 Chloë and I used to come here in the beginning of summer. We would go swimming and then lie on the banks to dry ourselves in the sun. While Chloë was absorbed in one of her books, I would study the beauty spots dappled across her back. This is how I learned to count (adding the largest ones together, subtracting the smallest and dividing them all by the blackest spots). But I had not yet learned how to read and write.
Chloë, of course, knew everything. She was the eldest. Her book was foxed with spots that resembled the ones on her back. As soon as she turned a page, I would look at the new spots. When their resemblance to the ones on her back was too great, I would ask her what the words around them meant. She taught me to read them. I learned the story of her book by heart when I mentally grafted it onto the spots on her back.
Then one day -- she had probably given me all she could -- I did not see her again.
I came back to the pond with other girls. But it was not the same. They were my age and did not bring any books along. I did not expect anything from them. I spent whole afternoons feeling bored in their company. However hard I looked at their backs, I found no interesting stories. My only fun was to watch the sun slowly redden their skin. At the end of the day, I would drop the dead skin that had peeled off their backs into the water. But the whiteness of the new skin underneath, its complete absence of pigmentation, seemed monstrously empty to me. I had to graft something onto it. I had to learn to write.
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 I always came here to rest my back against the oak to read my favorite books.
One evening, I was so absorbed in my reading that I did not even notice that night was falling. It was getting darker and darker but deep inside myself I could just not accept the fact that the Earth's mundane rotation could keep me from finishing the story. Then came the moment when the darkness was deep enough to prevent me from making out the least word. Despite all this, I decided to keep my eyes on the pages for the same length of time they would have rested there if were I reading under normal conditions. I hoped that in doing this, when day returned, the text captured in darkness would be revealed in the light.
I spent the night encircled by the frightening noises of the forest and had it not been for my absorption in the book, I would have been completely terrorized.
At daybreak, the first rays of the sun lit the highest branches of the oak. There is not a word in the world to describe the happiness with which I welcomed the light of day and the comforting song of birds. Yet this was the reason for my great disappointment, not a single word, not the slightest story had developed in my mind. It was obvious: I did not know the end of my book. And the simple joy of just being there was strong enough to keep me from discovering what, deep inside, the night might have given me. Had I not been careful, the joy would have filled me so completely that the stories sleeping inside me, the stories waiting for perhaps no more than a little sadness to come out into the world, would have been smothered.
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 When Chloë left, taking all of her big books with her, I was reduced to continuing my reading in the paperbacks books that were better suited to my meager pocket money. I continued to go read at the table at the end of the garden, but I encountered the greatest of difficulties in adapting to the narrowness of the pages.
Time and time again, my eyes ran off the lines and got lost in the whiteness of the margins ; and sometimes, the impetus would carry them out to the edge of the table. Then for many seconds, I would stare into space and think about the past. It took all the courage in the world to get back to my story.
One day I finally decided to take responsibility for the new shape of my life. I even accepted going to Chloë's engagement party.
Back in the garden, I surrounded my book with the photographs I had taken of Chloë's new friends. Thus, each time my eyes ran off the page, the sight of their faces made me avert my gaze in disgust and, like the carriage of a typewriter, I was shot back to the next line of my story with incredible force.
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 As a child, my grandfather used to climb up onto this roof to observe the movements of the enemy that had decimated my family. Later, my father spent hours up there, watching for the return of my grandfather who had been taken prisoner in combat.
Then my turn came. At first, I went up just to kill time. It is where I began to smoke cigarettes and read forbidden books without ever understanding what the danger was all about. The only real danger I ever encountered was the black smoke that came down in sheets from the chimney every time my father, inside the house, struggled over the fire. His father had disappeared before ever teaching him how to light one correctly.
One day, I was unable to stop a pack of soot from completely blackening the pages of my book. But when I lifted my thumbs, the print underneath them was still legible. Then I realized that on every page, a small part of the story had escaped me. I had to discover these little pieces of text that I had unknowingly kept hidden from myself and began the book over from the beginning, page by page, letting my thumbs fall instinctively and then lifting them to read what was underneath. But the words my thumbs had obscured made no sense. The thought of all that was being hidden from me was dizzying. Who could have helped me? Not my father, he did not even know how to light a fire. I began to scour the horizon in hopes that someone was coming to explain, my grandfather or even the enemy, I was ready to make a pact with the enemy! Suddenly, realizing how far off track my thoughts had taken me, how dangerous my book had become, I threw it down the chimney. Shortly afterwards, I heard my father shouting. It was the first time he had ever got the fire to really take.
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