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studying the menus, perplexed. She walks along the Boulevard Denain. At a bakery, she stops to buy a pain au chocolat with almonds. One small piece at a time, she consumes the soft, greasy confection, which she chews with the skill of an expert. Once the pastry is finished, she goes into Promod. The only people inside the store are women, their eyes riveted on the clothes hanging on rails at various heights. Pounding techno music complements the décor, making for a reasonably tolerable whole. By the entrance to the store, a young security guard is shaking his thick thigh in time to the beat. She observes him and wonders where his thoughts are sending him: a bar, a beer; to a football game, a serial on TV . . . After Work. She walks over to the displays. With one hand, she slides the hanging clothes along their rails. No one is talking around her. She picks out an item at random, though not without checking its size. She makes her way
over to the fitting rooms, where a young woman briefly asks her how many articles she has. The cubicle is cramped; with the curtain drawn, she has her nose pressed up against the mirror. Onto the single coat peg she piles the sweater, price tag still dangling, her jacket, and her tank top. Ten seconds later, the small bundle collapses to the floor, where she leaves it. She slips on the black sweater and surveys the result. Tugs it down, pulls up the sleeves, adjusts the neck, twists round to see the effect from the back, assessing whether any added appeal might be derived from the combination of this sweater and her chest. But everywhere the material is creased, too loose, makes her seem ugly. Needless to say, no 18-euro sweater is going to turn her into a model, and she concludes that it’s her body whose proportions are wrong, not the sweater. She slips back into her clothes—clothes she has worn long enough for them to fit. Outside the changing room, there is no sign of the salesgirl. She rolls the sweater up into a ball and stuffs it into her bag then proceeds through the displays, her eyes fixed on the automatic glass doors. She keeps her pace steady. She knows the alarm will be going off soon. The shoppers pay her no heed, not yet realizing that it is she who has made off with a measly 18-euro sweater from Promod. You earn your own living, don’t you, Miss? The security guard hasn’t spotted her yet either; his thigh is still moving to the beat, his eyes locked onto the beer he is going to drink two hours and forty-six minutes from now. She is coming up to the detector panels. The guard turns his head, sees her; she purses her lips but keeps on walking. The techno music slowly leaves her ears and is replaced by the din of car engines. She can now feel the tickle of fresh air on her face. She is out, the alarm has not gone off, she is safe. It takes her several seconds to grasp what has just
happened. She hardly dares smile, for fear that a passer-by will catch her expression and report her on the spot. The métro entrance is in sight, no one is going to point the finger now. An act gone unnoticed, lost amid a thousand others, missed by an infallible electronic device. Defiance in the face of technology and science, the system failed. Pardoned without even having been convicted. Only in her own eyes will she have been, at one time in her life, a black-sweater thief.
    Back home, she wolfs down a bowl of pasta garnished with bits of onion and tomato. Dinner over, she takes the sweater out of her bag. The security disc is tightly affixed to the wool. She fails to see how she might get it off. Giving up, she folds the sweater and puts it away with the rest of her things. Later, she dozes off in front of a TV serial in which the heroine, a woman in her forties who looks ten years younger on screen, can’t make up her mind between her taciturn husband on the one hand and her childish lover on the other, because she loves them both equally but not in the same way. Love.