Yes, the poor do not possess the luxury of having their own spaces; they don’t even fit in the margins of life; their own bodies close them in … Too literary a sentence, thought Mr. N. A bookish sentence, feeble and out of place, the sort of thing he would have to renounce, and cold turkey; just as someone who has given up cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs learns to fear even the presence of his old addiction, lest he succumb anew. Mr. N changed direction and, with it, the course of his thoughts.

He passed by a number of shrines and religious statues set in niches on the corners of those narrow streets. At their feet or between their arms had been laid the pictures of some “martyr,” some “bridegroom of heaven,” as they were called, unless they’d been dubbed “the nation’s lost”: those who had been killed in one of the big wars or else one of the many small ones, or maybe during a parking dispute, or because of an obscene word touching on the honor of someone’s mother or sister, or in a car crash, or on account of having the bad luck to turn up in the wrong place at the wrong time, or simply without any reason at all. Most of the shrines were to Saint Charbel, whose features were different from one shrine to the next, even if his beard and his long black robe were always the same. The ones that weren’t to Charbel were to the Holy Virgin, who kept watch at the entrances to houses, the corners of side alleys, and even on balconies. Her shrines came in various sizes, from the enormous to the minute, and in various colors, some a perfect shining white, and others showing the crimson of her lips and her blue cloak, the color of the sky. People always painted her as a young woman kneeling in front of Jesus on the cross, even though her son breathed his last at the age of thirty-three, and if she became pregnant with him when she was fifteen, she would have been pushing fifty when he died. Fifty in those days bore no resemblance to fifty today. Yet any wrinkles the artists had given Mary—and likewise painted onto the skin and hair of the Messiah, whom they had made a blond with blue eyes—were due to the rending pain of seeing her son first nailed to the cross and then giving up the ghost.