«My intention was to make a kind of memoir in which the narrator was only important thanks to the places through which he passed, the things that strangers told him or the handful of ashes that the past threw t him so that he would investigate the labyrinths of his memory.

»I do not present a chain of facts controlled by memory to elucidate a clear sense of the global experience, but a little mountain of experience that they don’t snag when blending into each other to compose an idea of the world, an unrepeatable identity or a self-portrait that improves the model. But the result needed to have an element of self-portrait: that of a timid person who preferred to compose the lines of his face by taking the lines of the faces of those to whom he once owed something important.»