I am some years younger. Twenty-something. I am sitting at home on my couch. But I am not alone. K. is sitting beside me. She is twenty-something. She does not seem to be nervous. She does the talking. It is late. I know I must make some move. My stomach has turned into a dense, painful network of nerves.

Then I remember the scene: Play it Again, Sam. Woody is sitting beside Diana. Humphrey Bogart, coming straight from a detective movie, appears over Woody's shoulder. Diana does not see him of course. Bogart is here to help out Woody. He whispers to Woody an unlikely line:

“I have met a lot of dames, but you are really something special.”

Bogart adds: “Go on. Tell her”

It works. Diana blushes: “Really?”

Now I can watch a scene on Youtube on my phone. It may be dubbed in Spanish, or Russian, I don't care, I know the words by heart. I watch a few minutes of the film, make the character familiar again, and try and figure out the funny line that he would tell, which would destroy the dark threats that are gathering around me.

The thing is: it works and it does not work. That is why the scene with Humphrey Bogart is funny. Woody is not Bogart. The words, the gestures, the pose of the secretive bartender of Casablanca are completely out of character when applied to Woody. So we laugh. If it really worked, if Woody could be Bogart, then it would just be a detective movie from the Fifties.

The same goes with me and Woody. If I could find the kind of jokes that he makes, then it would work, all my anxieties would crumble down, but it would not be real life. I would be a character in a comedy from some years ago.

That is why, when I was traveling, I also took a film with Cary Grant. In case the situation got more complicated. Cary Grant has a completely different way of coping with the threats that life confronts him with. Cary Grant, in the Hitchcock movies for instance, is always at ease. Not just when a plane attacks him in a cornfield. Or when he gets arrested at an auction trying to escape Russian spies. It works with little things, when, in Suspicion, the employee on the train notices he has a third-class ticket while sitting in first class. Cary Grant always finds a way to get out of the situation elegantly, without pain, nor even an awkward gesture. It is like some dance. My theory is that it is a question of skin. Cary Grant's skin is particularly thick. In French, we say that a tough character has a crocodile skin (on which, as is well known, bullets bounce back). But the skin of the crocodile doesn't fit the beast like Cary Grant's suits. The crocodile's skin is made of solid scales. It would not fall right. It is rough, and dirty, and wet. Cary's skin is different but it is so thick that nothing touches him, nothing threatens him. He is hiding behind, far back. That is why no one can figure him out. In Suspicion, his wife does not even know whether he trying to kill her or if he is just absentminded.

These role models are like Platonic ideas. They add up and combine, in different ways: Woody(Humphrey) + Cary Grant.

Maybe I should try and find the perfect formula that would solve all the cases that life offers. But the point is: Woody's solution, the cosmical joke, is a beautiful solution, like Baudelaire's poem, but it is not for me. Simply because, like TS92A, I can't make jokes. No more than I can write poetry in Alexandrines.