He moved away and stood at the window, shaking his head in vexation. It was already dark. The blues that ­invariably overcome me when the days start getting shorter suddenly gripped my heart. All this sounded too much like an end-of-the-romance explanation; I was frightened. My affair with Mathieu had got under way a little too slowly and now what seemed to be a dénouement was taking place with absurd haste. I felt we were close to a break-up and instead of wanting to fight, to preserve what had been the first happiness I’d allowed myself in years, I only wanted to give up. Was it the night that had fallen too quickly, catching me unawares, was it the sense of fatality I’d inherited from my mother, which colours everything that happens to me in melancholy tones? All I wanted to do was give in to the numbness that lay in wait for me, perhaps because of Mathieu’s silhouette at the living room window, a sad composition in grey and black, slightly out of focus actually, because my eyes were wet, a picture that was so disturbing in all its quiet sadness. Everything was still, inside as well as outside, and I felt helpless.

I switched on a lamp to chase away the lethargy that was preventing me from keeping Mathieu there with precise, definitive arguments. We’d been talking for a long time and I don’t think I’d said one intelligent word. This banal ­incident—two uninvited guests showing up at the wrong time—wasn’t going to screw up my life! I couldn’t come up with anything better than a pitiful: “I don’t stop you from seeing your friends!” which I knew was unforgivably ­idiotic even as I said it.

Mathieu snickered.

“You don’t even know if I’ve got friends. You’ve never asked! Sometimes I think as far as you’re concerned I came into the world when I stepped into your field of vision! I had a life before I met you, you know, and I seem to be giving it up so I can fit into yours! I’m not saying I don’t want to, but you should know it isn’t easy! It’s hard to be called a ­parasite by people you’re meeting for the first time, even without any witnesses!”

He sighed, came back to the armchair, and lit a cigarette.

“We’re going around in circles and I’m talking bullshit. I’ve said all this a thousand times and we both know it by heart . . .”

I slipped my hand onto his neck, where he loves to be stroked.

“You’re talking bullshit and I can’t think of anything to say. It’s not what you’d call a constructive dialectic . . .”