Never Any End to Paris (19 page)

80

I find it impossible to recall the first sentence of
The Lettered Assassin
— written once I had the finished whole book — without a great deal of affection: “So merged and intertwined are the occasions for laughter and tears in my life that I find it impossible to recall without good humor the distressing incident that forced me to publish these pages.”

This long first sentence not only seems to me a good opening but — together with those of the dangerous criminal manuscript at the center of the novel — it is also one of the few sentences I now recognize as my own. And the fact is almost all the others sound highly affected or distant or seem copied from other authors. Oddly, I initially resisted including this long first sentence with which I now identify so strongly because I told myself I couldn’t start my book with something so little in keeping with my actual life, since nothing like that had ever happened to me, never had my tears and laughter been intertwined.

But I soon realized that this sentence could end up being one of the few that over time I would end up recognizing as genuinely mine. I saw this thanks to Vicky Vaporú, who told me that life often ends up imitating art and I might eventually have the experience of seeing how with time I would feel absolutely responsible for that first sentence, and on the other hand not feel like the author of many of the others in my criminal book.

And, well, that’s what’s happened. It’s true, quite a few years have had to pass — I see them as having been well spent — for something as uncertain as that first sentence of my first book to become certain. The fact is that as time has passed the occasions for laughter and tears have become intertwined in my life and now, for instance, I find it impossible not to recall with a sense of humor the mental state in which I wrote my most recent novels, that strange mental state that would lead me to weep at my own humor and laugh my head off when my characters die. And the thing is, life’s like that, and so is art. In the long run, if you’re patient, you discover that, just like laughter and tears, life and art have a tendency to end up merging and intertwining to form a single figure, at once comic and tragic, a figure as singular as that formed by the bull and the bullfighter in those great performances we never forget.

81

A few days after the filming of
India Song
finished, Marguerite Duras felt very disoriented, I found out many years later; back then I didn’t worry about how Marguerite was feeling, it never occured to me to wonder what her state of mind might be. I now know that the end of the summer of 1974 was awful for her; the end of that summer was hot and anguished, and lonely too. After the filming, everyone had gone back to their everyday lives, and Marguerite felt lonely. Empty, in a state of weightlessness, according to Laure Adler’s biography of Duras. She went to Neauphle-le-Château, precisely where I went to visit her one day, at the end of that dreadful summer, unaware of this whole drama.

There, in Neauphle, she began hearing the same voices she’d been listening to throughout the days when she’d written the film’s screenplay. “I’m not functioning at all,” she told a friend, “I can’t get back to reality.” She started to think about a sequel to
India Song
. One night, she had a strange dream: she dreamed she was being burgled, that the apartment she had in Trouville was being emptied and, worst of all, even her sea views were being stolen. They took her papers, her money, her purse. She cried, but no one cared about her, she was all alone and without her sea views. When she woke up, she fell into a deep depression, and over the following days the dream returned again and again.

Her last two books hadn’t worked at all, she seemed to be finished as a writer. She felt isolated, despised, frightened. “The failure of my last two books fills me with shock and fear,” she wrote to Claude Gallimard, her editor. And then, talking about some praise she’d just received in an article, she told him: “You haven’t had time to read it, I understand perfectly: but this article said about me (rightly or wrongly, that’s not the point) that I’m a brilliant dramatic author . . . You are overloaded with work. And I have to live. My political position is very awkward. . . .
I have to live, I am on my own
and I’m not young any more and
I don’t want to end up in poverty
(the emphasis is hers). If I have to go back to suffering the poverty I knew as a child, I’ll shoot myself. You can’t turn the clock back, I want to defend myself, I’m no saint. No one is. The suffering of Bataille’s last years (he was always a few francs short) doesn’t seem normal to me . . . If I don’t sell here anymore, I’ll go abroad.”

I now know that, when
India Song
became a cult film in June 1975, this good reception surprised her and at the same time cheered her up a great deal, brought her out of the bad time she was going through. The film was shown at several multiscreen cinemas generally sharing the bill with the very commercial
Tommy
, the rock opera by The Who. These days, knowing the crisis she’d been going through, I understand perfectly why Marguerite was so excited — I remember being very struck by this — when she saw the lines of people outside the cinemas, the lines she thought were for
India Song,
when in fact they were generally for the other film, the rock film, which didn’t mean her film wasn’t a success, it just didn’t have the mass appeal she thought, or dreamed, it had.

Raúl and I had laughed fondly at this delusion, this conspicuous longing or obsession with success of Marguerite’s. It’s odd, I tell myself now. It’s odd, but of the entire story of fear and success, of laughter and tears, what has most taken hold in my soul is, primarily, that violent disappearance of the sea views in Marguerite’s dreams, perhaps because I remember one of the last sentences she wrote, a sentence from
C’est tout
, her literary testament, where she said she didn’t know when asked if death frightened her: “I don’t know anything anymore since I’ve reached the sea.” Or perhaps because what most terrifies me about the idea of eternal death is to never be able to see the sea again, the waves breaking in winter on deserted beaches.

But, above all, what most takes hold of my soul is this surprising sentence, which says a lot about her style that is so frequently bold, provocative and brilliant: “If I don’t sell here anymore, I’ll go abroad.” What a fantastic threat! I can see her saying it now: with a childish smile, almost in jest. But what she said is terrible, we all know it. At the same time it’s poetic. Terrible and poetic: Abroad.

82

A few days after the second death of Franco, I happened to see a photo in a magazine of an OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) meeting in the garden of François Le Lionnais’s house. Belonging to this workshop of potential literature were, among others, Georges Perec, Marcel Bénabou, Italo Calvino, and Raymond Queneau. I was puzzled by this. What could a workshop of potential literature be? I wanted to be a writer precisely so I wouldn’t have to go to work in an office, much less in a workshop. But surely it was a different kind of workshop, a literary workshop, just as the abbreviation
Li
indicated in the acronym OuLiPo. But I was back to where I’d started. What could a literary workshop be? It didn’t sound good. Could it be something to do with that weirdo Perec?

“Wanted:” it said under the photo, “successors to Raymond Roussel, precursor of this movement, by writing method as much as by his particular conception of literature.” I was fascinated by Roussel and also felt I was, in some ways, his successor. Could I be an
Oulipian
without knowing it? Seventeen members of the group appeared in the photo and on the table was a portrait of André Blavier, the workshop’s foreign correspondent, based in Belgium. I took particular note of this surname, Blavier, and that he wore his hair exactly the same as I did. Not to mention his pipe, which looked like mine. OuLiPo has stolen my pipe, I suddenly thought. The next day, I made inquiries about this Blavier. “He’s a librarian and a
pataphysicist
,” was all I could find out. The
pataphysicists
again!

Oulipians, pataphysicists, situationists
. . . I thought the most prudent thing would be to carry on being a
situationist
, though not a practicing one. I wasn’t in the mood for too many new adventures. But I had to admit that Paris was so full of surprises that there was never any end to them. I thought if I decided to take a little trip to Barcelona I’d get some attention when friends or acquaintances asked me how things were going in Paris. “Well, it’s the same as here, except up there I’m an
oulipian
, a
pataphysicist
and a
situationist
. And this, as I’m sure you’ll understand, changes things a bit,” I’d say to them with my hair cut
à la
Blavier, smoking my pipe. I’m sure I’d enjoy seeing their surprise or watching them go green with envy. It was about time I got a bit more recognition in my city.

83

A few days after the second death of Franco, I took a little trip to Barcelona, I don’t know why, perhaps so my parents could see my bandaged ankle. The fact is one night at the beginning of December I went to the Bocaccio nightclub on Calle Muntaner and there I met the novelist Juan Marsé, who’d lived in Paris for a few years and whom mutual friends had told of my aspirations to be a writer. At first I thought of asking his advice on what a person should do to make the most of their time in Paris, but it seemed stupid to ask something when I couldn’t care less what the answer might be. Then it occurred to me to ask him for some literary advice, just like that, advice related to the art of making novels. As soon as I’d asked, I regretted it, since I thought he might easily give me a list like Duras’s, a list of instructions. I thought if he gave me a list or something similar, I’d immediately show him the piece of paper with Duras’s strict instructions — I always carried it in my back pocket — and tell him thanks anyway but I already had more than enough written recommendations. But Marsé was no list of instructions man. “That’s strange, kid, young people don’t usually ask for advice,” he said. And then he took the trouble to explain — and I will always remember this — that one of the hardest aspects of the writer’s trade was having to throw away fragments of the novel we’re writing, passages we really like but are no use to the project in general because they don’t fit in with the plot or the structure. “It’s irritating sometimes to have to get rid of pages we like,” he said, and shortly afterwards he went off after a blonde everyone called Teresa.

The next night, still mulling over what Marsé had told me, I went back to the Bocaccio and didn’t see Marsé this time, the only thing I saw as I walked into the club was that I didn’t know anyone or, rather, at the far end of the bar, somewhat secretly, the writer Juan Benet was talking to the novice Eduardo Mendoza, who in those days had just published his first novel. I went discreetly over to where they were and heard one sentence, only one (because they immediately moved away from the bar, perhaps alerted to my spying), I got just close enough to hear the sentence Benet said to Mendoza and I heard it perfectly and have never forgotten; it was spoken — I remember it was raining heavily outside, a stormy night — as if by an actor in a whodunnit: “Today I wrote the first page of a novel, and I don’t know what it’s about, but I know I’ve got a year of obsession ahead of me.”

Benet’s system didn’t seem at all bad to me, I made a note of it, and I think I remember that it sounded like a magnificent and timely piece of unsolicited advice. Soon after this some people I knew came into the club. Among them, Beatriz de Moura, who would end up publishing
The Lettered Assassin
, although that night I couldn’t have known this, that night I didn’t even talk about my book with her, we talked about another book, one by Julio Ramón Ribeyro, a Peruvian writer I’d never heard of. Beatriz asked me if, when I returned to Paris, I could put the galleys of this book into the writer’s hands; she didn’t tell me what the title was, just that it was going to be published as soon as the proofs had been corrected by Ribeyro himself. I wasn’t planning on going back to Paris immediately, but this sped things up somewhat, since I was too shy to tell her I didn’t know when I’d be able to get there to give Ribeyro the proofs.

Three days later, I was back in Paris. And shortly after I’d gone back to my garret on Rue Saint-Benoît I took a subway train that, if memory serves, left me very close to Place Falguière, where it took me a very long time — I got quite nervous — to find the building Ribeyro lived in. It took me a while, but eventually I found it and then I remember I walked up a steep staircase with the immense, private satisfaction of someone preparing to carry out a mission he’s been entrusted with. I now tell myself it’s quite likely the proofs I was carrying were those of
Stateless Prose
, which over time has become one of my favorite books. I remember this assignment made me happy, since I felt as if I were finally responsible for something and I’d even found a respectable reason for my decision to move to Paris.

It was December 9, 1975, and that same day, after dropping my suitcase off in the garret, I carried out Beatriz’s assignment straightaway. I went up the steep staircase, rang the bell, and Ribeyro, who was playing with his son in the front hallway, opened the door instantly. I was very shy. But, by the look of it, so was Ribeyro. “I’ve brought you this,” I told him. I’ve since learned from his journal that for him there was a parallel between his son’s activity and his own, between play and writing: “The state of mind that draws him to his toys is similar to that which puts me in front of my typewriter: dissatisfaction, boredom, the desire to call upon others, or the others we have inside of us, to speak . . .”

Ribeyro took the proofs and looked at me in silence. He was tall and lean, he seemed to have an ambiguous fragility. “On behalf of Beatriz,” I added quite nervously. In the seconds that followed I waited for him to say something. When it seemed like he was about to speak, I ran away, and I did so because of the panic my timidity and his own had induced in me. I sped down the stairs and when I got to the ground floor and felt like I was about to reach the fresh and liberating air of the street, I suddenly heard the writer’s voice, muffled by his son’s happy laughter, coming from high up in the gloomy stairwell.

“Calm down,” I heard him say.

It’s paradoxical, but time has passed, and now I remember this timid, fleeting, cold encounter as very warm. I don’t know where it comes from, this warmth, which arrives from so far away and lingers so long afterwards.