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understand how, with a threat like that hanging over him, Monsieur Sauveur could come and go like everybody else without looking sad.
    “Your father is his right-hand man. He started working for him as an office boy, at the age of sixteen, and now he can sign for the firm.”
    Sign what? I found out later that my father was in fact the managing clerk and that his position was just as important as my mother had said.
    He went back to his old job, and we gradually got used to living together in our flat, where my mother was never mentioned, although the wedding photograph remained on the sideboard.
    It had taken me some time to understand why my father’s mood changed so much from one day to the next, sometimes from one hour to the next. He could be very affectionate and sentimental, taking me on his knees, which rather embarrassed me, and telling me with tears in his eyes that I was all he had in life, that that was enough for him, that nothing mattered in life but a son.…
    Then, a few hours later, he would seem surprised to find me at home and would order me about as if I were a maid, bullying me and shouting at me that I was no better than my mother.
    Finally I heard that he drank, or to be more precise that he had started drinking, out of grief, when he hadn’t found his wife waiting for him on his return and when he had heard what had happened.
    I believed that for a long time. Then I thought about it. I remembered the day of his arrival, his shining eyes, his jerky gestures, his smell, the bottles which he went to the grocer’s to get right away.
    I caught odd phrases when he was talking about the war with his friends, and I guessed that it was at the front that he had got into the habit of drinking.
    I don’t hold it against him. I have never held it against him, even when, reeling about and muttering swear-words, he would bring home a woman he had picked up in the street and lock me in my room.
    I didn’t like Madame Jamais wheedling me and treating me like a victim. I avoided her. I had got into the habit of going shopping after school, cooking the meals, doing the washing-up.
    One evening, a couple of passersby brought in my father, whom they had found lying unconscious on the pavement.I wanted to go for a doctor but they said that that wasn’t necessary, that all my father needed was to sleep it off. I helped them to undress him.
    Monsieur Sauveur only kept him on out of pity, I knew that too. Several times he was insulted by his managing clerk, who, the next day, would beg his forgiveness with tears in his eyes.
    That isn’t really important. What I wanted to show was that I didn’t lead the same kind of life as other children of my age and that when I was fourteen I had to be sent to a sanatorium above Saint-Gervais in Savoy.
    When I set off, alone on my train—it was the first time I had ever taken a train—I was convinced that I wasn’t going to come back alive. This idea didn’t make me sad, and I began to understand Monsieur Sauveur’s serenity.
    In any case, I would never be like other men. Already, at school, my poor sight had prevented me from playing any games. And now, on top of that, I was suffering from a disease which was regarded as a taint, a disease which was almost shameful. What woman would ever agree to marry me?
    I spent four years up there, rather like here in the train; I mean that the past and future didn’t count, nor what was happening in the valley, still less in the faraway towns.
    When I was declared to be cured and sent back to Fumay, I was eighteen. I found my father more or less as I had left him, except that his features were softer, his eyes sad and frightened.
    When he saw me, he studied my reaction and I realized that he was ashamed, that in his heart of hearts he wished I hadn’t come back.
    I had to find a sedentary occupation. I started work asan apprentice to Monsieur Ponchot, who ran the town’s big piano, record, and radio shop.
    In the mountains, I had got