TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Annie Ernaux

J e t’attendrai le jour et la nuit / j’attendrai toujours / Ton retour — I will wait day and night / always wait for your return (Lucienne Delyle) Si tu m’aimes / Je me fous du monde entier — If you love me, / the rest of the world can go hang (Édith Piaf )

Mon histoire, c’est l’histoire d’un amour — My story is a story of love (Dalida)

C’était hier, ce matin-là / C’était hier et c’est loin déjà — That morning was yesterday, / yesterday and already long ago (Henri Salvador) At this very moment, out in the streets, the open spaces, on the metro, in lecture halls, and inside millions of heads, millions of novels are being written chapter by chapter, erased and revised, and all of them die as a result of becoming, or not becoming, reality. When, in the subway or the RER, I hear the first notes of Dalida’s “Histoire d’un amour,” sometimes sung in Spanish, within a second I am emptied of myself, hollowed out. I used to believe (Proust had a comparable experience) that for three minutes, I truly became the girl of S. But it is not she who suddenly revives but the reality of her dream, the powerful reality of her dream, spread throughout the universe by the words sung by Dalida and Darío Moreno, and covered up again, buried by the shame of having had that dream.

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