“I remember a girl sitting at the next table in the Flore. I had been ogling her for a while, not only because her profile was vaguely reminiscent of Stella’s (an Algerian Jew, presumably) but because everything about her—looks, eyes, mien—was simply screaming with loneliness. She sat there, crushed beneath the terrifying ordeal of being human, the curse that dooms us to live in an eternally irreconcilable dichotomy: on the one hand, we are herd animals who can’t get along without one another and who are unhappy alone; and on the other hand, we are prisoners in the cage of the self, unable to escape, unable to reach the other, unable to find salvation from ourselves. . .

“This was so tremendously eloquent in the girl’s wan face that I had to keep peeking at her. She couldn’t ignore this in the long run, and when I stared very hard, she turned to me and our eyes met. At first, it was very beautiful—or it might be better to say, very pure—in a bleak way. We knew what we wanted from each other and what, in the best case, we could expect. We were agreed without having to pretend we had come even a millimeter closer together. I motioned to the waiter and paid for my Pernod and her coffee. It was only when we were on the street and trying to decide where we wanted to go that we first exchanged words.

“I could have taken her around the corner to the rue Jacob. The apartment was available. Dawn had taken flight again and I had temporarily given up looking for her. But she might return at any moment. So we went to the girl’s place. It was far away, on the boulevard Extérieur.

“I don’t have to describe what happened in that dump, which was unfit for human habitation. It was stereotypical, starting with the horror in her (and probably also my) eyes when we set about doing the dreadfully intimate initial manipulations of sexual intercourse, then, on top of that (registered, horridly enough, in full consciousness), the raging, one against the other, which in spite of everything did occur, and finally, the heartrending silence, which neither of us dared break, since a wrong syllable, a false tone, might have led to murder.

“Because she lived on a dead-end street, an absurd one-way street to boot, I had parked my car out in the boulevard. It was shortly before evening. The stores and offices had already closed, and even a nearby gas station was shut. Oddly enough, I can’t remember the season. I know I didn’t have a coat—but I seldom wear one, even in winter. You go from heated buildings to heated cars and then back again into heated buildings. So you don’t really need a coat. But I believe it was the evening of a long summer’s day. The precarious hour before darkness, when the Paris sky displays a full, an absolutely inexhaustible gamut of oppressive, heart-stopping stages of decay. The lava of cars flowed in two opposite torrents, roaring and glistening metallically along the boulevard. And there were swarms of pedestrians: the street teemed and crawled as with termites, pouring from all sides toward a black whirlpool, a vortex which, like a funnel, sucked in the thronging vermin, gulping it down in masses. The entrance to a Métro station, of course. Evening rush hour.