“It’s a moment, you know, Saleh? It takes just that one moment to see all of life’s truths arrange themselves in front of your eyes. And I saw it up there in that big, beautiful American country home. My boy was so happy there. It was as if he had two new brothers. I saw the joy in his heart. He had a family at last. And not just a gloomy Frenchman for a father who had wanted to be a war correspondent and instead ended up reporting about financial markets and trading in stock portfolios. Do you want to know when the moment came for me, the moment when I saw the light and knew I could walk away from everything without guilt, without remorse?”

“I am still sitting here listening, am I not?”

“Yes, you are. And I thank you. That American man who had taken my wife, he had built a dirt track for motorbikes at his country home where he taught his children and my boy how to ride. I had, honestly, not a shred of envy in me watching him. He was so capable, so able to build and fix and be the kind of man I was not. He had, if you will, joie de vivre in abundance. True abundance.”

“I guess that was good for your wife and son. No?”

“Yes. They had come under his protection. They too had developed joie de vivre. It was lovely to watch. But that moment, the moment I speak of, the moment of enlightenment, it came as I was taking a walk toward that dirt motorcycle track and I ran into my wife getting on the back of the American’s bike. My wife said to me, ‘We are going to the house to get dinner ready. Will you watch over the kids?’ Those were her exact words. Here I was in America, a land that I did not particularly like or dislike, in the house of a stranger who was sleeping with my wife, and I didn’t mind it at all. And I thought to myself: My God, Claude, what a waste your life has turned into! And I saw the joy in her face as she got on the back of that bike with him, a lovingness that I had never seen before with me, a joy that I was seeing in my son’s face too every day in that big country home. It was then that I knew the time had come for me to leave.”

I could not bear to sit in silence after a confession like this. So I immediately asked, “And then you hurried here to get yourself killed?”