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will be unravelled one day, stacks of movie magazines, and a scrapbook of clippings about the English royal family. The children of this country are of their time, abridged.
    Their knowledge of what is old comes from the abandoned houses they’re allowed to explore on Sundays, when people go north in search of coolness, travelling along the colonists’ old roads. Knees scraped on windowsills or cut by broken glass, or on torn-up carpeting. They found a family’s castoffs, the wind whistled under a battered roof, a boy hoisted himself to the second floor despite the broken staircases. They found rusty hooks, a reader, a plastic crucifix, the head of an iron bedstead. In an old tool chest lay Isis, a brown wool doll dressed in a yellow leotard, a black crown pulled down to the eyes. At once she was a goddess, the Negro Queen of childhood, brought here from the back lanes of the town. They swore oaths to her.
    And at the end of the summer they burned her. She had lost her powers, she was dead; to this country’s children magic is short-lived. Marie, like the others, had agreed: it was time to temper their dreams, learn how to recognize them as soon as one had slipped inside. She had destroyed the diary in which she had hated her mother, where she had run away, where she had copied out sickly sweet poems. She had come to loathe this wasted time. Isis had decomposed.

Six
    A L DAY LONG A GENTLE RAINFALL muddied the path around the future water tower, Summer mud snakes between scales of dried earth. Marie invents for herself an appetite for rain. Moves through it alone, though the sun, the extravagant sun, yesterday made her surrender.
    Everything is so simple. The wound already closing, mauve under the bandage, the only oozing inside her body, in her private wetness, in a secret that is unimportant now. Everything so simple, inside a white raincoat.
    Soon new titles on a bookstore shelf will offer a kind of deliverance. There are enough to last much longer than the week of night shift, which she always fills with American novels. Sentences that flow more slowly, words to be learned when they occur in the text, just as in the past, here in this part of the world, French was learned by force, from Péguy’s essays or the meditations of Claudel. As for the American writers, Marie confines herself to easy reading, the only kind of novels that come here in any case, but they sometimes offer images that please her: lonely bars, death that leaves no trace, love in the afternoon.
    The thirty-year-old bookseller has chin-length sideburns, an intellectual’s bony frame, and spectacles worn over unfocused eyes. In the year that she has been seeing him, for the two are always alone, he has never moved from his safe place behind an old tailor’s counter. He barely greets her, lets her make her choice in silence, and knows that soon she will consent to listen to his slow monologues, in a language in which she dares only to assent. “Why don’t you try something else?” he begins, never waiting for her reply. He won’t wrap up the yellow-covered books until he has plucked from his piles of paper the latest issue of a gloomy magazine, already dog-eared.
    He reads slowly, one pale finger following the line, paragraphs too weighty for her. He looks up: “Dreiser, I say, Theodore Dreiser is what you should be reading these days. I’ll order a book for you, just one.” She hears the name, knows that he dreams of entering, through her, the circuit that his other customers refuse him, only murmurs neutrally, “From Europe?” Impatient or triumphant, he purses his lips, bites into his reply with a small sucking sound. She is his quarry for another fifteen minutes, during which she offers only gestures, echoes.
    Perhaps next week, she thinks, in the humid bookstore, hypnotized by his voice that is at once plaintive and arrogant. Next week, perhaps, she’ll give in. Warmth encounters