Dislocations

By Sylvia Molloy

How do you keep a friendship intact, when Alzheimer's has stolen the common ground of language, memory, and experience, that unites you?

In brief, sharply drawn moments, Sylvia Molloy’s Dislocations records the gradual loss of a beloved friend, M.L., a disappearance in ways expected (forgotten names, forgotten moments) and painfully surprising (the reversion to a formal, proper Spanish from their previous shared vernacular). There are occasions of wonder, too—M.L. can no longer find the words to say she is dizzy, but can translate that message from Spanish to English, when it's passed along by a friend. 

This loss holds Molloy’s sense of herself too—the person she is in relation to M.L. fades as her friend’s memory does. But the writer remains: 'I’m not writing to patch up holes and make people (or myself) think that there’s nothing to see here, but rather to bear witness to unintelligibilities and breaches and silences. That is my continuity, that of the scribe.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charco Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781913867362

Sylvia Molloy

Silvia Molloy (Buenos Aires, 1938) es una novelista, ensayista y destacada crítica literaria de literatura latinoamericana. Es profesora emérita de la cátedra de Humanidades Albert Schweitzer en la Universidad de Nueva York, donde enseñó Literaturas Comparadas y Literatura Latinoamericana. En 2007, también en la Universidad de Nueva York, creó la Maestría en Escritura Creativa en español, la primera en los Estados Unidos. Escribió dos novelas: En común olvido (2002)__ y En breve cárcel (1981); varios volúmenes de relatos cortos, entre ellos Varia imaginación (2003), Citas de lectura (2017), Vivir entre lenguas (2016) y este libro, Desarticulaciones (2010). Entre sus ensayos y publicaciones críticas se encuentran At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America (1991) e Hispanisms and Homosexualities (1998). Ha sido becaria de la Fundación Guggenheim, del National Endowment for the Humanities, del Social Science Research Council, y de la fundación Civitella Ranieri. Actualmente vive en Nueva York. Sylvia Molloy (Buenos Aires, 1938-2022) was a novelist, essayist, and a leading literary critic of Latin American literature. She was Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities Emerita at New York University, where she taught Latin American and comparative literatures. In 2007, at New York University, she created the MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish, which was the first programme of its kind in the United States. She was the author of two novels: En común olvido (Shared Oblivion, 2002) and En breve cárcel (Soon Jail, 1981), and had written several books of short prose including: Varia imaginación (Varied Imagination, 2003), Citas de lectura (Reading Dates, 2017), Vivir entre lenguas (Living Between Languages, 2016) and Dislocations , originally entitled Desarticulaciones (2010). Her critical work includes At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America (1991), and Hispanisms and Homosexualities (1998). She was a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Dislocations is her first book of fiction to appear in English.

Book preview

DISCONNECTION

We went to see her one afternoon and, while I was busy making sure all was in order, E. wound up talking with her in her bedroom, where she spends a good part of the day, looking out the window at the meagre sliver of sky left between two buildings. She told me something that I’m not sure she knew she was telling me, E. said when we went home, she told me that as a child she went with an aunt to visit an older relative who was in the hospital and gravely ill, connected to a machine, and that at some point when they were alone with this ailing relative her aunt had indicated with her head, nodding, kind of – she demonstrated it for me, E. says, reproducing it in turn, this indication – and M.L. had crouched down and unplugged the machine that had been breathing on behalf of the patient. And that after that, they’d left.

E. tells me she doesn’t know what triggered this story, nor whether she realised she was telling it, but it was as though she needed to tell me, she says, or tell someone, maybe she’s never told anyone before. Or maybe she made it up, I think, wondering whether machines kept anyone alive in the 1920s, unless perhaps it happened later, and she simply tells the story as though it happened when she was a child, to diminish her responsibility for killing someone. We’ll never know, of course, since she’s already forgotten the story. Not that it matters.

I read over what I’ve written, and something occurs to me, something obvious, perhaps: Was she asking for something, from us?

RHETORIC

As her memory goes, I realise she resorts to a politeness that is ever more refined, as though delicate manners might compensate for any absence of mind. It’s curious to think that sentences so well-articulated – because she hasn’t forgotten the structure of language: you might even say she thinks about it more now that night is falling inside her head – will not lodge in any recollection. When I got there this morning she was sleeping deeply, after yesterday’s frenetic dispute. She opened her eyes, and I said hello, and she said, ‘How nice to wake up and see friendly faces.’ I don’t believe she recognised us – individually, I mean. Two days ago, before her crisis, I asked how she was feeling, and she said, ‘I’m good because you’re here.’ Today she told the nurse, ‘You’re looking very pretty, your face looks great today,’ although it was the first time she had ever seen her, and although the nurse did not speak Spanish. I translated, and the nurse took an immediate liking to her. She had also been immediately liked, I remember, by a Black Dominican waitress who served us