There are so many, and each one calls to the other, I could never note them all. I shall let them come here in the order without apparent order in which they come when I pronounce their key-name that is the colour of the chrome with which I buttered language with my brush in order to relish painting,

I say Oran, and the words come running down the boulevards and the alleyways, up the hills, along the cliffs the colour of raw meat overhanging the coast, here they are clacking high in my new child's ears dazzled with sonorous sparkles: le Villaginègre, Ya Ouled, Mémé Eckmühl, Ptivichy, Saha, La Calentica, El Khobz, Djib Batata, Ima Ima, Mleh, Fissa fissa, Khlass, El Bab, Mers El Kébir, toflah, sbakh al Kheir, Baba, archraâl, Tlatin douro, l'ahmar, Dolorès, old Mrs Flörsheim, Promenade de l'Etang, Boulevard Galliéni, Ya Benti, Lycée Lamoricière, Lycée Stéphane Gsell, Oran-Républicain, la Marine, Ain Temouchent, Canastel, Alberplage, Clairefontaine, Cap Falcon with its dunes, la Kemia, Aïd-el-Kebir, Imaâ, and on Sunday the family took the word les Planteurs and we went up the slopes of the Moorish cemetery climbing to the Belvedere, then across the rocky scrub, in the direction of the word Santacruz and when my father took us we made a stop at the word Marabout.

And all of this – these explorations, these communions, these ascensions – was Arabic, the Arabic we spoke at rue Philippe, on the corner of the Placedarmes in Oran.