Thème agrégation. Suggested translation, passage from Jauffret

 

The sun is not allowed in my flat. I open the shutters only at night, when it has long since set. Even deep in the heart of winter it is blinding, outlining people and things with razor-blade sharpness. I prefer the light of the moon when it is not yet full, that of lamps or nightlights.

 

I live off the income from the rents from this building, of which all six floors floors belong to me and where I live in only about a thousand square feet.

 

'I have only ever worked to increase my psychological well-being.'

 

I have been married thirty years. I refused to have children to avoid self-propagation and for fear of the noise. My wife likes light and bustle—I encourage her to go out, get

sunstroke in the Parc Monceau, listen to the motorbikes roar[ing] off when the lights go green, and walk all across the city as part of that crowd whose outlines are too sharply defined.

 

When she comes back, she describes the latest advertising posters to me, and tells me about a song she heard out of an open car window, a street being dug up by a pneumatic drill, a woman wearing nothing under her dress soaked by a July rainstorm, a stocky, yellowish, shortlegged

exotic dog walked on a lead by a behatted lady whose face-lift could not hide the fact that she had been in her sixties for ages.

 

'I also saw a man whose head looked like an asparagus tip.'

 

My wife makes an effective artificial limb, an articulated mechanical arm reaching out for the information I need so as to maintain daily contact with the outside world.

 

We do, however, dine out once a week in a brasserie. We always sit at the same table, tucked away in a far corner of the dining room, from where I can discreetly observe the patrons and dissect them as if I were a coroner who laid out living beings on his slab in exchange for financial gain or a box of Havana cigars.

 

My hearing is keen enough to make out what they are saying, and my brain  alert enough to keep up with several conversations going on at one time. I can slip into their lives as if into a glove; from under their  roars of laughter I can unearth the tragedies that have littered their existence, and from the way they raise a glass to their lips or cut up their meat, with a delicate white hand or a heavy hand covered in scars, I can detect the frustrations that will always prevent them from basking like me in perfect happiness.