The first time my mother saw Bouchta, she’d just picked me up from school. When he greeted us with a broad smile as he opened the gate, she let out a little cry of horror: Oi gevald, ein negger! — Yiddish for “How awful, a Negro!” Because Bouchta, who had been born in Morocco near the Mauritanian border, in addition to being Arabic, was also Black. And my mother, who had been born near the Yugoslavian border, had only seen her first Black person dressed up as a cannibal at the age of fourteen at a travelling circus. Her racism was of a pre-modern sort; the subtleties of the Valladolid debate, when the Spanish conquistadors had at least considered the question of whether the Indians had a soul, would have been lost on her.

From day one, she got on with the job of getting rid of Bouchta, like the nasty black spider he was.

She began by accusing him of a thousand wrongdoings: his cooking was too heavy, which was untrue. He cleaned badly, he shrank the laundry — all also untrue. At the same time, she would say how terribly sorry she felt for him. To be the Negro in this grim house next to a motorway, in the service of a madman who speaks to you like a dog and pays you a pittance, while making you bury bodies. It was awful!

For eleven years, she desperately tried to find his breaking point, to no avail. Bouchta was gentle and servile. The cupboards were full of impeccably folded linen piles smelling sweetly of lavender and the soup on the table was the perfect temperature for my father to be able eat dinner in the way he liked, that is, in four minutes flat.

And then one day, she found it.

At the age of sixty-five, Bouchta asked to take Sundays off, seeing as he was getting older and needed more rest. Carrying a plastic bag, he would head off in the morning, from the hut that had generously been fitted out for him at the bottom of the garden, and having passed through the gate of The Estate, instead of turning left towards the station, he would bear right towards nowhere, disappearing until seven o’clock in the evening.

“Don’t you think it’s odd that he turns right?” ventured my mother one evening.

“He must have found some other Arabs over that way,” replied my father, gesturing vaguely towards the yawning oblivion of the motorway.

Then one day, by chance, we spotted him overhead, on the A13 overpass, and four hours later, we saw him again in the same place but on the other side, looking in the other direction.

My mother sensed a weak point. She asked him: “Why don’t you go to Paris so you can meet other people like you instead of looking at cars go by on the overpass?”