But he was all in. He was slumped in his chair, panting, too weak even to hold his glass. It took him quite some time to recover. For a while he sat staring into the darkness and biting his lip, then he stood up and headed for the bathroom. But he stopped in the middle of the room and climbed into the big phosphorescent cube. When he was up there, he didn’t move. He stood there for a while looking down at the floor a couple meters below. By the time I figured out what he was planning to do, it was already too late. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him pull that stunt, but I thought at least by now that was something he’d had enough of. He swayed a little on the edge of the cube, then dropped to the floor face-first.

I elbowed my way through the crowd. He was lying facedown on the linoleum, so still it was quite scary. Someone touched him on the shoulder with that cautious revulsion with which we touch strangers who get sick in the middle of the street. I turned him over as gently as I could. His beard was smeared with blood. “Lucky Strike,” he said calmly. That was all he smoked at such moments. I passed on the request to the waiters nearby and before long a Lucky Strike arrived. I lit it and put it between his lips.

“Let him smoke it,” I said to the waiters, who wanted to get him back on his feet. “He’ll get up when he’s finished.”

And, in fact, it wasn’t long before he asked me to help him up. I walked him to the bathroom, waited at the door of the stall while he finished throwing up, then washed his face with a handful of wet toilet paper. He had a black-and-blue bump right in the middle of his forehead. “Christ, what a knock,” he said, touching himself with his fingertips. “Feel it, it’s throbbing like a heart.” I also tried to clean his shirt, but that only made things worse. “Forget it,” he said. “I have a whole lot of shirts.” To get out, we had to go back across the room, but he didn’t want me to help him. He was walking very upright, his trunk stiff. After a suicide attempt, you always need a lot of dignity.

He refused a taxi and we set off on foot, but he immediately grew tired and we had to sit down on the steps of a basilica that rose imposingly in a deserted square. He lit a cigar and let his gaze wander along the outside wall of the basilica until he saw a little door. He got up and went to see where it led. We found ourselves in a cloister enclosed by columns carved from boulders.

“Christ,” he said, “more rocks.”