Recuerdo

Through the Staten Island Ferry terminal, at the southern tip of Manhattan, nearly seventy thousand people pass each day. Most of them are workers who disembark in a hurry, then slip away down Whitehall St., Water St., State St., or dart like hares in hunting season into some subway burrow. In the afternoon, the scene is reversed: the hares emerge visibly exhausted, ready to board the ferry and return to their long-postponed Staten Island.

In summer, everything changes. It’s the tourists who take over the terminal, forming long, cheerful lines in front of boarding gate one or three. The hares watch indifferently and from a certain distance that, the other, and the ferry’s constant to-and-fro, which runs twenty-four hours a day. Its colossal orange structures appear and disappear from the dock, loading and unloading the bodies that feed the city’s unstoppable machinery.

Unaware of all this, amid the coming and going of those working-class souls, of all that timeless, fleeting, and perishable life, hides a verse by the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay: “..all night on the ferry..” (From “Recuerdo” Edna St. Vincent Millay 1920)

I suppose no one has noticed it. And I don’t blame them. It hangs about four meters high in the hallway overlooking the Hudson. It’s there, as if by accident. Like all those things improvised in this city that miraculously work. It doesn’t look like a tribute. And how could it be, if it’s in a place lost amid the rush and bustle of the passengers?

That morning, I took a quick walk through the terminal looking for the other part of the poem. I didn’t insist too much. Duty —or routine—, pushed me toward some burrow, on my way to work in Washington Heights. During the ride on the A train, I took advantage of the brief bursts of Wi-Fi to look up information about the poem. And I loved it. Recuerdo tells of two lovers who spend an entire night going back and forth on the Staten Island Ferry. Sometimes in the cold, other times surrounded by “barn smells”; and yet, for Edna, they were unforgettable moments. That’s where its beauty lies: in the simplicity of the everyday, in how the company of a loved one can turn any experience into poetry.

Then came the inevitable question: Why is it titled Recuerdo, in Spanish? I kept looking for more information about Edna St. Vincent Millay and confirmed it wasn’t a mistake: it was published in 1919 in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, with that title, Recuerdo. Curious, isn’t it? I searched on Wikipedia and discovered that Edna had a Latin American lover.

That same Saturday I went back to the terminal. I needed to find out if there were more verses floating around. I sat in the middle of the large waiting room with a cup of coffee and got distracted by a dark-skinned young man pacing back and forth, caught up in some kind of monologue. Dressed in rags and half-naked, his presence didn’t seem to bother anyone: New Yorkers, hardened by urban misery, didn’t even flinch. The tourists, on the other hand, looked at him with surprise, as if searching for an explanation that would never come. A woman dressed in a pink ballet leotard and ridiculous fairy godmother wings was singing Don’t Dream It’s Over by Crowded House, while glancing sideways at her nearly empty tip box. The 80s song reminded me of my home in the port city of Talcahuano. Those afternoons around the table with my parents, my sisters, and my grandmother. The jokes, the looks of affection exchanged in the middle of our conversations. The aroma of freshly brewed lemon verbena and cinnamon tea, the warmth of just-baked hallulla bread, the taste of the quince jam my father would make on autumn afternoons. I remembered my daughter, the first time we sat in this terminal, almost five years ago now, when I laughed listening to her say “Estuatua de la Libertad.” The song ended. The smells and the love faded away. I started looking around, as if snapping out of my memories and searching for more lines from that poem. But the doors opened, and the passengers began to board. I boarded with them, heading to Staten Island, where Aurélie is always waiting for me.

I’ve thought a lot about the poem Recuerdo and the transformative power of companionship. Those moments with my family and friends in Chile. Walking with my daughter through the noisy streets of New York, or stepping into intricate shops full of curiosities. Always alert, always amazed by a city that never tires of offering us a piece of itself

Walking is remembering.

I learned this from my father, with whom I used to roam the hills of Talcahuano every weekend. Back then, I remember him telling me about his own father. The warmth in his voice as he spoke of his life in the coastal mountains and the pain he felt from his early death, when he was only ten years old. Now, this habit of walking and observing has been passed down to my daughter, though in an urban landscape. We do it while lightening our steps with those “crazy stories” we make up to make each other laugh. It’s beautiful to see how a part of my father lives on in my daughter’s mischievous gaze.

Since I discovered that misplaced verse, I suggested to Aurélie that we take the ferry at night, just like Edna and her secret lover. Buy a bottle of French wine, some cheese, olives, and queue up a few songs by Dinah Washington and Ella Fitzgerald on Spotify. I thought it could be a marvelous adventure. But out of exhaustion, forgetfulness, or simple laziness, we never did it.

Until it happened one Saturday night in March.

That night, Village Works —a bookstore that usually closes at two in the morning— unexpectedly closed at one. I went to the corner, to Ray’s Pizza, to grab something to eat so I wouldn’t go to bed on an empty stomach. It was around one-thirty in the morning, as I was reaching for a napkin to wipe my mouth and watching a couple in love, that I remembered the Staten Island Ferry.

I decided to take the ride alone.

I think it was around two-thirty when I boarded the ferry named John A. Noble. It was so small that I could count all the passengers at once: seventy-two people, a bit tipsy. I sat by the window. When the engines started, the old steel hulk shook so much I thought it might fall apart along the way. As it made its way into the bay, the lively conversations began to fade, the laughter quieted. And then, we all fell asleep.

When I arrived at Staten Island, someone from the crew woke me up. I quickly got off to catch the ferry back to Manhattan. I boarded, and this time I fell asleep before even trying to count the people. When we arrived in Manhattan, I woke up to the jolt of the hull hitting the dock. Disappointed by the ferry experience, I got up thinking about my bed. The few passengers —no more than twenty in total— began to disembark, heads down and visibly tired. Unlike other times, that night we exited through the hallway that overlooks the East River. I looked out at the illuminated Brooklyn Bridge, and just as I was about to pull up the hood of my hoodie, it was that night I found another line from the poem:

“we were very tired, we were very merry- we had gone back and forth...”

They were about five meters high on a faded sign. I felt a tired kind of joy, the kind that comes from discovering a secret you no longer have the energy to share. I took a few photos. No one else stopped or even looked up to read it.Since that day, every time I leave the Staten Island terminal, I stop to read those lines. It’s a literary ritual. A way to honor Edna and memory itself. Sometimes I waste time watching others, hoping to catch their surprised expressions as they discover that verse, but it’s always the same. No one cares. Other times, I think there might be more verses hidden around the terminal, and I look in every corner. I recall a verse by Whitman that says, “Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost…” and it’s true. Maybe the verses from Recuerdo are there only for those who, like Edna, once dared to look at the city with wonder or nostalgia.

Now that I’m writing all this, I think of my daughter, and all I want is to hold her. Ask her how her day was, smell her hair, say something to make her laugh, or simply walk through the city holding her hand. As the years go by, the shape of memories turns into uncertain acts perhaps even inappropriate ones. They appear when all I want is to lie down and fall asleep thinking about the future.

Manhattan, June 20, 2025