73
In Paris, this August, each day on our way back to the hotel, we walked past the building on Rue Littré where there was once a secret bookstore called Zékian on the second floor. I couldn’t make up my mind whether or not I should go inside this building to try to find out what was now in the apartment where long ago the Zékian bookstore was, and neither could my wife. Would the bookstore perhaps still be there and would it even still be clandestine? And why the hell, incidentally, was there once a clandestine bookstore in a free Paris and why did this seem almost normal to me?
I remembered perfectly and almost obsessively the spiral staircase leading to the second floor, where there was a white door on which, painted in black, above the spyhole, there was a minuscule but informative letter
Z
.
Though I constantly felt the temptation to reclaim the space in which I once saw the legendary Borges in person, I never made up my mind to take the first step. At the same time, this indecision, which I shared with my wife — she is also very indecisive — was in reality steadily heightening my curiosity to know what the enigmatic Zékian could have become. Was it perhaps now the residence of a nice, quiet, middle-class family unaware of its past and who would be quite alarmed to know that one day, in the dining room of their sweet home, Borges admitted he was saddened by the thought that perhaps we don’t have real memories of our youth?
What could be behind the white door? The days went by, and we hadn’t made up our minds to enter the building on Rue Littré and go up to the second floor to ring the bell on the white door — would it still be white? — where Zékian was. Until one afternoon, in Café de Flore, where we were taking shelter from the rain, we suddenly ran into our friend Sergio Pitol — we hadn’t known he was in Paris and it was a nice surprise for us — who immediately became the leader of an expedition to the building on Rue Littré. He practically dragged us to the place. As soon as the rain eased off a little, he’d said, we’d find out everything we had to and we wouldn’t leave the building on Rue Littré until we knew what was behind the white door, what kind of person or piece of furniture — he said this with a smile — occupied the exact place where Borges once said it was sad not to have real memories of our youth.
It surprised me, once we were in the building on Rue Littré, to see that on the second floor there were, facing each other, two residences with their respective doors, neither of which were painted white. Still there, just as I remembered it, was the spiral staircase, so we hadn’t got the wrong building, but no doubt my memory had betrayed me. Surely there’d been a single door on the landing of the second floor. Suddenly, the whole investigation into the mystery of the Zékian started to revolve around which of the two was the white door of days gone by.
Despite my efforts, it was impossible to know which of the two doors was the one that I, almost thirty years ago, had gone through on two occasions. We decided to ring the bell of the one on the left, which was the one I thought more likely to be right. No one answered. We persisted, ringing several times. Nothing. “It’s obvious this was the door to the bookstore since there’s no one inside. The residents are so secretive, as you can see, that they’ve become invisible,” said Pitol, making no effort to hide how amused he was by this investigation. Suddenly, it seemed to me he was acting as if he were inside one of his own stories. And I thought that his stories would be enclosed stories if they ended by revealing what they never reveal: the mystery that travels with each one of us. The style of Pitol the storyteller has always consisted in telling all, but not resolving the mystery.
Pitol was enjoying himself so much he ended up hammering on the door, laughing his head off. Then we heard the sound of someone, behind the other door, opening the spyhole and peering at us. We rang the bell of this door a moment later. A woman of advanced years, an old lady, cautiously opened it a crack, leaving the chain on. “Are you looking for someone?” she asked. And then Pitol thought of a witty solution and asked in his impeccable French: “Monsieur Jorge Luis Borges? Does he live across the hall?” After a short silence, the woman told us: “They live there, but they’re not in, they’re never in.”
Pitol’s face lit up. Now we knew where the Zékian bookstore had been and could still be; the Borges family lived there, but they weren’t in. We left the place laughing, having the impression we’d done all we could to resolve the enigma of the secret bookstore and of the world. We left there with the impression of having been closer than ever to the invisible truth.
74
I used to go to lots of gatherings of Argentinians with Raúl Escari and it must have been around July 1974 when, at a party held in the studio of the painter Antonio Seguí, I met Gilberta Lobo, an Uruguayan lady who was nearly eighty years old and at first sight seemed like a great personality, a very interesting woman, though she sometimes conveyed a certain anguish, since she seemed to be assailed from time to time by brief but intense bouts of unease. She knew everything about Spain, although she’d never set foot on Spanish soil. But this country was her only passion in life, as she told me. Men, on the other hand, had never been her great passion. She told me this and then boasted about having a similar name to Gilberte de Saint-Loup, a Proust character, and then started going on about men again; she appeared proud of never having married one. “They all end up being a real pain,” she said, and asked me point blank if I’d like to go out for lunch the next day, just the two of us. “If you don’t think you’d be compromising yourself going out for a meal alone with a young man,” I said, trying to be clever, but with evident awkwardness. Seeing everyone laughing all around me, I added in time: “Or rather, alone with an old man.” I realized at that very moment that the first phrase of mine, the one that had made Seguí’s guests laugh so much, was exactly the kind of thing my mother might have said when talking about me (I was always a child to her: a gray child, it has to be said).
The following day I had lunch in a private dining room at a hotel on the Champs Élysées with Señora Lobo and felt, for a long while, like a child in the company of the kind of mother I would have liked to have had. “And does Marguerite Duras treat you well?” was one of her questions, as if competing with my landlady in the maternal feelings stakes. I felt really good throughout almost the entire meal. Protected. With a mother. Something I hadn’t felt for a while. Perhaps, I thought, I’d never felt protected by a mother until this day. A mother, moreover, who didn’t think of me as gray, but rather as someone with immense artistic potential — as she put it — which inspired me to feel creative and tell her the plot of
The Lettered Assassin
, although I told her a completely altered version.
A contributing factor — and not an insignificant one — in my transforming the entire plot of my novel must have been the three bottles of Bordeaux we’d drunk. The fact is I said that
The Lettered Assassin
told the story of a very attractive elderly lady with murderous tendencies, a woman who devoted herself to courting young Spanish men with whom she ended up making love until she killed them.
“So you see me as a man-eater?” she suddenly asked. I didn’t know what to say. “What do you think I am? A praying mantis?” I didn’t really know what she was talking about. “You think I’m one of those who eat the male after mating?” After saying this, she threw herself on me and I’ll always remember this as one of the shortest but also most significant episodes of what might be called — placing a lot of emphasis on the issue — my sexual education in Paris.
She stuck her hand down my pants and I seized up in fright. “You don’t seem very Spanish to me, more like a polar icecap,” she said, quite annoyed when I kept almost entirely still, colder than a glacier. I was going to ask her if she was criticizing me, but the effects of the Bordeaux led me down another complicated path.
“Is your mother well?” I said.
No doubt a polite question, but absurd at that moment no matter how you looked at it, and absurd, moreover, for a woman of her age. Nevertheless, I was surprised to find out that, as incredible as it might seem, Gilberta Lobo’s mother was alive.
“My mother is still admirably well,” she said, and went on to explain why: through the use of her physical faculties, such as walking to Mass or numbly enduring funerals, her mother, at ninety-five years of age, had gradually acquired an extraordinary moral beauty.
“And your mother’s mother?” I asked timidly and not the least bit sarcastically.
“Still dead,” she replied.
I saw that this time she was really annoyed with me; she reminded me of my mother when she got seriously angry after one of my pranks. So anyway. I should tell you something, ladies and gentlemen, without the slightest touch of irony: never in my life have I had the impression of having so many mothers as on that day.
75
I’ve been told your name’s Clara. Is that right? No? Well, I’m no mind-reader. The truth is nobody told me that was your name. I just wanted to briefly make contact with a member of the audience, step back a little from my papers, from the manuscript of this lecture. Get back to improvising again, to tell you and the audience in general that I’m not going back on something I’ve already said: I do like New York better than Paris. And I’m not going to deny that I would’ve loved to have swaggered down Broadway in Manhattan, in an honorary second lieutenant’s uniform, just as Hemingway did in May of 1918. And to march as he did down Fifth Avenue. And I’m not going to deny that I like nurses who wear their hair
à la garçon
either and that nurses like me, of course they do. You’re a nurse, I don’t think I’m wrong there. Your name’s not Clara, but you are a nurse.
I like nurses because they have a great capacity for sacrifice and resistance. Hemingway knew this very well, and often fell in love with them. In Italy, during the First World War, he was shot in the left leg by an Austrian machine gun and taken to the American Red Cross hospital, on Via Manzoni in Milan. There were eighteen nurses there for only four patients. And so Hemingway fell in love with Agnes Hannah von Kurowsky, the head nurse, an American of German origin who inspired the heroine of
A Farewell to Arms
and who led the ironical Scott Fitzgerald to say that Hemingway needed a new woman for each novel he wrote. Of course, you, Madam, you’re not called Clara, but you’re the new woman for this lecture, of that I haven’t the slightest doubt, just as I have no doubt that there’s never any end to Paris. That’s fine, leave, nobody’s stopping you. Just so you know, I didn’t mean to annoy you. I’m just a tired man. Leave, go on. It’s not important. Anyway, I was about to finish for today. Tomorrow I’ll tell you whether I really wanted to triumph in Paris.
76
We were walking down Boulevard Saint-Germain when, as we neared the Relais Odéon, it occurred to me to suggest to Amapola (an Andalusian with a bit of a truck driver look about her) that we stop for a minute to play a game of pinball. Basically, it was a strategy to try to see Martine Simonet, who used to go and play on that machine as well. It was a gray autumn day and I was feeling deeply nostalgic and desolate and felt I’d only cheer up if I saw the beautiful Martine.
Amapola, possibly jealous because she’d guessed what I was up to, acted just the opposite to Martine and easily managed, with her unforgettable, whisky-soaked voice, to put me straight into a bad mood. “Listen,” she said, “you’re too old to play on that machine. We’re not going into the Relais. You’re looking more like a spilled deck of cards every day.” I was intrigued by the image of the scattered cards. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Well, my boy, you’re the perfect image of confusion and errant ways. Because, let’s see now, what do you plan to do with your life?” I thought it disproportionate to attack me like that simply because she didn’t want to stop and play pinball. “And where, might I ask, is it that we’re going in such a hurry?” I replied. She stopped for a moment in the street and, coming out with one of her customary extravagant remarks, said in her strong Andalusian accent: “To kill ourselves in a fit of passion.”
When we got to the Relais, I could see from outside that the machine was occupied by Javier Grandes. “At least let me go inside and say hi to him,” I said to Amapola. We went in, she reluctantly. “What are you two up to?” asked Javier without taking his eyes off the machine. “Arguing,” she said. “What about?” asked Javier. “Nothing,” I said. “What do you mean nothing?” Amapola scolded me again. “We were talking about you and your confusion and errant ways.” “And how did that come up?” asked Javier laughing. “He still doesn’t know what he’s going to be in life,” she explained.
Javier, without stopping his pinball game, burst into his characteristic laugh and then, practically at the top of his voice, said to Amapola: “But he does know what he’s going to be. A writer. The fact he’s a little slow off the mark is another matter.” Another joyous guffaw from Javier, I thought he’d clearly smoked a rather considerable joint. “Slow?” I protested. Javier stopped playing for a few moments, put his hand on my shoulder, and with his unmistakable accent from Fuencarral, the Madrid neighborhood where he’d been born, said: “What I mean is you’re slow compared to Boris Vian. At your age he was already nearly dead, but he’d written about five hundred songs, three hundred poems, I don’t know how many novels, fifty stage plays, eight operas, one and a half thousand music reviews. And that’s not all, he used and abused the trumpet. And he was a great nighthawk, who used to flit from the Bar Vert to La Rhumerie Martiniquaise, from Tabou to Petit Saint-Benoît, from Trois Canettes to Vieux Colombier daily. Two marriages, I don’t know how many kids, an engineering degree, thousands of conversations with the waiters at the Balzar, a thousand transgressions, he wore out the needles on the record players at the local rich kids’ bashes, and, well anyway, I don’t need to tell you.”
I hung my head, practically destroyed, as if I’d lost a thousand games of pinball. “Oh great,” said Amapola, “all we needed was for you to get depressed.”