‘But what?’

‘I wanted to suggest something.’

‘Okay. Go ahead.’

‘I imagine that, if you’re writing about my mother, you’ll want to question me too.’

‘Yes, probably.’

‘In that case, you could also write about me. Well, not just about me but my whole family. My husband, my children.’

‘That’s not really how I imagined my–’

‘Your project is to follow a real person, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘But there’s nothing stopping you from broadening the project to take in her family as well. I don’t know if we’d be very interesting, but there would always be things to tell.’

‘That’s true, but–’

‘Listen, I’m suggesting this to help you out. I don’t want to have to tell you to go and find someone else in the street.’

‘…’

She stopped speaking for a moment, then said: ‘I can tell that your presence has been good for her. I saw it as soon as I arrived. But my intuition is telling me to make this suggestion. I don’t want my mother to feel that your entire project depends on her. That scares me.’

‘…’

I didn’t know what to think about this. I saw Valérie’s proposal as a sort of infidelity towards my first idea. But my project was to submit to chance, and there was no reason why I couldn’t continue to follow the dictates of chance. Valérie spent a few minutes talking about the advantages of her proposal and I understood why she was doing this. She didn’t want to get in the way of an adventure that, to judge from her mother’s smile, was a source of real enthusiasm. But she wanted to take some of the pressure off a memory that was unstable, unreliable. Anyway, it seemed as if I didn’t have much choice.

We went back into the living room and Valérie announced: ‘It’s all arranged, Maman. A writer is going to write about your life. That’s exciting. And he’s going to write about us too. In fact, I’m going to steal him from you tonight so he can have dinner with us at home …’ So that was it: I really had no choice. Then again, there was something relaxing about having characters prepared to take charge of the story.

10

And so I found myself having dinner with a family I didn’t know. I generally avoided all uncomfortable social occasions, but here I was, in the most improbable situation I could imagine.

When she introduced me to her husband and children, Valérie told them that I was going to have dinner with them and write a book about them. They looked pretty astonished.

A girl, who’d been presented to me as Lola, muttered: ‘What the hell is Maman up to now?’

To which her brother replied: ‘I preferred it when she was doing pottery.’

Their mother cut them short with the words: ‘I can hear you!’

Patrick, the husband, said nothing. He could have been welcoming, could have asked me what I would like to drink, seen the funny side of the situation, but he didn’t. He looked like a man putting up with one of his wife’s strange whims. He gave a doubtful little pout intended to show Valérie that he would agree to this absurd idea just to make her happy. But she was a persuasive person; within a few hours she had become the ambassador for my literary quest.