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Lodi bridge, the Little Corporal is born, the myth is underway, Bonaparte will pursue his adventure into Russia, passing through Egypt—he will land in Alexandria two years later with the idea of carving out an empire for France like that of British India, and the dead will be strewn not along the shores of the Adda but around the slopes of the pyramids: 15,000 human corpses and a few thousand Mameluk horses will rot at the entrance to the desert, the ripples of worms will give way to swarms of shifting black flies, on the channels of blood absorbed by the sand, there where, today, it’s tourists that succumb to the blows of vendors of postcards and all sorts of souvenirs, in Egypt the flies are innumerable, not far from the Fertile Valley, on the slaughtered cows hanging in the covered markets, irrigated by putrid ditches where the blood of sacrificed animals calmly flows, the smell of dead flesh must have been the same after battle, the flies always win, I rest my head gently against the window, pressed by the speed in the half-light, sleepy from the memory of the dense heat of Cairo, of the dusty mango trees, the shapeless banyan trees, the dilapidated buildings, the pale turbans of the porters and the boiling fava beans that made the dawn stink as much as the livestock hanging in the sun, a stone’s throw away from the British embassy where in the 1940s spies swarmed the way stoolpigeons do today, in a nameless boarding house on the top floor of a building whose elevator shaft served as a garbage chute where there piled up, as far as the second-floor landing, ripped-open mattresses and rusty bikes, my room had by some miracle a little balcony and at night, in the entirely relative calm of the city that never sleeps, I looked out on the dark strip of the Nile with the smell of catfish, streaked by the plunging lights of the new opera house on the island of Gezira, magnificent silurid with long luminous mustaches, I read Tsirkas’s Drifting Cities , without really understanding it, without recognizing in the schemes of the shadowy figures in his pages my own steps as an international informer, just as today, sitting below my suitcase, motionless at over a hundred kilometers an hour, I let myself be carried through the twilight without perhaps really being aware of the game I’m taking part in, of the strings that are pulling me as surely as this train is carrying me towards Rome, and in that gentle fatalism that weariness and insomnia push you into my eyes get lost in the middle of the December evening among the frost fireflies the train illumines at intervals on leafless trees, life can seem like a bad travel agency brochure, Paris Zagreb Venice Alexandria Trieste Cairo Beirut Barcelona Algiers Rome, or like a textbook of military history, conflicts, wars, my own, the Duce’s, Millán-Astray’s the one-eyed legionnaire or else before that the one in 1914 and so on ever since the Stone Age war for fire, a good soldier I arrived at the Gare de Lyon this morning right on time, what a funny idea I hear myself saying on the phone, what a funny idea to come by train, I guess you have your reasons, I don’t have any, I think, I simply missed the plane and in the train that brought me to Milan, half asleep, I dreamed—how long has it been since I took a train—about the Spanish War and the Polish ghettos, probably influenced by the documents in my briefcase, whose computer ink must have flowed onto my seat and penetrated my sleep, unless it was Marianne’s diaphanous fingers with the bluish veins, in this point of inflection in my life, today, December 8 th , I dreamed, sitting between two dead cities the way a tourist, swept along by the ferry that carries him, watches the Mediterranean flow by under his eyes, endless, lined with rocks and mountains those cairns signaling so many tombs mass graves slaughter-grounds a new map another network of traces of roads of railroads of rivers continuing to carry along corpses