At irregular intervals, articles are published under the title "Poetics of Childhood“Here we present books from contemporary French literature that address this phase of life in a literary way.
Where we come from
Nathacha Appanah's autofictional work La mémoire délavée (2023) is a multifaceted exploration of family origins, colonial history, and identity. At its heart lies the literary exploration of the history of the author's own ancestors, who came to the island of Mauritius as Indian indentured laborers (engagés) in the 19th century. The title itself hints at the central theme: the blurred, faded memory—both individual and collective—that must be reconstructed through oral tradition, family anecdotes, gaps, and archives. This search is simultaneously a return to the author's own childhood: back to a time in Piton, a Mauritian village, to a childhood marked by silence, fragments, and unspoken traumas. Childhood appears in this text as a biographical origin, a literary starting point, and an epistemological horizon: through the child's wonder, sensory perception of the world, and existential questions about "where we come from," the text takes shape as a poetic space of memory.
Jusqu'à l'âge de 6 ans, j'ai vécu with mes grands-parents and mes parents à Piton. The village is located in the Venelles, the chemins de terre cabossés or the fallait faire attention à ne pas trébucher sur les racines adventices. In my spirit, the device comes with a mixture of colors and matières, with large flaques of ombre and soudaines percées de lumière. C'est an endroit d'un other temps. Les chemins de boue et de poussière, les rideaux en dentelle aux fenêtres, les autels colorés dans les cours, les chiens, les poules, les coqs, les chèvres, les barres de fer qui dépassent des toits comme des antennas, les grands arbres aux troncs préhistoriques, les fleurs épaisses rouges jaunes orange, les hommes aux visages burinés, les femmes with the point rouge on the front, les langues qui se mélangent, hindi, bhojpuri, créole. D'aussi longtemps que me souvienne, je me suis toujours sentie à la fois au center de ce village et étrangère à lui. My world is a trend between my grandparents and my parents. Les premiers étaient des descendants de coolies, mariés avant la puberté, laboreurs une grande partie de leur vie, analphabètes. Les seconds available to you instructions, my father's function as a minister of agriculture, my mother is a teacher of the écoles, it also has a great ambition for the intellectual world, for social advancement. Les premiers s'habillaient toujours dans ce meme coton mou, les seconds portaient des pantalons pattes d'ef' et jupes courtes. I understand the language intrinsic to my grandparents, the rhythm of which is always the same as the sun; Our existence is available to a sense of immediacy and concrete. There are also a few of the ambitions of my parents for my brother and my father, both of them are in high places, of objects in view, of these nombreux projects that are available for all of us. Pendant les first années de ma vie, j'ai évolué entre le monde ancien de mes grands-parents et celui de mes parents, progressiste, volontaire mais pas encore tout à fait équipé des moyens de leurs ambitions. Pendant ces années-là, à Piton, heureusement, on m'a laissée vivre avec l'illusion que l'enfance est éternelle et que je n'avais pas à faire un choix entre ces deux mondes.
Nathacha Appanah, La mémoire délavée, Mercure de France, 2023.
Until I was six years old, I lived with my grandparents and parents in Piton. The village was a maze of alleyways and bumpy dirt tracks where you had to watch your step to avoid tripping over weed roots. In my memory, it's a mix of colors and materials, large patches of shadow and sudden flashes of light. It's a place from another time. The muddy and dusty paths, the lace curtains in the windows, the colorful altars in the courtyards, the dogs, chickens, roosters, goats, the iron poles sticking out of the roofs like antennas, the large trees with their prehistoric trunks, the dense red, yellow, and orange flowers, men with furrowed faces, women with a red dot on their foreheads, different languages blending together: Hindi, Bhojpuri, Creole. For as long as I can remember, I've always felt both a part of this village and a stranger within it. My world was a balancing act between my grandparents and my parents. The first set were descendants of coolies, married before puberty, and had spent most of their lives as farm laborers, illiterate. The second set were educated; my father was a civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture, my mother a teacher. They had great ambitions to be intellectually successful and to climb the social ladder. One set always dressed in the same soft cotton clothes, the other wore bell-bottoms and short skirts. I understood my grandparents' language, their rhythm, which seemed to synchronize with that of the sun; their lives had an immediate and tangible meaning. Sometimes I was a little afraid of my parents' ambitions for my brother and me, of all the high standards, the goals to be achieved, the many plans they had for the four of us. In the first years of my life, I moved between the old world of my grandparents and the progressive world of my parents, who, while determined, didn't yet quite have the means to realize their ambitions. During those years, I was fortunate enough to live in the illusion in Piton that childhood lasts forever and that I didn't have to choose between these two worlds.
The author begins her reflection with the image of starlings—the birds that appear in moving flocks in the sky—and compares them to language, to memories, to migration itself. Again and again, images from nature, from childhood, from the sensory world are invoked to give expression to the unspeakable nature of the past. Between poetic meditations, historical contextualizations of colonial engagement, and deeply personal recollections, a polyphonic narrative unfolds in which childhood becomes both theme and stylistic form.
Knowledge and memory
The figure of the lost child runs like a leitmotif through the work—a repeated oral tradition according to which two children of the family were lost upon arrival in the port of Port Louis. This childhood in limbo, this unlived life, becomes a symbol of loss that can only be given form through poetic writing. Appanah's childhood in La mémoire délavée It is more than just a phase of biography; it is a matrix for the writing itself. The child's perspective permeates the entire text, not only as the subject of the narrative but also as a mode of perception. Just as children often explore the world with an insatiable thirst for meaning, the narrator approaches her origins: tentatively, questioningly, and by combining different elements. This process of discovery is not linear but rather a back-and-forth between experience and imagination, between archive and anecdote.
J'ai also in my heart of two moments. J'y ai pensé constamment au course de l'écriture de ce livre mais ils emblent exister à part, refusant de se glisser dans le cours du récit.
The premier is drawn to the house of Piton. Ma grand-mère me lave sous this shower astucieuse et merveilleuse que my grand-père a bricolée with a pommeau d'arrosoir des champs. Je ne sais pas pourquoi ce jour-là elle est en sous-vetements – d'habitude elle reste en sari et se fiche bien d'être complètement trempée. This is the first time that I have heard of the corps. Son ventre forme plusieurs plis. This is a woman who is a young woman and has two children. These jambes are fine, the water is still in the bottle and it's not the same as me. Je suis frappée par la color crème de son ventre, de sa poitrine, de ses jambes. The salle de bains était faiblement éclairée and j'avais l'impression que son corps Luisait. Le reste de son corps – son visage, son cou, ses bras – est bronze, color marron glacé. There is a sentiment that makes me believe this day in an aspect of the secret of the person. This color is crème, the same thing as the outside, it is beautiful ; Elle appartenait dans mon esprit à ces femmes qui posent dans les magazines de mode que ma mère lit de temps en temps, des êtres éthérés, à la vie lisse et parfaite. J'associais this color aux gens privilégiés, protégés du malheur. This is a young child in old age, déjà, I don't have access to the little girl who is already beautiful when she is available to the peau claire. Pendant quelques secondes, je n'ai pas reconnu ma grand-mère. It touches the vent with the main savonneuse, it comes to the surface with the help of you can verify that this color is in the same color as the leurre, the make-up. Elle a ri.
Souvent, je pense que si elle n'avait pas travaillé toute sa vie au soleil, c'est ce teint-là qu'elle aurait gardé ; When she is a child, this is the color of the material that is available. When she is married with my grand father, her body is now available to her.
After a few minutes you can see what you're wearing with a sari, it's all the possibilities of the corps that you can imagine, in another context, without contradictions, without problems. Everything is also superb.
Nathacha Appanah, La mémoire délavée, Mercure de France, 2023.
Two moments are particularly dear to me. I thought of them constantly while writing, but they seem to stand on their own and not want to be integrated into the narrative flow.
The first one happened when I was a child living in Piton's house. My grandmother was washing me under this ingenious and wonderful shower my grandfather had fashioned from a watering can sprinkler head. I don't know why she was wearing underwear that day—normally she stayed in her sari and didn't care that she was completely soaked. It was the first time I had ever seen her body. Her stomach had several folds. It was the stomach of a woman who had given birth to more than ten children. Her legs were thin, her skin loose, but that wasn't what shocked me. I was struck by the creamy-white skin of her stomach, her breasts, and her legs. The bathroom was dimly lit, and I had the impression that her body was glistening. The rest of her body—her face, her neck, her arms—was tanned, an icy brown. I felt that she was revealing a secret side of herself to me that day. This creamy-white skin, like fresh whole milk, was so beautiful; in my mind, it belonged to the women who posed in the fashion magazines my mother occasionally read, ethereal beings with smooth, perfect lives. I associated this color with privileged people, protected from misfortune. I was still a child, but at my age, I was already aware that a girl was considered beautiful if she had fair skin. For a few seconds, I didn't recognize my grandmother. I touched her stomach with my soapy hand and began to gently rub her skin, as if to check whether this color was just an illusion, makeup. She laughed.
I often think she would have kept that skin color if she hadn't worked in the sun her whole life; as a child, she had this milky complexion. When she married my grandfather, her naked body radiated this glow.
After gazing at her skin for a few minutes, skin that had been covered by a sari her entire life, I now imagine all the possibilities this body holds, in a different context, without constraints, without trials. She, too, is beautiful.
Childhood thus constitutes a poetic principle: a space of questioning, not of knowing; of seeing, not of proving; of feeling, not of recording. In this mode, sentences like "Je veux une dame-jeanne qui se transforme en chapeau" (I want a lady-jeanne who transforms into a hat) emerge, generating poetic images to capture the unavailable and fragmentary nature of memory. The author herself names this need: not only to tell stories, but to question the act of telling itself. "Je veux dépasser le récit" (I want to transcend the narrative), she says—and in doing so, she chooses a path that stylizes childhood not as a closed phase, but as a paradigmatic mode of thought: associative, tentative, contradictory.
Poetry and play
Appanah's language in La mémoire délavée It is characterized by strong imagery and a rhythm that resembles an inner monologue more than a conventional narrative structure. The language is circular, circling around central motifs (sea, memory, names, numbers, body), repeating, tentative – much like childlike speech: fragmentary, emphatic, and imbued with emotion. This poetic speech not only evokes childhood but becomes a poetic body itself: the words flow, flicker, and elude – like children who cannot be held onto. Language becomes a "seconde peau" (second skin), a term Appanah herself uses to connect the literary form with her own body – it is a language that feels rather than explains. A striking example is the scene in which the narrator describes how, as a child, she ran impetuously towards the sea – a scene that exemplifies the emotionality, the directness, but also the existential weight of childhood experience: The sea, a symbol of origin and migration, becomes here an existential projection surface for childhood longing and fear.
A poem.
J'écris mes grands-parents et mes parents et mon enfance et this maison à Piton et ce domaine sucrier à Antoinette et this plantation à Camp Chevreau et toutes ces histoires cousues ensemble dans a grand poem en verse libres. A mot un étourneau des mots des étourneaux a phrase une forme une beauté. Je tords la langue pour qu'elle adopte this forme, mon père surgit avec sa voiture au coin d'un vers et disparaît, je ne peux pas le retenir, pas comme ça, pas dans ce moule. The noircis des pages et des pages de ce que j'appelle poésie et ma grand-mère est statique comme sur les photos, mon grand-père est flou, the manque quelque chose. Je dis esprit mais je veux dire cœur. If you think it's like milk, you'll have metamorphoses in two parts that are loud, the concrete on the surface.
Personne de ma famille ne pourrait lire ça, ça parle d'eux pourtant ça les aliène. It is not comprendraient rien à ces phrases, à ces ellipses, ça vire, ça tourne, ça serpente, this narration is opaque. Je drape la langue et la forme autour de mon corps comme une seconde peau, je ne pense qu'à la figure éphémère qui apparaît dans le ciel.
Ce soir, les étourneaux sont nombreux, ils ne murmurent plus, ils crient. Leurs formes obscures et épaisses comme l'intérieur des grandes bouches me font battre le cœur un peu plus vite. Ce ne sont que des oiseaux. This is not the case with my grandparents.
I start again.
C'est peut-être plus loin encore dans le temps que cette chose se trouve. Avant la naissance de mes grands-parents, sur ce bateau qui a transporté mes ancêtres et ça pourrait ressembler à un récit d'aventures with le black de la mer, le gris des houles, le bleu de l'île et le vert des champs de canne mais ce serait encore travestir This history with the colors and the atours of fiction. This is a source of irony, another exoticism.
If you open the vernis sur chaque page, you can use this peau-apparatus sous laquelle le récit est nu, le récit est sincère, le langage est celui de l'eau, de la terre, de la night. Il ya des absences, de grands pans d'histoire tombés dans le vide et je reste des jours au bord de ces gouffres, je n'arrive pas à les contourner, je voudrais fouiller les abîmes avec mes yeux me salir les mains à force de les plonger dans matière retrouver le goût de ce qui est perdu mais elles sont à jamais, ces absences.
Quand revient the temps of the étourneaux, my visage is souvent levé vers le ciel crépuscule dans l'illusion d'y apercevoir avec clarté et sincérité mon propre récit de migration, d'y lire le début, la beauté, l'intention, la forme et le secret. This is not the voile of a boat, but it is also just of the sea and it is beautiful, also, just of the sea.
Nathacha Appanah, La mémoire délavée, Mercure de France, 2023.
A poem.
I write about my grandparents and my parents and my childhood and this house in Piton and this sugar plantation in Antoinette and this plantation in Camp Chevreau and all these stories, woven together into one great poem in free verse. A word, a star, words, stares, a sentence, a form, a beauty. I twist my tongue to make it take that shape, my father appears in his car at the corner of a verse and disappears again, I can't hold him, not like that, not in that form. I fill page after page with what I call poetry, and my grandmother is static like in the photographs, my grandfather is blurred, something is missing. I say spirit, but I mean heart. I want it to flow like honey, for the hat to turn into a veil, but the words are heavy, like concrete.
No one in my family could read this; it's about them, but it alienates them. They wouldn't understand these sentences, these ellipses; it twists and turns, this narrative is opaque. I wrap language and form around my body like a second skin, forgetting what I want to say, forgetting my beating heart, simple and fragile, thinking only of how this skin shines, thinking only of the fleeting figure that appears in the sky.
There are many starlings tonight; they no longer whisper, they squawk. Their dark, dense forms, like the insides of large mouths, make my heart beat a little faster. They're just birds. They're just my grandparents.
I'm starting from scratch.
Perhaps this story dates back even further in time. Before my grandparents were born, on the ship that transported my ancestors. And that might sound like an adventure story, with the black of the sea, the gray of the waves, the blue of the island, and the green of the sugarcane fields, but that would again be a distortion of this story with the colors and splendor of fiction. It would be, ironically, another form of exoticism.
You have to strip away the varnish from every side, peel off this sumptuous skin beneath which history lies naked. History is honest, its language is that of water, earth, and night. There are gaps, large chunks of history that fall into the void, and I stand for days on the edge of these abysses. I cannot avoid them. I want to gaze into the abyss, to get my hands dirty by dipping them into this matter, to rediscover the taste of what has been lost, but these gaps are there forever.
When the starlings return, I often gaze at the evening sky, in the illusion of seeing there, clearly and honestly, my own migration story, reading its beginning, its beauty, its purpose, its form, and its mystery. It is not the sail of a boat, it is only starlings, and it is beautiful, just starlings.
A central structure of La mémoire délavée This is the fragment. Memories don't assemble linearly, but rather emerge from building blocks: photos, numbers, narratives, rumors, family myths. This form of memory resembles a child's play with puzzle pieces – assembling, adding to, changing, and discarding. The narrator doesn't just write... over childhood, but Who A child: She thinks aloud, she formulates hypotheses (“perhaps…”), she shifts perspectives, she imagines alternatives. This poetic process resembles the construction of a memory space with childlike seriousness and playful freedom. “I think…”, “it seems to me that…”, “I don’t know…” – these uncertainties are not weaknesses, but poetic potentials. At the same time, this imagination is constantly reflected upon: The author is aware of the “disguise” of stories; she names the “habiller,” the dressing up of memory, as a poetic yet problematic process. Thus, in the language of childhood, what is remembered is also revealed: that which is missing, that which hurts, that which remains speechless.
Loss and Taboo
Childhood in La mémoire délavée It is physical. It appears as a site of touch, vulnerability, smells, tastes, and postures. Memory is a sensory memory—it draws from somatic experience. Skin, water, warmth—all this is part of a poetic memory that feels more intensely than it knows. This becomes particularly clear in the motif of the numbers assigned to the engaged people: 358444, 358445, 358448. The narrator speaks them like a mantra, whispers them like a child who doesn't want to forget. These numbers represent the erasure of names, the reduction of a person to a digit—but at the same time, they also contain the desire to restore dignity to these people through language. In the language of childhood, the body is ever-present: as an expression of the unspeakable, as a bearer of memory, as a resonating chamber of history. The child who cries, who runs, who feels—it is a subject that embodies memory.
The archives do not reflect the exact history, everything is permeable with confusions, anachronisms, everything is influenced by the context of the documents, human errors, times that pass and leave, has a dossier that mixes with another person, A photo that is décolle and glisse. This is an imparable memory.
Pourtant, il ya des échos qui traversent le temps, et quand je regarde ces trois fiches et ces deux photos que j'ai étalées devant me, j'ai l'impression de m'approcher d'un événement qui est arrivé en 1872 à la descente du Bateau et qui, plus d'un siècle plus tard, is devenue une rumeur familiale. This is not a vérité qui éclate, this is the impression d'avoir un mot au bout des lèvres et de ne pas pouvoir le dire à voix haute.
Il ya plusieurs années, ma mère m'a raconté une anecdote qu'elle avait entendue lors d'une fête familiale, un mariage probablement. J'aimais ces fêtes-là quand j'étais enfant et que mes grands-parents étaient encore vivants. It is available to three generations of our family, and the branches don't grow together infinities and immortals: the cells of my grandparents, brothers and sisters, cousins; celle de mes parents, de leurs frères et soeurs, de leurs cousins ; la mienne, my brother and my cousins. C'était une même bulle bruyante, rieuse, désordonnée mais chaque génération avait son espace: les anciens dans la cuisine ou l'arrière-cour, les young adults dans le salon or dans le jardin à jouer aux cartes, au domino, à boire des coups, etc nous, les enfants, partout à la fois, in les jupes des mères, sur les genoux des grands-parents, in les arbres, caches in les armoires qui sentent la naphtaline, or sous les lits for a partie de cache-cache. It also has several languages in these bulls – créole, hindi, bhojpuri, telugu, français, anglais, franglais –, and parfois, in the milieu of the rires and repas, it also has the choice of avant qui se révélaient.
I have confidence that my child will arrive in Port-Louis. Dans le cafouillage du débarquement des engagés au dépôt, l'enfant, en bas âge, aurait lâché la main de sa mère et plus personne ne l'aurait revu. This is very important in this history and I don't have questions about the veracity. It is a grand idea with the ancients racontent forme an intimate and emotional history that participates in the construction of the tragedy or the bonheur. Je prends l'habitude " d'habiller " ces histoires dans ma tête avec des couleurs, des paroles, un décor et je suppose que " habiller " is a further mot pour incarner mais qu'est-ce que j'en sais, moi, je ne suis alors qu'une gamine. C'est également un moment où celui qui raconte – la grand-mère, le père, la mère – quitte son identité et sa responsabilité d'adulte pour redevenir un enfant, un adolescent, quelqu'un avec un champion des possibles devant lui. There are times in these histoires, both with children and adolescents.
Même si pour mon premier roman, j'ai use et abusé du mot roman, je n'ai pas pu m'empêcher d'y introduire ce drama: un des engagés perd en effet son enfant dans la cacophonie de l'arrivée. This is not a part of the central tram and there is no concern for my people in principle, but this incident is exactly the same as the tragedy of migration: the bruit et la fureur des mouvements de masse, les départs, les arrivées, les cris, on pousse, on tire, on tombe, on lâche la main de sa mère, la foule emporte, on disparaît à jamais.
Nathacha Appanah, La mémoire délavée, Mercure de France, 2023.
Archives are not an exact reflection of history; they are susceptible to confusion and anachronisms, influenced by the context of the documentary footage, by human error, by the passage and fading of time, by the chance of one file being mixed with another, by a photograph coming loose and shifting. It is an imperfect memory.
Nevertheless, there are echoes that endure through time, and when I look at these three index cards and the two photographs I have spread out before me, I feel as if I am approaching an event that occurred in 1872 when we disembarked the ship, an event that has become a family rumor more than a century later. It is not a truth that emerges, it is more the feeling of having a word on one's lips but being unable to speak it aloud.
Several years ago, my mother told me an anecdote she'd heard at a family gathering, probably a wedding. I loved those kinds of parties when I was a child and my grandparents were still alive. It was the three generations of our family, a tree whose branches seemed endless and immortal to me: my grandparents', their siblings and their cousins; my parents', their siblings and their cousins; my own, my brother and my cousins. It was the same loud, laughing, messy bubble, but each generation had its own space: the older ones in the kitchen or the backyard, the young adults in the living room or the garden playing cards, dominoes, or drinking, and we children everywhere at once—in our mothers' skirts, on our grandparents' laps, in the trees, hidden in mothball-scented closets, or under the beds for a game of hide-and-seek. Within this bubble there were several languages – Creole, Hindi, Bhojpuri, Telugu, French, English, Franglais – and sometimes, amidst the laughter and eating, things from the past would come to light.
My mother told me she'd heard that my paternal ancestors had lost a child upon arriving in Port Louis. In the chaos of the hired soldiers landing at the depot, the child, who was still very small, had let go of its mother's hand, and no one had ever seen it again. This story deeply moved me, and I never questioned it. I grew up with the idea that what the elders told was an intimate and emotional story, contributing to the construction of their tragedy or happiness. I got into the habit of "dressing" these stories in my mind with colors, words, and a setting, and I suppose "dressing" is another word for embodying, but what do I know, I was just a child then. It's also a moment when the storyteller—the grandmother, the father, the mother—sheds their adult identity and responsibilities to be a child again, a teenager, someone with a field of possibilities before them. I liked being with that child, that teenager, for the duration of these stories.
Even though I overused the word "novel" in my first novel, I couldn't avoid including this drama: one of the volunteers loses his child in the cacophony of arrivals. It's not part of the central plot and doesn't involve any of my main characters, but I felt this incident so aptly evoked the tragedy of migration: the noise and fury of the mass movements, the departures, the arrivals, the screams, pushing, pulling, falling, letting go of your mother's hand, being swept away by the crowd, disappearing forever.
A central, deeply moving motif is that of the lost child—who, according to family tradition, was lost upon arrival in Port Louis. This story, half rumor, half reality, is passed down from generation to generation—like a quiet murmur, a whisper that no one can fully verify, yet no one can forget. These "children of memory" represent the transgenerational trauma that remains as present as it is unspeakable in colonial memory. They embody the rupture, the speechlessness, the invisibility. But also the longing: for wholeness, for rediscovery, for redemption. The poetics of childhood in this work is always also a poetics of grief—it wrestles with words, with images, with empathy. Poetic storytelling becomes a form of remembrance, an ethical gesture. And the lost child becomes the cipher of a collective wound that can only find form in language.
Childhood as a prism
In La mémoire délavée Nathacha Appanah unfolds a multidimensional poetics of childhood. Childhood appears as a theme – for example, in memories of her own youth in Mauritius; as a perspective – through the associative, fragmentary, sensual language; as a method – through the playful combination of archival materials and family myths; and as an ethics – in the gesture of remembering the child who was not seen, not heard, and did not survive.
Appanah's text unfolds like an excavation, descending deep into the layers of one's own origins—not to find the one truth, but to embrace the beauty, the fragility, the unresolved as part of remembering. Childhood, in this work, is a prism through which the family history shimmers, fractured and fleeting perhaps, but luminous nonetheless.
I demand a combination of generations for a different memory.
My grandparents don't remember anything, they rest in the ombre of the flowers, they look at the sea. Est-ce queurs aînés leur avaient parlé de l'eau black?
Mes parents, eux, ne craignent pas du tout la mer. Mon père, par example, aime rodent loin of the mountain just has a point sombre qui fleet. Souvent the rest of the property, je crois qu'il aime être seul comme ça, bercé, porté par les vagues.
Il est vrai que j'ai toujours une impatience qui me submerge quand je vois l'eau. It's an appeal. Se déshabiller vite, courir, sauter ou plonger, effectuer quelques brasses. Au début, toujours, c'est magnifique, c'est exaltant. Mais une fois dedans, vraiment dedans, this is another histoire.
Nathacha Appanah, La mémoire délavée, Mercure de France, 2023.
I wonder how many generations it takes for a fear to disappear from memory.
My grandparents never swam; they sat in the shade of the filao trees and gazed out to sea. Had their elders told them about the black water?
My parents, on the other hand, aren't afraid of the sea at all. My father, for example, likes to swim away from the shore until he's just a dark dot floating in the water. Often he lies there motionless; I think he enjoys being alone like that, being rocked and carried by the waves.
It's true that I'm always overcome with impatience when I see the water. It's a call. Quickly undress, run, jump or dive, take a few strokes. At first, always, it's wonderful, it's exciting. But once you're in, really in, it's a different story.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
