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I’d been afraid of seeing the town without him. But I don’t
see it, because it’s not the same place: Someone has
transformed it into a stage set. As a result, I’m scared: I find
it deceptive, and therefore hostile. It deceives me in the
worse possible way: disguising itself as the town it was.
There are, therefore, no painful memories, but nor are there
memories that I can associate with him. And this lack of
familiarity is so strong that it sometimes provokes an
unbearable physical malaise, especially when I leave the
inside of a building and find myself on the street again. At
times I have to go back inside until I can regain my vital
signs, my breathing. Then I head home with the intention
of not going out again. Home, home, to our haven, to the
house, fast. Fast! To home.
I suppose it’s the indifference that makes the town so
inhospitable, meaning precisely that nothing has changed:
No river of tears has flooded it, no black sky has collapsed
onto the streets. People stroll nonchalantly. Everything
flows with the indifference that characterizes towns and
cities, whose movements are never contingent on death,
that is, not when the person dies an individual death.
At home, however, everything is different. His presence is
powerful; it accompanies you. You can touch his clothes,
his annotated books, his ideas spread about the table in
many little slips of paper. At home, the objects are not
indifferent. They speak. The oversized envelope left on the
bed—on top of the duvet cover with the large yellow