The Humiliation

I took rue La Pérouse toward the sea. A long, narrow street, it emptied into the nondescript Boulevard de la République. At one end, the train station; at the other, the dark brick walls of a prison recently rebaptized “institute for social rehabilitation.”

I walked fast, passed the parking lot, the renovated prison, the opulent new center. Beyond all that, there was the ocean, free to look at and dream about.

This is when I started to have a life.

That Saturday morning, I fixed my hair so it bulged in front like a toupée, rigid with gel. I wore a white shirt with a blue line of handmade stitches around the collar, bought in Paris on the Grands Boulevards, and a thick tweed jacket cut for a rich man. Every other month, I went up to Paris to stay with my father and his girlfriend and usually managed to get him to fund my passion for clothes. He produced women’s garments in his apartment near Le Sentier, so he had the right acquaintances and the right prices.

My pants flared elephantine at the feet and clung tight from the buttocks to the waist. They swallowed half my belly, held up by a thin crocodile belt with a super‑shiny buckle, and discreet suspenders if that was still the craze. If anyone had remarked I was overdressed, I’d have agreed—and not changed a stitch.

I had a good reason. That evening, I was going out on the plains of Normandy with two older guys who weren’t really my friends, just guys to go out with. We were headed to a renowned nightclub on a plateau among cornfields and rows of apple trees. I wanted to show them, these provincial aspiring dandies, how to dance the steps I’d learned in Paris. The disco, L’Archiduc, lay about seventy kilometers from my harbor city.

I’d already been once, the week before. First came the hitchhiking, which took time and made us laugh: three teens in patent leather shoes, gilded chains, stylish hairdos, toupées, and suspenders. Jacques, the oldest, wore a gabardine like an American detective in a gangster film. He left his few chest hairs on display through his open shirt.

Claude was a freshly graduated hairdresser, a freckled Normand with naturally reddish hair he’d whitened at the tips. The most effeminate of us three—though he wasn’t after men—it was hard to say what he wanted, exactly. When he opened his mouth, you heard the village. If he could get a woman pregnant, he’d soon have a car parked in front of the salon and an apartment upstairs.

Jacques was from the outskirts too. Once, hitchhiking dropped us at his doorstep, and I saw the hovel he lived in. Several generations sharing a floor of pressed earth or dried mud mixed with garbage.

Maman didn’t make a fortune in the third‑category hotel where we vegetated, but I was a city boy. I had my own room, always neat, with a sink and bidet to wash my feet after dancing. After the divorce I couldn’t share with my sister anymore, so I was given room 9 at the Hotel Lapérouse. 9 is a bad number, something of a curse, I remember thinking.

But the advantage of room 9 was that I could slip out incognito, while Jacques lived among siblings and parents, old and young, who spied on him. All the more surprising, then, to see him on a Saturday evening: proud, muscular, handsome, lustrous dark hair and green eyes. He saved us when roughnecks greeted us with “faggots” and “dick‑suckers.” Hands and feet flew at our faces when we left cafés and clubs. To stop the fights, Jacques had to step forward, dodge the kicks, and show that he could kick ass if need be.

To reach the highway ramp, we had to cross the city. I picked up Claude in front of his salon. He waited on the pavement, striking poses, greeting neighbors with a raised little finger. He cut everyone’s hair and knew them by first name.

I see him still with an umbrella held at arm’s length, pirouetting like Fred Astaire, rehearsing a new step for the night. He looked better when he didn’t say anything. Then we picked up Jacques, standing lonely on the esplanade in front of the township and the Maison de la Culture.

It was the pride of our mid‑size town: modern and “post‑war French,” I’d read. Pastel four‑story blocks, nicely proportioned, rebuilt after WWII. I would have loved to live in one endless apartment with a wrap‑around balcony, overlooking the avenue and the Porte Océane, opening onto the blue of the sea and sky.

As the flamboyant sun sank into muffled pinks and pale blues, we walked the seafront promenade. Cars around us were like horses at dusk, in a hurry to return to the stalls and eat hay. They had no thought of taking three clowns a few miles closer to our destination.

Dusk is bittersweet. We said nothing. Three losers, let’s face it.

The beach curved like the shell of a gigantic clam, part sand and part pebbles, with a deep tide that left a kilometer of glistening sand. At one end, a cliff rose, crowned by the villas of the rich kids who had let me out of the best school in town with great courtesy.

When the sun disappeared behind the cliff, we took a bus to the top. There, the high road began. The spot was windy and unpleasant. After an hour of drizzle and standing in the glare of the headlights, I was in a terrible mood. Jacques was more patient, more experienced. Claude’s dance steps and antics no longer made me laugh. Exposed under the sweep of headlights, I felt ashamed.

Eventually someone picked us up, out of curiosity, to get a closer look. Except for Claude, who was an airhead, we were not stupid. They’d thrown me into a technical high school, but I still read in my hotel room—big library books I could hardly understand. Jacques had left school, but he watched movies, went to Paris. At seventeen, he was inquisitive. At least two of us could talk politics, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, American music, French history, Charles de Gaulle, even a little science picked up from magazine photos of the universe. Lonely drivers are grateful for company that talks.

These drivers, though, were locals, hopping from village to village. Getting to L’Archiduc would take the whole evening. So much the better. Only losers arrived early at a disco.

How we’d return home at three in the morning, we’d see. That would depend on the connections we made. Jacques knew how to talk, and Claude would have his following of women—perhaps men too.

As for dinner, who knew if we’d eat. Clothes, entry, and alcohol cost enough.

I had my own way of getting pocket money at the hotel. When my mother was busy cleaning or cooking, she let me register clients. The “cash register” was a shoebox and a notebook in a drawer. I never touched the banknotes, only the monnaie now jingling against my leg.

It didn’t torment me to borrow from my mother. Since I was twelve, before the divorce, when my father was still around and things looked better, I’d noticed certain payments at the Hotel Lapérouse were never written down. No one counted that money. It didn’t exist.

Back then, before asking for a ride became synonymous with being a low‑life, hitchhiking was okay, especially if you were a student or an army recruit. We were neither.

That depressed me. I bitterly regretted not being in room 9, sprawled on the big two‑person bed reading. Learning something. Reading is free. Nobody looks over your shoulder.

I don’t remember the rest of the trip to L’Archiduc, only lush green fields and cows motionless in the darkness, their wet muzzles lifted, placidly watching us roar past in light and smoke. What was all the fuss about, they seemed to ask.

Once over the cliff, it’s a beautiful country: old chaumières, apple trees, high bushes, droopy beds of flowers.

We finally stood before L’Archiduc—warehouses patched with planks and graffiti, nothing from the outside. Only an ancient stone fountain, spurting more water under the rain, looked authentic. Centuries earlier it might have stood at the center of a farm or a castle.

Walking swiftly between Jacques and Claude, I avoided the bouncer’s eye; he didn’t ask my age. You paid, got stamped with a phosphorescent mark, and pushed through the turnstile. Inside, everything was painted red and black, probably easier to clean in the morning. There was an attempt at kitsch, though I didn’t know the word then: sunken sofas from another age, paintings in pretentious frames, newly gilded yet chipped to look antique.

I liked the phony décor. Nobody cared why it was called L’Archiduc, but I did. It touched me that it pretended to be the ancestral home of some obscure aristocrat. What I liked even more was that the place didn’t really try to look aristocratic: cardboard walls, sheetrock hurriedly painted so colors bled into each other. And in any case, the illusion didn’t last once you met the regulars: local bruisers who usually wore leather, now in Sunday clothes; stray dogs, lost souls, a couple of oldies, some idiots—and here and there, a few better‑dressed Parisians condescending to partake in our provincial pleasures.

Half the clientele were working‑class, more likely unemployed, reaching for upper‑class consumption one night a week. The other half were men too old for the game, daddies who should have been home with their wives and kids instead of pining after fifteen‑year‑old girls.

Lots of women: mostly too young for the place—my age, some younger—and a few real women, matron‑like. Maybe the youngest came with their mothers.

As we stepped into L’Archiduc that night, I sensed we had an opening. That’s what we’d come for: to impress with our Parisian hair, clothes, and steps. Jacques was handsome, Claude was funny, and I still looked innocent. That drew women and onlookers.

We revolved at the center of a circle that occupied a corner of the dance floor. I pirouetted, doing elaborate steps, while Claude and Jacques handled the women. I’d stopped practicing piano but listened to all kinds of music. Room 9 held a vinyl collection of blues, pop, and classical—impressive for a teen of little means. I loved Motown and American funk, especially James Brown, who was all the rage.

But I never forgot that in a low‑class place, showing off risked a brutal backlash. Impress them too much and they’d wait at the exit.

Jacques would have to make friends fast. He headed to the sunken sofas in the alcoves and disappeared.

Claude danced, invited girls, and bought drinks with his tips. Soon the whole disco knew him. He could make them leap. As for me, I lost myself in the frenzy and imagined they admired my sophistication—but not for long. I saw sneers at my youth. Others would gladly punch my face in front of the girls.

The first thing I feel in a disco exploding with people and music is loneliness. With the decibels so high, you can’t shout anything more elaborate than “pass me a drink” or “dance with me.” After a while, I never know what to do with myself.

Claude chatted with men on the sidelines, aspiring boyfriends wanting to assert their rights. Yet I didn’t see acrimony. Claude, after a couple of screwdrivers, smiled from ear to ear, friendly, down‑to‑earth. It was easy for him to suggest improvements to their hair. Amazing how interested people become when you talk about their hair.

Left alone, I wished some device would sweep me off my feet and drop me into my bed like in the comics. The sidelong glance of the bartender wiping the counter while I perched on a stool didn’t help. On the credit of my fluorescent stamp, I ordered a free screwdriver, then another which I paid for with a generous tip. He didn’t ask for ID.

That’s when the evening tilted. A few stools away, at the bend in the bar, a group of guys and girls kept looking my way and laughing. In that noise, whispering was useless, yet they covered their mouths and whispered when I glanced at them, as though they sat in a bubble of silence. It didn’t last. I didn’t make much of it. I was hoping Jacques and Claude would come back and we’d dance together at the center again.

Out of the crowd a girl emerged, sixteen or seventeen. Her face had no age but she was young. She grabbed my hand and asked me to dance just as Sex Machine came on. I couldn’t refuse. To be honest, I was grateful she’d noticed me, though I felt no attraction to her strong frame, tiny breasts, and big ass. Her face wasn’t tender or feminine; it showed hardship. What did she want from me?

She moved with a certain grace. Her toughness fit James Brown. She rubbed that big ass against me. I felt ready for anything as long as she told me what to do. Leaving the dance floor hand in hand, I feared some has‑been or would‑be boyfriend would appear from the crowd and pick a fight. Rednecks and frustrated lumpen liked that. But nobody claimed Jeannette.

She led me straight to the alcoves. We made out in the dark on the sofas. She let me slip my hand inside her pants, and I liked what I found. My experience with women was limited: basements, school courtyards, bedrooms at parties. I had touched pubic hair a few times and slipped halfway in. But I hadn’t yet had what you call sex.

Jeannette could remedy that. She made no bones about keeping me hard. Yet she didn’t move, and I didn’t know how to suggest we go somewhere more intimate. Upstairs? Everyone knew L’Archiduc rented rooms by the hour under the roof.

She stood and said we could go somewhere more adequate. I followed, expecting stairs. Instead we slipped out a back door. I didn’t like it. Outside meant cold, rain, and headlights.

Behind the warehouse, next to a cornfield, the rain had stopped but everything was wet: grass, tall corn heads. Jeannette insisted on staying under the exterior lights so her pants wouldn’t get wet. She opened my fly and took it out just like that—my back against the fire exit door, in full view of a dirty opaque window barred with metal. Anyone could be watching through the cracks.

My desire died the moment we stepped outside. We were totally exposed. Someone could crack open the door and get a good look. It already felt less like sex than like an examination, me on the table, them behind the glass.

She knelt and sucked, adding all the saliva she could muster. It didn’t help. I looked at her handful of fuzzy red hair I should have handled like a man. I thought of tapping her shoulder and saying something tender like, “Let’s do it inside, baby, I’m cold...”

I couldn’t find tenderness, let alone the balls to tell her to stop. I stood there, frozen with shame, my thing soft in her mouth, my balls in the cold, my whole body timid and retracted under her rough touch and the glare of the lights.

Finally she grimaced and sighed, as if thinking, If you can’t do it, why bother? She didn’t speak. She took a handkerchief from her pocket and spat into it, though there was nothing to spit. That was the worst of it: she didn’t even need to say it. I could feel my failure all over my skin, like the light itself. Then I saw them at the door—eyes watching, silhouettes behind the opaque window.

She readjusted her corsage. I zipped up and followed her back through the same door, more discreet than the main exit. I was petrified, sure they’d jump me inside and leave me bleeding on the gravel like I’d seen a guy or two the previous Saturday—white shirts stained with nosebleed, mucus on their tweed jackets, trouser knees caked with mud and gravel. Back then I’d been snug inside, protected by the crowd of those who see without being seen. This time, I felt I’d already taken a first blow, and it hadn’t even left a mark.

While Jeannette opened the door, I thought of running. But where? No car, not yet old enough to drive. Through the cornfield? Follow the edge until a village? A year as a scout had taught me that every path goes somewhere. But at midnight, in a village, everything is shut.

I didn’t run. I rounded my shoulders and prepared for the worst as I stepped through the door behind Jeannette, who didn’t look back and vanished into the crowd.

Once on the dance floor again, I saw the same group of guys and girls, now worse than at the bar, whispering behind their hands, laughing at my every move, mocking and mimicking me in outrageous ways. They moved with me as if my failure outside had already circulated — as if they’d all been out there under the same lights with us.

They looked at me like they knew.

I retreated toward the bar. The group followed. A man leaned over me to order his drink and, while waiting, said through his teeth without looking at me:

“So, you can’t do it to a woman, hey? You can’t even have a woman do it to you. You’re not the first, mind you. Long line before you. Maybe you prefer men? You’d like to suck my dick, or me to suck yours? Whatever you prefer.”

He spoke calmly, like a tired civil servant. No anger, no curiosity. No humiliation. The outcome didn’t matter to him.

Unbearable. I had to talk to Jacques. Pretending calm, I searched everywhere I was allowed. I noticed closed doors — barricaded, camouflaged, painted red and black like the walls, seemingly sealed from within.

Then, suddenly, there he was at the far end of the bar. He muttered a curt “Salut” as I approached, gesturing with his other hand that he was busy. He moved down the bar to talk to a man dressed like a Parisian, and the two of them looked at me sideways, disapprovingly.

When I finally forced a conversation, walking straight up as he was about to leave, Jacques had no patience.

“Where’ve you been? You disappeared for two hours,” I said.

“Are you drunk?” he replied. “I’ve been right here, with this Rouennais — Etienne Juste.” Etienne was in his twenties, head of a small gang of pretentious wannabes from the industrial side of Rouen.

Etienne Juste was infamous at L’Archiduc. He was the one who’d left a guy bleeding on the gravel last Saturday. Nobody dared come between him and his victim — not because Etienne alone was such a champion, but because the Juste brothers had lots of friends. You had to let him take the upper hand; otherwise, others would join in.

But why would Jacques be against me? Why Claude? What had I done? I replayed last Saturday — my first time at L’Archiduc.

Let’s see. In my innocence, I’d danced with several girls, kissed several, touched several — then, yes: a woman, not a girl. Sylvie. Thirty‑something, beautiful, perfumed—not cheap cologne. Real jewelry, not plastic. I’d praised the cut of her skirt and the way the tiny matching jacket suited her. Slightly plump, voluptuous. The transparent jacket left little to the imagination.

She let me get close in a corner. It was a joke for her; she played with me like a toy, laughed at my serious remarks. I made a fool of myself talking politics, convinced my advanced knowledge would seduce her: right and left, failed social revolutions in France and elsewhere.

“And it’s even worse when these revolutions succeed,” I added. She laughed.

“So young and so tragic already,” she said. We spoke in each other’s ears, warm breath caressing skin. I loved her neck, her round shoulders, the generous breast pressing against silk. She wore real artistic jewelry and high heels you’d see on fancy women shopping Boulevard Saint‑Germain.

Then, abruptly, she went to the bathroom. I saw her come back toward me, smiling, two drinks in hand—and then she disappeared.

Had she changed her mind about sharing a drink? About kissing a kid, letting him touch? It made no sense. On the spot, I didn’t dwell on it. It had been astonishing enough as it was. Taking me to a room upstairs would have been unthinkable.

Or would it? Seeing her with “our” drinks, for a second it had seemed everything was possible. Even the unimaginable.

But she vanished. So did Jacques and Claude. The Rouennais also had a way of disappearing and reappearing suddenly. The group that laughed at me did too.

The whole thing gave me the creeps and made me curious. Where did they all go when they weren’t whispering about me in front of me?

The bathroom near the back door I’d taken with Jeannette was less frequented. I sat on the toilet and examined the wood paneling behind me. When I knocked, it sounded hollow.

If I were in a movie, I would remove it. Or if I were a pampered, reckless fifteen-year-old starved for adventure and jealous of people having fun at his expense.

I undid a panel without difficulty. The nails were loose; they’d been pulled many times. I hunched and stepped through. Re‑fitting the panel behind me plunged me into darkness. I had to adjust to the tenebrous space. The deafening music and the mass of treading feet were muffled but present.

Gradually, I made out a parquet floor like the dance hall’s, but dilapidated. Bare walls, no red and black paint. It looked like an attic or the basement of some ancient castle, once grand. Piles of bric‑à‑brac littered the uneven floor: yellowed newspapers, discarded furniture, incomprehensible devices, old music systems; on the walls, scraps of wallpaper from past décors, torn and left on the floor yet preserved, as if everything needed to reconstruct earlier versions of L’Archiduc was stored there.

The floor slanted into a shallow depression, and in the far corner a glow appeared.

I moved carefully along a cleared path, avoiding metal and stone. Soon I reached an open space. In the distance, recovered furniture formed a living room that looked old yet comfortable, almost welcoming. On a low table stood chiseled glasses, bottles, and a thick crystal carafe half full of rich liquor.

As I approached, I saw a middle‑aged man, strong, dark‑skinned, gray at the temples, a massive gold chain around his thick neck. Dressed to the nines in dark blue pants and a double‑breasted suede jacket, he held a full glass of liquor in each hand. He offered one to a woman sunk into a ruby leather armchair. Black hair, well cut—her face hidden by the foot of an overwrought lamp.

Then I saw: Sylvie.

I was too far in to back out. They should have seen me coming. I was almost in front of them, within talking distance, but they were absorbed in their conversation, living in their own bubble of time and space.

I felt I could walk right up to them, even interpose myself, and they would simply talk over my shoulder and, weirdly, through me. At the same time, a crazier suspicion said it was me they were discussing, my case they were rehashing. Not me exactly, but what I’d done to Sylvie, and what she had let happen. My little person didn’t count.

They were arguing about the kissing last week. Sylvie letting herself be caressed and kissed, inviting me down her neck and the exposed part of her breast—that mattered, but less. I had the sense their argument had lasted all week, renewed by fresh nuances and distinctions, like an LP where the needle gets stuck. Not so much because of the kissing itself, but because it offered him a pretext to accuse and harp on her, and for her to counter and defend. The strangest thing was how much they seemed to enjoy this squabbling, complicating it with each phrase, as if the survival of their couple depended on it.

I waited halfway into their improvised salon, as despondent as a baby watching his parents quarrel. He knows it’s about him, feels in his stomach he’s done something wrong, but the words fly over his head. Feeling I was still outside even though I was inside, I stood and gawked, hoping to discover what truly agitated them. It couldn’t be just the kisses. It couldn’t be the other thing either, which I had almost forgotten: her holding me in the dark of the alcove, lovingly and efficiently enough to make me come in her fist through my pants. That, luckily, was not mentioned.

Out of nowhere, from pieces of paneling that slid aside and back again as quickly as water poured into a glass, from flashes of stroboscopic light and phosphorescent smoke, emerged Jacques and Claude—from different openings in the walls.

Past my initial amazement, I decided not to play the novice. Remove a panel and you reach another room—that’s all.

They acknowledged me at once but kept sending sidelong looks.

At least, I thought, I exist for my friends. I tried to draw close to Jacques. He didn’t refuse, but he didn’t encourage me either. Patience, I told myself. The time will come. It was clear I shouldn’t force anything. What was in store couldn’t be changed.

Jacques asked for a Calvados. The boss interrupted his debate with Sylvie—that’s how much credit Jacques had—went to his minibar, and poured him an antique Calvados from a plain bottle labeled 27 ans d’âge.

When I pressed him about his cold attitude, Jacques finally admitted he was “sore” at me. “Sick to the stomach, old pal, mon vieux,” he said. My kissing Sylvie had almost ruined his standing at L’Archiduc and, to begin with, his newborn friendship with Etienne le Rouennais. Because of me, instead of enjoying himself, Jacques had spent the evening running back and forth, calming the boss and making promises.

“Promises?” I asked.

“Well,” Jacques said, “we’ll talk about that later. For now we’re doing what we can to save your skin. It’s not easy...”

I felt sorry. I wanted to apologize, to beg him not to abandon me so quickly. I didn’t know kissing Sylvie would be such a big deal.

“You didn’t know she was the boss’s wife?” he asked.

“No, I didn’t know she was the boss’s wife. I didn’t even know the owner lived inside L’Archiduc.”

“If you knew nothing,” he replied shrewdly, sweeping a circular glance at the chaos around us, “then why are you here?”

I had no answer. I was nailed to the vibrating floor.

What remained negotiable was the severity of the punishment. Opinions differed. Sylvie favored a well‑worded reprimand, nothing more. I was still a child, she insisted, with no bad intentions, who perhaps needed a bit more “love, yes love, real love, fondness, tenderness” in a world visibly harsh and disorienting to me.

The boss, on the other hand, wanted a severe beating outside and no talk of reprimand, pardon, or justification. Claude agreed with a beating and no pardon, but insisted I should be able to walk afterward and go home in one piece.

Good thing I had friends. Thank you, Claude, really. I knew he’d make me pay for having thought so little of him.

Meanwhile the argument between boss and wife went on, fattened by subtle considerations. What kind of punishment, how many blows, which blows, where on my body, how painful or lethal? When would it end?

It had been settled: I was to be beaten. That was that.

“Everybody gets a beating,” Jacques whispered. Claude added, “That way you’re not a baby anymore. You learn how to behave.”

I wondered if Jacques and Claude had received similar beatings. Probably. How long had they been coming to L’Archiduc? I realized that last week had not been their first time. They were regulars, received by the boss and his wife in their inner sanctum.

It was understood that Claude and Jacques had mitigated the consequences of my blunder and that I should be grateful enough to kiss their hands.

The three of us walked slowly away from the boss and Sylvie, who were still arguing. We removed a panel behind the bar that Jacques knew about. Stepping up into the bar from nowhere made you feel part of the inner circle. From now on, I belonged to L’Archiduc.

From there, we disappeared into the crowd. I didn’t whine or cry. I only asked when it would happen. They didn’t know.

The only option left was to show courage. For the next hour, although I pretended to dance, I no longer tried to kiss girls. I prepared for the blows, rehearsing how I’d cover my balls with one hand and my face with the other.

But things never happen as you imagine. The fight didn’t take place outside on the gravel. It was late, around three in the morning. Between the backdoor and the bathroom, just as I really was heading to pee, I found myself surrounded. The usual words—“faggot,” “dick‑sucker”—flew at me. Then came the shoes, a smack across my face, fists on my ears until they buzzed and burned. I felt a sharp sting at the nape of my neck.

Later I learned someone had used a belt, and I had peed my pants. Someone spat in my face: “So you can’t get it up for a woman, fag?”

Which woman—Jeannette or Sylvie? Not the time to make distinctions.

They got my legs, my buttocks, everywhere. But nothing spectacular. No crack of breaking bones. My nose didn’t bleed. When I curled up like a fetus on the floor, they seemed thrown off and barely kicked. Even Juste le Rouennais, leading the pack, was of two minds. You could tell he hesitated and held back. Compared to Jeannette on her knees under the floodlights and the eyes at the window, these blows felt almost abstract, as if I were being punished for something that had already happened somewhere else.

From floor level, peeking between my fingers, I saw the boss and Sylvie weren’t there, not even watching through the panel chinks. They were still at it, arguing and drinking that exquisite liquor. That, I think, is why Juste and his crew never put on the real show. Higher powers were still debating my fate. Even he didn’t know what had finally been decided.

So as not to embarrass the Rouennais by exposing the weakness of his blows, to give him carte blanche, Claude and Jacques had prudently taken the exit door. My two “friends” were outside in the fresh air with a couple of girls from Rouen.

They had washed their hands of me while rescuing their reputations. I hated them.

They were smoking and joking with the girls, who avoided looking at the blood on my shirt, my hanging suspenders, my unlaced, no‑longer‑shiny shoes. My hairdo had collapsed, toupée flattened like a cheap postiche. I bled from various scratches, nothing serious. I limped but could walk; they didn’t have to support me.

One girl wet her handkerchief at the ancient fountain and, while cleaning me, cried over me like a baby brother.

“Young and already so hurt,” she said. My ears rang and voices echoed, but I liked her tone, half serious, half cajoling. She kept repeating that I was delicate, innocent—later, pure and cute—and so intelligent. She said she could sense it in my philosophical attitude.

The other girl’s older brother waited for us in his car.

I was pampered all the way back. Neither Claude, nor Jacques, nor the brother showed anger or jealousy when, to soothe the pain in my lips, I thirstily kissed one of the girls and slid a brash hand under the skirt of the other. These are the privileges of the boy who’s just gone through fire. For a short while, he’s allowed to handle things like a man.