I watch Marie-France for a while, listening to the excuses she invents and her lies about where she is and when. Like many women, she commits the cardinal mistake of wanting to make love with me more often than ever before, as if every legitimate hour with me offsets a forbidden hour with him. I’m touched by her inner turmoil. Sometimes I’d like her to feel ashamed, but ultimately I wish, for all our sakes, that we could simply be honest with each other.

I usually decline to have sex with her, and she’s relieved and simultaneously restless and suspicious. “Who are you sleeping with if not with me?” she asks one day when we haven’t held each other’s naked bodies for three or four months.

“How about you?” I retort. “Still sleeping with Claude?”

“I hate you,” she whispers, and I can see why. We hate people who don’t show any hurt when they’re being cheated on. Yet I genuinely don’t feel aggrieved. I don’t really care. I even hope she loves him: it’d do her a lot of good to love someone.

She suffers from the knowledge that I don’t love her, but the miracle that came into our lives is still powerful enough to bind us together—our miracle child, even if Sam is more foreign to her than to me.

I reckon that if her boss, Claude, were to separate from his wife, Chantal, tomorrow morning, Marie-France would have moved in with him by the evening. However, Chantal doesn’t make things as easy for her husband as I do for my wife.

I love Sam infinitely. He’s the miracle of the lack of love between Marie-France and myself, and occasionally when she comes home exhausted and relaxed from their tryst, reeking of white wine, Claude’s aftershave, and freshly laundered hotel bed linen, I quietly get out of bed and watch Sam sleeping.

So this is the meaning of life.

For the first time I understand men who don’t leave their families, even when they’ve fallen out of love with their wives. It’s because of these little people. These pure little people. Loving them is so simple and incurable.

Sam’s extremely sensitive to the outside world, for his only means of resistance to it are wailing, sleeping, or crawling away. I watch his tiny head swivel when he hears a pleasant voice or sound, but he turns away when he detects a tone of voice that he doesn’t like. He can hear lies, for example, and exaggeration and grief. He finds them practically unbearable, and so he cries.

Being with Sam seems to improve my perception of the world. He also reacts to spaces and places. We mustn’t walk along certain streets, and he once had a fit of crying outside the entrance to a building. I later discovered that someone had been mugged and killed there.