I met him in a night without any tinge of specialness in it, at a late session of a movie theater downtown. The movie playing was Accattone, and this session was unusually empty – just me, him, and a man who seemed to be drunk and was just looking for a comfortable place to spend the night. After the end of the session, he found his way to the sidewalk to smoke a cigarette. Since we were the only two people who actually watched the movie, and because I was feeling lonelier than usual that particular night, I felt compelled to start a conversation. To my surprise, he was quite amicable and had a very serene and reassuring demeanor – I quickly felt at ease next to him. His complexion was pale and somewhat silky and he smiled with just the corners of his mouth as if delivering it with minimal effort and smiling was a natural process to him.
He told me he was an antique dealer. This aroused my interest since I had a menial job as a clerk for a logistics business, which lacked any sense of beauty or wonder. He gave me his card with his name on it. It was clean, plain, and straightforward – Ruben, art and antique dealer. As the conversation went on and we started to feel more comfortable with each other, he invited me to visit his antique shop the next day, which I gladly accepted. We parted ways and fixed a time for our soon to occur meeting.
The antique shop didn’t exactly fit my expectations. It was crowded, somber, and dusty. It didn’t really feel like a business but more like a deposit, on which nothing seemed especially valuable or noteworthy. It was like things simply gathered there after they lost their utility. I couldn’t help thinking how he managed to collect so much junk. I was impressed with how the place was in direct contradiction with his soft, sweetly pastel manner.
He toured me around the place for a while but I couldn’t bring myself to get interested. I was quickly bored by it all – except for one piece that captured my attention. It was a stuffed wild boar head that looked extremely fresh. The fur was lavish and even the eyes, although clearly made of glass, had a vividness to it. I asked him about that piece and he said it went far back to the 1700s, which I found hard to believe. In a way, it almost felt like that head was still alive and its lost body was searching for it ever since to complete its process of being born, living, and, finally, dying.
I think Ruben realized I was spacing out and diverged the subject from his pieces. He mentioned that the store had a basement on which he kept his most special item, which was not publicly shown. He said that only a few people had seen it and he was very selective to whom he would show it. I guess, in a way, he was trying to fish my attention, building up suspense and expecting me to ask to see the damn thing. But the whole experience so far had been so tedious that I couldn’t bring myself to ask. I nodded agreeably and, shortly after, found myself an excuse to leave. I believe he was disappointed.
Of course, doing so proved to be a mistake. We didn’t speak for the next couple of weeks, but I couldn’t bring the experience out of my head. It was like Ruben and his shop had piercingly penetrated my mind. He, the shop, and the boar were frequent invaders of my thoughts – during work, at the bathroom, while eating – no matter what I was doing, they somehow appeared, uninvited. In the second week after my visit, I started to have dreams about them. Some of them were very dark and anxiety-inducing. There was one dream in which I simply sat in front of the boar head and nothing else. But, sitting there, I was completely paralyzed, so much so I couldn’t even breathe – not even blood moved through my veins. I was trapped inside my own body, frozen within it. It was like I was permanently stuck in those glassy, lively boar eyes. Another one consisted of getting down to the basement Ruben spoke about. The stairs seemed to extend themselves down to infinite, I couldn’t see where they ended. I kept going down and down but didn’t seem to find the end. And when I looked up the entrance door had also disappeared on the horizon. Ruben, who was next to me, simply stared at me with his palish, ghostly half-smile.
Although I wasn’t superstitious, the idea of seeing the special item Ruben mentioned stuck to me. Somehow, this seemed to be the only way to get him and his store out of my thoughts. I called him one day, after one of these dreadful dreams, to which he sounded pleasantly surprised. I told him I was thinking about seeing the special item in the basement he mentioned then and jokingly asked if I was qualified enough. He seemed happy with my request and, upon some further thought, he said I appeared to have enough qualifications as we both shared a taste for Pier Paolo Pasolini. To be honest, I had never heard of Pasolini prior to watching Accattone, and having a shared interest in a movie director sounded like a poor and lax requirement for what he conveyed as such a special event. Nonetheless, I played by his book and we set a date for my new visit.
On the settled date, before crossing the door to enter the basement, Ruben was lecturing me about the preciousness of the piece and other nonsense like that. I must confess I didn’t get most of what he said. My mind was fervently attached to the expectation of seeing the object, and I was submerged into an almost feverish state. I didn’t care about any ceremonials – I just wanted to cross that door.
After what felt like an eternity, Ruben opened the door and accompanied me through the stairs. Much like in the dream of the endless stairs, I couldn’t see where it ended, but this time because the basement was very dark. As we got down, I reached out for Ruben’s arm for support and asked him to turn on the lights so we could see. He said he couldn’t do that for reasons I would soon understand and asked me to keep going down with him. What happened next is something I could never conceive even in my wildest imagination.
Suddenly, all sense of space, time, or feeling sublimated and I plunged into what can only be described as pitch black. Amidst that total blackness, a small blur of light started to penetrate, slowly taking form. As I started to make sense of it, it became more and more clear – Franco Citti was showing on a screen and I somehow got transported back to the movie theater that night, watching Accattone. I noticed I couldn’t move my eyes or body around, but the feeling of being there was remarkably present and real, as real as it gets. My body felt heavy and cumbersome, and the overall sense was one of drowsiness. However, even though I couldn’t really move my eyes at will, I identified something shocking amidst the spectacle in front of me. In the front rows just a few meters apart, I recognized two familiar heads – Ruben in one seat and my own in another, both watching the movie intently.
I can’t really trace back how everything ended – it felt like getting up from fainting all of a sudden. I found myself sitting in one of the dusty chairs of the shop with Ruben sitting across from me, smiling as usual. He seemed pleased with my disorientation but refrained from speaking anything, allowing me to speak first.
I don’t want to get into further details on how the conversation went, mainly because I don’t really remember these. We talked for a long time, as I tried to process my disbelief. I got a faint idea of the concept, which he explained to me in detail, but I was just too dumbfounded to recall the specifics.
The chamber took us to a memory, any memory, and allowed us to relive it. However, you weren’t able to live that memory as yourself. You could only witness it, embodying the perspective of anyone who was there at the time. You would watch yourself from a distance, wearing the skin of a person in your past. We were taken back to Accattone because, since we went down the stairs together, we had to relive a memory we both shared. The person we embodied was the drunk man, half awake, half asleep, that attended the session with us.
As I expected, Ruben, the store, and the boar ceased to invade my thoughts after I visited the basement. However, what was first an invasion, turned itself into an invitation – I felt more and more compelled to think about what I have experienced there, intentionally and excitingly. This time, instead of having crazy dreams, I found myself unable to sleep at night, trying to make sense of what happened and searching avidly in my mind for a memory I would like to relive.
Every day after it, I wanted to call Ruben and ask to try again, but I refrained myself, scared and overwhelmed by the situation. Just like in a flirting game, I was afraid of coming across as too eager. But it didn’t take long until I built up the courage to call him.
This time, he picked up the phone as if expecting it was me. There was a sense of satisfaction in his voice, but without any hinge of arrogance. Upon hearing my request, he explained the procedure. I should pick a memory that I have a confident degree of clarity and certainty about. Naturally, it shouldn’t be something I experienced alone – there should be people there. Before going in, I must visualize in detail the person which I intend to embody. He said that I shouldn’t over worry about it as, once you go down the stairs, things have a way to work themselves out. I asked him if there were any risks involved. Of what? He asked, and hung up the phone.
We scheduled my visit for the upcoming week. I can’t really put into words how anxious I was about it all. I could barely do anything, spending all of my time ruminating in my memories and trying to find something worthwhile to be relived. I must say the process was harder than I expected it to be. I wavered around different criteria and degrees of confidence on what I should resurface. After much thought, I decided to go as far back as I could, to one of my earliest and most vivid memories.
It happened when I was around six years old. As a playful child, I liked to play games with my mom and I recall one day intending to play hide and seek with her. However, there was a catch – she shouldn’t know it was all a game. I recall climbing one wardrobe we had in my room and closing myself inside it. There was a small crack between the doors that allowed for a thread of light to come in, as well as the sounds from outside. I remember I was amused and excited with the idea of her looking and not being able to find me. Of course, as a child, I saw all of that as just fun and games and couldn’t conceive the fact she would actually be worried sick that her son had disappeared. As time went by and my mother took note of my absence, I remember listening to her calling my name repeatedly and louder, and discussing my potential disappearance with my dad. It started to dawn on me that this was a serious thing and that she was on the verge of becoming desperate, but the situation only got me scared of getting into trouble, and I remained frozen inside of the wardrobe. After I don’t know how many hours, it occurred to her to look inside the wardrobe where she finally found me and held me in a loving and crying embrace. I felt a mix of relief, joy, and fear, all at once and said “Gotcha!”
We met in the early evening, in what promised to be a cloudless night. Ruben once again had this calming demeanor to him, which was reassuring and appeased a bit of my anxiety. He told me I didn’t need to share the memory I was going to relive with him, that I could keep it in my mind and confidently go down the stairs. He seemed very sure of the whole process and I had no choice other than to trust him.
He opened the door of the basement and showed me the way as if he was a doorman. I looked at him and, to my surprise, he was not smiling this time. His face had a serious and solemn expression to it as if this was a sort of religious ritual and he was the one preparing the liturgy. He didn’t even look me in the eye. I felt a pinch of regret but it was too late to give up and I started to go down the stairs. At each step, which I took slowly and mindfully, I allowed my hand to slide gently through the handrail, only to grip it tightly when I reached total darkness.
The first thing that arose was a fragrant smell of stew, which my mom used to cook frequently when I was a kid. The textures and flavors all came back to me as if in a delirium – the whole experience felt too real to be true.
Slowly, as if it happened before in the movie theater, a blur of an image started to come through and I could see my mom’s delicate but firm hands handling the kitchen utensils needed to prepare the stew. I didn’t have any control of the situation but could live it as if it was myself, feeling even the metallic coldness of each one of the utensils in my hands as she stored them back into the drawer. As her eyes – which I was now borrowing – traversed through the kitchen, I could appreciate in a rich level of detail all of the forgotten memorabilia that inhabits one’s family house. The small pieces of home decor, calendars, fridge magnets, clocks, kitsch ceramics, everything so fresh and alive it really felt like I traveled back in time.
Then, I could feel her vocal cords trembling as she yelled for my name. Hearing her voice as if it was my own had an electrifying effect on me, and I realized how much our voices change as we age and how I almost couldn’t recall my mother’s youthful, vibrant voice in her mid-twenties. I didn’t know to what point I traveled back, but I think I was close to being discovered – my father had already left the house searching for me around the block, a detail that I had forgotten about completely and was reminded of on the spot.
Although I could feel her intense heartbeats, I didn’t share any of the fear – the body was hers but the feelings were my own. I think I was closer in feeling to what my six-year-old me was experiencing at that exact moment – a mix of excitement, guilt, and throbbing anxiety. My mom, then, walked decidedly into my room, going up the stairs until she found the door. Her movements were hurried and agitated, so when I entered back into my childhood room, I was afraid I would not be able to appreciate it entirely. Nothing could be further from the truth; getting even the slightest glimpse of that special place was deeply moving. The walls were decorated with stickers of my favorite cartoons and I could briefly spot the two large boxes on which I kept my toys, mostly action figures, and plastic dinosaurs. Above the bed, covered in a colorful linen sheet, shelves with family portraits and a Playmobil farm set were aligned with care and tenderness. On the floor, I noticed a few of my favorite toys scattered, including a worn-out brontosaur I used to play with in the backyard, pretending to be a caveman. I recalled that I had the hide and seek idea precisely there, playing around with my toys on my room’s floor. And, of course, there was the wardrobe, on which I knew I was hidden but my mother didn’t just yet. It was on the verge of happening and I could feel the expectation building up inside of me. I was eager and ready for the powerful climax of embracing myself as a child in an act of relief, solace, and tenderness.
My mom, then, turned her back to the wardrobe, which emitted a clattering sound. That was it then – I had betrayed myself by moving while she was in the room and that was how she figured out I was there. She walked intently in the direction of the wardrobe and held tightly into the handle as she opened the door to my utter satisfaction.
Until, of course, I saw with her own eyes what she was also seeing at that moment. There was nothing inside the wardrobe. It was empty, except for a few pieces of clothing and two pairs of shoes. The exact corner on which I expected to see myself had nothing in it besides the plain wooden boards that comprised the wardrobe’s walls. From that point on, everything upon these eyes I was borrowing started to grow more and more distant. I was going further and further back and my field of vision got smaller and smaller until it was nothing more than a dot in the blackness. As the dot started to get thinner and thinner, I felt an urgency and tried to reach out to it, as if I didn’t want to let go but I had no limbs or even a body that would allow me to do that. My mother’s voice as she yelled my name was growing fainter like she was slowly falling into a deep abyss. All of my senses, feelings, and thoughts started to descend further into the darkness and I lost all touch with what it means to be anything. The last thought that crossed my mind before everything vanished was that, somehow, at that moment, I was both unborn and unlived, and there was nothing I could ever do to get myself out of my hiding place.