By Roger Lewinter, from Story of Love in Solitude, a collection of short fiction that was published this month by New Directions. Lewinter, who lives in Switzerland, is the author of numerous literary and scholarly works. Translated from the French by Rachel Careau.

One evening in August, as I was going to bed in the northeast room, which I had decided finally to use — the connecting wall of the other apartment had been broken through two years earlier — , I noticed on the transverse edge of the alcove, obliquely above my head, a spider, black, large, and since I…