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  What was probably more deserving of criticism, from the point of view of generally accepted morality, is that Yuzu went, I was convinced, to ‘swingers’ parties’ quite often. I had attended one of these with her at the very beginning of our relationship. It took place in a town house on Quai de Béthune, on the Île Saint-Louis. I had no idea how much a house like that could cost, perhaps twenty million euros – anyway, I’d never seen anything like it. There were about a hundred participants, roughly two men for every woman, and as a rule the men were younger than the women, and of a clearly less elevated social class – most of them even had a frankly inner-city look about them, it occurred to me for a moment that they probably got paid, but then again probably not, for most men a free fuck is a bonus in itself, and there was also champagne and canapés, served in the three interjoining reception rooms, which is where I spent the evening.

  Nothing sexual happened in those reception rooms, but the extremely erotic outfits of the women and the fact that couples or groups headed regularly towards the stairs that led to the bedrooms or the basement, left no doubt about the spirit of the assembly.

  After almost an hour, when it became apparent I had no intention of exploring what was being hatched or swapped away from the safety of the buffet, Yuzu called an Uber. She didn’t tell me off on the way back, but she didn’t show any regret or shame either; in fact she didn’t allude to the evening at all, and would never mention it again.

  * * *

  That silence seemed to confirm my hypothesis that she hadn’t given up those distractions, and one evening I wanted to know for certain; it was absurd, she could come back any minute and there’s nothing very honourable about going through your partner’s computer. The need to know is a curious thing, though ‘need’ is perhaps a bit strong – let’s say the matches that were on that evening were a bit uninspiring.

  By sorting her emails by size, I easily isolated the ten or so with videos attached. In the first, my partner was at the centre of a classic gang-bang; she was masturbating, fellating and being penetrated by about fifteen men, who were unhurriedly waiting their turn, and using condoms for vaginal and anal penetrations; no one uttered a word. At one point she tried to take two cocks in her mouth, but couldn’t quite do it. Another time the participants ejaculated on her face, which was gradually covered with sperm, and later she closed her eyes.

  That was all very well – in fact let’s just say that I wasn’t overly surprised – but there was one other thing that grabbed my attention more: I immediately recognised the interior design; the video had been shot in my apartment, more precisely in the master suite, and I wasn’t very happy about that. She must have taken advantage of one of my trips to Brussels – and I’d stopped having those over a year ago – so it must have happened right at the start of our relationship, at a time when we were still fucking and even fucking a lot. I don’t think I’ve ever fucked that much in my life. She had been available for sex on a more or less constant basis, and at the time I had deduced that she was in love with me. Perhaps that was an error of analysis, but in that case it was an error common to many men, in which case it isn’t an error at all and just how most women work (as they say in popular psychology books), they’re programmed to do it (as they say in debates on Public Sénat), and so Yuzu might have been a special case.

  And she was indeed a special case, as the second video proved. This time it wasn’t filmed at my place, or in the town house on the Île Saint-Louis. While the furniture in the Île Saint-Louis house was high-class, minimalist, black and white, this new location was affluent, bourgeois, Chippendale – it suggested Avenue Foch, a rich gynaecologist or perhaps a successful television presenter. Either way Yuzu was masturbating on an ottoman before sliding on to the floor covered by a carpet decorated with vaguely Persian motifs, on which a middle-aged Dobermann was penetrating her with the vigour normally associated with its breed. Then the camera switched direction, and while the Dobermann went on fucking her (dogs in fact ejaculate very quickly under natural conditions, but a woman’s vagina must differ in notable respects from that of a bitch, and he couldn’t find his bearings), while Yuzu tugged on the dick of a bull terrier before taking it in her mouth. The bull terrier, which was probably younger, ejaculated in less than a minute before his place was taken by a boxer.

  After this canine mini gang-bang I interrupted my viewing; I was disgusted – particularly on behalf of the dogs – and at the same time I couldn’t conceal the fact that for a Japanese girl sleeping with a Westerner wasn’t far off copulating with an animal (at least from what I had been able to observe of their mentality). Before leaving the master suite, I downloaded all the videos on to a USB stick. Yuzu’s face was easily recognisable, and I began to imagine drawing up a new liberation plan, which consisted very simply (good ideas are always simple) of throwing her out of the window.

  The practical realisation of this plan presented few difficulties. First of all, I would have to make her drink, on the pretext that the beverage was of astonishing quality, a present from a small local producer of Mirabelle eau-de-vie in the Vosges, for example; she was very susceptible to such arguments, because she really had remained a tourist. The Japanese, and Asians in general, cope very badly with alcohol, due to their low level of aldehyde deshydrogenase-2, which transforms ethanol into acetic acid. In less than five minutes, she would plunge into a state of ethylic drowsiness, I’d seen it happen before; then I would only have to open the window and move her body, and as she weighed less than fifty kilos (roughly the same as her bags), I would be able to drag her without difficulty, and twenty-nine storeys are unforgiving.

  Of course I could try and convince people that it had been a drunken accident, that seemed quite credible, but I had an enormous and perhaps misplaced trust in my country’s police, and my initial plan was to confess: those videos, I thought, constituted mitigating circumstances. The Penal Code of 1810, article 324, stipulates that ‘murder committed by a husband on his wife, or by the latter on her husband, is not excusable (…) Nevertheless, according to article 336, in the case of adultery, murder committed by a husband on his wife, as well as on the accomplice, at the moment of surprising them in the act in the marital home, is excusable. In short, if I had set off with a Kalashnikov on the evening of the orgy, and we had been living in Napoleon’s time, I would have been acquitted without difficulty. But we were no longer living in Napoleon’s time, not even in the time of Divorce, Italian Style, and a swift Internet search told me that the average sentence for a crime of passion committed in a conjugal context was seventeen years in prison; some feminists wanted to go further and permit the introduction of more serious penalties by introducing the idea of ‘feminicide’ into the Penal Code, which I found quite amusing; it sounded like insecticide, or raticide. Still, seventeen years seemed a lot to me.

  At the same time, maybe prison’s not so bad, I said to myself: administrative problems evaporate, you get medical treatment; the chief inconvenience is that you’re constantly being beaten up and sodomised by other inmates, but on second thought it was perhaps mostly the paedophiles who were humiliated and raped by the other prisoners, or perhaps pretty young guys with angelic little arses, frail and well-to-do delinquents who gave in stupidly for a line of coke – whereas I was hefty, squat and a bit alcoholic and actually looked more like your average defendant. Fucked and Humiliated would have been a good title, a bit of trash Dostoyevsky, and besides I seemed to remember that Dostoyevsky had written about the prison world; it might be transferable, although I hadn’t had time to check and needed to make a decision quickly, and it seemed to me that a guy who had killed his wife to ‘avenge his honour’ might enjoy a certain level of respect among his fellow inmates, or at least that was what my feeble understanding of the psychology of the prison environment suggested to me.

  On the other hand, there were things that I liked in the outside world: a little trip to the G20, for example, they had fourteen different kinds of hummus; or a w
alk in the woods, I liked going for walks in the woods, I should have done it more often – I’d missed the contact with my childhood – so in the end a long time in prison perhaps wasn’t the best solution, but I think it was the hummus that made my mind up. Not to mention the moral element of murder, of course.

  Curiously enough, it was while watching Public Sénat – a channel from which I didn’t expect very much, and certainly nothing like this – that the solution finally came to me. The documentary, entitled Voluntarily Missing, told the stories of various people who had, one day, totally unpredictably, decided to sever all connections with their families, their friends, their jobs: one man who, on a Monday morning on his way to work, had abandoned his car in a station car park and taken the first train to a random destination; another who, rather than going home after a party, had found a room in the first hotel he came across before wandering for months from one Paris hotel to another, changing his address every week.

  The statistics were impressive: more than twelve thousand people, in France, every year, chose to disappear, to abandon their families and remake their lives, sometimes at the other end of the world, sometimes without changing cities. I was fascinated, and spent the rest of the night on the Internet trying to find out more, increasingly convinced that I was witnessing my own fate: I too would become someone voluntarily missing, and my case was especially simple as I didn’t have to escape a wife, a family, a patiently constructed social environment, but merely a simple foreign live-in girlfriend who had no right to pursue me. Having said that, all the online articles on the Internet insisted on a point that had already been put forward by the documentary: in France, any adult was free ‘to come and go’ – abandoning your family was not a crime. That phrase should have been carved in huge letters on all public buildings: In France, abandoning your family is not a crime. They insisted on this point a great deal, providing impressive evidence: if someone who had been reported missing was stopped by the police or the gendarmerie, the police or gendarmerie were forbidden to communicate that person’s new address without their consent; and, in 2013, searches on behalf of families had been terminated. It was startling that, in a country where individual liberties had tended to shrink, legislation was preserving this one, which was fundamental – in my eyes even more fundamental, and philosophically more troubling, than suicide.

  * * *

  I didn’t sleep that night, and I immediately put appropriate measures in place. Without a precise destination in mind, it seemed that my path would now lead me towards the countryside, so I opted for the Crédit Agricole. The account was opened immediately, but I would have to wait a week to have Internet access and a cheque book. It only took me fifteen minutes to close my account with BNP, and the transfer of the full balance into my new account was instantaneous. Moving the direct debits that I wanted to keep (car insurance, health insurance) took only a few emails. The apartment took a bit longer; I thought it would be a good idea to pretend I had a new job waiting for me in Argentina on a huge vineyard in the province of Mendoza and everyone at the agency thought it was wonderful – all French people think it’s wonderful to leave France, it’s a typical feature among them; even it you’re going to Greenland they think it’s fantastic, so let’s not even mention Argentina – and if I’d been going to Brazil I think the account manager would have drooled with jealousy. I had to give two months’ notice and would pay them via direct debit; as to the state of the place when I left I certainly couldn’t be present, but that wasn’t compulsory.

  * * *

  Which left only the question of my job. I was a contractual worker within the Ministry of Agriculture, and my contract was renewed annually at the beginning of August. My office manager seemed surprised that I was calling him during my holidays, but he agreed to a meeting that same day. It seemed to me that I needed a more sophisticated lie as he was relatively well informed about agricultural matters, although it would have to be one connected to the first lie. So I invented a job offer as an ‘agricultural exports’ adviser to the Argentinian embassy. ‘Ah, Argentina…’ he said darkly. In fact agricultural exports from Argentina had been exploding for some years, in all fields, and the growth wasn’t over; experts estimated that Argentina – which had only forty-four million inhabitants – could feed up to six hundred million people, and the new government had understood that, by devaluing the peso, those bastards were literally going to inundate Europe with their products, and they had no restrictive legislation regulating GM food, which got us off to a bad start. ‘Their meat is delicious…’ I objected in a conciliatory tone. ‘If only it was just the meat…’ he replied, his voice increasingly gloomy. Cereals, soya, sunflower, sugar, peanuts, fruit, meat of course and even milk: these were all industries in which Argentina could do a lot of harm in Europe, and do so very quickly. ‘So you’re going over to the enemy…’ he said in a tone that was superficially jocular, but filled with real bitterness; I preferred to remain prudently silent. ‘You’re one of our best experts; I imagine their offer must be financially interesting…’ he insisted in a voice that made me anxious that he was on the brink of losing control; on the other hand, I didn’t think it a good idea to reply, and attempted a smile which was at once affirmative, regretful, complicit and modest – a smile, in fact, that was hard to pull off.

  ‘Right…’ he tapped his fingers on the table. As it happened, I was on annual leave, and the end of it coincided with the end of my contractual period; so technically I didn’t even need to come back. Obviously he was a little perturbed, caught off guard, but it couldn’t have been the first time something like this had happened. The Ministry of Agriculture pays its contractors well as long as they can show enough operational competence, and broadly speaking it pays them considerably more than its civil servants; but it is clearly no match for the private sector, or even for a foreign embassy whose budget is almost limitless, once they decide to put a real plan of conquest in place. I remember a fellow student who had been offered a fortune by the United States Embassy and completely failed in his mission; Californian wines were still very poorly distributed in France, and beef from the Midwest struggled to work its charm while Argentinian beef remained successful; go figure why that might be – what an impulsive little creature the consumer is, more impulsive than cattle, anyway – although some communication advisers had reconstructed a plausible scenario and in their view the cowboy had been greatly over-exploited as an icon, these days everyone knew that the Midwest was really a vague anonymous territory covered with meat factories; there were too many burgers to serve every day and it wasn’t possible any other way; you had to be realistic, and catching animals with a lasso was no longer a viable option. But the image of the gaucho (was there some Latin magic at work here?) still fed the dreams of the European consumer, who imagined vast prairies as far as the eye could see, and animals galloping proud and free across the pampa (we would have to check whether a cow gallops), but either way a royal road was opening for Argentinian beef.

  * * *

  My former office manager shook my hand, just before I left his office, and he was decent enough to wish me good luck in my new job.

  Clearing my office took me a little under ten minutes. It was nearly four o’clock; in less than a day I had reconfigured my life.

  * * *

  I wiped the traces of my previous social life without any real problem; things had become easier with the Internet; all invoices, tax declarations and other formalities could now be dealt with electronically, and physical skill was no longer a requirement, an email address was all that was necessary. But I still had a body, that body had certain needs, and the hardest thing about my flight was to find a hotel in Paris that accepted smokers. It took me a good hundred phone calls, each time enduring the triumphant contempt of the switchboard operator who felt a palpable pleasure in repeating to me, with ill-disguised satisfaction: ‘No, sir, that’s impossible, our establishment is entirely non-smoking, thank you for your call.’ In the
end I spent two whole days on that quest, and it was only at dawn on the third day – when I was seriously considering becoming homeless (a homeless person with seven hundred thousand euros in the bank was unusual, even intriguing) – that I remembered the Mercure hotel in the Marais Poitevin, quite recently still a smoking-friendly hotel, and I thought perhaps there was a chance there.

  In fact, a few hours on the Internet told me that while almost all Mercure hotels in Paris applied a strict non-smoking policy, there were exceptions. So my freedom would not even come courtesy of an independent hotel but rather from the revulsion of an underling at respecting the orders of his hierarchy, a kind of insubordination, a rebellion of the individual moral conscience, already depicted in various pieces of existentialist theatre immediately after the Second World War.

  The hotel was on Avenue de la Soeur-Rosalie, in the thirteenth arrondissement, near the Place d’Italie; I didn’t know the avenue or the sister in question, but Place d’Italie suited me; it was far enough from Beaugrenelle, and so I didn’t risk running into Yuzu by chance; she hardly went anywhere aside from the Marais and Saint-Germain, and add in a couple of swingers’ parties in the sixteenth or the better part of the seventeenth and you had a good picture of her tracks – I would be as safe in Place d’Italie as I would have been in Vesoul, or Romorantin.