I asked him the date and place of birth of this Jacqueline Delanque. The date, also, of their marriage. Did she have a driver’s license? A steady job? No. Did she have any family left? In Paris? In the provinces? A checkbook? As he answered me in a sad voice, I jotted down all of those details that are often the sole things that bear witness to the passage of a human being on Earth. Provided that one day someone finds the spiral-bound notebook in which they were recorded in a tiny, difficult-to-read script such as my own.