Now, it is another time.

I woke up late. My mother was speaking softly to my father in the next room. Later she told me he had been sick in the early hours before he’d even had time to reach the bucket. She assumed it was indigestion, caused by the chicken leftovers we’d had for lunch the previous day. He was anxious to know whether she’d cleaned the floor and complained about pains in his chest. His voice sounded different. When the little one went up to him, he paid him no attention and remained motionless, lying flat on his back.

The doctor went straight upstairs to see him. My mother was serving in the shop, but she joined him soon afterwards and the two of them came down together. As he reached the foot of the stairs, the doctor whispered that he ought to be taken to the hospital in Rouen. My mother broke down. From the very start she would say to me, ‘He insists on eating things that don’t agree with him,’ and when she brought him his mineral water she would tell him, ‘You know perfectly well you’ve got a funny stomach.’ She kept twisting the clean napkin which the doctor had used for his auscultation, unable to understand or accept the fact that my father’s illness, which we had dismissed as indigestion, was really serious. The doctor tempered himself, suggested that we wait until evening to decide, after all it might just be heatstroke.

I went out to buy the medicine. It was going to be a 71muggy day. The pharmacist recognized me. There was hardly any more traffic in the streets now than on my previous visit the year before. Everything here was too similar to how it had been when I was a child for me to imagine that my father was seriously ill. I bought some vegetables to make ratatouille. Some of the customers asked after the boss, surprised that he still wasn’t up on such a fine day. They gave simple reasons for his indisposition, which they backed up with their own experience: ‘Yesterday it was at least 40º outside. If I’d stayed out like him, I’d have fainted,’ or ‘This heat is too much, I couldn’t eat a thing yesterday.’ Like my mother, they seemed to think that my father had fallen ill because he had challenged nature by behaving irresponsibly. He had got what he deserved but shouldn’t do it again.

When it was time for his afternoon nap, the child walked past the bed and said: ‘Mummy, why is the man sleeping?’

My mother would nip upstairs between customers. Every time the bell rang, I shouted out to her like I used to, so that she could come down and serve in the shop. Although he drank only water, his condition remained stable. When the doctor came round in the evening, he didn’t mention the hospital again.

The next day, whenever my mother or I asked him how he felt, he would snort angrily or complain that he hadn’t eaten for two days. The doctor hadn’t made a single joke about my father’s health, as he usually did: ‘Not to worry, he’s just farted backwards.’ When I watched him walk down the stairs, I longed for him to come out with some pleasantry or other. That evening my mother said to me, lowering her gaze: ‘I don’t know what’s to come of all this.’ It was the first time she had acknowledged the fact that my father might die. For the 72past two days we had shared our meals and taken care of the child without mentioning his illness. I replied: ‘Well, we’ll see.’ When I was about eighteen, she would sometimes snap: ‘If anything ever happens to you … you know what’s left for you to do.’ It wasn’t necessary to be more specific, we both knew exactly what she meant without her actually having to say the words: getting pregnant.