I never imagined that my manservant might like me. In fact, I thought, upon making him my manservant, that he would hate me. He was a lazy young man who, by chance, had snagged the leading role in a film and whom no director had contacted since. How unwise it proved for me to decide, that afternoon, to go see a movie at the theater.First I’d thought about hiring, since neither my secretary nor my steward could take on such a role, and since I was farting more and more violently at those high-society soirées that I barely ever went to anymore, some elegant young man who would follow my footsteps in public, but act as if he didn’t know me, like a magician’s assistant, doing his best to blush, to cough, to discreetly apologize instead of me every time I let out one of those machine-gun gusts.I’d imagined that whenever I brought this young man to a restaurant to keep me company after his workday, that by silent agreement we’d have decided that he would, without fail, insist to the maître d’ that he wasn’t the least bit hungry, and that with the tip of my lips, as if I didn’t want to burn myself, I would nibble at the glaze on an especially heavy dish, which I would then slide across the table toward my underling, who would wolf it down greedily. Unfortunately, nothing went as expected.And then I’d been keen on some Pakistani steward who wouldn’t speak French, and therefore wouldn’t understand a thing when I was on the phone. I’d been set on keeping what remained of my personal life discreet; the help is so quick to gossip with neighbors and storekeepers. But I don’t have many people to talk to anymore, much less anyone to keep from understanding me. All my real friends have died, the last one less than two weeks ago.The narrators of Russian novels have manservants who sleep like dogs in drafty antechambers, sharpen their foils for dueling, and wear their old overcoats. They’re failures, often counterparts to their masters, and could have stood in their stead had some accident of birth or some setback, some lady, sheer fate, not relegated them to this rank. They’ve been worn down into servility, all their being exudes something rancid. They work without any love, any attentiveness, not even waxing their masters’ boots can spark their enthusiasm.My own manservant was a killer lying in wait; that was why I’d chosen him. I was a man in decline. I needed a true bodyguard, someone who would pull me upright when I fell, get me dressed, massage my legs when they were so swollen that I couldn’t feel them anymore.My manservant was the polar opposite of the usual Russian manservant: he carried out the least obligation with zeal, as if this act, in this case getting me out of my bathtub, was of the most vital interest to him. Maybe it was the fervor of hatred that drove him; there was no way for me to know at that point.