‘You are insolent,’ she said, relieved to find an explanation for the incomprehensible words I’d just uttered, certain that it would be enough to return to the habitual ways, to convention, to commonplaces.

‘You’re a fool,’ I retorted, intoxicated by my new-found certainties. ‘And this conversation is absurd. You think you have power but you’re like the rest of us, reduced to receiving your share of food from enemy hands and with no means of punishing me if I rebel against you. Seeing as they forbid any authority other than theirs, you can neither beat me nor make me go without. Why should I obey you?’

This time it was clear that she wasn’t taking in a word I was saying. I think she’d rather have gone deaf. She muttered, fidgeted a little, then signalled to two younger women to come and help her up, even though she could in fact manage unaided. She returned to her usual position at the other end of the cage. The women stared at her intently, without daring to ask any questions. She closed her eyes to give the impression she was thinking, and fell asleep.

‘It’s because she’s old,’ said the younger ones. ‘An ordeal like that is too much for a woman of her age.’

They resumed their chatter and I returned to my story. I was back in the gloomy cell where I was in solitary confinement. I wasn’t injured—the guards were always careful not to resort to blows. I was huddled in a corner, terrified, and my humiliating posture shocked me. Crouched and trembling—was that fitting for someone who’d just confronted one of the most respected women in the cage, looked her in the eyes and told her she was a fool? Dorothy had been lost for words. I felt a delicious shiver. That was, I think, my first intellectual pleasure. In my imaginary cell, I had to stand up, and now, I had to smile and defy them. It was hard to concentrate on the story, I’d enjoyed the minor battle I’d just waged, and I wanted to savour it, but it didn’t cause the eruption because the young guard wasn’t part of it, so I summoned my inner discipline to return to my private world.

If the women had had any sense, they’d have let matters rest there. It was still possible to pretend that nothing had happened and avoid an unequal battle. I’d realised that I was as strong as they were and that not confiding a secret, which is within everyone’s grasp so long as there is no torture, immediately makes the secret seem infinitely precious. Their knowledge on the subject of love had seemed to me the ultimate object of desire when they’d refused to share it with me. Now, I scorned their pettiness, I told myself that in other times I’d have got what I wanted from the first boy who came along. In asking it of the women, I was granting them a prerogative that they’d never had, and it only underscored my ignorance. But now their curiosity was aroused, it was their turn to feel excluded and scorned. I’d found the eruption to console me: they remained disgruntled and powerless, sustained only by their gnawing exasperation. They began to watch me.