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decisive judgments). Similarly, although more obvious and better conserved in the tall, erect figure of Clara, somethingaristocratic, nostalgic, and reflective survived in Elise beyond all physical depredation. And then too, noble, incomprehensible words – God, destiny, the future – passed the lips of them both; can I be sure that the intonation these words still have today – in some inner ear that hears them resonate at my core – that their timber was not imprinted in me by the two of them? In short, I listened to them “with another ear”; they knew how to speak: the first with some ostentation (she was regarded as a bit sanctimonious), Elise, on the other hand, with that adorably rustic refusal, even in grief, to speak of “those things,” those things spoken of nonetheless, that only seem so formidable because they are universal, those things that are thought itself. Metaphysics and poetry came to me through women: Racinian alexandrines from the mouth of my mother, recalled by her only as high school memories, and grand abstract mysteries conveyed by the benevolent and awkwardly solemn vocables of my grandmothers in their vague faith.
    A few words more regarding Eugène, that massive old man, sincere, absent-minded, transparent to others, whose presence was quickly forgotten. It seems to me – but even this is not clear in my memory; my memories of him are vague, whereas the gently angular appearance of Clara is precise as a shadow cutout – it seems to me that he was a bit stooped, in the way of those who are broad-shouldered in their youth, and whose former unabashed virility becomes resigned to the rounded posture of the orangutan, manual workers grown too old, who do not know what to do with their hands and bear their bodies awkwardly, bodies all the heavier for having been powerful and efficient in their pure function as tools. He had been a mason, and no doubt an alert, untroublesome fellow worker. He would not have beentroublesome, rather, if he had not been, according to the little I know of him, the victim of a weakness of character that no doubt plagued him mercilessly and led him through one humiliating setback after another to that final state of smiling, often inebriated half-stupor in which I knew him. Though at the time, when I saw him, that was not what I thought; his illuminated, sorry face – more broken King Lear’s than clown’s, drunken old soldier, all shame drowned – his big red nose, his hands just as big and red, the incredible folds in his doggy eyelids, his croaking voice, all made me want to laugh – the laugh of the nervous child, which is a way of reversing the tragedy, of denying the unease. I reproached myself for that secret desire. To look dubiously, even ironically, upon “someone I should have loved,” to harbor that improper thought: “my grandfather is very ugly,” seemed to me a fault of the most serious nature; without a doubt, the faculty for such impious speculations belonged to “monsters,” and to them alone; was I, therefore, a monster? Immediately, I promised myself to love him better; and with that promise – the internal drama in which one plays all the roles is the emotional leaven of the so-called tender years – waves of affection for the poor old fellow washed over me again. My eyes misted with sweet tears of atonement, and I would have liked to follow through with manifest acts of kindness; I do not know if I dared to do so at the time.
    I will add that the old fellow was sentimental. Whereas I was not surprised to see Clara often on the verge of tears (women’s tears seemed to me in the order of things, no more or less comprehensible than flu or rain, and always justified), the massive, violent sobs of men, possibly drunk, such as my grandfather emitted in the evening, climbinginto his old car permeated with the same archaic odor as their house in Mazirat, those sobs