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So the Central American, Z, is there in the café when the photo is taken, and Carla and Marie-Thérèse have recognized him, they’ve remembered him; perhaps he has just arrived, perhaps he walked past the table at which the group is sitting and greeted them, but except for the two women, they had no idea who he was; this happens quite often, of course, but it’s something that the Central American still can’t accept with equanimity. There he is, to the left of the group, with some Central American friends, or waiting for them, maybe, and deep within him — nourished by affronts and grudges, fuelled by bitterness and the chill of the City of Light — there’s a seething. His appearance, however, is equivocaclass="underline" it makes Carla Devade feel like a protective older sister or a missionary nun in Africa, but it catches at Marie-Thérèse Réveillé like barbed wire and triggers a vague erotic longing.

And then night falls again and the photo empties out or disappears under a scribble of lines entirely traced by the night’s mechanism, and Sollers is writing in his study, and Kristeva is writing in the study next door, soundproofed studies so they can’t hear each other typing, for example, or getting up to consult a book, or coughing or talking to themselves, and Carla and Marc Devade are leaving a cinema (they’ve been to a film by Rivette), not talking to each other, although, a couple of times, Marc and then Carla, who’s more distracted, greet people they know, and J.-J. Goux is preparing his dinner, a frugal dinner consisting of bread, pâté, cheese and a glass of wine, and Guyotat is undressing Marie-Thérèse Réveillé and throwing her onto the sofa with a violent thrust that Marie-Thérèse intercepts in midair as if she were catching a butterfly of lucidity in a net of lucidity, and Henric is leaving his apartment, going down to the parking lot and he stops again as the lights go out, first the ones near the metal roller gate that opens onto the street, and then the others, till there is only the light down at the back, flickering helplessly, illuminating his multicolored Honda, and then it fails as well. And it occurs to Henric that his motorbike is like an Assyrian god, but for the moment his legs refuse to walk on into the darkness, and Marie-Thérèse shuts her eyes and opens her legs, one foot on the sofa, the other on the carpet, while Guyotat pushes into her, the panties still around her thighs, and calls her his little whore, his little bitch, and asks her what she did all day, what happened to her, what streets she wandered down, and J.-J. Goux is sitting at the table and spreading pâté on a piece of bread and lifting it to his mouth and chewing, first on the right side, then on the left, unhurriedly, with a book by Robert Pinget open beside him at page two and the television switched off but the screen reflecting his image, a man on his own with his mouth closed and his cheeks full, looking thoughtful and absent, and Carla Devade and Marc Devade are making love, Carla on top, illuminated only by the light in the corridor, a light they usually leave on, and Carla is groaning and trying not to look at her husband’s face, his blond hair in a mess now, his light eyes, his broad and placid face, his delicate, elegant hands, devoid of the fire she’s longing for, ineffectually holding her hips, as if he were trying to keep her there with him, but he has no real sense of what she might be fleeing from or what her flight might mean, a flight that goes on and on like torture, and Kristeva and Sollers are going to bed, first her, she has to lecture early the next day, then him, and both of them take books that they will leave on their bedside tables when sleep comes to close their eyes, and Philippe Sollers will dream that he is walking along a beach in Brittany with a scientist who has discovered a way to destroy the world; they will be walking westward along this long, deserted beach, bounded by rocks and black cliffs, and suddenly Sollers will realize that the scientist (who is talking and explaining) is himself and that the man walking beside him is a murderer; this will dawn on him when he looks down at the wet sand (with its soup-like consistency) and the crabs skittering away to hide and the prints the two of them are leaving on the beach (there is a certain logic to this: identifying the murderer by his footprints), and Julia Kristeva will dream of a little village in Germany where years ago she participated in a seminar, and she’ll see the streets of the village, clean and empty, and sit down in a square that’s tiny but full of plants and trees, and close her eyes and listen to the distant cheeping of a single bird and wonder if the bird is in a cage or free, and she’ll feel a breeze on her neck and her face, neither cold nor warm, a perfect breeze, perfumed with lavender and orange blossom, and then she’ll remember her seminar and look at her watch, but it will have stopped.

So the Central American is outside the frame of the photograph, sharing that pristine and deceptive territory with the object of Guyotat’s gaze: an unknown woman armed only, for the moment, with her beauty. Their eyes will not meet. They will pass each other by like shadows, briefly sharing the same hazardous ambit: the itinerant theater of Paris. The Central American could quite easily become a murderer. Perhaps, back in his country, he will, but not here, where the only blood he could possibly shed is his own. This Pol Pot won’t kill anyone in Paris. And actually, back in Tegucigalpa or San Salvador, he’ll probably end up teaching in a university. As for the unknown woman, she will not be captured by Guyotat’s asbestos nets. She’s at the bar, waiting for the boyfriend she’ll marry before long (him or the next one), and their marriage will be disastrous, though not without its moments of comfort. Literature brushes past these literary creatures and kisses them on the lips, but they don’t even notice.

The section of restaurant or café that contains the photo’s nest of smoke continues imperturbably on its voyage through nothingness. Behind Sollers, for instance, we can make out the fragmentary figures of three men. None of the faces can be seen in its entirety. The man on the left, in profile: a forehead, one eyebrow, the back part of his ear, the top of his head. The man on the right: a little piece of his forehead, his cheekbone, strands of dark hair. The man in the middle, who seems to be calling the tune: most of his forehead, traversed by two clearly visible wrinkles, his eyebrows, the bridge of his nose, and a discreet quiff. Behind them, there is a pane of glass and behind the glass many people walking about curiously among stalls or exhibition stands, bookstands perhaps, mostly facing away from our characters (who have their backs to them in turn), except for a child with a round face and straight bangs, wearing a jacket that may be too small for him, looking sideways toward the café, as if from that distance he could observe everything going on inside, which, on the face of it, seems rather unlikely.