How do you keep a friendship intact, when Alzheimer's has stolen the common ground of language, memory, and experience, that unites you?
In brief, sharply drawn moments, Sylvia Molloy´s Dislocations records the gradual loss of a beloved friend, M.L., a disappearance in ways expected (forgotten names, forgotten moments) and painfully surprising (the reversion to a formal, proper Spanish from their previous shared vernacular). There are occasions of wonder, too-M.L. can no longer find the words to say she is dizzy, but can translate that message from Spanish to English, when it's passed along by a friend.
This loss holds Molloy´s sense of herself too-the person she is in relation to M.L. fades as her friend´s memory does. But the writer remains: 'I´m not writing to patch up holes and make people (or myself) think that there´s nothing to see here, but rather to bear witness to unintelligibilities and breaches and silences. That is my continuity, that of the scribe.'