Villa Bunker (French Literature) by Sebastien Brebel Page A

as he slowly turned the pages, as though they were the pages of some rare and precious book; in our eyes, these photos are worth more than the most precious work of art, they are our works of art, the only works that matter to us. One day we begin to doubt our memories, we realize that our memory is faulty and that most of what we remember is distorted, and since our memory is flawed, we decide to reject outright everything we remember, relying instead on photographs, which have become in our eyes the only true memories; we consult these photographic images more and more frequently, and by examining these photos in the light of our critical judgment, we forget our own memories—that’s why we’re so attached to photos of ourselves as children, and to ones of our parents, but we’re also just as attached to other family photos, and in a general way to every photo in our possession. It’s not unusual to find, among these family photos, pictures of people we can’t identify, beings we can’t name and who are strangers to us. We’ve glued their photos to the album’s pages, next to the other photos, and soon, after contemplating their image, we get to know these beings, who wind up almost becoming part of our family. A photo of a perfect stranger can make us think we know and understand this stranger’s personality, as though we had a relationship with the person depicted in this photograph. We come across a picture of a stranger and we are immediately engrossed and caught up in this stranger’s world, we begin to have a certain feeling about him, and we act as though we know this being from a prior period in our existence. Once we’ve looked at this photo carefully and immersed ourselves in it, we can no longer forget it, we don’t know who took this photo, and we don’t have any information about the person in it, we examine his clothes, relying upon their style to date the photograph, and more often than not we can’t even manage to track down the stranger’s name. This stranger’s name and personality have been erased, all that’s left is his image in an old snapshot, which we consider without being able to look away—and frankly we can no longer feel indifferent to this photo. The stranger in the photo can smile all he wants, but we aren’t fooled by this smile, we grasp right away that this stranger feels an infinite sadness; in a flash of insight, we get in touch with the stranger and read his thoughts as though in a book. So it’s impossible for us to destroy a photo like this, even when it’s out of focus and hasn’t come out right—that is the one sacrilege we refuse to commit. Destroying this photo would amount to a serious affront to the person found in the picture, it would be like a crime committed against this unknown person who has become in our eyes strangely familiar. And when all is said and done—after we have stared at these photos of some stranger or another—we turn our attention back to the photos of our parents, and we tell ourselves that they’re the ones who have become strangers, they’re the ones we now don’t recognize and who seem distant and strange. I realize the photos are of my parents, but I also realize that what I am looking at is not my parents, but rather actors or extras who merely resemble them; these people have put on my parents’ clothes and are simply imitating my parents’ gestures. And try as they might to look just like them, they aren’t my parents anymore, they are instead fictional characters with the grace and composure of immortal beings, they are two inaccessible beings striking a pose for eternity.
    70. By chance, she found one of the first snapshots of the villa on the floor, slid under a bedroom door. Had the photo fallen out of his pocket, or had he left it there intentionally? The photo reminded her of a bookmark left inside an old tome. It was, in my mother’s exact words, the first clear sign of an illness that had taken years to