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And I discovered to my utmost dismay that at any moment and with no apparent cause, everything we believe to be stable can be upset, derailed, twisted from its course.
Propriety and honor were lovely concepts, but they didn’t give you food to eat, or pay your debts, or take away your cold on winter nights. Moral principles and irreproachable behavior were for another kind of creature, not for an unhappy pair with battered souls.
Normality wasn’t in the days I’d left behind me: it was only to be found in whatever fortune placed in my path each morning.
Morocco, in Spain, or in Portugal, running a dressmaker’s studio or in the service of British intelligence: wherever I chose to direct my course or lay down the foundations of my life, there it would be, my normality.
Normality was simply whatever my own will, my commitment, and my word accepted as such, which was why it would always be with me. To look for it somewhere else or to try to retrieve it from yesterday made no sense at all.
Our destinies might have gone in any direction, as we succeeded in remaining unnoticed, forever on the reverse side of history, crisscrossed by stitches, invisible lives from the time in between.
