The nameless man’s amnesia

The nameless man’s amnesia is the first clear sign that the figure the narrator has summoned does not possess an ordinary, recoverable past. When she asks who he is, he cannot answer: he does not remember his name, or anything else. The blankness initially appears as a mystery about his identity; after the narrator performs a later spell, it becomes part of her understanding that she has made him herself.

The First Encounter

The amnesia is introduced beside the open Il libro di magia, which lies one step below the narrator. She approaches it with a knife and scans the spell’s page for a key, but can make out only the old-fashioned, blurred title, Desideri del cuore. The setting links the man’s appearance to the book and its magic before she has any explanation for who he is or how much of him is real.

Her first question is direct: she asks who he is. He opens his mouth, closes it, and folds his arms around his chest before saying that he does not know and cannot remember. When she clarifies whether he has forgotten only his name or everything, he shakes his head and answers that he remembers nothing at all. The exchange distinguishes a missing name from a total absence of memory: he offers no fragment of biography, personal history, or identity that the narrator could use to place him.

His physical gestures give the exchange a subdued, vulnerable quality without supplying an explanation. He holds his chest and later responds to a question about wish-granting with a small, melancholy smile. He denies knowing that he can grant wishes, while leaving open the possibility of trying. The scene thus presents him as uncertain about his own capacities as well as his own past; neither his apparent personhood nor his possible magical function comes with an account he can verify.

A Created Past, Not a Recovered One

The narrator’s later understanding changes the meaning of the amnesia. Only after completing the third spell, for intelligence, can she formulate a defense of what she has done. She reasons that the man has no name and no history because she summoned him as a body shaped to her desires. In her account, even his melodious accent comes from the depths of her dreams. His missing memories are therefore not explained by a specific remembered incident or an identified loss; the narrator instead connects them to his origin in her own magical act.

She goes further than saying that the spell has brought a stranger into the room. She concludes that she created him from a mixture of herbs, blood, magic, and desire, and that he is not very real: not quite a person, but an idea given life by the activity of her mind and the words on the page. The amnesia acquires a disturbing double meaning. It is a condition the man experiences and states plainly, but it also fits the narrator’s account of him as a figure without an independent history. The text does not establish that her explanation is an objective diagnosis; it establishes that this is the interpretation she reaches once the intelligence spell lets her articulate it.

Limits and Narrative Significance

The man’s memory loss remains total in the evidence available. The narrator tests its scope by asking whether he has forgotten his name or everything, and he confirms the latter. He does not later retrieve a name or past in the scenes presented here. Nor does the narrator discover a personal history behind the blankness. The important change is in her understanding of the blank: at first it is an unanswered question about the man; later she treats it as evidence of the way she has made him.

That shift also makes the exchange about wishes more than a casual inquiry. The man cannot identify himself as someone who grants wishes, but suggests that they could try. His uncertainty parallels the narrator’s incomplete grasp of the spell and its consequences. The page offers a title, not a usable explanation; the summoned figure offers no memories that could clarify his nature. Instead, the narrator’s later spells furnish the interpretation that the first encounter could not.

The amnesia therefore marks a boundary between apparent human identity and magical construction. The man can speak, gesture, and express sadness, yet cannot supply the personal continuity by which the narrator might recognize him as someone with a past independent of her. Her conclusion that he is an idea rather than quite a person does not erase the scene’s presentation of his vulnerability; it makes that vulnerability ethically unsettled, because his apparent personhood exists alongside her claim to have created him for her desires. The text leaves that tension intact rather than resolving it through a recovered identity.