Scene 5

After the meal which is, as is often the case in Asian restaurants, gone by in a flash, Maille wandered through downtown Gwangju: shoe shops and fast food joints, telephone booths, cosmetic stores, bon-bon bazaars and Cappuccino meeting points, pulsating rhythms and the smell of pastries baked in fat – like everywhere in the world. Young families, girls with naked, terribly white limbs, skinny, shy boys greedily puffing cigarette smoke into their skinny bodies, almost as if they wanted it to pave a path for them in real life. Among them were a few weather-beaten faces, probably farmers, selling apples, boiled corn and candied octopus or piling paperboxes onto rusty handcarts.

There were no tourists around here. Maille noticed the looks he received with every step he took. They were neither hostile nor dangerous, just a quick once-over that could make one feel like a giant-eared weasel in a zoo – a being that God's mighty force had turned into a unique entity. Here, there were children who stared at him as though he had fallen out of a television – and girls who looked through their seductive eyelashes at the foreigner, giggling, elated by the tiny triumph of receiving a glance in return. Only the old people looked through him, perhaps on account of their Confucian reserve, or because they assumed that he had no interest in candied octopus.

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