Between the town as it was at present, which you had crossed, or the town of the future that your mind constructed based on what your eyes gave it to see, you preferred the town of the past, which the panorama in the museum had shown to you. The photography gallery was located near the port, amid industrial warehouses surrounded by shipping containers and other materials. You walked alongside several sheds and ended up entering into a large gray and white space lit by bay windows situated high up. The exhibition, “New Urban Zones,” presented the work of ten photographers who had surveyed the territories of Europe. Few clues permitted one to say where these views had been captured. The landscape portraits showed anonymous places, industrial or commercial zones in the suburbs of modern towns, often on the borderlines between urban and rural areas. There were no people to be seen. The only human presence hinted at was in the cars on the roads. The color prints in large format were lined up as anonymously as the places they represented. It was difficult to distinguish one photograph from another. The framing was frontal, the colors flat, the prints carefully executed. You couldn’t succeed in desiring these non-places offered to your view. The photographers had wanted neither to magnify nor to dramatize their subjects. The neutrality of their style recalled those of the buildings they had photographed. Life seemed to have escaped them. You thought the photographers were correct: who could have wanted to live in those thankless, immense, and deserted places? Leaving the gallery again, you found that the port zone could easily have figured among them. But the wind, the bustle of life, the movement of people and vehicles that animated it made the zone habitable. Was this a case of photography killing life by freezing it? It was six in the evening. Museums, galleries, and monuments were closing. You found yourself alone in the town without anything else to do but walk the streets and look at shops, restaurants, architecture. You took the same road back you had come by in order to look at the urban landscape from an inverse point of view. You counted the buildings that you did not remember seeing earlier. There were dozens. You no longer believed in he hypothesis that everything is recorded in memory, but that we are only capable of recalling some of it, according to memory’s caprices. Between the next two roads, nine buildings appeared. Only three of them were familiar to you. Each possessed one remarkable detail. The front door of one was adorned with a lion’s head painted in blue. A totalizator, for gambling on horse racing, was installed on the ground floor of another, and the windows of the last, recently restored, were still covered in a green plastic film. Only two of the other buildings had distinctive marks. On one a golden plaque stated: “Charles Dreyfus, Psychoanalyst,” and the other contained a store selling scuba gear, in the display window of which two divers dressed in yellow and black, equipped with masks and fins, were floating in the middle of a subaquatic universe consisting of regulator valves, spear guns, electric torches, watches, snorkels, buoys, knives, and weights. You asked yourself how, on the one hand, the inscription, which announced to passersby a room where confidences are shared, or, on the other, this gleaming and comical window, could have escaped your attention. Had you been looking at the other side of the street, in the direction of the Garonne? Had you been lost in thought or in the emptiness of the walk? You looked for explanations rather than believe in the shortcomings of your memory. Following your itinerary in reverse however confirmed to you that there now remained only scraps of what you had seen earlier, heading in the other direction. You continued on surrounded by scenery, the majority of whose details were unknown to you. Having come close to the big theater, you considered turning back again in order to verify whether, on a third passing, your memory would be more reliable. But you were hungry. You entered a restaurant decorated with antique woodwork and old tables with marble tops. Some elderly regulars were drinking aperitifs while waiters were spreading tablecloths for the meal. “Will you be dining with us?” a waiter asked at the moment you told yourself that the place was too sad to spend an evening in alone. You told him that you were looking for someone, and after scanning the room you left. You wandered about for an hour looking for a modern restaurant. Night had fallen when you discovered, in a pedestrian cul-de-sac, a chic wine bar, softly lit, where they served tapas. The place was welcoming. Thirty-odd young people were chatting at the bar while slow electronic music created a relaxed atmosphere. Some low tables were occupied by groups of friends. You took up a place in a corner, on the windowed terrace in order to be able to observe the patrons at the bar at the same time as people on the street. But the cul-de-sac was empty, and the only people circulating there were those coming to the bar or leaving it. You ordered squid, ham, chili peppers, chorizo sausage, and cured pork loin with half a bottle of rioja. You had already eaten half your meal when the Polish artist with whom you had passed the previous evening came in looking for some friends. She did not see you and headed in their direction. You hesitated to interrupt her; you did not want to meet new people you would not see again after leaving the city. But not to show yourself, when you were alone, seemed to you absurd, especially since you could not keep from looking at her. She turned toward you, recognized you, and gave you a big smile. You in turn smiled at her, embarrassed to think that she might believe you had wanted to shrug her off: given your position, you could not help but have seen her. You both hesitated to make the first move toward the other. You looked at each other for what seemed to you an endless amount of time. You got up at last and made to join her. The introductions done with, you suggested she join you at your table, without including her friends. She accepted, despite the impoliteness of your proposal. You asked her questions about her life in Poland, about her family and her art. She replied at length and with precision, but when she in turn asked questions of you, you responded with more questions. You had no desire to talk about yourself, but you could have listened to her talk about herself for hours. You wondered if you were trying to seduce her, and whether this had occurred to her. What would you do if her friends left without her and if she walked you to the door of your hotel? You were faithful to your wife, but wasn’t that because, in the town where you lived, there was no opportunity to cheat on her? You remembered the opportunities that you had been given for liaisons with women who crossed your path far from your home. You had never yielded. This evening, when this woman suggested going for a drink elsewhere, and when you understood that her friends had discreetly left, you decided to go back to your hotel. She went with you. Having arrived at the threshold, neither of you spoke. You remained standing there without speaking, looking at one another. The moment she slowly approached, you told her that you were going to bed. She smiled at you, and you left her after having gotten her contact information. In your room, you regretted nothing, and you fell asleep, in spite of feeling as though you passed the day simply killing the time that separated you from your return. The next day, you were awakened by this same impression of vacuity. You made the same gestures as the day before, getting up, opening curtains, shaving, and washing. You went down for breakfast in the dining room. It was empty; it was nearly ten o’clock. You read a local newspaper from the day before, cursorily. Back upstairs in your room, you hardly remembered the news you had just learned. You went back out, and set off at random into the town. But your steps spontaneously led you to the same locations that you had strolled through the day before. You paid less attention to what you were looking at; the places no longer had the attraction of novelty. You then decided to walk taking the first street on the right, the second street on the left, the first street on the right and so on, without deviating from this method, so as to not let yourself be guided by the appeal of whatever turned up. You passed the day in this way, looking on your map from time to time at where chance was leading you. You had lunch in a café on a square, in a working-class neighborhood nearly five kilometers from the city center. You watched the passersby and you gathered statistics to keep yourself busy. You counted the number of women, men, and children. You classified people by age, by their probable jobs, or according to more subjective criteria, like the taste revealed by their clothing, or the strangeness of their gait. You stayed for two hours doing this on the terrace of the café. After having reread these statistics, you were struck by their absurdity. What meaning did this inventory have, for which no one had any use and with which you would do nothing? You tore up the pages and you threw them in the gutter. It was three o’clock. Rather than resuming your random walk, you returned by the shortest route to the city center. When you got close to your hotel, it was still too early for dinner. You decided to take the same route as the day before, to verify if what you had seen was now anchored in your memory. You didn’t look at the map, you didn’t hesitate once over changes in direction. You noticed the same details, signs, sidewalks, roadwork. Only the passersby broke the monotony of the spectacle. You felt your body tiring; this urban strolling was turning into an accidental gymnastic exercise. Having come back to your point of departure, you had lost any notion of time. You looked at your watch and were flabbergasted to discover that four hours had slipped by. You decided to dine in the first restaurant that offered itself to you. It was the Clos Saint-Vivien, a restaurant with traditional bourgeois cooking, elegantly decorated. You chose the first dishes from each section of the menu, a foie gras with mango preserves, a rib steak with bordelaise sauce and sautéed potatoes, and a raspberry cake. The hushed atmosphere reassured you, but the marked attention of the waiters watching you in order to respond to your wishes weighed on you increasingly as the other customers left the restaurant. Before the last couple could leave, you paid the bill and left the restaurant. It was twelve thirty. Back at your hotel, you took notes on the last two days. You described what you had seen, done, and thought. While you believed that you had only passed through a zone of emptiness, the writing of this text kept you up until five in the morning. When you reread it the next day on the train that was carrying you back home, you added numerous notes in the margin. And when your wife asked you what you had done, you spent the entire night telling her, with innumerable details. You had felt idle in this city through which you had paced only to kill time. But the emptiness that you believed yourself to be confronted with was an illusion: you had filled those moments with sensations all the more powerful in that nothing and no one had distracted you from them.