“I never forgot it; but I found a job at a local newspaper and resumed an active night life. A few months later, a coincidence stirred up the memory of this affair. One night, I slept with a girl who happened to share the same room number as did Su Li-Zhen. This girl was murdered by a client a few days later. I then decided to move into the adjacent room.
“The room number was 2046. I was fired from the newspaper and began to write erotic novels. The room number gave me an idea. I was nostalgic for a woman I had known. I first found her back in her name – Su Li-Zhen. I then found her back in her room number – 2046. This number was both a place and a year. I was trying to get back to 2046. So were the characters of my novel, embarked on a train towards 2046, towards their lost memories.
“Space and time. A girl moved into room 2046. I had an affair with her and used to pay her only symbolically. I said no to her twice. The first time, she asked me to consider her differently from the other girls I was seeing. I was too much absorbed in my journey into the past to accept the shock of reality and commitment, so I said no. She left and came back a few years later. This time it was her who wanted us to be “like in the old times”, so I said no again. The first refusal was out of indifference; the second was out of resignation.
“Neither my novel nor my life had a happy ending. Love can overcome space; love cannot overcome time.
« A few days ago I met a retired American police officer, who had found himself in a comparable situation. A friend had hired him to look after his wife, who seemed to behave as though she were possessed. They fell in love and the woman threw herself out from a tower shortly after. The retired American police officer soon discovered that the woman he had fallen in love with was in reality a girl impersonating his friend’s wife. She did love him, but he only loved the woman whose role the girl had been hired to play.
« His story seems to me even more pathetic than mine. I once loved a woman and searched for her in every other woman; but it was too late. I should have moved on. The retired American police officer once loved a woman who did not even exist and tried to shape a girl to bring “back” to life this non-existing woman. I had memories. The only memories this man could cling on to were a set-up in which he had been but a puppet.
« I have always regarded as a lack of perspective the fact of considering Proust’s madeleine as a simple cookie; I personally think he was after a Madeleine, a woman whom he had met but loved too late, whom he had made up and was looking for in every other woman. »
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