Does he remember me? No, but like Byron perhaps he has words filed away in the back of his mind, mantras, repeated actions and hazy concepts which declare, there is a woman you cannot remember, these are her qualities… If this were a hospital in Iceland, or rural Russia, he would absolutely be asking those questions now, wondering how a woman of my description came to be in this place. But this is Nîmes, and the French have a colonial history as long and ignoble as the British, and the south is full exiles who crossed the waters from Algeria in the 1960s, of travellers from the west coast of
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