The Memory Palace by Mira Bartók Read Free Book Online Page A

sister got ready for bed while I pulled out one of the photo albums we’d brought back from U-Haul, our baby book. “You coming?” sheasked. She switched off her light and turned her masked face to the wall. “Soon,” I said. “Good night.”
    I held the photo album up to my nose. It smelled like my mother used to smell—cigarettes and Tabu, her favorite perfume—our sense of smell, the strongest memory trigger of all, the only sense that travels directly to the limbic system in our brain. I thought of my mother’s small white face in the hospital bed, her delicate, cold hands. Then another picture of her rose up in my mind, her hands hovering over mine at the piano—a younger Norma; my mother in the bloom of life, a dark-eyed beauty in a red silk dress, her face unreadable, listening to something no one else can hear.
    I took out my mother’s last diary. Her final entry was a random list:
Hyssop: plant used in bunches for purification rites by ancient Hebrews. Po River: Runs through Italy into Adriatic. Avert: to turn away or aside. Note: My white cane is missing. I dropped my sunglasses on the bus
. Then farther down, these words:
Chica—drink of Peru. Hecuba—wife of Priam. Baroque Palace—? What palace?
What did her last entry mean? A few pages back were little sketches she had made: a leaf, her hand, a shoe.
    I thought of random pictures from my past—paintings from the Cleveland Museum of Art, objects from our grandparents’ house, things I liked to draw. What pictures did I remember? What could I create to contain them all? Was the answer in my mother’s very last page? Hadn’t she herself built a memory cabinet at U-Haul to contain her beautiful, tragic, and transient life? Was there something I could build too?
    A memory palace
. A man named Matteo Ricci built one once. I read about him the year after my accident. Ricci, a Jesuit priest who possessed great mnemonic powers, traveled to China in 1596 and taught scholars how to build an imaginary palace to keep their memories safe. He told them that the size of the palace would depend on how much they wanted to remember. To everything they wanted to recall, they were to affix an image; to every image, a position inside a room in their mind. His idea went back to the Greek poet Simonides, who, one day while visiting friends at a palace, stepped outside for a minute to see who was at the door. As soon as he went outside, the great hall came crashing down. All the people inside were crushed to death and no one could recognize them. Simonides, however, remembered whereeveryone stood at the party, and recalled them one by one so their bodies could be identified.
    My mind was full of so many pictures—with each one I could build a different room, each room could lead me to a memory, each memory to another. Since I knew what Ricci didn’t at the time, that memories cannot be fixed, my palace would always be changing. But the foundation would stay the same.
    Ricci told the scholars that the place to put each picture must be spacious, the light even and clear, but not too bright. He said that the first image they should choose for their memory palace must arouse strong emotions. It was the entranceway, after all. I closed my eyes and opened a door. I turned to the right and there, in a reception room with high arched ceilings, I placed two pictures on opposite walls. The light was clear in the room, the space free of clutter.

2

    They turned their snaky heads and when they saw Perseus, they roared with fury. Flapping their great wings, they set off in pursuit. But they could not outstrip the winged sandals.
    “The Gorgon’s Head,”
The Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends

Medusa
    The first picture in my memory palace is from the baby book my sister and I found in our mother’s storage room. It’s a close-up of her, taken shortly after she gave birth to me in 1959. Her face is soft and demure in the cropped photograph, and a little startled. If you could