Never Any End to Paris (20 page)

84

Perhaps because my father had given me an ultimatum about money, the first night I spent back in Paris, I dreamed that André Blavier, the man whose haircut was exactly like mine, was trying to tell me something but didn’t dare. Until eventually he told me: “Young people think money is everything, and when they grow up, they find out it’s true.”

85

Thinking over what Juan Marsé had said to me in Barcelona, I discovered that what he’d said about passages one sometimes has to throw away might be related to the enigmatic section
unity and harmony
that appeared on Duras’s list. If I understood correctly, a novel needed to have a certain inner coherence and it was preferable for the story line to be consistent. Anything that breaks away from the plot, no matter how alluring what one might have written, should be eliminated. Wasn’t this what Marsé had been telling me in the Bocaccio? Or perhaps he’d been trying to explain that as he wrote he came up with unexpected stories that grew uncontrollably off the central trunks of his plots and he had to give them up, often with some regret? Had he actually been talking about unity and harmony? Or had he been talking about something quite different? Could I accept as an unbendable rule that novels needed to have unity? Perhaps the best thing to do was what I’d been doing in
The Lettered Assassin
, where I’d never strayed from the backbone of the story. But it wasn’t clear this was for the best either, since paradoxically, as I wrote the book, I’d been discovering it was highly debatable that a novel
must
have unity and harmony. For, what about digressions then? I knew, or rather sensed, that there were very good novels that were brilliant precisely because of their digressions. What’s more, I said to myself, a book was like a conversation. Did a conversation have to deal with the same subject, take the same form or follow the same intention for hours?

I told Raúl Escari about my worries, and he told me that the subject of unity and harmony was a far more difficult question to resolve than I thought. “Why’s that?” I asked in fright. We were at his house on Rue de Venise. I remember there was a Boris Vian record playing and we’d argued because — I suppose I was still traumatized by the figure of Vian — I’d wanted to listen to Harry Belafonte instead. He went off to his bookshelves and said he was going to look for an example of a writer’s violent struggle for unity. And after a short time he came back with Flaubert’s letters to Louise Colet: “In five months I have written seventy-five pages. Each paragraph is good on its own and there are pages that are perfect. I am sure of it. But, precisely for that reason, it’s not working. It is a collection of well turned out and ordered paragraphs that are not connected to each other. I will have to undo them, loosen the joins, as one does to the spurs of a boat when one wants the sails to catch more wind . . .”

“So,” said Raúl, “it’s not a question of unity or a degree of tolerance for digression. It’s a more profound or complex matter than it appears to be. The paragraphs should be connected to each other. Nothing more and nothing less.”

I didn’t say anything, but I felt faint.

86

I was full of doubts, of course, not a particularly bad way to be, but I didn’t know that. Doubting so much made me suffer, but I could have saved myself the anxiety and simply doubted, without any problem. I was unaware that to doubt is to write. Marguerite Duras would say so in 1995, toward the end of her days: “I can say what I like, but I shall never know why people write and how it is people don’t write. In life, there comes a time, and I think it is total, that we cannot escape, where we doubt everything: that doubt is writing.”

Allow me to improvise a little now, ladies and gentlemen, to stop reading for a few moments and tell you something I think will fit perfectly into the lecture at this time, when you now have an outstanding view of the “grayness” of my days in Paris. I think I should tell you that of all the sentences of Marguerite’s that I’ve read, there’s one I know by heart and which, as I understand it, speaks the truth about me and about the life I’m recounting in this lecture: “We writers lead a very poor life: I’m talking about people who write for real. I don’t know anyone with less of a personal life than I have.”

87

Jeanne Boutade looked a lot like Coco Chanel, but a more modern version. She was a sort of thin, immaculate sparrow, talkative and lively as a woodpecker. She talked a lot and often mixed up her facts, though sometimes she was surprisingly lucid; in general, she used to get into a huge muddle with the information picked up from the thousand books she claimed to have read in the last three years, specifically since she’d realized she was a grown-up now and, desperate to no longer be a girl, she had started to read novels and non-fiction to try and discover something about the world, to try and find out everything that, as a girl, hadn’t interested her at all.

As for the writer, cartoonist, actor, and painter Copi, he’d been one of the previous tenants of my garret and had left a manuscript there and one day he decided to pick it up, and that’s how we met. It turned out we had lots of mutual friends, for instance, we both had friends in what might be called the
Argentinian group
of Paris, a bunch of young people who often hung around Marguerite Duras and who I remember always seemed very comfortable in the company of her intelligent madness, very comfortable because, as well as being fun and conveying a feeling of liberty and euphoria, Marguerite took a lot of interest in all of them, she was always asking them indiscreet questions, she wanted to be up to date and know everything. As Copi said: “Marguerite is alone, but she feeds off others.”

One day, Copi, Boutade, and I went to eat oysters in a brasserie in the neighborhood. I’ll always remember that day, not just because it was the first time I ever ate oysters (Copi was paying), but also because I discovered there were people who could literally live off a secret, and also because the winter light was so beautiful, I’m sure I have never in my life seen another day with light like that. The three of us had happened to run into each other on Rue de Medicis, up by the Corti bookstore, and we’d started to walk together in the strong, clear wind, strolling along the wet gravel paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg. We hadn’t yet decided to go and eat oysters when, on the other side of the Luxembourg, turning onto Rue Bonaparte, we almost bumped into the bohemian Bouvier who, pointing to the top of a building in that street, was telling a bewildered couple that as a young man he had spent his bohemian days up there. “I lived up there, and there, thanks to that building, I became blocked and I failed as an artist,” he was telling them in a very singsong voice.

“Look, look at that old guy,” said Copi. We’d all seen him before. Boutade had even spoken to him one night when she’d found him outside the doorway to her house and seeing him light a match without a cigarette in his hand, she’d asked him what he was doing and the old man had replied: “It’s nighttime, right? I’m lighting a match so I won’t see a thing.”

He was mad, that much seemed obvious. But his obsession with blaming the buildings of the neighborhood — only those of our neighborhood — for his artistic failure was a constant enigma. The bohemian Bouvier was one of the topics of our conversation that day on the terrace of the brasserie, with braziers outside, where we stuffed ourselves with oysters, and Copi didn’t stop behaving like a rat for a second. Copi had a huge tendency to identify with the roles he was playing and at the time he was performing his work
Loretta Strong
every night in a Paris theatre. This play told the story of a rat who’d been sent into space and who, after an accident caused the disappearance of the entire human race, is left all alone in the universe and holds forth like a madwoman.

It was his glorious rat-like conduct that lunch time that would open my eyes once and for all to the absence of any boundary between theatre and life and would also show me the immense capacity other people have for writing dangerously, that is, starting off, from the very first moment, from an extreme situation that forces the author not ever to lessen the tension with which he has begun the drama. Would I one day be able to write starting off from an extreme situation, just as my admired friend Copi always did? That’s what I wondered that day as I ate oysters with the writer and with Boutade and, as I ate the oysters, I remembered Hemingway, on the one hand, who, whenever he had some money in Paris, used to eat them “with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture,” and on the other hand I kept thinking about how lucky I was to be able to eat these delicious oysters, to be able to eat them slowly drinking the cold liquid from each of the shells and washing away the taste shortly afterward with the clear taste of the dry white wine.

“Why does the bohemian Bouvier spend all his time accusing this neighborhood of having ruined his art?” asked Copi in the voice a rat would have if rats had voices and if, moreover, they were hoarse. Boutade thought for a while, all of a sudden she drank down a whole glass of wine and said: “Basically the old guy’s quite funny. He doesn’t realize what he’s spared himself by not being a successful artist.” And she then got into a muddle with various famous names and called the painter Miró Pablo.

“Think of Tolstoy or Hemingway, both triumphant. And remember what happened to them and to so many other famous artists when they grew old,” said Copi.

“Sometimes, I used to eat at La Fragate and I would see Henry de Montherlant hidden there behind the piano, it was disgusting and at the same time you couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, you could see he was about to commit suicide. There’s not a single artist who, no matter how triumphant, doesn’t end up a recluse, hiding away when he gets old,” said Boutade.

“Maybe the bohemian Bouvier is an existentialist and Juliette Greco’s boyfriend and that’s why he’s like that,” I joked. I don’t think Boutade even heard me. She’d been lost in thought for a few moments and didn’t hear me. Suddenly she said, as if starting a litany of reflections: “They, the winners, kill themselves, or they go mad or turn into idiots, or they die of boredom, almost none of them endures old age gracefully. The bohemian Bouvier, on the other hand, thanks to his failure, has fantastic presence and dignity, don’t you think so? Though he does take his obsession with the buildings of the neighborhood a bit too far.”

“Sometimes I wonder if he didn’t actually spend his bohemian days in my garret and my fate will be the same as his,” I joked again. Boutade, who didn’t hear me that time either, began to talk as if she’d suddenly had a flash of inspiration: “I’m sure the old man will never tell us why he’s obsessed with the buildings of the neighborhood and he won’t tell us because this secret is clearly very important, it’s what keeps him alive, clearly it’s all the bohemian Bouvier has left, the secret of why he acts like that.
He lives off that secret
.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” said Copi. But then he added ironically: “Though you could also say that the old man is one of those who knows that three people can keep a secret perfectly well provided two of them are dead.”

This summer in Paris, walking through the neighborhood, I thought again of what Boutade said that day and it seemed to me it wasn’t a bad idea at all and that perhaps the bohemian Bouvier really did live off his secret. I thought a lot this summer in Paris about that day with the unforgettable winter light when I went to eat oysters with Copi and Boutade. I thought so much I began to look the buildings up and down trying to hate them so I could blame them for my garret failure of those days, and at the same time verify at last what kind of secret it was that gave Bouvier so much life. But I didn’t get anywhere in this respect. I ended up confirming that, just as Boutade and Copi had, and just as I would one day, the bohemian Bouvier, as everyone does, he’d taken his least communicable secret to the grave. Hemingway had already said as much with his idea about short stories, his famous iceberg theory: never tell what is most important.

88

“Having lived in Paris unfits you for living anywhere, including Paris.” (John Ashbery)

89

One day I finally decided to replace the burnt-out headlight on my car. Since I still didn’t know where to go to get it fixed, I decided to ask the man who ran a tire shop in an alley off Rue Saint-Benoît, across from my house. The mechanic’s wife looked drunk and told me that to talk to her husband I needed to request an audience and invited me to sit down. I sat. A dog came over and tried to jump on top of me. The woman said: “These little dogs just love knees.” And what I just loved was the phrase. I wrote it down in the notebook I carried to write down things I heard in the street that might be useful for my book. A few days earlier I’d started to enjoy taking notes aimed at what I was writing. I liked doing it, because I noticed it made me feel like a writer.

A little while later, waiting in Porte d’Orleans for a mechanic to fix my headlight, I thought again of what the other mechanic’s wife had said and thought she must’ve been slightly drunk and this explained why she’d come out with such a lovely phrase. And I immediately realized there was a certain similarity between my brief episode in the garage and the famous passage in
A Moveable Feast
where Hemingway explains how Miss Stein had trouble with the old Model T Ford she drove, and a mechanic at the garage, a young man who’d served in the last year of the war, hadn’t shown much interest in repairing it; he had been told off by the
patron
, who said to him: “You are all a
génération perdue
.” Miss Stein, when she heard this, added: “That’s what you are. That’s what you all are. All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.”

“Really?” Hemingway asked her. For Miss Stein none of these youngsters had any respect for anything, they drank themselves to death. Hemingway tried to make her see that wasn’t the case and that it was probably the boy’s
patron
who was drunk by eleven o’clock in the morning and that was why he came out with such lovely phrases. “Don’t argue with me, Hemingway,” said Miss Stein. “It does no good at all. You’re all a lost generation, exactly as the garage keeper said.”

That same day, that is, the day I got my headlight fixed, in the evening, with the light now working, I went past the place they fixed tires again. With the excuse of thanking her for telling me where to get my headlight repaired, I went over to the garage to see if the mechanic’s wife was still saying lovely phrases or if by now her drunkenness had taken her beyond that, perhaps to a dimension of hideous phrases. She wasn’t there. Her husband was there, however, playing with the little dog. “What can I do or not do for you?” he asked. He was very drunk. Maybe he’ll say a lovely phrase too, I thought. “Nothing,” I said timidly, although with a certain amount of audacity as well, which I suppose came from the timidity itself. “What d’you mean, nothing?” said the mechanic, putting the little dog on his knees. “Nothing,” I said, “I’ve just come to say thank you because I finally have two working headlights, and I didn’t want to leave it till tomorrow.” He stared at me strangely, then said slowly in Spanish, “Leave it till tomorrow? Tomorrow is today.” The stalker of notable phrases inside me that day was so happy to have heard
Tomorrow is today
. I wrote down the phrase and, faced with the possible angry reaction of the man, walked out of there with the speed some people employ when walking out of garages after having to pay a fortune for a tiny repair. I still had time to hear the mechanic, possibly annoyed now, say,
“Bonjour lunettes, adieu fillettes.”
But this phrase didn’t interest me in the slightest. A little while later, back in my garret, with the happiness of someone returning satisfied from a day devoted to phrase-hunting, I decided first and foremost to incorporate
Tomorrow is today
into my novel.
Tomorrow is Today,
and not what I’d had in mind (
Cloud of Now
), would be the title I’d give to a novel supposedly written by a character named Juan Herrera. As for “Those little dogs just love knees,” I’d put this phrase in the mouth of Ana Cañizal, the most likeable of my female characters. “It’s been a fertile day,” I thought, giving myself airs. As if my vocation as a writer had been confirmed that day.