t make up her mind about me and I desired her, her name was Françoise, she was drinking a lot too, I don’t know why I went over to her, I’d rather not think about it, night entomologist pinning that insect maybe, I could have told her I want to pin you violently if I had thought about anything but I just kissed her out of mischievousness in fact as a dare out of joy at my last Parisian night her tongue was very thick and bitter she was drinking liqueur I turn my eyes away from the window I observe the companion of the crossword-Hemingway, there’s an elegant weariness in her features, she has lain her head on the man’s shoulder her hair loose now is slightly covering the crossword journal — Françoise didn’t talk about pinning, she said I want you to plow me, she talked to me about plowing her, in my ear, with a lot of modesty, she said I want you to plow me thinking it was a euphemism, because I want it she said, and that’s what happened, a plowing, nothing more, her eyes wide open onto nothing like a blind person, her wrinkles became furrows in the half-light, in the weak oblique light from the street, she wanted to stay in the dark, ground floor former concierge box on the Rue Marcadet a plowing without any preliminaries she went to the bathroom quickly without saying a word or even turning back, and once the stupor of orgasm was over I understood that she wasn’t going to come out again until I left, that she was just as ashamed as I was once desire was slaked I got dressed in a minute I slammed the door to take refuge in the fresh air under the rain that hadn’t stopped, wet dog with his caudal appendage sticky in his trousers, the pitch-black night and the return to the bar all full of shame stupid and filthy, sent to the bottom with one more little humiliation, as I looked for my change I lightly nicked the pad of my index finger against the condom wrapper stuffed without thinking back into my pocket and now fifteen hours later there’s a little diagonal wound on the finger that I crush against the cold window: I regret I don’t know why I regret, you regret so many things in life memories that sometimes return burning, guilt regrets shame that are the weight of Western civilization if I had caught the plane I’d have been in Rome for hours already, I turn round once more in my seat my head facing right towards the great void outside, going backwards, I’m going backwards my back to my destination and to the meaning of history which is facing forward, history which is taking me directly to the Vatican, with a suitcase full of names and secrets: I’ll find Sashka in Rome, her fat cat, the apartment, her short hair in my hands and that strange silence there is between us, as if through her ignorance I could erase the weight of remorse, the women, the insects, the traces, the war, The Hague, the ghosts of my Service files, Algeria first of all, then the Middle East, and recently I dreamed of a post to South America, for a change of polluted air, names, and languages, maybe that’s the reason for this journey, moving through phonemes as if into a new world, neither my father’s language nor my mother’s, a third language, another one, and in the rhythm of this monotonous train rewrite myself to be reborn when I get out — the tired traveler invents idiotic games for himself, memories, daydreams, companions to pass the time since the landscape is completely invisible in the night, unable to sleep, I see again despite myself the photos of the Tibhirine monks faces without bodies I had a copy of them in my file, immortalized by the Algerian embassy, the first shock of my new life as a spy that all of a sudden brought me back to wounds to massacres to revenges to the cold rage of revenge the muddy blackened heads I was entering the Zone entering Algerian land that brought forth limbs and corpses more abundantly than Bosnia, then the long carefully recorded list only grew, Sidi Moussa, Bentalha, Relizane, one after the other, stories of axes and knives in the shadows in the flames the scenarios all identicaclass="underline" a few hundred meters away from a post of the Algerian army a band of terrorists got into the village began systematically massacring the population women men men women children newborns their throats cut their bellies ripped open burned shot slammed against walls skulls burst jewelry torn from fingers from wrists with axes beautiful virgins carried off into the mountains as spoils the share of honor for the conquerors with no enemies in the night and the warriors killed killed killed villagers just as poor as they or farmers even poorer, there was nothing in our notes and our reports, nothing whatsoever aside from endless torrents of blood names of villages and emirs scrublands chaparral touched by the fury of Ares, bearded men who spoke more and more incomprehensibly, more and more abstrusely, who spoke of Satan and God of the vengeance of God of all those farmers those Algerians who were infidels and deserved to die, the translators transcribed into French for me the pamphlets the declarations of war the anathemas the insults against the West the army the government farmers women alcohol livestock life and God himself whom they ended up excommunicating because he was too forgiving in their eyes, they worshipped their saber their rifle their leader and when they weren’t fighting amongst themselves they went cheerfully off to massacre and raid in darkness, in front of my civil servant’s eyes, why didn’t they provide night vision equipment in the Algerian army, that was their only excuse for not intervening, they were blind, night was night it belonged to the warriors and I knew better than anyone the terror of combat in the dark, in the midst of civilians between houses they could do nothing — but without provoking it terror suited them, turmoil favored them, Europe had no other choice than to support their dying regime against the barbarism and extremism to protect the oil the mines the villagers the workers the laypeople the infidels the liberals the region the quaking Tunisians and Moroccans, they had to hold firm, the Trojans were outside the ramparts, about to invade the camp and push us out to sea in our hollow vessels, the Islamists were the common enemy and this already before 2001, before the Great Accord that would have us exchanging terrorists galore, the Great Cleanup, suspects activists of all kinds sent off to Guantánamo, chucked out of planes in the middle of the Indian Ocean, tortured in Pakistani or Egyptian cellars, lists and more lists as long as possible until the Iraqi bone of contention, Troy took ten years to fall, and in my well-guarded office I began as an accountant of bodies, like someone who becomes a referee after having been a boxer and himself no longer touches the faces that explode beneath fists, he counts the blows, I gave Algeria beaten down by KOs several chances, and even raised high the arms of winners in my endless reports: Lebihan my boss constantly congratulated me on my prose, you’d think you were there he said, you are the all-round champion of notes, but couldn’t you be a little drier, get a little more to the point, just think, if everyone were like you we wouldn’t know if we were coming or going, but bravo my good man bravo — poor Lebihan, he constantly had health problems, never very serious, always very annoying, hives, pruritus, alopecia, all kinds of fungus, he was nice to me, he addressed me with the formal “vous,” I never knew anything about him or almost nothing, aside from the fact that he came from Lille, which his name did not suggest (if that really was his name), and that he wore a wedding ring — he was a specialist in the ISF, the GIA, all sorts of more or less violent movements, we’d find their names and their members’ names for years to come scattered throughout the four corners of the globe, sometimes with a different spelling or nickname, sometimes in a list of those “presumed dead,” because of the problems in Arabic transcription there were guys with us who had three or four index cards that had to be grouped together, some died three times in a row in three different places and finding a man was not always easy, even if that wasn’t our main objective, as Lebihan gently pointed out to me, the threats against internal security are the concern of the DST, the internal state security department, and cops didn’t at all mind throwing a spanner in our works whenever they could, convinced that we’d do likewise, which was no doubt the case — in the incredible muddle of the affair of the Tibhirine monks everyone had taken credit for himself, Foreign Affairs, the Service, everyone, and afterwards, when the DST picked up an Algerian officer who had “gone over to France” or an Islamist who asked for asylum, they kept the information to themselves, carefully doling out what might be useful to us in dribs and drabs, like us, more or less, with the information the agent gathered, those false solitary diplomats, immured in their embassy whose only contact with the outside was their precious “sources”: I went there one time, with an Agency passport and an assumed name, barely forty-eight hours, just enough time to meet the two guys we had over there and a local soldier whose name I forget, Algiers the white city was grey, dead after sunset, drowned beneath the unemployed and the dust, Cervantes the survivor of Lepanto had spent five years here in captivity, dreaming of escape plans just like the Islamists in the government jails, we had a meeting with the “source” in a magnificent villa atop the city, which I was allegedly supposed to be renting, an immense furnished villa, with a pool, property of a merchant who had taken refuge in Nice — the contact was brief, I remember his swaggering air, almost scornful of us, and the fear, the great fear we could still sense in his voice: the deal was clear, he wanted to go to Paris, get a residency permit and money for sensitive information, they all dreamed of the same thing, they thought they were selling themselves at a high price and didn’t realize that for us the price was laughable, that any engineer in pharmaceuticals or biotechnologies was worth ten or fifteen times more than they, the third world remains the third world even in the most specialized transactions, the advantage of the cost of living, and I myself if I think about it carefully I could have sold myself for much more, who knows, if I had offered my documents elsewhere, that’s the law of the trade, the seller fixes the price, I could have included my room at the Plaza in it and a piece of the true Cross and they would have agreed, what’s a little money compared to Eternity — Cervantes was ransomed by a congregation of monks for 500 escudos just as he was about to be deported to Istanbul, in 1996 Algiers the white smelled of sweat burnt tires hot oil and cumin, I had put places and landscapes into my notes, faces, smells into my summaries, fear, the mustiness of fear that reminded me of the odors of Mostar and Vitez, the Islamists were afraid of the army, the army was afraid of the Islamists and the civilians were dying of fear of everyone, cornered between the saber of the true Faith and the combat tanks of the toughât, the “tyrants” of the government, Algiers the white where my father served, between 1958 and 1960, I see myself exchanging impressions with him, memories — of course against all the rules of security I had spoken to him about my trip, he was very surprised, in this day and age, he said, ever since my return from Croatia he looked at me suspiciously, always trying to stare straight into my eyes, maybe to find the traces of war there, I didn’t understand why, I would understand later on, for now I was learning little by little to distinguish the parties, the emirs, the factions, and the tiny groups and I had my work cut out for me, as they say, to train myself in my Zone, I was sinking into it without realizing it, now I’ve become an expert, a specialist in politico-religious madness which is an increasingly widespread pathology, which is spreading the way the fungi or pustules spread on Lebihan’s body, now there isn’t one country that doesn’t have its future terrorists, extremists, Salafists, jihadis of all sorts and Parma that’s fleeing into the night with its Napoleonic nobility is giving me a headache, or maybe it’s fear, fear panic of darkness and pain