Memoria

It was not the furniture that took the time. The furniture went in a morning: a man with a van came, looked at everything, offered a price that was close to an insult, and took it all anyway.

What took the time was the drawers.

Our father had kept everything that had ever been printed with his name on it. Electricity bills from 1994. A letter from the bank congratulating him on a loan. Every birthday card my sister and I had ever sent him, in order, with the envelopes — and on some of them a note in pencil of the date each had arrived. He had, it seemed, been keeping track of how late they were.

Not once in thirty years did he mention that.

My sister wanted to throw it all away. “He was a hoarder,” she said. “It’s paper.” I wanted to read every page, which she said was the same illness in a different form. We compromised the way we always have: she filled bags, and when she went out for lunch, I took things out of them again.

At the bottom of the last drawer there was an exercise book. In it, in his careful handwriting, were the names of the patients he had treated in forty years as a country doctor near Manizales, and next to some of them a single word. Better. Moved. Died. Thanked me.

Only a few had that last one.

Neither of us said anything for a while. Then my sister put the exercise book in her own bag — not one of the rubbish bags, her handbag — and went back to work without a word.

We finished on Sunday. The flat was empty, and smaller than I had ever seen it. I have kept three things: a pen, a photograph of the three of us at the coast, and the birthday cards with his notes on them. I am still not sure whether I kept the cards because I miss him or because I want to argue with him.

My sister has kept the exercise book. She has never told me why, and I have never asked.

My brother and I agree on very little about the afternoon of 25 January 1999, which is strange, because we were in the same room.

What we agree on is this. We were at our grandmother’s house in Armenia. It was a Monday, a little after one o’clock, and we were watching television while she made lunch. Then the floor moved in a way floors are not supposed to, and a noise — which nobody who heard it has ever managed to describe — came up from underneath us.

After that, our accounts divide.

In mine, my brother, who was eleven, picked me up — I was six — and carried me out through the kitchen, past our grandmother, into the patio, where we stood under the mango tree while the house behind us lost its front wall. I can feel his arms. I can see the dust on his shoes. I have told this story at his thirtieth birthday, at his wedding and, once, to a psychologist, and in every version he is the reason I am alive.

In his, he did nothing of the kind. He says he couldn’t move. He says he stood in the middle of the living room holding the remote control, that it was I who ran, alone, and our grandmother who went back for him. He says he never told me because I seemed to need the other version, and because, by the time he realised what I believed, correcting it felt like taking something from me.

He told me all this last year, at our grandmother’s funeral, which was perhaps not the best place for it, though I am not sure there is a better one.

I did what anyone would do: I looked for evidence. Our grandmother can no longer be asked. Our mother was at work in Pereira. The neighbours have moved, or died, or remember that afternoon only as the moment their own lives split in two. There is one photograph, taken that evening by someone we never knew: the three of us under the mango tree, grey with dust. In it, my brother is holding my hand. Nothing more. It proves nothing in either direction, which is, I have come to think, what most photographs do.

What unsettles me is not that one of us is wrong. Memory is wrong all the time; I have read that a story repeated often enough becomes a memory in its own right. What unsettles me is that I cannot tell, from the inside, which kind mine is. It feels exactly like his arms.

Only recently have I begun to consider that we may both be telling the truth, just not about that afternoon. Mine may be a record of everything he has done since — and he has, in fact, carried me out of a number of collapsing things. His may be a record of how he has felt about himself ever since.

We have agreed not to settle it. When people ask now, we tell both versions, one after the other, and let them choose. Most people choose mine. My brother says that is the correct answer, and that whether it is true has never really been the point.