That one never faded from my mind
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Tive outras muitas, melhores, e peores, mas aquella nunca se me apagou do espirito.
I had many others, better and worse, but that one never faded from my spirit.
I had many others, better and worse, but that one never faded from my spirit.
He sets the one afternoon against all the rest: 'Tive outras muitas, melhores, e peores, mas aquella nunca se me apagou do espirito' — I had many others, better and worse, but that one never faded from my spirit. He is scrupulous, as ever: the November afternoon was not his happiest, nor his most terrible — there were finer days and grimmer ones. Its distinction is not its quality but its permanence. Everything else washed away; this alone would not. The verb is precise and haunting: 'apagar', to be extinguished, rubbed out, effaced, as a candle is snuffed or a chalk mark wiped — and 'nunca se me apagou', it never let itself be rubbed out of him. Recall the chapter's argument: memory strips and disenchants and bewitches, the past fades, the friends dissolve into geology, the self goes missing, the interior 'takes no dye'. Against all that erosion, one afternoon held fast, indelible in the 'espirito', the innermost mind — the single thing time could not extinguish. And there is the deep suggestion, left unspoken, that a memory this permanent, this unwilling to fade, is not merely cherished but fixed, burned in, perhaps festered — the one image a brooding mind has kept perfectly preserved and returned to and returned to across a lifetime. What will not fade can also be what will not heal. The afternoon he is about to summon has been alive in him, unerasable, all these years; and the very fact that it never dimmed is the first sign of how much depends on it, and how little the man who cannot forget it may be able to see it plainly.
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