He opened up the black linen jacket he was wearing and pulled out a shiny object. He placed it on the table and pushed it toward me. “Take it,” he invited.

It was the most fabulous pen I had ever seen, the queen of all Montblancs. Its nib was made of gold and platinum, and had I still been a child I would have thought that only masterpieces could flow from it.

“They say it originally belonged to Victor Hugo, although I’d only take this in a metaphorical sense.”

“Did fountain pens exist in Victor Hugo’s day?” I asked.

“The first piston fountain pen was patented in 1827 by a Romanian called Petrache Poenaru, but it wasn’t until the eighteen eighties that it was perfected and began to be commercialized on a large scale.”

“So technically it could have been Victor Hugo’s.”

“If you insist. . . . Let’s say that from the dubious hands of Monsieur Hugo it passed on to the no less illustrious and more likely hands of one Daniel Sempere, a good friend of mine. Eventually it crossed my path, and I’ve been keeping it all these years, waiting for the day when someone, someone like you, came to collect it. About time.”

I shook my head energetically, pushing the pen back toward his hands. “I won’t hear of it. I can’t accept it. It’s yours.”

“A pen doesn’t belong to anybody. It’s a free spirit that stays with one while that person needs it.”

“That’s what a character in one of your novels said.”

“They always accuse me of repeating myself. It’s a disease that affects all novelists.”

“I’ve never caught it. A sign that I’m not one.”

“Just give it time. Take it.”

“No.”

Carax shrugged and put the pen back. “That’s because you’re not ready yet. A pen is like a cat—it only follows the person who will feed it. And just as it comes, it goes.”

“What do you think of my proposal?”

Carax took the last spoonful of his ice cream. “This is what we’ll do. We’ll write it together. You give it all the force of youth, and I’ll put in the old dog’s tricks.”

I was stunned. “Are you serious?”

He stood up and tapped my shoulder. “Thanks for the ice cream. Next time it’s on me.”

* * *

There was a next time, and many more. Carax always asked for two scoops of strawberry ice cream, whether it was summer or winter, but he never ate the rolled wafer. I would take what I’d written and he would go through it, cross things out, and rearrange the words on the page as if they were notes on a music score.

“I’m not sure this beginning is the right one,” I would say.

“A story has no beginning and no end, only points of entry.”

Every time we met, Carax went carefully through the new pages I handed him. He pulled his pen open and made notes that he would then use to point out, with endless patience, what I’d done wrong, which was almost everything. Point by point he would show me what didn’t work, giving me the reason why and explaining in detail how it could be fixed. His analysis was extraordinarily meticulous. For every error I thought I’d made, he’d show me fifteen whose existence I hadn’t even suspected. He pulled apart every word, every sentence, and every paragraph, and put them together again like a goldsmith working with a magnifying glass. He did all this without condescension, as if he were an engineer telling an apprentice how combustion or steam engines work. Sometimes he would question turns of phrase and ideas that I thought were the only things likely to be saved that day, most of which I’d copied from him.