Whenever a man entered our street (actually a cul-de-sac that made an elbow in the middle), he would inevitably see, no matter what the hour of day, a woman's head disappearing behind a door. A stranger wouldn't pay much attention to this occurrence. At most he might experience that mild perturbation caused by the sight of a woman's face, half-concealed. He would continue on his way, without remarking that the door wasn't closed all the way, that a greedy stare pursued him, and that the head reemerged to note which house he stopped in front of. But an intimate of the place would know what was going on and with whom he was dealing. Amused or annoyed, sometimes even indignant, he would suffer the stare clinging to his back, marking the details of what he wore, gauging the weight of his shopping bag. Because the men of those days were terribly discrete, however, not one would turn around to confirm that he was being watched and confront the guilty party.
The wife of R. spent the whole day right behind her door and didn't retire into the house until night fell, just before her husband came home. She never went out and never received visitors. A woman of the threshold, she lived at the limit of the exterior world but harvested its every echo, by stealth. We knew nothing about her except that she was R.'s wife and that her curiosity knew no bounds. …
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