He went off and I thought sadly, 'What a mess!' Nadine was speeding along roads, her hands clenching the handlebars, crying to the wind, 'Lambert doesn't love me. No one ever loved me except Diego, and he's dead.' And meanwhile, Lambert was pacing in his room, his heart full of doubts. It's difficult to become a man at a time when that word is so heavily weighted with meaning: too many of the dead, tortured, decorated, famous seniors offered themselves as examples to a boy of twenty-five who's still dreaming of a mother's tenderness and a father's protection. I thought of those primitive peoples who teach their five-year-old boys to stick poisoned thorns into the flesh of living animals. With us as well, a male, to win to the dignity of adulthood, must know how to kill, must make others suffer, must suffer himself. Girls are weighed down with restrictions, boys with demands — two equally harmful disciplines. If they had really wanted to help each other, perhaps Nadine and Lambert would have succeeded together in accepting their age, their sex, their real place on earth. Would they ever decide to want to help each other?