I of course had never met Madame Veuve, she died long before I arrived on the Main, but I’d heard about her, especially from the drag queens who for some reason kept her memory alive even more assiduously than the strippers of various beliefs and forms of worship who observed them almost fanatically. Every one of Fine Dumas’s “girls" possessed some relic of the saint, no doubt as phony as the Blessed Foreskins that had crisscrossed the world during the Middle Ages – a black thread from the widow’s veil, a lock of her peroxided hair or a scrap of fabric that may have been used in one of her acts. If asked what they did with them, they would reply that anything touched by the blessed Widow of the Snowbanks was sacred and that the curative properties of those venerated objects would prove to be many and priceless, for the soul as well as the body.

Babalu, for instance, the Boudoir’s Brigitte Bardot, always had somewhere on her, even while plying her trade, an old wad of chewing gum – I swear I’m not making this up – which, legend has it, Madame Veuve had stuck to the underside of her makeup table at the Coconut Inn just before she left the club for good, and another stripper, a fetishist who was in love with her, had collected it reverently and put it inside a locket that she wore around her neck. If anyone made the mistake of pointing out to Babalu how absurd the story was, she’d glare at them as if to say that what mattered was the belief, not the object: it didn’t matter if the gum was real or not, or if the story was sheer invention, if she, Babalu, had decided to believe. She knew then, or at least she suspected – like the Christians with their Blessed Foreskin, no doubt – that the relic was a fraud, but she preferred to swallow it hook, line and sinker simply because she needed to believe, as did most of the girls, even if the object of worship was ridiculous. She would show you the locket she claimed she’d inherited from another queen, but for which she must have paid a fortune, then recite with imperturbable seriousness all the wonderful things the Blessed Wad of Gum had done for her since she’d acquired it.

Finding out that my Gilbert was the son of the famous phony saint, the miracle worker of the red-light district whose miracles had yet to be proved, could not leave me totally indifferent. For two years I’d been hearing about the bright little boy who’d covered the neighbourhood long before I worked there, an adorable little blond imp who was passed from one to the next like a teddy bear and who grew up in a childless environment that was home to the most questionable elements of society, and there he was in my bed – a gorgeous adult, a little mysterious, true, just the slightest bit weird but so charming and so very expert at what I’d been missing till then that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to live without it.

That’s what I was thinking about that afternoon as I got ready for work. I’d never pictured Gilbert as an adult and I had trouble seeing him as the child he’d been in the stories about his mother, which came close to fantasy, I knew that, but my curiosity – too often uncontrollable like my imagination for that matter – led me to ask a bunch of questions. What had Gilbert done between the time when he’d disappeared from the Main and the time when he’d ended up at the Sélect? Had he gone to elementary school, had he attended the National Theatre School like his friends – though he hadn’t mentioned acting during the hours we’d spent together – did he earn his living as a musician, did he earn his living at all? I suspected that it was too early in our relationship to ask him something like that, but I did wonder if I’d be able to stop myself. If I ever saw him again. I couldn’t get over the impression I’d had when I watched him go down the staircase in the Place-d’Armes Metro station. The possibility of a final farewell that for a moment had been imposed on me. Would Gilbert become in my memory a legend like the one surrounding his mother, that would serve to magnify an encounter that had no future?