The Fidelity of Non-Memory

I don’t remember my father’s face.

It happened once before, some years before he was finally erased (nah, he wasn’t, really). I recall the angsty teenager nights when I would rise from my sheet-waves and bring a box of tattered photographs to eat in bed. I used to line them up (about a dozen copies of him) to let my eyes trail his every nose, walk upon each sturdy eyebrow bridge and stand before the constant eyes until I gained the transient peace that let sleep back in. But by morning it was clear that the midnight morsels had not made their way into memory. His face was indigestible.  

I had left Cuba immediately after his hesitant signature; with my mother and our second family. The little girl, barely ten or was it eleven or twelve, the little toes, the frail torso, the large new teeth, the chirping questions; all relinquished on an official form. We were both certain— this was the early nineties and the trickle of immigration did not include doctors— that he wouldn’t see that girl ever again.

For years, the curled photographs and my own cognitive technology made a reproduction of my father that had all the detail of a cardboard cutout. This tormented me and made me question my love. How could anybody forget these things? But how could memory hold the shape of his face, the shape of my love?  

While it lasted, he loved being a father. And he was very, very good. This needs qualification: he was imperfect and so was his parenting but neither matters, and that’s the thing about being great at the right times. 

I can’t summon distinct images of his presence but I know how it felt to be with him. It felt the way that first summer you had ice cream tasted. It felt like sticky feet on a just-cleaned floor. Like gregarious wind whistling through a cracked window and brushing your hair. It’s a kind of change in temperature, a stepping into a space that contrasts where you were just a moment before, right there.

These are reliable non-memories, I assure you. And aren’t most memories produced in our factories of past, anyway? And don’t their conveyor belts cram months into a day and amalgamate unlabeled elements into cohesion and use bits of photographs for the labeling? This is how I’ve made lasting peace with my faded memories of dad. They would have been tarnished by processing anyway. 

Sensing their inaccuracy, perhaps their futility, I have let them go in favor of non-memories. I’ve kept (and very much remember) the texture of my past, the way it felt. Reality, or the why it felt that way, is free to line the bottom of a birdcage. 

Memory was unable to give me a single unprocessed image, but it did smuggle a moment with my father. Our last time together in Cuba, a day before my extraction, we sat outside my shuffling apartment, on the marble staircase that appeared to shatter the ceiling above my front door. On the second step, we sat, inside the indentation dug by the brushing of tired shoes.  We sat there in silence. Not in the solemn silence of things about to happen, or in the graveyard silence of things happened and exhausted, but in the cosmic silence that holds the world. And there were his hands. With all their protrusions, his healing hands on my head; and some words that traveled between us slowly and of course I can’t recall, and my footprints of steam on the chilled marble floor. That moment. That National Heritage Moment sneaked past customs and would be saved in a fire.

And then there are my little artifacts. Inside a box of Cohiba Esplendidos, the many letters he wrote in the years it took him to maneuver his way to an international physicians’ symposium, and eventually, back to me. (Yes, he got to see me again, but not as the little girl.) 

One among them is indispensable: August 1993. It starts like this:

Querida hijita. Ya ves, estoy nuevamente ante tus ojos. Estas palabras fueron hechas por mi, y vistas por mi, y salieron de mi corazón. Y eso es como si estuviera parado frente a ti.

I used to revisit his letters on occasion. The nature of reality is so negotiable that I have been a different person at each reading and so the content of the letters, which themselves are tangible as furniture, has transmuted and stretched past the liminal space that memories fill clumsily. Past that space between here and gone.

I no longer read the letters, but this fragment from August 1993, I have memorized.