The movement of the girl's knuckles had become less delicate and, although the direction of her gaze had remained steady, her focus on me was now indistinct. She used her free hand to widen the opening in her fly, and shifted her feet, fractionally moving her legs further apart.
I took the first of my three remaining shots. In the corner of the frame, I caught the boyfriend at exactly the moment his eyes flicked in my direction.
The shutter reopened and the viewfinder cleared. The boy was looking at me with his eyebrows raised and one finger held up in the universal signal of pause. I don't know why, but the gesture made me hold my breath. A moment later, I heard the faint sound of an engine, accelerating. A car was leaving the pit-lane.
The boy's eyebrows raised higher, and his mouth spread into a grin. Turning back to the girl, he said something to her or whispered something to her, and she responded, in kind, by biting her lower lip.
First lap out, taking it slow on the cool tyres, it would take over a minute and a half for the car to reach us.
The girl's mouth opened wide and she gasped. Then her hips bucked forward once, in a prelude to her little death. A reflex action: all it took was a slight tightening of my grip on the camera, and I had accidentally taken the second of my three remaining photographs.
In France, they call it petit mort. Little death-everyone knows that. Eskimos have an infinite number of words for snow; if a butterfly flaps its wings then a hole appears in the ozone layer; when the French orgasm they think they're dying.
Only two racers have died at Monaco. In 1952, Luigi Fagioli entered the tunnel in his Mercedes, but he didn't come out the other side. Somewhere in the half-lit right-hand curve, he lost control. His tyres lost grip, he ran wide, and he smashed into a stone balustrade. A decade and a half later, Lorenzo Bandini rolled his ride as he tried to negotiate the chicane. The car landed upside down on the straw bales that used to act as track barriers, and caught fire. Bandini was trapped and died later from his burns.
The accident happened on the eighty-first lap of a hundred-lap race. The following year, the Monaco circuit was reduced to eighty laps-as if it was the extra lap that had killed Bandini. Maybe it was, because no one has been killed since.
As the car left the tunnel, halfway around the circuit, thirty or so seconds away from where I stood, there was a sudden increase in the volume of the engine noise. The girl's hips bucked again and the boy looked back at me, and mouthed the make of the car.
From close by, the car engines sound like someone channelling an electric drill from your gut, up your neck, into your mind. Take your earplugs out, and you'll lose balance. The noise will make you sway drunkenly on the heels of your feet and you'll reach out a hand to steady yourself.
Experts, tifosi, engineers and old hands-they can easily distinguish one car from another, just from the engine noise. But there is one engine that everybody knows. If you've heard it once, you will always recognise it if you hear it again. The engine noise is like a signature. I once heard an Italian journalist describe it as a machine gun firing through a vapour of blood.
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