“I don’t know how to read, so I’m scared I’ll get lost if I leave here,” came the honest answer.

The very next day, Bouchta had his own Daniel et Valérie reader and my mother began to fuss over him as if he were about to sit the entrance exam for France’s top university.

“The geese are drinking at the pond . . . The donkey is in the stable . . .” she chanted in her heavy Jewish accent.

“The geese are drinking at the pond . . . The donkey is in the stable . . .” Bouchta would repeat in his Arabic accent.

He used to love those sentences, the first he had ever read and which reminded him of his farm in Tunisia. He would use them every opportunity he could, laughing, especially when he was talking to me, the sole person he used to see during the day.

Within a month, he was deciphering signs, within four he could read the newspaper. And six months later, one morning, without saying goodbye, with no warning, he was no longer there.

He left to be with other people like him, he’s happy now, my mother used to say, the way you would console a child whose flea-ridden, nuisance of a pet had finally run away. How I hated her! She was speaking to me like I was some sort of imbecile about the man who had dressed me, washed me and fed me. Who had seen me grow up. Whom I had entrusted with all my joys and troubles. Who had been my father and my mother, too, the only person in my entire family endowed with any humanity. Everything pleasant I knew how to do in life, I owed to him, for he was kind and patient, with the patience of those who live in harmony with the trees and the seasons. As well as teaching me Moroccan and Tunisian dialect and showing me how to make gazelle horns cookies, he taught me how to care for animals and how to navigate in the dark using the stars.

Even now, when I come across a chibani, an old guy from the Maghreb, I can’t help staring at him, searching for Bouchta in his features, even though I know it’s absurd, because he’d be over 100 by now.

The day after he left, my mother dressed up as a crime scene cleaner, in a raincoat, rubber gloves and with a mask over her mouth, and set about eradicating all trace of my darling Bouchta and the relationship between us — illegitimate in her eyes even though it was the direct result of her own apathy towards my upbringing.