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both their greatest pain and their greatest joy, so commingled as to be undefinable, a single entity but unnamable for lack of a word. I like to believe—since I love her—that if Lol is silent in her daily life it is because, for a split second, she believed that this word might exist. Since it does not, she remains silent. It would have been an absence-word, a hole-word, whose center would have been hollowed out into a hole, the kind of hole in which all other words would have been buried. It would have been impossible to utter it, but it would have been made to reverberate. Enormous, endless, an empty gong, it would have held back anyone who had wanted to leave, it would have convinced them of the impossible, it would have made them deaf to any other word save that one, in one fell swoop it would have defined the future and the moment themselves. By its absence, this word ruins all the others, it contaminates them, it is also the dead dog on the beach at high noon, this hole of flesh. How were other words found? Hand-me-downs from God knows how many love affairs like Lol Stein's, affairs nipped in the bud, trampled upon, and from massacres, oh! you've no idea how many there are, how many blood-stained failures are strewn along the horizon, piled up there, and, among them, this word, which does not exist, is none the less there: it awaits you just around the corner of language, it defies you—never having been used—to raise it, to make it arise from its kingdom, which is pierced on every side and through which flows the sea, the sand, the eternity of the ball in the cinema of Lol Stein.
    They had watched the violinists file past, and been surprised.
    What Lol would have liked would have been to have the ball immured, to make of it this ship of light upon which, each afternoon, she embarks, but which remains there, in this impossible port, forever anchored and yet ready to sail away with its three passengers from this entire future in which Lol Stein now takes her place. There are times when it has, in Lol's eyes, the same momentum as on the first day, the same fabulous force.
    But Lol is not yet God, nor anyone.
    He would have divested her slowly of her black dress, and by the time he had done it a good part of the voyage would have been over.
    I saw Lol undress herself, still inconsolable, inconsolable.
    For Lol, it is unthinkable that she not be present at the place where this gesture occurred. This gesture would not have occurred without her: she is with it flesh to flesh, form to form, her eyes riveted on its corpse. She was born to witness it. Others are born to die. Without her to witness it, this gesture will die of thirst, will disintegrate, fall, Lol is in ashes.
    The tall, thin body of the other woman would have appeared little by little. And, in a strictly parallel and reverse progression, Lol would have been replaced by her in the affection of the man from Town Beach. Replaced by that woman, unto her very breath. Lol holds her breath as this woman's body appears to this man, her own fades, fades, voluptuous pleasure, from the world.
    "You. You alone."
    Lol had never been able to carry this divesting of Anne-Marie Stretter's dress in slow-motion, this velvet annihilation of her own person, to its conclusion.
    I am of the opinion that Lol never thinks about what happened between them after the ball, when she was no longer there. The fact that he left forever, after their separation, if she were to think about it, in spite of herself, would remain a mark in his favor, would only confirm the opinion that she had always had about him that he could find true happiness only in some short-lived and hopeless love, with courage, and nothing more. Michael Richardson, in his time, had been loved too deeply and completely; it was as simple as that.
    Lol no longer thinks of that love. It is dead, even has the odor of dead love.
    The man from Town Beach has only one task left to accomplish, which is always the same in