I’ve been wandering around Europe for more than a month now, still retracing my father’s footsteps. I was travelling back through time. It was the story of my life. I can’t cope with being in France, with being at home, with the day-to-day routine. Too much had happened. The company finally fired me, Ophélie finally left me, my health wasn’t too good. And there was nothing I could do about any of it. To be honest, I had seen it coming but I did nothing, I just let it come. On a battlefield, such stoic acceptance and self-sacrifice would have marked me out as a hero, but I did nothing because in the situation I was in, there was nothing to be done – the evil came from within. Everything inside me was broken. I was like one of those hopeless people whose great love has died, like someone who has survived a terrible disaster and goes into mourning never to come out. I had lost my place in the social order, in life, I was a pariah, I was my father’s son – I had been told as much by my friend, that ruin of a man, the great Adolph, aka Jean 134, son of the no-less-remarkable Jean 92. At work, it was like I didn’t exist: no projects, no meetings, no phone calls. The paperwork was in hand, just waiting for a signature, everyone was waiting. There was nothing to be done, the CEO was constantly on the move, looking for some new El Dorado. When the paperwork finally arrived, I left, and it was as though I had never worked for the company. One signature wiped away ten years of loyal service. All anyone remembered were the last six months, which, admittedly, were catastrophic compared to the successes of my first nine and a half years there. Monsieur Candela shook my hand, squeezed my shoulder, said, ‘Drop by the house anytime.’ He even had a tear in his eye, he’s always been a straight-up guy. I promised to drop by and I left. I’ve had enough of selling pumps and sluices, of cavitation problems that are always the fault of the manufacturer, never the fault of the client, I don’t give a damn about the terrible quality of their water, their oil, their milk, I can admit that now I’ve been relieved of my duties. Ophélie had reached the point of no return; in her mind, she had already left me, now she could breathe easily as she slowly put her affairs in order as though getting ready to move house. I didn’t say anything. From time to time, she would look at me, head tilted back, eyes half-closed, then she’d shrug and go back to her tidying. That’s how she’s always been, more worker bee than wife. Then, one day, she walked out. She left a note on the kitchen table. I read it and put it in a drawer. I knew that she was only doing what she had to do, I didn’t blame her. I couldn’t expect her to go on living with this frightening stranger. And she had no idea what was really going on, she didn’t know the stranger she was living with was the son of a monster who at any moment might turn into an SS officer and stuff her into the gas cooker. My body no longer sent out alarm signals, I had long since passed the danger point, now I didn’t feel anything except a slight sclerosis sometimes, a sudden confused urge to tear off my skin. I was distanced from life, and the distance had grown wider, the haze had thickened, the silence had deepened, the empty hours passed, the emptiness ever deeper. I was like the outsider the prescient Camus describes, an alien on earth, everything is here but nothing means anything. Perhaps I was dead but didn’t know it. How could I know, since in my state everything was relative and therefore equally unimportant?