Knowing How to Lose (lost in thought)

 

The important thing is always to speak as if everything had to be transcribed.
That way one can sense how unfree we really are.
J.M.G. Le Clézio, Le procès-verbal (1963)

 

A slight headache, burning eyes, tingling feet. 4:20 a.m., August 15, 2025.

I sit in my seat and glance to my left. Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel.

Then to my right. Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan.

Composed delegates, noisy delegates, bewildered delegates. To the left and to the right, four countries could not be more different. The Israeli deputies haven’t shown up. Sometimes, when my own seat was occupied by compatriots, I confess I sat there, in Tel Aviv’s chair, just to rest my laptop. Each time, the Iranian delegate would stare at me: I must admit I prefer being stared at by other countries.

How did I end up here? I ask myself, closing my eyes for a moment. But it’s 4:20 a.m. and that moment stretches out, spreads across my consciousness, and carries me elsewhere.

Images, sensations, smells flash before me.

First of all something seemingly intangible: heat. The flat heat of an endless August, an invisible ceiling pressing down on our heads. I walk along the tram line, weighed down by the melancholy of the recent sessions — South Korea cold and rainy, with its sea that felt somehow black, hostile, ready to swallow us all — that same melancholy seems to pollute this one too. Will this really be the last? I think, sheltering from the heat under a gigantic broken chair, in front of a gate and a pompous avenue. Could this be the tragic, real end of the plastic negotiations? A group shouts for Ocalan’s freedom, a man denounces the Afghan Taliban: desperate, useless cries, etched in memory like a stain on the back of the eye.

Like when you look at the sun for a second and its imprint, red as blood, lingers under your eyelids.

But even under the chair you suffocate, so I try to escape the heat by entering the tram, which departs immediately. Punctual to the second. Bright Horses by Nick Cave in the background as I watch empty August Geneva roll past, with its clockwork soul, measured and sadly precise.

If Rome was born from fratricide, what did Geneva spring from?

No one knows, but I’d say nothing nearly as striking. Suddenly the Saudi delegate sits beside me, thin white mustache-light glasses. Beneath his gray pinstripe suit he wears a t-shirt that says I’M CONFUSED. He smiles, but I see no teeth, and from his mouth a dark vortex opens. Terrified, I jump up, hit my head against an iron handle, but I don’t care and run to the back of the tram where a red curtain hangs. I push it aside and find myself inside the Palace.

The Palace seems to have a life of its own. It is gigantic, designed to make you lose yourself physically and mentally: the rooms out of order, corridors tangled, endless wasted space. Windows are either absent or enormous, pouring in kilos of sunlight. Outside, maybe three benches in the whole area, shade is rare, and if you try to move between buildings avoiding the labyrinth inside, you’re condemned to long journeys under the sun. But it’s not the logistics that unsettle. It’s the place itself: vast and oppressive. You can see lobbyists, Saudis, Russians, Iranians marching inexorably from afar down an enormous corridor, or bump into them suddenly in one of the narrow inner passages leading to the cafeteria or the European coordination room.

We are in Switzerland, which is, essentially, like being nowhere.

And this Palace makes you feel just that, out of time.

Back to my closed eyes. My head still throbs. I’m in the Palace, surrounded by delegates from every corner of the world. It’s time to negotiate. Men and women pretending not to understand each other, circling like electrons and leptons at CERN, colliding every now and then, right on schedule. Suddenly the session is interrupted, and clusters of particles from different Nations crowd together in one corner of the room (built, of course, with Qatari funds). Someone tries to snap a useless photo. The group disperses, many nodding without having caught a word, and meanwhile I think I glimpse a familiar red dress at the entrance, but I know it’s not hers. I go there anyway, pull aside the curtain, and I’m elsewhere.

I’m in the other wing of the Palace, the harder one to decipher, the more hidden side. I walk an immense, interminable, empty corridor. Now I understand when García Lorca wrote “I was alone as a tunnel.” Nothing but oppressive heat and solitude. Mediocre works of art on the walls. A tiny knight from Trinidad and Tobago fallen to the floor. Does dust even exist in Geneva?

Inside the hall you watch the incomprehensibility of communication: thanks, formulas, etiquette that say one thing but aim for another. Outside the hall, desert. 1980s relics scattered everywhere: rooms with wall phones, outdated signs, phone books. A souvenir shop where, at least, I found a postcard with a funny bear. This Palace is more than a palace, a resigned place that transmits resignation to those who walk it (or is it the opposite? Is distrust a fire and are we the wind?), an inhuman giant surrounded by suffering greenery, unaccustomed to this heat. A hybrid place in a hybrid country that decides everything collegially, in secret. The corridor seems endless. At the end a silhouette appears, then vanishes. Could it be her? No. Stop it. I try to open a window: blocked. I hear distant cries, in Spanish, pulling me back to reality.

I open my eyes again. The Cuban delegate is shouting at the Chair. Between his acting and our listening, trust never builds. The session closes abruptly, postponed to the plenary at 6 a.m. I have a bit of time to recover. I drag myself out with the other survivors: my friend Sébastien goes for coffee. I wave him off, say I’ll take a walk: I want to shed the images my mind just conjured. Down the stairs by the men’s bathroom. Or was it the women’s? I don’t know, I’m lost in thought. We always are lost in thought, in this Palace. What do you think about, Italian delegate? Article 11? A couple of faces you’ll never see again? The fishing gears, gone from the text? That moment you were happy last year? The European colleagues, the passion for a mission, the melancholy of this ending, the melancholy that belongs to every ending? All the different ways of working together, all the different languages? Sometimes you turn one of the thousand corners and find someone crying. Pressure, heat, intensity, this Palace that holds and compresses.

The Danes are giving everything they’ve got, you understand, but it’s also true there are Saudis everywhere, and the heat is unbearable. You approach and place a hand on their shoulder. This place is a kind of Overlook Hotel, materializing fears and weaknesses, you think as you drift back to reality. Where am I? How many floors have I gone down? I’m in an underground corridor. Concrete, a silent autoclave. On the floor, a sticker with a white cross on red. A yellow Ricola. Maybe the way to the cafeteria? I tell myself yes, maybe it is: I follow it because I want to get out, out of this uncertain place I’ve been stuck in for so long, I want to do whatever it takes to get out, but at the end of the corridor there’s no cafeteria!

Why am I so distracted? The Czech delegate told me Kafka was German, but I know he was born in Prague. Just wrote in German. Why did he say that? Maybe I’m the one mistaken? I wish I were Czech, to share something with Kafka. At the end of the corridor, on one side, a pile of library carts for hauling tomes. Never a rat in these basements. What kind of basements have no rats? To the right, a glass door. Maybe I can get out! No. Not a door. A giant painting of one. I see the faint halo of my silhouette, a pixelated version of a European delegate who’s lost his bearings. I sigh and turn the corner. No windows, but a door: a small office, some employee’s workplace. I shudder imagining what it must be like, coming here every day.

I can’t help but enter: no lights, but something filters in from cracks in the wall. The room is bare: a desk with a computer, a fan with blackened blades. A dead fly on the floor. A sink with a small mirror. Once a service bathroom, now a man with two Master’s degrees sits here reading reports and wondering what to do on Saturday night in Geneva. I open the tap. Nothing. What time is it? I still rub my hands over my face, as if to wash away everything. In the end, what can we be sure of? Everything reduces to perception. Is this room less real than my earlier hallucinations? Why?

I look into the opaque mirror again. Can you work three years for nothing? Maybe yes. And if so, was it still worth trying? Yes, I think so. I remember one afternoon when I went with my father to watch him play tennis. I was seven. It was Gargano peninsula, but it could have been the Katyn forest, Fuente Vaqueros, or the Ring of Kerry. It didn’t matter where: it was Europe, and thus, home. I loved the sound of the ball on clay. That day his opponent was much stronger. My father made him sweat, but in the end he lost. That was the order of things, it could happen and he knew it: I grieved at each point he lost, but then I saw him start again at every point, without frustration. Sometimes I handed him water, and he winked and smiled. Simply happy to play, and to have his son there with him. On the way back he drove fast in his sports car: thank God Mom wasn’t there! She would have been furious (though secretly delighted). He looked at me and said, “Did you see what a great match?” That man taught me well what it means to know how to lose. It’s one of the few important things to know.

The mirror distracts me with my own image, pulling me away from yet another thought spiral. Overlapping channels. I barely see my outline: dirty, maybe greasy, maybe burned with a lighter. (Can you burn a mirror?) I leave the saddest office in the world and try to focus. Where’s the way to the plenary? Where am I?

Ahead, another corridor, and at the end, a staircase. I climb, and climb, and climb, ever more exhausted, but I want to see dawn again, how long has it been since I’ve seen it, I want to find a window, yet the higher I climb the hotter it gets. Always this heat. This invisible force that oppresses us, then disappears, then returns in another form and sustains us. But will there remain, somewhere, a trace of these different kinds of heat? The melancholy that oppresses us, and the humanity of Europeans working together: will there remain a trace of both?

I keep climbing but find closed doors, another small construction site. I descend a few floors, needing another staircase, trip on a cable, curse. Then I hear something! A kind of distant murmur, but it’s there, and it wasn’t before. I tell myself again: I’m approaching something. I move like a blind man, following my hearing, and end up in a small meeting room. Inside, a wall phone, a phone book. You wouldn’t be surprised to find a newspaper from the 1980s. But you’re getting closer somehow, you know it, we Europeans are all getting closer, slowly.

I open a tiny door (have to crouch to pass through) and emerge into an elegant room. High ceilings, wooden furniture. Fine tables littered with crumbs and scraps of a recent meal. Single-use plastics, straws, bottles, chip bags. It must be the SIDS room, even here flooded with our plastic. The murmur grows. I remember the European room, all the traces of that good kind of heat. Digital scars, hallucinations, connections, boarding passes, late-night walks back to hotels together, chatting idly. What did the Saudi delegate mean? Why is the Brazilian always such a jerk? Or maybe we are the jerks? Or maybe both? We have no choice but to live trying to understand the mystery of those beside us. Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel. Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan.

I leave the room. How did I get here? Now I’m in a wide corridor, brighter, though still night. And there, I see a figure in the distance. Am I imagining it? Once, someone told me that if we reached an agreement in Geneva, she’d dance on the chair. I told her I’d wade into the fountains. It seems we’ll have to reschedule our celebrations. Seems long ago, their voice far away, as distant as Rome, that incredible theater of millions of extras welcoming everyone. That time you passed a small church and discovered inside the imprint of Christ’s feet*, then stepped out and saw the sun sinking on the Appia Antica, billions of dust particles wandering in backlight (going who knows where? And for what purpose?) and you stood there looking at the Mausoleum of Cecilia Metella, the great millennial stones, the eternal, unerasable silence stretching like a black hole, making you feel, for a moment, present, alive, eternal like this city that can’t be visited but just, somehow, lived.

The figure in the distance raises an arm. Smiles. Is it Sébastien? Or the Kuwaiti delegate? My vision is blurred, I feel as if I were in South Korea, or perhaps in Canada, what was the name of that spider sculpture in Ottawa, which I then found again, unmistakably the same, elsewhere in the world almost a year after? I don’t know, but the one ahead is Sébastien! Maybe something will remain, regardless of this Treaty. Maybe we just have to keep going and maybe an agreement will be found but, in any case, as I see him approach I ask myself again: Will something remain? Somewhere, of these young Europeans speaking together, will anything remain? Will there remain some trace of this good warmth?

Perhaps yes, among the hundreds of minutes. Among the reports. Among the silent agreements and the night walks. Among the group photos and cafeteria receipts. Among the badges and plug adapters, boarding passes and cold sandwiches. Among the hundreds of Italian restaurants they associate me with. Ah, God, the banana-split ice-cream. (Does being so inflexible about food make me a stereotypical Italian?) We will find, somewhere, in the intersections of others’ speeches, integral parts of ourselves, a trace of this warmth all around. The way that a Swedish has to be warm, the way that a Southern European can have. We will collect and take advantage from all of these different types of warmth. Something that touched so many continents without changing and that, now that the plenary ends and we return to float (again) between real and unreal in our capitals, with reimbursed taxis and trains, as always I no longer know if it ever truly happened.

Sébastien looks at me, curious.

“Where did you disappear to? The plenary is about to begin.

But wait…

what happened to your head?”

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*The church of Domine Quo Vadis, also known as Santa Maria in Palmis.