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morning sun bathing his face made it seem even paler. He thanked me for my help. The Padre confided in me later that George was one of his closest friends: they had spent two years studying together in a Jesuit college where the cream of the Madrid bourgeoisie sent their children. They had lost touch, reconnecting by chance years later in a Paris nightclub…He recounted the story of their friendship for me without ever explaining what had made them so close. In any case, all three of us henceforth were linked by a corpse. We separated at the taxi stand on Avenue Matignon and agreed to meet up later that night.

    And so began what seemed to me a new life, but what seemed to all those who knew me the beginning of a resigned and aimless wandering. The Padre neither encouraged nor discouraged me from this new path; after all, he had been partly responsible for leading me into it. That daywe chatted on the phone, neither of us bringing up the morbid events of the night before except in terms of the possible negative consequences on my future. But I had become indifferent to my fate. A possibility, an opportunity even, was presenting itself, and I was abandoning myself to it, following an inclination that the naïve might call “natural.” I acquiesced to whatever presented itself without much arm-twisting, and I neither suffered from nor reveled in it: I was spared the exhaustion of searching and seizing. I was giving up a state of being that was in turn abandoning me and sliding into another that slowly, imperceptibly came to envelop me.
    Around six that night, I took a shower and dressed myself with an unusual attentiveness. I went out to eat in a little restaurant located on the slope of Montmartre. The little old lady who tended the stoves was very fond of me. Ever since I had found myself without any family ties, I had taken up the habit of dining in this restaurant frequented only by those of the neighborhood. Jeanne and her husband served a cuisine that was certainly lacking in refinement but that I found nostalgic, and I was in that sort of mood. Seated at a table with a very worn plastic tablecloth, my mind was racing: ideas and images were strung together in a film of uncertain speed, poorly montaged, often skipping and shifting. I pushed myself back in my chair and absent-mindedly played with the food left on my plate. Jeanne came over, worried that I hadn’t eaten enough. She sat down in the chair opposite me and wiped her hands on her black cotton apron. Faintly wheezing from her asthma, she stared at me without wanting to disrupt my daydreaming, waiting for me to confess the secrets she saw in my eyes. But I didn’t know where to begin, or how to recount the change happening in my life. Suddenly I smiled at her. She praised my unusual elegance, feeling the silk of my shirt. For the first time she saw the mark of the bourgeoisie on me. I had pulled these clothes from the bottom of an armoire where they had been relegated after I worethem for a series of flashy events that crop up in certain phases of life, those moments of urbane frivolity when one is suddenly caught up in a frenzied succession of parties, receptions, and salons. Jeanne was secretly admiring me in this outfit; it looked like something a posh person would wear. It was if I were eclipsing the modesty of her small café and the old-fashioned simplicity of her clothes with this intrusion of refinement. She commented on my appearance, highlighting with a sort of possessive avidity how nicely a classic haircut would accentuate my facial features. Then I explained the cause of this grand display.
    Jeanne had an outdated idea of high society: she both feared nocturnal adventures and admired this newfound luxury, this idea of a life of partying that only old money or the nouveau riche could afford. The difference between a nightclub like the Apocryphe and a cabaret or shady dive on the Place Pigalle remained obscure for her. She saw how