I said almost nothing about my mother in my first testimony of the pass, except that she and my father were a young couple very much in love. And also from something she said, that she confided to a neighbor but which I overheard–it was perhaps banal–that was very painful: “Children are so ungrateful.” I placed this in the rank of paradoxical forms of recognition that I had gone through.

In one fell swoop I lost a country, an idiom, and the physical body of my mother. Beyond the persistence of that single statement that remained with me–almost–my memory of her was swallowed up along with many other things. The steamroller of effacement worked under the species of forgetting, dereliction, inhibition.

However, below the unforgettable utterance, three modalities of ciphering and deciphering by the unconscious succeeded in making its trace appear regularly.