I remember her name. But it was never spoken after the thing happened. I remember her face, too. Soft and round. Pink velvety cheeks. Her voice. Her hair, light brown. Her scent, lemony. She was young. Probably seventeen, maybe younger. She was a village girl from the area. Her father was a truffle harvester. She was hired to look after me, two afternoons a week, because my mother was expecting. I was four. I didn’t know how to read or write yet. I was too small for school. She came, always smiling, and we would go for walks around my grandfather’s property.

There was so much to see. Especially in summer. The black pond high up on the clump, near the pass, where toads croaked. We would throw pebbles at them, and laugh while they swam away. The cypress trees at the end of the vale, rising high and proud like warriors. She called them “the Mohicans.” Careful, the Mohicans are coming to get you, she’d say playfully to scare me. Sometimes they did look like giant Indians with huge feathers in their headbands, striding down over the hills. We would sit in the lavender fields quietly. She made daisy chains and strung them over her head. Oh, she looked pretty. We sang “À la Claire Fontaine.” We counted butterflies. We coaxed caterpillars into old matchboxes to examine them as they writhed. We picked apricots from overladen branches in July. We fetched milk and eggs from the neighboring farm. They had sheep out in front, their white collie herding them in. I was a happy little fellow. When horseflies stung me, she knew how to make it better. She’d blow on the ugly pink bite and hum a little tune for me under her breath.

A couple of times, in February, when the mistral blew strong and it was freezing, she took me to her father’s well-protected truffle field to watch him harvest the rare wild mushrooms from beneath the oak trees. His bitch was trained to sniff them out and locate them under limestone and roots. I loved watching the dog glue her nose to the ground, scratching the earth with her paws. The girl’s father then carefully extracted the truffles with his special spade. The mushrooms didn’t look like anything extraordinary to me, small, black, irregularly round, sometimes lumpy, but the girl’s father said they were priceless. He always made me smell them. Such a musty, strong odor. I wasn’t sure if I liked it. But when I took my truffle home, carefully wrapped up in a cloth, my parents were always pleased.

I need to choose the right words now. I have to explain exactly what happened and how it felt to me, as a child.

Go back to that child’s mind, those childlike eyes. Not looking back as a grown man. Say it right, say it true, even if it fills me with horror.