Read Never Any End to Paris Online

Authors: Enrique Vila-Matas

Tags: #Fiction, #General

Never Any End to Paris (18 page)

77

 

Did I really want to triumph in Paris? I try to delve deep into my rather shallow thinking of those years and I can’t find the exact answer to this question. I do remember that I thought I should already be a well-known writer, but it was a shame that I lacked a certain essential element: having completed a book. But even if I did finish the book I was working on, my fear of publishing was enormous; I can still remember the awful fear I felt at the thought of publishing. I also lacked a wife who was beautiful and intelligent and loved me. I didn’t have this either. I had nothing, really. And I said to myself: How unfair, maybe if I finish the novel and publish, I’ll triumph, but I’m so scared. Though, who knows, maybe I’ll get over my fear and publish it and triumph precisely because a beautiful and intelligent woman reads it, maybe a nurse, who’ll love me straightaway when she reads my book. But then the terrible suspicion arose that I was unlikely to find a reader to love me considering I planned to kill my readers. There could never have been a more ill-fated prospect for a literary debut, because I was cutting off my own murderous lettered nose to spite my face, and on top of that I’d have to wait till I’d finished my book to start the next one which would really give me the chance to triumph, to find the woman of my dreams. And how was I going to triumph if I wasn’t sure it was worth my while? How was I going to publish if I didn’t want to finish the book precisely because I was scared of publishing? And if I found the woman of my dreams and didn’t triumph? Ideally, I told myself many nights as I switched off the light in the sinister garret, I’d meet a beautiful and intelligent woman who’d help me triumph, who’d make good the saying that behind every great man there is a great woman. But how could I aspire to find such a woman if deep down I knew perfectly well I wasn’t a great man? Would I become one some day? I told myself this is what my second novel could be about, the one I’d write when I got the damned lettered assassin off my back. I told this to myself and went to sleep. And then I imagined in my dreams it was Paris — not I — that had a great future and, moreover, it had streetcars.

78

 

I met a guy called Alfonso, a Spanish political exile and compulsive reader of everything he came across. He was without doubt an intelligent guy, but forced by circumstances to deal hashish in order to survive in Paris. Whenever I saw him, he was always dressed in boxing sweatpants with a shirt on top and a blue French sailor’s sweater over the shirt, that is, he was dressed just as Hemingway very often dressed in his youth in that city. As for the rest of him, he looked quite a bit like the writer when he was young, above all like a photo I’d seen of him when he was Red Cross lieutenant. I always noticed how much he looked like Hemingway, but never mentioned it to him, I bought his merchandise (which was for Vicky Vaporú, who gave me a commission and so gave my fragile budget a little respite), put up with his envy or resentment that came from reading excessively about the class struggle, put up with his jokes about me and about my garret, and walked away. I didn’t see the use in remarking on his resemblance to Hemingway, since he wore the sweatpants because he boxed in his spare time. But it was true that his blue French sailor’s sweater was the oldest I’d ever seen, which made it possible — not very, but possible — that this sweater could be the same one that had once belonged to Hemingway. But I didn’t say anything. What for? Until one evening he went too far with his jokes and started to laugh so cruelly at my garret that I couldn’t take it any more and I asked him if he hadn’t realized he dressed just like Hemingway when he was young and living in Paris. He reacted faster than I’d expected and managed to surprise me when he said: “That’s because I am Hemingway. I thought you’d realized that.”

When people ask me if I have my texts organized in my head before I write them or if they develop as they go surprising even me, I always reply that infinite surprises occur in the writing. And that it’s lucky it’s like that, because surprise, the sudden change of direction, the phrase that appears at a precise moment without one knowing where it comes from, are the unexpected dividends, the fantastic little push that keeps the writer on his toes. This is what “the boxer” Alfonso managed to do that day with his surprising reply, he managed to keep me alert and really on my toes, ducking and weaving more than acceptably. I realized I’d do well to carry on down the path he’d begun when he told me he was Hemingway. Because if it was true, if he was Hemingway (and he wasn’t, of course), I had a unique opportunity to interview him. And, if he wasn’t, it didn’t matter: fiction has always been fiction and one has to believe in it gracefully when it appears. When it does, one must be aware that one is dealing with an exquisite fiction and, knowing this, believe in it. One mustn’t be fussy when faced with situations of this sort. If Alfonso said he was Hemingway, the most practical thing I could do was to accept his claim and interrogate him to see how he defended himself being who he claimed to be.

“The rich are different from you and me,” I said to him. This, as everyone knows, is what Scott Fitzgerald said on a certain occasion to Hemingway, who answered ironically: “Yes, they have more money.” Instead, Alfonso replied with: “The curse of the rich is that they have to live with the rich.” Although an ingenious reply, it wasn’t altogether the most pertinent. Or was that how Hemingway spoke? Of course it wasn’t, Hemingway didn’t speak as if he were Oscar Wilde or G. K. Chesterton. I decided the best thing would be to give up on the interview, but first I asked him one last question, a question that concerned me directly: “Mr. Hemingway, what do you think is the best training for the novice writer?” Again when I was least expecting it, his reply surprised me. The unexpected jab came back, and I was able to go on interviewing him enthusiastically. “Let’s say,” he replied, and this sounded very like Hemingway, “that a novice writer should hang himself because he discovers that writing well is intolerably difficult. Then someone saves him mercilessly, and his own ego forces him to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least that way he’ll have the story of the hanging for a start.”

I couldn’t have felt more excited, and asked him: “Mr. Hemingway, does the subject or the plot or a character change as one writes?” “Sometimes one knows the story,” he said, covering his face as if he was boxing, “and other times one invents the story as one writes and hasn’t the slightest idea how things are going to go. Everything changes as it goes along. This is what produces the movement of the story. Sometimes the movement is so slow it doesn’t seem to be moving. But there is always change, there is always movement.”

I grew even more excited. “Mr. Hemingway, when you write, do you ever discover you’re influenced by what you’re reading at that moment?” He concentrated for a few seconds then finally said: “Nothing I read influences me now, but there was a time when Joyce was important. This caused serious problems with my friend Gertrude Stein when it occurred to me to say that
Ulysses
was a goddamn wonderful book, and she said if I brought up Joyce twice in her house, I would not be invited back.” “So what did you do?” I asked. “What could I do, my friend? I restrained myself. I never mentioned his name in her house again.”

I spent quite a while interviewing him and I had the feeling I’d learned a lot, since in truth I listened carefully to some of his advice. “It’s odd,” he said toward the end of the interview, “that you’re paying attention to my advice. Normally nobody listens or accepts it. It’s strange that almost nobody accepts advice while they all accept money, it must be that money’s worth more.”

This sounded nothing like Hemingway to me. And what he went on to say, even less so: “I’ve tried to get out of poverty using what I’ve taught myself, but it’s done me no good at all. I struggle to get by selling
shit
. When I was a child, we barely had enough to eat. I had a disabled mother and a drunken father. But of course, we had to keep up appearances. We were poor, but clean. I still don’t understand how I acquired a social conscience, because I didn’t have one, I was resigned.”

It was only when he said this, which sounded nothing like Hemingway either, that I brought the interview to a close. A worldwide exclusive, I thought, some day I’ll write it up. “Anything else you’d like to add?” I asked. “Put that I’m very fond of snow and winter and taking my little girls to piano class,” he said. And in the face of the ferocious look I gave him — as if asking him to please stick to the script — he added: “What’s the matter? I don’t usually tell all, I’m governed by the principle of the iceberg. You’ll have to make up the secret story of this encounter out of the unsaid, I’m not going to do all the work. A drunken father and a disabled mother. Remember that and put all your skill into telling the inscrutable story of my sadness.”

Did I have a worldwide exclusive interview or a short story? It was dark by then and I had to go back to my neighborhood, where Vicky Vaporú was waiting for me to give her the hash. He, meanwhile, had a painter waiting for him. “I’ve arranged to meet Joan Miró at the gym where I box,” he said. And I don’t know . . . The word “box” sounded very forceful, like a jab at the interviewer, or the storyteller.

79

 

And now that we’re talking about Spanish exiles in Paris, I think the case of the crazy, young orphan Tomás Moll, who ended up becoming a real institution at the Café de Flore, might deserve our attention. Having inherited a large fortune in his native Majorca, young Moll, who watched with satisfaction how overnight an accident left him without a relative in the world, moved immediately to Paris — went into exile, he said — the city of his dreams.

He moved, or exiled himself, to Paris, seeking to forget the ragged, scruffy dead people he was leaving behind him (his Majorcan family was very decadent, but this isn’t always a guarantee of elegance, far from it), and to lead the life of a dandy or a
flâneur
, two ways of life that were impracticable in his cramped home city of Palma de Mallorca. He soon gave up the second ambition, being a
flâneur
, and became sedentary in the Flore. He was fascinated and trapped by the terrace of this café to the point where, accompanied by a Venezuelan secretary he’d hired in Paris, he began to spend whole days there, devoted, with as much dandyism as possible, to preparing the appropriate material for an extravagant book he planned to call
How to be the Least Like Baroja Even Though You’re in Exile in Paris
.

On one occasion, shortly after the young millionaire Moll had arrived in Paris, he’d attended, out of simple curiosity, the philosopher García Calvo’s Spanish
tertulia
in the Café La Boule d’Or on Place Saint-Michel where, just as he’d guessed would happen, he was horrified by the bad-tempered atmosphere and the participants’ scant elegance. The
tertulia
reminded him of the dirty, decadent family he’d left behind. Appalled at the filth — in his view — of a misunderstood dignity, he couldn’t even bring himself to approach García Calvo and ask his opinion on Baroja’s life during his first exile in Paris.

In any case, this brief incursion into La Boule d’Or turned out to be very advantageous for him, as he told me the day I spoke to him. The incursion made him immune to any more follies or attempts to find better cafés than the Flore. He wasn’t happy, he confessed to me that day, the only time I spoke to him. He wasn’t happy because he noticed that all the people who approached him did so out of self-interest, because of his money. His secretary, at least, he’d sought out himself so as not to go through the irritating stage of suspicion and mistrust.

“So you must be suspicious of me, then?” I said that day when we exchanged a few words in the Flore. “Very,” he replied. I’d approached him because I was intrigued to know how one wrote a novel with a secretary. Marguerite Duras hadn’t mentioned anything about a possible need for an assistant on her instruction list. And even though I was practically certain it wasn’t necessary to have a secretary in order to write, I didn’t want to rule anything out in advance, since I wasn’t exactly overrun with resources to keep my fragile condition of novice writer on track. This led me to ask young Moll what the intellectual contribution of his Venezuelan companion was or if he’d hired him purely because having a secretary looked very elegant. “Everything can be elegant, apart from being like Pío Baroja when he was living in Paris,” he replied. And that was how I began to learn about the subject of the book he was working on.

Through the collection of data on Baroja’s life around 1912 during his first exile in Paris — a meticulous study, on which several hired students were working, co-coordinated by the secretary, who informed Moll of their results conscientiously each day in the Flore — Moll was preparing a book that proposed a model of life for writers in exile or who would be in the future: an impeccable model, based on a shameless search for happiness, although diametrically opposed to the not at all exemplary life that, according to Moll, Baroja had led in Paris when, in his foul room in the awful Hotel Bretonne on Rue Vaugirard at a disgusting table covered with a tablecloth, he’d written
The Tree of Knowledge
.

“Just a stone’s throw from there,” young Moll told me that day in the Flore, “also on Rue Vaugirard, revealing the stark contrast between Spanish and American literature, in a splendid apartment at number 58 and surrounded by glamour, lived Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Baroja, in contrast, lived in a sordid room with a hide-away bed built into the wall. Spanish literature will never amount to anything if it doesn’t get away from tablecloths and hide-away beds.”

He told me, looking horrified — I suppose wanting me to share his horror — that Baroja only left his hotel room in Paris to
inflict dinner
on visiting friends, as Ramón Gómez de la Serna recounted in a portrait of Baroja, meals he insisted on blighting with long sermons on the importance of science and the biologist Metchnicov, in fashion back then because he’d recently judged that the long lifespan of some Bulgarian citizens was due to fermented dairy products. “So there,” Baroja repeated over and over at these dinners, “what one should be is a Metchnicofff,” (and he added three
f
’s instead of the last
v
).

It didn’t take a genius to see that the young orphan and millionaire’s book was the delusion of a nutcase, who was being swindled out of his money by a good number of fake students, all friends of the Venezuelan secretary. But in any case, it was beyond doubt that the Flore, with its record of exiles, was the most suitable place to prepare a book about someone’s exile, so I congratulated him on having chosen a setting as appropriate as that café. Anyway, I only spoke with young Moll that one time, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t follow, at a prudent distance, the laborious production of a book that, as the students hired by the secretary scandalously increased in number, grew longer and longer until one day, apparently, many years after I’d left Paris, the book became interminable for the young millionaire, it became literally infinite: something, I was told, that Moll himself verified without it mattering to him at all, rather just the opposite, since by then he’d discovered that the true charm of the book and true dandyism lay in the generosity of giving work to fake students. And so, despite it having proved infinite, he decided to continue with the preparations for a book that he should have cut short some time ago, especially when he began to read Baroja and discovered he adored him and had been unforgivably frivolous in wanting to trash him for details such as his missing a button on his shirt. If he didn’t stop the preparations at that point, he was hardly going to do so now just because the book had become infinite. Why stop when the book was never going to appear anyway and prolonging these preparations would allow him to carry on helping, with all the dandyism in the world, a good number of young people in need of work, in this case, work that was — Moll knew it, the secretary knew, and in the end I’m told everyone knew — pure farce, simply the need to distribute the inheritance of an unpleasant Majorcan family?

Moll ended up becoming an institution on the terrace of the Flore, and even the Japanese sought him out in the 1980s to photograph him next to his secretary. He died of a sudden illness in February 1992. There’s a brilliant photo from the end of the eighties, I think it’s the winter of ’89, in the doorway of the Café de Flore, where you can see the Majorcan millionaire and his Venezuelan secretary surrounded by smiling fake students who you couldn’t exactly say had approached Moll and his assistant (by then he was also a millionaire) out of financial self-interest, but rather, as the secretary himself happily said, they’d been sought out by the pair; all of those unemployed youngsters had literally been captured, embroiled by them, caught up in the adventure of a senseless and endless book, but which after all made a living for a lot of people and moreover allowed the now not-so-young Moll, this great nutcase and strange orphan, to justify himself before death with a deed well done, even if it was infinite and therefore unfinished: to justify himself before death, and to be, moreover, due to his principle of generosity (and not his aesthetic opposition to built-in hideaway beds), a true dandy. A silhouette of a dandy alive in the golden exile of the Café de Flore.

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