we’re going to clarify the situation meant that in all probability someone was going to disappear, in the great clarity of a car bomb, Hobeika the dashing commander of special forces of the Phalangists during the civil war had in his trunk two bottles of compressed air, a mask, and a pair of flippers, he liked scuba diving, he had bad luck, he liked scuba diving and one morning he was going down Hazmieh to Beirut when an insignificant car exploded as he went by the two diving bottles also blew up, ripping open the back seat he was sitting in, piercing Elie Hobeika’s body with shards of steel and chair springs, farewell nice diplomatic butcher, he had no time to think about anything before the dark veil covered his eyes, farewell, he didn’t see the flares of the Israeli army guiding its soldiers through the little streets of Shatila, those nights in September 1982, three nights and three days of knives of submachine guns for how many Palestinians massacred, no one knows, between 700 and 3,000, according to sources, they buried the corpses with bulldozers, in secret, the Israeli army had asked Hobeika’s militia to rid the camp of the terrorists that were still there, rid the camp of terrorists yet to be born, of terrorists in the making, of retired terrorists and of possible engenderers of terrorists, that’s what the Lebanese with the long blades must have understood, those conscripts of the Phalangist Party founded by Pierre Gemayel the athlete, admirer of that fascistic Hitlerian order he discovered at the Olympic Games of Berlin in 1936, he would take the name of his movement from Spain, Mediterranean symmetry once again, Beirut and Barcelona touch by folding over on the Rome/Berlin axis, surely Pierre Gemayel with the Brylcreem in his hair pictured a Spanish fate for his country, a victory of the nationals after a sad but necessary civil war, I want to go back to Intissar and the Palestinian fighters but I’m too sleepy to go on reading, I make myself more comfortable, my legs stretched out onto the opposite seat, I’d almost take off my shoes after all why wouldn’t Yvan Deroy take them off, in a first-class car, for me though my upbringing is such a heavy burden that I wonder if my socks are clean, if they’re free of holes and in my doubt I refrain, the humiliation would be too great if upon waking the flautist or harpist on the other side of the aisle saw my big toe sticking out of a misshapen knee-sock, the hypocrisy of the well-polished shoe hiding the foot’s wretchedness, just as my pants are hiding faded underwear with a sagging waistband — the world of appearances is like that, who can claim to know his neighbor, I had been very surprised to find a photo of a child in Andi’s bag, carefully put away between the pages of the little Bible that he never opened because, he said, he knew it by heart, the photograph of a young girl of about eleven or twelve, with pigtails, Vlaho and I had immediately started in on him, it’s your fiancée, she’s not bad, we passed the photo back and forth like a ball without him being able to get it back, come on guys, that’s enough, give it back, we had begun teasing him about the obvious advantages of such youth, virginity assured, the absence of cellulite, all the macho lewd remarks that came into our heads and Andrija exploded he looked at us as he shouted with all the rage he was capable of, one hand on his knife, if he had been armed he would have gunned us down on the spot, Vlaho the magnanimous immediately handed him the snapshot as if he had received a divine order and then we had seen two tears stream down the cheeks of Andi the furious, he caressed the young girl’s face before pressing it to his heart and putting it carefully away, in his pocket this time and when he raised his head he smiled, he smiled and said that’s my sister you pair of assholes, we had been stunned and ashamed, ashamed of having forced Andrija’s tears and of having discovered his weakness, as ashamed as if we had brought to light a terrible infirmity, as ashamed as if we had discovered, despite ourselves, that he had a tiny penis or a single ball, the warrior had feelings, tears, Andi’s tenderness was all the more inconceivable to us because he never spoke about this little sister, out of shyness, because he himself was ashamed of his affection as I am of my holey sock or my tramp’s underwear or my informer past my cop’s life as I’m ashamed of having been afraid of having been cowardly of having dumped Stéphanie, Marianne, my mother, all the weight of the endless shame of Francis the coward, who is trying today to redeem himself with a suitcase and a borrowed name, in Rome the city of great forgiveness and of indulgences, or rather in the outskirts of Prato, we’re almost in Florence, Prato birthplace of Curzio Malaparte the restless — the ex-fascist disillusioned journalist owner of one of the most beautiful houses in the world in Capri is buried in his birthplace a stone’s throw from here, like a good Tuscan, nowhere near his villa on the Neapolitan island, that immense stone staircase between the sea and the rocks, sublime parallelepiped where God knows how Godard managed to film Contempt—Brigitte Bardot skinny-dipping in the inlet at the base of the steps, Fritz Lang spinning around, Michel Piccoli smoking and I imagine Georges Delerue on the rooftop terrace with the magnificent view, playing the cello: in that dark house, the Piccoli-Bardot couple comes apart in the midst of filming Ulysses, a film by Fritz Lang, and when the shrewd warrior sees faraway Ithaca from his hollow vessel it’s the villa of Curzio Malaparte in Capri, lost in the midst of the waves like a boat, Curzio Malaparte’s real name was Kurt Suckert, his father was German, at the age of sixteen the young Kurt signs up and takes part in the First World War, back home he develops a passion for the “social revolution” promised by the squadre d’azione, those eccentric militiamen who tortured leftist men by making them drink castor oil until their intestines were completely liquid: Malaparte became one of the first theoreticians of fascism before being disappointed by Mussolini in 1928, Malaparte the disillusioned was a prolific journalist, he was the special correspondent for the Corriere della Sera with the Axis forces, in Croatia, in Poland, and then on the Russian front, in 1943 he interviews Ante Pavelić the Croatian Poglavnik, in Kaputt he tells how the Slavic Führer with the big eyes was a friendly man, somewhat reserved, a fervent Catholic, in his office he had a basket full of shellfish without shells that Malaparte thought were Dalmatian oysters, to hell with oysters, Pavelić said to him, it’s a gift from my Ustashis, a hundred Serbian eyes offered to the head of the triumphant homeland, Curzio Malaparte tells this story in a novel, is it true, what do I know, in any case it’s true for a number of Serbs and no less a consequential number of Westerners, apparently Malaparte denied this on his deathbed, which seems to me even more unlikely, why would he care, on the verge of the great plunge, about the dictator’s reputation, it was just one more stain on his name, didn’t matter, what did a hundred victims matter a few enucleations it could just have well have been fingers ears noses balls or birth certificates it didn’t matter Malaparte’s portrayal is no doubt quite realistic, Pavelić the discreet smiling friendly cultivated man was at the head of a band of assassins, like it or not, he ordered the detention and violent death of enemies of the Croatian people, he was neither fundamentally anti-Semitic nor profoundly anti-Serb, he was just pragmatic, in that great Céline-ian pragmatism of the 1930s— 1940s according to which every problem calls for a solution, every question an answer, to each his own devil, the Jews the Serbs the communists the fascists the Freemasons the saboteurs and everyone sought to resolve his problem in a definitive way with the help of some group or other — the subordinates sought above all to get richer, Globocnik the man of Trieste, Ljubo Runjas the Valencian exile, they sought above all to fill their pockets with goods taken from the dead, they were no ideologues, just nice little corpse robbers on a large scale, on the scale of millions of men and women gassed or shot, and Malaparte’s eyes are only the sticky gaze of all those dead men their bodies humiliated and robbed, Curzio Malaparte the equivocal the fickle who goes from fascism to cynicism to resistance to communism before joining the lukewarm bosom of the Holy Roman and Apostolic Catholic Church in a grave in Prato pretty town in Tuscany that the train is thundering through, I had given his novel Kaputt to Stéphanie, her pout said a lot about what she thought about that sort of author, I the uncultivated neo-fascist dared to give her books, I didn’t have the good fortune to be admitted into the circle of culture, Stéphanie who however loved me passionately couldn’t bear what I was, someone who had begun to read late in life, out of boredom, out of despair, out of passion, and perhaps it was out of jealousy that she looked down on my reading, she wanted to convert me to her, I had to study, to pass a test to advance in rank, she kept reassuring me you graduated from Sciences-Po you can pass, in-house it’s just a formality, I secretly thought that I would then have to combine Proust with Céline, that all of a sudden I’d have an orgasm as I dipped my croissant into my coffee and I’d become a doctor, I prefer Lebihan his bike and his oysters, indeed my job was subordinate from the salary point of view but I was fine, I was able to devote myself to drinking, to mourning, to my notes, to my shadows, of course I didn’t play in the adults’ playground as she did, I didn’t have the no doubt pleasant sensation of controlling the planet, or at least a piece of it, drawing maps of prospects and possibilities for change in other words all the prestige that comes with the future and with anticipation in a world of pen-pushers, that illusion of decision, I had enough experience to know that there’s always someone higher up, a lieutenant general above the major general, or vice-versa, I don’t know anymore but maybe since Stéphanie was a woman of responsibilities in an extraordinarily macho world she couldn’t understand why I threw in the towel before even reaching the rungs of the Agency ladder, she who, ever since the age of twenty-seven, dealt with the Defense Minister’s cabinet, the directors, the heads of God knows what party in the Elysée or the Ministry of the Interior — Stéphanie felt poor, the more she glimpsed the world higher up the more her own means and income seemed laughable to her, whereas what with the many and various bonuses I myself always had the impression of being rich, the tenant of a not too tiny top-floor two-room apartment, owner of three shirts a package of photographs and a Zastava 1970-model pistol with no firing pin so I wouldn’t be tempted to use it, I never deprived myself of anything, she spent all her time asking me but how do you do it? how do you manage to get by financially? I had no idea, for Stéphanie money was above all there to be hoarded, accumulated, amassed, deposited, for later on, for God knows when, for God knows what, she already owned her own apartment, every month she deposited a fortune in the bank and still found a way to economize — we were in love, inseparable as the blind man and the cripple of Jerusalem: she saw for me, she guided me in the dark and I carried her, or vice-versa, we loved the missing part of the other, the part that wasn’t there and this attraction to absence was as strong as anti-matter doomed to destruction to explosion and to great silence, a real romantic novel, apparently love is one of the constants of universal literature — as strange as that may seem I remember that phrase of Lebihan’s the lover of mollusks and bicycles, the man able to expedite a contingent of suspects to Guantánamo and to wolf down two dozen oysters, once he talked to me about love, but it wasn’t about him or me or the secretary, it was Les Misérables, in his semi-detached house in the suburbs (I picture a semi-detached house in the suburbs, but maybe after all he lived in a sumptuous apartment on the Quai Voltaire) he regularly watched a serial adaptation of the novel on television, with delight, and every morning commented on the actions and gestures of the characters as if, for him, there was a real suspense there: Lebihan actually didn’t know the end of the Les Misérables, he’d say Francis, Francis, yesterday Marius kissed Cosette, or something like that, and I’d reply ah, love, Monsieur Lebihan, and then he’d say love is one of the constants of universal literature, Francis, which made me speechless, I must say, I had never thought about it, Lebihan no doubt was right, Rafael Kahla speaks well about love, between Beirut and Tangiers, in his elegant little book, a Palestinian passion of heavy-booted fighters, what will happen to the noble Intissar, where was I, I earmarked a page, here: