My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early

afternoon. I had been to Mass at a quarter to twelve as usual. I must have brought back some cakes from the baker in the new shopping precinct—a cluster of temporary buildings erected after the war while reconstruction was under way. When I got home, I took off my Sunday clothes and slipped on a dress that washed easily. After the customers had left and the shutters had been pinned down over the store window, we had lunch, probably with the radio on, because at that hour there was a funny program called Courtroom, in which Yves Deniaud played some wretched subordinate continually charged with the most preposterous offenses and condemned to ridiculous sentences by a judge with a quavering voice. My mother was in a bad temper. The argument she started with my father as soon as she sat down lasted throughout the meal. After the table was cleared and the oilcloth wiped clean, she continued to fire criticism at my father, turning round and round in the tiny kitchen—squeezed in between the café, the store and the steps leading upstairs—as she always did when she was upset. My father was still seated at the table, saying nothing, his head turned toward the window. Suddenly he began to wheeze and was seized with convulsive shaking. He stood up and I saw him grab hold of my mother and drag her through the café, shouting in a hoarse, unfamiliar voice. I rushed upstairs and threw myself on to the bed, my face buried in a cushion. Then I heard my mother scream: “My daughter!” Her voice came from the cellar adjoining the café. I rushed downstairs, shouting “Help!” as loud as I could. In the poorly-lit cellar, my father had grabbed my mother by the shoulders, or maybe the neck. In his other hand, he was holding the scythe for cutting firewood which he had wrenched away from the block where it belonged. At this point all I can remember are sobs and screams. Then the three of us are back in the kitchen again. My father is sitting by the window, my mother is standing near the cooker and I am crouching at the foot of the stairs. I can’t stop crying. My father wasn’t his normal self; his hands were still trembling and he had that unfamiliar voice. He kept on repeating, “Why are you crying? I didn’t do anything to you.” I can recall saying this sentence, “You’ll breathe disaster on me. My mother was saying, “Come on, it’s over.”

Afterward the three of us went for a bicycle ride in the countryside nearby. When they got back, my parents opened the café like they did every Sunday evening. That was the end of it.

It was June 15, 1952. The first date I remember with unerring accuracy from my childhood. Before that, the days and dates inscribed on the blackboard and in my copybooks seemed just to drift by.

Later on, I would say to certain men: “My father tried to kill my mother just before I turned twelve.” The fact that I wanted to tell them this meant that I was crazy about them. All were quiet after hearing the sentence. I realized that I had made a mistake, that they were not able to accept such a thing.

This is the first time I am writing about what happened. Until now, I have found it impossible to do so, even in my diary. I considered writing about it to be a forbidden act that would call for punishment. Not being able to write anything else afterward, for instance. (I felt quite relieved just now when I saw that I could go on writing, that nothing terrible had happened.) In fact, now that I have finally committed it to paper, I feel that it is an ordinary incident, far more common among families than I had originally thought. It may be that narrative, any kind of narrative, lends normality to people’s deeds, including the most dramatic ones. But because this scene has remained frozen inside me, an image empty of speech—except for the sentence I told my lovers—the words which I have used to describe it seem strange, almost incongruous. It has become a scene destined for other people.

Before starting, I reckoned I would be able to recall every single detail. It turns out I can remember only the general atmosphere, our respective places in the kitchen and a few words or expressions. I’ve forgotten how the argument actually started, what we had to eat and whether my mother was still wearing her white storekeeper’s coat or whether she had taken it off in view of the bicycle ride. I have no particular memory of that Sunday morning besides the usual routine—attending Mass, buying the cakes and so on—although I have often had to think back to the time before it happened, as I would do later on for other events in my life. Yet I am sure I was wearing my blue dress, the one with white spots, because during the two summers that followed, every time I put it on, I would think, “it’s the dress I wore that day.” Of the weather too I am quite sure—a combination of sun, clouds and wind.

From then on, that Sunday was like a veil that came between me and everything I did. I would play, I would read, I would behave normally but somehow I wasn’t there. Everything had become artificial. I had trouble learning my lessons, when before I only needed to read them once to know them by heart. Acutely aware of everything around me and yet unable to concentrate, I lost my insouciance and natural ability to learn.

What had happened was not something that could be judged. My father, who loved me, had tried to kill my mother, who also loved me. Because my mother was more religious than my father and because she did the accounts and spoke to my schoolmistresses, I suppose I thought it normal for her to shout at him the same way she shouted at me. It was no one’s fault, no one was to blame. I just had to stop my father from killing my mother and going to jail.

I believe that for months, maybe even years, I waited for the scene to be repeated. I was positive it would happen again. I found the presence of customers comforting, dreading the moments when my parents and I were alone, in the evening and on Sunday afternoons. I was on the alert as soon as they raised their voices; I would scrutinize my father, his expression, his hands. In every sudden silence I would read the omens of disaster. Every day at school I wondered whether, on returning home, I would be faced with the aftermath of a tragedy.

When they did show signs of affection for each other—joking, sharing a laugh or a smile—I imagined I had gone back to the time before that day. It was just a “bad dream.” One hour later I realized that these signs only meant something at the time; they offered no guarantee for the future.

Around that time a strange song was often heard on the radio, mimicking a fight that suddenly breaks out in a saloon: there was a pause, a voice whispered, “you could have heard a pin drop,” followed by a cacophony of shouts and jumbled sentences. Every time I heard it I was seized with panic. One day my uncle handed me the detective story he was reading: “What would you do if your father was accused of murder but wasn’t guilty?” The question sent a chill down my spine. I kept seeing the images of a tragedy which had never occurred.

The scene never did happen again. My father died fifteen years later, also on a Sunday in June.

It is only now that a thought occurs to me: my parents may have discussed both that Sunday afternoon and my father’s murderous gesture; they may have arrived at an explanation or even an excuse and decided to forget the whole thing. Maybe one night after making love. This thought, like all those that elude one at the time, comes too late. It can be of no help to me now; its absence only serves to measure the indescribable terror which that Sunday has always meant to me.

In August an English family pitched their tent by the side of a small country road in the south of France. In the morning they were found murdered: the father, Sir Jack Drummond, his wife, Lady Anne, and their daughter Elizabeth. The nearest farmhouse belonged to the Dominici, a family of Italian extraction, whose son Gustave was originally accused of the three deaths. The Dominici spoke very little French; the Drummonds probably spoke better than them. I knew no English or Italian at all apart from “do not lean outside” and “è pericoloso sporgersi,” inscribed on train windows underneath “ne pas se pencher au-dehors.” We thought it strange that a family who was well-off should choose to sleep out in the open rather than at a hotel. I imagined myself dead with my parents by the side of the road.

From that year, I still have two photographs. One shows me in my Communion dress. It’s an “artistic portrait” in black and white, stuck on to a cardboard back with raised scrolls, covered by a semi-transparent sheet of paper. Inside—the signature of the photographer. You can see a girl with full, smooth features, high cheekbones, a rounded nose with large nostrils. A pair of glasses with heavy, light-colored frames bars her cheekbones. Her eyes are staring intently at the camera. The short permed hair sticks out from the back and the front of her Communion cap, loosely tied under her chin; from this cap hangs the veil. Just the hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth. The face of a conscientious little girl, looking older than her age because of the spectacles and permed hair. She is kneeling on a prie-dieu with her elbows on the padded cushion and her broad hands—a ring surrounds her little finger—locked under her chin, circled by a rosary falling down on to the missal and gloves lying on the armrest. There’s something vague and nondescript about the figure in the muslin dress, whose belt has been tied loosely, just like the Communion cap. It seems there is no body underneath this small nun’s habit because I cannot imagine it, let alone feel it the way I have come to feel mine. Yet, surprisingly, it’s exactly the same body as the one I have today.

This photograph is dated June 5, 1952. It was taken not on the day of my solemn Communion in 1951 but, for some reason, on the day marking the “renewal of the vows,” when the whole ceremony, including the costume, is repeated one year later.

In the other photograph, a small oblong one, I am pictured with my father in front of a low wall decorated with earthenware jars of flowers. It was taken in Biarritz in late August ’52, no doubt somewhere along the promenade running by the sea hidden from view, during a bus trip to Lourdes. I can’t be taller than one meter sixty: my head comes slightly higher than my father’s shoulder and he was one meter seventy­three. In those three months my hair has grown, forming a sort of frizzy crown kept tight around my head by a ribbon. The photograph is blurred; it was taken with the cube-shaped camera my parents won at a fair before the war. Although one cannot clearly make out my face or my spectacles, a beaming smile is discernible. I am dressed in a white skirt and blouse—the uniform I wore for the Christian Youth Movement gathering. Over my shoulders—a jacket with its sleeves hanging. Here I appear to be slim, lean, because the skirt hugs my hips, then flares out. In this outfit, I look like a little woman. My father has on a dark jacket, pale shirt and pants, a somber tie. He is barely smiling, with that anxious look he has in all photographs. I imagine that I kept this snapshot because it was different from the others, portraying us as chic people, holiday-makers, which of course we weren’t. In both photographs I am smiling with my lips closed because of my decayed, uneven teeth.

I stare at the two photographs until my mind goes blank, as if looking at them for long enough might allow me to slip into the head and body of the little girl who, one day, was there in the photographer’s studio, or beside her father in Biarritz. Yet, if I had never seen these pictures before and if I were shown them for the first time, I would never believe that the little girl is me. (Absolute certainty—“yes, that’s me”; total disbelief—“no, that’s not me.”)

The two pictures were taken barely three months apart. The first one at the beginning of June, the second one at the end of August. The format and quality are too different to reveal any significant change in my face or figure but I like to think of them as two milestones: one shows me in my Communion dress, closing off my childhood days; the other one introduces the era when I shall never cease to feel ashamed. It may be that I just need to single out part of that summer period, in the manner of a historian. (To write about “that summer” or “the summer of my twelfth year” is to romanticize events that could never feature in a novel, no more than the current summer ’95; I cannot imagine any of these days ever belonging to the magical world conveyed by the expression “that summer.”)

I have found further material evidence dating from that year:

a postcard with a black and white photograph of Elizabeth II. It was given to me by the daughter of a couple living in Le Havre, friends of my parents, who had been on a school trip to England to attend the coronation ceremony. On the back—a small brown stain, which was already there when she gave me the card and which I found quite repulsive. Every time I came across the card, I would think about the brown stain. Elizabeth II is pictured in profile, gazing into the distance, with short black hair combed backwards, her full lips outlined in ruby. Her left hand is resting on a fur coat; her right hand is holding a fan. I can’t remember whether I thought she was beautiful. The question was immaterial since she was the Queen.

a small sewing kit in red leather, without its accessories—scissors, crochet hook, bodkin and so on—a Christmas present I had chosen instead of a desk blotter because it would be more useful at school.

a postcard showing the inside of Limoges Cathedral which I sent to my mother during the bus trip to Lourdes. On the back, in big letters: “In Limoges, the hotel is very nice, lots of foreigners come here. Love and kisses,” with my name and “Papa.” My father had written the address. The postmark reads 08/22/52.

a book of postcards—“The Castle in Lourdes—Museum of Pyrenean Arts and Customs”—which I probably bought when we visited the museum.

the sheet music for Miami Beach Rhumba, a blue double spread with little boats on the cover, bearing the names of artists who had sung or performed the song, namely Patrice and Mario, the Etienne sisters, Marcel Azzola and Jean Sablan. I guess I really loved that song as I longed to have the lyrics, contriving to persuade my mother to give me money for something which she saw as both trivial and useless for school, especially the latter. It certainly meant more to me than the summer hits Ma p’tite folie and Mexico, which one of the drivers would hum during our bus trip to Lourdes.

the vesperal pictured underneath my gloves in the Communion photograph—Missel vespéral romain by Dom Gaspard Lefebvre, Bruges. Each page is divided into two columns, Latin-French, except for the middle of the book, taken up by the “Ordinary of the Mass”: here the right-hand page is in French, the left-hand page in Latin. The beginning features the “Roman Catholic Calendar of Secular Holidays and Movable Feasts from 1951 to 1968.” Strange dates indeed; the book is so timeless it could have been written centuries ago. The same words keep reappearing and still mean nothing to me—secret, gradual, tract (I don’t remember ever having tried to understand chem). Sheer amazement, verging on unease as I leaf through this book written in what seems to me to be an esoteric language. I know all the words and I could reel off the Agnus Dei or any other short prayer by heart, yet I cannot identify with the little girl who, on Sundays and feast days, would recite Mass with seriousness or even fervor, assuming it would be a sin not to do so. Just like the two photographs are proof of my body in 1952, this missal—the fact that it has survived so many moves is in itself significant—provides indisputable evidence of the religious world to which I once belonged but which fails to move me today. Miami Beach Rhumba doesn’t spark off the same feelings of unease because it’s about love and traveling, two ambitions that are still part of my life. I have just been humming the lyrics with great satisfaction—Ai ai ai ay / It will thrill me / When I take a flight through the sky / To Miami by the sea / Ai ai ai ay / It will thrill me / To fly to the place / Where my love waits for me.

For the past few days, I have been living with that Sunday in June. When I wrote about it, I could see it “in focus,” with well-defined shapes and colors; I could even hear the voices. Now it has become gray, incoherent and mute, like a movie shown on crypted television without a decoder. The fact that I have put it into writing does not make it any more significant. It remains what it has always been since 1952—something akin to madness and death, to which I have never ceased to compare the other events in my life in order to assess their degree of painfulness, without finding anything that could measure up to it.

If, as it now seems from a number of indications (needing to reread the lines I have written, being unable to undertake anything else), I have indeed started a new book, then I have taken the risk of revealing it all straight away. Yet nothing is revealed, only the stark facts. That day is like an icon immured within me all these years; I would like to breathe some life into it and strip it of its sacred aura (which long made me believe that it was responsible for my writing, that it lies somewhere at the heart of all my books).

I expect nothing from psychoanalysis or therapy, whose rudimentary conclusions became clear to me a long time ago—a domineering mother, a father whose submissiveness is shattered by a murderous gesture To state “it’s a childhood trauma’’ or “that day the idols were knocked off their pedestal” does nothing to explain a scene which could only be conveyed by the expression that came to me at the time: to breathe disaster. Here abstract speech fails to reach me.

Yesterday I went to the archives in Rouen to consult copies of the 1952 Paris-Normandie newspaper, which the delivery boy from the local news dealer brought round to my parents’ house every day. This too was something which I could not face doing before, as if I would breathe disaster again simply by opening the June edition of the paper. As I climbed the stairs, I felt that I was heading toward some fearful encounter. In a room nestling under the eaves of the Town Hall a woman brought me two big black registers containing all the back issues published in 1952. I began reading from January 1. I wanted to delay the moment when I would reach June 15; I wanted to re-enter the innocent unfolding of days I had known before that date.

In the top right-hand corner of the first page was the weather forecast of Abbe Gabriel. There was nothing I could associate with it—no games, no walks, no bicycle rides. I did not feature in this drifting of clouds, sunny with bright intervals, strong winds, that punctuated the passing of time.

Although most of the events mentioned were known to me—the war in Indochina, the Korean conflict, the riots at Orleansville, Antoine Pinay’s economic program—I wouldn’t have set them in 1952, having no doubt memorized them at a later stage in my life. I could find no connection between “Six bicycles loaded with plastic explosive blow up in Saigon” or “Jacques Duclos imprisoned at Fresnes and indicted on charges of plotting against security of the state” and the images I had of myself in 1952. I found it strange to think that Stalin, Churchill and Eisenhower were once as real to me as Yeltsin, Clinton and Kohl are today. Nothing looked familiar. As if I hadn’t lived in those days.

Gazing at the photograph of Antoine Pinay, I was struck by his resemblance to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, not the decrepit man of today, but that of twenty years ago. The expression “Iron Curtain” took me back to the days of my Catholic school, when the mistress would tell us to recite a decade on our rosary for the Christians who were behind it: I would imagine a huge metal wall with men and women hurling themselves against it.

On the other hand, I immediately recognized the strip cartoon Poustiquet, similar to the ones published on the back page of France-Soir for so many years, and the joke of the day, wondering whether it used to make me laugh: “Well, then, young man, are the fish biting?—Oh no, Sir! These are yellowtail and they’re as cute as can be!” I also recognized the advertisements and the names of movies showing in Rouen before they came to Y—September Affair, Ma Femme est formidable and so on.

There were horrific news items every day: a two-year­old had died eating a croissant; a farmer had sliced off the legs of his son, playing hide-and-seek in the wheat fields; a bombshell had killed three children in Creil. This was what I wanted to read about most of all.

The price of milk and butter made front-page news. Agricultural issues seemed to feature prominently, illustrated by information on foot-and-mouth disease, reports about farmers’ wives and ads for veterinary products, Lapicrine, Osporcine. Judging by the number of throat lozenges and syrups that were advertised, people seemed to suffer from chronic coughing or else they relied exclusively on these products to get better instead of consulting a doctor.

The Saturday edition had a column called “Ladies’ Choice.” I seemed to detect a vague likeness between some of the jackets pictured here and the one I was wearing in the Biarritz snapshot. However, as regards the other clothes, I was sure that neither myself nor my mother had ever dressed that way and among the different hairstyles reproduced on that page I could not see the frazzled, crown-shaped perm I had in the photograph.

I got to the weekend edition dated Saturday 14-Sunday 15 June. The headlines read: “Wheat harvest up an estimated 10%—No favorites for the 24-hour race at Le Mans—Jacques Duclos undergoes lengthy questioning in Paris—Joelle’s body is found near her parents’ house after a ten-day search. She had been thrown into an outdoor latrine by a neighbor who confessed to the crime.”

I did not feel like reading on any further. Walking downstairs, I realized that I had gone to the archives thinking I might actually find some record of what had happened to me in the 1952 newspaper. Later on, I reflected with astonishment that at the same time a continuous stream of cars had been roaring round the racetrack at Le Mans. I found it impossible to equate the two images. Then I said to myself that not one of the billion events that had happened somewhere in the world that Sunday afternoon could stand the comparison without producing the same feelings of dismay. Only the scene I had witnessed was real to me.

I have before me the list of events, films and advertisements that I jotted down with satisfaction while I was leafing through Paris-Normandie. I can expect nothing from this sort of document. Pointing out that cars and refrigerators were scarce and that 9 out of 10 screen stars used Lux Toilet Soap in 1952 is no more relevant than listing the different types of computer, microwave oven and frozen food that characterize the 1990s. The social distribution of goods is far more significant than their actual existence. In 1952, what mattered was that some did not have running water when others had bathrooms; today what matters is that some buy their clothes from Froggy when others go to Agnes B. When it comes to illustrating social change, newspapers can provide only collective evidence.

My overriding concern is to find the words I would use to describe myself and the world around me; to name what I considered to be normal, intolerable or inconceivable. But the woman of 1995 can never go back to being the little girl of 1952, who knew nothing beyond her small town, her family and her convent school, and who had a limited number of words at her disposal. With the immensity of time stretching ahead of her. We have no true memory of ourselves.

To convey what my life was like in those days, the only reliable method I have is to explore the laws, rites, beliefs and references that defined the circles in which I was caught up—school, family, small-town life—and which governed my existence, without my even noticing its contradictions; to expose the different languages that made up my personality: the words of religion, the words my parents used to describe their behavior and daily environment, the serialized novels I read in Le Petit Écho de la mode or Les Veillées des chaumieres; to use these words, some of which I still find oppressive, in order to dissect and reassemble the text of the world surrounding that Sunday in June, when I turned twelve and thought I was going mad.

Naturally I shall not opt for narrative, which would mean inventing reality instead of searching for it. Neither shall I content myself with merely picking out and transcribing the images I remember; I shall process them like documents, examining them from different angles to give them meaning. In other words, I shall carry out an ethnological study of myself.

(It may not be necessary to commit such observations to paper, but I won’t be able to start writing properly until I have some idea of the shape this writing will take.)

I may have chosen to be impartial because I thought the indescribable events I witnessed in my twelfth year would fade away, lost in the universal context of laws and language. Or maybe I succumbed to a mad and deadly impulse suggested by the words of a missal which I now find impossible to read, a ritual which my mind associates with some sort of Voodoo ceremony—take this, all of you, and read it, this is my body, this is the cup of my blood, it will be shed for you and for all men.