Mr. Nobody, no longer young, develops an allergy to tuna;
he discovers this by accident
in an Italian restaurant in the historic city center.
His face turns red, his eyes go bloodshot
his table-mates push their chairs back, terrified,
say a doctor should be called immediately
but Mr. Nobody categorically refuses all aid
and staggers toward the men's room
where he plunges his head into the toilet bowl.
He has barely recovered from his first attack
when a second occurs,
even worse,
which keeps him flat on his back for several days.
Despite a meticulous reconstitution of his liquid and solid intake,
he arrives at no convincing explanation,
and Mr. Nobody wonders if it wasn't the environment which had provoked his illness this time.
He suspects the pigeons in the square where, when the weather permits,
he goes to sit and read the evening newspaper,
the neighbor's cat who mysteriously prefers his terrace crowded with worm-eaten boxes and rusty metal chairs
to her mistress's, planted with flowers
or it could be the dying cypress tree behind the Augustine monastery,
last vestige of a departed park.
Then, during a cruise on the Nile on the luxury yacht Ferdinand de Lesseps
where there were no animals, and not the smallest shrub,
and he ate only bread and rice due to a case of dysentery he'd contracted the very afternoon of his arrival
an attack twice as virulent as the one he'd suffered in the restaurant
made him suddenly understand the multifaceted nature of his ailment:
the sources of his pathology were numerous;
and the most surprising among them,
discovered empirically on the upper deck
on the occasion of an evening of Viennese waltzes
was women. Not a certain type of woman,
no, women in general.
One must add that men irritated him almost equally,
and there, too, of whatever sort.
Only children, babies especially, and the very old
- there are two or three hunched in their wheelchairs warming themselves in the desert sun -
seem to lack these elements that so violently reject
his body.

Translation: 2009, Marilyn Hacker