He aquí que la lectora surge de un mundo completamente diferente al del autor y termina por comprender perfectamente la exasperación de quien narra el hecho. El cuento en general es desgarrador, poético, hermoso y mejor haría en comentarlo, sin embargo, me limito a transcribir tan sólo este extracto que se presenta en el inicio: me vi reflejada en la ironía.
I was annoyed with myself, as you always are when a failure of some kind
makes you aware of the inadequacy and imperfection of your intellectual powers.
But I did not give up hope of retrieving the memory after all. I knew I just
had to lay hands on some tiny hook, for my memory is an odd one, good and bad
at the same time: on the one hand defiant and stubborn, on the other incredibly
faithful. It often swallows up what is most important, both incidents and
faces, what I read and what I experience, engulfing it entirely in darkness,
and will not give anything back from that underworld merely at the call of my
will, only under duress. However, I need just some small thing to jog my
memory, a picture postcard, a few lines of handwriting on an envelope, a sheet
of newsprint faded by smoke, and at once what is forgotten will rise again like
a fish on the line from the darkly streaming surface, as large as life. Then I
remember every detail about someone, his mouth and the gap between the teeth in
it on the left that shows when he laughs, the brittle sound of that laughter,
how it makes his moustache twitch, and how another and new face emerges from
that laughter –I see all that at once in detail, and I remember over the years
every word the man ever said to me. But to see and feel the past so graphically
I need some stimulus provided by my senses, a tiny aid from the world of
reality. So I closed my eyes to allow me to think harder, to visualize and
seize that mysterious hook at the end of the fishing line. Nothing, however,
still nothing! All lost and forgotten. And I felt so embittered by the stubborn
apparatus of memory between my temples that I could have struck myself on the
forehead with my fists, as you might shake a malfunctioning automatic device
that is unjustly refusing to do as you ask. No, I couldn’t sit calmly here any
longer, I was so upset by the failure of my memory, and in my annoyance I stood
up to get some air.
Stefan Zweig, “Mendel the Bibliophile”, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig (Pushkin Press), pp. 592,
593.