Moods “The river is my memory” TEXT Milton Hatoum I was eight when my mother took me to the banks of the Río Negro, the largest tributary of the Amazon. I peered at the horizon and saw only the line of the forest, like a mirage almost. Puzzled, I asked where the other side was. Can a river have only one bank? My mother laughed and explained: “In Manaus, there is a vast distance between the two banks of the Río Negro: to a child, it must seem even greater.” She added words I would never forget: “The river is like life: they are both crossings.” Years later, I came across this gem from Heraclitus: “You cannot step into the same river twice.” Aphorisms like that teach you things about life. The two shores symbolize stability and instability, the tension between opposing forces. The river is a metaphor for our existence: life is like the perpetual movement of the water. Within the constant flow contained between its banks, tranquil backwaters convey serenity while sweeping currents represent turmoil. Rest and unrest. Permanence and flux. I have never forgotten that vision of the Río Negro. That expanse of dark, dense water worried and fascinated me. My fear disappeared with childhood, but my fascination for the river, for all rivers, has grown ever since. Seeing the Seine, the Thames, the Danube, the Rio da Prata, the Euphrates and the São Francisco for the first time was a moving experience for me. As was the time I sailed on that distant and grand cousin of the Amazon, the Mississippi, a character in a wonderful novel by William Faulkner. When I spot a sinuous watercourse from a plane, way down below, like a metallic line snaking across an unfamiliar map, I think of that anonymous river as a thing of mystery, an enigma, which poetry and the imagination are free to explore. Every river, imaginary or real, flows toward the eternal river of our childhood. Their waters run between the shores of life, which narrow over the years. But the river is cosmic, out of time: it dies and is reborn at every moment, dwindles and fertilizes, passes through the heavens, the earth and the underworlds. The river is my memory. 34