“She has a difficult job. All these kids, it’s good what she does.”

“She’s a lunchtime supervisor, Papa. She just serves them food, that’s all.”

“You think feeding kids is nothing?”

“Papa…”

The old man runs out of breath, and Manuel gets frightened. He’s sorry once again. “Did I tell you I’m working on a site in Bonnieux? We’re rebuilding a drystone wall, it was quite tricky, I wish you could have seen it.”

His father’s large eyes get lost on the window frame. “Tell the girls to come and see me.”

“… The boss said it looks good, so maybe next time round he’ll put me in charge of the team.”

“It’s not long now and they’re on holiday, so they can come.”

A new silence, worse than the previous one, marks the end of the visit.

There are magazines lying on the night table – La Marseillaise, La Provence – that are several days old. Manuel wonders who brings them to him. A nurse, perhaps. Or Séverine, who sometimes stops by to give his father a kiss on her way back from work. He forces a smile before leaving the room, and turns one more time to look at his father.

“I’ll tell them, Papa.”

Edward Bond

Edward Bond

“That was brilliant!”

The girl says it with the grave face of eternal faith. Jo clings to this fervour she’s just shared for forty minutes in the tiny Bourg-Neuf Theatre. There aren’t many of them here for the performance of Edward Bond’s Summer: five audience members, but the guy at the door said We’ll play anyway, it’s Avignon, it’s like that, there are too many theatres and too many shows, so five people in the audience isn’t too bad. He was wearing make-up, he was also acting in the play – and no doubt doing the driving, acting, taking the set down and doing the cleaning. The city is saturated with posters and people, too many, of course, a strange madness that’s a bit tackier every year. The Avignon Festival has taken on new identities. In the past, there was that magical excitement, the square in front of the Palais des Papes covered in magnificent savages, with or without costumes, acting or braiding long hair, reciting poetry even to the stones beneath their feet, sublime beggars. At night, parties and acrobatic, drunken climbing of the slopes of the Rocher des Doms despite municipal prohibition. They still have parties in the secluded enclosures of the palace courtyard and theatre back rooms, but between prohibitions and decrees, and increasingly right-wing social cleansing, every year Avignon looks more and more like a set, a Truman Show to which Parisians and tourists flock during the festival. Everybody agrees that the festival is even better than before.