Never Any End to Paris (11 page)

46

I wasn’t prepared for failure or, to put it a better way, I knew that, when failure arrived, I wouldn’t be able to endure it. Perhaps because of this I did everything I could not to finish
The Lettered Assassin
and thus delay the arrival of the beginning of the end, the arrival of a foreseeable disaster. Though I was writing, I was afraid to write (especially afraid of finishing my book), I suspected this would lead me straight to failure. Similiarly, though I slept with women, in general I was afraid of doing so, afraid they’d find me sexually timid, disappointing. I was afraid of writing and of women. Irony would have helped me but, since I was scarcely acquainted with it, there was nothing it could do for me. Irony would have been perfect for de-dramatizing it all and letting me laugh at myself, reducing the intensity of my fear of writing and women. I’m sure that irony would have increased my self-confidence. But I scarcely knew what it was. Nevertheless, I was given an unexpected hand by some transvestite friends, who were able to point me in the direction of irony as well as to lessen my fear of women.

I remember very well the somewhat contemptible way my mind worked in those days: I became convinced that, as incredible as it might seem, there were beings in the world even more fragile than my feeble self, there were some people who needed my help and attention, and these people were none other than the neighborhood transvestites. It was that simple, and that strange. That’s what brought me close to Marie-France, Vicky Vaporú, Amapola, and Jeanne Boutade. I will never forget them; they were a great help to me unbeknownst to them. This contemptible but useful feeling of believing myself necessary to them — attributable to the moral poverty of youth — ended up giving me self-confidence. I used to go over to my transvestite friends’ houses and, if they had a problem, I would advise them what to do. In exchange they advised me, too, and helped me take a step forward, to know how to be less scared around women. After all, they thought of themselves as more womanly than women.

For a few months — the time it took to film
Tam Tam
, Adolfo Arrieta’s underground film, the film with the most transvestites per square foot in the history of cinema — most of my social interaction was with transvestites. The filming contributed to an increase not only in my confidence with women, but also in my writing, since day after day Arrieta’s aesthetic facilitated all kinds of happy discoveries for me, the lively cinematographic raw material that ended up being useful for creating my literary world, for creating
The Lettered Assassin
: mirror games, changes of appearance (applied even to the text itself), the erotics of transformation and, above all, my poetic prose viewed as a celebration. In fact, Arrieta’s whole film was a party. It begins with a few scenes in New York in which the camera of the legendary filmmaker Jonas Mekas focuses on the small
journal
of a young writer (Javier Grandes) who is expected at a party in Paris. The party lasts as long as the film does.
Tam Tam
is the story of this continuous, boundless party, which takes place without interruption in Paris, by way of the south of Spain (Marbella), in an apartment of all apartments: that house in Paris where everyone is waiting for Grandes, who, being in New York, doesn’t show up, but is thoughtful enough to send his twin brother.

When it premiered, the film was seen, perhaps somewhat rashly, as a
cinéma-verité
feature on the world of the new generation of bohemian artists of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. “The audience,” declared Arrieta, “thinks everything in the film is real and say it’s a snob’s film as do the critics. However, those very
chic
ladies who walk around among young millionaires are mostly transvestites. After filming with me, they go and perform in the show at the Carrousel cabaret.”

What Arrieta was actually making was punk cinema in the French style, and with its apparent excess of realism he was years ahead even of his compatriot Almodóvar. “An excess of realism. In the transvestite there is an enhanced femininity (women imitate
them
), but Arrieta just directs them as actresses, without insisting on excessive cosmetics or the easily flamboyant aspects of the situation,” Severo Sarduy wrote about the film.

The central nucleus, festive Paris, was filmed in several Parisian houses that pretended to be just one, so that the shooting of
Tam Tam
was in some ways a huge traveling
fiesta
and the film could easily have been given the title of Hemingway’s book,
A Moveable Feast
. In this film not even the lighthearted plot was what it seemed to be. Being involved as an actor helped me lose some of my fear of writing and of women, and so my terror of failure gradually decreased, you could say my fear of failure in the aspects of life I considered most important gradually decreased the intensity of my fear of total failure. Although failure hadn’t yet arrived, why should I kid myself, I knew that sooner or later it would. All I had to do was finish the novel.

47

The memory of Bouvier the bohemian surfaces clearly today from my dark past as an apprentice lover and novice writer. It’s a clear, sunny morning, it must be March 1974, not long since I arrived in the city; it’s cold. Barthes hasn’t gone to China yet. I feel like going for a walk. I put on my raincoat and my checked scarf and go down the stairs of my building three steps at a time and land in the street and there come face to face with an elderly man with noble features and a white beard. “A fog has descended over me,” the old man says. I think he must be crazy, and he seems to read my thoughts: “I’m not crazy, I’m a former resident of this building, that’s all. Many years ago I lived up there,” he points more or less to where I live, “and there I came to a halt as an artist.” I try to leave him behind, but he follows me. “Allow me to introduce myself,” he says, “I am Bouvier the bohemian, up there I tried and failed to be an artist.” He looks at me as if with pity, as if he knows I live high up there where he was unhappy. “Up there I came to a halt,” he repeats. “All right, now I know,” I tell him, and again try to escape. “What I mean is that this building has a strange atmosphere, a weird vibe, one’s fuses get blown in there, one fails, I’ve ended up as Bouvier the bohemian because of this house,” he tells me. Over time, I have retained above all the phrase about it being a place where one’s fuses get blown, and in fact it turned out to be a premonition of what was going to happen. When he said it though, I thought the phrase was something that didn’t concern me, just the words of a madman. But madmen do often predict the truth.

48

I went one Sunday to Neauphle-le-Château, invited by Duras to her country house, and I remember that after lunch, an hour before she told me the plot of
The Afternoon of Monsieur Andesmas,
we went up to the third-floor loft where, scattered across the floor, were the translations of her books, she had too many and didn’t know who to give them to, but she didn’t want to throw them out; she hadn’t found any better place for them than this loft. Marguerite began to give me copies of the Spanish translations and to ask me my opinion on Carlos Barral, her publisher in Barcelona. I knew hardly anything about Barral, and so I simply resisted this question she pressed, repeating it over and over again, up there in the loft, while I began to imagine that in a large chest, in this place, I found, stained with damp, the manuscript of
The Lettered Assassin
, happily already finished and translated into several languages, actually written by Duras but published under my name (that was one more way of trying to overcome my fear of publishing), which, when the book came out, would bring me a certain renown as a
succès d’estime
.

This pretentious daydream with its mixture of laziness, terror and a certain idea of success, couldn’t have been more wretched — it certainly is wretched to want someone to write your book for you — but curiously, despite its detestable character, the dream managed to push me towards serious reflection. I suddenly began to fear that the damp stains on the manuscript in the chest might erase the words that were to lead to my success. Suddenly, thanks to my literal belief in those stains and in that dream and, therefore, in my imagination, I began to reflect — an activity I didn’t engage in excessively back then — and I remember as if it were happening now, coming down the central staircase of the house in Neauphle-le-Château, in marked contrast to the picaresque dream of the loft — as if arising precisely from that immense contrast — I thought I perceived the full power of the written word, and this led me, by way of a rather involved shortcut, to sense its importance as a means of acquiring a certain distance from what people called reality, which is — as it has always been for such a great number of young people — actually a very disappointing thing. I thought I suddenly perceived, coming down those stairs, the need I had for words and also the need for these to be useful to me so I could distance myself from the real world. On those stairs, I definitely began to turn into a real writer. But as I still had no access to irony, words could do little for me that day, although I didn’t know it then, precisely because of my lack of a sense of irony. I was like the serpent that bites its own tail. Being young is certainly rather complicated, though this doesn’t mean one should go around in despair, far from it. Of course maturity isn’t so great either. When you’re mature, true, you understand irony. But you’re not young any more and the only possibility of remaining so lies in resisting, with the passage of time, not relinquishing that damp chest I imagined so vividly in Neauphle-le-Château. You can resist, and not be like those who — as the intensity of their youthful imagination gradually diminishes — accommodate to reality and worry for the rest of their lives. You can only try and be one of the stubbornest, keeping faith in imagination for longer than other people. To mature with obstinacy and resistance: to mature, for example, by giving a three-day lecture on the irony of not having been aware of irony as a young man. And then to grow old, very old, and tell irony to go to hell, but cling pathetically to it so as not to end up with nothing, and be the horrifying target of the irony of others.

49

A couple of lines from Gil de Biedma: “Now, let me tell you / how I too was in Paris, and I was happy. / It was in the heyday of my youth . . .” It seems it’s always been generally assumed that young artists who go to Paris live an interesting bohemian existence, they go through hardships but ultimately come out on top thanks to the city itself, which is hospitable, free, and marvelous. But there are very tragic cases that contradict this idea. There is the Uruguayan short story writer Horacio Quiroga, for example, who went to Paris and instead of looking at his future with hope, plunged into the deepest despair. Luckily, I never found out about his case while I was living in Paris. Luckily, since it could have been catastrophic, as I would have felt even more encouraged in my fictitious despair.

There never being any end to Paris must have been for Quiroga, unlike for Hemingway, a real nightmare. Look at what the unfortunate Quiroga wrote in his diary: “What great anguish! There are moments when I almost weep. And for this to happen to me in Paris, without a single person to talk to! Each day that passes, instead of bringing more hope, is darker.” He wrote this in his diary, where later on we find some sentences that are the exact opposite of Hemingway’s notion that the memory of Paris is a feast that follows us around. Quiroga writes that the only thing capable of quieting his thoughts of suicide is an idea producing a new emotion, one which in theory should distance him from the memory of his time in Paris, yet not only doesn’t distance him, but, he also senses, won’t allow him to lose sight of it, even with the final pistol shot, since “even then, I tell you, I will have the horror or the memory of Paris.”

50

More on despair. One day, Raúl Escari and I were sitting in the dangerous Café Blaise, at the top of the Eiffel tower. It was aperitif time, if I remember correctly. I decided to read him something Perec said in his book
Species of Spaces
: “There is something frightening in the very idea of a city; you have the impression you can fasten only onto tragic or despairing images.” I asked Raúl what he thought of the sentence and he shrugged his shoulders. Then it occurred to me to say, “I hope things will get better soon.” There was despair in my words, but also a certain degree of histrionics. Raúl smiled. “This means you believe there’s hope,” he said. “And isn’t there?” I asked him. “Well of course there is, but not for us,” he replied.

I reminded him of this brief dialogue when he called me this August in Paris after a mutual friend gave him the number of my hotel. As always he called from Montevideo, from Quiroga’s country, as it happens. He called from the usual place, from the phone booth near the house where Lautréamont was born. He remembered absolutely nothing of this conversation about hope. “I’m calling from the phone booth — not from hope,” he said, trying, I suppose, to let me know with this sentence (absurd, incomplete, but well suited to his purposes) that he wasn’t interested in this topic of hope and, what’s more, that a lot of time had passed since we’d spoken about it. “You know, I’m trying to remember and write down the conversations we had in Paris?” I told him. Silence. “Are you still in the phone booth?” I asked. “And what are you doing that for?” he suddenly answered. So then I told him I was preparing a three-day lecture in which I was ironically reviewing the years I spent in Paris. “And you talk about me the whole time?” he said, “Well, yeah,” I replied, “but mainly about irony, about Paris, about Hemingway, about Marguerite Duras, and about how I wrote my first book.” Another silence. “So, it’s a lecture that’s something like an autobiography of bohemia and your years of literary apprenticeship in Paris,” he said all of a sudden. “Well, yeah,” I answered, “though I didn’t really learn that much.” “It sounds good,” he said. “Among the many fictions possible, an autobiography can also be a fiction.” Another silence followed. “But try,” he added, “to be as truthful as you can, so you can be seen as you
really
are. And, if possible, portray me as I’m really not.”