Never Any End to Paris (14 page)

60

A month and half after that night, Petra turned up at my garret again and, to keep her from staying there, after paying her back the money, I invited her to the cinema; as luck would have it, the film I chose happened to illustrate, in a disturbing way, what had gone on between us that night in the garret with the teddy bear, that night a month and a half ago when she was my money order and my whore and I her fleeting visitor and pimp and big shot.

“How about we go see a film by Benoît Jacquot, a friend from the neighborhood,” I said. It was true Jacquot lived a few steps from my house, but his being my friend was somewhat more dubious. I’d seen him for a few minutes at Paloma Picasso’s party. And on one single other occasion, that time at Duras’s house, where he’d come with his wife, Martine Simonet.

L’assasin musicien
starred Anna Karina, Joël Bion and the inestimable veteran — always in secondary role — Howard Vernon, who worked with Arrieta and was a keen supporter of young or risky filmmakers. Jacquot’s film had an austere style, influenced by the cinema of Bresson and Duras, a slow rhythm, with sober and, to tell the truth, rather clumsy dialogue. Martine Simonet had a very small part, which seemed a glaring injustice to me.

e film was an adaptation of an unfinished story by Dostoyevsky that Jacquot set in Paris: the tale of a young violinist from the provinces who, convinced he has an exceptional talent for music, leaves the city of his birth to conquer the capital, where he doesn’t get hired by any of the orchestras in which he tries to get a place. is leads him to declare he’s not working because he’s not interested in sharing his exceptional genius with the modest players of the world’s orchestras, no matter how good they are. He considers himself the best violinist in the world and walks around the streets of Paris, staring with a strange mixture of conceit and envy at the billboards advertising concerts in the city and ends up with no option but to pimp out a poor servant girl (Anna Karina) who takes him in to her modest
chambre de bonne
because she’s fallen in love with him — not with an arrogant, unemployed provincial musician, but with the poor, pathetic wretch she’s found stumbling around the city saying he’s the best violinist in the world.

61

On the 29th of April, 1974, I bought paper and an envelope and wrote the same letter that Arthur Rimbaud wrote on the 29th of April, 1870, to Théodore de Banville:

And if these lines could find a place in the
Parnasse contemporain
?

I am unknown; but what does it matter? Poets are brothers. These lines believe, they love, they hope: and that is all.

Dear Master: help me up a little. I am young. Hold out your hand to me . . .

I put the letter in the envelope and sent it to Monsieur Théodore de Banville, chez M. Alphonse Lemerre, éditeur. Passage Choiseul, Paris.

Seven days later, the post office returned Rimbaud’s letter to the garret. The letter had arrived at Passage Choiseul (the scene, incidentally, of the writer Céline’s adolescent hell), but they hadn’t found any Monsieur Théodore de Banville there and they’d sent it back to Rue Saint-Benoît, where I waited for nightfall to open and read it. “I am young,” I read out loud. And I waited the whole night for someone to come to my aid, knock at the door of my
chambre
and give me their hand. I spent that night waiting for Rimbaud.

62

I went to the cinema a lot.

Johnny Guitar,
by Nicholas Ray, is the film I’ve seen the most times in my life. Whenever it was on in Paris in some late night showing, I was there in the nocturnal line, ready to watch the film for the umpteenth time. I was fascinated by the film’s dialogues about love and I was captivated by the sense of security that emanated from the hero’s strong personality. I thought that if I’d met him when I was young, my childhood would have been very different. I imagined myself sleeping in my child’s bedroom, safe from all nocturnal terrors, in the knowledge that Johnny Guitar was guarding the house. I knew by heart everything the hero says in the film, above all the dialogues about love, like when Johnny (Sterling Hayden) asks Vienna (Joan Crawford) how many men she’s forgotten and Vienna says as many women as he remembers.

One night in Paris, on the way back from a long night at Le Sept on Rue Sainte-Anne, a fashionable club and hangout for
beautiful people
(Ingrid Caven, for example, but also Yves Saint Laurent, Nureyev, Helmut Berger, Andy Warhol, and the
other
Josette Day, always gorgeous and accompanied by a monster), I walked with friends by the Seine, and Adolfo Arrieta suddenly pointed out the top floor of one of the imposing buildings by the river. “Up there, that big balcony you see lit up, is where Sterling Hayden lives,” he told us.

I didn’t know that Johnny Guitar lived in Paris. After Arrieta said these words, we walked on, almost all of us in respectful silence, as if we’d fallen under the spell of the hero’s balcony above the river. After that day and that silence, there were other days, other silences. Alone or in company, I walked at night several more times along the banks of the Seine near Sterling Hayden’s house. And I remember I always instinctively looked up toward the top floor of the building and searched for the balcony, and it was always lit. And I remember, too, how much it comforted me to walk past that place and look up and have the feeling that from this house by the Seine, from that sleepless balcony with the lights always on, the great Johnny Guitar was looking out for me, watching the sometimes pathetic drift of my steps by the river.

63

I went to the cinema a lot.

I felt genuine shock watching
Notre Dame de Paris,
the mediocre director Jean Delannoy’s adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel. While the movie was dreadful, by any standards, the story of the hunchback Quasimodo and the beautiful Esmeralda touched me deeply. After the movie, I left the cinema and walked to the Hotel Esmeralda, next to Notre Dame — the famous
Esmegaldá
, indisputable center in those days of the bohemian heart of the city, a legendary space of liberty, where, rumor had it, the rooms had no keys and were all interconnected. Germán, a young Spaniard who worked in reception and was friends with Arrieta and Javier Grandes, told me that someone who came to the hotel a lot, and always caused some sort of scandal, was the transvestite who imitated Josette Day.

And who was the real Josette Day? Germán informed me that she was the actress who’d starred in Cocteau’s
Beauty and the Beast
and was famous above all because, after shooting this film, she’d married a Belgian who was one of the richest men in the world and she’d bankrupted him by getting carried away with her fascination for emeralds, or
esmeraldas
, as they’re called in Spanish.

“And you tell me all this in the Esmeralda,” was the only thing that occurred to me to say to Germán, who became absurdly annoyed at me for what he called the obviousness of my comment. I found his annoyance so unfair, and so disproportionate, that I left before long, not without first thanking him for telling me who the real Josette Day was. I walked out of the Esmeralda and decided to go up to the top of Notre Dame, where I’d never been, and see the legendary territory of Quasimodo. I went up with a group of tourists and, once at the top, was enormously bewildered by what I saw. The photographer Martine Barrat, a friend of some mutual friends, was immortalizing Raúl Escari with her camera, who at that precise moment was sharing a joint with William Burroughs, and it
was
Burroughs who was there with my friend, from the first moment I had no doubt about it, though my surprise and bewilderment at this discovery were huge. What was Raúl doing with that famous writer up there at the top of Notre Dame? Of course, if it was time for such questions, I should have asked myself what I was doing up there too.

I realized there were many things I didn’t know about my good friend. I felt, moreover, so excluded from the scene that I didn’t dare go up to them and say hello. Since they didn’t see me, I preferred to say nothing, I saw myself as a poor wretch they would quickly have cast out into the world of strangers.

Over the next few days, whenever I saw Raúl I couldn’t help constantly thinking he was hiding friendships and undoubtedly stories from me and that perhaps hell wasn’t
other
people — as Sartre said — but in fact a few complete strangers no matter how well we thought we knew them. Until, one day, Raúl himself showed me Martine Barrat’s photo. “I was with Burroughs the other day, did I tell you?” he said with absolute simplicity and no mystery whatsoever. And if anybody was being mysterious and enigmatic it was me, especially when I said: “I was at the top of Notre Dame, but I didn’t go over to you because you were with such a famous person, I didn’t dare . . .”

Raúl looked at me as if I was the one who’d been smoking joints. In reality he looked at me as I’d looked at him up there next to Burroughs. But the most surprising thing of all is that shortly afterwards, demonstrating how well he knew me, he realized that, strange as it might seem, I was telling the truth and that I was speaking somewhat resentfully and prompted by jealousy. He believed me so much that he apologized, before saying that the next day, he’d arranged to play pinball with Serge Gainsbourg. Many times I’ve thought that our great friendship wasn’t totally established until these two serious scenes of mystery, disturbance, and jealousy.

64

I went to the cinema a lot.

From my last days in Paris I have a strong memory of the afternoon I saw, by chance, on one of the small screens in the Quartier Latin,
3 American LPs
, a Wim Wenders short from 1969, where the soundtrack, the rock and roll music, is all important, much more so even than the images. I suddenly remembered the forgotten soundtrack to my life. “We have long forgotten,” writes Walter Benjamin in
One-Way Street,
“the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and the enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, strange antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations!”

That day, in that small cinema, a strange antiquity appeared that I had buried in the basement of the building of my life: the memory of the day in 1963 when I was walking down Calle Pelayo in Barcelona and heard the Beatles for the first time singing
Twist and Shout
, music that seemed different from all the rest and made me feel a strange happiness, unthinkable until then.

Discovering rock and roll saved my life, or at least gave me the impetus to look for it. Rock and roll was something my generation hadn’t inherited from anyone and so there was no one to teach us how to like it. On the contrary, more than one person tried to convince us we should despise it. The Beatles’ long hair, which now seems banal, was rather the complete opposite, I believe it was decisive for rock, because it created a sense of identity totally different to capitalism. In a way, it was a step toward revolution, as it was rock that gave many of us, for the first time, a sense of identity. And this was possible because more than anything, rock, in spite of our despair (fictitious or not), connected us to a strange happiness.

That day, in the Quartier Latin cinema, I recovered the strange memory buried in the foundations of the house of my life, the memory of
Twist and Shout
that had changed my perspective.
3 American LPs
begins with a car trip, and the camera spends a long time framing the landscape through the window as it moves along sideways. You see the city, shops, billboards, the outskirts, car cemeteries, and factories go past, as the music of Van Morrison plays. Off-screen, the voices of Wenders and Handke talk about the songs they’re listening to on the car radio. The real hero of that film is rock and roll, which becomes the only vehicle of communication in a desolate, impenetrable universe. It doesn’t matter what’s outside — this isn’t a road movie — but rather what’s inside: the car radio, the soundtrack to the film, the rock.

Ever since that day, Van Morrison has been my favorite singer. I suppose it was an important day for me, since I discovered I needed to lose certain complexes and not consider rock music alien to what I might write. It was also the day I realized I didn’t have to be intimidated by certain Spanish writers of my generation who claimed to be interested only in classical music and who, for instance, had felt sorry for me when it occurred to me to quote the Rolling Stones. It was the day I realized, not only should I not rule anything out when it came to creativity, but I shouldn’t be influenced by the pitying looks of those pedants from my very backward country, haughty writers entrenched in a papier-mâché literature. It was the day I discovered that when it comes to writing I shouldn’t rule anything out since, as Walter Benjamin said, the chronicler who narrates events without distinguishing between great and small ones is guided, as he does so, by this truth: of all that has happened, nothing should be considered lost to history. It was the day I discovered that there were writers and filmmakers abroad from the generation before mine — such as Wenders and Handke — who talked unashamedly about rock and roll, about the strange happiness a Van Morrison song can suddenly produce. I continued to live in despair, but with moments of strange happiness that now and then came to me — still come to me — from rock and roll.

65

I went to the cinema a lot and Edgardo Cozarinsky must have gone a lot too, as I often found him watching the same film as me. Cozarinsky, a late Borgesian according to Susan Sontag, was an Argentinian exile who seemed to have ended up feeling comfortable in the role of outsider. A writer and filmmaker, he lived between Paris and London, I don’t know where he lives now, I think just in Paris. I remember I admired him because he knew how to combine two cities, two artistic allegiances — something I certainly couldn’t do; until I arrived in Paris, it had never occurred to me that one could live in two cities at the same time, I found it hard enough just being in one — I also remember I saw one of his films, and read his book on Borges and film, and also his study about gossip as a narrative process and other texts, all of them always spellbinding. Ten years after I left Paris, I especially admired his book
Urban Voodoo
, an exile’s book, a transnational book, employing a hybrid structure very innovative in those days that has since become more established in literature.

Urban Voodoo
gave the impression Cozarinsky had written it after having taken very seriously what Godard said about making fictional films that might be documentaries and documentaries that were like fictional films.
Urban Voodoo
, a book that was ahead of its time in the way it mixed essay with fiction and advanced new and interesting tendencies in literature, seemed composed of stories that were like essays and essays that were like stories. It was also laden with quotes in the form of epigraphs, reminiscent of those films by Godard that are littered with quotes. Some of my books from the 1980s and ’90s derive in part, though I suppose unconsciously, from the cinema of Godard. And I think also somewhat from the novelistic structure of Cozarinsky’s
Urban Voodoo
, from that structure where the apparently capricious quotes or grafts lend a magnificent eloquence to the discourse: the quotes or cultural references are incorporated into the structure in a prodigious way; instead of placidly joining the rest of the text, they collide with it, elevated to an unpredictable power, becoming another chapter of the book.

I think the literary artifact
Urban Voodoo
, that book written by someone who struck me as feeling comfortable as an outsider, was particularly influential to my novel about portable plots, but I received this influence in the mid-eighties so it belongs to a period in my literary biography far removed from that covered in this three-day lecture, which speaks not of plots but rather, a plot to exorcise my youth by reviewing it ironically.