DISLOCATIONS

In brief, plangent paragraphs, Molloy offer snapshots of the advancing loss of a friend “who is coming apart before my very eyes.”

Like flashes from a lighthouse, Argentinian writer Molloy offers sudden, extremely short glimpses and apercus—while also posing complicated questions—concerning her friend and longtime associate M.L., who is disappearing into incapacity and remoteness due to memory loss. Their relationship has spanned 45 years and includes professional connections, like collaboration on writing articles, as well as more profound links, such as sharing their particular language, “an at-home Spanish….A home from another era,” words used by mothers or grandmothers, evocative of roots and recognition. “When talking to her I feel—or I felt—connected to a past that is not entirely illusory. And with a place: that of before.” Molloy remembers M.L. as she used to be: “witty, ironic, snobby, critical, at times even malicious.” Now tended by carers, M.L. has forgotten how to sign her name. She no longer remembers to avoid the foods she used to dislike and will soon forget how to eat, what to chew, when to swallow. She is using tactile memory—the feel of things—to replace the mental instinct. Not only tragic and valedictory, these fragments are also philosophical: “How does someone who remembers nothing speak in the first person? What is the location of that ‘I’, once the memory has come undone?” And on another level, there’s an attempt to scrutinize and secure a relationship by one party as the other fades. What will happen when Molloy stops recording their interactions? Who will be abandoning whom? These are the final, unanswerable, guilty enquiries.

Often chilling, occasionally banal, this ultrashort work fully inhabits its very specific terrain.