Sinister joy

I remember a bike ride with my family when I was a teenager in strange, dark autumn weather. The kind of weather that should be depressing but actually produces the opposite effect; a kind of sinister joy. My father and I had stopped at a village pub to wait for my mother and sister, who were lost on the way. The silence was almost total. No one was passing by. I was fascinated by this silence and this peace, under this heavy and grey sky, which appeared to me then as the sky that suited our region, our "race", for reasons that I was still unable to formulate.

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Over the years, I have travelled a lot through the same valley, following the river and the villages that lived on its banks. Sometimes on foot, but most often on bicycle. I dreamt a lot about it, too - and the places, and the bikes. Sometimes in my dreams we were large groups of cyclists, a real community, going further and further into this forgotten, peaceful, unspoilt rural area, at the very end of which was and still is a Gallo-Roman thermal town whose ruins can be visited. So it was a journey through space and time; leaving the town behind, pedalling with all one's might towards the past, towards the origins, under a grey, stormy sky, electric like a brain buzzing with memories that want to come to the surface of the consciousness.

Night routes

For a few months, when I was about thirty years old, I had a curious habit, born from anxiety, insomnia and loneliness; that of making many trips by car, at night, driving at random in the countryside, with a destination chosen at random but always far away and still unknown, with the very precise aim of feeling lost, of feeling far away, of feeling in the middle of nowhere, alone, in the darkness and the cold light of the moon, driving towards a place where nobody was waiting for me and where I had nothing to do.

Now that I think about it, maybe it was a way to act out what was my situation in life in general, and in a way to mimic it: being alone, being lost, being in the dark. Moving towards an unknown and hazardous goal, which I knew in advance I would not find.

Meyerbach

When I was about thirty years old, not long before I lost my mother, I had undertaken with my sister and her a visit of the places where our family originated, on her side. A farm, an uninteresting village on the side of the road... But there was also a day in this town near Paris where she took us to a large white house, rather decrepit, which reminded me of the few more or less abandoned houses belonging to the army on Avenue Joffre in my own town – a legacy of the German occupation after 1871. She explained that the house was called "Meyerbach".

It had become a kind of orphanage or home for troubled teenagers and young adults. We had an ancestor who had lived there when it was a mansion. Was he the master in question or an employee, I'll never know. The moment was quite moving; I was eager to enter this building to explore it, to discover it – whereas I had never wondered about the very existence of such a house, and would have passed by without paying the slightest attention to it if my mother had not pointed it out to us, I now felt the need to make it part of my life, to make it mine, or to make myself part of it, of its history, even of its present life, preparing, after all, to become an orphan myself, soon, and to wander through life like the young people who lived there.