The Writer usually drove down in May, in a car packed to the roof with books and exotic foods. I would help her to unload it, because she had a bad back. She went about in an orthopaedic collar; it seems she had had an accident in the past. Or perhaps her spine was ruined by writing. She looked like a survivor from Pompeii — as if she were entirely coated in ash. Her face was ash-grey, including her lips, and her eyes were grey, and so was her long hair tightly gathered into a small bun on the top of her head. If I hadn’t known her so well, I’m sure I would have read her books. But as I did know her, I was afraid to open them. What if I found myself described in them in a way that I couldn’t fathom? Or my favourite places, which for her are something completely different from what they are to me? In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind — that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences; in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality — its inexpressibility.