Letter from Casablanca

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I don’t know why I begin this letter talking to you about a palm tree when you haven’t heard anything about me for eighteen years. Perhaps because there are many palm trees here. I see them from my hospital window waving their long arms in the torrid wind along the blazing avenues that disappear in whiteness. In front of our house, when we were children, there was a palm tree. Maybe you don’t remember it because it was pulled down, if my memory does not fail me, the year the event took place — in 1953, therefore, I think in summer. I was ten years old.

We had a happy childhood, Lena. You can’t remember it, and no one could talk to you about it. The aunt with whom you grew up can’t know about it. Yes, of course, she can tell you something about Papa and Mama, but she can’t describe for you a childhood that she didn’t know and which you don’t remember. She lived too far away, up there in the north. Her husband was a bank clerk. They considered themselves superior to the family of a signalman, a level-crossing keeper. They never came to our house.

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