“It makes no sense to keep this letter.”
“You've kept it for thirty years.”
Marie-Thérèse tries to take back the rest of the letter. Adam screws the sheets into a ball and hides them behind his back.
“Give it to me.”
“No.”
Adam dodges Marie-Thérèse's hands. Was she vexed by his lack of reaction? Vexed by his silence, the unhappy woman now wants to destroy all trace of her past error. To burn her shame, he thinks as he uses the armchair as a shield, and sizes up the inexplicable puerility of his own behavior. They make several feints around the armchair, then Adam escapes toward the window. Come on, give it to me! She laughs, waltzing around him. Give it to me, laughing her incongruous throaty laugh. Marie-Thérèse laughs. This is how great love affairs begin. People spinning around each other laughing. The lover holding the parcel and the coquette spinning this way and that, trying to grab it. Granted, the drama is not generally played out in the morgue at Viry-Châtillon, the principals are not fifty-year-olds, don't have thrombosis, don't sell merchandise. But no matter. This is a variation. Adam passes the ball of paper from one hand to the other, raises his arms, Marie-Thérèse hops around chuckling, without her sneakers she's just a little shorter than him. She has abandoned all restraint, her face is pure toothy glee, foolish rapture, he thinks. He surprises himself in several physical pranks, feints, wrong-footings, high throws, the ball flies, disappears. At a given moment Adam miscalculates his lunge and inadvertently throws it across the room. The ball lands on the top of the sideboard. Both rush for it. Adam bangs into the corner of the low table, Marie-Thérèse grasps the tattered scraps. Got it! she cries. Got it! she sings, letting the pages flutter past her eyes as she unfolds them and Alice Canella's coarse blue handwriting, crossed out in places, reappears on them. Adam has collapsed onto the sofa. He's hurt his knee and the pain in his forehead has invaded new territory, he notes, it's now reached his nose and upper jaw. On the bookshelf Andreas smiles crookedly in his silver frame. Maybe I should consult a dentist as well, thinks Adam. Marie-Thérèse glances through the smoothed-out fragments of the letter in silence. She thrusts the pages at the candle and lays down the little torch on the trefoil-shaped ashtray. There's a mild blaze, the pages stretch out and curl up, there are flames, smoke, a lingering bluish glow, and then a blackened mass.