The Zahir
A Novel of Obsession
Paulo
Coelho

Author of the alchemist

Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa

Dedication

In the car, I mentioned that I had finished the first draft of my book. Later, as we set out together to climb a mountain in the Pyrenees which we both consider to be sacred and where we have already shared some extraordinary moments, I asked if she wanted to know the main theme of the book or its title; she would love to, she said, but, out of respect for my work, she had, until then, asked nothing, she had simply felt glad – very glad.

So I told her the title and the main theme. We continued walking in silence and, on the way back, we heard a noise; the wind was getting up, passing above the leafless trees and coming down towards us, causing the mountain once more to reveal its magic and its power.

Suddenly the snow began to fall. I stopped and stood contemplating that moment: the snowflakes falling, the grey sky, the forest, the woman by my side. The woman who has always been by my side.

I felt like telling her then, but decided to let her find out when she read these pages for the first time. This book is dedicated to you, Christina, my wife.

The author

O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who turn to you.

Amen

What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?

Luke 15:4

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Ithaca

Prologues

I am a Free Man

Her name is Esther…

I immediately come under suspicion and am…

I find her comment absurd…

‘What is this Favour Bank’…

The publisher places a lot of deposits…

‘What are you saying’…

Today…

Han’s question

In Buenos Aires…

The following year was a Holy Year…

A Time to Rend and a Time…

‘When people praise us…

Looking around at the crowd gathered…

“‘Don’t worry”…

The following morning…

People are waiting patiently for someone to…

‘Their eyes really are different…

I had been a regular customer at…

There are two kinds of world:…

‘I assume that…

The owner of the Armenian restaurant had…

‘When I was fifteen…

I had arranged to meet the American…

When I regained consciousness…

Two days later…

Ariadne’s thread

I am born in a small village…

‘Right…

Zagreb, Croatia. 6.30 a.m.

I have to write an important article…

‘Last week…

I hear the applause…

I arrived in a gloomy part of…

‘You seem strange’…

Ah…

Later that afternoon…

It takes twenty minutes for the taxi…

‘How was it on your table’…

The Return to Ithaca

‘We’ll sleep here tonight and…

The following day…

‘What’s happening? Isn’t it light yet?’…

The furious wind is abating…

I am filthy…

Although I know that I may have…

Author’s Note

More about Paulo Coelho and The Zahir

A Conversation with Paulo Coelho

Author Biography: Paulo Coelho

Like the Flowing River

Also by Paulo Coelho

Copyright

About the Publisher

Ithaca

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca, pray that the road is long, full of adventure, full of knowledge. The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops, the angry Poseidon – do not fear them: You will never find such as these on your path if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine emotion touches your spirit and your body. The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops, the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter, if you do not carry them within your soul, if your heart does not set them up before you.

Pray that the road is long. That the summer mornings are many, when, with such pleasure, with such joy you will enter ports seen for the first time; stop at Phoenician markets, and purchase fine merchandise, mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony, and sensual perfumes of all kinds, as many sensual perfumes as you can; visit many Egyptian cities, to learn and learn from scholars.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind. To arrive there is your ultimate goal. But do not hurry the voyage at all. It is better to let it last for many years; and to anchor at the island when you are old, rich with all you have gained on the way, not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches. Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage. Without her you would never have set out on the road. She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you. Wise as you have become, with so much experience, you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933), translated by Rae Dalven

Prologues

According to the writer Jorge Luis Borges, the idea of the Zahir comes from Islamic tradition and is thought to have arisen at some point in the eighteenth century. Zahir, in Arabic, means visible, present, incapable of going unnoticed. It is someone or something which, once we have come into contact with them or it, gradually occupies our every thought, until we can think of nothing else. This can be considered either a state of holiness or of madness.

Faubourg Saint-Pères, Encyclopaedia of the Fantastic (1953)

I am a Free Man

Her name is Esther; she is a war correspondent who has just returned from Iraq because of the imminent invasion of that country; she is thirty years old, married, without children. He is an unidentified male, between twenty-three and twenty-five years old, with dark, Mongolian features. The two were last seen in a café in Rue Faubourg St-Honoré.

The police were told that they had met before, although no one knew how often: Esther had always said that the man – who concealed his true identity behind the name Mikhail – was someone very important, although she had never explained whether he was important for her career as a journalist or for her as a woman.

The police began a formal investigation. Various theories were put forward – kidnapping, blackmail, a kidnapping that had ended in murder – none of which were beyond the bounds of possibility given that, in her search for information, her work brought her into frequent contact with people who had links with terrorist cells. They discovered that, in the weeks prior to her disappearance, regular sums of money had been withdrawn from her bank account: those in charge of the investigation felt that these could have been payments made for information. She had taken no change of clothes with her, but, oddly enough, her passport was nowhere to be found.

He is a stranger, very young, with no police record, with no clue as to his identity.

She is Esther, thirty years old, the winner of two international prizes for journalism, and married.

My wife.

I immediately come under suspicion and am detained because I refuse to say where I was on the day she disappeared. However, a prison officer has just opened the door of my cell, saying that I’m a free man.

And why am I a free man? Because nowadays, everyone knows everything about everyone; you just have to ask and the information is there: where you’ve used your credit card, where you spend your time, who you’ve slept with. In my case, it was even easier: a woman, another journalist, a friend of my wife, and divorced – which is why she doesn’t mind revealing that she slept with me – came forward as a witness in my favour when she heard that I had been detained. She provided concrete proof that I was with her on the day and the night of Esther’s disappearance.

I talk to the chief inspector, who returns my belongings and offers his apologies, adding that my rapid detention was entirely within the law, and that I have no grounds on which to accuse or sue the State. I say that I haven’t the slightest intention of doing either of those things, that I am perfectly aware that we are all under constant suspicion and under twenty-four-hour surveillance, even when we have committed no crime.

‘You’re free to go,’ he says, echoing the words of the prison officer.

I ask: Isn’t it possible that something really has happened to my wife? She had said to me once that – understandably given her vast network of contacts in the terrorist underworld – she occasionally got the feeling she was being followed.

The inspector changes the subject. I insist, but he says nothing.

I ask if she would be able to travel on her passport, and he says, of course, since she has committed no crime. Why shouldn’t she leave and enter the country freely?

‘So she may no longer be in France?’

‘Do you think she left you because of that woman you’ve been sleeping with?’

That’s none of your business, I reply. The inspector pauses for a second and grows serious; he says that I was arrested as part of routine procedure, but that he is nevertheless very sorry about my wife’s disappearance. He is married himself and although he doesn’t like my books (So he isn’t as ignorant as he looks! He knows who I am!), he can put himself in my shoes and imagine what I must be going through.

I ask him what I should do next. He gives me his card and asks me to get in touch if I hear anything. I’ve watched this scene in dozens of films, and I’m not convinced; inspectors always know more than they say they do.

He asks me if I have ever met the person who was with Esther the last time she was seen alive. I say that I knew his code name, but didn’t know him personally.

He asks if we have any domestic problems. I say that we’ve been together for ten years and have the same problems most married couples have – nothing more.

He asks, delicately, if we have discussed divorce recently, or if my wife was considering leaving me. I tell him we have never even considered the possibility, and say again that ‘like all couples’ we have our occasional disagreements.

Frequent or only occasional?

Occasional, I say.

He asks still more delicately if she suspected that I was having an affair with her friend. I tell him that it was the first – and last – time that her friend and I had slept together. It wasn’t an affair; it came about simply because we had nothing else to do. It had been a bit of a dull day, neither of us had any pressing engagements after lunch, and the game of seduction always adds a little zest to life, which is why we ended up in bed together.

‘You go to bed with someone just because it’s a bit of a dull day?’

I consider telling him that such matters hardly form part of his investigations, but I need his help, or might need it later on – there is, after all, that invisible institution called the Favour Bank, which I have always found so very useful.

‘Sometimes, yes. There’s nothing else very interesting to do, the woman is looking for excitement, I’m looking for adventure, and that’s that. The next day, you both pretend that nothing happened, and life goes on.’

He thanks me, holds out his hand and says that in his world, things aren’t quite like that. Naturally, boredom and tedium exist, as does the desire to go to bed with someone, but everything is much more controlled, and no one ever acts on their thoughts or desires.

‘Perhaps artists have more freedom,’ he remarks.

I say that I’m familiar with his world, but have no wish to enter into a comparison between our different views of society and people. I remain silent, awaiting his next move.

‘Speaking of freedom,’ he says, slightly disappointed at this writer’s refusal to enter into a debate with a police officer, ‘you’re free to go. Now that I’ve met you, I’ll read your books. I know I said I didn’t like them, but the fact is I’ve never actually read one.’

This is not the first or the last time that I will hear these words. At least this whole episode has gained me another reader. I shake his hand and leave.

I’m free. I’m out of prison, my wife has disappeared in mysterious circumstances, I have no fixed timetable for work, I have no problem meeting new people, I’m rich, famous, and if Esther really has left me, I’ll soon find someone to replace her. I’m free, independent.

But what is freedom?

I’ve spent a large part of my life enslaved to one thing or another, so I should know the meaning of the word. Ever since I was a child, I have fought to make freedom my most precious commodity. I fought with my parents, who wanted me to be an engineer, not a writer. I fought with the other boys at school, who immediately homed in on me as the butt of their cruel jokes, and only after much blood had flowed from my nose and from theirs, only after many afternoons when I had to hide my scars from my mother – because it was up to me not her to solve my problems – did I manage to show them that I could take a thrashing without bursting into tears. I fought to get a job to support myself, and went to work as a delivery man for a hardware store, so as to be free from that old line in family blackmail: ‘We’ll give you money, but you’ll have to do this, this and this.’

I fought – although without success – for the girl I was in love with when I was an adolescent, and who loved me too; she left me in the end because her parents convinced her that I had no future.

I fought against the hostile world of journalism – my next job – where my first boss kept me hanging around for three whole hours and only deigned to take any notice of me when I started tearing up the book he was reading: he looked at me in surprise and saw that here was someone capable of persevering and confronting the enemy, essential qualities for a good reporter. I fought for the socialist ideal, went to prison, came out and went on fighting, feeling like a working-class hero – until, that is, I heard the Beatles and decided that rock music was much more fun than Marx. I fought for the love of my first, second, and third wives. I fought to find the courage to leave my first, second, and third wives, because the love I felt for them hadn’t lasted, and I needed to move on, until I found the person who had been put in this world to find me – and she was none of those three.

I fought for the courage to leave my job on the newspaper and launch myself into the adventure of writing a book, knowing full well that no one in my country could make a living as a writer. I gave up after a year, after writing more than a thousand pages – pages of such genius that even I couldn’t understand them.

While I was fighting, I heard other people speaking in the name of freedom, and the more they defended this unique right, the more enslaved they seemed to be to their parents’ wishes, to a marriage in which they had promised to stay with the other person ‘for the rest of their lives’, to the bathroom scales, to their diet, to half-finished projects, to lovers to whom they were incapable of saying ‘No’ or ‘It’s over’, to weekends when they were obliged to have lunch with people they didn’t even like. Slaves to luxury, to the appearance of luxury, to the appearance of the appearance of luxury. Slaves to a life they had not chosen, but which they had decided to live because someone had managed to convince them that it was all for the best. And so their identical days and nights passed, days and nights in which adventure was just a word in a book or an image on the television that was always on, and whenever a door opened, they would say:

‘I’m not interested. I’m not in the mood.’

How could they possibly know if they were in the mood or not if they had never tried? But there was no point in asking; the truth was they were afraid of any change that would upset the world they had grown used to.

The inspector says I’m free. I’m free now and I was free in prison too, because freedom continues to be the thing I prize most in the world. Of course, this has led me to drink wines I did not like, to do things I should not have done and which I will not do again; it has left scars on my body and on my soul, it has meant hurting certain people, although I have since asked their forgiveness, when I realised that I could do absolutely anything except force another person to follow me in my madness, in my lust for life. I don’t regret the painful times; I bear my scars as if they were medals. I know that freedom has a high price, as high as that of slavery; the only difference is that you pay with pleasure and a smile, even when that smile is dimmed by tears.

I leave the police station, and it’s a beautiful day outside, a sunny Sunday that does not reflect my state of mind at all. My lawyer is waiting for me with a few consoling words and a bunch of flowers. He says that he’s phoned round all the hospitals and morgues (the kind of thing you do when someone fails to return home), but has not as yet found Esther. He says that he managed to prevent journalists from finding out where I was being held. He says he needs to talk to me in order to draw up a legal strategy that will help me defend myself against any future accusation. I thank him for all his trouble; I know he’s not really interested in drawing up a legal strategy, he just doesn’t want to leave me alone, because he’s not sure how I’ll react (Will I get drunk and be arrested again? Will I cause a scandal? Will I try to kill myself?). I tell him I have some important business to sort out and that we both know perfectly well that I have no problem with the law. He insists, but I give him no choice – after all, I’m a free man.

Freedom. The freedom to be wretchedly alone.

I take a taxi to the centre of Paris and ask to be dropped near the Arc de Triomphe. I set off down the Champs-Elysées towards the Hotel Bristol, where Esther and I always used to meet for hot chocolate whenever one of us came back from some trip abroad. It was our coming-home ritual, a plunge back into the love that bound us together, even though life kept sending us off along ever more diverging paths.

I keep walking. People smile, children are pleased to have been given these few hours of spring in the middle of winter, the traffic flows freely, everything seems to be in order – except that none of them knows that I have just lost my wife; they don’t even pretend not to know, they don’t even care. Don’t they realise the pain I’m in? They should all be feeling sad, sympathetic, supportive of a man whose soul is losing love as if it were losing blood; but they continue laughing, immersed in their miserable little lives that only happen at weekends.

What a ridiculous thought! Many of the people I pass must also have their souls in tatters, and I have no idea how or why they are suffering.

I go into a bar and buy some cigarettes; the person answers me in English. I go into a chemist’s to buy a mint I particularly like, and the assistant speaks to me in English (both times I asked for the products in French). Before I reach the hotel, I am stopped by two boys just arrived from Toulouse who are looking for a particular shop; they have asked several other people, but no one understands what they say. What’s going on? Have they changed languages on the Champs-Elysées in the twenty-four hours since I was arrested?

Tourism and money can perform miracles, but how come I haven’t noticed this before? It has obviously been a long time since Esther and I met here to drink hot chocolate, even though we have each been away and come back several times during that period. There is always something more important. There is always some unpostponable appointment. Yes, my love, we’ll have that hot chocolate next time, come back soon; I’ve got a really important interview today and won’t be able to pick you up at the airport, take a taxi; my mobile’s on, call me if there’s anything urgent; otherwise, I’ll see you tonight.

My mobile! I take it out of my pocket and immediately turn it on; it rings several times, and each time my heart turns over. On the tiny screen I see the names of the people who have been trying to get in touch with me, but reply to none of them. I hope for someone ‘unidentified’ to appear, because that would be her, since only about twenty people know my number and have sworn not to pass it on. It doesn’t appear, only the numbers of friends or trusted colleagues. They must be eager to know what happened, they want to help (but how?), to ask if I need anything.

The telephone keeps ringing. Should I answer it? Should I arrange to meet up with some of these people?

I decide to remain alone until I’ve managed to work out what is going on.

I reach the Hotel Bristol, which Esther always described as one of the few hotels in Paris where customers are treated like guests rather than homeless people in search of shelter. I am greeted as if I were a friend of the family; I choose a table next to an exquisite clock; I listen to the piano and look out at the garden.

I need to be practical, to study the options; after all, life goes on. I am not the first nor will I be the last man whose wife has left him, but did it have to happen on a sunny day, with everyone in the street smiling and children singing, with the first signs of spring just beginning to show, the sun shining, and drivers stopping at pedestrian crossings?

I pick up a napkin. I’m going to get these ideas out of my head and put them down on paper. Let’s leave sentiment to one side and see what I should do:

Consider the possibility that she really has been kidnapped and that her life is in danger at this very moment, and that I, as her husband and constant companion, must, therefore, move heaven and earth to find her.

Response to this possibility: she took her passport with her. The police don’t know this, but she also took several other personal items with her, amongst them a wallet containing images of various patron saints which she always carries with her whenever she goes abroad. She also withdrew money from her bank.

Conclusion: she was clearly preparing to leave.

Consider the possibility that she believed a promise someone gave her and it turned out to be a trap.

Response: she had often put herself in dangerous situations before; it was part of her job, but she always warned me when she did so, because I was the only person she could trust completely. She would tell me where she was going to be, who she was going to see (although, so as not to put me at risk, she usually used the person’s nom de guerre), and what I should do if she did not return by a certain time.

Conclusion: she was not planning a meeting with one of her informants.

Consider the possibility that she has met another man.

Response: there is no response. Of all the hypotheses, this is the only one that makes any sense. And yet I can’t accept it, I can’t accept that she would leave like that, without giving me a reason. Both Esther and I have always prided ourselves on confronting all life’s difficulties together. We suffered, but we never lied to each other, although it was part of the rules of the game not to mention any extramarital affairs. I was aware that she had changed a lot since meeting this fellow Mikhail, but did that justify ending a marriage that has lasted ten years?

Even if she had slept with him and fallen in love, wouldn’t she weigh in the balance all the time that we had spent together and everything we had conquered before setting off on an adventure from which there was no turning back? She was free to travel whenever she wanted to, she lived surrounded by men, soldiers who hadn’t seen a woman in ages, but I never asked any questions, and she never told me anything. We were both free, and we were proud of that.

But Esther had disappeared and left clues that were visible only to me, as if it were a secret message: I’m leaving.

Why?

Is that question worth answering?

No. Because hidden in the answer is my own inability to keep the woman I love by my side. Is it worth finding her and persuading her to come back? Begging and imploring her to give our marriage another chance?

That seems ridiculous: it would be better merely to suffer as I had in the past, when other people I loved had left me. It would be better just to lick my wounds, as I had also done in the past. For a while, I’ll think obsessively about her, I’ll become embittered, I’ll bore my friends because all I ever talk about is my wife leaving me. I’ll try to justify what happened, spend days and nights reviewing every moment spent by her side, I’ll conclude that she was too hard on me, even though I always tried to do my best. I’ll find other women. When I walk down the street, I’ll keep seeing women who could be her. I’ll suffer day and night, night and day. This could take weeks, months, possibly a year or more.

Until one morning, I’ll wake up and find I’m thinking about something else, and then I’ll know the worst is over. My heart might be bruised, but it will recover, and become capable of seeing the beauty of life once more. It’s happened before, it will happen again, I’m sure. When someone leaves, it’s because someone else is about to arrive – I’ll find love again.

For a moment, I savour the idea of my new state: single and a millionaire. I can go out in broad daylight with whomever I want. I can behave at parties in a way I haven’t behaved in years. The news will travel fast, and soon all kinds of women, the young and the not so young, the rich and the not as rich as they would like to be, the intelligent and those trained to say only what they think I would like to hear, will all come knocking at my door.

I want to believe that it is wonderful to be free. Free again. Ready to find my one true love, who is waiting for me and who will never allow me to experience such humiliation again.

I finish my hot chocolate and look at the clock; I know it is still too soon for me to be able to enjoy the agreeable feeling that I am once more part of humanity. For a few moments, I imagine that Esther is about to come in through that door, walk across the beautiful Persian carpets, sit down beside me and say nothing, just smoke a cigarette, look out at the courtyard garden and hold my hand. Half an hour passes, and for half an hour I believe in the story I have just created, until I realise that it is pure fantasy.

I decide not to go home. I go over to reception, ask for a room, a toothbrush and some deodorant. The hotel is full, but the manager fixes things for me: I end up with a lovely suite looking out at the Eiffel Tower, a terrace, the rooftops of Paris, the lights coming on one by one, the families getting together to have Sunday supper. And the feeling I had in the Champs-Elysées returns: the more beautiful everything is around me, the more wretched I feel.

No television. No supper. I sit on the terrace and look back over my life, a young man who dreamed of becoming a famous writer, and who suddenly saw that the reality was completely different – he writes in a language almost no one reads, in a country which is said to have almost no reading public. His family forces him to go to university (any university will do, my boy, just as long as you get a degree, otherwise you’ll never be anyone). He rebels, travels the world during the hippie era, meets a singer, writes a few song lyrics, and is suddenly earning more money than his sister, who listened to what her parents said and decided to become a chemical engineer…

I write more songs, the singer goes from strength to strength; I buy a few apartments and fall out with the singer, but still have enough capital not to have to work for the next few years. I get married for the first time to an older woman, I learn a lot – how to make love, how to drive, how to speak English, how to lie in bed until late – but we split up because she considers me to be ‘emotionally immature, and too ready to chase after any girl with big enough breasts’. I get married for a second and a third time to women I think will give me emotional stability: I get what I want, but discover that the stability I wanted is inseparable from a deep sense of tedium.

Two more divorces. Free again, but it’s just a feeling; freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose – and commit myself to – what is best for me.

I continue my search for love, I continue writing songs. When people ask me what I do, I say I’m a writer. When they say they only know my song lyrics, I say that’s just part of my work. When they apologise and say they’ve never read any of my books, I explain that I’m working on a project – which is a lie. The truth is that I have money, I have contacts, but what I don’t have is the courage to write a book. My dream is now realisable, but if I try and fail, I don’t know what the rest of my life will be like; that’s why it’s better to live cherishing a dream than face the possibility that it might all come to nothing.

One day, a journalist comes to interview me. She wants to know what it’s like to have my work known all over the country, but to be entirely unknown myself, since normally it’s only the singer who appears in the media. She’s pretty, intelligent, quiet. We meet again at a party, where there’s no pressure of work, and I manage to get her into bed that same night. I fall in love, but she’s not remotely interested. When I phone, she always says she’s busy. The more she rejects me, the more interested I become, until, at last, I manage to persuade her to spend a weekend at my house in the country (I may have been the black sheep of the family, but sometimes rebellion pays off – I was the only one of my friends at that stage in our lives to have bought a house in the country).

We spend three days alone, contemplating the sea. I cook for her, and she tells me stories about her work and ends up falling in love with me. We come back to the city, she starts sleeping at my apartment on a regular basis. One morning, she leaves earlier than usual and returns with her typewriter; from then on, without anything being said, my home becomes her home too.

The same conflicts I had with my previous wives begin to surface: women are always looking for stability and fidelity, while I’m looking for adventure and the unknown. This time, though, the relationship lasts longer. Nevertheless, two years on, I decide it’s time for Esther to take her typewriter back to her own apartment, along with everything else she brought with her.

‘It’s not going to work.’

‘But you love me and I love you, isn’t that right?’

‘I don’t know. If you’re asking me if I like your company, the answer is yes. If, on the other hand, you’re asking me if I could live without you, the answer is also yes.’

‘I’m glad I wasn’t born a man. I’m very content with my female condition. All you expect of us women is that we can cook well. Men on the other hand are expected to be able to do everything – they’ve got to be able to keep a home afloat, make love, take care of the children, bring in the money and be successful.’

‘That’s not it either: I’m very happy with myself. I enjoy your company, but I just don’t think it’s going to work.’

‘You enjoy my company, but hate being by yourself. You’re always looking for adventure in order to forget more important things. You always want to feel the adrenaline flowing in your veins and you forget that the only thing that should be flowing through them is blood.’

‘I’m not running away from important things. Give me an example of something important.’

‘Writing a book.’

‘I can do that any time.’

‘Go on then, do it. Then, if you like, we can go our separate ways.’

I find her comment absurd; I can write a book whenever I want to; I know publishers, journalists, all of whom owe me favours. Esther is just a woman who’s afraid of losing me, she’s inventing things. I tell her it’s over, our relationship is at an end, it isn’t a matter of what she thinks would make me happy, it’s about love.

What is love? she asks. I spend half an hour explaining and realise that I can’t come up with a good definition.

She says that, since I don’t know how to define love, I should try and write a book.

I say that the two things are completely unrelated. I’m going to leave the apartment that very day; she can stay there for as long as she likes. I’ll go and stay in a hotel until she has found somewhere else to live. She says that’s fine by her, I can leave now, the apartment will be free within the month – she’ll start looking for a new place tomorrow. I pack my bags, and she goes and reads a book. I say it’s getting late, I’ll leave tomorrow. She says I should leave at once because, tomorrow, I won’t feel as strong or as determined. I ask her if she’s trying to get rid of me. She laughs and says I was the one who wanted to end the relationship. We go to bed, and the following day, the desire to leave is not as urgent, and I decide I need to think things through. Esther, however, says the matter isn’t over yet: this scenario will simply keep recurring as long as I refuse to risk everything for what I believe to be my real reason for living; in the end, she’ll become unhappy and will leave me. Except that, if she left, she would do so immediately and burn any bridges that would allow her to come back. I ask her what she means. She’d get another boyfriend, she says, fall in love.

She goes off to her work at the newspaper, and I decide to take a day’s leave (apart from writing lyrics, I’m also working for a recording company). I sit down at the typewriter. I get up again, read the papers, reply to some urgent letters and, when I’ve done that, start replying to non-urgent letters. I make a list of things I need to do, I listen to music, I take a walk around the block, chat to the baker, come home, and suddenly the whole day has gone and I still haven’t managed to type a single sentence. I decide that I hate Esther, that she’s forcing me to do things I don’t want to do.

When she gets home, she doesn’t ask me anything, but I admit that I haven’t managed to do any writing. She says that I have the same look in my eye as I did yesterday.

The following day I go to work, but that evening I again go over to the desk on which the typewriter is sitting. I read, watch television, listen to music, go back to the machine, and so two months pass, with me accumulating pages and more pages of ‘first sentences’, but never managing to finish a paragraph.

I come up with every possible excuse – no one reads in this country, I haven’t worked out a plot, or I’ve got a fantastic plot, but I’m still looking for the right way to develop it. Besides, I’m really busy writing an article or a song lyric. Another two months pass, and one day, she comes home bearing a plane ticket.

‘Enough,’ she says. ‘Stop pretending that you’re busy, that you’re weighed down by responsibilities, that the world needs you to do what you’re doing, and just go travelling for a while.’ I can always become the editor of the newspaper where I publish a few articles, I can always become the president of the recording company for whom I write lyrics, and where I work simply because they don’t want me to write lyrics for their competitors. I can always come back to do what I’m doing now, but my dream can’t wait. Either I accept it or I forget it.

Where is the ticket for?

Spain.

I’m shocked. Air tickets are expensive; besides, I can’t go away now, I’ve got a career ahead of me, and I need to look after it. I’ll lose out on a lot of potential music partnerships; the problem isn’t me, it’s our marriage. If I really wanted to write a book, no one would be able to stop me.

‘You can, you want to, but you don’t,’ she says. ‘Your problem isn’t me, but you, so it would be best if you spent some time alone.’

She shows me a map. I must go to Madrid, where I’ll catch a bus up to the Pyrenees, on the border with France. That’s where a medieval pilgrimage route begins: the road to Santiago. I have to walk the whole way. She’ll be waiting for me at the other end and then she’ll accept anything I say: that I don’t love her any more, that I still haven’t lived enough to create a literary work, that I don’t even want to think about being a writer, that it was nothing but an adolescent dream.

This is madness! The woman I’ve been living with for two long years – a real eternity in relationship terms – is making decisions about my life, forcing me to give up my work and expecting me to walk across an entire country! It’s so crazy that I decide to take it seriously. I get drunk several nights running, with her beside me getting equally drunk – even though she hates drinking. I get aggressive; I say she’s jealous of my independence, that the only reason this whole mad idea was born is because I said I wanted to leave her. She says that it all started when I was still at school and dreaming of becoming a writer – no more putting things off; if I don’t confront myself now, I’ll spend the rest of my life getting married and divorced, telling cute anecdotes about my past and going steadily downhill.

Obviously, I can’t admit she’s right, but I know she’s telling the truth. And the more aware I am of this, the more aggressive I become. She accepts my aggression without complaint; she merely reminds me that the departure date is getting closer.

One night, shortly before that date, she refuses to make love. I smoke a whole joint of marihuana, drink two bottles of wine and pass out in the middle of the living room. When I come to, I realise that I have reached the bottom of the pit, and now all that remains is for me to clamber back up to the top. And I, who so pride myself on my courage, see how cowardly, mean and unadventurous I am being with my own life. That morning, I wake her with a kiss and tell her that I’ll do as she suggests.

I set off and for thirty-eight days I follow the road to Santiago. When I arrive, I understand that my real journey only starts there. I decide to settle in Madrid and live off my royalties, to allow an ocean to separate me from Esther’s body, even though we are still officially together and often talk on the phone. It’s very comfortable being married and knowing that I can always return to her arms, meanwhile enjoying all the independence in the world.

I fall in love with a Catalan scientist, with an Argentine woman who makes jewellery, and with a young woman who sings in the metro. The royalties from my lyrics keep rolling in and are enough for me to live comfortably without having to work and with plenty of time to do everything, even…write a book.

The book can always wait until tomorrow, though, because the mayor of Madrid has decreed that the city should be one long party and has come up with an interesting slogan – ‘Madrid is killing me’ – and urges us all to visit several bars each night, coining the phrase la movida madrileña (‘the Madrid scene’), which is something I cannot possibly put off until tomorrow; everything is such fun; the days are short and the nights are long.

One day, Esther phones to say that she’s coming to see me: according to her, we need to sort out our situation once and for all. She has booked her ticket for the following week, which gives me just enough time to organise a series of excuses. (‘I’m going to Portugal, but I’ll be back in a month,’ I tell the blonde girl who used to sing in the metro and who now sleeps in the rented apartment where I live and with whom I go out every night to enjoy la movida madrileña.) I tidy the apartment, expunge any trace of a female presence, and ask my friends not to breathe a word, because my wife is coming to stay for a month.

Esther gets off the plane sporting a hideous, unrecognisable haircut. We travel to the interior of Spain, discover little towns that mean a great deal for one night, but which, if I went back there today, I wouldn’t even be able to find. We go to bullfights, flamenco shows, and I am the best husband in the world, because I want her to go home feeling that I still love her. I don’t know why I want to give this impression, perhaps because, deep down, I know that the Madrid dream will eventually end.

I complain about her haircut and she changes it and is pretty again. There are only ten days left of her holiday and I want her to go home feeling happy and to leave me alone to enjoy this Madrid that is killing me, the discotheques that open at ten in the morning, the bullfights, the endless conversations about the same old topics, the alcohol, the women, more bullfights, more alcohol, more women, and absolutely no timetable.

One Sunday, while we are walking to a bar that serves food all night, she brings up the forbidden topic: the book I said I was writing. I drink a whole bottle of sherry, kick any metal doors we pass on the way back, verbally abuse other people in the street, ask why she bothered travelling all this way if her one aim was to make my life a hell and to destroy my happiness. She says nothing, but we both know that our relationship has reached its limits. I have a dreamless night’s sleep, and the following morning, having complained to the building manager about the phone that doesn’t work, having told off the cleaning woman because she hasn’t changed the bedclothes for a week, having taken a long, long bath to get rid of the hangover from the night before, I sit down at my typewriter, just to show Esther that I am trying, honestly trying, to work.

And suddenly, the miracle happens. I look across at the woman who has just made some coffee and is now reading the newspaper, whose eyes look tired and desperate, who is her usual silent self, who does not always show her affection in gestures, the woman who made me say ‘yes’ when I wanted to say ‘no’, who forced me to fight for what she, quite rightly, believed was my reason for living, who let me set off alone because her love for me was greater even than her love for herself, who made me go in search of my dream; and, suddenly, seeing that small, quiet woman, whose eyes said more than any words, who was often terrified inside, but always courageous in her actions, who could love someone without humbling herself and who never ever apologised for fighting for her man, suddenly, my fingers press down on the keys.

The first sentence emerges. Then the second.

I spend two days without eating, I sleep the bare minimum, the words seem to spring from some unknown place, as they did when I used to write lyrics, in the days when, after much arguing and much meaningless conversation, my musical partner and I would know that ‘it’ was there, ready, and it was time to set ‘it’ down in words and notes. This time, I know that ‘it’ comes from Esther’s heart; my love is reborn, I write the book because she exists, because she has survived all the difficult times without complaint, without ever once seeing herself as victim. I start by describing the experience that has affected me most profoundly in those last few years – the road to Santiago.

As I write, I realise that the way I see the world is going through a series of major changes. For many years, I studied and practised magic, alchemy and the occult; I was fascinated by the idea of a small group of people being in possession of an immense power that could in no way be shared with the rest of humanity, because it would be far too dangerous to allow such vast potential to fall into inexperienced hands. I was a member of secret societies, I became involved in exotic sects, I bought obscure, extremely expensive books, spent an enormous amount of time performing rituals and invocations. I was always joining and leaving different groups and fraternities, always thinking that I had finally met the person who could reveal to me the mysteries of the invisible world, but, in the end, was always disappointed to discover that most of these people – however well-intentioned – were merely following this or that dogma and tended to be fanatics, because fanaticism is the only way to put an end to the doubts that constantly trouble the human soul.

I discovered that many of the rituals did actually work, but I discovered, too, that those who declared themselves to be the masters and holders of the secrets of life, who claimed to know techniques that gave them the ability to achieve their every desire, had completely lost touch with the teachings of the ancients. Following the road to Santiago, coming into contact with ordinary people, discovering that the Universe spoke its own language of ‘signs’ and that, in order to understand this language, we had only to look with an open mind at what was going on around us – all this made me wonder if the occult really was the one doorway into those mysteries. In my book about the road to Santiago, I discuss other possible ways of growing and end with this thought: ‘All you have to do is to pay attention; lessons always arrive when you are ready, and if you can read the signs, you will learn everything you need to know in order to take the next step.’

We humans have two great problems: the first is knowing when to begin, the second is knowing when to stop.

A week later, I begin the first, second and third draft. Madrid is no longer killing me, it is time to go back home. I feel that one cycle has ended and that I urgently need to begin another. I say goodbye to the city as I have always said goodbye in life: thinking that I might change my mind and come back one day.

I return to my own country with Esther, convinced that it might be time to get another job, but until I do (and I don’t because I don’t need to) I continue revising the book. I can’t believe that anyone will have much interest in the experiences of one man following a romantic but difficult route across Spain.

Four months later, when I am busy on my tenth draft, I discover that both the typescript and Esther have gone. Just as I’m about to go mad with anxiety, she returns with a receipt from the post office – she has sent it off to an old boyfriend of hers, who now runs a small publishing house.

The ex-boyfriend publishes the book. There is not a word about it in the press, but a few people buy it. They recommend it to other people, who also buy it and recommend it to others. Six months later, the first edition has sold out. A year later, there have been three more print runs and I am beginning to earn money from the one thing I never dreamed I would – from literature.

I don’t know how long this dream will continue, but I decide to live each moment as if it were the last. And I see that this success opens the door I have so long wanted to open: other publishers are keen to publish my next book.

Obviously, I can’t follow the road to Santiago every year, so what am I going to write about next? Will I have to endure the same rigmarole of sitting down in front of the typewriter and then finding myself doing everything but write sentences and paragraphs? It’s important that I continue to share my vision of the world and to describe my experiences of life. I try for a few days and for many nights, and decide that it’s impossible. Then, one evening, I happen upon (happen upon?) an interesting story in The Thousand and One Nights; in it I find the symbol of my own path, something that helps me to understand who I am and why I took so long to make the decision that was always there waiting for me. I use that story as the basis for another story about a shepherd who goes in search of his dream, a treasure hidden in the pyramids of Egypt. I speak of the love that lies waiting for him there, as Esther had waited for me while I walked round and round in circles.

I am no longer someone dreaming of becoming something: I am. I am the shepherd crossing the desert, but where is the alchemist who helps him to carry on? When I finish this novel, I don’t entirely understand what I have written: it is like a fairy tale for grown-ups, and grown-ups are more interested in war, sex, or stories about power. Nevertheless, the publisher accepts it, the book is published, and my readers once again take it into the bestseller lists.

Three years later, my marriage is in excellent shape; I am doing what I always wanted to do; the first translation appears, then the second, and success – slowly but surely – takes my work to the four corners of the earth.

I decide to move to Paris because of its cafés, its writers and its cultural life. I discover that none of this exists any more: the cafés are full of tourists and photographs of the people who made those places famous. Most of the writers there are more concerned with style than content; they strive to be original, but succeed only in being dull. They are locked in their own little world, and I learn an interesting French expression: renvoyer l’ascenseur, meaning literally ‘to send the lift back up’, but used metaphorically to mean ‘to return a favour’. In practice, this means that I say nice things about your book, you say nice things about mine, and thus we create a whole new cultural life, a revolution, an apparently new philosophy; we suffer because no one understands us, but then that’s what happened with all the geniuses of the past: being misunderstood by one’s contemporaries is surely just part and parcel of being a great artist.

‘They send the lift back up’, and, at first, such writers have some success: people don’t want to run the risk of openly criticising something they don’t understand, but they soon realise they are being conned and stop believing what the critics say.

The Internet and its simple language are all that it takes to change the world. A parallel world emerges in Paris: new writers struggle to make their words and their souls understood. I join these new writers in cafés that no one has heard of, because neither the writers nor the cafés are as yet famous. I develop my style alone and I learn from a publisher all I need to know about mutual support.

‘What is this Favour Bank?’

‘You know. Everyone knows.’

‘Possibly, but I still haven’t quite grasped what you’re saying.’

‘It was an American writer who first mentioned it. It’s the most powerful bank in the world, and you’ll find it in every sphere of life.’

‘Yes, but I come from a country without a literary tradition. What favours could I do for anyone?’

‘That doesn’t matter in the least. Let me give you an example: I know that you’re an up-and-coming writer and that, one day, you’ll be very influential. I know this because, like you, I too was once ambitious, independent, honest. I no longer have the energy I once had, but I want to help you because I can’t or don’t want to grind to a halt just yet. I’m not dreaming about retirement, I’m still dreaming about the fascinating struggle that is life, power, and glory.

‘I start making deposits in your account – not cash deposits, you understand, but contacts. I introduce you to such and such a person, I arrange certain deals, as long as they’re legal. You know that you owe me something, but I never ask you for anything.’

‘And then one day…’

‘Exactly. One day, I’ll ask you for a favour and you could, of course, say “No”, but you’re conscious of being in my debt. You do what I ask, I continue to help you, and other people see that you’re a decent, loyal sort of person and so they too make deposits in your account – always in the form of contacts, because this world is made up of contacts and nothing else. They too will one day ask you for a favour, and you will respect and help the people who have helped you, and, in time, you’ll have spread your net worldwide, you’ll know everyone you need to know and your influence will keep on growing.’

‘I could refuse to do what you ask me to do.’

‘You could. The Favour Bank is a risky investment, just like any other bank. You refuse to grant the favour I asked you, in the belief that I helped you because you deserved to be helped, because you’re the best and everyone should automatically recognise your talent. Fine, I say thank you very much and ask someone else into whose account I’ve also made various deposits; but from then on, everyone knows, without me having to say a word, that you are not to be trusted.

‘You’ll grow only half as much as you could have grown, and certainly not as much as you would have liked to. At a certain point, your life will begin to decline, you got halfway, but not all the way, you are half-happy and half-sad, neither frustrated nor fulfilled. You’re neither cold nor hot, you’re lukewarm, and as an evangelist in some holy book says: “Lukewarm things are not pleasing to the palate.”’

The publisher places a lot of deposits – or contacts – into my account at the Favour Bank. I learn, I suffer, my books are translated into French, and, in the tradition of that country, the stranger is welcomed. Not only that, the stranger is an enormous success! Ten years on, I have a large apartment with a view over the Seine, I am loved by my readers and loathed by the critics (who adored me until I sold my first 100,000 copies, but, from that moment on, I ceased to be ‘a misunderstood genius’). I always repay promptly any deposits made and soon I too am a lender – of contacts. My influence grows. I learn to ask for favours and to do the favours others ask of me.

Esther gets permission to work as a journalist. Apart from the normal conflicts in any marriage, I am contented. I understand for the first time that all the frustrations I felt about previous love affairs and marriages had nothing to do with the women involved, but with my own bitterness. Esther, however, was the only woman who understood one very simple thing: in order to be able to find her, I first had to find myself. We have been together for eight years; I believe she is the love of my life, and although I do occasionally (or, to be honest, frequently) fall in love with other women who cross my path, I never consider the possibility of divorce. I never ask her if she knows about my extramarital affairs. She never makes any comment on the subject.

That is why I am astonished when, as we are leaving a cinema, she tells me that she has asked her magazine if she can file a report on a civil war in Africa.

‘What are you saying?’

‘That I want to be a war correspondent.’

‘You’re mad. You don’t need to do that. You’re already doing the work you want to do now. You earn good money – not that you need that money to live on. You have all the contacts you need in the Favour Bank. You have talent and you’ve earned your colleagues’ respect.’

‘All right then, let’s just say I need to be alone.’

‘Because of me?’

‘We’ve built our lives together. I love my man and he loves me, even though he’s not always the most faithful of husbands.’

‘You’ve never said anything about that before.’

‘Because it doesn’t matter to me. I mean, what is fidelity? The feeling that I possess a body and a soul that aren’t mine? Do you imagine I haven’t been to bed with other men during all these years we’ve been together?’

‘I don’t care and I don’t want to know.’

‘Well, neither do I.’

‘So, what’s all this about wanting to write about a war in some godforsaken part of the world?’

‘Like I said, I need to.’

‘Haven’t you got everything you need?’

‘I have everything a woman could want.’

‘What’s wrong with your life then?’ ‘Precisely that. I have everything, but I’m not happy. And I’m not the only one either; over the years, I’ve met and interviewed all kinds of people: the rich, the poor, the powerful, and those who just make do. I’ve seen the same infinite bitterness in everyone’s eyes, a sadness which people weren’t always prepared to acknowledge, but which, regardless of what they were telling me, was nevertheless there. Are you listening?’

‘Yes, I’m listening. I was just thinking. So, according to you, no one is happy?’

‘Some people appear to be happy, but they simply don’t give the matter much thought. Others make plans: I’m going to have a husband, a home, two children, a house in the country. As long as they’re busy doing that, they’re like bulls looking for the bullfighter: they react instinctively, they blunder on, with no idea where the target is. They get their car, sometimes they even get a Ferrari, and they think that’s the meaning of life, and they never question it. Yet their eyes betray the sadness that even they don’t know they carry in their soul. Are you happy?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I don’t know if everyone is unhappy. I know they’re all busy: working overtime, worrying about their children, their husband, their career, their degree, what they’re going to do tomorrow, what they need to buy, what they need to have in order not to feel inferior, etc. Very few people actually say to me: “I’m unhappy.” Most say: “I’m fine, I’ve got everything I ever wanted.” Then I ask: “What makes you happy?” Answer: “I’ve got everything a person could possibly want – a family, a home, work, good health.” I ask again: “Have you ever stopped to wonder if that’s all there is to life?” Answer: “Yes, that’s all there is.” I insist: “So the meaning of life is work, family, children who will grow up and leave you, a wife or husband who will become more like a friend than a real lover. And, of course, one day your work will end too. What will you do when that happens?” Answer: there is no answer. They change the subject.’

‘No, what they say is: “When the children have grown up, when my husband – or my wife – has become more my friend than my passionate lover, when I retire, then I’ll have time to do what I always wanted to do: travel.” Question: “But didn’t you say you were happy now? Aren’t you already doing what you always wanted to do?” Then they say they’re very busy and change the subject.’

‘If I insist, they always do come up with something they’re lacking. The businessman hasn’t yet closed the deal he wanted, the housewife would like to have more independence and more money, the boy who’s in love is afraid of losing his girlfriend, the new graduate wonders if he chose his career or if it was chosen for him, the dentist wanted to be a singer, the singer wanted to be a politician, the politician wanted to be a writer, the writer wanted to be a farmer. And even when I did meet someone who was doing what he had chosen to do, that person’s soul was still in torment. He hadn’t found peace yet either. So I’ll ask you again: “Are you happy?”’

‘No. I have the woman I love, the career I always dreamed of having, the kind of freedom that is the envy of all my friends, the travel, the honours, the praise. But there’s something…’

‘What?’

‘I have the idea that, if I stopped, life would become meaningless.’

‘You can’t just relax, look at Paris, take my hand and say: I’ve got what I wanted, now let’s enjoy what life remains to us.’

‘I can look at Paris, take your hand, but I can’t say those words.’

‘I bet you everyone walking along this street now is feeling the same thing. The elegant woman who just passed us spends her days trying to hold back time, always checking the scales, because she thinks that is what love depends on. Look across the road: a couple with two children. They feel intensely happy when they’re out with their children, but, at the same time, their subconscious keeps them in a constant state of terror: they think of the job they might lose, the disease they might catch, the health insurance that might not come up with the goods, one of the children getting run over. And in trying to distract themselves, they try as well to find a way of getting free of those tragedies, of protecting themselves from the world.’

‘And the beggar on the corner?’

‘I don’t know about him. I’ve never spoken to a beggar. He’s certainly the picture of misery, but his eyes, like the eyes of any beggar, seem to be hiding something. His sadness is so obvious that I can’t quite believe in it.’

‘What’s missing?’

‘I haven’t a clue. I look at the celebrity magazines with everyone smiling and contented, but since I am myself married to a celebrity, I know that it isn’t quite like that: everyone is laughing and having fun at that moment, in that photo, but later that night, or in the morning, the story is always quite different. “What do I have to do in order to continue appearing in this magazine?” “How can I disguise the fact that I no longer have enough money to support my luxurious lifestyle?” “How can I best manipulate my luxurious lifestyle to make it seem even more luxurious than anyone else’s?” “The actress in the photo with me and with whom I’m smiling and celebrating could steal a part from me tomorrow!” “Am I better dressed than she is? Why are we smiling when we loathe each other?” “Why do we sell happiness to the readers of this magazine when we are profoundly unhappy ourselves, the slaves of fame.”’

‘We’re not the slaves of fame.’

‘Don’t get paranoid. I’m not talking about us.’

‘What do you think is going on, then?’

‘Years ago, I read a book that told an interesting story. Just suppose that Hitler had won the war, wiped out all the Jews and convinced his people that there really was such a thing as a master race. The history books start to be changed, and, a hundred years later, his successors manage to wipe out all the Indians. Three hundred years later and the Blacks have been eliminated too. It takes five hundred years, but, finally, the all-powerful war machine succeeds in erasing the oriental race from the face of the earth as well. The history books speak of remote battles waged against barbarians, but no one reads too closely, because it’s of no importance.

Two thousand years after the birth of Nazism, in a bar in Tokyo, a city that has been inhabited for five centuries now by tall, blue-eyed people, Hans and Fritz are enjoying a beer. At one point, Hans looks at Fritz and asks: “Fritz, do you think it was always like this?”

“What?” asks Fritz.

“The world.”

“Of course the world was always like this, isn’t that what we were taught?”

“Of course, I don’t know what made me ask such a stupid question,” says Hans. They finish their beer, talk about other things and forget the question entirely.’

‘You don’t even need to go that far into the future, you just have to go back two thousand years. Can you see yourself worshipping a guillotine, a scaffold or an electric chair?’

‘I know where you’re heading – to that worst of all human tortures, the cross. I remember that Cicero referred to it as “an abominable punishment” that inflicted terrible suffering on the crucified person before he or she died. And yet, nowadays people wear it around their neck, hang it on their bedroom wall and have come to identify it as a religious symbol, forgetting that they are looking at an instrument of torture.’

‘Two hundred and fifty years passed before someone decided that it was time to abolish the pagan festivals surrounding the winter solstice, the time when the sun is farthest from the earth. The apostles, and those who came after them, were too busy spreading Jesus’ message to worry about the natalis invict Solis, the Mithraic festival of the birth of the sun, which occurred on 25 December. Then a bishop decided that these solstice festivals were a threat to the faith and that was that! Now we have masses, Nativity scenes, presents, sermons, plastic babies in wooden mangers, and the cast-iron conviction that Christ was born on that very day!’

‘And then there’s the Christmas tree. Do you know where that comes from?’

‘No idea.’

‘St Boniface decided to “christianise” a ritual intended to honour the god Odin when he was a child. Once a year, the Germanic tribes would place presents around an oak tree for the children to find. They thought this would bring joy to the pagan deity.’

‘Going back to the story of Hans and Fritz: do you think that civilisation, human relations, our hopes, our conquests, are all just the product of some other garbled story?’

‘When you wrote about the road to Santiago, you came to the same conclusion, didn’t you? You used to believe that only a select few knew the meaning of magic symbols, but now you realise that we all know the meaning, it’s just that we’ve forgotten it.’

‘Knowing that doesn’t make any difference. People do their best not to remember and not to accept the immense magical potential they possess, because that would upset their neat little universes.’

‘But we all have the ability, don’t we?’

‘Absolutely, we just don’t all have the courage to follow our dreams and to follow the signs. Perhaps that’s where the sadness comes from.’

‘I don’t know. And I’m not saying that I’m unhappy all the time. I have fun, I love you, I adore my work. Yet now and then, I feel this profound sadness, occasionally mingled with feelings of guilt or fear; the feeling passes, but always comes back later on, and then passes off again. Like Hans, I ask that same question; when I can’t answer it, I simply forget. I could go and help starving children, set up a foundation for street children, start trying to save people in the name of Jesus, do something that would give me the feeling I was being useful, but I don’t want to.’

‘So why do you want to go and cover this war?’

‘Because I think that in time of war, men live life at the limit; after all, they could die the next day. Anyone living like that must act differently.’

‘So you want to find an answer to Hans’s question?’

‘Yes, I do.’

Today, in this beautiful suite in the Hotel Bristol, with the Eiffel Tower glittering for five minutes every time the clock strikes the hour, with an empty bottle of wine beside me and my cigarettes fast running out, with people greeting me as if nothing very serious had happened, I ask myself: was it then, coming out of the cinema, that it all began? Should I have let her go off in search of that garbled story or should I have put my foot down and told her to forget the whole idea because she was my wife and I needed her with me, needed her support?

Nonsense. At the time, I knew, as I know now, that I had no option but to accept what she wanted. If I had said: ‘Choose between me and becoming a war correspondent’, I would have been betraying everything that Esther had done for me. I wasn’t convinced by her declared aim – to go in search of ‘a garbled story’ – but I concluded that she needed a bit of freedom, to get out and about, to experience strong emotions. And what was wrong with that?

I accepted, not without first making it clear that this constituted a very large withdrawal from the Favour Bank (which, when I think about it now, seems a ludicrous thing to say). For two years, Esther followed various conflicts at close quarters, changing continents more often than she changed her shoes. Whenever she came back, I thought that this time she would give it up – it’s just not possible to live for very long in a place where there’s no decent food, no daily bath, and no cinemas or theatres. I asked her if she had found the answer to Hans’s question, and she always told me that she was on the right track, and I had to be satisfied with that. Sometimes, she was away from home for months at a time; contrary to what it says in the ‘official history of marriage’ (I was starting to use her terminology), that distance only made our love grow stronger, and showed us how important we were to each other. Our relationship, which I thought had reached its ideal point when we moved to Paris, was getting better and better.

As I understand it, she first met Mikhail when she needed a translator to accompany her to some country in Central Asia. At first, she talked about him with great enthusiasm – he was a very sensitive person, someone who saw the world as it really was and not as we had been told it should be. He was five years younger than her, but had a quality that Esther described as ‘magical’. I listened patiently and politely, as if I were really interested in that boy and his ideas, but the truth is I was far away, going over in my mind all the things I had to do, ideas for articles, answers to questions from journalists and publishers, strategies for how to seduce a particular woman who appeared to be interested in me, plans for future book promotions.

I don’t know if Esther noticed this. I certainly failed to notice that Mikhail gradually disappeared from our conversations, then vanished completely. Esther’s behaviour became increasingly eccentric: even when she was in Paris, she started going out several nights a week, telling me that she was researching an article on beggars.

I thought she must be having an affair. I agonised for a whole week and asked myself: should I tell her my doubts or just pretend that nothing is happening? I decided to ignore it, on the principle that ‘what the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over’. I was utterly convinced that there wasn’t the slightest possibility of her leaving me; she had worked so hard to help me become the person I am, and it would be illogical to let all that go for some ephemeral affair.

If I had really been interested in Esther’s world, I should at least have asked what had happened to her translator and his ‘magical’ sensibility. I should have been suspicious of that silence, that lack of information. I should have asked to go with her on one of those ‘research trips’ to visit beggars.

When she occasionally asked if I was interested in her work, my answer was always the same: ‘Yes, I’m interested, but I don’t want to interfere, I want you to be free to follow your dream in your chosen way, just as you helped me to do the same.’

This, of course, was tantamount to saying that I wasn’t the slightest bit interested. But because people always believe what they want to believe, Esther seemed satisfied with my response.

The words spoken by the inspector when I was released from the police cell come back to me again: You’re a free man. But what is freedom? Is it seeing that your husband isn’t interested in what you are doing? Is it feeling alone and having no one with whom to share your innermost feelings, because the person you married is entirely focused on his own work, on his important, magnificent, difficult career?

I look at the Eiffel Tower: another hour has passed, and it is glittering again as if it were made of diamonds. I have no idea how often this has happened since I have been at the window.

I know that, in the name of the freedom of our marriage, I did not notice that Mikhail had disappeared from my wife’s conversations, only to reappear in a bar and disappear again, this time taking her with him and leaving behind the famous, successful writer as prime suspect.

Or, worse still, as a man abandoned.

Han’s question

In Buenos Aires, the Zahir is a common 20-centavo coin; the letters N and T and the number 2 bear the marks of a knife or a letter-opener; 1929 is the date engraved on the reverse. (In Gujarat, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Zahir was a tiger; in Java, it was a blind man from the Surakarta mosque who was stoned by the faithful; in Persia, an astrolabe that Nadir Shah ordered to be thrown into the sea; in Mahdi’s prisons, in around 1892, a small compass that had been touched by Rudolf Karl von Slatin…)

A year later, I wake thinking about the story by Jorge Luis Borges, about something which, once touched or seen, can never be forgotten, and which gradually so fills our thoughts that we are driven to madness. My Zahir is not a romantic metaphor – a blind man, a compass, a tiger, or a coin.

It has a name, and her name is Esther.

Immediately after leaving prison, I appeared on the covers of various scandal sheets: they began by alleging a possible crime, but, in order to avoid ending up in court, they always concluded with the statement that I had been cleared (cleared? I hadn’t even been accused!). They allowed a week to pass; they checked to see if the sales had been good (they had, because I was the kind of writer who was normally above suspicion, and everyone wanted to find out how it was possible for a man who writes about spirituality to have such a dark side). Then they returned to the attack, alleging that my wife had run away because of my many extramarital affairs: a German magazine even hinted at a possible relationship with a singer, twenty years my junior, who said she had met me in Oslo, in Norway (this was true, but the meeting had only taken place because of the Favour Bank – a friend of mine had asked me to go and had been with us throughout the only supper we had together). The singer said that there was nothing between us (so why put a photo of us on the cover?) and took the opportunity to announce that she was releasing a new album: she had used both the magazine and me, and I still don’t know whether the failure of the album was a consequence of this kind of cheap publicity (the album wasn’t bad, by the way – what ruined everything were the press releases).

The scandal over the famous writer did not last long; in Europe, and especially in France, infidelity is not only accepted, it is even secretly admired. And no one likes to read about the sort of thing that could so easily happen to them.

The topic disappeared from the front covers, but the hypotheses continued: she had been kidnapped, she had left home because of physical abuse (photo of a waiter saying that we often argued: I remember that I did, in fact, have an argument with Esther in a restaurant about her views on a South American writer, which were completely opposed to mine). A British tabloid alleged – and luckily this had no serious repercussions – that my wife had gone into hiding with an Islamist terrorist organisation.

This world is so full of betrayals, divorces, murders, assassination attempts, that a month later the subject had been forgotten by the ordinary public. Years of experience had taught me that this kind of thing would never affect my faithful readership (it had happened before, when a journalist on an Argentinian television programme claimed that he had ‘proof’ that I had had a secret meeting in Chile with the future first lady of the country – but my books remained on the bestseller lists). As an American artist almost said: Sensationalism was only made to last fifteen minutes. My main concern was quite different: to reorganise my life, to find a new love, to go back to writing books, and to put away any memories of my wife in the little drawer that exists on the frontier between love and hate.

Or should I say memories of my ex-wife (I needed to get used to the term).

Part of what I had foreseen in that hotel room did come to pass. For a while, I barely left the apartment: I didn’t know how to face my friends, how to look them in the eye and say simply: ‘My wife has left me for a younger man.’ When I did go out, no one asked me anything, but after a few glasses of wine I felt obliged to bring the subject up – as if I could read everyone’s mind, as if I really believed that they had nothing more to occupy them than what was happening in my life, but that they were too polite or smug to say anything. Depending on my mood, Esther was either a saint who deserved better, or a treacherous, perfidious woman who had embroiled me in such a complicated situation that I had even been thought a criminal.

Friends, acquaintances, publishers, people I sat next to at the many gala dinners I was obliged to attend, listened with some curiosity at first. Gradually, though, I noticed that they tended to change the subject; they had been interested in the subject at some point, but it was no longer part of their current curiosities: they were more interested in talking about the actress who had been murdered by a singer or about the adolescent girl who had written a book about her affairs with wellknown politicians. One day, in Madrid, I noticed that the number of guests at events and suppers was beginning to fall off. Although it may have been good for my soul to unburden myself of my feelings, to blame or to bless Esther, I began to realise that I was becoming something even worse than a betrayed husband: I was becoming the kind of boring person no one wants to be around.

I decided, from then on, to suffer in silence, and the invitations once more flooded in through my letter box.

But the Zahir, about which I initially used to think with either irritation or affection, continued to grow in my soul. I started looking for Esther in every woman I met. I would see her in every bar, every cinema, at bus stops. More than once I ordered a taxi driver to stop in the middle of the street or to follow someone, until I could persuade myself that the person was not the person I was looking for.

With the Zahir beginning to occupy my every thought, I needed an antidote, something that would not take me to the brink of despair.

There was only one possible solution: a girlfriend.

I encountered three or four women I felt drawn to, but then I met Marie, a 35-year-old French actress. She was the only one who did not spout such nonsense as: ‘I like you as a man, not as the celebrity everyone wants to meet’ or ‘I wish you weren’t quite so famous’, or worse still: ‘I’m not interested in money.’ She was the only one who was genuinely pleased at my success, because she too was famous and knew that celebrity counts. Celebrity is an aphrodisiac. It was good for a woman’s ego to be with a man and know that he had chosen her even though he had had the pick of many others.

We were often seen together at parties and receptions; there was speculation about our relationship, but neither she nor I confirmed or denied anything, and the matter was left hanging, and all that remained for the magazines was to wait for the photo of the famous kiss – which never came, because both she and I considered such public exhibitionism vulgar. She got on with her filming and I with my work; when I could, I would travel to Milan, and when she could, she would meet me in Paris; we were close, but not dependent on each other.

Marie pretended not to know what was going on in my soul, and I pretended not to know what was going on in hers (an impossible love for a married neighbour, even though she could have had any man she wanted). We were friends, companions, we enjoyed the same things; I would even go so far as to say that there was between us a kind of love, but different from the love I felt for Esther or that Marie felt for her neighbour.

I started taking part in book-signings again, I accepted invitations to give lectures, write articles, attend charity dinners, appear on television programmes, help out with projects for up-and-coming young artists. I did everything except what I should have been doing, i.e. writing a book.

This didn’t matter to me, however, for in my heart of hearts I believed that my career as a writer was over, because the woman who had made me begin was no longer there. I had lived my dream intensely while it lasted, I had got farther than most people are lucky enough to get, I could spend the rest of my life having fun.

I thought this every morning. In the afternoon, I realised that the only thing I really liked doing was writing. By nightfall, there I was once more trying to persuade myself that I had fulfilled my dream and should try something new.

The following year was a Holy Year in Spain, the Año Santo Compostelano, which occurs whenever the day of St James of Compostela, 25 July, falls on a Sunday. A special door to the Cathedral in Santiago stands open for 365 days, and, according to tradition, anyone who goes through that door receives a series of special blessings.

There were various commemorative events throughout Spain, and since I was extremely grateful for the pilgrimage I had made, I decided to take part in at least one event: a talk, in January, in the Basque country. In order to get out of my routine – trying to write a book/going to a party/to the airport/visiting Marie in Milan/going out to supper/to a hotel/to the airport/surfing the Internet/going to the airport/to an interview/to another airport – I chose to drive the 1,400 kilometres there alone.

Everywhere – even those places I have never visited before – reminds me of my private Zahir. I think how Esther would love to see this, how much she would enjoy eating in this restaurant or walking by this river. I spend the night in Bayonne and, before I go to sleep, I turn on the television and learn that there are about 5,000 trucks stuck on the frontier between France and Spain, due to a violent and entirely unexpected snowstorm.

I wake up thinking that I should simply drive back to Paris: I have an excellent excuse for cancelling the engagement, and the organisers will understand perfectly – the traffic is in chaos, there is ice on the roads, both the French and Spanish governments are advising people not to leave home this weekend because the risk of accidents is so high. The situation is worse than it was last night: the morning paper reports that on one stretch of road alone there are 17,000 people trapped; civil defence teams have been mobilised to provide them with food and temporary shelters, since many people have already run out of fuel and cannot use their car heaters.

The hotel staff tell me that if I really have to travel, if it’s a matter of life or death, there is a minor road I can take, which, while it will avoid the blockages, will add about two hours to my journey time, and no one can guarantee what state the road will be in. Instinctively, I decide to go ahead; something is forcing me on, out onto the icy asphalt and to the hours spent patiently waiting in bottlenecks.

Perhaps it is the name of the city: Vitória – Victory. Perhaps it is the feeling that I have grown too used to comfort and have lost my ability to improvise in crisis situations. Perhaps it is the enthusiasm of the people who are, at this moment, trying to restore a cathedral built many centuries ago and who, in order to draw attention to their efforts, have invited a few writers to give talks. Or perhaps it is the old saying of the conquistadors of the Americas: ‘it is not life that matters, but the journey’.

And so I keep on journeying. After many long, tense hours, I reach Vitória, where some even tenser people are waiting for me. They say that there hasn’t been a snowstorm like it for more than thirty years, they thank me for making the effort, and continue with the official programme, which includes a visit to the Cathedral of Santa María.

A young woman with shining eyes starts telling me the story. To begin with there was the city wall. The wall remained, but one part of it was used to build a chapel. Many years passed, and the chapel became a church. Another century passed, and the church became a Gothic cathedral. The cathedral had had its moments of glory, there had been structural problems, for a time it had been abandoned, then restoration work had distorted the whole shape of the building, but each generation thought it had solved the problem and would rework the original plans. Thus, in the centuries that followed, they raised a wall here, took down a beam there, added a buttress over there, created or bricked up stained-glass windows.

And the cathedral withstood it all.

I walk through the skeleton of the cathedral, studying the restoration work currently being carried out: this time the architects guarantee that they have found the perfect solution. Everywhere there are metal supports, scaffolding, grand theories about what to do next and some criticism about what was done in the past.

And suddenly, in the middle of the central nave, I realise something very important: the cathedral is me, it is all of us. We are all growing and changing shape, we notice certain weaknesses that need to be corrected, we don’t always choose the best solution, but we carry on regardless, trying to remain upright and decent, in order to do honour not to the walls or the doors or the windows, but to the empty space inside, the space where we worship and venerate what is dearest and most important to us.

Yes, we are all cathedrals, there is no doubt about it; but what lies in the empty space of my inner cathedral?

Esther, the Zahir.

She fills everything. She is the only reason I am alive. I look around, I prepare myself for the talk I am to give, and I understand why I braved the snow, the traffic jams and the ice on the roads: in order to be reminded that every day I need to rebuild myself and to accept – for the first time in my entire existence – that I love another human being more than I love myself.

On the way back to Paris – in far more favourable weather conditions – I am in a kind of trance: I do not think, I merely concentrate on the traffic. When I get home, I ask the maid not to let anyone in, and ask her if she can sleep over for the next few nights and make me breakfast, lunch and supper. I stamp on the small apparatus that connects me to the Internet, destroying it completely. I unplug the telephone. I put my mobile in a box and send it to my publisher, saying that he should only give it back to me when I come round personally to pick it up.

For a week, I walk by the Seine each morning and, when I get back, I lock myself in my study. As if I were listening to the voice of an angel, I write a book, or, rather, a letter, a long letter to the woman of my dreams, to the woman I love and will always love. This book might one day reach her hands and even if it doesn’t, I am now a man at peace with his spirit. I no longer wrestle with my wounded pride, I no longer look for Esther on every corner, in every bar and cinema, at every supper, I no longer look for her in Marie or in the newspapers.

On the contrary, I am pleased that she exists; she has shown me that I am capable of a love of which I myself knew nothing, and this leaves me in a state of grace.

I accept the Zahir, and will let it lead me into a state of either holiness or madness.

A Time to Rend and a Time to Sew – the title is from a verse in Ecclesiastes – was published at the end of April. By the second week of May, it was already number one in the bestseller lists.

The literary supplements, which have never been kind to me, redoubled their attacks. I cut out some of the key phrases and stuck them in a notebook along with reviews from previous years; they said basically the same thing, merely changing the title of the book:

‘…once again, despite the troubled times we live in, the author offers us an escape from reality with a story about love…’ (as if people could live without love)

‘…short sentences, superficial style…’ (as if long sentences equalled profundity)

‘…the author has discovered the secret of success – marketing…’ (as if I had been born in a country with a long literary tradition and had had millions to invest in my first book)

‘…it will sell as well as all his other books, which just proves how unprepared human beings are not to face up to the encircling tragedy…’ (as if they knew what it meant to be prepared).

Some reviews, however, were different, adding that I was profiting from last year’s scandal in order to make even more money. As always, these negative reviews only served to sell more of my books: my faithful readers bought the book anyway, and those who had forgotten about the whole sorry business were reminded of it again and so also bought copies, because they wanted to hear my version of Esther’s disappearance (since the book was not about that, but was, rather, a hymn to love, they must have been sorely disappointed and would doubtless have decided that the critics were spot on). The rights were immediately sold to all the countries where my books were usually published.

Marie, who read the typescript before I sent it to the publisher, showed herself to be the woman I had hoped she was: instead of being jealous, or saying that I shouldn’t bare my soul like that, she encouraged me to go ahead with it and was thrilled when it was a success. At the time, she was reading the teachings of a little-known mystic, whom she quoted in all our conversations.

‘When people praise us, we should always keep a close eye on how we behave.’

‘The critics never praise me.’

‘I mean your readers: you’ve received more letters than ever. You’ll end up believing that you’re better than you are, and allow yourself to slip into a false sense of security, which could be very dangerous.’

‘Ever since my visit to the cathedral in Vitória, I do think I’m better than I thought I was, but that has nothing to do with readers’ letters. Absurd though it may seem, I discovered love.’

‘Great. What I like about the book is the fact that, at no point, do you blame your ex-wife. And you don’t blame yourself either.’

‘I’ve learned not to waste my time doing that.’

‘Good. The universe takes care of correcting our mistakes.’

‘Do you think Esther’s disappearance was some kind of “correction”, then?’

‘I don’t believe in the curative powers of suffering and tragedy; they happen because they’re part of life and shouldn’t be seen as a punishment. Generally speaking, the universe tells us when we’re wrong by taking away what is most important to us: our friends. And that, I think I’m right in saying, is what was happening with you.’

‘I learned something recently: our true friends are those who are with us when the good things happen. They cheer us on and are pleased by our triumphs. False friends only appear at difficult times, with their sad, supportive faces, when, in fact, our suffering is serving to console them for their miserable lives. When things were bad last year, various people I had never even seen before turned up to “console” me. I hate that.’

‘I’ve had the same thing happen to me.’

‘But I’m very grateful that you came into my life, Marie.’

‘Don’t be too grateful too soon, our relationship isn’t strong enough. As a matter of fact, I’ve been thinking of moving to Paris or asking you to come and live in Milan: it wouldn’t make any difference to either of us in terms of work. You always work at home and I always work away. Would you like to change the subject now or shall we continue discussing it as a possibility?’

‘I’d like to change the subject.’

‘Let’s talk about something else then. It took a lot of courage to write that book. What surprises me, though, is that you don’t once mention the young man.’

‘I’m not interested in him.’

‘You must be. Every now and again you must ask yourself: why did she choose him?’

‘I never ask myself that.’

‘You’re lying. I’d certainly like to know why my neighbour didn’t divorce his boring, smiling wife, always busy with the housework, the cooking, the children and the bills. If I ask myself that, you must too.’

‘Are you saying that I hate him because he stole my wife?’

‘No, I want to hear you say that you forgive him.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘It’s hard I know, but you’ve no option. If you don’t do it, you’ll always be thinking of the pain he caused you and that pain will never pass. I’m not saying you’ve got to like him. I’m not saying you should seek him out. I’m not suggesting you should start thinking of him as an angel. What was his name now? Something Russian wasn’t it?’

‘It doesn’t matter what his name was.’

‘You see? You don’t even want to say his name. Are you superstitious?’

‘Mikhail. There you are, that’s his name.’

‘The energy of hatred won’t get you anywhere; but the energy of forgiveness, which reveals itself through love, will transform your life in a positive way.’

‘Now you’re sounding like some Tibetan sage, spouting stuff that is all very nice in theory, but impossible in practice. Don’t forget, I’ve been hurt before.’

‘Exactly, and you’re still carrying inside you the little boy, the school weakling, who had to hide his tears from his parents. You still bear the marks of the skinny little boy who couldn’t get a girlfriend and who was never any good at sport. You still haven’t managed to heal the scars left by some of the injustices committed against you in your life. But what good does that do?’

‘Who told you about that?’

‘I just know. I can see it in your eyes, and it doesn’t do you any good. All it does is feed a constant desire to feel sorry for yourself, because you were the victim of people stronger than you. Or else it makes you go to the other extreme and disguise yourself as an avenger ready to hit out at the people who hurt you. Isn’t that a waste of time?’

‘It’s just human.’

‘Oh, it is, but it’s not intelligent or reasonable. Show some respect for your time on this earth, and know that God has always forgiven you and always will.’

Looking around at the crowd gathered for my book-signing at a megastore in the Champs-Elysées, I thought: how many of these people will have had the same experience I had with my wife?

Very few. Perhaps one or two. Even so, most of them would identify with what was in my new book.

Writing is one of the most solitary activities in the world. Once every two years, I sit down in front of the computer, gaze out on the unknown sea of my soul, and see a few islands – ideas that have developed and which are ripe to be explored. Then I climb into my boat – called The Word – and set out for the nearest island. On the way, I meet strong currents, winds and storms, but I keep rowing, exhausted, knowing that I have drifted away from my chosen course and that the island I was trying to reach is no longer on my horizon.

I can’t turn back, though, I have to continue somehow or else I’ll be lost in the middle of the ocean; at that point, a series of terrifying scenarios flash through my mind, such as spending the rest of my life talking about past successes, or bitterly criticising new writers, simply because I no longer have the courage to publish new books. Wasn’t my dream to be a writer? Then I must continue creating sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and go on writing until I die, and not allow myself to get caught in such traps as success or failure. Otherwise, what meaning does my life have? Being able to buy an old mill in the south of France and tending my garden? Giving lectures instead, because it’s easier to talk than to write? Withdrawing from the world in a calculated, mysterious way, in order to create a legend that will deprive me of many pleasures?

Shaken by these alarming thoughts, I find a strength and a courage I didn’t know I had: they help me to venture into an unknown part of my soul. I let myself be swept along by the current, and finally anchor my boat at the island I was being carried towards. I spend days and nights describing what I see, wondering why I’m doing this, telling myself that it’s really not worth the pain and the effort, that I don’t need to prove anything to anyone, that I’ve got what I wanted and far more than I ever dreamed of having.

I notice that I go through the same process as I did when writing my first book: I wake up at nine o’clock in the morning, ready to sit down at my computer immediately after breakfast; then I read the newspapers, go for a walk, visit the nearest bar for a chat, come home, look at the computer, discover that I need to make several phone calls, look at the computer again, by which time lunch is ready, and I sit eating and thinking that I really ought to have started writing at eleven o’clock, but now I need a nap, I wake at five in the afternoon, finally turn on the computer, go to check my e-mails, then remember that I’ve destroyed my Internet connection; I could go to a place ten minutes away where I can get online, but couldn’t I, just to free my conscience from these feelings of guilt, couldn’t I at least write for half an hour?

I begin out of a feeling of duty, but suddenly ‘the thing’ takes hold of me and I can’t stop. The maid calls me for supper and I ask her not to interrupt me; an hour later, she calls me again; I’m hungry, but I must write just one more line, one more sentence, one more page. By the time I sit down at the table, the food is cold, I gobble it down and go back to the computer – I am no longer in control of where I place my feet, the island is being revealed to me, I am being propelled along its paths, finding things I have never even thought or dreamed of. I drink a cup of coffee, and another, and at two o’clock in the morning I finally stop writing, because my eyes are tired.

I go to bed, spend another hour making notes of things to use in the next paragraph and which always prove completely useless – they serve only to empty my mind so that sleep can come. I promise myself that the next morning, I’ll start at eleven o’clock prompt. And the following day, the same thing happens – the walk, the conversations, lunch, a nap, the feelings of guilt, then irritation at myself for destroying the Internet connection, until I, at last, make myself sit down and write the first page…

Suddenly, two, three, four, eleven weeks have passed, and I know that I’m near the end; I’m gripped by a feeling of emptiness, the feeling of someone who has set down in words things he should have kept to himself. Now, though, I have to reach the final sentence – and I do.

When I used to read biographies of writers, I always thought they were simply trying to make their profession seem more interesting when they said that ‘the book writes itself, the writer is just the typist’. Now I know that this is absolutely true, no one knows why the current took them to that particular island and not to the one they wanted to reach. The obsessive re-drafting and editing begins, and when I can no longer bear to re-read the same words one more time, I send it to my publisher, where it is edited again, and then published.

And it is a constant source of surprise to me to discover that other people were also in search of that very island and that they find it in my book. One person tells another person about it, the mysterious chain grows, and what the writer thought of as a solitary exercise becomes a bridge, a boat, a means by which souls can travel and communicate.

From then on, I am no longer the man lost in the storm: I find myself through my readers, I understand what I wrote when I see that others understand it too, but never before. On a few rare occasions, like the one that is just about to happen, I manage to look those people in the eye and then I understand that my soul is not alone.

At the appointed time, I start signing books. There is brief eye-to-eye contact and a feeling of solidarity, joy and mutual respect. There are handshakes, a few letters, gifts, comments. Ninety minutes later, I ask for a tenminute rest, no one complains, and my publisher (as has become traditional at my book-signings in France) orders champagne to be served to everyone still in the line (I have tried to get this tradition adopted in other countries, but they always say that French champagne is too expensive and end up serving mineral water instead, but that, too, shows respect for those still waiting).

I return to the table. Two hours later, contrary to what anyone observing the event might think, I am not tired, but full of energy; I could carry on all night. The shop, however, has closed its doors and the queue is dwindling. There are forty people left inside, they become thirty, twenty, eleven, five, four, three, two…and suddenly our eyes meet.

‘I waited until the end. I wanted to be the last because I have a message for you.’

I don’t know what to say. I glance to one side, at the publishers, sales people and booksellers, who are all talking enthusiastically; soon we will go out to eat and drink and share the excitement of the day, and describe some of the strange things that happened while I was signing books.

I have never seen him before, but I know who he is. I take the book from him and write: ‘For Mikhail, with best wishes.’

I say nothing. I must not lose him – a word, a sentence, a sudden movement might cause him to leave and never come back. In a fraction of a second, I understand that he and only he can save me from the blessing – or the curse – of the Zahir, because he is the only one who knows where to find it, and I will finally be able to ask the questions I have been repeating to myself for so long.

‘I wanted you to know that she’s all right, that she may even have read your book.’

The publishers, sales people and booksellers come over. They all embrace me and say it’s been a great afternoon. Let’s go and relax and drink and talk about it all.

‘I’d like to invite this young man to supper,’ I say. ‘He was the last in the queue and he can be the representative of all the other readers who were here with us today.’

‘I can’t, I’m afraid. I have another engagement.’

And turning to me, rather startled, he adds:

‘I only came to give you that message.’

‘What message?’ asks one of the sales people.

‘He never usually invites anyone!’ says my publisher. ‘Come on, let’s all go and have supper!’

‘It’s very kind of you, but I have a meeting I go to every Thursday.’

‘When does it start?’

‘In two hours’ time.’

‘And where is it?’

‘In an Armenian restaurant.’

My driver, who is himself Armenian, asks which one and says that it’s only fifteen minutes from the place where we are going to eat. Everyone is doing their best to please me: they think that the person I’m inviting to supper should be happy and pleased to be so honoured, that anything else can surely wait.

‘What’s your name?’ asks Marie.

‘Mikhail.’

‘Well, Mikhail,’ and I see that Marie has understood everything, ‘why don’t you come with us for an hour or so; the restaurant we’re going to is just around the corner. Then the driver will take you wherever you want to go. If you prefer, though, we can cancel our reservation and all go and have supper at the Armenian restaurant instead – that way, you’d feel less anxious.’

I can’t stop looking at him. He isn’t particularly handsome or particularly ugly. He’s neither tall nor short. He’s dressed in black, simple and elegant – and by elegance I mean a complete absence of brand names or designer labels.

Marie links arms with Mikhail and heads for the exit. The bookseller still has a pile of books waiting to be signed for readers who could not come to the signing, but I promise that I will drop by the following day. My legs are trembling, my heart pounding, and yet I have to pretend that everything is fine, that I’m glad the book-signing was a success, that I’m interested in what other people are saying. We cross the Champs-Elysées, the sun is setting behind the Arc de Triomphe, and, for some reason, I know that this is a sign, a good sign.

As long as I can keep control of the situation.

Why do I want to speak to him? The people from the publishing house keep talking to me and I respond automatically; no one notices that I am far away, struggling to understand why I have invited to supper someone whom I should, by rights, hate. Do I want to find out where Esther is? Do I want to have my revenge on this young man, so lost, so insecure, and yet who was capable of luring away the person I love? Do I want to prove to myself that I am better, much better than him? Do I want to bribe him, seduce him, make him persuade my wife to come back?

I can’t answer any of these questions, and that doesn’t matter. The only thing I have said up until now is: ‘I’d like to invite this young man to supper.’ I had imagined the scene so often before: we meet, I grab him by the throat, punch him, humiliate him in front of Esther; or I get a thrashing and make her see how hard I’m fighting for her, suffering for her. I had imagined scenes of aggression or feigned indifference or public scandal, but the words ‘I’d like to invite this young man to supper’ had never once entered my head.

No need to ask what I will do next, all I have to do now is to keep an eye on Marie, who is walking along a few paces ahead of me, holding on to Mikhail’s arm, as if she were his girlfriend. She won’t let him go and yet I wonder, at the same time, why she’s helping me, when she knows that a meeting with this young man could also mean that I’ll find out where my wife is living.

We arrive. Mikhail makes a point of sitting far away from me; perhaps he wants to avoid getting caught up in a conversation with me. Laughter, champagne, vodka and caviar – I glance at the menu and am horrified to see that the bookseller is spending about a thousand dollars on the entrées alone. There is general chatter; Mikhail is asked what he thought of the afternoon’s event; he says he enjoyed it; he is asked about the book; he says he enjoyed it very much. Then he is forgotten, and attention turns to me – was I happy with how things had gone, was the queue organised to my liking, had the security team been up to scratch? My heart is still pounding, but I present a calm front, I thank them for everything, for the efficient way in which the event was run.

Half an hour of conversation and a lot of vodka later, I can see that Mikhail is beginning to relax. He isn’t the centre of attention any more, he doesn’t need to say very much, he just has to endure it for a little while longer and then he can go. I know he wasn’t lying about the Armenian restaurant, so at least now I have a clue. My wife must still be in Paris! I must pretend to be friendly, try to win his confidence, the initial tensions have all disappeared.

An hour passes. Mikhail looks at his watch and I can see that he is about to leave. I must do something – now. Every time I look at him, I feel more and more insignificant and understand less and less how Esther could have exchanged me for someone who seems so unworldly (she mentioned that he had ‘magical’ powers). However difficult it might be to pretend that I feel perfectly at ease talking to someone who is my enemy, I must do something.

‘Let’s find out a bit more about our reader,’ I say, and there is an immediate silence. ‘Here he is, about to leave at any moment, and he’s hardly said a word about his life. What do you do?’

Despite the number of vodkas he has drunk, Mikhail seems suddenly to recover his sobriety.

‘I organise meetings at the Armenian restaurant.’

‘What does that involve?’

‘I stand on stage and tell stories. And I let the people in the audience tell their stories too.’

‘I do the same thing in my books.’

‘I know, that’s how I first met…‘

He’s going to say who he is!

‘Were you born here?’ asks Marie, thus preventing him from finishing his sentence (‘…how I first met your wife’).

‘I was born in the Kazakhstan steppes.’

Kazakhstan. Who’s going to be brave enough to ask where Kazakhstan is?

‘Where’s Kazakhstan?’ asks the sales representative.

Blessed are those who are not afraid to admit that they don’t know something.

‘I was waiting for someone to ask that,’ and there is an almost gleeful look in Mikhail’s eyes now. ‘Whenever I say where I was born, about ten minutes later people are saying that I’m from Pakistan or Afghanistan…My country is in Central Asia. It has barely 14 million inhabitants in an area far larger than France with its population of 60 million.’

‘So it’s a place where no one can complain about the lack of space, then,’ says my publisher, laughing.

‘It’s a place where, during the last century, no one had the right to complain about anything, even if they wanted to. When the Communist regime abolished private ownership, the livestock were simply abandoned and 48.6 per cent of the population died. Do you understand what that means? Nearly half the population of my country died of hunger between 1932 and 1933.’

Silence falls. After all, tragedies get in the way of celebrations, and one of the people present tries to change the subject. However, I insist that my ‘reader’ tells us more about his country.

‘What are the steppes like?’ I ask.

‘They’re vast plains with barely any vegetation, as I’m sure you know.’

I do know, but it had been my turn to ask a question, to keep the conversation going.

‘I’ve just remembered something about Kazakhstan,’ says my publisher. ‘Some time ago, I was sent a typescript by a writer who lives there, describing the atomic tests that were carried out on the steppes.’

‘Our country has blood in its soil and in its soul. Those tests changed what cannot be changed, and we will be paying the price for many generations to come. We even made an entire sea disappear.’

It is Marie’s turn to speak.

‘No one can make a sea disappear.’

‘I’m twenty-five years old, and that is all the time it took, just one generation, for the water that had been there for millennia to be transformed into dust. Those in charge of the Communist regime decided to divert two rivers, Amu-Darya and Syr-Darya, so that they could irrigate some cotton plantations. They failed, but, by then, it was too late – the sea had ceased to exist, and the cultivated land became a desert.

The lack of water affected the whole climate. Nowadays, vast sandstorms scatter 150,000 tons of salt and dust every year. Fifty million people in five countries were affected by the Soviet bureaucrats’ irresponsible – and irreversible – decision. The little water that was left is polluted and is the source of all kinds of diseases.’

I made a mental note of what he was saying. It could be useful in one of my lectures. Mikhail went on, and his tone of voice was no longer ecological, but tragic.

‘My grandfather says that the Aral Sea was once known as the Blue Sea, because of the colour of its waters. It no longer exists, and yet the people there refuse to leave their houses and move somewhere else: they still dream of waves and fishes, they still have their fishing rods and talk about boats and bait.’

‘Is it true about the atomic tests, though?’ asks my publisher.

‘I think that everyone born in my country feels what the land felt, because every Kazakh carries his land in his blood. For forty years, the plains were shaken by nuclear or thermonuclear bombs, a total of 456 in 1989. Of those tests, 116 were carried out in the open, which amounts to a bomb 2,500 times more powerful than the one that was dropped on Hiroshima during the Second World War. As a result, thousands of people were contaminated by radioactivity and subsequently contracted lung cancer, whilst thousands of children were born with motor deficiencies, missing limbs or mental problems.’

Mikhail looks at his watch.

‘Now, if you don’t mind, I have to go.’

Half of those around the table are sorry, the conversation was just getting interesting. The other half are glad: it’s absurd to talk about such tragic events on such a happy occasion.

Mikhail says goodbye to everyone with a nod of his head and gives me a hug, not because he feels a particular affection for me, but so that he can whisper:

‘As I said before, she’s fine. Don’t worry.’

‘“Don’t worry,” he says. Why should I worry about a woman who left me? It was because of her that I was questioned by the police, splashed all over the front pages of the scandal sheets; it was because of her that I spent all those painful days and nights, nearly lost all my friends and…‘

‘…and wrote A Time to Rend and a Time to Sew. Come on, we’re both adults, with plenty of experience of life. Let’s not deceive ourselves. Of course, you’d like to know how she is. In fact, I’d go further: you’d like to see her.’

‘If you’re so sure about that, why did you help persuade him to come to supper with us? Now I have a clue: he appears every Thursday at that Armenian restaurant.’

‘I know. You’d better follow that up.’

‘Don’t you love me?’

‘More than yesterday and less than tomorrow, as it says on those postcards you can buy in stationery shops. Yes, of course, I love you. I’m hopelessly in love, if you must know. I’m even considering changing my address and coming to live in this huge, empty apartment of yours, but whenever I suggest it, you always change the subject. Nevertheless, I forget my pride and try to explain what a big step it would be for us to live together, and hear you say that it’s too soon for that; perhaps you’re afraid you’ll lose me the way you lost Esther, or perhaps you’re still waiting for her to come back, or perhaps you don’t want to lose your freedom, or are simultaneously afraid of being alone and afraid of living with someone – in short, our relationship’s a complete disaster. But, now that you ask, there’s my answer: I love you very much.’

‘So why did you help?’

‘Because I can’t live for ever with the ghost of a woman who left without a word of explanation. I’ve read your book. I believe that only by finding her and resolving the matter will your heart ever truly be mine. That’s what happened with the neighbour I was in love with. I was close enough to him to be able to see what a coward he was when it came to our relationship, how he could never commit himself to the thing he wanted with all his heart, but which he always felt was too dangerous to actually have. You’ve often said that absolute freedom doesn’t exist; what does exist is the freedom to choose anything you like and then commit yourself to that decision. The closer I was to my neighbour, the more I admired you: a man who decided to go on loving the wife who had abandoned him and who wanted nothing more to do with him. You not only decided to do that, you made your decision public. This is what you say in your book; it’s a passage I know by heart:

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