Croupier

As a matter of fact, the mob was playing in exceedingly foul fashion. Indeed, I have an idea that sheer robbery was going on around that gaming-table. The croupiers who sat at the two ends of it had not only to watch the stakes, but also to calculate the game—an immense amount of work for two men! As for the crowd itself—well, it consisted mostly of Frenchmen.

Every time the little gate creaks—I'm in the shed with the tanks at the end of the garden—I wonder from which of my pasts the person is arriving, seeking me out even here: maybe it is only the past of yesterday and of this same suburb, the squat Arab garbage collector who in October begins his rounds for tips, house by house, with a Happy New Year card, because he says that his colleagues keep all the December tips for themselves and he never gets a penny; but it could also be the more distant pasts pursuing old Ruedi, finding the little gate in the Impasse: smugglers from Valais, mercenaries from Katanga, croupiers from the Veradero casino and the days of Fulgencio Batista.