Never Any End to Paris (12 page)

51

Sometimes at dusk, if I’d gone for a walk in the relaxing Jardin du Luxembourg, I made a detour before going back to my neighborhood to walk past the house where Gertrude Stein had an apartment in the 1920s, to walk by number 27 Rue de Fleurus. I wasn’t going there, as Hemingway did, “for the warmth and the great pictures and the conversation” he found in that house, but because I thought it could bring me luck, since after all Miss Stein, in her role as patron, had been for Hemingway what Marguerite Duras — I assumed — was for me. As the more or less ambitious young man that I was, I aspired to have not a single but double patronage, and so I saw a possible talisman during my ritual of occasionally walking past that house and stopping to read the plaque, which reminded people that the place had been one of the hubs of world literature, but neglected to inform them that the great geniuses who came visiting here sometimes had to hear “a rose is a rose is a rose,” one of Miss Stein’s favorite phrases and irrefutable proof that even in the world’s literary hubs, people have always talked nonsense.

“A dreadful writer,” those who erected the commemorative plaque could also have added. Because Gertrude Stein, American exile who attempted to purify the English language and administer aesthetic shocks through an excessive simplification of language (forcing the reader to look at the outside world as if for the first time), was a terrible writer though she did impart some interesting teaching to the young Hemingway. She is the one who advised him to dispense with every kind of embellishment in his prose and to compress, concentrate, in short, destroy the old rhetoric by means of parody. In fact, without realizing it, she’d advised her disciple Hemingway to do what James Joyce had just done in an exemplary way in
Ulysses.

When Hemingway read Joyce’s book, months after receiving this advice, he called it: “a goddamn wonderful book.” It was the only time he’d be able to say this in that house, as Miss Stein told him straightaway that if he brought up Joyce a second time in that room, he would not be invited back. But in any case his praise of
Ulysses
came to the attention of Ezra Pound, a friend of Joyce’s, who decided to read the young Hemingway and saw great talent in him and encouraged him and ended up receiving boxing lessons in exchange.

I walked past the commemorative plaque at 27 Rue de Fleurus at dusk, sometimes fearing the spirit of Miss Stein would discover that I, seeking to give my text
verisimilitude
, had shifted most of page seven of the Spanish edition of
Giacomo Joyce
(a personal notebook by the author of
Ulysses
) into
The Lettered Assassin
, where in the introduction to the central manuscript, I mentioned the assassin’s illustrated notebook, saying that “numbers in brackets indicate the pages of the notebook, and the text and drawings correspond page for page to the original” — on page seven of
Giacomo Joyce
something very similar can be read.

Since I’d based my text on a real notebook, Joyce’s, I thought it would appear more realistic. There was no doubt I still had a very shaky idea of what verisimilitude really was, something that makes real novelists sweat the darkest blood. However, seen from the perspective of the present, I guess it was better than nothing. I remember how satisfied I felt believing I’d resolved without too much difficulty one of the items of that brusque instruction list Duras had given me for writing a novel. Clearly (I said to myself) I’ve still got to tackle some of the hardest items on the list, such as unity and harmony, time, style, not to mention narrative technique, which must be frightful.

I walked past that house on Rue de Fleurus at dusk sometimes and wished that doing so would bring me luck. It never did, at least while I remained in Paris, and so this August, when I went back again to see the talismanic house, I looked at the commemorative plaque, thought of Gertrude Stein and of the luck she didn’t bring me and of the fear I once had that her spirit would discover my modest connection to Joyce, and I also thought of, or rather remembered, the problems I had in those days with unity, harmony, let’s not even mention style or time. And on this occasion I gave vent to my feelings, saying out loud, risking being taken for a madman: “Miss Stein, are you there, can you hear me? Look, look closely at me, I’m Hemingway. Can you see me?
Ulysses
is goddamn wonderful goddamn wonderful goddamn wonderful . . . Can you hear me, Miss Stein?”

52

One morning, I saw Jean Seberg
in real life
. She had her hair cut very short (like a Hemingway heroine), and was wearing sunglasses and a white dress with black polka dots. I saw her walk quickly past in front of one of the neoclassical pediments in the Palais de Chaillot where, in gilded letters, some solemn phrases by Paul Valéry are inscribed, written especially for this place and that suddenly, next to the quick step of the beautiful Seberg, seemed to have found their true meaning:
It depends on those who pass whether I am tomb or treasure.

53

I called my mother once a month, always from the phone booth — specially equipped for long-distance calls — in the basement of the Relais Odéon, a café on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. It was a quick call I made monthly seeking to assuage my conscience. I thought that going for more than a month without speaking to her, without showing signs of life, would be unnatural in a son, would be taking things too far. But in reality she didn’t care if I called or not, and I knew this perfectly well. Unlike my father (who wanted me to come back to Barcelona), she was indifferent about what I tried to make of my life. What’s more, she thought I was a dull, gray creature, and she’d never kept this to herself, but instead — as if it amused her — had told me so on many occasions, intending to humiliate me, I think. She’d told me so — always when my father wasn’t there — in many different ways, with all kinds of variations, one day she even compared me to Paris: “Son, you’re grayer than Paris.”

She didn’t care whether I was in that city or not. She was a woman whose mind was on other things. Such as, for example, adding up all the numbers she saw. Some people read everything they see, even newspaper pages blowing down the street. She added up numbers. For instance, there were some people she never called on the phone because their numbers added up to something unlucky. She refused hotel rooms for the same reason. She didn’t like the sum of the year I’d been born and perhaps for that reason made an effort not to feel too much affection for me, she was always finding reasons for me not to matter to her at all.

I called her from Paris when I knew my father wasn’t at home and we exchanged four or five words and the conversation was generally cold, above all very strange, and not because I was — though indeed I was — but because my mother — I think this is now clear — has always been very much so, has always been hugely eccentric. In case it’s still not completely clear: she couldn’t stand there to be three cigarette butts in the same ashtray, screamed if she saw a loose button, wouldn’t travel on a plane if there were two nuns on board, and she couldn’t start or finish anything on a Friday. As if that wasn’t enough, she never turned off faucets all the way. This last thing, by the way, was frankly exasperating.

My mother couldn’t care less that I was in Paris, but one day, during one of those monthly calls, her attitude changed. It only happened once and perhaps for that reason became engraved in my memory. Not until years later did I find out that her strange attitude was due to the fact that my father had come home early that day and she found herself suddenly obliged to play the role of worried mother on the phone and to tell me I must come home to Barcelona and give up my bohemian whims, this “ridiculous literary promise.” That day at the other end of the line, I couldn’t have been more confused, and that call remained in my memory as the strangest of all those I made from Paris. It was a city she knew well, since in her early youth she’d spent a few brief spells there, which only served to turn her into a person who occasionally said strange things, things that, before she married, my grandmother had been obliged so many times to explain away good-humoredly to visitors: “The child, you see, has lived in Paris,” my grandmother would say. “Oh, well, that’s understandable. If she’s lived in Paris . . .” the visitors would say in a half teasing, half affectionate tone.

“You’re like a broken record,” I remember she said to me suddenly that day (coinciding, I later found out, with the arrival of my father in the house), “always boasting about Paris, Paris, but what exactly do you see in Paris?” I was surprised; I remember I was about to tell her that I walked through the streets of that city with my heart bewildered by sadness, but I didn’t dare say anything. “What a disgrace for me,” continued my mother, “to see my son turned into a broken record.” She fell suddenly silent. When this happened, it was a sign that she was about to come out with one of her eccentric phrases, one of those things she’d picked up in Paris and which were often touched by a strange genius. As happened that day when she said: “Always Paris, Paris, you’re like a broken record in a city that’s . . . full of broken lines. Look at the Eiffel tower, it’s nothing but broken lines. Broken lines on the French bigshots’ pants, broken lines on the concierges’ foreheads, lines and lines. And you’re the biggest broken record of all. You need to reconsider the broken life you’re leading.”

My mother was a woman of curious intuitions and strange strokes of genius. What has impressed me for a long time about what she said that day about Paris and its broken lines is the strange similarity to something Kafka wrote that I discovered not long ago . . . and that my mother would certainly never have read, for one reason because she never read anything and I don’t believe she even knew of the existence of Kafka, that fleeting twentieth-century stranger, a man who saw a Paris much like the one my mother saw and wrote in his diaries: “Paris is striped . . . the lined glass roof of the Grand Palais des Arts, the office windows divided by lines, the Eiffel tower, made of lines, the lined effect of the side and central panels of the French windows on opposite balconies, the little chairs and tables in front of the cafés, with lines for legs, the gold-tipped railings in the public parks.”

Kafka’s “striped” Paris. I’d be more inclined to agree with Walter Benjamin, who in
The Arcades Project
saw Paris as the city of mirrors: “The asphalt of its streets, smooth as a mirror, and above all the glass-walled terraces in front of each café. A profusion of mirrors in the cafés to brighten the interiors and lend an agreeable spaciousness to all the booths and all the tiny nooks of every Parisian establishment. Women look at themselves here more than elsewhere, and this is where the specific beauty of Parisian women comes from. ”

My mother. My loopy mother. A character and a genius. I loved her, but she didn’t love me. In any case, it upset me when she died. She spent the last years of her life more neurotic than ever, trusting everything to some little Moorish charms she’d bought in Granada. On her deathbed, in front of me and my father and two of her brothers she hadn’t seen for years, she said a few words of farewell, a few last words that, due to their premeditated strangeness, sounded to me like an epitaph, though we didn’t dare put them on her tombstone. “I’ll laugh at the bitter things I said,” she said. Her two brothers looked dismayed. “It’s because she lived in Paris,” I told them.

54

“You’ve come here to Paris ready to forge your own style, isn’t that right?” Marguerite Duras asked me one day, in a treacherous, sombre tone. At first I chose to think I’d heard wrong, that she’d spoken in her
superior
French and had actually said something else. But no, she’d said exactly that. She repeated it and I realized I’d understood perfectly. I remembered that
style
was one of the entries on her list. I remembered when we were already in my car, a Seat 127. I’d agreed to drive the vehicle for the first time in many months. I had it eternally parked in front of my house — maybe I should say in front of Marguerite’s house — because one of the front headlights was missing and I didn’t know where to get it fixed or how much it would cost, but that day I’d agreed to drive the car because I’d bumped into Marguerite in the street and to my surprise she’d asked me — in fact, almost ordered me — to go with her to the Bois de Boulogne to see if it was true there were prostitutes there at night wearing First Communion dresses. She’d just read as much in
L’Express
and thought it insulting, an intolerable disregard for feminine dignity. If it was true there were prostitutes dressed that way, she was going to write an article somewhere, it was unacceptable. I got into the driver’s seat, absolutely resigned to my tough luck, since I imagined that, due to the absence of one headlight, I would immediately have trouble with the traffic police (although strangely I didn’t).

Those words of Marguerite’s about my style are still ringing in my ears today. “I have no style,” I finally told her after holding back from replying for a good long while. By then we were already driving through the Bois de Boulogne. We spent a long time driving around and found nothing. After an hour, tired of this wild goose chase, I said very politely but on the verge of losing my grip: “We’ve combed the woods twenty times now, and there aren’t any First Communion whores, that seems obvious.”

“And why are you missing a headlight?” she asked me then. “Because I don’t know how to fix it or how much it would cost,” I replied. She suddenly saw a symbol in my missing headlight. “You could say that, like so many young men, you’ve got a one-headlight style,” and she laughed, coughed, laughed again, then repeated that I had a one-headlight style. Though I’d understood her perfectly, I chose to believe she was speaking her
superior
French. I pretended to pay great attention to the steering wheel and the truth is I would have loved to find a prostitute at that moment, just one, dressed for First Communion and put an end to the annoying subject of my literary style once and for all. An hour and a half spent going back and forth and all around the Bois de Boulogne and we still hadn’t found what we were looking for, so we ended up having a couple of glasses of port in the bar of La Coupole — whenever I went there this is what I drank. And there she asked me if I wanted to hear Queneau’s advice. I was about to reply when she said she wasn’t going to give it to me, since it wouldn’t do me any good. And she went on to make an extremely complicated remark to do with the missing headlight, and from then on spent the rest of the night speaking to me in her
superior
French and I barely understood another word she said.

Style! For many years I saw
The Lettered Assassin
as the work of a writer who was a stranger to me, cold and barely connected to life: something, moreover, not all that strange if we take into consideration that all I was thinking of was the death of my readers. Now I think I know why my first book has always seemed cold to me. I think it’s due to the total lack of style. In those days I had no idea that, as Gide said, the great secret of works with style — the great secret of Stendhal, for example — consists of writing
on the spot
. Gide says of Stendhal that his style, what we might call the malice of his style, consists in his stirring thought being so alive, so freshly colored, like a newly hatched butterfly (the collector is surprised to see it emerge from the chrysalis). From this comes Stendhal’s vivid, spontaneous, unconventional touch, sudden and naked, that captivates us again and again.

I think that in my first foray into literature, in
The Lettered Assassin
, I dissociated form from content too much, and emotion from the expression of emotion and thought, and these should be inseparable. Emotion and thought should always be inseparable, the reader should witness
live
thoughts stirred by emotions in the creation of a text.

Rare are the moments in youth when one writes with a stirring thought.