Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

My Mother’s Tears

woman whose mere presence, whose silent, supremely silent presence erases in a single breath the idea you had ferociously defended, the idea you considered irrefutable just seconds earlier.

* THE STATUE

Why didn’t my father keep the statue in his bedroom?... That way he could have contemplated it before falling asleep and let it accompany him in his dreams. I knew the statue was very old, thousands of years old, and that it came from far away, from Yemen, a stone statue, almost ten inches high, half of its height taken up by the pedestal (the figure had no legs, or its legs were hidden inside the pedestal), and the two small breasts set wide apart clearly indicated it was the bust of a woman, something impossible to discern from the flat, spare face. My father had the habit of brushing his hand over the statue before leaving for work as if it lent him some of its strength and serenity. He looked at it with a majestic tenderness, there wasn’t the slightest doubt that it was the object he was most attached to in the apartment. Without completely grasping the depth of this attachment, I understood it. More than once, I had climbed on a chair the better to feel the statue’s form and the limestone’s coarse-grained asperity against my

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