The broad: a chance conquest. Not undeliberate: I’ve been separated from Dawn for over a month, haven’t touched another woman (to put it in cultivated terms); this probably explains a good portion of my hysteria, a symptom of abstinence I’m not used to. Besides, when it comes to monogamous relationships, I have an obnoxious tendency to overcommit myself—and one can see what comes of it, one can tell by the telephone bill. I am at the mercy of the women I love, I become burdensome, like any dependent does sooner or later; love is a child’s game—so cruel, so destructive, so ruthless, so stupid, and woe to him who loses, for in the struggle of the sexual organs there is no mercy, and the colder party has the upper hand. In short, I need distance—from Dawn, myself, the situation (hommage à Monsieur Benn!). Soon I no longer feel like a man; if a woman were to carry on the way I’ve been doing these past few weeks, she’d disgust you and you’d tell her to go to hell; with a man, this is really demeaning, humiliating. A matter of convention, I know; I can ask myself ten times a day why it’s not manly to love a woman, but it just isn’t, at least not the way I do it, it’s downright ludicrous, and who wants to be a slaveholder? But the broad is, as it were, a fitness exercise. An erotic lightning rod. A spiritual garbage incinerator. A marvelous person.

The broad. I got to know her when registering at the immigration office. As a stateless person, I had to renew my residency permit. As usual, hours were spent waiting in the corridor, wedged in between foreign workers and other ungroomed types, all of them my brethren: circus performers, peddlers, Maghrebinian students, Calabresi, Sicilians, Hungarian refugees, they change their countries but not their shirts, they smell of the shabby clothes they sleep in, hang around government offices, smoke foul-smelling cigarettes, cough up their mucus in the corner spittoon as if they were vomiting. Then who should come walking down the corridor but her: a very well groomed petite bourgeoise, bloody fucking middle-class, with the accent on the second adjective, I hope. Her clothes are as flawless as they are tasteless—a bottle-green suit with a nutria collar, a bizarre plant of a hat—the whole creature medium height, a bit plump, which I like (my Viennese formative years), in her late twenties (earlier, they can’t screw, too embarrassed or too curious, inhibited; anyway she probably lets go completely), correspondingly sassy—acts as though she didn’t see me, yet her nostrils flare like a mare’s at the stud station. The strenuous effort to take no notice of me makes her movements jerky; I sit poised on the bench, my legs crossed, I look her over with insolent thoroughness: the hat above all, the breasts (voluptuously snug in Maidenform), the handbag, the ass, the legs (excellent: narrow of ankle, full of calf; see my poor heart it’s split in half). My inspection ended, I look away again: neither satisfied nor disappointed, I have merely registered her; I soundlessly whistle a little tune over my lips, peering absently through the window into the pale coastal sky.