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and left. Not quite running, but moving fast, I made it back to the house. I was terrified (I could already envision myself in a straitjacket, trying to explain to muscle-bound syringe-wielding nurses that I was Alberto, a colleague of the Greek psychiatrist) and furious (enough crap had already happened to me for one day); so I headed straight for the phone, only to remember, just as I was about to dial his girlfriend’s phone number, that he hadn’t left it. I started to search through the house for clues of any sort that might help me to discover her identity. Nothing.
    On the other hand, I found something that gave me food for thought: a shopping bag full of condoms. Greek condoms. I’d never seen anything like it. There were hundreds of condoms, enough to stock a nuclear fallout shelter. In one drawer, I found an address book that gave me a moment’s hope, but evidently the guy was friends with half the population of Paris. The address book was crammed with names and phone numbers.
    Before giving in to despair and accepting the idea that I was going to spend the next three days as a prisoner in an insane asylum, I decided to try my luck with a few phone calls. I singled out a series of phone numbers that corresponded to women’s names without surnames, imagining that they all might be friends. The first phone call was also the last one. Monique was very adamant that the psychiatrist wasn’t at her house. She only saw him once a week, since she was his patient.
    Twenty-four hours later, I ran out of cigarettes. It was a terrible weekend. About ten days later, I moved out of that damned hospital and into a new place in the Place de la République neighborhood.
    I had found a place to live and a job in the same area. I was working as an usher in a movie house owned by a Portuguese guy. The movie house didn’t attract many customers. The movies were definitely high quality stuff, but really boring. He would schedule things like a week of Angolan film, or Vietnamese movies in the original language, with Russian subtitles. In France, the only money that ushers make comes from tips, so from time to time, I attempted to persuade the owner to show something a little more commercial, but there was so little interest in third-world cinema in Europe that the Portuguese owner, rightly, preferred political commitment to profit.
    Next to the movie house was a major punk club, the Gibus. Brawls were a nightly occurrence: inside, among the club-goers, and outside, between punks and North Africans. The neighborhood, once inhabited by middle-class families, had slowly declined through the strange urban alchemistic process typical of big cities, and even though it was in the heart of Paris, it had become cheap enough for the lowest classes of immigrants to live there. I could have afforded better, but I hadn’t found anything. I was living in an apartment building that had known better days; now, however, it was a warren of studio apartments, one-room cells no bigger than two hundred square feet, swarming with rats and cockroaches, where entire families paid rents of a thousand francs a month to live in crowded squalor. I was the white tenant in the building. Gaining acceptance from my neighbors wasn’t easy, nor was finding a character who would fit in with the location. A Bernard wouldn’t live in a neighborhood like that one. I selected a “mask” that would work only there, and that forced me to stay in the neighborhood for months: José, a Spaniard, who wore
camperos
boots and blue jeans, a leather jacket and a dark-blue sailor’s cap. He worked at the movie house, but he gave the impression that he was involved in something shady. That was to keep the neighborhood kids from robbing me every night.
    I was coming home from work one night when I heard some young guys who lived in the building talking in the courtyard about teaching the punks a lesson. I was in favor of it myself; I