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A grandmother who committed suicide, my father’s mother. She threw herself out the window at the moment her husband and his son, my father’s brother, were entering the courtyard on their way to take a walk. My father suffers from Alzheimer’s, as did his father before him. I suffer from the opposite disease, for almost fifteen days now, fifteen days on Wednesday, I can’t get Christmas out of my mind, I have cried every day because of Christmas. I can’t forget Christmas. I cry, I can’t forget, I want to, but I can’t. I cried, I broke up with her, I got myself strangled, I even slapped myself. Christmas Christmas Christmas. Memory loss is not what I suffer from. I don’t have amnesia, rather I suffer from hypermnesia, too strong a memory, if there is such a thing. Christmas Christmas Christmas. I have a six-and-a-half year old daughter, “you always have to bring in Léonore.” Nadine is just an intermediary, Christmas a trigger. I don’t want the legitimate family to take precedence over the unstable one. Paranoids cannot tolerate certain things, I can’t tolerate Marie-Christine not loving me enough to want my child to have a nice Christmas with her and going to celebrate Christmas with her godchildren. My child in other words my flesh in other words my body, what I am, my life, what I’ve lived through that makes Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas.

Now: to organize the mistakes I’ve made not by how I’ve made them but by why, things I’ll never recover from, “move on to other things” I’ll never move on to other things, the causes, suffering at its most ineradicable, I will be polite, because in the end it makes you very, very polite. It takes away all your aggression, all true hatred, the hatred we show, sometimes, it’s fake, it’s not real, it’s false hatred. It’s a pretense. I’ll try to talk to you. Just as I’m now trying to talk to Marie-Christine, to see if it can be any use. I’ll try to talk to you, here we go, there won’t be any plays on words, there won’t be any hatred, there won’t be anything, there won’t be any literary formulations, maybe this won’t be literature, there will be nothing; nothing, nothing, nothing, there will be nothing. There will be nothing but memories, each memory will be a wrenching that must be written down. Memory, a book of memories. I remember. I remember Ricola, Kréma candies, but something else too. I remember Vittel Délice soda, but something else too. A swing set, stitches in my head, near my eyebrow, my mother in a state, but something else too. I remember Marie-Hélène, the soft sand, my pleated tweed skirt with leather piping, the Nuts and Mars candy bars and Americanos when we got out of the swimming pool in Reims, but something else too. I remember my green skirt with suspenders, my wheelbarrow, my little friend Jean-Pierre, my neighbor Chantal, my grandmother, the rabbits and chicks at the Ligot’s house, Kréma candies, raspberry first, strawberry second, lemon third and orange to finish. I remember cookies with hazelnuts and all sorts of delicious things, I remember two-person swings, etc., etc., but something else too.

What?

Go on, spit it out, your Valda candy.