Ignatius (english version)

 

“Proper names are like clouds; they change shape and color according to the memories and dreams we attach to them.”

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way 

 

 

 

 – You know… Ignacio, may I call you by your first name?

It was a strange question. After all, we had been meeting for months now, over a year, perhaps two, and had long since become friends.

– Ignatius, my friend, I replied, slightly unsettled as I always am when someone alters my name. Ignatius del Amaro. That’s how I’ve always been called.

For some time, I had found myself wondering what it was that Lucian wrote whenever, as friends do, we would talk about this and that. It seemed almost a professional habit of his—he was, after all, a psychiatrist. Yet in recent days, I had grown nearly certain that he was not writing at all. The movements of his hand and wrist were far too broad, too sweeping, for ordinary writing. He was drawing.

More than that, I had, without quite knowing why, after a sudden, uncontrollable impulse rising from deep within me, and quite against all propriety, intruded for an instant into his private space. I had caught a brief glimpse of his notebook and recognized the style, yes, unmistakably, the hand, of his drawings. There was a kind of signature in them that reminded me of a picture that had struck me once, long ago, in a gallery abroad. I had bought it and later brought it to him, hoping he might analyze it. The piece was rather large, so we had hung it on his wall, for convenience, to study it more closely.

–You’re right, Ignatius, he said then, without the slightest embarrassment. I do sometimes draw in my notebook.

A curious feeling came over me, a confusion mingled with a flicker of satisfaction that made me blush slightly.

– I suppose, he went on, after urging my patients to try it so often, I thought it might help me as well, to understand certain situations better, nothing more. And I must admit, modestly, that I’ve taken quite a liking to it. I decided not to let myself be guided by imagination—or at least, by what I thought imagination was. I may think I know what I want to draw, a scene, perhaps, that one of my patients has described, but what appears on the page always surpasses me entirely.

 As for the little sketch you… rather forcefully glimpsed—if you found it difficult to grasp what was happening there, so did I. In fact, I’d even say that its meaning lies precisely in that sense of being overtaken. You see, that’s what drives me—or so it seems—to pursue this work, never suspecting that, by one of those strange coincidences that shape and unshape the world, you would one day find yourself face to face with the very drawing you brought to me…

I was stunned. I couldn’t stop myself from asking:
– This image we’ve been discussing… are you its author?

– For my part, he said, with an unusual hint of confusion, I had the feeling I was encountering it, if I may put it that way, for the second time. And when you asked me to analyze it, it didn’t take long for me to realize that, quite surprisingly, it had become utterly foreign to me.