I pretended, for two reasons, not to recognize him. Firstly, so that he did not regard my eagerness as a sign of my love—which would have put me in an awkward position in relation to him. Though the fact is, I was wasting my time, for he admitted to me later that he had read everything in my eyes the first time we met. “I could tell right away. I could see you got a kick out of being next to me.” Secondly, because I had seen him until then in the company of big shots, particularly pimps who couldn’t admit me to their clan since I was a newcomer, and I didn’t want to look as if I were playing up to them by associating too openly with one of them whom I had no right to treat otherwise than I did them. Furthermore, I had a feeling that the crashers were at odds with the pimps. . . . It was he who came up to me and put out his hand.

“Hello, Jean!”

I still don’t know how he knew my name.

“Hello,” I answered casually, in a tone of indifference and in a very low voice—but I stopped:

“Well?”

His lips remained slightly parted after whispering that word. There was no telling what his question was about, and his body was hardly at rest for his whole body was questioning. “Well” meant “How goes?” or “What else is new?” or “What’s up, kid?” or all of them together. I didn’t answer.

“Say, you look healthy! I don’t know how the hell you manage, but you always seem rarin’ to go!”

I shrugged slightly. A prisoner who did not know us stopped on our stair on his way down. Bulkaen looked him in the eyes in such a way that he dared not say a word to us; he dashed off. Bulkaen’s gaze delighted me with its hardness. I could tell what my fate would be if ever such a gaze transfixed me, and what followed frightened me more, for in order to alight on me his eyes grew milder until they were only a moonbeam quivering with leaves, and his mouth smiled. The walls crumbled, time turned to dust, Bulkaen and I remained standing on a column which kept raising us higher. I don’t think I even had a hard-on. The prisoners continued on their way down in silence, one by one, invisible to our solitary encounter. There was a great rustling of leaves, and Bulkaen screamed at me:

“How the hell do you manage? You probably eat your head off!”

I still didn’t answer. He continued his whispering, very low, without ceasing to smile, for we realized that behind the bend of the stairway the guards were counting the prisoners on their way down to recreation. Behind the walls, the commissary, the offices. We had to speak very low. Also behind, the Warden, the countryside, the free people, the towns, the world, the seas, the stars, everything was close to us though we were far away. They were on the watch, they could take us by surprise. His smile tried to put them off the track; Bulkaen muttered quickly: