Alba is forty years old. She is about to start a grand tour. She wrote a ballet by listening to her memory. This narrative is her story, the one that shaped her, her quest for identity. An atypical and enchanting narrative.
“Seated on a stone block of the Tholos of Delphi, I listened to my memory.”
Memory holds a very special place in this narrative. Alba, who is now about forty years old, is about to embark on a grand tour where she will perform her ballet. From a very young age, Alba has had an astonishing memory. She is able to transcribe word for word parts of conversations she has heard. She learned to read and write in a month. And by delving back into her memories, in which dance and music play a very important role, she wrote her ballet, by listening to her memory.
“When nature has endowed us with eagle-like vision and the fine hearing of a cat, we are not aware, at least in childhood, of this superiority over others.”
Alba has always been different. Suffering from atypical autism, from a very young age she became passionate about things that seem insignificant to most people. While other children played video games, she preferred to cross the stream by jumping from stone to stone. She found pleasure only in nature and its wonders. Nature is ever-changing, whereas television is repetitive and tiresome. Naturally, she was neglected, sidelined, and left in indifference. She lived according to chance encounters and the vagaries of life. It is all these encounters that taught her, over time, to find herself. Her days spent in the hills studying nature with Fausto, her roommate Rose who led her to the path of being an “occasional escort,” her life with Jean-Paul the French teacher, her lover Azazel whom she met in Saint Petersburg, or her sculptor friend Maïssa. Everything is still very clear in her memory, so much so that she can recount them to us as if we were there. And in retrospect, Alba discovered two things: not only did these moments of her life shape her personality, but she is also capable of listening to them.
“I was born of stone and perhaps of water. My name is Alba. It is the only name that I have made my own, among all those that were given to me, or that I temporarily adopted, only to leave and abandon, as I often did with my clothes.”
We follow Alba’s journey, an orphan born in Syria and taken to France when she was still a baby. Throughout her life, she has forged new identities, as if she could not find her place in this world. Baptized Marie-Madeleine by the nuns, she became Marlène when she worked as a caregiver, she was nicknamed Galatée by the friends of the man she lived with for several years, she transformed into Roxelane with her lover Azazel…
Quest for identity. Awakening of consciousness. This intimate narrative by Roger Baillet is an extraordinary slice of life. I was captivated from start to finish by Alba’s story, which was transcribed with a lot of poetry and finesse.
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