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An icy wind dried the sweat on my brow. If Annette left him cold, how can I hope to move him? I told myself. He’s strong, and the strong are without pity even toward themselves.

A man shapes his desire according to his woman, and thus loves her only as much as he respects her, I told myself in consolation. So reasoning, I quickly realized then that Annette could never have inspired anything lasting in him.

“Is she better?” he asked Dr. Audier.

“Yes, she will sleep a day or two and then she will wake up.”

The ash from his cigarette fell on Annette’s face and Jean Luze, bending over her, blew it away.

I am watching and waiting for Annette to wake up. I am sitting by her side, arms folded. My eyes don’t leave her. It’s over. Let her live her own life. I failed to reach my goal with her. I am going to play my next card. No third party this time. Unexpected confidence fills me. Slowly I feel it emerge. Is this maturity? I run my hand over my face to feel the first transformations in my features. Yes, I have changed. My moist lips are parted on a tentative decision still unclear to me. I realize my worth. Everything that has fermented in my mind over forty years—my unappeased desires, my unheard pleas, the oblivion of solitary pleasure—is rising up within me. A revolution. I feel ready to answer to the demands of my being.

Jean is anxious again. He’s got two sick women on his hands. He knows full well that he is partly responsible for Annette’s suicide attempt. What’s going on inside him? And what’s going on inside me—I who am fully responsible? For the second time in my life and the first time in the last twenty years, I don’t want to know what’s inside me.

Annette opened her eyes two days later. She didn’t cry didn’t say a word. She took the milk on Dr. Audier’s orders and swallowed it with a grimace. Legs shaky she went to the bathroom and then got back in the bed I had remade for her.

“I don’t want anyone else but you in the room, you hear me, Claire? No one else …”

Her mournful stare inspires no remorse in me.

“Not even Jean?”

“Not even him.”

“And Dr. Audier?”

“Well, he is my doctor.”

She too has taken a decision. Maybe we took it together.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she adds with a sort of dignity, “and I took too many sleeping pills … How many days was I unconscious?”

“Two days.”

I stop Jean Luze at her door with malicious glee.

“She doesn’t want to see anyone.”

“Not even me?”

“Not even you.”

He lights a cigarette.

“Naturally, I haven’t told Félicia anything,” he tells me, “and I’m relying on your discretion. Whatever Annette’s reasons, there is no excuse for what she did. She only thinks of herself. She’s only a dirty little egoist, you hear me? The dirtiest little egoist I have ever known.”

An emptiness in me. Graves, ravines, chasms, aren’t deep enough to bury me. I lie beneath the last geological layer, at once dead and alive. No, dead, truly dead. A kind of automaton. I no longer have a soul. Is this what despair is? I can’t fool myself anymore. If I were to throw myself at him, I now know what to expect. He has made up his mind about us.

“Dirty little egoist,” he said. “Cracked-up women” … And we are indeed that, me and Annette, I know.

I’m alone in the dark cradling my doll. Her little artificial body is cold in my hands. Cold, this hair the wind has never tangled, cold, every part of her is cold, like death, like Jean Luze.

There was such wealth in my impoverishment! Back then anything that came from him was bliss. What possessed me to be demanding? Look how I am being punished! I angrily swallow my hopes and my love. There is nothing but hatred in me. Its roots spread, I feel them take hold of every part of my being. In every human being there is a blessed soul made miserable by the pursuit of happiness. All those who pray demand favor from God. But He’s tired of it all and He gets His revenge by botching His work. We are merely the rough drafts Nature cynically employs in its quest for Perfection. Tormented