so you killed people? and I’m flabbergasted, this cultivated mind is incapable of admitting that she too is touched indirectly by violence, splattered by my actions, this civil servant who prepares strategic options for the French army doesn’t realize what there is at the other end of her work, no, I spent a few months gathering mushrooms and singing dirty songs, I feel a mute rage rising in me, what exactly does she want to know, but. . how many? it reminds me of those teenage trysts, when you ask “so you’ve slept with how many guys?” I have no idea, Stéphanie is stubborn, she looks like a judge, she insists, a lot? I answer truthfully, I have no idea, it’s impossible to know, and she is so ignorant of what I’m talking about that she thinks she can see on my shoulders thousands of corpses, all of a sudden, she imagines I’m Franz Stangl or Odilo Globocnik, she has tears of anger in her eyes, she feels deceived, she is discovering that her lover is a murderer, I down my drink at one go and pour myself another, you’re an alcoholic killer, she says between sobs and she begins laughing, laughing and crying at the same time, then she calms down, she calms down dries her tears and says oh my, oh my, she gathers herself together, things follow their course in her mind, she’s pragmatic, she’s curious, she wants to know, she wants to understand, she wants to put herself in my place she insists and what’s it like to kill someone? with a small hesitant voice, almost beseeching, so I explode, I think of Lowry and Margerie in Sicily, I say to her you’ll see for yourself, I get up I find the Yugoslav 7.65 in the wardrobe Stéphanie is dumbfounded like a good conjuror I hand her the weapon I show her the cartridges in the clip I shove the breech lift the safety catch I say to her you see there’s a bullet in the chamber she is paralyzed with fear I go over to her I say you want to know what it’s like to kill someone? so I grab her by the wrist I put the gun in her hand she doesn’t react I place my finger next to hers in the trigger she doesn’t understand she is paralyzed with fear and surprise I stick the muzzle in my mouth Stéphanie shouts no no no she fights I put pressure on her finger she presses despite herself on the release shouting noooo instinctively she hits me with a terrific left jab worthy of Zeus in the mouth the pistol goes click and that’s it, it falls heavily onto the wood floor, Stéphanie collapses too, she’s hiccupping as she sobs, she looks as if she’s going to throw up, she is curled up on the ground her hair hides her face and I leave, I leave her there like that lying alongside the little black Zastava with no firing pin, to go running down the stairs running down the street running onto the bridge over the Montmartre cemetery and so on until the Place de Clichy without even noticing that it was raining I arrive soaked at a bar a burning pain in my jaw I order a brandy that I down in one gulp, I feel my spirits lifting — my spirits are lifting in the midst of drunks, as the jukebox is playing Claude François’s “As Usual,” the original version of “My Way,” what idiocy, what got hold of me, and it’s my turn to have a big sticky cry, standing at the bar, in the midst of a choir of lushes who are repeating in chorus as uuuusual, guilt is flooding through me again now, 1,500 kilometers away and months later, it all can’t be ascribed to the alcohol, what cunning god breathed that idea into me, that macabre, violent farce, Stéphanie convinced that my skull was going to shatter and stain the ceiling, Sandra Balsells her eye in the gunsight, Intissar washing Marwan’s body, Malcolm Lowry with his hands around his wife’s neck, what a trip, the train slows down, we’re in a suburb of Florence the sublime, capital of beauty and tourism — the museums even the Uffizi gallery always give off a funereal smell, artworks, artworks stuck in time and space hung on a nail or placed on the floor, artworks that are more or less macabre like Caravaggio’s decapitations or stuffed human beings, in the Cairo Museum Nasser forbids the crowd of tourists from seeing the mummies of pharaohs, those little men dried by time their inner organs carefully preserved in alabaster vases, ever since his adolescence Nasser has found it disgraceful that colonialist foreigners come to satisfy their curiosity in front of the embalmed remains of the glorious fathers of Egypt, imagine, he said, that a group of Arab archeologists wanted to unearth the kings of France in Saint-Denis to exhibit their coffins and their most intimate bones to the view of all, it seems to me that the French government would oppose that, it’s likely, after all the head of Louis XVI was brandished on the Place de la Concorde but we haven’t seen it since, so Egyptian mummies are locked up in a big room forbidden to the public, except that of Tut-Ankh-Amun and his wooden sarcophagus — on the other hand the Egyptians don’t have that same delicacy with the dozens of animals swaddled 3,000 years ago, ibis, dogs and jackals, cats, swallows, garter snakes and cobras, calves and bulls, falcons, baboons, perch and catfish, a whole zoo preserved in strips of linen and resin fills the Cairo Museum, dignified and dusty like an old Englishwoman, a museum of natural history, before in this kind of establishment they didn’t hesitate to exhibit stuffed men, I read somewhere that a little city in Spain by the sea still possessed, not long ago, a 150-year-old bushman warrior, in a glass cage, with spear and tackle, the plaster skin was regularly repainted ebony black which earned him the nickname El Negro, he sat in state between two human fetuses that were swimming in formaldehyde, in the company of a two-headed cow and a five-footed sheep, the Bushman had been bought in Paris at the taxidermists Verreaux Fils that provided half the museums in Europe with specimens of various species, El Negro disinterred secretly the day after his burial in Botswana was sent to Paris by boat accompanied by a number of skeletons from the same cemetery, after having been eviscerated his skin dried with salt his body smeared with a special preparation, stuffed in France he immediately interested a veterinarian who set him up in 1880 in his collection, I forget where near Barcelona, by the Mediterranean, and the nice black man with his spear and a borrowed loincloth was the delight of generations of Catalan schoolchildren, for he was four and a half feet tall, more or less their height, and I imagine the children playing at hunting lions in the playground after having seen it, for almost a hundred years: dusted, repaired, repainted El Negro was forgotten in the back of a provincial museum until one day they decided to give it a proper burial, out of decency, there had to be an international campaign for the museum of natural history in question to agree to part with the jewel of its collection, but the Bushman ended up finding its way back to Africa again, on a plane, the government of Botswana organized a national funeral for this unknown warrior whose remains now rest next to his own people — in Florence the Noble of course there’s no stuffed black man in the Uffizi gallery, no animal or human mummies, pictures statues gods goddesses saints all the nobility of representation, from the perfectly proportioned busts to the golden hair of Botticelli, one of the most popular museums in Italy, where Caravaggio’s aegis sits enthroned, the Gorgon’s blood-red face on a round shield, a corseless head with crazy eyes, the snakes are still moving in Medusa’s mane, did cultured Stéphanie admire Caravaggio so obsessed with decapitated heads and blood, maybe, always that curiosity about death, that desire to see her own death in that of others, to guess, to pierce the secret of the final instant just as Caravaggio depicts himself in the suffering face of the Gorgon with the cut neck, Stéphanie curious about my war exploits, my courage or my cowardliness, Stéphanie lying on the ground, broken with fear and tears, next to my useless 7.65 abandoned on the floor, did she get an answer to her question, was that really what she was asking me, I’m obscure even to myself, rattled by Fate like a convoy in this tunnel where traces of humidity gleam on the blackened concrete underneath Florence city of flowers