I have come to this place of almost total isolation as a result of not replying to others, of not having worked on genuine friendships or neglecting the ones I had. My solitude is the result of never having cared about anyone except myself. And little by little people disappear. On days like today, my loneliness is a terrible burden, it doesn’t matter that I’m accustomed to it, that I’m an expert loner. I don’t like it, and it often distresses me. That’s why I need to be constantly involved in working on a film, but although that’s fine right now, with three projects lined up, there are always holidays, there’s bloody Holy Week, when all activity grinds to a halt because people in my office are off, and my brother and the few friends I have leave Madrid.

I shake off my boredom, get dressed, and go out into the street. Madrid is empty, except for the pavement opposite where I live and walk, the Paseo de Pintor Rosales, where there are a lot of people lounging on café terraces or strolling around, families with children. On a bench I see a Latin American couple, engaged or recently married, they are both very short and are looking excitedly at the passersby. I also see a lesbian couple, almost identical in their neutral dress style, their casually masculine hairstyles. They’re also quite short. They are older. I’d love to know more about them. I’m glad that they have found each other. I am always impressed by the silence of couples.

“To write, you must refuse yourself to others; refuse them your presence, your love. You must disappoint your friends and your children. For me, this discipline is a source of satisfaction, even happiness, and at the same time, the cause of my melancholy,” Slimani says in her book. I don’t agree, or not entirely. I’ve taken this paragraph literally and it’s brought me no happiness or satisfaction, but lots of melancholy. It’s unpleasant, at least to me, to realize that you’re begrudging with your time, even if the business of writing and directing films is one that completely absorbs you. Maybe Leïla Slimani is right that her work and mine require countless hours of isolation, but I deeply miss the contact with other people’s lives, and it’s difficult to go back to how things were, to a time when I was a social creature and led a more communal life, because as you get older, not everything works in your favor, it’s not enough to meet people. Picking up the phone and randomly calling the usual friends isn’t always an incentive. And I think that’s very detrimental, especially for someone like me, who has fed on everything going on around me to write my screenplays—my mother, my childhood, my time with the priests in Catholic school, my years as a young adult in Madrid, the countless friends I hung out with during La Movida, the conversations overheard, the weirdness of some of those friendships, the pain that was caused by intimate personal relationships. If there was one thing I knew for certain when I was young, it was that I’d never be bored. Now I am bored. And that is a kind of defeat.

I like writers who talk about the act of writing and constantly quote from other authors. Slimani’s book is full of reflections about writing. “I don’t think writers write to gain relief,” she says. I agree. “A writer has an unhealthy attachment to their sufferings, their nightmares. Nothing would be more terrible than being cured of this attachment.” I’m not sure. It’s true that you don’t write when you’re happy, or write about happy characters. Tension and conflict are like beats in music, they are indispensable, they give the story a sort of framework, a structure and a rhythm.