In the subway, at night, while I was waiting for a train that, once I boarded it and it was moving, would stop at a station in the neighborhood where I live before continuing on toward other stations, in other neighborhoods, I saw, beneath a bench on which a man had already been lying when I arrived, so that I couldn't have said how long he'd been there, or whether he was asleep or only trying to sleep, a rat whose progression I'd been following with my gaze since it had appeared, half a minute earlier, near a bin that was positioned further along the platform and from which some refuse had fallen.