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had died in the jungle. Maybe she was the woman who had lost her lover outside the house of my maternal grandfather, the prefect.

O ne day when we were deep inside the darkness of a cube van on our way to pick strawberries or beans, my mother told me about a woman, a day labourer, who would wait for her employer across from my maternal grandfather’s place every morning. And every morning my grandfather’s gardener brought her a portion of sticky rice wrapped in a banana leaf. Every morning, standing in the truck that was taking her to the rubber trees, she watched the gardener move away in the middle of the bougainvillea garden. One morning she didn’t see him cross the dirt road to bring her breakfast. Then another morning … and another. One night she gave my mother a sheet of paper darkened with question marks, nothing else. My mother never saw her again in the truck jam-packed with workers. That young girl never went back to the plantations or to the bougainvillea garden. She disappeared not knowing that the gardener had asked his parents in vain for permission to marry her. No one told her that my grandfather had accepted the request of the gardener’s parents to send him to another town. No one told her that the gardener, her own love, had been forced to go away, unable to leave her a letter because she was illiterate, because she was a young woman travelling in the company of men, because her skin had been burned too dark by the sun.

M adame Girard had the same burned skin even though she didn’t work in the strawberry fields or the plantations. Madame Girard had hired my mother to clean her house, not knowing that my mother had never held a broom in her hands before her first day on the job. Madame Girard was a platinum blonde like Marilyn Monroe, with blue, blue eyes, and Monsieur Girard, a tall, brown-haired man, was the proud owner of a sparkling antique car. They often invited us to their white house with its perfectly mown lawn and flowers lining the entrance and a carpet in every room. They were the personification of our American dream.
    Their daughter invited me to her roller skating competitions. She passed on to me her dresses that had become too small, one of them a blue cotton sundress with tiny white flowers and two straps that tied on the shoulder. I wore it during the summer, but also in winter over a white turtleneck. During our first winters, we didn’t know that every garment had its season, that we mustn’t simply wear all the clothes we owned. When we were cold, without discriminating, without knowing the different categories, we would put one garment over another, layer by layer, like the homeless.

M y father tracked down Monsieur Girard thirty years later. He no longer lived in the same house, his wife had left him and his daughter was on sabbatical, in search of a purpose, a life. When my father brought me this news, I almost felt guilty. I wondered if we hadn’t unintentionally stolen Monsieur Girard’s American dream from having wanted it too badly.

I also got back together with my first friend, Johanne, thirty years later. She didn’t recognize me, neither on the phone nor in person, because she had known me as deaf and mute. We’d never spoken. She didn’t really remember that she’d wanted to become a surgeon, even though I had always told my high school guidance counsellors that I was interested in surgery, like Johanne.
    The guidance counsellors would call me into their offices every year because there was a glaring gap between my grades and the results of my IQ tests, which bordered on deficient. How could I not find the intruder in the series “syringe, scalpel, skull, drill” when I could recite by heart a passage about Jacques Cartier? I only mastered what had been specifically taught to me, passed on to me, offered to me. Which is why I understood the word
surgeon
but not
darling
or
tanning salon
or
horseback riding
. I could sing the national anthem but not