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Leopolda, Don’t Forget Me
- University of Ottawa Press
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Cloudburst 178 Leopolda, Don’t Forget Me She didn’t know why, but she couldn’t open the envelope. It had been on the desk for three days. She told herself again that it would be impossible not to open it. By now it wasn’t simply a matter of her having left it there unopened for so long; instead, it had started to worry her. The interference of a space and time that were hidden, fugitive. The anguish of a journey, the time of writing inconsistent with the time of reading. Two people facing each other from a near—or remote?—past, in this, her present. Once again she looked at the envelope. Her name was clear, typewritten, Leopolda. The colour of the envelope was grey. She turned it over again to look for the name of the sender. All that was there was Don’t forget me. She left it on the desk. Who would send her a letter like this? Who didn’t want her to forget? Three days looking for an answer, imagining faces: who? It was two o’clock in the afternoon on the third day. The envelope had been waiting. Persistent? Impassive? As nervous as she was? It was on the desk in the back room. The room where things with no place in the house ended up—what nobody wanted, had gone out of fashion or was simply waiting for the right time to be used or discarded. She had brought it in when she found it in the mailbox, at the front door, and had left it there. What would she do now? Leave it among the other things? Open it suddenly as if nothing would happen? Would there be a letter in the envelope? Nobody sends just an envelope: that’s ridiculous, she told herself, covering up her mouth as usual so no one could see her false teeth. And out of sheer fright, melodramatically, she started to laugh: “Don’t forget me,” a message from the past! Several times she laughed and then stopped suddenly as she paced around the room. I clearly seemed to have forgotten. Who was emerging from my past, urgently, standing there firmly on an envelope and telling me “Don’t forget me”? How should I read those words? All I’d have to do is open the envelope, I know. It had been a while since something so intriguing had happened to Nela Rio 179 me. That was probably why I didn’t want to open it. However, in those days of coming and going through my memories, remembrances piled up like in the back room, I hadn’t been able to find the face of anyone I either didn’t want to remember or wanted to forget. Sometimes it seemed romantic to have this letter, and to have someone behind those lines remembering a special moment, wanting to draw closer, to appear before me again. When I recognized the person, I would smile with the same smile of that moment and say, “Ah, it’s you!” coquettishly, and it would be a magical reunion and our smiles would be broad and white and our young teeth would shine. But who was it? I looked at the walls of the room that nobody wanted to paint—why would they after all, if it wasn’t used for anything. And I’d brought in this imagined remembrance from the pile of memories that barely had an owner, piled up in disorder, no one claiming anything and now, unexpectedly, a voice demanded a place, a shared time. Sometimes this odd envelopeseemedsinistertome.PerhapsI’doncehurtsomeone, and now that person was coming to punish me? Beseeching me, cornering me in this room of the ashes of memories. The person wouldn’t leave me alone and would probably call me many times, but I wouldn’t answer, I wouldn’t even touch the phone. Or the person would write me threatening notes; I’d be afraid to walk from the main part of the house to this room filled with knickknacks, looking towards the corners apprehensively and hiding the key to the door in another place, just in case. I’d spend sleepless nights and no one would notice until, perhaps on the intended night, something would happen and I would be suffocated with fright and unable to scream. But enough of this foolishness! Maybe it was an invitation from a friend to one of those reunions where we talk of...