The mute bell was tolling for an eternity beneath my windows. I sensed that once again I was on the brink of a life whose meaning I would have to fumble after. All day under gray and vacant skies, it clamored at me, cruel, unwarrantable: I must learn how to love, as a child might sing: ‘Love’s the only answer.’

Then a pale, mournful hand hovered over mine for what seemed an eternity, an interval of frozen tension in some room that was simultaneously cold and obscene—a room on the outskirts of Paris which, ten years before, I’d felt I’d glimpsed through the eyes of another. At some stage—perhaps when that hand had entered through the door, that door which neither of us noticed and which only a certain light falling at a certain angle disclosed to me—my shadow fell over my companion’s childish profile.

In that second she turned in despair, fled towards the light from outside, where shadows don’t fall, but which might otherwise, by rights, have fallen across her—in spite of every possible counter-maneuver. Then I knew she wanted children, yet I also knew with silent cruelty that we would never have a single one together. She wanted a child so very passionately; it seemed more than reasonable to me, this desire that possessed us both, just as all around us life sprang from noisy bedsheets, howling with laughter, spasming in ecstatic collapse, rolling from room to room, hanging over balconies, every taboo broken…but she sensed what no one could say: it was too late for a child that would never arrive, too late for the purification of some mislaid original spark; we would never get further than that whispered, heavy hovering of hands and we could do nothing other than register revulsions in our entrails, cold beads sweating upon your skin.

The bells resounded behind me as I left her behind me, fled into the street, a grey, unforgivable stranger, and—I don’t know if it’s true or a figment of my distressed brain—she leant her mournful hand over her door to follow with a ghost of an enquiry: ‘…so it’s Tuesday?’, the day chosen a moment earlier, since for weeks we’d only seen each other by accident.

This was what was real. Only a madman could know and testify to it; those with a grasp of the situation merely smiled pityingly and shook their heads at our inevitable breakdown into that blind date, for nothing but a date would satisfy her, despite knowing where we both lived: no prelude, just to show up at the same place, at the same time. There followed an end to everything I knew: of all the conceivable encounters between two human beings in that labyrinth that I’ve retraced hundreds of times through the intervening days, this was the only possible outcome. Yet it should also be noted: never before had the light shone like that; never had so much been contained in that single touch; and in the days that followed, until she finally cried out with anguish in that pale bedroom—with its curtains drawn against that cold, bright light—the ghost of a child had lurked here, just here. It’s probably because they are more honest that mad people live shorter lives, the same way that stupidity leads to early graves. Now I understood clearly that her fatal melancholy stemmed from knowledge of the one thing no child is allowed: knowledge of what adults once were. It was from one of those that she had learned everything.