27 July 2013. I spend this month whose door she opened – and together we passed through a cement tunnel on the other side of time – in our house as in this Mutterleib, this motherbody in which one night we dreamed of spending a life. Mutterleib is a sweet armoire of secrets: it holds surprises in store for me. Maman left there an unknown number of messages. The general message is: I am still here. She returns, sometimes from totally unexpected hiding places. One sees fate lending a hand. Here's one: the flood of the 26th, the first of our history, at first I wept about it, saying: Ève never saw such a catastrophe. Then I laughed: the water chased out from beneath Mutterleib's knees four fat cardboard trunks that Ève had forgotten there in 1962, so say the newspapers that look as if they’ve been buried alive when we find them upon opening. And each of these four fossils bears a title written in white chalk by my mother. They summarise: we left Osnabrück in 1934, we were in London, we were in Paris in 1935, we were in Oran in 1936, in 1947 in Algiers, next we were sent to France to Sainte-Foy-la-Grande in 1959, from there we went back to Algiers and we came back in 1962 to Arcachon, all alone, by way of maritime shipping services. And until this flood, we held up very well. And now, we are dead. We’ve given up the cardboard ghost.

‘Eurydice?’ says an A4 sheet that my hand pulls from a bundle of paper beneath my table.

–You know Eurydice? I read. And right away I recognise, I hear Ève answer, ici, ici, ici: –I don't remember anything. She was unhappy, I think. It's not from my time, it's very old. Who is it?

Then I answered her: she's the wife of Orpheus.

And now I say to Ève, precipitously so as to hold onto her with my words, here, today, sitting in the little desk chair – while looking at her in the large eyes of her shadow: Eurydice! my darling, it's you! Do not fade! Stay! and as long as I hold this paper beneath my pen, fate acts, pins her down beneath my supplication, I sense she is going to dash off, wait! I’m not Orpheus, it's Hélène, do you hear me?