II
the following day was st. catherine’s day. Pierre didn’t go out to look for work. He made it to Place Vendôme in the early morning and, leaning on the gate next to the warehouse, waited for Jeannette to appear. A hollow anxiety filled his body. In his heavy, sleep-deprived head, vague images of the most improbable accidents rose like drifting islands of tobacco smoke in an airless room. He stayed that way all day, glued to the iron grille. He’d had nothing in his mouth for two days, but the sickly aftertaste of saliva remained a gustatory sensation that had yet to pierce his consciousness and become hunger. Rain started to pour in the evening, and under the sluicing streams of water the hard contours of objects rippled gently, sinking into the depths, as if immersed in a swift, transparent current. Dusk fell. The lanterns were lit and splattered colorless stains on the inky surface of the night, neither soaking into it nor illuminating it, an algae of shadows, the fantastical fauna of the bottomless depths populating the riverbed of the street. The precipitous banks — full of the phosphorescent, magical grottoes of jeweler’s windows, where virgin pearls the size of peas, shucked from their shells, slumbered on suede rocks — stretched upward, their perpendicular walls vainly groping for the surface. Down in the wide valley of the riverbed, a tightly-packed school of bizarre iron fish with fiery, bulging eyes flowed past, swishing their rubber-tire scales, lustily rubbing against one another in clouds of bluish gasoline spawn. Along the steep banks, straining to move, divers in the limpid gelatin of water waded under heavy wetsuit umbrellas with feet of lead. It seemed as though at any moment someone would pull at a dangling 16