My new lifestyle wasn’t immediately upended by meeting A***. I merely added a preliminary stop to my nights—an obligatory visit to the Eden. However, my fascination, quickly transforming into passion, soon required more. To satisfy it, I had to start making more than one daily courtesy call.

A*** loved going out to clubs once the show at the Eden was over. Soon after, some of the other dancers from the Eden, dragged in A***’s wake, would show up at the Apocryphe. They did me the honor of dancing to the music I played and their performance gave me a new enthusiasm for my work. At certain moments throughout the night A*** would come keep me company in my glass booth, dancing until the surroundings were eclipsed, leaning in to say something to me with an accent I found irresistible. A***’s spirit, like A***’s dance, was infused with a crafty and charming naïveté.

Soon we became rather close; we would call each other almost every day when we woke up and would eat dinner together at least once a week, just the two of us, after which I would allow myself to escort A*** to the Eden. We would meet again at the Apocryphe, and would often go loiter somewhere else after closing. This strange intimacy didn’t stem from any common social or intellectual interests; it wasn’t the sign or effect of a close friendship or romantic relationship. I wasn’t particularly enthralled by the originality of A***’s views, or by a similarity in our tastes; we neither combated nor conversed. Our time together and our conversation were simply a pleasure, like the contemplation of A***’s body or A***’s dance, an aesthetic pleasure that I could attribute only to a lightness of being that never dipped into inanity. I can’t define A*** as being anything other than both frivolous and serious, residing in the subtle dimension of presence without insistence.

Our arrival together at every locale and the attention we paid to each other started to incite gossip. Our encounters, which took place only in public, aroused suspicions of a private affair that, at the time, didn’t exist. At the Apocryphe and everywhere we went, people made remarks about our striking dissimilarity. They teased me over the contrast in color between our skins, they stressed the difference in our mannerisms: the impulsiveness of A***’s voice and gestures, that wild exuberance and openness to the world, which by comparison underscored my moderation and reserve. A*** in turn had to bear the incessant prattle about my religious and social background. They painted a picture of my incomprehensible oddities: my isolation; my taste for solitude strangely coexisting with a sudden dive into this world; an unheralded abandon of a university career for the improvised post of DJ. For want of any intelligible coherence, they assumed I must have been harboring some kind of vice or perversion.

What did I get out of spending all my time with someone with whom I shared no social, intellectual, or racial community? That was precisely the question troubling them. Black skin, white skin: our looks were against us. Our intimacy went against the mandate dictating that birds of a feather flock together. And this impossible clash of colors produced the general opinion that this was an unnatural union.

In order to stop the scandal, we diluted our dissimilarity by always hanging out in a group. But the people in this crowd tried to detach me from A*** by attempting to convince me that we were fundamentally incompatible. I couldn’t care less that my attachment to my seemingly perfect antithesis was provoking worry and alarm. They complained of A***’s numerous affairs, highlighted A***’s notorious fickleness and capriciousness that would make any real attachment impossible. They charitably forewarned me that I wasn’t A***’s “type,” that we weren’t even of the same species. That if my intention was to turn this friendship into something more, it was best to give up now, and that if, by some misfortune, it had already become something more, it was just as well to break it off now before it dissolved into unpleasantries and pain.

I thoroughly did not care about their opinions, their advice and warnings, their slanders and denigrations. I was well aware of A***’s fickleness, capriciousness, and quickly changing tastes, for I had witnessed all of these traits myself. As for this concert of well-intentioned deceit and charitable denunciations aimed at discouraging me, I was deaf to it all.

One morning at the Kormoran, that final stopover for night owls, an old mobster whom I knew and liked rather more than his congeners saw me enter with A***, called me over to his usual spot at the bar, and, after the customary ceremonious greetings, imparted this strange speech, interspersed with knowing winks:

“You know me. I like you. So listen up. All those idiots, they don’t know anything. Because they see us chatting fairly often and because I seem to know you pretty well, for a week now they’ve been coming to me to complain that you’re mucking around, that you’re out of your mind. That you’re foolishly running after that attractive animal there [gesturing toward A***]. You know what they say to me? That it could never work between whites and blacks…And that, furthermore, you two aren’t compatible…That one’s always dancing, you’re always hitting the books. They come to me desperately seeking an explanation…[He paused to finish his whiskey] But they’ve got it all wrong, I’m telling you…I’ve been observing your conquest for two weeks now…And I know what blacks are like…For ten years I’ve been watching them pass through here…Listen to me: if you keep at it, you will succeed...All those assholes are talking bullshit…Saying that you’re lowering yourself! That’s what they’ve been saying to you, right? When you talk to them, they don’t absorb anything, and so they can’t understand what you see in A***…[He ordered another drink and relit his cigar] But I get what you see…Come back to me in a month and we’ll discuss it again. Because it’s not at all a lost cause, it just takes a bit of time. Yeah? Turn on the charm! Bring out the violins and tutti quanti…It takes time, but you can handle it…Have patience, and by God, you will succeed! And they’ll have to eat their words.”

He firmly grasped my hand after finishing his speech, pronounced in his eternally hoarse voice, rolling the gravel of an accent that rendered him incomprehensible to any ear unaccustomed to the deformations he inflicted on his syllables. The high-end escort keeping him company winked while watching me with a slightly alarmed air. Ruggero, as he called himself, was studying me paternally, a cigar wedged between his teeth, gauging my surprise. “Persevere or you’ll have me to deal with…When you achieve your victory, the champagne is on me. Don’t let yourself be intimidated by the blathering, the scandals, and the bullshit…Now go tend to your love affair.”

I went and found A***, who had no clue about the sermon I had just endured. No doubt others had taken advantage of those ten minutes I had spent with Ruggero to make remarks about how I seemed to want to capture A***’s attention, and more still, at any price. They saw us everywhere together, but no act or gesture allowed them to definitively conclude it had turned into an affair. They didn’t know what to believe, and for them that was insufferable. They would have excused a brisk adventure, without consequence and without tomorrow—what was called in this milieu “getting some ass.” But an attachment that appeared to stem from something other than sex was intolerable.

Ruggero had, however, clumsily formulated what I had been struggling to express myself, without it being, on my part, a conscious project or concerted maneuver. His soliloquy had clarified and simplified the ideas floating around in my head. Indeed, I’m sure that had been his aim. What I was feeling for A*** needed its own embodiment; the pleasure I took in A***’s company demanded its own fulfillment. I wanted A***, it was true, and all my other desires, needs, and plans paled in comparison. Suddenly, the obsessive clamor for amorous possession took hold of me.

I was surprised to find myself desiring, painfully. In a sudden rush of vertigo, I was tantalized by the idea of contact with A***’s skin. I wanted to dismiss, destroy all those who were thronging around A***, keeping this presence from me. I wanted to wrest A*** from their company, from the intrusive glances clinging to us there, and hide us both away. With an unknowingly crazed look, I was always watching this irresistible body. But my gaze was narrowing and stiffening under the tension of carnal desire. That night, A*** was wearing a black silk shirt and white pleated leather pants that showed off a firm behind. A***’s hair, shaved not long ago for the show, was beginning to grow back, materializing as a light shadow. That face, thus restored to its pure nudity, appeared without interference, without anything that could deceptively modify its proportions or veil its imperfections. Its features had retained nothing of A***’s African origins, except for a barely perceptible, sensual heaviness of the mouth.

I don’t know what more to say about this body, although I spent hours contemplating it. But that night, my contemplation was exorbitant, quickly twisting into a desire to take possession…A*** noticed my unusual comportment. I made excuses; I didn’t dare reveal the reason for my turmoil and so I was restraining myself from clearly expressing my feelings. I spent the end of that night in a state of incredible confusion: daggers of desire, scattered snippets of conversation, a fragmented vision of A*** dancing were all assailing me in a blur.

We separated on a street corner with the light kiss on the lips that wasn’t reserved for me alone. Once home, I was unable to fall asleep, although the night had been, per usual, long and draining. But the exhaustion, which, in the stages of desire, typically follows confused excitation, emptied me of all energy, of even that energy required to sleep. I was turning over in my bed as one might collapse onto a body in the heat of a furious embrace. I was tortured by the memory of A***’s scent, by the residual imprint, barely there, of a shoulder resting against my own this morning as we spoke. The ghost of A***’s presence against mine; a hand poised for a moment on my face, our thighs pressed together in a cramped space. I had the sensation in my flesh of contact with those limbs, no longer there; the effect lingered long after its source had disappeared, retaining the same intensity. A hallucinatory sensation, as if my body had suffered an amputation. This sensation that, even after the split, the separation of our two bodies kept scalding me, kept me awake. I oscillated the entire morning between the rage of embracing only a void, and the memory, the bliss of an instant, of the past night that I was trying so hard mentally to recompose.

Around two in the afternoon, I got out of bed without having slept, prey to a mixture of despair and exhaustion. Wandering the apartment aimlessly, the shutters closed, I declaimed in an incoherent monologue all that passed through my head for the next two hours. The sound of the telephone, which rang right in the middle of my vociferations, terrified me. I knew who was calling, but I was afraid of answering and betraying my nervousness. Nonetheless, I answered it and managed to control myself for long enough to agree to meet A*** around six o’clock at the Café de Flore.

As soon as we hung up, I hurriedly started getting ready. In the shower, I promised myself twenty times that I would declare my passion that night in no uncertain terms, which I immediately began to assemble and articulate. Looking at myself in the mirror, I swore when I saw the bags under my eyes, which were much worse than usual. Then I wasted a good twenty minutes wondering what clothes to wear on this solemn occasion; I wanted to look my best, which, normally, was the least of my concerns. Look good! Look good! The idea suddenly made me shrug. I observed my naked form displayed in the mirror: was it really that important how I chose to veil my nudity? Since I had lost weight (the mirror confirmed this), my clothes, which I always wore a bit loose, had become rather baggy. I surveyed my wardrobe, still unable to decide what to wear. In a sudden fury to be done with this inner debate on the uselessness of artifice, I grabbed the first pair of pants and the first shirt to fall into my hands. I pulled on my usual leather jacket and left in a rush from the apartment, dreading a late arrival to this decisive rendezvous.

Before A*** brought me there, I had never stepped foot in the Café de Flore. I held a sort of prejudice against this place that stemmed from an old image of the 1950s to which it was for me indissolubly linked. My aversion to this distressing, foul-smelling intellectualism—also known as “existentialism”—was combined with my distrust of these clichéd spaces where public notoriety summons a hybrid species of artists and intellectuals. That they packed together there didn’t imply that the place was in good taste; quite the opposite, their presence foretold an undeniable unpleasantness.

Contrary to the theological idea that if I value the Creator very highly, I can’t admire His creation or honor His creature, when a work of art moved me to the highest point I could only comparatively disparage the author once he or she was relegated to the dismal banality of this café.

To mix with company that derives its life force from the desire to show off is to confine oneself to the enslavement of the ogler; I was disgusted by this pagan and idolatrous Mass, its adepts, its servants, and its totems. And so when I crossed the threshold of this temple for the first time, I wasn’t surrendering to its obscene cult, but to desire alone, and to the deliberate invitation of A*** who, living close by, enjoyed tanning on the terrace in the summer. The perverse effect of A***’s presence was the only thing that made this café tolerable. A***’s tendency to constantly act as if on a stage relegated me to the wings or to the coatroom, which suited me perfectly. As soon as I infiltrated the Flore, I reduced myself to being nothing but a sort of understudy; and only this rather particular statute, which exempted me from the widespread and monstrous fury of recognition, allowed me to show myself without showing off myself.

That evening, without a glance at the audience, I steered myself toward a table tucked to the side where I always insisted on sitting, and where A*** was waiting for me. The proclamations that I had debated nonstop en route crystallized unexpectedly at the sight of A***, and I abruptly broached the subject close to my heart, as if to get it out of the way. A declaration of love is always tedious; it exceeded my patience to dilute the exasperation of my passion in a detailed statement, to represent discursively the unbearable confusion of my immediate desire— tolerating neither delay nor explanation, so much did its urgency torment me. My intentions were clear; my speech only muddled and veiled them in incoherence. I was alternating aimlessly between snippets of narration, the minutes of my interior monologue, syllogisms and images, passing without transition from slang to high style and from the trivial to the abstract, without ever finding the right tone or genre in which to deliver my words. A*** was taken aback by this unprecedented bout of garrulous, confused violence.

A***’s response to the declaration I proved incapable of making was, however, perfectly clear. Its essence could be summarized with a single verdict: “You must not love me”—an attempt to claim that A*** was unworthy of my passion and that it would damage our friendship. A***’s propensity had always been to refrain from passionate attachments of the flesh, attachments that, once broken by misfortune, betrayal, or accident, resulted in prejudicial excesses of sadness. Consequently, A*** thought it wise to disavow the idea of amorous possession, which could do nothing but exacerbate my confusion and forbid us from returning thereafter to that honest friendship, that guarantee of stability, to which we would be better off confining ourselves.

That response, the arguments used to justify A***’s refusal, were attempts to disorient me; in fact they did nothing but accentuate even more the imperative violence of my desire. They also left room for debate. All of the notions of love A***’s reasoning invoked seemed erroneous to me, and I set about proving it. Those reasons were only a pretext; I wanted the truth. I was ranting, using cunning to obtain it, and seeing that the facts were being concealed from me, I brazenly concluded that they must have been in my favor. We spent the night discussing, disputing the erroneous fables used to justify A***’s refusal, and the valid reasons for my desire. Through every tone I modulated the absolute demand and legitimacy of my passion.

In return, A*** took refuge behind a moderation far from the habitual impulsiveness to which I was accustomed. That night the inversion was complete: I made myself into a demon, and A*** symmetrically put on the mask of the angel that I had abandoned. A***’s final argument, pronounced on the threshold of the Eden, was of this order: “I rely on your friendship, and a physical relationship would annihilate it irremediably; so you must not love me, for such a relationship would be hellish. Don’t ask of me what I’m unable to give you without the risk of letting you down.” I relate neither the exact terms of this plea—they were much more trivial—nor the precise progression of A***’s personal logic, which was much less clearly defined. And I cannot relate them simply because A*** never formulated a link between successive sentences. From an unorganized mass of statements, of partial notes and arguments, I managed to extract a line of reasoning, a collection of synthetic propositions that I subsequently reiterated to verify their accuracy. For example, the following assertions emitted more than an hour apart: “If I agree to sleep with you, things won’t be the same afterward;” and, “I’m ill-tempered, no one tolerates me for long;” and, “We can’t sleep together, we’ll end up fighting because neither of us will want to let the other take the lead.” I concluded implicitly that A***, only able to imagine love as a system of power relations, could only envisage our relationship as a battle, leading irremediably to a violent rupture. I had to translate and arrange every word so that they became intelligible to me. Add to this some misunderstandings stemming from different mother tongues, and perhaps one can grasp the difficulty of my enterprise.

This resistance, despite being hard to define, did not disarm me: I persevered and kept at it for weeks, trying to prove to A*** through every means imaginable that to succumb to my pleas and do the deed, far from destroying our affection, would only deepen and reinforce it. I insisted, tactically, on this shocking fact: A***’s not-so prudish attitude could coexist with my moral rigidity, and a carefree practice of bodily exhibition could rub shoulders with an equally strong contempt and suspicion of the flesh. In other words, that A***’s excesses could go hand in hand with my moderation and decorum. Far from being enraged by my obstinacy or taking offense at my incessant urging, A*** found it all quite amusing. This was a good sign. Certainly the variety of my pleas was astonishing; one often finds oneself suddenly capable of deploying the treasures of rhetoric, imagination, and persuasion in order to convince someone to have sex—a very common ambition, and not so interesting when one thinks about it in the cold light of day. But voilà, the price that I seemed to attach to my conquest, measured in terms of the energy and ingenuity I was expending, was high enough to be flattering. What must have seemed at first to be a passing blaze of concupiscence was, over time, taking on real form.

Our daily telephone conversations were no longer anything but a game: a hypothetical reconstruction of our relationship if A*** were to succumb to my desires. We were presenting each other with illusions, visions, and tableaux. The object of this display was to figure out how to get along without drama, how to deal with the overcrowding engendered by a relationship that we hoped would not be temporary, but rather truly invested with stable affections, tastes, habits, and lifestyles—all of which differed radically, even more each day. We discussed everything down to the most trivial details. Would we live together? And if so, how would we divide up the household chores? Would we sleep in separate beds, thus shielding ourselves from the boredom of a complacent conjugality? And if not, what type of bedding would we choose? A*** was pushing for the classic pairing of sheets and covers, I for the more rational duvet.

The slow workings of this fiction, which didn’t shy away from any ridiculous or insignificant detail, were taking on the meticulous traits of familiarity. It was winning A*** over to the possibility of such a relationship. Its incongruity, its danger was dissipating in the soothing quietude of our constructed fable. Repetition and habit tend to diffuse excess. A*** was no longer systematically imagining the worst, no longer predicting disasters at every turn; the scenarios were becoming less catastrophic. Our union, by dint of simulation, was no longer completely inconceivable. The game of “and if” wore down A***’s reluctance; every day, we already belonged to each other in our imaginations. My desire was gaining power through a trick, was gaining life through a fiction.

Finally it no longer seemed to be a perilous trap to plan a vacation together, an idea I had secretly been entertaining for a long time now. I convinced A*** to go away with me to Munich for a few days just before Christmas, with no ulterior motive, in keeping with our “and if…” We left, pretending for a laugh that it was our honeymoon, where of course nothing scandalous would actually happen. One morning, after a night of work, we boarded the first plane for Munich and settled into a comfortable hotel room around noon.

The weather was astonishingly beautiful for the entire duration of our trip. A***, who had lived for some time in Munich, knew a lot of people there. I went along on some visits, but I saved three afternoons for myself to go from church to church and to make a rapid tour of some of the museums. It was important for me to prove to A*** that a relationship didn’t amount to servitude and suffocation. Nevertheless, I was trying to secure the promise that we would visit the church Saint*** together, a little Baroque gem that I thought A*** would like because of its excessive decorative style and outrageous ornamental magnificence. Indeed, this extreme manifestation of Baroque taste, magnified in the confined proportions of that church, swallowed up and overwhelmed the view, from the spiral trompe-l’oeil to the horrible allusion to the confessional placed under the sign of the skull and crossbones.

Catholic and as far as possible from the censorious tastes of the Puritans, A*** was the perfect antithesis to white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant America. The spirit of the Counter-Reformation suited A*** perfectly, and, in guessing that, I had brought A*** a pleasure that might never have been discovered otherwise.

Munich also had some nightclubs to offer. Each night we visited three or four, where A***’s extensive notoriety was again made clear to me. Two years spent in Munich had sufficed to make A*** known in more or less all of the city’s social circles. In each of these clubs, we were always invited to a table where I was introduced to a mob of people I would have been incapable of recognizing if I were to meet them again.

The clubs in Munich closed earlier than in Paris and some of them legally had to shut down at two o’clock. This particular policy forced us into a transhumance around four in the morning, inevitably leading us to a rather snooty club—the Sans-Nom, the Bavarian equivalent to the Apocryphe, frequented moreover by the same fashionable idlers that can be found in all the major cities of the world.

We would return by taxi to our hotel, which was not too far from the city center but still removed from the old town. The room had only one bed and we slept side by side in a platonic concubinage, as if this sort of asceticism were natural for us, or agreed upon in advance. There was a hint of perversity in this game; before I went to sleep I kept calculating all the possible consequences of transgressing. That A*** had conceded to come away with me and to share a bed with me, that sleeping next to each other had seemed to go without saying, could have been a sign that I had permission to succumb to the temptation currently putting my perseverance to the test. I was excited by the proximity of A***’s body; I didn’t know whether to suppress this excitement or to give it free rein. What was it that A*** really desired? Each night, a ray of light, passing through the slightly opened curtains, illuminated A***’s sleeping face, and I couldn’t help but stare. I was hoping that our unconscious nighttime bodily movements would culminate in a compromising position in the morning. But A***, always waking before me, eluded all fortuitous languor.

In the evenings, we would take a walk through the English garden nearby. At night, we would have dinner with some of A***’s friends before beginning our nocturnal wandering. We would walk from one club to another in the sharp cold of those December nights. The night before our departure, we completed a farewell tour. I still remember the amazing ambiance of the trashy dive we found ourselves in, a meeting point for homosexuals of all stripes, where A*** knew the owner, who was a former dancer. In the penumbra, further obscured by cigarette smoke and the movements of perspiring bodies packed one against the other, a barely visible transvestite burlesque show was unfolding. By contrast, the awkward stiffness of the Sans-Nom bored me and so we returned a bit earlier than usual to pack our bags. Worn out from visiting a number of museums that afternoon, I collapsed onto the bed, asleep, without taking the time to undress. From the depths of an intractable slumber, for a very brief moment, I vaguely perceived someone leaning over me, a vision of A***’s face near mine, the sensation of being tucked in. Then I plunged back, muttering, into an interrupted dream. Once again, I was stirred awake by the feeling of being touched and, in the uncertainty of shadows and the fog of sleep, I discerned A*** looking at me. Turning over, I groped in the darkness for A***’s body and threw myself against it before falling back to sleep.