On The Presence of Absence

On November 17th, 1966, shortly before eight in the evening, a man left his favorite café on the Place Saint-Jean in Brussels, to go to a restaurant on the Grand-Place where it was his costume to take dinner. As the weather was mild, he left his coat at the café, intending to return for it later.

Arriving at the restaurant, he died of a heart attack. For several months his coat continued to hang from a peg at the Petit Rouge, as though to demonstrate that, just as a gesture may give an object special meaning, so the absence of a gesture, a gesture interrupted or uncompleted, may have the same result. Thirty years before, that man had written a story entitled Le Rite du billet de chemin de fer.