Never Any End to Paris (15 page)

66

I went to the cinema a lot, to see
India Song
. For one reason or another I was always seeing
India Song
, Duras’s best film. Someone hadn’t seen it and I would go with him. I saw it many times when it first came out in 1975 and was playing in several Paris cinemas with remarkable success. I saw it many times and it always fascinated me and, what’s more, it felt like it belonged to me, perhaps because I’d been there for so much of the filming, especially when they were shooting at the Rothschild palace in the Bois de Boulogne, a few steps away from where, two months before, Marguerite and I had spent a night looking for First Communion whores. Marguerite had discovered this palace on one of her long walks through the city, and from the first moment had been attracted to the place. Until the end of her days she was impressed by the space, and said that Goebbels had lived there, and some of the Rothschilds’ servants had worked for the Resistance in some of the palace’s secret rooms, behind the Germans’ backs. After the war, the Rothschilds had decided never again to live in that palace. When Marguerite chose it as a location everything was in an extreme state of abandon, of collapse. It was a tremendously decadent house and ideal for the story Marguerite was trying to tell, which was simply a love story paralyzed at the height of its passion. Surrounding this love story is the outside world, India. And with it, horror, hunger, leprosy and the humidity of the monsoons. Horror appears fixed in a daily paroxysm. A few — faceless — voices are given the task of speaking and trying to reconstruct this love story that they vaguely recall, although they haven’t forgotten the lover crying out in the middle of the reception at the French embassy, the cry of the vice-consul pronouncing the name of his beloved, the name of Anna Maria Stretter. The sound of boat sirens can be heard in the distance and the trilling of birds close by. The whole film is the echo of a great cry of love.

On some occasions with Raúl Escari, and others with Adolfo Arrieta, I went to the film set many times and witnessed how the Rothschilds’ park was transformed into a colonial garden. An enormous quartz lamp attracted moths, which were scorched in their hundreds. The white light of the Parisian summer acquired the color of the monsoon. Marguerite loved it on the day of the preview, when people asked her in which region of India she had shot the film. I remember, at the end of the first showing, Robbe-Grillet approached her to say that, as with all her films, he had enjoyed this one very much. And I remember I was stunned and wondered if I’d heard correctly or if she’d gone back to her
superior
French when I heard her say to Robbe-Grillet that she was very sorry she couldn’t say the same about his films. I think I had never in my life heard anyone speak with such frankness, and perhaps for this reason the words etched themselves deep in my memory. What’s more, I have imitated this kind of frankness on a few occasions in my life, always with bad results, since in all cases those affected reacted badly and became enemies of mine and I’ve ended up, through a curious association of ideas, considering them to be enemies of the beauty of
India Song
, enemies of the crepuscular stretching out of the echo of a great cry of love in the Indian night: an association that with time I’ve come to realize was not as crazy as I thought, since it is exclusively my friends who like
India Song
.

67

I went to the cinema a lot and among my favorite films was always
The Conformist
, by Bernardo Bertolucci. I adored the contributions of Dominique Sanda, Stefania Sandrelli, and the ambiguous Pierre Clementi. And I also adored the extraordinary photography of Vittorio Storaro, but above all what most fascinated me about this film so different from all the rest was its highly unorthodox way of telling the story, a story that moves forward in leaps, as one moves when one is writing a novel and doesn’t know what’s going to happen if one is going to even reach the end. Bertolucci, just as Cortázar did in
Hopscotch
— a novel I read to feel more tied to Paris and admired in its day — turned the narration into a game. And I wondered when I would dare to start a novel in this playful spirit I’d encountered in Bertolucci and Cortázar, jumping from square to square with the primitive freedom the art of storytelling had in the beginning. Although not in the category of a perfect
hopscotch
, another Bertolucci film,
Last Tango in Paris
, also shook me quite a bit, especially the breathtaking beginning, with a disoriented and very desperate Marlon Brando — like me, I thought — lost on the streets of Paris. With a beginning like that, starting from such an extreme situation, anything seemed possible. This was a time when cinema was a mirror. A mirror even of my disorientation, I say disorientation because I was aware — and I suffered because of it — that, in the same way that cinema organized visual reality, good novels organized verbal reality. All this I knew, but, nevertheless, in spite of having discovered this narrative game, the jumps from square to square, an ideal pattern for telling a story, I didn’t know how to organize my own reality. What’s more, the shadow of an alarming question was hovering above my garret. What
was
my reality? If I didn’t know, how could I expect to organize it?

I’ll leap forward now and perhaps change the subject, but not the square. The rules of the game are there to be played with. I’m leaping to confess to all of you now that I feel lucky not to yearn for my years of writerly apprenticeship. Because if I could tell you that from those years I remember the intensity, those hours consumed writing in the garret, consumed all day long and then at night, bent over my desk while the world slept, without feeling tired, electrified, working till dawn, and even beyond . . . If only I could tell you something like that, but the fact is I can’t, there’s not much nobility, beauty or intensity from these minutes of my youth spent writing. I know, it’s deplorable. But this is my fate, I live without nostalgia. I don’t yearn for my purity, or stimulating enthusiasm, or intensity. It’s as if in Paris I skillfully postponed everything in order to truly feel the seduction of writing in these current years, those of my later life.

68

Legend has it that Hemingway, armed with a machine gun and accompanied by a group of French Resistance fighters, on August 25, 1944, after four long years of German occupation, went into Paris a few hours ahead of the allies and
liberated
the bar of the Ritz Hotel, the famous Petit Bar on Rue Cambon. More precisely the legend says that Hemingway
liberated
the hotel’s wine cellars. Afterwards, he took a suite there and, in a near-permanent haze of champagne and cognac, he received friends or just visitors who came to congratulate him. Among those who showed up at the hotel was André Malraux, arrogant as they come. The French writer marched into the Ritz with a squad of soldiers under his command, transformed into quite the colonel with shiny cavalry boots. He hadn’t gone to the Ritz to congratulate anybody, least of all Hemingway, who noticed him straightaway and immediately remembered that this proud colonel had abandoned the Spanish Civil War in 1937 to write
L’espoir
, a novel some simpletons had elevated to the category of a masterpiece. He soon saw that colonel Malraux was boasting about his squad of soldiers and laughing at the “worthless characters” under the command of Hemingway, liberator of the Ritz bar.

“What a pity,” Hemingway said to Malraux “that we did not have the assistance of your force when we took this small town of Paris.” And one of the staunch ragged men under Hemingway’s command murmured in his leader’s ear:
“Papa, on peut fusiller ce con?”
(“Papa, can we shoot this prick?”)

On August 25 this past summer I went to the Petit Bar, the small bar that had its name changed twenty years ago and that the management of the Ritz now calls Bar Hemingway, though it’s had lots of other famous customers: Marlene Dietrich, Scott Fitzgerald, Ingrid Bergman, Graham Greene, and Truman Capote, among others.

As I entered with my wife planning to celebrate the fifty-eighth anniversary of the liberation of the bar, I found the little place packed with a crowd of people who, in the midst of their terrible general drunkenness, gave the impression that they, too, were celebrating that date. Ugly, very inebriated people. What I saw there was a far cry from heaven. “When I dream of heaven,” Hemingway said, “the action always takes place at the Paris Ritz.” I felt immediately obliged to point out to my wife that this, contrary to what I’d hoped, was not heaven. “But it’s preferable to heaven,” said my wife, enigmatically. I was about to ask her what she meant when some of the people at the bar, seeing us looking for a table, exchanged words and some even laughed, I’ll never know what about. “Have you seen how these clowns are laughing?” I said to my wife, who shrugged, since this didn’t seem to affect her as much as it did me, as I’ve always taken things more seriously.

I remember, when I was young and living in Paris, I used to go to that bar, when it was still called the Petit Bar, and nobody laughed at me. On the contrary, there were people there who took me very seriously and gave me advice, lots of advice. I liked to sit on the raised alcove by the bar whenever there was a table free. One day, sitting at one of these tables with Vicky Vaporú, she deigned — this is what I call taking me seriously — to give me some advice I’ve never forgotten: “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” Some days later I discovered the phrase was from
The Great Gatsby
and I asked Vicky for an explanation. She nearly cried when she saw she’d been found out, and right then I understood that her advice had been given in good faith, with very good intentions, and that no one in Paris took me as seriously as she did.

She nearly cried and apologized saying it’d been an homage to Scott Fitzgerald, who’d been a regular client of this bar and who’d written, moreover, a novella called
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
, which was what she aspired to in life, to have a diamond of that colossal size. Vicky Vaporú, as well as being the best-looking transvestite in the Latin Quarter, was the one person who most resembled Holly Golightly from Truman Capote’s
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. On clear, cool Paris mornings, I would suddenly run into her in the neighborhood and she’d ask me questions that reminded me of Capote’s heroine: “I thought writers were very old. Though, of course, Patrick Modiano isn’t old. By the way, is Hemingway?” “He’s dead,” I felt obliged to reply.

On clear, cool Paris mornings I would suddenly run into her in the neighborhood buying bread and she would ask loud, very funny, or incredible questions for that time of day, especially given that we were waiting in line at the bakery. I remember one of these questions in particular: “Isn’t it true that I’m not a sophisticated or counterfeit woman, but rather a genuine counterfeit?” Everyone waiting to buy bread turned to look at us, of course. In a way, that scene set a precedent for the feeling I had this August 25, when we walked into the old Petit Bar and everyone looked at us and some of them laughed at us. Is this what it means to grow up? When I was young (I thought), no one in this bar laughed at me, and what’s more, they gave me advice and took me seriously.

One day, again at a table on the alcove, the actor Jean Marais, the star of Jean Cocteau’s films, gave me a mysterious piece of advice I’ve been thinking over ever since. I’d gone along with a journalist friend who was interviewing him for a Spanish magazine. At the end of the meeting, Jean Marais found out I wanted to be a writer and, going off on a tangent before giving me advice, said that I must surely dream of being famous. “Isn’t that true?” he asked. I didn’t reply, I didn’t really know what to say to him; more than fame what I really wanted was to triumph in Paris, but perhaps they were one and the same thing. “Fame,” Marais said then, “is made of a thousand rumors and misunderstandings that usually bear little relation to the real person.” I was only half listening to him and didn’t really know what he was getting at, and foremost in my mind at that moment was how much he imitated Jean Cocteau, for he spoke like him, he’d soaked up the personality of his ex-lover and master, some of his gestures were exact copies of Cocteau’s. When he announced he was about to give me some advice, I began to listen attentively. “Make a double of yourself,” said Marais, “to help you assert yourself and which can even come to take your place, to occupy the stage and leave you alone to work far from the noise.” Some time afterwards, I found out — and it didn’t surprise me in the least — that this advice was a famous phrase that Cocteau used a lot.

So, the bar at the Ritz was a place in which I’d heard all sorts of advice. I had not yet heard the piece my wife was about to give me when, this past August 25, at the sight of the panorama in the bar on the anniversary of Hemingway’s heroic deed, I said to her that, if a party’s being thrown, no matter what party, there’s no reason at all for us to take part in it. I said this with the intention that we not stay there. Since she didn’t say anything, I went on: “And anyway, we’re not in the heaven Hemingway was talking about.” At that point she gave me some advice that kept us in the bar until daybreak: “For that very reason I suggest we stay here awhile, let’s take advantage of the fact this isn’t heaven to have a bit of a laugh. They’re not going to let us laugh in hell, much less in heaven, where it certainly won’t do us any good.”

This August 25, my wife and I liberated our most secret impulses, as if we were liberating the cellars of the Ritz, we liberated them perhaps a little too much. We began by ordering two daiquiris and, cheering up slightly, I told her about the military run-in there between Malraux and Hemingway. “I’m tired of you, Hemingway,” said my wife suddenly, daughter and granddaughter of military men. And I should have remembered at that moment that bivouacking inside her — the most appropriate verb is precisely this military term,
to bivouac
— there was a personal, military sort of phobia, a solely nocturnal hatred, one fueled by alcohol — a hidden but serious antagonism toward me, and especially toward my obsession that someone will one day say to me, even if it’s only a white lie, that I resemble Hemingway. But I didn’t take that first outburst of aggression seriously enough. We ordered two more daiquiris and then another two and then ten more, and I began calling the daiquiris
Malraux cocktails.
It sounded good, I thought it sounded perfect:
Malraux cocktails
. But everything had turned dangerous now, like a gigantic Molotov cocktail. Suddenly we realized it was past dawn and, to put it in Hemingwayesque terms, we were across the river and into the trees. We were laughing like completely happy clowns, the hours had flown by, and daylight was seeping into the bar. I was talking to some absolutely stupid Americans when suddenly my wife, in her extreme drunkenness, stopped laughing, because she thought that those “worthless characters” — she said this — were looking at her rudely. “What worthless characters?” I asked, taken aback. The worthless characters, according to her, were the stupid ones I was talking to, “your personal army,” the last drunks in the bar. I looked at her and she reminded me of Colonel Malraux and I couldn’t help it, I let it slip: “You aren’t thinking I want to shoot you?” I should never have asked that question, never. I betrayed the fact that a secret phobia also “bivouacked” in me. There followed a “military skirmish,” I in my role of
Papa
Hemingway and she in that of Malraux. There followed a terrible skirmish and I lost the war and two teeth, and I also lost trust in myself and trust in her. I could only hate my wife the next day when she told me I was more handsome. “With two missing teeth, you don’t look so much like Hemingway anymore,” she said ironically.