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There you are.

This list of what we do and don’t have in common may interest no one apart from ourselves.

But that’s how it is.

It’s been established.

The second thing I’ve enjoyed is that in the course of and because of this exchange, I’ve said things that I would have otherwise probably never said in the same way.

I’ve already explained about my pathological taste for secrecy.

And when I say pathological, I mean that because of the partitions, compartmentalizing, lies that are false and false clues that are true, through—as in my novels earlier—multiplying the diversions whose aim is to send the voyeurs to see whether I am somewhere else, I myself, as you put it, sometimes slip up. In such cases, I remind myself of a secret agent who knows that he’s on a mission but doesn’t know which one or for whom, or of an excessively wily actor losing himself in the panoply of his masks and ruses.

That’s just to say that it would never occur to me either to take up my pen to write my memoirs or still less my confessions.

Even around my journal I’ve built up a truly paranoid protection system, allowing my legal heirs to destroy it immediately should I die without having had time to use it or destroy it myself.

By the way, that’s a colorful story.

One night two years ago I was at the bar in the Hotel Excelsior in Venice with Olivier Corpet, the director of IMEC, the Institute of Contemporary Publishing Archives, who is thus a professional, an expert in and fanatic about the archives of writers.

We were accompanying Alain Robbe-Grillet, who had come to present C’est Gradiva qui vous appelle to the festival, and we were therefore surrounded by the usual fauna of starlets, fly-by-night producers, and gossip columnists. While waiting for the man of the moment to appear and in order to kill some time, we began to chat about one thing and another.

Corpet put pressure on me, as he does whenever we meet, to start thinking about storing my archives with him.

I teased him, as I also always do, about the twenty thousand and something pages of this fantastic journal full of secrets, one more explosive than the next, which he will never get to hold in his hands because, if I die suddenly and without having been able to use it as I would like to (e.g., as material for a real and lengthy novel), my secretary has been given an order to shred them.

Then he looked at me in a way he’d never done before, with a steady gaze, a Buddhist stillness, and said in a soft voice, almost too soft, each word seeming loaded, “I don’t want to upset you but archives are my thing, and I know all about these journals, correspondences, papers kept under lock and key while a writer’s alive. There’s a law, which, as an expert and fanatic, I can tell you brooks no exception. There is no example—do you understand, not a one—of a document of that kind that really was destroyed and escaped from literary curiosity. Let’s save time. I’m sure you’ve organized everything, I’m not questioning the loyalty of those close to you, but I also know that in one way or another—don’t ask me how, the number of scenarios is infinite—a chink will appear in the armor. A betrayal? An emotion? Someone who loves you too much and at the last instant will not have the heart, on top of the sorrow of your death, to burn your papers? An indiscretion? An error on the part of the bank where I imagine you store the document? Anything’s possible, literally anything, as history has more imagination than man. Whatever measures you take, there will be a bug, a failure, a ruse, a grimace on the part of history, and your journal, like everybody else’s, will end up in IMEC …”

I slept badly that night.

That conversation haunted me for weeks.

If I’d been to the Delphic oracle and had learned the hour of my death, I could hardly have been more agitated.

I used those weeks to set up a complicated system, which in my opinion is one of a kind, whose function was to thwart Corpet’s theorem and prediction.

From Kafka and Max Brod to Henry