student, yet unlikely to ever move out of this room, I was acting out my own confinement, performing to perfection my Foucault mania, never once letting my attention stray from my starring role. She wasn’t expecting me to write back, she wasn’t writing to receive a response, she would write more than twenty letters without even being sure I was reading them, she’d talked about the indoor plants, and all those rooms that seemed to tense up as soon as you entered, as if they were angry at you, or else reacting to some age-old fear; she’d discussed the renovations and my father’s migraines, she could have easily found a thousand more things to talk about if she’d wanted to. Had it not crossed her mind to get in touch with my bes t friend, asking that old buddy to snoop around under a false pretext, asking him to take notes on everything he observed, analyze my most meaningless gesture, the way I walk, committing to memory everything I say, as a lab technician would, nothing would escape the notice of this aforementioned friend, he would provide a quasi-scientific description of my behavior, how I spent my time, information regarding my opinions, my intentions, a complete inventory of my ideas dealing with the notion of family, that’s what she was demanding, did I speak readily about my parents, he would record the frequency with which I used the words “mother,” “father,” “parents” in conversation, describing in detail the expression on my face, the tone of my voice when I mention my mother, etc. Was he still listening to music, or had he thrown out all his records? He must have accumulated mountains of notes in the time he’s been working on that dissertation of his, the title of which she’d heard once, a crazy title she’d quickly tried to forget, because it sounded so arrogant and unhinged. She used to imagine impressive piles of notes on his desk, she would also see editions of Foucault’s works in the tiny bedroom, the complete works of the philosopher of prisons, as well as commentaries upon these works, fat annotated books gnawing away at the cramped space of his small bedroom, a bedroom that must resemble a paper mill, a closet is what she would like to say (more so than a bedroom), that’s what he lives in, an enclosed space dedicated to Foucault, a sealed space where the Foucault mania had been allowed to flourish freely for years, spreading its wings above his thin face, he’d never been a pudgy child, but boy, after these past few years on the Foucault diet, morning, noon, and night, skipping meals, never going out, drastically cutting back all of his contact with the outside world, he’d had to have lost weight, to the point of being unrecognizable, looking himself like one of those AIDS patients floating in their baggy clothes, now he must resemble one of those prematurely aged intellectuals, dried-up by sleepless nights and an unhealthy diet, taking too many pills as had always been his habit, would he sometimes at least take a break to play records, was he still listening to the Goldberg Variations , the Glenn Gould version, as before, perhaps he’d gotten rid of everything, his books, his clothes, his grandfather’s watch, his electric razor, maybe he’d taken down or shattered the mirrors, he’d maybe even thrown his computer out the window, but he’d likely kept the disc of the Goldberg Variations , yes he’d gotten rid of everything except the Goldberg Variations , she was remembering that his first impulse upon arriving in Sables (when he used to take advantage of our absence to hang out in the small apartment in Sables and catch up on his studies) was always to put on the Bach disc, before even turning on the heat and opening the shutters, he’d one day confided this detail to her about his time spent in that one-bedroom apartment in Sables, she’d never really known what he was up to when he used to spend weeks at a time there, the only thing she was sure of was that
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