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owners who pay for these damned tenants who vandalize everything because they can’t afford a moving company with a hydraulic lift. Ferdinand is beside himself. It’s not even nine o’clock in the morning, he hasn’t slept a wink, and this is the day these morons choose to make such a terrible racket?
    “Can’t they put a sock in it?” He lost Daisy just a few weeks ago. They could leave him in peace, for Pete’s sake. He would have called the police to protest the disturbance, but after eight thirty in the morning, his request would lack legitimacy. People don’t have respect for anything anymore. What if he needed to go out? Would he have to shove the boxes aside by himself? Climb over the furniture? At his age?
    Ferdinand goes into the bathroom to put in earplugs (very useful on New Year’s Eve and Independence Day) and settles in back on the couch. Suddenly, he remembers he got an ear infection the last time he used them. They weren’t the cleanest things. Oh, well. He has to sleep. He wants to sleep.
    But he can’t manage it. The scraping right in front of his door, the movers’ deep voices, their heavy steps, the moving of objects. It’s impossible. He tosses and turns, gets annoyed, grumbles, gives up, and eventually gets up. Though all parking is prohibited in the courtyard, a moving truck is there. So somebody is moving into the building and nobody thought to warn the tenants of possible inconvenience? Who are these people?
    Next to the truck, parked facing the other way, is a little red Ford, slightly dirty. Ferdinand knows this car. It’s normally parked in front of the Hair Affair Salon, and the backseat is always full of flyers for styling products. It’s Christine’s car. Could she be leaving the building? To go where? Ferdinand would be willing to bet it’s to follow a lover who will break her heart by never leaving his wife. Ah, these women who don’t know how to make good decisions, and wait for men to do it for them!
    “And to think I’m going to have to go outside to get any peace. Really, what kind of world are we living in?” Two options come to mind. The library or the church. At the library, the seats are more comfortable. But on a Saturday morning, they’ll be taken over by little brats or, worse, their parents. Ferdinand doesn’t like children, and he likes these new lax parents who refuse to give their kids the slightest spanking even less. The good-for-nothings are raising a generation of little emperors over whom—at barely three years old—they’ve lost all authority, and are therefore abandoning their snot-nosed brats’ upbringing to others. In his day, that didn’t fly. Not at school, not at home. And when the teacher reported his shenanigans to his grandmother, Ferdinand got a slap in front of his teacher (in addition to his usual smacks), and another thrashing at home, for the public shame. Ferdinand therefore behaved himself rather well. At least he was clever enough not to get caught too often.
    If he weren’t so deaf and so resistant to novelty, the old man could take refuge in a movie theater, but he hasn’t seen anything on the big screen since Don’t Look Now . . . We’re Being Shot At! in 1966. A museum, a café, or a restaurant are pleasant hideaways, but they don’t even occur to him as options. So he sets out for the church, a man who isn’t the least bit God-fearing.
    In order to leave, Ferdinand has to climb over the boxes on his doormat. As he lifts his leg, he tells himself that if he’d been an animal, he would have gladly relieved himself on one of these crates. On the ground floor, it’s a jungle. The lobby is filled with pots overflowing with soil and jutting trees. If Ferdinand were better versed in horticulture, he would recognize a Japanese camellia, an oleander, an orange tree, a red maple, and several perennials. But what Ferdinand does know best, like a modern-day Attila the Hun, is weed killer, as his naked balcony and the poor