"Of course I do."
"I don't think you love me anymore. You're not jealous. You don't care. Do I normally get back home at two in the morning?"
"Didn't you say you were a free man?"
"And I am."
"In that case, it's normal that you should get back home at two in the morning and do whatever you want to do. If I were your mother, I'd be worried, but you're a grown-up, aren't you? You men should stop behaving as if you wanted the women in your life to treat you like children."
"I don't mean that kind of worried. I'm talking about jealousy."
"Would you prefer it if I made a scene right now, over breakfast?"
"No, don't do that, the neighbors will hear."
"I don't care about the neighbors. I won't make a scene because I don't feel like it. It's been hard for me, but I've finally accepted what you told me in Zagreb, and I'm trying to get used to the idea. Meanwhile, if it makes you happy, I can always pretend to be jealous, angry, crazy, or whatever."
"As I said, you seem strange. I'm beginning to think I'm not important in your life anymore."
"And I'm beginning to think you've forgotten there's a journalist waiting for you in the sitting room, who is quite possibly listening to our conversation."
Ah, the journalist. I go on automatic pilot, because I know what questions he will ask. I know how the interview will begin ("Let's talk about your new novel. What's the main message?"), and I know how I will respond ("If I wanted to put across a message, I'd write a single sentence, not a book.").
I know he'll ask me what I feel about the critics, who are usually very hard on my work. I know that he will end by asking: "And have you already started writing a new book? What projects are you working on now?" To which I will respond: "That's a secret."
The interview begins as expected:
"Let's talk about your new book. What's the main message?"
"If I wanted to put across a message, I'd write a single sentence, not a book."
"And why do you write?"
"Because that's my way of sharing my feelings with others."
This phrase is also part of my automatic pilot script, but I stop and correct myself:
"Although that particular story could be told in a different way."
"In a different way? Do you mean you're not happy with A Time to Rend and a Time to Sew?"
"No, on the contrary, I'm very pleased with the book, but I'm not so pleased with the answer I've just given you. Why do I write? The real answer is this: I write because I want to be loved."
The journalist eyed me suspiciously: What kind of confession was this?
"I write because when I was an adolescent, I was useless at football, I didn't have a car or much of an allowance, and I was pretty much of a weed."
I was making a huge effort to keep talking. The conversation with Marie had reminded me of a past that no longer made any sense; I needed to talk about my real personal history, in order to become free of it. I went on:
"I didn't wear trendy clothes either. That's all the girls in my class were interested in, and so they just ignored me. At night, when my friends were out with their girlfriends, I spent my free time creating a world in which I could be happy: my companions were writers and their books. One day, I wrote a poem for one of the girls in the street where I lived. A friend found the poem in my room and stole it, and when we were all together, he showed it to the entire class. Everyone laughed. They thought it was ridiculous--I was in love!
"The only one who didn't laugh was the girl I wrote the poem for. The following evening, when we went to the theater, she managed to fix things so that she sat next to me, and she held my hand. We left the theater hand in hand. There was ugly, puny, untrendy me strolling along with the girl all the boys in the class fancied."
I paused. It was as if I were going back into the past, to the moment when her hand touched mine and changed my life.
"And all because of a poem," I went on. "A poem showed me that by writing and revealing my invisible world, I could compete on equal terms with the visible world of my classmates: physical strength, fashionable clothes, cars, being good at sports."
The journalist was slightly surprised, and I was even more surprised. He managed to compose himself, though, and a