For “Le Temps”, all summer long, Frédéric Pajak revisits some of the cities of his life. Towns in the north, towns in the south, each plays its part, secret or manifest, in the journey of the writer-draughtsman. find here all episodes
In the river of oblivion, I bathed without drowning. It is good to go and hunt the memory, and not to bring it down or hurt it. Just capture it, put it in a cage and observe it. If he gets scared or gets too excited, you have to give him his pittance. At forty, I left what was hindering my life. I first rented a room in a village in the Grand-Saint-Bernard valley, in the northwest of Italy, under the Pointe de Barasson. A village called Etroubles, which the mountain annihilates with its shadow from the middle of the followingnoon. I spent dozens of nights there; it was cold in the middle of summer. I then lived in a modest apartment in the center of Aosta. Two large bedrooms opening onto a balcony, an even larger bathroom. 1960s construction, thin walls, but marble floors. A five-storey building, of ordinary ugliness, smeared with beige, located rue de la Tour du Lépreux, a tower built on the ruins of a Roman building, called for a time the tower of Frayeur because the inhabitants believed it to be haunted by ghosts, notably a tall woman dressed in white, prowling around a lamp in her hand.
