‘My land isn’t for sale,’ he says.
‘But with that money you could buy a lovely house in town and live out the rest of your days there with your wife, without having to put up with harsh winters and failed harvests.’
‘My farm is not for sale. I was born here and grew up here, and I’m too old to move.’
He suggests that we get an expert from town to come and assess the situation and make a decision – that way, neither of us need get angry with the other. We are, after all, neighbours.
When he leaves, my first reaction is to label him as insensitive and lacking in respect for Mother Earth. Then I feel intrigued: why would he not agree to sell his land? And before the day is over, I realize that it is because his life has only one story, and my neighbour does not want to change that story. Going to live in the town would mean plunging into an unknown world with different values, and maybe he thinks he’s too old to learn.
Is this something peculiar to my neighbour? No. I think it happens to everyone. Sometimes, we are so attached to our way of life that we turn down a wonderful opportunity simply because we don’t know what to do with it. In his case, his farm and his village are the only places he knows, and there is no point in taking any risks. In the case of people who live in the town, they all believe that they must have a university degree, get married, have children, make sure that their children get a degree too, and so on and so on. No one asks themselves: ‘Could I do something different?’
I remember that my barber worked day and night so that his daughter could finish her sociology degree. She finally graduated and, after knocking on many doors, found work as a secretary at a cement works. Yet my barber still used to say very proudly: ‘My daughter’s got a degree.’
Most of my friends, and most of my friends’ children, also have degrees. That doesn’t mean that they’ve managed to find the kind of work they wanted. Not at all. They went to university because someone, at a time when universities were important, said that, in order to rise in the world, you had to have a degree. And thus the world was deprived of some excellent gardeners, bakers, antique dealers, sculptors, and writers. Perhaps this is the moment to review the situation. Doctors, engineers, scientists, and lawyers need to go to university, but does everyone? I’ll let these lines by Robert Frost provide the answer:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Just to conclude the story about my neighbour. The expert came and, to my surprise, showed us a French law which states that any tree has to be at least three metres from another property. Mine are only two metres away, and so I will have to cut them down.
The Japanese journalist asks the usual question: ‘Who are your favourite writers?’
And I give my usual answer: ‘Jorge Amado, Jorge Luis Borges, William Blake and Henry Miller.’
The interpreter looks at me in amazement:
‘Henry Miller?’
Then she realizes that it is not her role to ask questions, and she carries on interpreting. At the end of the interview, I ask her why she was so surprised by my response. Was it perhaps because Henry Miller is not considered to be ‘politically correct’? He was someone who opened up a vast world for me, and his books have an energy and a vitality rarely found in contemporary literature.
‘No, I’m not criticizing Henry Miller. I’m a fan of his too,’ she said. ‘Did you know that he was married to a Japanese woman?’
Of course I knew. I’m not ashamed to be enough of a fan to want to find out everything about a writer and his life. I went to a book fair once just to meet Jorge Amado; I travelled forty-eight hours in a bus to meet Borges (and it was my fault that I didn’t, because when I saw him, I froze and couldn’t say a word); I rang the bell of John Lennon’s apartment in New York (the doorman asked me to leave a letter explaining the reason for my visit and said that John Lennon would phone me, but he never did); I had plans to go to Big Sur to see Henry Miller, but he died before I had saved enough money for the trip.
‘The Japanese woman is called Hoki,’ I said proudly. ‘I also know that there is a museum of his watercolours in Tokyo.’
‘Would you like to meet her tonight?’
What a question! Of course I would like to meet someone who once lived with one of my idols. I imagine she must receive visitors and requests for interviews from all over the world; after all, she lived with Miller for nearly ten years. Surely she won’t want to waste her time on a mere fan? But if the translator says it’s possible, I had better take her word for it – the Japanese always keep their word.
I spend the rest of the day anxiously waiting. We get into a taxi, and everything starts to seem very strange. We stop in a street where the sun probably never shines, because a railway viaduct passes right over it. The translator points to a second-rate bar on the second floor of a crumbling building.
We go up some stairs, enter a deserted bar, and there is Hoki Miller.
To conceal my surprise, I exaggerate my enthusiasm for her ex-husband. She takes me to a room in the back, where she has created a little museum – a few photos, two or three signed watercolours, a book with a dedication written in it, and nothing more. She tells me that she met him when she was studying for an MA in Los Angeles and that, in order to make ends meet, she used to play piano in a restaurant and sing French songs (in Japanese). Miller had supper there once and loved the songs (he had spent much of his life in Paris); they went out a few times, and he asked her to marry him.
I see that there is a piano in the bar – as if she were returning to the past, to the day when they first met. She tells me some wonderful stories about their life together, about the problems that arose from the difference in their ages (Miller was over fifty, and Hoki not yet twenty), about the time they spent together. She explains that the heirs from his other marriages inherited everything, including the rights to the books, but that this didn’t matter because the experience of being with him outweighed any monetary compensation.
I ask her to play the same song that first caught Miller’s attention all those years ago. She does this with tears in her eyes, and sings ‘Autumn Leaves’ (‘Feuilles mortes’).
The translator and I are moved too. The bar, the piano, the voice of that Japanese woman echoing through the empty room, not caring about the success of the other exwives, or the rivers of money that must flow from Miller’s books, or the international fame she could be enjoying now.
‘There was no point in squabbling over the inheritance: love was enough,’ she said at last, sensing what we were feeling. Yes, in the light of that complete absence of bitterness or rancour, I think love really was enough.
At first, Theo Wierema was merely a very persistent individual. For five years, he kept sending letters to my office in Barcelona, inviting me to give a talk in The Hague, in Holland.
For five years, my office replied that my diary was full. My diary was not, in fact, always full, but a writer is not necessarily someone who speaks well in public. Besides, everything I need to say is in the books and articles I write, which is why I always try to avoid giving lectures.
Theo found out that I was going to record a programme for a Dutch television channel. When I went downstairs to start filming, he was waiting for me in the hotel lobby. He introduced himself and asked if he could go with me, saying: ‘I’m