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I I went to Lyon because an organisation called Villa Fondebrider invited me to give a talk on the relationship between fiction and reality as part of a series of International Literary Meetings I accepted the invitation because I had never been there and I wanted to get to know the city Also, two of my favourite writers, John Banville and Rick Moody, were taking part in the symposium This question of the connections between fiction and reality, which is touched upon more and more each day, was a topic about which I had already written an infinite number of times and in a variety of formats, and it seemed like the time had come for me to arrive at a firm position on the subject, even if it was one that I myself lacked faith in   I still remember how, throughout the flight, I thought about the absurd things I imagined I would find in Lyon, and how I ended up falling asleep When I woke up we had already arrived In the airport an imbecilic-looking character was waiting for me (I had a bad feeling about him from the moment I saw him), a young taxi driver holding a placard on which he had written – very badly, with three grotesque spelling mistakes – my name   Usually, the taxi drivers who do this kind of job do it in a routine, bureaucratic manner They exchange a few short words with you and then drop you off, with the efficiency required, in your hotel, and nothing more My taxi driver, however, was in the mood for talking and nosing around in my business Noticing that my French was not perfect, he suggested we speak in Portuguese, his mother tongue, which was a pain as my Portuguese is worse than my French   Halfway through the journey he confessed that he didn’t really know how to get to the Hôtel des Artistes, where I was meant to be staying After explaining that he had only received his taxi driver’s licence three days ago, he started to make use of the traffic lights in the outskirts of Lyon to consult a map of the