Labyrinth

They’re seated. They’re looking at the camera. They are captioned, from left to right: J. Henric, J.-J. Goux, Ph. Sollers, J. Kristeva, M.-Th. Réveillé, P. Guyotat, C. Devade, and M. Devade.

There’s no photo credit.

They’re sitting around a table. It’s an ordinary table, made of wood, perhaps, or plastic, it could even be a marble table on metal legs, but nothing could be less germane to my purpose than to give an exhaustive description of it. The table is a table that is large enough to seat the above-mentioned individuals and it’s in a café. Or appears to be. Let’s suppose, for the moment, that it’s in a café.

The eight people who appear in the photo, who are posing for the photo, are fanned out around one side of the table in a crescent or a kind of opened-out horseshoe, so that each of them can be seen clearly and completely. In other words, no one is facing away from the camera. In front of them, or rather between them and the photographer (and this is slightly strange), there are three plants—a rhododendron, a ficus, and an everlasting—rising from a planter, which may serve, but this is speculation, as a barrier between two distinct sections of the café.

The photo was probably taken in 1977 or thereabouts.

But let us return to the figures. On the left-hand side we have, as I said, J. Henric, that is, the writer Jacques Henric, born in 1938 and the author of “Archées,” “Artaud Travaillé par la Chine,” and “Chasses.” Henric is a solidly built man, broad-shouldered, muscular-looking, probably not very tall. He’s wearing a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms. He’s not what you would call a handsome man; he has the square face of a farmer or a construction worker, thick eyebrows, and a dark chin, one of those chins which need to be shaved twice a day (or so some people claim). His legs are crossed and his hands are clasped over his knee.

Next to him is J.-J. Goux. About J.-J. Goux I know nothing. He’s probably called Jean-Jacques, but in this story, for the sake of convenience, I’ll continue to use his initials. J.-J. Goux is young and blond. He’s wearing glasses. There’s nothing especially attractive about his features (although, compared with Henric, he looks not only more handsome but also more intelligent). The line of his jaw is symmetrical and his lips are full, the lower lip slightly thicker than the upper. He’s wearing a turtleneck sweater and a dark leather jacket.
Beside J.-J. is Ph. Sollers, Philippe Sollers, born in 1936, the editor of Tel Quel, author of “Drame,” “Nombres,” and “Paradis,” a public figure familiar to everyone. Sollers has his arms crossed, the left arm resting on the surface of the table, the right arm resting on the left (and his right hand indolently cupping the elbow of his left arm). His face is round. It would be an exaggeration to say that it’s the face of a fat man, but it probably will be in a few years’ time: it’s the face of a man who enjoys a good meal. An ironic, intelligent smile is hovering about his lips. His eyes, which are much livelier than those of Henric or J.-J., and smaller, too, remain fixed on the camera, and the bags underneath them help to give his round face a look that is at once preoccupied, perky, and playful. Like J.-J., he’s wearing a turtleneck sweater, though the sweater that Sollers is wearing is white, dazzlingly white, while J.-J.’s is probably yellow or light green. Over the sweater Sollers is wearing a garment that appears at first glance to be a dark-colored leather jacket, though it could be made of a lighter material, possibly suède. He’s the only one who’s smoking.

Beside Sollers is J. Kristeva, Julia Kristeva, the Bulgarian semiologist, his wife. She is the author of “La Traversée des Signes,” “Pouvoirs de l’Horreur,” and “Le Langage, Cet Inconnu.” She’s slim, with prominent cheekbones, black hair parted in the middle and gathered into a bun at the back. Her eyes are dark and lively, as lively as those of Sollers, although there are differences: in addition to being larger, they transmit a certain hospitable warmth (that is, a certain serenity) which is absent from her husband’s eyes. She’s wearing a turtleneck sweater, which is very close-fitting, though the collar is loose, and a long V-shaped necklace that accentuates the form of her torso. At first glance she could almost be Vietnamese. Except that her breasts, it seems, are larger than those of the average Vietnamese woman. Hers is the only smile that allows us a glimpse of teeth.

Beside la Kristeva is M.-Th. Réveillé. About her, too, I know nothing. She’s probably called Marie-Thérèse. Let’s suppose that she is. Marie-Thérèse, then, is the first person so far not to be wearing a turtleneck sweater. Henric isn’t, either, actually, but his neck is short (he barely has one at all), while Marie-Thérèse Réveillé, by contrast, has a neck that is long and entirely revealed by the dark garment she is wearing. Her hair is straight and long, with a center part, light brown in color, or perhaps honey blond. Thanks to the slight leftward turn of her face, a pearl can be seen suspended from her ear, like a stray satellite.

Next to Marie-Thérèse Réveillé is P. Guyotat, that is, Pierre Guyotat, born in 1940, the author of “Tombeau pour Cinq Cent Mille Soldats,” “Éden, Éden, Éden,” and “Prostitution.” Guyotat is bald. That’s his most striking characteristic. He’s also the handsomest man in the group. His bald head is radiant, his skull capacious, and the black hair at his temples resembles nothing so much as the laurel leaves that used to wreathe the heads of victorious Roman generals. Neither shrinking away nor striking a pose, he has the expression of a man who travels by night. He’s wearing a leather jacket, a shirt, and a T-shirt. The T-shirt (but here there must be some mistake) is white with black horizontal stripes and a thicker black stripe around the neck, like something a child might wear, or a Soviet parachutist. His eyebrows are narrow and definite. They mark the border between his immense forehead and a face that is wavering between concentration and indifference. The eyes are inquisitive, but perhaps they give a false impression. His lips are pressed together in a way that may not be deliberate.

Next to Guyotat is C. Devade. Caroline? Carole? Carla? Colette? Claudine? We’ll never know. Let’s say, for the sake of convenience, that she’s called Carla Devade. She could well be the youngest member of the group. Her hair is short, without bangs, and although the photo is in black-and-white, it’s reasonable to suppose that her skin has an olive tone, suggesting a Mediterranean background. Maybe Carla Devade is from the South of France, or Catalonia, or Italy. Only Julia Kristeva is as dark, but Kristeva’s skin—perhaps it’s a trick of the light—has a metallic, bronzelike quality, while Carla Devade’s is silky and yielding. She is wearing a dark sweater with a round neck, and a blouse. Her lips and her eyes betray more than a hint of a smile: a sign of recognition, perhaps.

Next to Carla Devade is M. Devade. This is presumably the writer Marc Devade, who was still a member of Tel Quel’s editorial committee. His relationship with Carla Devade is obvious: man and wife. Could they be brother and sister? Possibly, but the physical dissimilarities are numerous. Marc Devade (I find it hard to call him Marc, I would have preferred to translate that “M” into Marcel or Max) is blond, chubby-cheeked, and has very light eyes. So it makes more sense to presume that they are man and wife. Just to be different, Devade is wearing a turtleneck sweater, like J.-J. Goux, Sollers, and Kristeva, and a dark jacket. His eyes are large and beautiful, and his mouth is decisive. His hair, as I said, is blond; it’s long (longer than that of the other men) and elegantly combed back. His forehead is broad and perhaps slightly bulging. And he has, although this may be an illusion produced by the graininess of the image, a dimple in his chin. How many of them are looking directly at the photographer? Only a few: J.-J. Goux, Sollers, and Marc Devade. Marie-Thérèse Réveillé and Carla Devade are looking away to the left, past Henric. Guyotat’s gaze is angled slightly to the right, fixed on a point a yard or two from the photographer. And Kristeva, whose gaze is the strangest of all, appears to be looking straight at the camera, but in fact she’s looking at the photographer’s stomach, or, to be more precise, into the empty space beside his hip.

The photo was taken in winter or autumn, or maybe at the beginning of spring, but certainly not in summer. Who are the most warmly dressed? J.-J. Goux, Sollers, and Marc Devade, without question: they’re wearing jackets over their turtleneck sweaters, and thick jackets, too, from the look of them, especially J.-J.’s and Devade’s. Kristeva is a case apart: her turtleneck sweater is light, more elegant than practical, and she’s not wearing anything over it. Then we have Guyotat. He might be as warmly dressed as the four I’ve already mentioned. He doesn’t seem to be, but he’s the only one wearing three layers: the black leather jacket, the shirt, and the striped T-shirt. You could imagine him wearing those clothes even if the photo had been taken in summer. It’s quite possible. All we can say for sure is that Guyotat is dressed as if he were on his way somewhere else. As for Carla Devade, she’s in between. Her blouse, whose collar is showing over the top of her sweater, looks soft and warm; the sweater itself is casual, but of good quality, neither very heavy nor very light. Finally, we have Jacques Henric and Marie-Thérèse Réveillé. Henric is clearly not a man who feels the cold, although his Canadian lumberjack’s shirt looks warm enough. And the least warmly dressed of all is Marie-Thérèse Réveillé. Under her light, knitted V-neck sweater there are only her breasts, cupped by a black or white bra.

All of them, more or less warmly dressed, captured by the camera at that moment in 1977 or thereabouts, are friends, and some of them are lovers, too. For a start, Sollers and Kristeva, obviously, and the two Devades, Marc and Carla. Those, we might say, are the stable couples. And yet there are certain features of the photo (something about the arrangement of the objects, the petrified, musical rhododendron, two of its leaves invading the space of the ficus like clouds within a cloud, the grass growing in the planter, which looks more like fire than grass, the everlasting leaning whimsically to the left, the glasses in the center of the table, well away from the edges, except for Kristeva’s, as if the other members of the group were worried they might fall) that suggest a more complex and subtle web of relations among these men and women.

Let’s imagine J.-J. Goux, for example, who is looking out at us through his thick submarine spectacles.

His space in the photo is momentarily vacant and we see him walking along Rue de l’École de Médecine, with books under his arm, of course, two books, till he comes out onto Boulevard Saint-Germain. There he turns his steps toward the Mabillon Métro station, but first he stops in front of a bar, checks the time, goes in, and orders a cognac. After a while, J.-J. moves away from the bar and sits down at a table near the window. What does he do? He opens a book. We can’t tell what book it is, but we do know that he’s finding it difficult to concentrate. Every twenty seconds or so he lifts his head and looks out onto Boulevard Saint-Germain, his gaze a little more gloomy each time. It’s raining, and people are walking hurriedly under their umbrellas. J.-J.’s blond hair isn’t wet, from which we can deduce that it began to rain after he entered the bar. It’s getting dark. J.-J. remains seated, and now there are two cognacs and two coffees on his tab. Coming closer, we can see that the dark rings under his eyes have the look of a war zone. At no point has he taken off his glasses. He’s a pitiful sight. After a very long wait, he goes back out onto the street, where he is gripped by a shiver, perhaps because of the cold. For a moment he stands still on the sidewalk and looks both ways, then he starts walking in the direction of the Mabillon Métro station. When he reaches the entrance, he runs his hand through his hair several times, as if he’d suddenly realized that his hair was a mess, although it’s not. Then he goes down the steps, and the story ends or freezes in an empty space where appearances gradually fade away. Who was J.-J. Goux waiting for? For someone he’s in love with? Someone he was hoping to sleep with that night? And how was his delicate sensibility affected by that person’s failure to show up?

Let’s suppose that the person who didn’t come was Jacques Henric. While J.-J. was waiting for him, Henric was riding a 250-cc Honda motorcycle to the entrance of the apartment building where the Devades live. But no. That’s impossible. Let’s imagine that Henric simply climbed onto his Honda and rode off into a vaguely literary, vaguely unstable Paris, and that his absence on this occasion is strategic, as amorous absences nearly always are.

So let’s set up the couples again. Carla Devade and Marc Devade. Sollers and Kristeva. J.-J. Goux and Jacques Henric. Marie-Thérèse Réveillé and Pierre Guyotat. And let’s set up the night. J.-J. Goux is sitting and reading a book whose title is immaterial, in a bar on Boulevard Saint-Germain; his turtleneck sweater won’t let his skin breathe, but he doesn’t yet feel entirely ill at ease. Henric is stretched out on his bed, half undressed, smoking and looking at the ceiling. Sollers is shut up in his study, writing (pinkly snug and warm inside his turtleneck sweater). Julia Kristeva is at the university. Marie-Thérèse Réveillé is walking along Avenue de Friedland near the intersection with Rue Balzac, the headlights of the cars shining in her face. Guyotat is in a bar on Rue Lacépède, near the Jardin des Plantes, drinking with some friends. Carla Devade is in her apartment, sitting on a chair in the kitchen, doing nothing. Marc Devade is at the Tel Quel office, speaking politely on the phone to one of the poets he most admires and hates. Soon Sollers and Kristeva will be together, reading after dinner. They will not make love tonight. Soon Marie-Thérèse Réveillé and Guyotat will be together in bed, and he will sodomize her. They will fall asleep at five in the morning, after exchanging a few words in the bathroom. Soon Carla Devade and Marc Devade will be together, and she will shout, and he will shout, and she will go to the bedroom and pick up a novel, any one of the many that are lying on her bedside table, and he will sit at his desk and try to write but fail. Carla will fall asleep at one in the morning, Marc at half past two, and they will try not to touch each other. Soon Jacques Henric will go down to the underground parking garage and climb onto his Honda and venture out into the cold streets of Paris, becoming cold himself, a man who shapes his own destiny, and knows, or at least believes, that he is lucky. He will be the only member of the group to see the day dawning and the disastrous retreat of the night wanderers, each an enigmatic letter in an imaginary alphabet. Soon J.-J. Goux, who was the first to fall asleep, will have a dream in which a photo will appear, and he’ll hear a voice warning him of the Devil’s presence and of hapless death. He’ll wake with a start from this dream or auditory nightmare and won’t be able to get back to sleep for the rest of the night.

Day breaks and the photo is illuminated once again. Marie-Thérèse Réveillé and Carla Devade look off to the left, at an object beyond Henric’s muscular shoulders. There is recognition or acceptance in Carla’s gaze: that much is clear from her half smile and gentle eyes. Marie-Thérèse, however, has a penetrating gaze: her lips are slightly open, as if she were having difficulty breathing, and her eyes are trying to fix on (trying, unsuccessfully, to nail) the object of her attention, which is presumably moving. The women are looking in the same direction, but it’s clear that they have quite different emotional reactions to whatever it is they are seeing. Carla’s gentleness may be conditioned by ignorance. Marie-Thérèse’s insecurity, her defensive yet inquisitorial glare, may result from the sudden stripping away of various layers of experience.

Any moment now, J.-J. Goux might start to cry. The voice that warned him of the Devil’s presence is still ringing, though faintly, in his ears. He is not, however, looking to the left, at the object that has attracted the women’s attention, but directly at the camera, and an infinitesimal smile is creeping over his lips, a would-be ironic smile confined, for the moment, to the safer domain of placidity.

When night falls over the photograph again, J.-J. Goux will head straight for his apartment, make himself a sandwich, watch television for exactly fifteen minutes, not one more, then sit in an armchair in the living room and call Philippe Sollers. The phone will ring five times and J.-J. will hang up slowly, holding the receiver in his right hand, raising his left hand to his lips, and touching them with two fingers, as if to check that he’s still there, that the person there is him, in a living room that’s not too big, not too small, crowded with books, and dark.

As for Carla Devade, having lost her acquiescent smile, she’ll call Marie-Thérèse Réveillé, who will pick up the phone after three rings. In a roundabout way, they’ll talk about things they don’t really want to talk about at all, and arrange to meet in three days’ time at a café on Rue Galande. Tonight Marie-Thérèse will go out on her own, to nowhere in particular, and Carla will shut herself in her room as soon as she hears the sound of Marc Devade’s key sliding into the lock. But nothing tragic will happen for now. Marc Devade will read an essay by a Bulgarian linguist; Guyotat will go to see a film by Jacques Rivette; Julia Kristeva will stay up late reading; Philippe Sollers will stay up late writing, and he and his wife will barely exchange a word, shut away in their respective studies; Jacques Henric will sit down at his typewriter, but nothing will occur to him, so after twenty minutes he’ll put on his leather jacket and his boots and go down to the underground parking garage and look for his Honda; for some reason the lights in the garage don’t seem to be working, but Henric can remember where he left his bike, so he walks in the dark, in the belly of that whale-like garage, without fear or apprehension of any kind, until about halfway there he hears an unusual noise (not a knocking in the pipes or the sound of a car door opening or closing) and he stops, without really understanding why, and listens, but the noise is not repeated, and now the silence is absolute.

And then the night ends (or a small part of the night, at least, a manageable part) and light wraps the photo like a bandage on fire, and there he is again, Pierre Guyotat, almost a familiar presence now, with his powerful, shiny bald head and his leather jacket, the jacket of an anarchist or a commissar from the Spanish Civil War, and his sidelong gaze, veering off to the right, as if into the space behind the photographer, as if directed at someone near or at the bar, perhaps, standing or sitting on a stool, someone whose back is turned to Guyotat and whose face is invisible to him unless, and this is not unlikely, there is a mirror behind the bar. It may be a woman. A young woman, perhaps. Guyotat looks at her reflection in the mirror and looks at the back of her neck. His gaze, however, is far less intense than the gaze of this woman, which is plumbing an abyss. Here we can reasonably conclude that, while Guyotat is looking at a stranger, Marie-Thérèse and Carla are looking at a man they know, although, as is usually (or, in fact, inevitably) the case, their perceptions of him are entirely different.

Let’s call these two beyond the frame X and Z. X is the woman at the bar. Z is the man who is known to Marie-Thérèse and Carla. They don’t know him very well, of course. From Carla’s gaze (which is not only gentle but protective) it could be inferred that he is young, although from Marie-Thérèse’s gaze it could also be inferred that he is a potentially dangerous individual. Who else knows Z? No one, or at least there is nothing to suggest that his presence is of any concern to the others. Maybe he’s a young writer who at some stage tried to get his work published in Tel Quel; maybe he’s a young journalist from South America, no, from Central America, who at some point tried to write an article about the group. He may well be an ambitious young man. If he’s a Central American in Paris, in addition to being ambitious he may also be bitter. Of the people sitting around the table, he knows only Marie-Thérèse, Carla, Sollers, and Marc Devade. Let’s say he once visited the Tel Quel office and was introduced to those four. (He also once shook hands with Marcelin Pleynet, but Pleynet’s not in the photo.) He has never seen the others in his life, or only (in the cases of Guyotat and Jacques Henric) in author photos. We can imagine the young Central American, hungry and bitter, in the Tel Quel office, and we can imagine Philippe Sollers and Marc Devade, wavering between puzzlement and indifference as they listen to him, and we can even imagine that Carla Devade is there by pure chance; she has come to meet her husband, she has brought some papers that Marc forgot on his desk, she’s there because she couldn’t stand being alone in the apartment a minute longer, etc. What we can’t imagine (or justify) in any way at all is Marie-Thérèse’s presence in the office. She is Guyotat’s partner, she doesn’t work for Tel Quel, and she has no reason to be there. And yet there she is, and that is where she meets the young Central American. Is she there on that day because of Carla Devade? Has Carla arranged to meet Marie-Thérèse at the office because she knows that Marc will not be coming home with her? Or has Marie-Thérèse come to meet someone else? Let’s return, discreetly, to the afternoon when the Central American came to the office on Rue Jacob to pay his respects.

It’s the end of the workday. The secretary has already gone home, and when the bell rings it’s Marc Devade who opens the door and lets the visitor in without meeting his eye. The Central American crosses the threshold and follows Marc Devade to an office at the end of the corridor. He leaves a trail of drops on the wooden floor behind him, although it stopped raining quite some time ago. Devade is, of course, oblivious of this detail; he walks ahead, talking about something or other—the weather, money, chores—with that elegance that only certain Frenchmen seem to possess. In the office, which is spacious and contains a desk, several chairs, two armchairs, and shelves full of books and magazines, Sollers is waiting, and as soon as the introductions are over the Central American hails him as a genius, one of the century’s most brilliant minds, a compliment that would be par for the course in certain tropical nations on the far side of the Atlantic but which, in the Tel Quel office and the ears of Philippe Sollers, verges on the preposterous. In fact, as soon as the Central American makes his declaration, Sollers catches Devade’s eye and both of them wonder whether they’ve let a madman in. Deep down, however, Sollers is eighty per cent in agreement with the Central American’s appraisal, so once he has set aside the idea that the visitor might be mocking them the conversation proceeds in an amicable fashion, at least for a while. The Central American speaks of Julia Kristeva (he winks at Sollers as he mentions that eminent Bulgarian), he speaks of Marcelin Pleynet (whom he has already met), and of Denis Roche (whose work he claims to be translating). Devade listens to him with a slightly wry smile. Sollers listens, nodding from time to time, his boredom increasing with every passing second. Suddenly, a sound of footsteps in the corridor. The door opens. Carla Devade appears, wearing tight corduroy trousers, flat shoes, and a disconsolate smile on her pretty Mediterranean face. Marc Devade gets up from his chair; for a moment the couple whisper questions and answers. The Central American has fallen silent; Sollers is mechanically flipping through a British magazine. Then Carla and Marc walk across the room (Carla taking tentative little steps, holding her husband’s arm), and the Central American stands up, is introduced, obsequiously greets the newcomer. The conversation immediately resumes, but the Central American’s chatter veers off in a new direction, unfortunately for him (he changes the subject from literature to the matchless beauty and grace of French women), at which point Sollers completely loses interest. Shortly afterward, the visit is brought to a close: Sollers looks at his watch, says it’s late; Devade shows the Central American to the door, shakes his hand, and the visitor, instead of waiting for the elevator, rushes down the stairs. On the second-floor landing he runs into Marie-Thérèse Réveillé. The Central American is talking to himself in Spanish, not under his breath but out loud. As their paths cross, Marie-Thérèse notices a fierce look in his eyes. They bump into each other. Both apologize. They look at each other again (and this is surprising, the way their eyes meet again after the apology), and what she sees, beneath the expedient mask of bitterness, is a well of unbearable horror and fear.

So the Central American, Z, is there in the café when the photo is taken, and Carla and Marie-Thérèse have recognized him, they’ve remembered him; perhaps he has just arrived, perhaps he walked past the table at which the group is sitting and greeted them, but, except for the two women, they had no idea who he was; this happens quite often, of course, but it’s something that the Central American still can’t accept with equanimity. There he is, to the left of the group, with some Central American friends, or waiting for them, maybe, and deep within him there’s a seething anger nourished by affronts and grudges, fuelled by bitterness and the chill of the City of Light. His appearance, however, is equivocal: it makes Carla Devade feel like a protective older sister or a missionary nun in Africa, but it catches at Marie-Thérèse Réveillé like barbed wire and triggers a vague erotic longing.

And then night falls again and the photo empties out or disappears under a scribble of lines traced by the mechanism of night, and Sollers is writing in his study, and Kristeva is writing in her study next door—soundproofed studies, so that they can’t hear each other typing, for example, or getting up to consult a book, or coughing or talking to themselves—and Carla and Marc Devade are leaving a cinema (they’ve been to see a film by Rivette), not talking to each other, although a couple of times Marc and then Carla, who’s more distracted, greet people they know, and J.-J. Goux is preparing his dinner, a frugal dinner consisting of bread, pâté, cheese, and a glass of wine, and Guyotat is undressing Marie-Thérèse Réveillé and throwing her onto the sofa with a violent thrust that Marie-Thérèse intercepts in midair as if she were catching a butterfly of lucidity in a lucidity net, and Henric is leaving his apartment, going down to the parking garage, and he stops again as the lights go out, first the ones near the metal roller door that opens onto the street, and then the others, till there is only the light down at the far end, illuminating his multicolored Honda, flickering helplessly, and then it fails as well. And it occurs to Henric that his motorcycle is like an Assyrian god, but for the moment his legs refuse to walk on into the darkness, and Marie-Thérèse shuts her eyes and opens her legs, one foot on the sofa, the other on the carpet, while Guyotat pushes into her, the panties still around her thighs, and calls her his little whore, his little bitch, and asks her what she did during the day, what happened to her, what streets she wandered down, and J.-J. Goux is sitting at the table and spreading pâté on a piece of bread and lifting it to his mouth and chewing, first on the right side, then on the left, unhurriedly, with a book by Robert Pinget open beside him to page 2 and the television switched off but the screen reflecting his image, a man on his own with his mouth closed and his cheeks full, looking thoughtful and absent, and Carla Devade and Marc Devade are making love, Carla on top, illuminated only by the light in the corridor, a light they usually leave on, and Carla is groaning and trying not to look at her husband’s face, his blond hair a mess now, his light eyes, his broad and placid face, his delicate, elegant hands, devoid of the fire she’s longing for, ineffectually holding her hips, as if he were trying to keep her there with him, but he has no real sense of what she might be fleeing from or what her flight might mean, a flight that goes on and on like torture, and Kristeva and Sollers are going to bed, first her, she has to lecture early the next day, then him, and both of them take books that they will leave on their bedside tables when sleep comes to close their eyes, and Philippe Sollers will dream that he is walking along a beach in Brittany with a scientist who has discovered a way to destroy the world; they will be walking westward along this long, deserted beach, bounded by rocks and black cliffs, and suddenly Sollers will realize that the scientist (who is talking and explaining) is himself and that the man walking beside him is a murderer; this will dawn on him when he looks down at the wet sand (with its souplike consistency) and the crabs skittering away to hide and the prints the two of them are leaving on the beach (there is a certain logic to this: identifying the murderer by his footprints), and Julia Kristeva will dream of a little village in Germany where years ago she participated in a seminar, and she’ll see the streets of the village, clean and empty, and sit down in a square that’s tiny but full of plants and trees, and close her eyes and listen to the distant cheeping of a single bird and wonder if the bird is in a cage or free, and she’ll feel a breeze on her neck and her face, neither cold nor warm, a perfect breeze, perfumed with lavender and orange blossom, and then she’ll remember her seminar and look at her watch, but it will have stopped.

So the Central American is outside the frame of the photograph, sharing that pristine and deceptive territory with the object of Guyotat’s gaze: an unknown woman armed only, for the moment, with her beauty. Their eyes will not meet. They will pass each other by like shadows, briefly sharing the same hazardous ambit: the itinerant theatre of Paris. The Central American could quite easily become a murderer. Perhaps, back in his country, he will, but not here, where the only blood he could possibly shed is his own. This Pol Pot won’t kill anyone in Paris. And actually, back in Tegucigalpa or San Salvador, he’ll probably end up teaching in a university. As for the unknown woman, she will not be captured by Guyotat’s asbestos nets. She’s at the bar, waiting for the boyfriend she’ll marry before long (him or the next one), and their marriage will be disastrous, though not without its moments of comfort. Literature brushes past these literary creatures and kisses them on the lips, but they don’t even notice.

The section of restaurant or café that contains the photo’s nest of smoke continues imperturbably on its voyage through nothingness. Behind Sollers, for instance, we can make out the fragmentary figures of three men. None of their faces can be seen in their entirety. The man on the left, in profile: a forehead, one eyebrow, the back part of his ear, the top of his head. The man on the right: a little piece of his forehead, his cheekbone, strands of dark hair. The man in the middle, who seems to be calling the shots: most of his forehead, traversed by two clearly visible wrinkles, his eyebrows, the bridge of his nose, and a discreet quiff. Behind them, there is a pane of glass and behind the glass many people walking about curiously among stalls or exhibition stands, bookstands perhaps, mostly facing away from our characters (who have their backs to them in turn), except for a child with a round face and straight bangs, wearing a jacket that may be too small for him, looking sideways toward the café, as if from that distance he could observe everything going on inside, which, on the face of it, seems rather unlikely.

And in a corner, to the right: the waiting man, the listening man. His face appears just above Marc Devade’s blond hair. His hair is dark and abundant, his eyebrows are thick, he is thin. In one hand (a hand resting listlessly against his right temple) he is holding a cigarette. A spiral of smoke is rising from the cigarette toward the ceiling, and the camera has captured it almost as if it were the image of a ghost. Telekinesis. An expert could identify the brand of cigarette that he’s smoking in half a second just by the solid look of that smoke. Gauloises, no doubt. He’s gazing off toward the photo’s right-hand side—that is, he’s pretending not to notice that the photo is being taken, but in a way he, too, is posing.

And there is yet another person: careful examination reveals something protruding from Guyotat’s neck like a cancerous growth, which turns out to be made up of a nose, a withered forehead, the outline of an upper lip, the profile of a man who is looking, with a certain gravity, in the same direction as the smoking man, although their gazes could not be more different.

And then the photo is occluded and all that is left is the smoke of a Gauloise floating in the air, as if the viewfinder had suddenly swung to the right, toward the black hole of chance, and Sollers comes to a sudden halt in the street, a street near Place Wagram, and feels in his pockets as if he had left his address book behind or lost it, and Marie-Thérèse Réveillé is driving on Boulevard Malesherbes, near Place Wagram, and J.-J. Goux is talking on the phone with Marc Devade (J.-J.’s voice is unsteady, Devade isn’t saying a word), and Guyotat and Henric are walking on Rue Saint-André des Arts, heading for Rue Dauphine, and by chance they run into Carla Devade, who says hello and joins them, and Julia Kristeva is coming out of class surrounded by a retinue of students, quite a few of whom are foreign (two Spaniards, a Mexican, an Italian, two Germans), and once more the photo dissolves into nothingness.

Aurora borealis. Terrible dawn. As they open their eyes, they are almost transparent. Marc Devade, alone in bed, snug in gray pajamas, dreaming of the Académie Goncourt. J.-J. Goux at his window, watching clouds float through the sky over Paris and comparing them unfavorably with certain clouds in paintings by Pissarro or the clouds in his nightmare. Julia Kristeva is sleeping and her calm face seems an Assyrian mask until, with a very slight wince of discomfort, she wakes. Philippe Sollers is in the kitchen, leaning on the edge of the sink, and blood is dripping from his right index finger. Carla Devade is climbing the stairs to her apartment after having spent the night with Guyotat. Marie-Thérèse Réveillé is making coffee and reading a book. Jacques Henric is walking through a dark parking garage, which echoes to the sound of his boots on the concrete.

A world of forms is unfolding before his eyes, a world of distant noises. The possibility of fear is approaching, the way wind approaches a provincial capital. Henric stops, his heart speeds up, he tries to orient himself. Before, he could at least glimpse shadows and silhouettes at the far end of the garage; now it seems hermetically black, like the darkness in an empty coffin at the bottom of a crypt. So he decides to keep still. In that stillness his heartbeat gradually slows and memory brings back images of the day. He remembers Guyotat, whom he secretly admires, openly pursuing little Carla. Once again, he sees them smiling and then he sees them walking away down a street where yellow lights scatter and regroup sporadically, without any obvious pattern, although Henric knows deep down that everything is determined in some way, everything is causally linked to something else, and human nature leaves very little room for the truly gratuitous. He touches his crotch. He is startled by this movement, the first he has made for some time. He has an erection and yet he doesn’t feel sexually aroused in any way.