This clear summer day is one of those that will never end, and for me this seems to be its only meaning or the only one that counts. Otherwise, these figures could be strangers, as unknown to me as myself, 40 or 45 years ago, at sixteen or twenty.
When I try to think of them as my mother and my aunt, I begin to imagine them as the blackened silver grains of the photograph, exfoliating, diffuse, without identity, but sometimes because of this, or in spite of it, radiant and unreal.
My mother died in the summer of 1969, I was in my early 30's. I left home when I was 23. Between then and her death, in all that time, we saw each other not much more than a month or 6 weeks of days. Simply no money. And there was one separation of four years.
If I speak about her now with my sister or my father, they assume I speak about her as they do, as an adult who knows and knew an adult. But for me my mother is the mother of childhood. Such a mother can be only fictive, the mother of imagination and wonder, the necessary absence without which one could not know everything else that is.