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seriously drunk when he told me this story, he was drooling a little, tea stuck to his drooping mustache then streamed into the corners of his mouth, his accent was increasingly pronounced and his chin trembled as much as his hands as the setting sun plunged the empty apartment into shadow, empty of the wife and two daughters who had been “deported” back to Holland soon after his arrest, Harmen Gerbens the alcoholic Batavian stayed in Qanater for eight years, forgotten by the gods and his embassy, afterwards I knew why, eight years in the foreigners’ section next to the jail where my Islamists rotted forty years later, he was the appointed mechanic of the prison director, Gerbens spits on the ground at the mere mention of his name, he pours a swig of hard stuff into the dregs of his tea utters terrible Dutch curses and I wonder if this story is true, if it’s actually possible that this man spent eight years in prison for some obscure reason, isn’t he just some lost guy, some old madman gnawed by solitude and rotgut—why don’t you go back to Holland, I can’t he replies, I can’t and that’s none of your business, I say nothing I take my leave of the old drunkard he has tears in his eyes he accompanies me to the door—the stairway is strewn with trash and I go down back into the red death throes of Cairo evenings that smell of mummies
     

III
     
     
    Harmen Gerbens the Cairo Dutchman rests now in the briefcase above my seat—a name and a history, chronologically the first on the list, without my knowing at the time that the list had begun and that I’d end up carrying it to Rome five years later, all trembling with a terrible hangover exhausted feverish unable to sleep, would I have chosen the Vatican if Alexandra weren’t waiting for me at Trastevere, in that little ground-floor apartment by a pretty courtyard, Alexandra called Sashka a Russian painter with the face of an icon the worst is over now, the worst leaving everything behind quitting leaving my strange employer, ever since Venice after my two years of war I’ve never been so free, I own nothing now, not even my real name—I have an appropriated passport under the name of Yvan Deroy, born almost at the same as me in Paris and locked up a long time ago now in an institution for psychotics in the suburbs, he never had a passport and his doctors would be quite surprised to know that he’s wandering around Italy today, I got this document in the most legal way in the world with a record of civil status and a doctored electric company bill at the 18 th arrondissement town hall: I’ve had so many different names these past years, on identity papers of all colors, I’ll become attached to Yvan Deroy, tonight the mute psychotic will sleep in the Grand Plaza in Rome, he reserved a room at an internet café on the Champs-Elysées, Yvan Deroy won’t go see his Roman lover right away, he’ll hand over his last suitcase to whomever has a right to it, as they say, someone will come visit him in his room they’ll proceed with the exchange before Yvan Deroy disappears more or less for good, Yvan has had a new life since last month even an account opened in a big branch of an ordinary bank, which is a big change for him from his postal savings account where his parents regularly deposit the price of his little extras in his “residence,” today he owns an international credit card—Yvan bought himself two pairs of pants and as many shirts in a big department store, withdrew cash paid in advance for one night in the Plaza and an airplane ticket he didn’t use and now he’s playing at making out the landscape in the gathering dusk, far from Venice from Alexandria from Cairo from Marianne with the white breasts a little closer to the end of the world thirty kilometers from Milan where Bonaparte rested for a few days in the middle of his first Italian campaign, in a magnificent palace confiscated from I forget whom, Milan whose train station so resembles