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 December 25. 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."
"Saint Boniface decided to 'christianize' a ritual intended to honor 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 civilization, 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 realize 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 Favor 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,