This work speaks of ‘personal effects’, of those objects that are kept of a person who has gone. In this case the person who has gone is the child I was many years ago. And the personal effects are my memories, or rather what I think I remember of that time now. In summer, when I was little, my parents, my brother José and I would go from Barcelona to a large house that my maternal grandfather had in Rodez, in Aveyron (France). And there we would meet up with my cousins and aunts and uncles, who lived in Paris and Montpellier. It was a ritual. Every year. A sort of celebration, a reunion. I don’t know why, but the memory of that house has assumed an epic dimension in my memory… And it is certainly one of the places that my nose has preserved most record of. I remember the kitchen of the house, with its thick walls, and the smell of damp, which in the morning combined with the boiled milk, the bread and the coffee. I remember the bathrooms, which I would say smelled of wet wood or something like that, and of soap and of paper… And the corridors, like of furniture polish. And the smell of the fabric-covered walls, somewhat stale, and the presence of the wet grass smelt at dusk from the library, with the windows open… The house was sold long ago, and then turned into a hotel. No doubt they ripped out the fireplaces, the washbasin and the wall tiles. But I treasure in little bottles, in some corner of my neurons, the traces of all that, and I think that is the only thing that remains of that then. Xavier Mascaró