Back to the difficult subject … My relapse into searching for pornography last year, I mean. I’ll need to go back to some earlier events. Towards the end of May ’98, I met Chl, and then, around the middle of July, our romantic relationship began. This made the atmosphere in the house where I was living unbearable, because the woman who at the time was my wife didn’t look kindly on this new relationship, even though by that point she and I were merely living under the same roof and our relationship had ended around two years before. Little by little a kind of war was gathering force, becoming more and more terrible, erupting into torturous everyday scenes, and in the end there was nothing for it but to move in with some friends who knew about the situation and had invited me to stay. I planned to be in that house for ten days; I didn’t leave for six months.

I’ve skimmed over what I called that ‘kind of war’ because it affects the privacy of another person, my ex-wife, with whom these days I have a very good friendship. It took me a lot of work to get to this stage, but I think it was worth it, because despite the various ways she’s incompatible with me when it comes to life as a couple, she’s a wonderful woman. I don’t want to go into my own suffering in those months, either, which was made bearable only by the magic of Chl; I’ll simply say that one fine day I realised my ex-wife was right to be hurt, and I put a stop to all our arguments and waited for time to soothe her pain and heal the wound. This realisation came to me by means of a dream, which I can’t remember very well right now.