Cogito ergo sum. I close my eyes and go back sixteen years. Mother Marie-Therese writes it on the blackboard. Her arm is bare to the elbow: the sleeve of her habit is rolled up to avoid chalk dust. ‘I think therefore I am,’ she says. Where the Latin was just something to translate, the English jumps and my hand is up (unlike me, that) and when Mother sees me I ask wouldn’t it have been more correct for him to have said, Memento ergo sum?
‘Memento?’ With that winter frost smile of hers.
‘Yes, Mother. I remember, therefore I am.’
She sends her smile searching among the other girls in the class. But no one has a comment. As for Reverend Mother’s smile, it could mean, ‘A silly girl has misunderstood Descartes,’ or ‘See how we have engaged the attention of Mary Dunne.’
‘And why would you say that?’ she asks me.
‘Because’ (I am fifteen) ‘we are what we remember.’
…
I am, always have been, a fool who rushes in, a blurter-out of awkward truths, a speaker-up at parties who, the morning-after, filled with guilt, vows that never again, no matter what, but who, faced at the very next encounter with someone whose opinions strike me as unfair, rushes in again blurting out, breaking all vows.
Quotation: I Am Mary Dunne by Brian Moore. Penguin 2012 (1968)
