Never Any End to Paris (13 page)

55

As far as I know there’s never been a novice writer worthy of the title who hasn’t worried about style. The following night, after that outing with Marguerite, I was walking around agonizing over the subject of style when I ran into Raúl Escari outside the Pommeraye cinema. There was a long line of people trying to get in to see the film of the rock opera
Tommy.
I knew one thing for sure that night, and I knew it as surely as everyone else in Paris: it wouldn’t be long before it rained. Style, on the other hand, was something that seemed confusing, although something else was also certain: in trivial matters, style, not sincerity is essential. And, in important matters, style is also essential. To sum up: it’s always very important. But what exactly is style? Is it essentially the way one has of smoking a pipe, for example? When I asked Raúl his opinion, he looked at me in annoyance and quoted Wilde: “Sin should be solitary, and have no accomplices.” I turned the phrase over and over. Perhaps he’d wanted to point out that those who seek their own style should know that seeking it is hardly a subtle way of achieving it, since to achieve it all they have to do is be themselves. I played dumb, to see if I could get more information out of Raúl. “Is style a sin?” I asked. More and more people were gathering outside the Pommeraye and we decided to leave, walking in the direction of Rue Mouffetard. “The writers of the future will be dry, not very eloquent, Great Style will seem like a stodgy Easter cake to them,” said Raúl suddenly. And then, not long afterwards, he added somewhat enigmatically: “Being constipated is the future of style.” When we got to Rue Mouffetard, we went into Café Robin. And then Raúl, seeing how I was as disconcerted as I was anxious to know more about the subject, added, almost pityingly: “Look, it’s raining or maybe even snowing and you want to tell me that. How do you do it? Well, you say: it’s raining, it’s snowing. That’s style. Right?” Not even he could imagine the harm he was doing me with his wit. And the fact is, as the French maxim goes, there is no one so intelligent they can know all the harm they do.

56

In the deafness of eternal sleep, we are not importuned by Glory.

– MARCEL PROUST

And immortality? Did immortality count for nothing? Marguerite hadn’t included it in her list. Why not? Should one not write with maximum ambition, always aspiring to create a masterpiece, an immortal work? Why hadn’t she advised ambition? Did she see me as incapable of reaching immortality? It must have been common sense that made her leave it out; in the same way, intuition, genius, wisdom, and sensitivity weren’t on the list either.

When I managed to see this, I calmed down. How could she recommend immortality to me? But still I was left with a strange feeling, a bitter aftertaste. Whenever I saw her, I felt
mortal
. One day, I mentioned this to Raúl. He didn’t seem surprised by what I’d said. He became thoughtful, and I waited to hear what he had to say. As a little time passed and he was still thinking, I asked him what he was thinking. “That the glow of our names ends on our tombstones,” he said.

57

Character is formed on Sunday afternoons.
– RAMÓN EDER

On Sunday afternoons I always felt very lonely. The neighborhood, in contrast, changed a great deal and filled with strangers, visitors from the outskirts of the city or even from the provinces who looked bored as they window-shopped in legendary, albeit closed, Saint-Germain. There was no way I’d run into anyone I knew in the cafés, and every Sunday I was overcome by a feeling of great unhappiness, I spent them waiting for the next day when it would be Monday again and everything could return to some sort of normality. Many Sunday afternoons, I went to the bookstore in the basement of the Saint-Germain drugstore and looked at books. Occasionally, as if to justify the long hours I spent there killing time —
fazer horas
, as the Portuguese say — I ended up buying a paperback book that blew my weekly budget. I was bored and I knew it, I looked at the same books ten, twenty times.

“Life is short, and even so we get bored,” said Jules Renard.

Some Sundays I had the impression I was
killing time
so I could go back to Barcelona and tell people I’d lived in Paris. One day, towards the end of a Sunday evening when it was clear it would snow before too long, I saw in that bookstore in the drugstore someone from Barcelona I knew, the psychiatrist Alicia Roig, watching me. I thought she’d discovered my boredom and most of all that she’d seen I was alone and didn’t know what to do in Paris. I tried to hide, but I knew it was useless because she’d seen me. I saw her approaching and blushed. “You live in Paris, don’t you?” she asked in a friendly tone. I was totally convinced she’d realized how lonely and bored I was. I blushed even more. “Someone’s waiting for me, excuse me, I think I’ve got to go,” I said in a brusque, sharp way. “You only think you do?” she asked, smiling. I bought a paperback and had them wrap it for me as if it were a present. I bought the first one I saw and she found it strange I should be interested in the work of Afanasi Golopupenko. I had no idea who that writer was. “I think it’s going to snow,” I told her and left.

That encounter cut me to the quick. Shortly afterwards, at night, in the garret, I went to pieces. I bent over the typed pages of
The Lettered Assassin
and burst into tears. I felt more lonely and vulnerable than ever. The moon, shining through the small window, was reflected in the room’s mirror, doubtless hung there to give the false and very Parisian illusion that the room was bigger than it was. The moon, dazzling me, seemed to be trying to get me to look out the window and see if it was snowing. I stood up, left my nocturnal desk. I looked and saw that snow was falling over Paris. I spent a long time contemplating the serene, slow, silent spectacle. When the monotony of the snow started to seem unbearable, I remembered that someone once thought how monotonous snow would be if God hadn’t created crows.

58

One winter’s evening, in the garret, as I was writing, I felt as if Elena Villena, one of the characters in
The Lettered Assassin
, was standing behind me dictating what I should say about her. “I’m not a lesbian,” I heard her say clearly. I turned around and didn’t see her, but I had the impression she’d just vanished a split second before. “Well, now you’re going to be a lesbian forever,” I told her. There was no reply. I loved knowing I had enough authority to stop my characters from rebelling, knowing that what had happened to Unamuno in
Mist,
what we’d heard about so often in school couldn’t or shouldn’t happen to me. And the fact is what I liked most about being a writer was the freedom I experienced in the solitude of my garret. A freedom far removed from the patriarchal and authoritarian world of family and politics I’d left behind in Barcelona. I hadn’t turned myself into a writer and a free man in Paris so that some little lady, invented by me after all, could come and ruin everything with her whims and orders.

So from the start I was sure — and that’s strange in itself, because I was sure of almost nothing from the start — that writers, through a certain mental effort, had to walk, as it were, all over their characters, and not let their characters walk all over them. I told myself it was essentially a matter of discipline and also of good manners and above all something related to the confidence a reader might have in us. And I think I was right. Because tell me now, ladies and gentlemen, wouldn’t you lose confidence in me and wouldn’t you think it chaotic and bad-mannered and a remarkable nuisance if, for instance, all of a sudden Marguerite Duras came back from the other world and walked among us and complained about the things I make her say here, and demanded I fix my car’s headlight once and for all and demanded all those months’ rent, and if I apologized to her, fixed the headlight and paid my debt?

With my first book, then, I learned — more through instinct than anything else — not to let my characters control me; but most of all, if I really learned anything in Paris — I’m not trying to be ironic — it was how to type. Before the garret I hadn’t really been trained in the constant and monotonous use of the keys. As for style, I carried on after my first book still without a style of my own, that’s the truth. It was more or less the same as when I’d arrived in Paris. I still hadn’t much style, despite all the effort I made with the pipe and despair. I suspected that by killing off my readers, I was never going to find anyone who would love me, but I never fully comprehended that it was unnecessary to kill readers
textually.
The thing is that style consists precisely in bringing them to life, instead of killing them off, in addressing new readers with the greatest clarity and simplicity possible, no matter how strange what you want to say might be.

It took me a long time to understand — if I really do understand — what Stendhal realized as he was writing
The Charterhouse of Parma
. He decided that to achieve the correct tone, no matter how strange what he wanted to say might be, so his readers would understand exactly what he was trying to say, he needed, every now and then, to read a few pages of the Civil Code. “If I am not clear,” he wrote, “
my whole world
is annihilated.”

59

Since the garret had a tiny, repulsive communal bathroom on the landing and no shower, I took a long ride on the metro once a week, with a towel, to wash in the public baths in Austerlitz station, precisely where all the trains from my city arrived, a fact that filled me with a rather huge fear of being discovered by friends or acquaintances from Barcelona just arriving in Paris. Few things terrified me more than the possibility of one of them catching sight of me, that someone might suddenly see me with my lowly bath towel and discover the non-idyllic conditions in which I was preparing to be a great artist like Hemingway. Of course, one day, what I most feared happened. I heard my name, looked around to see who’d called me, and it was Antonio Miró, now a famous fashion designer, and then the owner of Groc, the beloved clothing boutique, on the Rambla de Cataluña in Barcelona.

Luckily, he saw me after my shower, not before. “What are you doing here looking so neat and tidy?” he asked me. I took a few seconds to react and I think my answer was cunning. “I have a date,” I said, winking. “Goodness. What a schemer. You’ve brought a towel and everything,” he replied.

Those long trips on the metro to have a shower always belonged to the world of the absurd, above all the journeys back to the garret, so ridiculous after the useless wash, since, after traveling back on the metro, I returned home as dirty as I’d been when I’d left. And on top of that, always worried that someone would be waiting for me at the door and would see me show up with my miserable towel and dirty face.

And the fact is that friends from the neighborhood sometimes came up to the garret to say hello, others to pry, and some, those who’d come from Barcelona, to attempt — I didn’t usually allow it — to stay the night. Young Petra was one of the latter. In her case, I made an exception and said she could stay. I wasn’t exactly fighting off women and her visit was a gift from the heavens. I’d slept with her several times in Barcelona, in fact she was the last girlfriend I’d had before leaving the city (I kept this a secret, since she was unattractive, and working-class). I thought she was horrendous, but that was precisely what turned me on so much. That, and the fact that she was the daughter of factory workers from the furthest outskirts of Barcelona, which turned me on even more, among other things because, unlike the girls of my own social class, sleeping with her filled me with less fear of relative or total sexual failure. With her I felt less tense and more uninhibited in bed and was able to learn as a lover, always with the advantage that, if I didn’t rise to the occasion, no one from my social circle would find out and I could happily carry on with my sexual insecurities.

Young Petra knocked at the door and a few seconds later was walking around naked in front of me, her body blocking the big photo of Virginia Woolf cut out from a French magazine I’d hung up as a poster. Sitting on the mattress on the floor where I slept, I spent a long time observing Petra. It felt like we were in a brothel, though I soon saw that wasn’t true, since in the brothels I’d seen in films, a vast stretch of mirrored floor consigned a female nude to an almost sacred distance; whereas, in the garret, between the four walls of such a meager room, the proximity of the nude, the closeness of stark-naked Petra bordered on aggression, though this was interesting, and it really turned me on.

“You can stay here for both nights,” I said. Petra only wanted to stay two nights, since, despite appearances — she told me — she hadn’t left Barcelona for Paris to follow in my footsteps, she’d just found a job and that was all. In two days she’d have her own garret: she was going to give Spanish lessons to the daughter of a woman who lived at number 25 Boulevard Malesherbes, who’d hired her in exchange for room and board and a few francs. All this sounded a little fantastical, the part about the Spanish classes seemed a bit implausible, it was most likely they’d hired her as a maid, and for that precise reason she had her
chambre de bonne
, that is, her maid’s room, a garret like mine.

Two days later, she left my garret. We arranged that I would visit her the following Friday in her brand new home. And that’s what happened. One nasty wet Friday night I took an endless trip by metro, changing trains twice, to go and sleep with Petra in her
chambre de bonne
on Boulevard Malesherbes. But I was in a bad mood, because that very same Friday I had a more attractive invitation to a party with some of Paris’
beautiful people,
at Paloma Picasso’s house, on the other side of the city.

I headed to Petra’s garret first with the intention of going to both places. There was a postal strike in Spain and I’d already gone twenty days without a money order from my father. I didn’t have a franc, and meeting up with Paloma Picasso and her friends interested me because I thought the least I’d get out of it would be invitations to other parties among her circle of friends, invitations that would help me to get by, as I could eat for free at the parties. The trip to Petra’s
chambre de bonne
was a genuine irritation. I went there feeling divided, torn between the evening’s two options and determined to make them compatible.

Petra and Picasso. An hour’s journey on the metro separated the two very different houses. The thing I remember most about Petra’s room is that it was hideous. There were curtains made of cheap blue gingham material and a matching bedspread with a teddy bear on the pillow. The thought that at that very moment I could be talking to Paloma Picasso or with Duras’s entire circle of friends was enough to make me weep. I told Petra I had an important engagement and didn’t have time to sleep with her, I’d only gone there because I needed her to lend me some money, since the postal strike in Spain had left me without a single franc. Petra was annoyed. And I was very surprised by what she said, I hadn’t expected it. “I’m going to lend you this money,” she said, “but you should go back to Barcelona, you’re wasting your time here. I’m wasting mine too, but at least I’ve got a job.” She gave me nearly all the francs she had. I suddenly felt like her pimp, and that felt good. “Now go,” she said angrily, but tenderly. I looked at the money. “I’m going to become the best writer in the world, and that’s why I’m in Paris,” I explained to her. I looked at the money again. “I’ll pay it back as soon as the postal strike ends and my father starts sending me my salary again,” I said. “What salary?” she asked. I didn’t respond. An hour later, after my long nocturnal journey on the metro, I was
triumphing
— this at least was my ridiculous impression — in Paloma Picasso’s salon, talking about Audrey Hepburn and
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
with the filmmaker Benoît Jacquot, Duras’s assistant director on
India Song
, the film then dominating the Parisian film listings. Jacquot, in turn, had just released his first film, whose title was similar to that of my novel:
L’assassin musicien
. There were luxurious lamps and tables piled with caviar in those rooms. With Petra’s francs in my pocket, I felt like the richest man in the world and was very proud of having been so clever, such a pimp, and getting hold of this money, which I believed had turned me into a big shot.