Once I even tried my hand at terrorism, but I didn’t last long — it gave me dreadful nightmares. The older I get, the less violence I can take. The beatings by the cops right under my nose, as if I didn’t even exist. The spitting in the face and the insults. You filthy whore of a traitor! Or: You harki bitch! The raids where I was made to stand in the front line outside the door without so much as a bullet-proof vest, so I could shout in Arabic: Police! Open up!

At some point, enough was enough.

Mainly I translated telephone intercepts: for the drug squad at 36 Quai des Orfèvres, for the Central Bureau for Illicit Drug Traffic Control in Nanterre, or for criminal investigations at the Second District of the police judiciaire, aka the DPJ. But with technological progress, and because I’m Patience Portefeux, the-French-woman-who-speaks-Arabic — that is, a woman above suspicion — I was allowed to withdraw to my own home and work on audio files at my computer. And when my mother had her stroke and my daughters wisely fled my cantankerous presence to rent with friends, I shut myself away like a hikikomori.

It was around this time that I threw myself into translating the inane conversations of drug traffickers. To afford the 3,200 euros a month I was being charged by the aged care facility where I’d had to send my mother, I was forced to churn through them at a rate of knots. Translation pays if you work like a dog. You get 42 euros for the first hour, 30 euros thereafter, and when you calculate the number of hours yourself, you quickly arrive at quite a tidy sum. You also end up with a head about to explode — with horror stories often, because it’s the interpreters who filter out the baseness of human nature before the police and judges have to confront it.

I’m thinking in particular of the death agonies recorded on mobile phone that I once had to listen to during a case involving a settling of scores. Did anybody rush me off to a psychologist to look after me? And yet it was truly awful.

Asba, Patience, fissa — just do the translation, and hurry up about it . . .

Just one of the many reasons I couldn’t give a shit about any of them.