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By Root 293 0

an angel — taxis are so rare at this time of night, especially on such a small street.” And, without waiting for a response, she settled in and asked him to take her to Rue Auguste-Comte, by the Jardin du Luxembourg. Engrossed in the pictures she was deleting from her camera, she hardly looked at him. Their eyes met in the rear-view mirror, and he heard her explain, as if answering a question of his, that she used a digital for minor projects. She stared at him for a split second and returned to her business. She talked while selecting and deleting pictures. He followed her with his eyes, furtively spying on his customer as she purged her camera of portraits that did not please her. A bitter smile appeared on his face. Because it occurred to him in very precise terms that, four years earlier, before he had fled, he too had been wiping out faces with the click of a button.

He had taken boulevard Saint-Michel. There was nothing very complicated about this run. All he had to do was let his customer off farther along, near the Luxembourg gates. In front of the fountain bearing the same name as the boulevard: silhouettes gliding past, coats buttoned up against the dying winter, noises, moods, skins, a man standing alone with his back to a corner of the fountain, tending a grill and the chestnuts he sold to those scurrying over the cobblestones of Lutetia. The night had spilled its ink across the page of the day, the street had retrieved a light different from that of the old sun: signs glittering on the facades of the cafés, waffle shops, and newsstands. And another light streamed from the nimble fingers of a juggler, an artist throwing flaming torches, catching them and launching them back into orbit again. It was a beautiful performance, but he was afraid the juggler would get burned.

His passenger was still bent over her camera. He wanted to hear her voice again, perhaps assailing him with the music of her speech: Isn’t it a lovely night? Do you like chestnuts? He wanted her to tell him something, a word, a thought: You know, this technology makes things so easy. You can get rid of all the faces, I mean all the portraits, that aren’t to your liking! She raised her head, stared at him a second time in the rear-view mirror, and finally said, “You look like someone. But without the turban.”

He shivered. What she saw in the mirror was not him. She saw someone else behind him, beyond his face. She lifted her head and introduced herself: “I’m Olia,” and instantly went back to deleting pictures, the ones she found unsatisfactory, furiously hitting the buttons of her camera. They were caught in traffic near the Gibert Joseph bookstore. The passersby were rifling through the books laid out on tables on the sidewalk, searching for buried treasure, their attention focused on the volumes that they flipped through before dropping them back on the piles.

Askia was still stuck in the long line of cars with his passenger. In the meantime she lowered the window on her side and, leaning out her thin body, photographed the readers in profile.

5

FOR A LONG TIME he had sought to cleanse his mind of the memory of his father, that ghost, that stubborn shadow filling the film screen of his childhood, the screenlike wall at the foot of the bed where he slept in his mother’s hut. It was 1973, and already three years had passed since the family had been reduced to the son and the mother huddled in their tropical shanty. The father was this: a film that started up at the end of a run, when he found himself alone in the car, images streaming down onto the windshield of Askia’s taxi. In the film the father’s faithful shadow loomed up on the wall in front of him at night in the hut. The father would play with a clown who sported a broad pair of wings on his back. Sidi, the father, who must have become associated with the clown at a travelling circus, wore a large white turban and inhabited the world of the dreamy child that Askia had been. Time had passed since their flight from the Sahel. The father and the clown did their routine:

Where