Never Any End to Paris (16 page)

69

The first time Franco died — he died twice — I was quietly reading poetry in my garret. The dictator was on his death bed in a hospital in Madrid when a false rumor led Santiago Carrillo, the head of the Spanish Communist Party in exile, to announce on Radio Paris the dictator’s death before the fact. My neighbor on the top floor — a mysterious black man who never spoke to me, except on this day — heard the news on his transistor radio and was kind enough to bang on my door; when I opened it, more scared than anything else — he was from Ivory Coast, six foot six and looked a bit like a cannibal — he said: “Morning,
tubab
. Franco from Spain
mort
, dead.” Then he burst out laughing and showed me his pointed teeth, whether on purpose or not I don’t know. The news made me very happy, although I kept my composure, I displayed a certain sang-froid, I suppose, trying to keep him from realizing he intimidated me. “What’s that about
tubab
?” was all I said. He didn’t answer, just went back to his room.

Naturally, I didn’t carry on reading poetry. I went out to celebrate with the first friend I could find. In those days, aside from reading Borges (whom I’d just discovered) and the whole
noir pantheon of literature
(Roussel and Rimbaud first and foremost), I continued reading poetry by the Generation of ’27, as I had in Barcelona, above all Luis Cernuda, Pedro Salinas, Juan Larrea, García Lorca and Jorge Guillén. I read a lot of poetry. That of the Generation of ’27 had for a long time been influencing my let’s call it literary education. In fact, in the period immediately before I moved to Paris, I’d done nothing but read poetry in Barcelona, and not only that of the Generation of ’27 but also Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado and some of the post-war poets such as Blas de Otero, and this had all been steadily influencing my apprenticeship before my life in the garret and gradually stirred me to write.

As for Spanish poetry, well, I never lost sight of it, I was loyal; after all, that was what had driven me, in my university years in Barcelona, to jot down a few naive early verses, which I still have, such as my poem “Youth Exposed to the Elements,” which today I could ironically re-title “Despair in Black,” since it was a very euphoric and optimistic poem, but at heart didn’t hide my anguish and total bewilderment about life: “I had a world planned / filled with blackboards and old friars / who cried psalms / while they drank Latin / and spread dead geographies . . . but now I’m ready to radiate freedom / to feel at last I’m living the life / the old bastards never dreamed for me . . .”

Did I “radiate freedom” in Paris? Not much, though perhaps I radiated a risk of pneumonia. My electric heater broke once, and I spent several extremely cold days in the
chambre
. Without central heating, as in the house I’d grown up in, there was no true or, to put it a better way, complete freedom. Deep down I knew this, but I preferred to kid myself and believe that the cold and bohemia were sheer freedom. I was a frustrated poet who, having wanted to write great verses, had tempered my ambitions and accepted being merely (I already had my work cut out for me) a storyteller. But I carried with me the lost ideals of my wish to be a poet. Basically, what the criminal manuscript of
The Lettered Assassin
narrates is the death of the poet I’d wanted to be.

Anyway, when I found out about Franco’s death, I was reading poetry. As soon as I heard the murderous general had died, I stopped reading and went out into the street to look for someone to celebrate with and found Javier Grandes, who knew nothing of the dictator’s death and hugged me hard and we hugged each other a lot and jumped up and down so joyfully and so savagely that I ended up twisting my ankle. An hour later, my foot bandaged, I found out Franco hadn’t died and started cursing Santiago Carrillo. Over the following few days, half immobilized by the accident, I returned to my poetry reading. And then, one day, Franco died again, my black neighbor’s radio announced it again, and this time it was true, but now I couldn’t jump for joy. Since I’d already celebrated and, besides, my ankle wouldn’t cooperate. My neighbor knocked on my door again and again he called me
tubab
. For a minute I had the impression that every time Franco died, people called me
tubab
. The second death of the dictator found me reading poetry again. This time, reading “Song of Awakening,” some lines by Claudio Rodríguez: “As if it had never been mine / give to the air my voice and in the air let it / belong to everyone and let everyone know it / just like a morning or an afternoon.”

I opened the window in the garret. The dictator, the great murderer had died and, though one might not say, as Claudio Rodríguez did in his poem, that the wind or the light were mine, I said to myself that soon perhaps my voice would be in the air and would belong to everyone. At first, it occurred to me that Franco’s death was a very important historical event, that it had something of Claudio Rodríguez’s
song of awakening
about it. And I grew solemn. I said to myself that perhaps a new stage was beginning for me and for the wind and for the light. And suddenly . . .

It wouldn’t be the last, but that was the first time in my life something like this happened to me. I was thinking that the circumstances at that moment were terrifyingly transcendent when all at once, without even realizing it, I wandered out of my solemn trance and ended up straightaway with a mere trifle, as a foreign word came into my head, a word that was nonsense, if you will, compared to the transcendence of the moment, but in the end I let myself relax, because my mood suddenly hinged on this trifle.

The foreign word was
Savannakhet
.

It was an eastern name that was obsessively repeated in
India Song
. It was an eastern name, a foreign word that sounded to me — because of the way it was pronounced by an Indian beggar woman in the film — more like a question than a proper name, a question in the form of a bloodcurdling cry, as if someone were crying out like the vice-consul and saying: And now what? It sounded just like Savannakhet. And now what. It sounded anguished. It was a cry, a question, it was a word as lost as the name of Venice in a deserted Calcutta.

It was a cry, a question, it was a word that later, in the film, turned into a song.

A song of Savannakhet.

And now what?

Franco had died and suddenly all I could think of was the trembling of monsoon light in a park by the Ganges. Franco had died and all I could think of was Savannakhet. It seemed frivolous. But then I said to myself: So what?

70

I came across a book that I decided had connections to my bohemian life:
The Time of the Assassins
by Henry Miller, a biography of Rimbaud and at the same time an evocation of the years Miller was poor and happy in Paris. In a preface written in Big Sur, California, in 1955, referring to Rimbaud, he says that, in the symbolic language of the soul, the French poet “described everything that is happening now.” According to Miller, there was a direct relation between Rimbaud and the great religious innovators. The French poet also proposed to re-invent life, to start over from zero. He is more alive than ever, Miller wrote, “and the future is all his . . . even though there be no future.” I said to myself that, given how mediocre my present was, it would be fantastic if the future belonged to me. I was prepared to believe Miller when he said there was no future, I was prepared to believe him in order to retain hope that in any case this future, even without existing, could one day belong to me.

71

I went to Paris in August and traveled by metro to the absurd structures, erected by Mitterrand’s megalomania, that house the National Library of France. I went to this strange place as convinced as W. G. Sebald was that there, “everything our civilization has produced is entombed,” and convinced too that modern man, under the hypnosis of progress and singular thought, does not miss what lies in this pantheon — the traces of those who are gone — lost as he is seeking the mirage of a future beyond his reach.

In the 1970s, too, when I was in Paris — as far as I was concerned back then, Mitterrand was just a friend of Duras’s who in 1943, at the height of the Resistance, had hidden for two nights in my garret — back then, the future was certainly a mirage, but I refused to accept this. Being young, I felt it was my obligation to believe I had a future, even if I couldn’t see it very clearly. On the other hand, feigning so much despair led me to spend days on end truly desperate, seeing everything as dark, the future very black. My youth was starting to look like what I called earlier, despair in black. This despair — at times feigned and at others genuinely endured — was my most loyal and constant companion throughout the two years I lived in Paris. Often, a sudden lucidity that seemed to arise from my least feigned despair told me I was burying my youth in the garret. Youth is extraordinary, I thought, and I’m suffocating it by living a bohemian life that’s not leading anywhere.

One day, through Cozarinsky’s book on Borges and cinema, I discovered the author of
The Aleph
. I bought his stories at the Spanish Bookstore, and reading them was a total revelation for me. I was knocked out, especially by the idea — found in one of his stories — that perhaps the future did not exist. The same idea I’d come across in Miller’s book on Rimbaud. Once more I was perplexed by this negation, or refutation, of time, in this case, in a piece of writing about Orbis Tertius, the most important axiom of the philosophical schools. According to this axiom, the future has no reality other than as a function of our present fears and hopes, and the past has no reality other than merely as that of memory.

The past is always a collection of memories, very precarious memories, because they are never real. On this subject I heard Borges himself say something very beautiful and moving. I heard him say it at a secret lecture he gave at Zékian, a clandestine bookstore located on the second floor of a house on Rue Littré. It was Cozarinsky himself who put me onto the trail of this secret bookstore.

I went to Zékian with no future and I left without a past.

I heard Borges say he remembered one evening his father had told him something very sad about memory, he’d said: “I thought I could remember my childhood when I first arrived in Buenos Aires, but now I know I can’t, because I think if I remember something, for example, if today I remember something from this morning, I get an image of what I saw this morning. But if tonight I remember that thing from this morning, then what I remember is not the first image I had of that thing, but the first remembered image. And so each time I remember something, I am not really remembering it, but rather I am remembering the last time I remembered it, I am remembering the last memory. So in reality I have absolutely no memories or images of my childhood, of my youth.”

After recalling his father’s words, Borges was silent for a few seconds that seemed endless to me, and then added: “I try not to think of things past because if I do, I know I am thinking about memories, not about the first images. And this makes me sad. It saddens me to think that we might not have real memories of our youth.”

72

A few months after hearing Borges say we don’t have any real memories of our youth, a girl who said her name was Sylvie stopped me in the street and, in a conspiratorial tone, explained that she’d seen me the day Borges was at the Zékian bookstore and wanted to let me know that next Tuesday, at six in the evening, there was to be a clandestine appearance by Georges Perec in that secret bookstore. “I’ll wait for you there,” she said, half shrouded in mystery, “don’t be late because Perec will be very brief.” Then she gave me the password to get in to the secret meeting and, turning the corner of Rue Saint-Benoît and Rue Jacob, disappeared forever. What I most remember about her is that she had the same hairstyle as Jane Birkin. And I say she disappeared forever because I didn’t see her in the Zékian the following Tuesday when I went to the secret meeting, I didn’t see her there and I’ve never seen her again in my life. A mystery.

I had a hard time making up my mind to go to the Zékian to see Perec. First because I had to go alone and my shyness made the prospect daunting, walking up those stairs again to the white painted door on the second floor of that building on Rue Littré where months before I’d heard Borges speak. And second because I’d already seen Perec once, at the launch of a book by Philippe Sollers, and I’d already spied on him enough. All in all, there were many reasons I found it a real uphill struggle to go to the bookstore. But the fact is I ended up going. I said the password (“I am a man who sleeps”) and went in, even more timidly than I would have in normal circumstances, since they made fun of me after I gave the password, saying, “Well, you don’t look sleepy to me.” There were some thirty people in the bookstore and I didn’t know a single one of them. At six on the dot a man appeared who said he was Perec, but wasn’t. More than that, he looked nothing like Perec. Among other things because he was a black guy and looked a lot like Tony Williams, the lead singer of The Platters. The false Perec’s appearance was very brief and of the sort that a person, even if it is a memory from youth, doesn’t forget.

This is what he said, more or less: “A long time ago, in New York, a few hundred yards from the rocks where the Atlantic’s last waves come to break, a man succumbed to his death. He worked as a scrivener for a lawyer. Concealed behind a folding screen, he spent his time sitting at his desk and never moved from there. He lived on ginger nuts. Through the window he looked out at a wall of blackened bricks he could almost have touched with his hand. It was futile to ask him to do anything, to re-read a text or go to the post office. Neither threats nor pleas had any effect on him. In the end, he went almost blind. He had to be fired. He installed himself on the stairs of the building. So they locked him up, but he sat in the prison yard and refused to eat.”

When he’d finished, he stared at the audience for a few seconds, then headed for the exit and left the bookstore, slamming the door hard. “Hitting rock bottom doesn’t mean a thing,” shouted the man sitting next to me. Everyone looked annoyed. And shortly afterwards the meeting broke up. I didn’t understand a thing. I went out to Rue Littré and returned to the garret. I hadn’t seen Sylvie, I hadn’t seen Perec. And that slam?

How strange, I thought. Will I remember this in a few years? The following day, I transferred the phrase “hitting rock bottom doesn’t mean a thing” to
The Lettered Assassin
, perhaps just so I’d remember this singer from The Platters in years to come.