or Fontainebleau (park landscape in Technicolor: the foliage colorfully discolored—pretty much the only thing that, along with the breasts of aging international stars, still fills the word “resplendent” with substance);

occasionally, a quick and useless visit to the Boulogne studios to view the newcomers: new faces inspire new ideas . . .

sometimes, scribbling a few notes on some café terrace, for instance Fouquet’s—for sentimental reasons—if the tables are still out. (I don’t know if they really are. I’ve been locked up here too long, and it’s October);

once, at most twice, a week, dinner with Nadine, a chat and some fornication to avoid creative differences about the movie;

and in the very last week, a week of unleashed, unreflected writing (it wouldn’t be the first time, God knows);

in short, living the life.

•

After which, to be sure, I would reach the far end of never-never land: where you have to eat your way out through the enclosing mountain, and it’s not made of rice:

for six solid weeks: critical objections from the piglets (compared with whose artistic empathy Nadine’s is a gift of the Muses); at least six more weeks: changes from the distributor (it is not true that man is descended from the ape: the ape is a man who has imagined himself returned to nature out of shame of his humanity);

another six weeks: changes from the director (who, soon united with Nadine in spirit and in bed, has a dreadful say in the matter)—

summa summarum: four and a half months of coprophagia.

But that’s the normal steep cost of doing business: I have to take it into account.

•

I had taken it into account when planning to do what I had originally intended to do: misappropriate four of the eight weeks from the movies (and from cineastic existence) and write in monastic isolation through the blue-gold days and the quietly misty evenings—

not the agreed-upon screenplay, but my book . . .

I had pegged all my hopes on being able to do it. Finally to put together a part of this book large and lucid enough to convince Scherping that I was still worth another advance. That way I could have sent the piglets and their goddamn cinema to hell and I’d have been free for my book—

if my dream had not come to haunt me—and with it Schwab. I’ve squandered the last seven days and nights with the two of them—and thereby all the hope I set in my book.

•

My rotten experience in these past few days and nights (a morass of one hundred and ninety-two dream- and trauma-choked hours of powerless fury, disappointment, and despair over the contents of a half dozen suitcases, bags, and cardboard boxes full of disordered papers) teaches me that I cannot be precise enough in my notes: