MargenI live on a street named for a gentleman no one remembers anymore. No plaque with dates, no great deed: a surname, that's all.
I asked at the tobacconist's, at the haberdasher's, asked the newsstand man who knows everything: nobody knows who he was.
And yet his name appears on our letters, on the parcels, on the contracts, in the first address the neighbourhood children learn by heart.
There is a second death, they say, when your name is spoken for the last time. This man was granted the opposite: to be named every day by couriers, taxi drivers, lovers giving out his street the way you give a place to meet, and even so to be remembered by no one.
I don't know if it's a tribute or the politest form of forgetting.