ABSTRACT
When spring comes, the city’s inhabitants, by the hundreds of thousands, go out
on Sundays with leather cases over their shoulders. And they photograph one
another. They come back as happy as hunters with bulging game bags; they spend
days waiting, with sweet anxiety, to see the developed pictures (anxiety to which
some add the subtle pleasure of alchemistic manipulations in the darkroom,
forbidding any intrusion by members of the family, relishing the acid smell that is
harsh to the nostrils). It is only when they have the photos before their eyes that they
seem to take tangible possession of the day they spent, only then that the
mountain stream, the movement of the child with his pail, the glint of the sun on
the wife’s legs take on the irrevocability of what has been and can no longer be
doubted. Everything else can drown in the unreliable shadow of memory.
