Life Outside Prison Has More Bars and Fewer Boundaries

An excerpt from Dogs and Wolves by Hervé Le Corre

They’d released him an hour earlier than planned and since it was raining, he’d had to wait under a kind of bus shelter erected at the intersection, with the entrance of the prison behind him and the only landscape a cornfield on the other side of the road and the parking lot with its gates and its metal detectors and the comings and goings of the visitors, women, children, old people, mixed with the muffled slamming of car doors. He’d leaned out and seen the high walls that ran for nearly four hundred yards, and it had sent a nasty shiver down his spine and he’d sat down on the wooden bench set deep inside the shelter, so that he should see as little as possible, even though all these years he’d dreamed of surveying the whole of the horizon without the slightest obstacle. He had put his big overnight bag down at his feet. It was lumpy and bulging and weighed as much as a dead donkey because of the books he’d sent for during his imprisonment and which he’d been determined to take with him just as he would have taken loyal, loving pets.

He had time to smoke three cigarettes, listening to the rain abate and move away southward with a dull rumble as if a storm was coming. Suddenly, the clouds parted and the light appeared, throwing a glow like fake jewelry over the whole scene, alive with the sucking of tires on wet asphalt. He blinked in the blinding light and gazed at those glittering expanses with the awe of a child looking at a Christmas tree.

When he saw the car slow down and drive into the parking lot and slow down even more, he looked at his watch. He’d already been waiting more than an hour and he hadn’t felt the minutes pass. Time was like water that slipped through your hands and disappeared, unlike in prison, where every quarter of an hour stuck to your skin, sweaty and stifling and unhealthy. He watched the little red Renault come back out of the parking lot and stop. It was driven by a woman whose features he could barely make out behind the reflections on the windshield. He didn’t need her to flash her headlights to know that she’d come for him. He waved at her and stood up as the car crossed the street and pulled up in front of him.

He leaned down at the same time as the window was lowered and said “Hello” to a pair of very light blue or gray eyes. Very light. All he could see in the shade of the car’s interior was that washed-out phosphorescence. She smiled and leaned toward him. She wasn’t yet thirty.

“How are you?”

“Better now.”

With a broad gesture, he indicated the sky, the trees massed in the distance, lining the road, the dried-up fields. The light, and the heat beating down again. He opened the back door of the car and dropped his bag on the seat. He sat down next to the woman and held out his hand but she moved closer and pecked him on both cheeks. He loved the coolness of her lips on his skin. Something went through him, something rapid but deep, awakening tiny, buried pathways, hidden branches. It was almost painful. An oppressive sense of fulfillment.

“Isn’t Fabien here?”

The woman put her sunglasses back on and started the car.

“I’m Jessica.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Franck.”

“I know.”

“Fabien told me a lot about you in his letters, I . . .”

He fell silent. Better that way. He’d have to get used to it again. Having normal conversations with people. Taking care what you said. Not like with the cops, or the other convicts, no. Just so as not to hurt people, not to rub them up the wrong way. 

“Fabien’s been in Spain for three weeks. He couldn’t put it off, it was urgent. I’ll tell you about it. He may be away for two or three more weeks, you never know with him.”

“What’s he doing in Spain?”

“Business. I’ll tell you later. Otherwise he’d have come himself, you can be sure of that. You’re his little brother, that’s what he always says: ‘My little brother.’”

She switched on the car radio, a station that played French singers, and she hummed along to their sentimental songs as if she was the only one in the car. As soon as they were on the highway, going in the direction of Bordeaux, she switched off the air conditioning and the radio and lowered her window and warm air came into the car with a violent, deafening rush. She didn’t say anything for a while. Franck was expecting questions about the slammer, what a shithole it was, he was ready to tell her the bare minimum because you never tell the whole truth about what happens in prison. About what you had to see and go through in there. He would have liked her to talk to him, because that would have given him a good reason to turn and look at her without having to ogle her out of the corner of his eye as he was doing now.

She was wearing a man’s shirt with the sleeves rolled up over her forearms. It was too big for her and reached down to the tops of her thighs, over a pair of shorts cut out of old jeans. Her legs were tanned, the skin glistened, and he told himself she must have put on a moisturizing cream and that if she hadn’t been Fabien’s wife he would have put his hand on that softness, even if it meant getting a slap. He constructed a whole porn script in his mind, a script so realistic, with the woman sitting just an inch or two from him, that it made his jeans feel too tight and he had to change position several times to relieve the pressure on his groin.

“You want to stop? There’s a service station over there.”

He gave a start because part of him took this for an invitation to prolong the fantasy that held him captive. A bumpy path, the shade of a tree, the girl shifting to the back seat, panties coming down, a hand moving up.

“Yeah, I’d like that.”

His voice hoarse, filled with embarrassment. He cleared his throat, mouth dry.

She put the turn signal on, a half-smile on her pretty mouth. Ironic or mocking. Or simply calm, relaxed. He didn’t know. He hadn’t thought about women’s smiles for a long time. The meanings they imply, the misinterpretations they give rise to.

“I need a coffee and a smoke,” she said.

She pushed her dark glasses back over her hair to look for a parking spot, squinting, bent forward slightly. She parked the car near a picnic table where a couple and three children were sitting in front of cardboard plates that the mother was filling with tomato salad while the father fiddled with his cell phone. The table was cluttered with sachets and bags, cans of soda, packages wrapped in aluminum foil, and the children were throwing their hands into this chaos to grab pieces of bread or paper cups that they held out to their mother for her to give them a drink.

Franck watched the man, who was indifferent to all this bustle, starting to talk on the phone then moving away to continue his conversation, and all you could see was his back, his bent neck, shrugging his shoulders from time to time, his free hand beating the air in front of him.

“Shall we go? Is this bringing back memories?”

Yes, vaguely, the road leading to vacations in Spain when he was nine or ten, when everything was still going well, before the shipwreck, the sandwiches he feasted on, bought in stores along the highway and quickly devoured standing by the car because his father didn’t like to stop, the games he and Fabien played on their consoles in the back seat. His big brother Fabien. Four years older. Who taught him all the tricks, always patient. And who later would take the blame whenever they did anything stupid. The blame and the blows. And the tears, too, which he wiped away with the back of his hand, panting, without a word, his father above him, yelling, fist raised. Fabien muttering insults at night in their room, buried beneath the sheets, cursing their father in a low voice, vowing to exact a terrible revenge one day.

The two brothers had never fought. Had hardly ever quarreled. They needed to support each other, the way you cling to someone or something in the current of a river gone crazy or in a wind that uproots trees. There weren’t many brothers like them in the world. That was what they’d told each other once on one of those endless nights. Screams, groans, obscene insults. Mom.

---

And there had been that day, the day it had happened, about four in the afternoon. Fabien running across the supermarket parking lot without turning, the bag full of money, Franck bouncing off the hood of a passing car, leg broken, the security guards lying on top of him.

He hadn’t talked despite all the pressure from the cops, all their blackmail, the advice he’d gotten from the court-appointed lawyer.

He hadn’t talked despite all the pressure from the cops, all their blackmail, the advice he’d gotten from the court-appointed lawyer.

He had a clean record. The gun was a fake gun, a copy of a Sig-Sauer, a starting pistol. But the bookkeeper, a father of three, had been left a tetraplegic after his fall down the stairs. The case had gone to court in the Gironde. Six years with no remission.

He hadn’t talked.

---

He got out of the car without saying anything in reply, and immediately the slamming of car doors, the calls, the coming and going of people, all that casualness of bare legs and short sleeves and dark glasses dazzled him and he lowered his head beneath the bright, harsh light the sun cast over it all.

Jessica was walking ahead without bothering about him, the strap of her bag pulling on the collar of her shirt and baring a shoulder with no bra strap over it. Franck caught up with her so as not to have the curves of her ass in front of his eyes, curves emphasized by her shorts, the line of her neck emerging from the askew collar, that nakedness that the clothes revealed or implied. They entered the vast hall, drowned in the noise of the customers and the muzak, freezing cold because of the air conditioning, and they staggered in the direction of the toilets through the groups massed in front of the coffee machines and the people standing around, waiting for someone, gazing at the road map of the region on the wall, or else busy on their phones.

Franck shut himself in a cubicle with a damp floor where the toilet bowl was still full of urine and toilet paper, and his excitement receded, faced with this filth saturated by the smell of rim blocks. He peed, quickly buttoned himself again, relieved, calm almost, then watched the toilet bowl clean itself in the din of the flush, his mind empty, no longer knowing where he was or why he was there. At the washstands, there were guys washing their hands, sprinkling water on their faces, looking at themselves in the mirror without seeing themselves or maybe without recognizing themselves. Some seemed in a daze after hours on the road, others rolled their shoulders like toughs. The noise of the hand driers was deafening and the swing door squeaked every time someone came in or went out. Franck rinsed his lowered eyes in the lukewarm water, refusing to see anything around him, scared by all this noise, then he left the place without turning back because that smell of men, that lack of privacy reminded him of prison, but without the raised voices and the shuffle of feet, the guys who made out like they didn’t give a fuck about anything.

He went to the freezer aisles and started looking at the sandwiches in their triangular packaging, and he salivated at the sight of the sliced white bread and the garnish and his stomach felt hollow and there was a painful lump in his throat because what he saw was worth more than any cooked meal, any pastry filled with cream or fruit. He made his choice, took a bottle of water, then went to pay for everything, trying to spot Jessica in the crowd. He looked in his wallet for the right change but couldn’t find the coins he needed and the cashier waited, looking away, stiff on her seat, sighing with impatience, and he felt stupid and clumsy, the way he had as a child, when he took out a ten-euro bill and the girl stuffed it in her cash drawer and without a word gave him his change with the same almost abrupt gesture. He saw Jessica through the glass doors in front of the entrance, smoking in the sun, a paper coffee cup in her hand.

“Where did you get to?”

“I was buying something.”

He showed her his sandwiches and unwrapped one and ate it in three mouthfuls. He pushed it all down with a gulp of cold water, and one of his back teeth rang with pain. Jessica looked at her watch and said it was time they left, they still had a way to go, and she walked away in the direction of the car, not bothering about him, as if she were alone. He followed her at a distance, finishing his snack, hardly chewing it, happy to stuff his mouth with it then swallow it down with the help of a little water. It was a greedy pleasure, the pleasure of a little boy fond of his food, a kind of animal satisfaction that quietly brought him back to this side of the world, to the blinding light flooding everything, the noise of the voices and the bustle of crowds of human beings rushing about in all directions, like flies on a windowpane, unable to understand that they can’t get through it. He couldn’t find words for the invisible walls of that prison. He only felt his own freedom lift his shoulders and soften his back, relieving it at last of the weight of those looks like bags filled with knives, and it seemed to him that he was walking with a lightness, a grace, maybe, that he had never felt, like a dancer pacing this overheated blacktop after a star with a stunning ass. He finished eating by the car while she smoked another cigarette. She didn’t say anything to him as she leaned on the car door, apparently engrossed by the sight of a group of fairly elderly tourists getting off a huge red bus, wearing caps and Bermuda shorts and brand-new sneakers, attempting a few stretching exercises as they walked stiffly toward the toilets and the shops.

In a corner of his field of vision he saw Jessica’s legs moving as she maneuvered the car back onto the highway, moving her legs up and down on the pedals like scissors, and the desire to slip his hand into the gap between those legs, or even to place his fingers on that brown skin, took hold of him again and forced him to keep his arms folded, and he tried to concentrate on the landscape or the traffic, eyeing the big sedans, the powerful 4×4s overtaking them at ninety miles an hour, or turning to look at the caravans and trailer homes dragging along at sixty and cursing them under his breath. As for her, she said nothing. Her face was suddenly impassive, inscrutable, with bitter lines at the corners of her lips, and behind the dark glasses her eyes were fixed straight ahead, unblinking, as if she were a disturbing figure in a wax museum. She might have been asleep, hypnotized by the ribbon of asphalt unreeling before them, the intermittent whiteness of the barricade tapes.

He wondered for a moment what he could have said or done for her to withdraw into that hostile silence, then he started daydreaming as he looked out at the landscape, imagining himself living in that brick farmhouse he glimpsed below the highway, or in that other one on a hillside, picturing himself walking at dawn amid the vines or in the grass wet with dew beside a deserted road. He began to dream of winter in that drab, dry, yellow landscape, without relief or depth because the shade had fled, never to be seen again. He sat down in a deep armchair, in front of a wood fire, a book on his knees while the icy blue light of a dying day faded beyond the window panes. He walked on frost-hardened earth early in the morning. This was the kind of image he had projected for himself in prison, lying on his cot and seeing the first light of dawn through the skylight. To watch the sun rise. To witness that miracle every day without any barrier—any wall, any window—between yourself and the silent clamor of everything emerging from the darkness.

Then she turned to him and threw a glance behind her. “Can you pass me my smokes? They’re in my bag.”

It was as if she’d suddenly came back to life. Her fingers were moving on the wheel, her lips half open as if she was starting to breathe again. He gave her a cigarette.

“Help yourself, if you want one.”

She lowered the window a little on her side, and he did the same, and they smoked in the whoosh of the hot air rushing in on them. Franck took the opportunity to speak, thinking that whatever he said would be drowned out in that vast tremor anyway.

“What kind of business is Fabien doing in Spain? He didn’t say anything about it in his last letter.”

“It was decided on quickly, last week. You know how he is, you’re his brother. He can be quite secretive, not always easy to deal with. One evening, he told me he was leaving the next morning to meet some guys in Valencia. And since he wanted to take advantage he told me he’d stay for at least three weeks because he has friends down there. That was all he’d tell me, there wasn’t even any point in arguing. He wanted to do something with that dough of yours that’s been lying around all this time. It was a suggestion from Serge, a Gypsy who’s a good friend of my father’s. That’s all he told me. I think right now, he’s probably sweet-talking girls on the beach, I’m not worried about him.”

“He just thought about using that money after five years? It’s about time. What’s he been doing all these years?”

“Odd jobs here and there. He used to help out this scrap metal merchant, the Gypsy I mentioned, then he found a job in Langon, night watchman in a logistics depot, they call it. Three nights a week, for crap pay. Anyway, right now, you can’t find anything. He’s a cook by trade, but he can’t stand the bosses anymore, and he’s not interested in lousy pay at the end of the month for long hours.” 

They hadn’t had time to count it. There had been at least fifty or sixty thousand euros in cash in the attaché case. Monday’s takings. Monday was a quiet day, and the courier came alone in an unmarked car. Franck had learned that over time, during the ten months he’d spent moving pallets around on his cart and making friends with a security guard named Amine, a huge black guy who swore he’d pull the job one Saturday night with pals of his. Franck had let him talk while they smoked a joint one evening after the depot closed. Other times, too, Amine had given him all the details and even suggested they should pull the job together. He’d shake his head after every drag as if the dope was blurring his neurons or his sight, then he would breathe out everything his lungs had been unable to absorb and close his eyes and laugh silently. Franck would merely smile and nod in agreement while Amine put together his plans, shaking and stamping like a sportsman just before the start of a race or coming on to the pitch. Franck didn’t trust him, that genial, talkative guy and his pre-rolled joints filled to the brim with hash he claimed came straight from Sierra Leone.

After leaving the highway at Langon, they drove along a country road that cut through a gloomy forest of pines whose dirty green tops glistened in the sun. At times, there were bare stretches of sand, blackish as if charred and overrun here and there by gray-green gorse. The heat was more intense here, dry and dusty, and an acrid smell of burned earth and resin infiltrated the car. Franck wondered how it was possible to live here, far from everything, and he took fright at this desert bristling with black trunks from which there occasionally emerged a round, dense thicket of tightly packed oaks, survivors on a battlefield planted with halberds.

He yearned for a town, its noise, its crowds, its girls especially, in summer skirts and tops loose over their breasts, he would have looked at all of them, peered at them, an unashamed voyeur, caressing and feeling that warm skin, that round softness with his eyes, not knowing how he would resist the desire to touch them in reality, to lift their skirts and slip his fingers between their thighs and stick in his tongue and the rest. The times he had jerked off on his stinking mattress, tormented by these images and the fantasies he fabricated, the cell suddenly invaded by holograms in flowery skirts pushing back the mass of their hair as they all know how to do with that quick, supple gesture. The times, shaken by the spasms of his wretched orgasm, he had sighed into the hollow of a warm, tanned shoulder only to find himself blowing with his mouth open into the questionable material of his pillow.

The times, shaken by the spasms of his wretched orgasm, he had sighed into the hollow of a warm, tanned shoulder only to find himself blowing with his mouth open into the questionable material of his pillow.

Jessica turned abruptly onto a dusty path, its ruts filled with pebbles and broken tiles, which led first past a thicket of oaks then past a parched meadow strewn with the wrecks of cars and rusty trailers and agricultural equipment—an ancient tractor, its faded hood baking in the heat with sad red patches, a harrow, its long tines overrun with bindweed—in the middle of which wild grass and yellow acacias thrived. There were tires, some burst, some piled up in the middle of the brambles. The sky was as white and blinding as molten metal, crushing these heaps of scrap iron.

When the car drew up in front of the house, something emerged from around a corner of the wall. It took Franck a second to realize that it was a dog. A dog such as he’d never seen, not even in movies or videos. Black, its coat smooth, its body bulging with muscles, its square head crowned by ears cut into points like two spearheads. Simply standing on its four legs, it pressed its muzzle against the half-lowered car window and Franck could hear its breathing and the deep growling that rolled in its mouth through bared chops and see up close its eyes fixed on him, protuberant, set in whitish circles where madness gleamed. It didn’t move, content to stare at him. It was waiting, quivering with an anger that ran beneath its skin like a fierce charge of electricity.

“Don’t open,” Jessica said. “Roll the window up. I’ll deal with him.”

She went around the car and grabbed the dog by the collar and pulled it toward her with some effort, yelling, “Quiet now, Goliath!” and hitting it on the head with the flat of her hand. When she let go of it after a while, the animal sat down, its big head at the level of Jessica’s stomach, looking up at her, ears lowered, blinking as if it was afraid of her.

“You can come out, he won’t hurt you. He’s always like that with people he doesn’t know.”

Franck tore himself from the car as if from an oven and sweat ran down his back and he mopped it with the material of his shirt. Jessica ordered the dog to lie down under an old bench next to the front door of the house and the animal obeyed but kept its head up and its eyes on Franck.

“When he’s gotten used to you, you’ll see, he’s quite docile. And besides, he’s a good guard dog. We’re safe with him here.”

She went inside and Franck followed her, making sure the dog wasn’t moving. His heavy bag was pulling on his arm and beating against his leg, giving him the lopsided, uncertain walk of someone who’s disabled.

“I’m here!” Jessica called out.

She had stopped at the foot of a staircase and was listening out. The chatter of a TV could be heard from somewhere in the house but nobody replied, nobody seemed to be there.

“What are those jerks doing?”

She waited a few more seconds then shrugged.

“Never mind. You’ll see them later. Come with me. We’ll go this way.”

She opened the door to the kitchen. The room was dark, the shutters half closed. The table hadn’t been cleared after lunch, the sink was full of dirty plates and greasy dishes, and the counter was cluttered with cans, empty sachets, and wine and beer bottles.

“Don’t mind the mess. My mom isn’t having a good day. I’ll see to it later.”

She took two beers from the refrigerator, piled up some plates that had been left on the table, and placed the cans on a corner of the oilcloth. With a sigh, she sat all the way back on a chair, stretched her legs, slipped her sandals from her feet, and wriggled her toes as she opened her can.

“Shit, it’s hot,” she said. “Don’t just stand there like that, sit down. Cheers.”

Franck sat down on the other side of the table. He could see nothing now but her tanned shoulders, the neckline of her shirt, the damp shadow between her breasts, glistening with sweat. She drank a long gulp then rolled the aluminum can over the insides of her thighs, slowly, closing her eyes. He drank, too, taking great swigs of the ice-cold beer, and felt the chill of it descend into his stomach and spread throughout his body, and gradually the oppression of the heat gave way to a bitter lucidity he couldn’t quite figure out. He no longer knew what he was doing here, in the chaos of this grimy kitchen, within reach of the perfect body of this girl lying back, abandoned, on her chair and cooling her thighs with a beer can. Amid the sickly-sweet odors of the filth surrounding them, he thought he could perceive also Jessica’s intimate scent, the perfume of her skin, the aromas of her secret folds.

In almost five years, how many times, driven almost crazy by that desperate desire, had he dreamed of a woman’s body so close, so available? He watched her as she lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out in front of her, staring vaguely at the window above the sink overflowing with dishes. She might have been alone, holding her beer between her outstretched legs, her eyes closed now, smoking slowly and flicking the ash onto the floor. He didn’t dare move, suddenly dreading to attract her attention, like a little boy who keeps quiet after a harsh reprimand. Then something moved to the right of his field of vision and he gave a start. There in the doorway stood a little girl, watching him gravely, questioning him with her dark eyes, a plastic racket in her hand.

Franck said hello in a low voice, trying to smile at her, but the girl didn’t react. Her face remained impassive, eyes still wide open with curiosity or perhaps anxiety, and it occurred to Franck that he didn’t know how to behave with children, how to talk to them or how to smile at them—but was he any better at dealing with adults, or people in general?

Jessica’s voice drew him back from these questions that had no answers. “Rachel, sweetie, aren’t you with Grandma?”

The little girl shook her head, then started twisting her black hair around her finger, one foot behind her, rocking on the tips of her toes as if she didn’t dare come into the room. Jessica threw her cigarette butt into her beer can then held out her arms to the little girl, who ran toward her and threw herself between her legs and huddled against her belly. From there, she continued to stare at Franck. Jessica stroked her forehead and kissed her hair, whispering to her that she was hot and that she should have washed herself, but the little girl seemed not to hear her, just kept examining the man who was looking at her from the other side of the table, embarrassed by his own forced smile.

“Do you want a drink?”

Rachel moved away from her mother’s knees and opened the refrigerator and took out a big bottle of soda, then stood with this burden in the middle of the room, looking around for a usable glass. Reluctantly, Jessica stood up with a sigh and opened a cupboard that was too high for the little girl and took down a glass and looked at it in the light from the window.

“Here you are, Missy. This one’s clean.”

Rachel put her glass down on a corner of the table and filled it and drank slowly, turned toward the window. When she had finished, she put the bottle back in the fridge, then went and rinsed her glass at the sink, standing on tiptoe to reach the faucet, and put the glass on the drain board in the middle of what was already there. Then she picked up her racket and left the room without saying a word. The door creaked slightly as it closed. 

Jessica had sat down again and lit another cigarette. She sighed some more, blowing the smoke out through her nose.

“She always has to have clean things. She never eats from someone else’s plate, not even mine, not even to have a taste, or with a fork that’s been used to serve. She always looks through glasses to make sure they’re clean. And then she has to put everything away, all the time. You should see her room! I don’t know where she gets all these habits from. I didn’t bring her up like that, like a princess, I mean. And her dad wasn’t the delicate kind. As far as I’m concerned, it’s good to be clean, I mean I don’t like living in a pigsty. But you’re not going to catch a fucking disease because you drink out of someone else’s glass, especially if they’re family, are you?”

She turned to Franck. She was puffing nervously on her cigarette, waving her hands in front of her.

“How old is she?”

“Eight. She’ll be nine in September.”

“She seems quiet. She’s like you.”

Jessica giggled. “She’s like me because she’s quiet? I don’t know who she gets that from either. We’re the nervous kind in this family . . . Well, maybe from her grandfather. He hasn’t always been like that, but he’s quieted down a lot now.” She stubbed out her cigarette in a plate. “Well, it’s been best for everyone.”

She got to her feet. She seemed impatient all of a sudden.

“Come on, let me show you where you’ll be staying.”

Franck followed her outside. Once again, she walked a few yards in front, without waiting for him. Inside a roughly built old shed, he saw a trailer raised up on cinder blocks, with a satellite dish on top. Jessica went inside and he hurried to join her there. She was leaning against the little stainless-steel sink and in the light coming in through the open Plexiglass windows at a low angle, all he could see were her legs and the gleam of her eyes, which made him think of those lagoons you see in photographs, more luminous than the sky. He put his bag down on a bench seat and watched her open the closets, run the water, show him where the clean sheets were, explaining that there was a little bathroom on the first floor of the house that he could use. Beneath that low ceiling, her muted voice came to him as if she had spoken in his ear and it seemed to him that this confined space was pushing them into an intimacy that almost embarrassed him. At any moment, he expected to see her undress, like someone making themselves comfortable at home, maybe keeping on only her panties, and come and go barefoot across the linoleum floor, putting away his things, then press herself against him and stick her tongue in his mouth and eagerly unbutton his jeans.

When she left the trailer, telling him to take his time and join them later behind the house because that was where her parents were—those two idiots must be having a nap, even though they were supposed to be keeping an eye on Rachel from the side of the pool—he felt relieved and hurried to stick his head under the faucet in the sink and splash water on his face. The water was warm at first then grew colder as it ran, so he drank it in great gulps until he couldn’t breathe.

He put away his few clothes in the chests, taking care to keep them well folded, then put his toiletries in the little cabinet. He stood for a moment looking at his toothbrush and his disposable razor, which he’d placed on the plastic shelf, and the bar of soap on the edge of the tiny washstand and the towel hanging from a chrome bar, like so many tangible signs of peace and freedom. Already, the silence, disturbed only by a purring in the distance, probably a tractor, was welcoming him into a kind of bubble that gradually adjusted itself to him like a new garment that becomes comfortable as soon as you put it on. He no longer had to watch his back in the mirror, dreading to see some randy bigshot or some crazy guy who might be hiding a knife in his towel loom up behind him. He no longer had to wait or to hurry through the enforced closeness, the touches, the nudges, the constant challenge of those bodies that were either threatening or tense with fear.

He left the toilet and felt a kind of well-being in his chest. The trailer was small, with a low ceiling. It looked like a doll’s house with that miniature washstand, that two-ring portable stove that would just about do for making tea on a campsite, but he felt the same tranquility as he had in his boyhood room, so long ago, once he had shut the door and left behind him, depending on the evening, his father’s cries of rage or else the yelling and slamming of doors or else his mother’s sobs as she sat on the steps in front of the door. He and his brother would wait for everything to quiet down, listening out for murmurs and groans in a tomblike silence, to come into the other’s room and slip into his bed and plot escapes, acts of revenge, scenarios of another life, far from here, far from everything.

He lay down on the bed, surrounded by the smell of clean sheets, and closed his eyes, thinking of Fabien and how they would party when he got back, before getting out of here and really starting to live. And then because this dump, with that monstrous dog, that girl who looked really hot, and that almost mute little girl, struck him as weird and dicey. Something in the air, like a lingering odor, the trace of an old stench that sometimes stopped you from breathing deeply. Nothing to do with prison. He couldn’t have said truly what he was feeling.

But here, in this hovel, he felt a little at home, alone, really alone, and very calm.