For this is precisely my situation. A screenplay is expected of me in eight weeks: a screenplay after a treatment that I delivered six months ago and that since then has been reworked by me and other screen-writers seven and seventy times. Waiting for it are not only my producer piglets, but also (hired by them and ready to start filming) an entire staff in Cannes. Chief among them, in the Negresco hotel, Nadine Carrier, an international star in the waning phase that is transfigured, if not completely lost from sight, by the nimbus of outstanding thespian ability.

Madame Carrier is already waiting for me here and now, in Paris, at the Hôtel de Crillon. Ready to participate in the treatment. Not only artistically (may the LORD preserve me!) but also personally: with an open Thou-soul striving toward my own self (and, needless to add, with the attendant hospitably open thighs). She’s already been waiting for eight days. That’s how long I’ve been lost to the movie world.

I’m playing a risky game. Of the eight weeks I’ve got for the treatment, I’m trying to use four for different ends. If nothing else it would mean twenty-eight days of peace and quiet. I’d live in a hotel (expensed, naturally): ideal conditions for a writer. The advance I’ve drawn is enough to cover Christa’s alimony and my son’s monthly allowance (my two most ruthless creditors). The piglets have to leave me in peace, it’s in my contract. It’s only Nadine I have to keep at a distance—both physically and, sadly, emotionally as well. But I’d have twenty-eight whole days and nights for my book! . . .

•

—My book—

That sounds as if I were carrying it within me like Nagel carries one of his: like a divine mission . . .

as if, in the flood of printer’s ink inundating us, I were chosen to create the maelstrom that could stir up the human race; I, the conscience of our race (as if this race still existed as a race and as if yet another pang of conscience might help it):

the book that bears witness to man in the second half of the twentieth century and to his heroic effort to save himself from himself:

—Prometheus as fire captain: using the brittle hose of humanity to put out the fire the spark for which he stole in its, humanity’s, name;

Daedalus astray in his own labyrinth: shouting warnings to others not to follow him;

Noah in the deluge of overpopulation: doubting whether he is truly the only righteous man to choose from,

the tragicomical hero at the end of a civilization, who (in order to carry out his mission with clean hands, hands that violence has not desecrated) has no way out other than literature—