[...] One night, a girl whose name was Marguerite and whom I wanted to sleep with started to read a poem by Robert Desnos. I didn’t know who the fuck Robert Desnos was, but other people at my table did, and anyway the poem was good, it got to you. We were sitting at an outside table, and lights were shining in the windows of the houses in town, but there wasn’t even a cat on the streets and all we could hear was the sound of our own voices and a faraway car on the road to the station, and we were alone, or so we thought, but we hadn’t seen (or at least I hadn’t seen) the guy sitting at the farthest table. And it was after Marguerite read us the poem by Desnos—in that moment of silence after you hear something truly beautiful, the kind of moment that can last a second or two or your whole life, because there’s something for everyone on this cruel earth—that the guy across the café got up and came over and asked Marguerite to read another poem. Then he asked if he could join us, and when we said sure, why not, he went to get his coffee from his table and then he emerged from the dark (because Raoul is always saving on electricity) and sat down with us and started to drink wine like us and bought us a couple of rounds, although he didn’t look like he had money, but we were all broke so what could we do? we let him pay.