By the time he came to the second case of wine, he was no longer able to leave the house. He lay on the sofa under a pile of rustling manuscript pages and had no intention of ever getting up again. But he had got up enough nerve to act—albeit not enough to look Nagel in the eye or even call him and tell him man to man what he thought of the form and content of his work in progress. (Even now, at my side, telling me the story, his goggle eyes widening in fear each time I innocently moved out of another car’s way, he expressed himself rather evasively.) He did not want to write to Nagel; a letter would be too formal, too callously depersonalized, and also too blatant an admission of his cowardice (déformation professionelle: the written word is reduced to a sheer defense barricade and we withdraw behind it). So, in order to show that he was a warmhearted friend, a sympathetic human being, and even in need of sympathy himself, and also to demonstrate his fine detachment from the message itself, he selected the modern device of the tape recorder—a flight into abstraction for which he would pay dearly.

Ingenious man! With the timbre, the brio, the tremolo of his abstracted voice (a voice at anyone’s disposal, so to speak), he hoped to express all the things that would excuse his lack of enthusiasm. Not the words but the voice alone was supposed to document his sincere interest, the honesty of his involvement, his conscientious perusal of the manuscript, the ordeal of reaching a verdict given the complex situation; likewise his admiration of the risk Nagel had taken, his hope that a second, carefully composed attempt might lead to eventual success . . . In words, this sounds quite discouraging, you know; but the voice ought to quiver in paschal promise, expressing everything that the meager word distorts . . .

and yet, forty-eight hours of isolation and the thirteenth bottle of wine gummed up his speech faculties rather badly. The first tape, he now surmised, must have sounded faltering. It probably consisted mostly of pauses, heavy breathing, tortuously begun and hastily concluded verbal digressions, frequent harrumphs, coughs, sudden spluttering assurances of sympathy—in short, everything that would try Nagel’s patience and annoy him in the extreme when he heard it—all this interspersed with the annoyingly undefinable noises of a smoker, matches being struck and cigarettes being put out too energetically in an ashtray, new cigarette packs furiously ripped open (his fingers already trembling violently; this increased the softness, anxiety, femininity, sensitivity of his hands, which, by the way, were very beautiful), and of course the clinking of glasses and bottles, gurgling, splashing, swallowing. (And Nagel had been teetotal for years now, never even touched a woman anymore, in order to devote himself entirely to his art—like that little Algerian painter, late at night at the bistro counter behind the place Pigalle: “Je donne tout cela à mon art!”)