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“Irritating? Are you talking to me?”
    “Yes. You never say hello to me. You could at least say hello.”
    “Do we know each other?”
    “My husband is Roland Botton. We had dinner together last winter.”
    I said hello to her for a year. Because I hadn’t recognized her again, I forced myself to recognize her. See what things depend on. Hello for a year. Nothing more. Translate that into twenty hellos if you reckon that I went to Rouen once or twice a month, because due to a phenomenon I put down as sheer chance, I ran into her each time I was there. Twenty hellos, which evolved from hello madame to hello dear Madame Botton and finally, after passing through several variations, ending with Marisa hello! Never an extra word, never a how are you, nothing. The day I said Marisa hello! she stops: “Such familiarity all of a sudden.” Why did I throw out Marisa hello!? You know me, nice day, unexpected memory of her first name, probably heard it mentioned five minutes before, in short, a momentary whim and suddenly this woman who didn’t exist a second ago, becomes a bodily reality because she decides to take these chance words seriously. “Is that a reproach?”
    “Quite the opposite.”
    She looks me straight in the eye. Incredible cheek. Smiles and goes off somewhere or other. From that day on, I think about Marisa Botton. That’s it. But it’s enough. It takes a mere nothing, you see, for someone to start making his bed in paradise. Don’t clear the table, leave the crumbs, Dacimiento will sweep up. You can’t not make crumbs eating this cake. You like the cake, that’s good. At least I don’t ruin your appetite anymore. You see how I’ve swelled up? I’m going to croak from intestinal cancer, nobody gives a shit. And I’ve also probably got Kreutzfeld-Jakob disease, since this morning there’s this tremor in my hand. Did you see the stuff she makes me eat? Last night she cooked white beans and ox tongue. Didn’t say a word. Ignoring unbelievably filthy looks from Nancy, I told her I was surprised that she’d take a week’s paid holiday smack in the middle of the year without giving us more than a bare month’s notice. And she starts defending herself, she’s been here for seven years, seven years of pure slavery of course, for seven years and she’s never once asked for however much it is a month she’s supposed to get, she wasn’t hired to do the shopping and since she’s been doing the shopping her lower back is all shot to hell, she’s not even adding in the number of hours she’s had to spend because we sat down late to dinner and the central-heating repairman was waiting outside in the car and of course that meant they had to eat dinner even later but they’re human beings too, just like we are, and so on. Because they’ve got nothing better to do but drive to Auchon now and then and sit glued to the TV, cracking peppercorns in their teeth, and suddenly they’re talking unions, you know. I’m tempted to tell her they’re not even humans, they don’t even qualify for the lowest rung on the pretty damn low ladder of human evolution, and if I manage to restrain myself it’s only due to Nancy’s vindictiveness because for some time, it’s good you should know this, she’s been beating me. Up till now she’s always beaten me in private and I have to say these moments always make me feel tender toward her again, as if this temporary madness is taking me back to the fragile person she was and this unstoppable uncontrollable meltdown is making me desire her again, but I’m afraid one day she’ll lose it and start to hit me in front of Dacimiento, all the more because she’s been developing some kind of weird complicity with Dacimiento recently and isn’t far from turning her into her everyday bosom buddy. (What’s more, Nancy sent her to her own hairdresser, I didn’t dare say a thing but when she came back she looked like Richard Widmark off to the Korean War.) Beating me up in