guten Abend, Spanier says the man, he makes the sign to pass, in the women’s room there are women in civilian clothes and men in striped uniforms, voices amiable conversations laughter in the midst of the noise of wooden clogs on the hard floor, a dozen whores, double the number of inmates, Boix catches sight of Garcia deep in conversation with one of the ladies, he goes over, cap in hand like a shy child, the women are speaking German, Garcia introduces him, he hastily tries ich heisse Franz. Wir gehen? in his contraband German, they make for one of the adjoining rooms, Francesc holds out his two reichsmarks, the girl takes them, lets her dress fall to the ground, her skin is covered in bruises and scars, she signs to him to go over to the washbasin, she lowers his striped trousers washes his private parts examining them carefully to make sure there are no lice, the water is freezing he feels as if his tool is retracting into the base of his pelvis, he’s a little ashamed, he remembers Barcelona here he is silent, he catches hold of one of the woman’s drooping breasts she gives him a frightened look he closes his eyes thinks about his Aragonese whore about the photograph he did not take the German woman pulls him by his member to the bed she lies down spreads her legs Francesc stretches out over her she stinks of sweat and barracks her name could be Lola or maybe Gudrun he moves as much as he can with no result she emits carnival cries he pretends to come gets up smiles at her she is ugly neither of them has fooled the other — Francesc Boix goes back to the main room a smile on his lips Garcia gives him a tap on the shoulder, that’s better, isn’t it, he says, and Boix replies without lying yes, that’s better, that’s better already and soon it will be even better, at what instant does he know he’ll get out, he’ll survive, at what instant does he make the decision to survive? they say that the prisoners knew, saw the ones that had a chance and the ones that were going to die, Manos Hadjivassilis one of the Greek resistants from ELAS who ended up in Mauthausen after quite a tour, escaped twice, recaptured almost a thousand kilometers from Salonika, in the neighborhood of Gorizia in the company of Yugoslav partisans, scarcely had he returned to the camp, while he was still waiting in the identification line, already destroyed by what he saw around him, seized with the certainty that it was the end, Manos suddenly broke out of rank began running towards the electric barbed wire fence to throw himself onto it, the electricity contracted all his muscles made him bleed from his nose and mouth in a smell of ozone and burnt flesh he was still alive when a guard finished him off with a reverent volley of gunfire, exit Manos Hadjivassilis the Greek communist from Macedonia who had traveled the Epirus and crossed the Balkans on foot rifle in hand, the image of his corpse photographed by Paul Ricken will appear in Francesc Boix’s developing bath, then it will be hung on a clothesline to dry, in the meantime Manos’s body will already have disappeared into the crematorium, to end up in the heart of Austria’s filthy sky, let’s hope that Zeus the patient made that grey cloud rain down on Olympus, Boix will get out of the camp, and will even go to Greece to cover the civil war for communist publications, a respite, a brief reprieve before the Rothschild Hospital and the Thiais cemetery, Francesc was already dead, he was already dead in Mauthausen which you don’t leave, he was dead in the arms of the German prostitute, one night at the brothel of Barracks No. 1, in impossible contact with that Gudrun or Lola, his soul fallen between their two bodies, that’s where he contracted the illness, there, in the impossibility of finding anything but more or less putrid flesh, no other contact possible, no consolation, an eternal solitude caught hold of him, he would float over the world without touching anything, like Paul Ricken documentarist of deterioration, stricken with the same affliction — if I think about it, my attempts at escaping the Zone and memory are part of the same syndrome perhaps, what happened, in Venice with Marianne, in Paris with Stéphanie the brunette, in the harlot bars in Zagreb or the sordid cabarets in Aleppo, what happened in Bosnia, what is waiting for me at the end of this trip, in Rome, in the distant tenderness of Sashka and her apartment, what’s waiting for me under the name Yvan Deroy the mad, will I be able to rid myself of myself the way you take off a sweater in an overheated train, in the black despair of the Bolognese night, suburbs without end, I tremble at the memory of Stéphanie’s face, I see her portrait thrown out yesterday with the rest of the apartment’s useless objects, maybe a homeless man will recover it for its frame or for the shoulder-length dark-brown hair, the few spots of red on the nose and cheeks, the very calm half-smile, sure of herself, the black polo-neck, a three-quarter-length portrait with the Hagia Sophia and the Bosporus behind her, from the window of our last hotel room, a portrait of a dazzling beauty, maybe the tramp going through the trash is also falling in love with her, he sees her and immediately he swoons, he’ll keep the photo to keep himself company, he’ll talk to it, invent a name for it a life a passionate love story, if he only knew, if he knew Stéphanie Muller the brilliant strong dangerous Alsatian, I saw her before she left on a job, before she went under the drainpipe, as we say in our jargon, to be under the drainpipe means to leave on a job abroad and hence to get a rain of cold hard currency on your head corresponding to three or four times a Parisian salary, Stéphanie destined for a great future is probably in Moscow at present, I’m supposed not to know where she is, I shouldn’t have thought about her again, it must be very cold in Moscow, a little like in Alsace, not at all like here in gentle Mediterranean Italy, I shift in the seat, I want to get up, take a few steps to chase away the image of Stéphanie with the perfect body, the perfect voice, the keen intelligence, Stéphanie to whom I told the story of Francesc Boix the photographer of Mauthausen during our trip to Barcelona, how can you care so much about such stories, she said, she was reading Proust and Céline, nothing but Proust and Céline, which gave her, I think, the cynicism and irony necessary for her profession, she was rereading the