These urban wanderings are punctuated by brief pauses in the cafés of Neukölln to down a quick beer; prolonged pauses in the lines outside kebab shops at lunchtime, long queues where people breathe steam into the biting cold, where they stamp their feet, where they hop up and down, arms folded, hands wedged under armpits. The doner is a Berlin institution; there are more kebab shops here than McDonald’s. Mauro will taste more than thirty during his stay, finally deciding on his favorite—made in a van at the Mehringdamm U-Bahn station. Crunchy slices of meat, sweet grilled onions, crisp fries, soft bread, the smooth sauce soaking through all of it, and hot, hot, hot: the perfect fuel.

These long walks are a way of orienting himself, of mapping the city in his mind, but they are also a way of giving himself space to think: while his body steams in the icy air, while he cleaves his way through the congested geography of a city in the midst of metamorphosis, it is his own life that Mauro maps out and orients, his own life that he elucidates.

Mile after mile, he goes over the past few years. The semesters in economics that he devoured at Censier until he got his degree, passing the final exams only by pulling an all-nighter, the sole burst of intensity in a year as transparent as glass, as soft as cotton wool; basking in the mud pool of collective sloth, the days veiled and the nights thickened by the smoking of joints, everything lost in a generalized haze with zero mnestic peaks showing through.… Fuck, where did those years go? The Lisbon parenthesis like a sun-soaked orange: the business school for young bourgeois heirs of the system, deserted in favor of an experiment in communal living, and all those roommates who were empty bellies, devoting themselves to four- or five-hour feasts consumed amid continuous talk, a confusion of tongues—Basque, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian—and Mia’s tongue playing with his; Mauro cooking enormous gratins, lemon blancmanges, French toast, all sorts of soups and broths; the endless supply of homemade jams and farmhouse charcuterie, treasures wrapped in newspaper and smuggled at the bottoms of gym bags. The “comedown” with the arrival of summer, the end of the Erasmus course, the master’s achieved, and it’s bye-bye, Lisbon, the death knell of the lovers’ banquet, and suddenly his life is a void, the future opaque. Then it’s all poverty and brooding, and the car breaking down on the drive home, in the courtyard of a Charente farm where his cousin lives with Jeanne. It’s midsummer; the countryside buzzes idly. For two months, Mauro does nothing. He has no plans, but he is sure of one thing: he will not go back to university in the fall.