Read Never Any End to Paris Online

Authors: Enrique Vila-Matas

Tags: #Fiction, #General

Never Any End to Paris (10 page)

41

 

Even though I’d come across a real assassin while writing about a lettered one, I rejected the idea of giving the narrator of my novel the look of the malicious Kikí. Oddly, a few days later, almost by pure chance, at a party at Marguerite’s, I encountered the extremely perturbing look of a girl that seemed to me ideal for my femme fatale, my murderess.

We’ve all fallen prey to uttering hackneyed and schmaltzy phrases, referring to the previous night as “an unforgettable evening.” But, at the end of life, only those who really haven’t experienced unforgettable evenings are ridiculous, as Pessoa would say. I think I’ll be spared from being ridiculous because I remember at least one evening that was truly unforgettable. A night in Marguerite Duras’s house. A lively get-together, with many guests; I felt like I was in a film, as if I were in the reception room of the French vice-consul’s house in Calcutta, since the music playing on the record player was the soundtrack to
India Song
composed by Carlos d’Alessio.

Among the guests, there was a young actress, with a face of absolute beauty, an actress not yet famous but who would be before long, a girl named Isabelle Adjani. She had just filmed
L’Histoire d’Adèle H
with Truffaut, but the film hadn’t been released yet and on that day she wasn’t yet a famous actress. I thought I could grow to like her more than my platonic love, more than Martine Simonet herself. But I didn’t dare say a word to her the whole of that long evening. In fact, I barely spoke during the entire party, which was carried along, very animatedly, by Dyonis Mascolo, Edgar Morin (who sang several songs by Joan Manuel Serrat), and Duras. I spent the whole night naively waiting for Adjani to fall in love with me. And only at the end of the party, since this hadn’t happened, did I resort to alcohol so I could dare say something; I drank three glasses of cognac in a row and finally, taking advantage of a brief lull in the general conversation, I said that if I were a film director I’d immediately hire Isabelle. I said it like someone writing a love letter, a ridiculous love letter. Then, after the huge effort this took for me, I sank back deep into the sofa. The ceiling fan spun, but as slowly as in a nightmare. Everyone looked at me and laughed thinking I’d spoken ironically, as everyone, except me, knew that she’d just finished filming with Truffaut. I didn’t get it, I thought my brief intervention had gone down rather well, and then, with the help of the fourth cognac, I dared to look Adjani straight in the eye, trying to look at her as steadily and profoundly as possible.

At that moment, an ill-timed fly landed on my left eye and, having to swat it away, I looked away from her. Annoyed, I thought flies were always sticking their noses in where they weren’t wanted. When I resumed my steady and profound gaze, I discovered at that precise instant Adjani was giving me a look as icy as it was terrifying. I was disabled for the rest of that unforgettable evening, as I saw with total clarity and horror that if those eyes could kill, not a soul would be left alive. But every cloud has a silver lining. I realized that, as compensation, I’d found the femme fatale for my book. Now I knew exactly what sort of look my
lettered assassin
would have.

“Thanks for being so gallant,” Adjani said sarcastically. And everyone laughed a lot, as if they found it funny that the nightmarish ceiling fan was turning even more slowly.

42

 

Among the contributions drugs made to the construction of
The Lettered Assassin
, three stand out above the rest: 1) Grand questions about whether the visual reality accepted by common sense has anything to do with true reality. 2) The discovery of my taste for simulation and transvestism. That unforgettable, dangerous day in the Café Blaise, after the incident with Kikí, I walked home to my
chambre
, and once I was in it, many hours before I returned to normality and to reality, I realized I felt very bad about my body and also my bourgeois, corseted way of dressing and began to change my clothes frenetically, searching the mirror for a different presence from the usual one; I ended up dressed as Hemingway in his female version, that is, I dressed up as a little boy with a girl’s blonde ringlets, just as Hemingway’s mother dressed him when he was little, in pink gingham with a flowery hat, a look, by the way, that has always made me think that Ernest’s entire virile-literary career can be read as an extreme reaction to the image of the effeminate mommy’s boy. 3) The discovery of the fragility of my incipient writing, mainly attributable to my scant experience as a reader, which led me to decide, given that I could barely subsist on literary material (I had little reading experience), that I would draw sustenance from the visual, cinematographic lessons the drug had provided me.

Okay! Since this three-day lecture is an ironic review of the years of my youth in Paris, I can now find it very easy to laugh about the
non
-literary material that began to nourish
The Lettered Assassin
from that day on. Certainly an author who has come to the experience of writing after having imbibed the contents of the family library seems much more respectable than one who has begun to construct his literary edifice after an acid trip. The quality of my early poetics seems scant if, as I’m saying, it was basically sustained by a drug that simply widened my visual field of perception. And yet, I’m not sure now that I should reproach myself at all, rather quite the reverse. Because while it’s true that later on I read quite a lot and my literary knowledge was strengthened, it’s also true that LSD, by opening up my visual field, was not at the time by any means an insignificant source of inspiration. Besides, some of those perceptions of a distinct reality have lasted firmly and still today carry a highly remarkable energy, and are the reason I can laugh at realist writers, for example, who duplicate reality and so impoverish it.

43

 

A few days after the party with Isabelle Adjani at Duras’s house, I was sitting calmly in the Flore waiting for Jeanne Boutade when the person at the next table, a young man who said he was called Yves, began talking to me just like that, in somewhat accelerated speech at first, but soon acquiring a slow and lucid rhythm. He went from asking me if I liked
croques-monsieur
— he scarcely heard my courteous reply — to talking about the neighborhood, Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He’d spent his whole life there, he told me. He was very fond of Rue Mazarine, where he’d been born. When he was a very young boy, Saint-Germain was still a provincial neighborhood. I looked at him quite carefully: I saw a sweet smile beneath curly hair and two myopic or worried eyes behind a pair of round glasses. He liked me, that seemed totally obvious. I entrusted my fate to Jeanne Boutade and hoped she’d be on time and help me escape, without offending Yves, from that small misunderstanding.

In two minutes we’d covered seven or eight different topics and I don’t know how we settled on the subject of May ’68. Just a few years had passed since those events, he said, but it felt like an eternity. I thought he was right about this. Since I’d arrived in Paris I’d barely thought, nor had it occurred to me to think, that I was in the city where, just a few years before, events had taken place, according to what I’d been able to read, that had convulsed the Western world. If I really thought about it, none of the people I spent time with talked about May ’68. And besides, that student revolution mattered very little to me; I felt only a certain curiosity to know what had happened.

“Nothing happened,” Yves told me. “Nothing?” I asked. “That’s right, nothing. All I remember from it all is a feeling of great emotion as dawn broke, that day we thought the world was going to change,” he said. “What sort of emotion?” I asked, sincerely interested. “We were on the barricades and no one was tired and it seemed like Paris was waking up from years of a dull and cretinous life. We had a very exciting moment of collective inspiration, started to sing Jacques Dutronc and that really seemed like the Revolution:
Il est cinq heures, Paris s’éveille . . .”

“And that was it?” I asked him. He became thoughtful, concentrating very hard. At that moment, as on so many other evenings at that hour, Roland Barthes walked into the Flore and quickly glanced around at the café fauna. Two steps behind him, and it even looked as if she was with him, came Jeanne Boutade, who quickly noticed my awkward situation with the man at the next table and, to give me a hand, she said that we had to get going if we didn’t want to be late for the party Copi was having over in la Bastille. I stood up and gave a sign to the thoughtful and concentrating Yves to let him know I was leaving.

“The Revolution,” he said then, with melancholy, “reminds me of the definition of life a family friend, Dr. Gottfried Benn, always used to give. Life, the doctor told us, lasts twenty-four hours and at most is just congestion.”

44

 

It was raining and the wind was very strong, and in this violent mixture the New York air seemed like a shattered mirror. I was walking with Sonia Orwell down Park Avenue, near the building where Khrushchev used to stay when he went to the UN and in the middle of a general assembly, possibly loaded with vodka and humor, thumped his desk with his own shoe. Sonia Orwell and I walked slowly, as if it were a warm, calm day under a turquoise sky and the hard, slippery streets were long Caribbean beaches with pearly reflections.

I had seen Sonia Orwell, outside of that dream, only once in real life, one morning in Paris when, as I passed the third floor on my way down from the garret, I saw that Duras’s door was ajar and thought my landlady must be lurking behind it, poised to ask for the rent I owed her for the umpteenth time.

Somewhat terrified, I tiptoed past the crack in the door, but it opened suddenly and I saw a strikingly beautiful older woman who was sweeping the hallway very happily and who looked at me. “Is Marguerite home?” I asked, flustered; I asked this because I thought I should say something. “No, she’s gone out,” the woman answered. “Will she be back soon?” She thought for a minute, smiling, she seemed to know me well, to know exactly who I was and even to know — as Big Brother would have — the precise amount of money I owed to Marguerite. “Listen,” she told me as she began sweeping the landing and the stairs, “no one goes very far when they know the joy of coming home again.” Logically confused, wondering if this lady was suggesting I return to the garret, I decided to resume as soon as possible my habitual headlong rush down the stairs. Later, that night, Adolfo Arrieta told me the woman was Sonia Orwell, who was staying with Duras for a few days. I thought that one day I’d be able to tell my grandchildren that I saw George Orwell’s wife sweeping a staircase.

But I don’t have children, I won’t have grandchildren. Instead of grandchildren, ladies and gentlemen, I have you. But I don’t want you to think I’m just a man who saw Orwell’s wife sweeping a staircase. You should stick with the dream about New York, it’s more poetic.

45

 

A few days before I was born, in March 1948, Hemingway, who was approaching his fiftieth birthday and deep in a creative crisis, fell in love in Venice with an eighteen-year-old girl named Adriana Ivancich. “That merely imaginary love,” she told me when I interviewed her at her home last year.

Fifty years is nothing, thought Hemingway, as the disconcerting birthday grew nearer. In those days, he had the impression he was washed up as a writer, but at the same time he resisted accepting this. Perhaps the fault lay with Cuba, living on that island. Needing to stimulate his creative imagination, put it into action, he left his fighting cocks and his daiquiris in the Floridita bar in Havana and returned to Europe, the center of the art world.

Venice became Hemingway’s new mistress. He and his fourth wife, Mary, settled happily in the Venetian winter on the island of Torcello and later in Cortina. He shot duck and partridge; he tried to write. “He needed, though he did not yet know it, the rejuvenating spark of a relationship with a surrogate daughter — autumnal, deciduous, minimally tinged with the erotic, painfully delicious,” wrote Anthony Burgess.

What is it about Venice that makes it the ideal place to fall in love? He found this surrogate daughter in an eighteen-year-old girl named Adriana Ivancich, soft-spoken, Catholic, devout, feminine, with the kind of femininity that was rapidly disappearing from America. He saw his attitude toward her as completely paternal, but turned her into the heroine of a novel,
Across the River and Into the Trees
, a dreadful novel, it has to be said, with a transparent plot: the story of an old soldier who knows he’s going to die. He dies in Venice. The picture on the cover — not a very good one — was drawn by Adriana. When I went to see her last year, she explained that she’d burned all of Hemingway’s letters because she was in love with a young man, who thought it a scandal that she had any kind of relationship with the old writer. “A young
innamorato
,” she told me, “who threatened not to marry me if I didn’t burn the letters. I’ve regretted destroying them so many times! And the worst of it is, do you know what? The young man ended up not marrying me.”

Two years after the failure of the novel about the old soldier dying in Venice, Adriana also drew the picture — nothing special — for the cover of
The Old Man and the Sea
, and this time the young Italian brought Hemingway more luck, as the novel revived his reputation as a writer worldwide and contributed to his being awarded the Nobel Prize. Mary, Hemingway’s fourth and last wife, always tolerated her husband’s amorous adventures because she realized that he needed a young muse to go on. He won the Nobel Prize, but again felt washed up. When he was alone thinking of life and literature, he knew he was finished — with life and with novels — perhaps because Venice was behind him. He started to suffer a general physical and nervous deterioration. In 1960 he started work on a book of recollections called
A Moveable Feast
. He shut himself up in a very gloomy house, in an appalling house he owned in Ketchum, Idaho. You could see it was a house to die in.

When, after his suicide,
A Moveable Feast
was published, the book emerged as a kind of autobiography of his years of bohemia and literary education. In this book he says of Paris — and now this, unlike the abrupt end to his life, seems ironic — that there is never any end to it and “the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received a return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.”

Burgess regards the prose in this book as pure Hemingway, simple and very evocative, life-accepting, yet, as always in his work, touched by melancholy. It is a prose that speaks always of stoic endurance in the face of adversity. Although this endurance would end up shattered by a shot to the head, his melancholy melody is youthful. And his book about Paris blows like a hurricane-force wind into the minds of young men and women just starting to write. It is a book for future writers.

“That
brutto
shot!” Adriana Ivancich said last year when I went to see her, “I would have liked to have done something for him, but distance and indecision, you know what I mean, prevented me. And to think that young suitor, my
innamorato
, didn’t even marry me, the fool.”

Not knowing how to end my visit to Adriana — the conversation with her felt like Paris, there was never any end to it, and I knew I had to leave before it was too late — I told her I didn’t know if she’d ever thought of it, but even the worst of Hemingway’s writing reminds us that to commit oneself to literature one has first to commit oneself to life. I thought this might make her cry, but to tell the truth she didn’t, among other things because she didn’t understand a word of what I’d said. I decided to leave as soon as I could. And then she said something with the intention of making
me
cry. “Now I’m as old as my father, who’s dead.” I decided not to delay my departure any further. I kissed her hand ceremoniously and left. I remembered a phrase I’d heard my mother say many times: “One has to know how to swim just well enough to avoid having to save anyone else.”

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