RAYMOND GALLE

I was born in Salin-de-Giraud, a working-class town wedged at the mouth of the Rhône.
It’s not a place I would urge anyone to visit — clouds of mosquitoes rise from the marshes,
 and the migratory birds that pause there soon take flight again, haunted by the dread that one day the waters will consume everything. It is a fear well-founded, in a land forever wavering between earth and water. Faced with the slow and certain advance of the sea, this region will soon vanish. But did it ever truly exist? Even before my parents came, it was already fading, and afterward, we ourselves belonged to no one.

My father, a factory worker, spent his entire life tending the lime kilns of a Solvay soda plant. My mother worked too — seated by her window, her existence unfolded in the raising of her children

and in the ceaseless motion of her knitting machine's carriage. My two brothers and I grew up in the streets of that workers’ housing estate - a southern echo of the mining towns of Belgium. Around us stretched a flat, hostile, waterlogged land, untamed and immense.  My childhood, I sometimes think, took place on another planet.

More than an end of the world, it was a beginning - an origin, a dawn. It was not a destination but a  point of departure.  Nature surrounded us, yet culture felt infinitely distant. Naked from the sea, the first man must have risen there to set forth on his conquest. It was from that very place that I longed to leave.

With all the strength I possessed, I thrust myself out of the delta to join, at last, those who seemed ahead of me in life's race for its blessings — people I did not know, but whose distance I felt in every gesture. At the boarding school where I arrived, they spoke of culture — which, they said, meant schooling the mind not to covet what belongs to others. I understood nothing of it, for I coveted nothing another possessed, nor did I wish to possess anything myself, save the key that might open the door to freedom.

From the notion of work, I kept only what my parents had taught me : regularity, patience and the slow satisfaction that comes from a day wholly spent. None of the jobs I later held ever spoke to me in that language; none ever gave me that fullness.