th arrondissement, commenting on another sort of news, usually connected to sports, to teams that aren’t doing so well, to results that are always disappointing, losing or winning at dice, with the surprising sensation, for someone returning from vacation, of discovering your family, your friends, and your house still in the same place, a place where there’s somewhere to drink, what’s more, and where you can crush your butts out on the ground without risking a reprimand, you find yourself patting the owner’s dogs as if they were distant cousins, endless demonstrations of affection, everyone’s happy to see you again, everyone celebrates with relief that this haven of manhood hasn’t yet been conquered by females the police or public health, and once you’re nice and tipsy you go back up to your place, you leave the zinc under your elbow for the zinc over your head, with all the windows open in order to get rid of the heat of Paris in early September, an armchair, a detective novel, and the warm smell of asphalt that invades the room as night falls — Stéphanie didn’t like my rituals, neither the bar nor the trashy novels, when the passion from the early days fades away, these nice character traits turn into unbearable defects, little by little the crack becomes an abyss of reproaches and annoyances that has to be filled with the plaster of lies and dissimulation, month after month, summer after summer, burying myself in the Zone, filling my briefcase with corpses right and left, as I traveled to Damascus Jerusalem Cairo Trieste Valencia, I was detaching myself from her as surely as from Marianne in Venice: my guilt after the incident of the fake suicide changed into constant aggressiveness, everything went downhill, into the bottom of the sea, the way a shroud becomes unraveled thread by thread, this is going to end badly, we thought sometimes, each at one end of Paris in our respective apartments, it will all end badly, and one day as I got out of the Intercity coming from Frankfurt at the Gare de l’Est, exhausted after a sleepless night in the Prague train in the company of a talkative railway fanatic, having gone back to my place with new documents for my suitcase of catastrophes, my devil’s cauldron, a little jetlagged, confused, hazy, having reached my place in the early afternoon I didn’t go to the office right away, to check some minor details and put in an appearance, I should have, it’s very cowardly but I should have gone instead of taking a shower and sitting quietly in my armchair gazing off into space, she rang the doorbell at around five o’clock, I heard her voice on the intercom and I was surprised, she hardly ever came to my place, almost never and especially not without warning, she knew I was supposed to get back from Prague in the afternoon she had left the Boulevard a little early to run here, I heard her climbing the stairs, a little anxious, why was she coming, maybe one of those proofs of love that you plug the cracks with, a surprise, she came in smiling and kissed me tenderly saying just