At half past twelve I put the child to bed. He wasn’t sleepy and kept jumping up and down on his mattress. My father’s breathing was laboured, his eyes wide open. My mother closed the shop and the café around one o’clock as she did every Sunday. Then she went back upstairs. My uncle and aunt arrived while I was doing the washing-up. After seeing my father, they settled in the kitchen. I gave them some coffee. I heard my mother’s footsteps cross the floorboards above and start to come downstairs. Despite her slow, deliberate pace, I thought she was coming down for her coffee. When she reached the bend in the staircase, she said softly: ‘It’s all over.’

The business has closed down. Now it’s a private house with Terylene curtains hanging in what used to be the shop windows. It stopped being a business when my mother moved out. She now lives in a flat near the town centre. She ordered a beautiful marble memorial for my father’s tomb. A— D— 1899–1967. Something simple, requiring no maintenance.

Now I have finished unearthing the legacy which I had to leave at the door when I entered the educated, bourgeois world.75

One Sunday after church, when I was twelve years old, my father and I walked up the sweeping staircase inside the town hall. We were looking for the public library. I was terribly excited, we’d never been there before. We couldn’t hear anything on the other side of the door. All the same my father pushed it open. It was completely quiet in the room, quieter even than in church. The floorboards creaked and there was a strange, musty smell in the air. Perched behind a high desk barring access to the shelves, two men watched us approach. My father let me say: ‘We’d like to borrow some books.’ One of them immediately asked: ‘What books do you want?’ At home it hadn’t occurred to us that we had to prepare a list and reel off titles as easily as if they had been brands of biscuits. They chose the books for us: Colomba for me and a light novel by Maupassant for my father. We never went back to the library. My mother must have returned the books, maybe when they were overdue.

He would take me to school on his bicycle, carrying me from one shore to the other, come rain or shine.

His greatest satisfaction, possibly even the raison d’être of his existence, was the fact that I belonged to the world which had scorned him.

He liked to sing: C’est l’aviron qui nous mène en rond – ‘The paddle that is rowing us in circles’.

I remember the title of a book, L’Expérience des limites. I was so disappointed when I started reading it, it was only 76about metaphysics and literature.

While I was writing this book, I was also marking papers and sending out model essays because that’s what I’m paid to do. These intellectual games aroused the same feelings in me as luxury, a feeling of unreality, and wanting to cry.