, I now remember.) She walked away down the hall, toward the elevator, and I stood there with the Conrad novel and a few papers in my hand. It didn’t seem to have been a deliberate intention, but tragic events can cause any detail to become significant. On the back cover of the book was the number of the course she was teaching that semester (COMP. 555), and the papers were all pointless announcements from the dean of the faculty or suggestions from the boy scouts on call about the dangers of sexual harassment (“Never close your office door when meeting with students, male or female. Never plan to meet students for personal reasons. Never address them by their first names.”) Ida had taught The Secret Agent during the first half of March, on Thursday the 7th, a week before that terrible, appalling day. It was a sign, a signal; each of us finds our oracle at the crossroads of the road we are destined to take.
I’d read that novel many years ago, but now Ida’s markings led me to read it with passion, the same way you can trace new paths around the map of a city you already know. With her underlining it seemed like a different novel, and it also felt like a private message. Ida had precisely and methodically marked out the areas of the book that she found significant. There was nothing special in that; she used private signs, little marks, slight indications, for example a “v” on its side (>) or a sign of amazement (!), and in cases of special interest she would write “ojo” in lowercase with several little vertical dashes next to a paragraph she didn’t want to forget. Keys enclosing phrases, arrows, slightly wavy lines, or very straight dashes (as if she’d made them with a ruler), they were clues, trails, and I followed her markings as though reading along with her!
Sometimes I’d get disoriented and lose my way, straying in the middle of the page as memories broke in and distracted me or images struck out vividly. In the bedroom of my house, in the neighborhood of Congreso, I imagined Junior stretched out in bed, naked (but wearing glasses), amusedly looking through the things underlined in my books (the things I had underlined in the books). “But look at what this idiot underlines… Hold on, I’ll read it to you,” he would say, while Clara, her body reclining in a graceful Greek curve, would be painting her toenails, with little bits of cotton between her toes, the smell of acetone… I could smell that intimate aroma! A wicked madeleine distracting me from the pencil strokes (she never underlined a book with ink) that she’d left for me, my Ariadne. Syntax is the first thing that you feel the effects of when you read, and I skimmed along—without grammatical articulations—reading Ida’s message. But was it a message? There were pages that contained no markings.
