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disconcerted me. Of course I was used to Félix weeping like that, when a heartfelt emotion suddenly made his voice break, or when he had had too much to drink; it was the same short, dry sob, quickly retracted; it both was and was not a kind of weeping. No doubt I was already well aware that my grandfathers drank a good deal of wine on those days – and what did those two men talk about over a bottle, constrained to the silence of essential things? With the help of what evasions, what empty words, did they avoid speaking the name of the “missing person” in my presence and elsewhere no doubt, the traitor in this melodrama who was also its deus ex machina , whose trace my presence attested to, the director-deserter without whom they would never have been united over that bottle, at a loss for words, actors without direction or prompts having forgotten their roles? What silences avoided or evoked the flight of their former hopes, the ruin of that day, null now in retrospect, on which they had married their children, when they had wept as today, but with a different emotion? It seems to me I can hear those conversations, awkward, artificial, and yet full of good will.
    I was told – probably by Elise – that in their younger days, Clara had left Eugène, surely intending to leave him for good. Then, at the age when “the mask and the blade” become useless props, when the mask is only wrinkles, and memory alone sharpens its long blades in old heads, they became a couple once again. I do not know for certain if my father is the son of the old mason. I do not know how old the child was when Eugène came back, or was once again accepted into the fold; but no doubt the latter was for the former such a nonentity of afather that he might as well have been absent; and even if he was sometimes present, the model was intellectually unacceptable for someone for whom certain qualities of mind were surely an essential feature – if I am to credit all those who, having known him, have insisted on this point, and especially considering how that testimony comes from humble folk, from those who use the word “intelligence” to account for what they think themselves absolutely lacking. On Aimé, the influence of this father whom he loved – or perhaps detested as a distorting mirror set eternally before him at the table – must have been indirectly negative. He must have felt, as painfully as I do, the weakness of the male branches of the family, a promise not kept, a nobody married to the mother. Aimé’s feminine sentimentality, of which I have so much proof, formed itself around that void, that hollowing of the heart to the point of tears; also his apparent cynicism was rooted there. No doubt he wasted his life searching for something to replace that missing link; and it was also to fill that void that alcohol entered his body and his life – to fill it with a known place, a place of plenitude forever borrowed and forever vanishing, the tyrannical place of liquid gold that, in the thighs of its bottles, harbors as many fathers, mothers, wives, and sons as you could want. But I am inclined to think that he also drank to set himself free, to flee his love for a mother he could, alas, never forget.
    I think of the rather sad Sundays that Clara and Eugène spent in Mourioux, days cut short, since they were made to fit between eleven in the morning and five in the evening to avoid driving at night, although Mazirat was not more than a hundred kilometers away. I think especially of the inevitable cardboard box of assorted presents,wrapped by anxious old hands with exaggerated care; of the endless balls of crumpled newspaper that, having been stuffed in to keep them from breaking, were pulled out with the outdated china, mirrors, prewar toys, the occasional incongruous and charming cosmetic case, lighter without its flint, piggy bank missing a leg – all objects they would not