La Zona Fantasma: Ghosts and Ancient History

As I write this I suddenly realize that All Souls’ Day, November 1, might have been a more timely date for the publication of this article, but alas, that is one of the (very few) inconveniences of not being a religious man. Life is life, however, and certain truths do not always dawn on us in a timely fashion; they come when they come. And in the end, there is so much more to be pondered in November, the month that Herman Melville always associated with melancholy, as he so succinctly expressed it at the beginning of Moby-Dick, through the voice of Ishmael, his narrator who said that “whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul… I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can,” since the sea was his “substitute for pistol and ball.”

In my case, a few days ago I decided it was high time I clean up my old address book, with its dog-eared oilcloth cover and its haphazard, chaotic content—last names starting with “C” that had long since overflowed into the “E” section because the “C” and “D” pages were entirely filled up with other names, just like “M,” “R,” and so many other sections. As I contemplated this tedious task I realized that it had been twenty-five or perhaps even thirty years since I had last updated my address book, not ten or twelve as I had first thought. Or perhaps the last time around I had simply decided what I knew I would inevitably decide this time as well: not to eliminate a single name, not even those of the dead people whose telephone numbers and addresses were no longer of any use to me. This is entirely possible. It is also possible that ten or twelve years ago, I may have felt it disloyal or unfair to erase those names that had once been a part of my life, albeit in the briefest or most tangential way.

In my address book the most arbitrary of entries are the names and numbers of several people who live abroad, people I met perhaps once in my life, if at all— the kind of names and numbers that, when you are very young and embarking on a trip somewhere, parents and friends pass on to you in case something terrible or mildly unpleasant happens to you, and you don’t know who to call. I have no idea who any of these people are, though their names remain on the tattered graph-paper pages of my book. Roberto Oltra. Beatrice Brooks, whose address somewhere in San Mateo, California, is a place I have certainly never visited in my...