The Long, very long Journey. The goal is known, but not how long the voyage is going to last, whether years, or years and years, disarmed years, it's an odyssey that will terminate not with a nostos, but with a descent into the subterranean cavern; or else, no, perhaps the end will be reunion? No one knows how many stops, sojourns, turnarounds await us. It will have been three years, perhaps longer, that I have been sailing along strenuously with Maman. Without the help of my guardians the notebooks, there would not have been an odyssey, but one single wailing mess. I have forgotten everything.

Every month or almost we reached another island, a new rock where some unknown evil spell awaited us. There have been so many of them – when I cast a glance at some photograph (I have never taken any, not one. The takers are my friends, my son.) a shock makes me tremble: it's the process of the infinite alteration, mutation, thus, in truth, the virulent work of death that is suddenly revealed to me. During life, leaning with my nose against Maman's face I see only her-at-the-moment, and perhaps even I see only ever the immutable, the immortal brilliance of her eyes on the alert, I grasp onto this sparkling that will never have changed at the end and I dismiss effortlessly the numerous traits that are doing the work of disfiguration. Nevertheless I obstinately took care of her appearance. Thus, with great difficulty, I transported her in 2011 to a dermatologist to clean up her face, which had been invaded like a shaggy garden of underbrush, lumps of keratitis very busy growing and proliferating. They looked like ticks. At least during the last months these parasites didn't reappear. Also the whiskers around her lips, her chin, not all of them, but those that could be pulled out. The photos leave me speechless. The immensities of the mutations, at once minuscule and brutal, have the appalling effect of the apocalypse on me. I believe and don't believe my eyes. And yet it is Ève. Ève as if bewitched, bitten. I cannot believe it.