A little background here, Bruno said, is important to understand: For thirty years the peasants had been conscripted by the nobility to fight the religious wars. For a peasant who had never strayed more than a half day’s walk from where he was born, these wars were abstract, wars he was told he must die for and also must pay for, whether through taxation or extortion or land seizure. This situation and its discontents partly explains how it was that peasants and Cagots, historical enemies, suddenly conspired and came together to attack the nobles.

Peasants had targeted the Cagots for generations, and so this collusion between Cagot and peasant was shocking. It was as if, Bruno said, the poor white overseer and the Black man forced into chattel slavery had colluded against plantation owners in the American South, as if the poor white overseer all at once discarded his racial superiority, recognizing it as a dirty prize and little more, for his own servitude.

“Does this ship take passengers,” Vito and I would say to each other, in emulation of Monica Vitti in Red Desert, a despairing housewife clutching her coat, looking for an escape from her neurosis. Does this ship take passengers? she asks a sailor from a docked boat. There is no vessel that can remedy what ails her, but the sailor cannot understand her question, doesn’t speak Italian, and responds in untranslated Turkish.

The banner photo on grown-up Franck’s Facebook page was of a race car. It would be acceptable to me in the what-became-of-Franck genre if he were a race car driver. But this was a commercial photo, an advertisement for Lamborghini, a make whose broad fan base has never owned and will never own actual Lamborghinis. Lamborghini fans own a poster or calendar. They have a T-shirt.

Franck had thirty-one Facebook friends. His interests and hobbies included Nescafé, Burger King, and a Facebook group called I Love My Daughter. Adulthood had sanded him into someone profoundly unremarkable.

But what did I expect? As he had made clear on film—it was all there in the record—Franck’s plan for adulthood had been: go to work, come home, shower, eat your dinner, watch TV, fuck your wife, go to sleep, and the next day, do it all over. Work, eat, fuck, sleep, over and over and over.

Grown-up Franck is driving an Amazon delivery van right now, in his Lamborghini baseball cap.

“ ‘You’re always talking about your status, your role, the part you played,’ they tell me. ‘Victories aren’t about credit,’ they say. By Pascal’s rules, everything must be an invisible ‘we.’ Well, you know what, Pascal, some of us were born an invisible ‘we.’ Some of us are from a nameless nothing, and we want a name. When you’re one of six mouths to feed and your parents can no longer work because their bodies are broken from labor and stress, you want a name and a place and respect, as part of a movement. Pff. Renouncing individuality, that’s for rich kids. Pascal can go ahead and get rid of himself. But me, thanks, I’ll stay me!

In Marseille, as we lay in the hotel bed, my back to him, pretending I was asleep, he said into my hair, “When I’m inside you it’s like I’m home.”

I’d shivered in disgust. Sensing my shiver as if it were a tremble of love, he squeezed me and whispered, “Sadie.”

He would stare at me, his gaze focused and direct. This never felt intrusive, on account that it wasn’t quite real. He had stared at hundreds of women, I understood, with those light-filled eyes. René knew his own beauty, used it as a tool, would have stared at whoever he was making love to in order to stir up a sense of urgency. His gaze wasn’t about love. It was about him and what he was after. It had nothing to do with me.

Somewhere on the line, he said, someone had lost fingers, or a hand. But in order to activate the compression for stamping, he said, you had to have both of your hands on the outside of the machine. There was no way to accidentally bring the stamper down on your own hand or arm. To get one hand into the stamper, and bring the stamper down with your other hand, this required skill, he said. These accidents, which happened every few days, could only have been planned and deliberate. People started drinking schnapps at five a.m., he said, when their shift began. They drank schnapps all day long. By the time a worker decided to pull down the stamper with a single hand, having fitted his other arm into the machine, the magic moment when this worker was ready to sacrifice a functioning limb, he was good and drunk, René said, numbed up, and he would not feel much when the stamper swung down with great and smooth and unstoppable force, to crush his hand.
Why would someone do that? I asked.

“To buy an E-Class Mercedes,” René said, as if this were obvious. He sipped his beer. “With the compensation they give you, you can buy a nice car. Plus, you get a pension for life. You never have to work again.”

And this was what had activated him, he said. He had looked down the assembly line and thought, if sacrificing a perfectly good hand was an improvement, if that could elevate the quality of a man’s life, something was wrong.

The company was always angling to chip away break time, to lengthen shifts, to trim bonuses. The union pushed back. There were strikes. René started talking to the more political guys on the line, the strident ones. The radicals. He learned a lot. The union organized a work stoppage. It lasted a couple of weeks, and then Daimler fired everyone. By that point, he didn’t give a shit. He’d become a subversive.

I put the book down and looked out the window. I heard wind, and no truck driving up the road.

Part of attraction is the unpredictable nature of everything, the manner in which you wait, and want.

Good for you, I thought at René, for reducing me to those who wait. But also, go to hell.

Having decided he was not coming, I finished the final two cans of my six-pack and went to sleep.

Watching the others go to prison, or to Algeria to fight for colonial France, Bruno had a revelation that he could change course, that his own commitment to mayhem was not inevitable, not total. He stopped thieving. He gave up drinking. He got a job punching tickets in the metro, rented a maid’s room out in the nineteenth. He made plans to enroll in school. He was still a teenager. Guy Debord shunned him, and the others followed suit. Working, enrolling in school, these things were just not done. You were meant to reject society completely, to fling yourself headlong into a world without the old structures.

Bruno punched tickets in the metro by day, and by night, he took up reading. At the age of twenty, he left Paris to study earth science in Lyon.

“We always felt like there was something to honor in the clandestine nature of our communications with him but it’s wearing off.”

There was a time, he said, when a communiqué from Lacombe would come through and they’d all gather around the printer like supplicants, to read these emails full of outré declarations about cave bears and cavemen. But that time had passed.

“My position, and Pascal knows this, it’s not anything I’ve kept hidden, is that you can’t go back. To live in a cave and renounce technology, renounce everything, that’s like”—he laughed—“about the most modern thing a person could ever do.”

I asked how so. It was fine to be curious. I was curious.

“A caveman isn’t rejecting what’s around him. That’s for intellectuals, people who have overthought everything. You have to deal with life as it is. This guy is talking about half a million years ago, but he’s writing about it on a computer. He’s a crudivore, renouncing the cooked, while people have been eating cooked food forever, and he’s renounced agriculture, which the people in this area have been practicing for twelve thousand years.”