Le Monde, I didn’t even have time to look at it. I thrust my right hand into her purse and help her extract the folded, crumpled article. — Can you read it out loud? Jeannette puts on her glasses and reads in a dismal voice: “Ernest Blot Dies. A banker both influential and secretive. Born in 1939, Ernest Blot died in the night of June 23 at the age of seventy-three. His demise marks the passing of a leading figure in French elite banking, one of those whose career began in the civil service and whose savoir-faire was equaled only by his discretion. In 1965, he graduated with top honors from the National School of Administration” — top honors, you see, I’d forgotten about that — “and joined the General Inspection of Finances. Between 1969 and 1978, he was a member of several ministerial cabinets, serving as technical consultant,” et cetera, we know all that … “In 1979, he joined the Wurmster Bank, which had been founded just after the First World War and had since fallen somewhat into obsolescence. He was the bank’s director general until 1985, when he became its chairman and chief executive officer. Little by little, he turned the Wurmster Bank into one of France’s premier institutions, on a par with Lazard Frères or the Rothschild banking houses …” — et cetera — “He was the author of a biography of Achille Fould, Minister of Finance in the Second Republic (Éditions Perrin, 1997). Ernest Blot held the rank of Grand Officer in the National Order of Merit and was a Commander in the Legion of Honor …” Not a word about his wife, Jeannette observes. Is that the usual procedure? As for the Achille Fould, I never once opened it. It sold three copies. I feel nauseous after reading all that. My mother says, it’s stifling in this car, will you turn up the AC, darling? No AC! Jeannette screams, no AC, it makes my head throb. I look at the rearview mirror. So as not to contradict the widow of the day, my mother has rearranged herself by simply throwing back her head and opening her mouth like a carp out of water. Jeannette reaches into her purse again and pulls out a battery-operated pocket fan with transparent blades. — Here, Zozo, this will cool you off. She turns it on. It makes a sound like a maddened wasp. Jeannette describes two circles around her own face and holds out the fan to my mother. — Try it, Zozo, it really works. — No, thanks. — Take it, Maman, you’re hot. — I’m fine, stop bugging me. Jeannette makes another little pass with the fan from one side of her neck to the other. In a cavernous voice right behind my ear, my mother says, I still blame your father for not selling that pathetic burial plot. When I die, Robert, have us moved. Put us in the city. Paulette told me there are still some places in the Jewish section in Montparnasse cemetery. The Mercedes turns left, describing a kind of majestic circle and fleetingly revealing the mute profiles of Odile and Marguerite. Jeannette says, I don’t feel anything at all. She seems lost. Her arms are at her sides, her open purse on her lap, the buzzing fan in one inert hand. I feel I should reply to her, make some comment, but nothing comes to me. Ernest occupied an important place in my life. He was interested in my work (I’d read certain articles to him before submitting them to the newspaper). He’d question me and dispute with me the way I would have liked my own father to do (my father was kind and affectionate, but he didn’t know how to be a grown man’s father). We’d call each other almost every morning to fix Syria and Iran and criticize Western naïveté and European conceit. That was his hobbyhorse: the fact that now, after a thousand years of massacres, we have license to lecture everybody else. I’ve lost a friend who had a vision of existence. That’s pretty rare. People don’t have a vision of existence. They have nothing but opinions. To speak with Ernest was to be less alone. I know their day-to-day marriage couldn’t have been much fun for Jeannette. One day — Ernest was leaving for a monetary conference — she threw a cup of coffee at his head. You’re a vile character, she said, you’ve wrecked my life as a woman. Ernest, who was wiping coffee off his suit jacket, replied, your life as a woman? What’s that, a life as a woman? After I met Odile, he told me, I give you fair warning, she’s a pain in the ass, I’ll thank you if you take her off my hands. And later he said, don’t worry, my boy, the first marriage is always hard. I asked him, have you been married more than once? — No, that’s just it. I hear my mother talking in the backseat. It takes me a couple of moments to come back from my thoughts and understand her words. She’s saying, it’s afterward that you feel something, when all the pomp and fuss of death is over. When the pomp and fuss is over, Jeannette says, I’ll feel nothing but resentment. You’re exaggerating, I say. She shakes her head and asks, was he a good husband, yours, Zozo? Ooohh … says my mother. — What are you trying to say, Maman? You were happy with Papa, weren’t you? — I wasn’t unhappy. That wasn’t it. But you know, good husbands are few and far between. We drive along Avenue Gambetta in silence. The trees cast swaying shadows. Jeannette has started digging in her purse again. A driver on my left blows his horn. The car pulls even with us and I’m on the verge of replying with some insult when I recognize the Hutners’ smiling (in the proper funeral manner) faces. Lionel’s driving. Pascaline’s leaning out of the window and making hand signals to Jeannette. I glance briefly at the rear of their car. Before I accelerate, I have time to notice their son Jacob sitting in the backseat, grave and ramrod-straight, with some kind of Indian scarf wrapped around his neck. You invited the Hutners? Jeannette asks in a crushed voice. — We invited our closest friends. The Hutners were very fond of Ernest. — Oh my God, it kills me to talk to all these people, all this kills me. This society gathering. For this crappy cremation. She pulls down the sun visor with the mirror and checks her face. As she’s putting on lipstick, she says, you know who