I had been planning to get rid of that revolver — not only because I find weapons hideously ugly, but because this particular one had killed people whose bodies had been buried on The Estate. After all, if one day somebody stumbled upon those remains, it would inevitably lead back to me; and then if they were to find the weapon that had been used to bump off all those people, I would find myself having to offer all sorts of exhausting explanations. But getting rid of a gun is the sort of job you never get around to doing, always putting it off to tomorrow.

On that memorable day, when I emptied my cellar so I could use it to store my hash, I finally decided to keep it.

With the cold weight of the metal in my hand, I thought about how you never remember what you felt about the events you witnessed as a child, almost as if they were made-up stories that had happened to somebody else.

One image comes back to me often: of my father, standing motionless for several long minutes in the middle of the lawn. To the untrained eye, he was merely admiring his garden. His cauliflower-sized roses that neither I nor my mother were allowed to cut. His irises every colour of the rainbow. The wisteria that climbed all over his bench; his hedges trimmed into round balls; his pyramid-shaped yews . . . But that wasn’t at all what he was looking at; he was occupied by something much further removed in time and space — the valley of the Medjerda River where he had grown up.

It had driven him crazy to be torn from his roots without having a chance to fight for his Tunisian farm.

There in the middle of The Estate, under a weeping willow, he had installed a reproduction of one of Émile Boisseau’s allegorical sculptures, Defence of the Home. For those who don’t know, it’s a sculpture in the art pompier tradition dating from 1887, the original of which stands in the Square d’Ajaccio in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. It was reproduced in a series of different metals, and we had the cheap version in zinc and antimony at our place.

No work of art better expressed the mental image my father had of himself. Just like the valorous Gaul clad in a simple fur skin, protecting his wife and infant with his broken sword, he would die defending his family and The Estate, weapons in hand. Perit sed in armis.

When night fell, the tall streetlights along the motorway illuminated the garden like an Expressionist film set — especially when the elongated silhouette of a burglar could be seen slipping through the rustling shadows cast by the tall trees. On two occasions, I saw somebody scale the wall, make their way around the house and, after seeing that the place was both occupied and impregnable, leave again the same way they had arrived.