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.
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