Summer was just over, and autumn was softening the faint tan that colored my skin. The streets were calming down after the chaos that had become a constant lurking presence in the cobbled streets. The table stood at a slight angle in the uneven street. Reggae music filtered from the restaurant, and I couldn’t help smiling when his face assumed an expression of amazement: I was well aware that this kind of music was as remote from him as it could be. He would have preferred somewhere discreet, a setting to which he could have applied adjectives like “delicious,” “exquisite,” or “charming.” He would have called this place “noisy,” “vulgar,” and “young.” But all he did was look at me and recoil from this place as best he could.

“It’s extraordinary how you manage to make me say things I’ve never said even to myself,” he said.

I just smiled. I wasn’t listening to him.

“When I talk to you about my ruined dreams, about the new life you’ve given me, for the first time I feel as though I’m not being judged. As though someone thinks highly of me. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”

I nodded, looking utterly bored.

He stopped talking for a few minutes and then, gazing at me intensely, asked, “What do you think of me?”

The last thing a man should ever do is ask me what I think of him.

I don’t think anything—what’s to think? If I love you I love you, if you disgust me you disgust me. Is that so hard to figure out? And you want to know what I think? I think you shouldn’t give a fuck what people think of you. I think you’re selfish and cowardly, and blind, too. I think you were so greedy for me that you didn’t even feel, while you were fucking me, that my body was as motionless and unresponsive as the expensive white wine in this big glass.

He looked at me with big eyes, like a whipped dog. He waited.

I took a sip of wine and replied, “I think you’re a good person.”

“You know, I’ve never felt free. Not even with my wife,” he said, not paying the slightest attention to the words I had just uttered.

I didn’t feel like talking. He felt like talking. I let him go on.

“I always have this vise around my heart, my brain, and my tongue, making me passive and powerless. Do you have any idea what that means? Do you?” His voice had grown reproachful; it was as though he were telling me off.

I shrugged and said gently, “No, I don’t know. I’ve always loved my freedom.”