Several weeks later I went to join him in Madrid and our collaboration began. Buñuel’s face lit up, and he sent the wine steward off for two bottles of Pradel.

I answered - truthfully - that not only did I drink wine but made it as well, since I come from a family of wine growers. I was nervous and arrived punctually Buñuel received me with characteristic kindness, escorted me to a table in the dining room, sat me down, and said, “Do you drink wine?” I realized that this was not a casual remark but rather something really important. Buñuel saw one of us, each day, at his hotel.

The producer, Serge Silberman (who was to become our faithful collaborator), sent me to Cannes along with several other writers. Buñuel was looking for a French scriptwriter, preferably young, as I was, to collaborate on the adaptation of Mirbeau’s novel Diary of a Chambermaid. We met for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival, in 1963. I’m not even counting the walks, the drinks, the films we watched together, the film festivals. When today I amuse myself by making useless calculations, I realize that Buñuel and I shared more than two thousand meals together and that on more than fifteen hundred occasions he knocked on my door, notes in hand, ready to begin work. That same night we returned to Mexico City. At four o’clock in the afternoon he announced that his life as a filmmaker was over. He spoke of some “menace,” and one could tell that he was worried about something. Buñuel had barely arrived in San Jose Purua when he felt unwell, ill at ease (this was 1979 and Luis, who always said he was “born with the century,” was therefore seventy-nine years old). The screenplay we were working on was for a film to be called A Sumptuous Ceremony, in homage to Andre Breton, who defined eroticism as “a sumptuous ceremony in an underground passage.” From the outset our watchwords were “terror” and “eroticism.” We imagined a young girl in a prison cell receiving a visit from a phantom bishop a trap door led to an underground passageway and to a boat filled with explosives for blowing up the Louvre museum. It is a semitropical paradise set in a green canyon - a bit too hot, in truth, for Buñuel liked rain, fog, the north. We were staying in the spa at San Jose Purua in southwest Mexico where, for more than twenty years, Buñuel had gone to write his scripts. At four o’clock one afternoon Luis Buñuel decided that he would make no more films.

Luis bunuel my last sigh