Never Any End to Paris (21 page)

90

I remember very well a very cold November day (or was it December?) in 1974, when I finally decided to make an incursion into the Place de la Contrescarpe, so linked to the memory of Hemingway’s days in Paris. Sitting on the terrace of a bar that was called the Café des Amateurs in the twenties (“It was a sad, evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness,” it says in
A Moveable Feast
), in less than an hour, I saw some five or six stalkers of Hemingway’s life go by, day trippers who climbed the steep Rue Mouffetard and once in the square went looking for the old Café des Amateurs, took photos and then, as if they were hardened mountain climbers, carried on up to stop in front of number 74, Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, where Hemingway lived in the early twenties. They must have looked at and photographed the commemorative plaque that recorded the writer’s interlude in the place, said a prayer for their hero and discovered that the famous
bal-musette
, the popular dance hall on the ground floor whose accordions wouldn’t let Hemingway write, had become a humble discotheque.

I remember very well that, sitting there on the terrace of the café, I suddenly recalled a scene from “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” where the protagonist, who’s dying, thinks of all the stories he’s never going to write: “He knew at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never written one. Why?”

Did I know twenty good stories too? I immediately wondered that day. The truth was I didn’t, I hadn’t lived much, I had very few experiences and, if I was honest with myself, I had to acknowledge that I didn’t have twenty, I didn’t even have one story aside from
The Lettered Assassin
, a book I’d better keep on writing, and after that the muses would have their say. It’s not really that serious, I remember telling myself. After all, it’s a matter of patience, some day I’ll be a good writer. But I also remember, then I set off a chain of questions in my head: Why the hell am I not already this good writer I’ll be one day? What am I missing? Experience in life and reading? Is that what I’m missing? And what if I never get to be a good writer? What’ll I be then? Will I spend my whole life being an inexperienced, unlettered young man, incapable of writing well? Will I be able to cope? I thought again of
The Lettered Assassin
and this time thought I should finish it right away and try and embark on a new project, a new, better book. But how was I going to improve on it when I spent so many hours sniffing around in all the books I had in the garret in search of ideas and never found a thing, and this made me live out every hour to the rhythm of my black despair?

If I were really a writer, I said to myself, I wouldn’t have such atrocious problems. But would I have to wait until I was older not to have them? Did one ever get to be a real writer?

If I were really a writer, I said to myself, Africa would be mine. And why Africa? Because I’d know the melancholy of returning to where I’d never been. Because I’d go to places where I’d already been before ever having gone there, cities I’d already been to before ever having gone.

If I were really a writer, I’d try like Rimbaud to
create
all the celebrations, all the triumphs, all the dramas. I would try to invent new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new languages.

If I were really a writer, I would be absolutely modern. And when dawn came, armed with a burning patience, I would enter splendid cities. If I were really a writer, my days would go by in a very different way. If I were really a writer . . .

91

One night, I was jolted awake by a torrential storm raging over Paris. I shut the little garret window, threw a shawl over my shoulders, listened with some pleasure to the thunder and pretended to be frightened of the lightning. I remembered what I’d overheard Juan Benet say a few days ago in Barcelona, a sentence spoken on another stormy night. And I suddenly felt an enormous desire to start another novel, to leave, for other days and other nights, the final pages of
The Lettered Assassin
. I went to my desk and remembered that, after all, I was Mediterranean and, despite detesting the vulgarity of sunbathers’ summers, I still adored the sun and the sea. In the midst of that storm, I bent over my desk and triumphantly wrote the first sentence of my new novel: “I love the sun, sand, and salt water.” I filled a whole page talking about my fascination for the Mediterranean, and never managed to move on to a second page. “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,” I’d heard Benet say. I too had written the first page and I didn’t know what my novel was about. So far, everything was perfect, everything the same — but from then on, everything was different. I spent hours waiting for my year of obsession to begin, which it never did. What would a year of obsession be like anyway? Not as simple as I’d thought at first. And, besides, what exactly might that obsession be? The following day, the storm over, I returned, downcast and humiliated, to
The Lettered Assassin
. I wrote for a few hours in the morning and then went out to buy a Spanish sports paper and eat in a very cheap Chinese restaurant on Rue du Bac, and on my way there I ran into Martine Simonet. I would have given anything for her to come and have lunch with me. Instead, walking quickly, she gestured from her side of the street to mine as if to say that the storm last night had been very heavy. Then she disappeared around a corner. She didn’t even give me a chance to tell her I loved the sun, sand, and salt water. Perhaps it was better that way, because that day, if I’d been able to tell her that, I might also have said something more. “For the last year you’ve been my obsession,” I might have said, for example.

92

At the end of 1950, when
Across the River and Into the Trees
appeared, the critics shook their heads. No and no. They were unanimous. Hemingway was done. But, not exactly one to give up without a fight, he wasn’t going to let his arm be twisted so easily. He was someone who was in his element when faced with adversity. Life and literature were just that for him: a stage for the exaltation of man’s most winning and heroic virtues. When the critics shook their heads, Hemingway came out with his usual sarcastic snarls, threatened to crack a few of their heads open, but none of this went beyond bluster, and he went back to work hard in an effort to prove he was very far from done. And then he wrote
The Old Man and the Sea
.

This book, about the courage of a man faced with failure, told the story of the tough and solitary struggle of an old Cuban fisherman. “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” The book told of the old man’s solitary struggle against a marlin that he vanquishes the way a matador kills a beloved bull.
The Old Man and the Sea
restored his international prestige as a writer, it moved ordinary readers to tears and surely contributed to his being considered for the Nobel Prize, an award he received with both great annoyance and secret satisfaction. He thought it awful to be given the same stupid prize they’d given to the mediocre Sinclair Lewis or the indescribable William Faulkner, whom he now saw as “a bourbon-soaked verbalizer.” In any case, the Nobel made him more successful than ever: preachers based sermons on his novels; people kissed him, weeping, in the streets; his Italian translator was so moved to tears by
The Old Man and the Sea
he could hardly make any progress on its translation.

I read one of the lines from
The Old Man and the Sea
over and over again in the garret: “Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” I read this over and over again especially toward the end of my days in Paris, when a certain sensation of absurdity mixed with failure began to overcome me, and I had to keep telling myself that I hadn’t been defeated at all, simply because I hadn’t engaged in any sort of battle. But this wasn’t sufficient consolation because the feeling of absurdity remained, something we might also call a sensation of “why.”

Why life, why write about an assassin, why Adjani’s eyes, why my parents, why Hemingway, why Paris, why everything, my God, why? I remember walking quickly through the neighborhood on many occasions pretending I was going somewhere when really there was no place in the world where anyone was waiting for me. And one day, wandering more aimlessly than ever and very depressed, I met someone even more depressed than I was. It was near the end of October 1975, the very day they buried the great French boxer Georges Carpentier. I was wandering around with nowhere to go and sad as sad can be, when I saw, to my surprise, Alfonso sitting on the terrace of the Himes Bar. It was odd to see him there because he never left his neighborhood. In any case, there he was, his head bowed, the very image of a person in the depths of depression. I approached him. Since he liked boxing so much, I thought naively that he’d been to the former world champion’s funeral and that his despondency had something to do with that death. I said hello and asked him if Carpentier’s death had upset him, and he gave me a look of hatred I don’t think I can ever forget. I wasn’t expecting that. I never found out what it was that had so upset him, but the fact is that in a matter of seconds, I still don’t really know how, we ended up in an absurd argument and he started to tell me, with unusual insistence, how much the young artists of that neighborhood got on his nerves. “Those whose lives have no plan or meaning,” he said, “those who smoke pipes and go from café to café thinking they have to drink absinthe all the time and that it’s a heroic feat to cheat their landlady out of her rent and that this makes them more of an artist.” After these words, I felt perfectly depressed. My life had no plan or meaning. The great truth about me could not have been better expressed.

A few minutes later, returning to the garret, the sound of the door closing — hermetically as usual — seemed to me that day identical to that of a cold tombstone as it closes forever over a dead man. Was this even a place to fall down dead? If I died that night, it would take a very long time for anyone to notice my disappearance, look for me, find my corpse. I’d surely rot there inside the garret for a few days, until I started to reek and they kicked the door down.

Thinking all this made me instinctively clutch my head in my hands all of a sudden. The loneliness, the anxious searching, the familiarity with the absurd, all this was part of my world but none of it helped me write, it just worried me. I knew or had heard of other writers who’d put their anguish to good use. But I had no idea how to get anything out of my anxiety. I stayed with my hands over my face until deciding to lie down on the horrible mattress on the floor and not think any more, make my mind blank, I set myself the aim of not trying to comprehend, not analyze anything. I thought perhaps that was what wisdom consisted of. But the mere fact of having thought something, even if it was thinking that I didn’t want to think, brought back the feelings of bitterness, anxiety, that anguish I still hadn’t learned to translate into my literature.

However, as compensation for so much anguish, thinking about it led me to suspect that all those writers who knew how to translate their problems into their books and who had an
already made
vision of the world were actually ridiculous, since if literature was possible it was because the world wasn’t
made
. Or was it just my world that wasn’t? I decided to go outside again and smash Alfonso’s face in. I realized straightaway, luckily, that this would simply be suicidal, since Alfonso, among other things, was an expert boxer. Besides, it wasn’t exactly him I should be angry with, since he’d had the decency to tell me the truth. I decided to get out of there in a hurry anyway, leave the garret that was feeling like my tomb, and go to Rue Jacob, I left and even tried not to think I was going, tried to think of nothing, to analyze nothing, to be nothing (to be exactly what I was: nothing); depressed, I went to Rue Jacob to buy myself a piece of cheesecake, a sad little nothing piece of cake.

93

Jeanne Boutade — pseudonym of Estela Carriego — would often repeat this phrase: “No man knows who he is, no man is anyone.” She claimed it was an old French saying. But one day, reading Borges, I discovered the famous phrase came from Macedonio Fernández. Boutade had most likely heard one of her Argentinian friends say it and then forgotten where it had really come from. Did she know who Macedonio was? His name probably rang a bell. I was in a similar position. About Borges, however, we both knew more every day, especially me, who had discovered him very late but now couldn’t stop reading him and finding ideas in his texts. The astonishing creative parasitism of Pierre Menard, for instance, with his exact yet distinct replica of the Quixote, which could be summed up as follows: if I write something that you’ve already written, it’s the same, but it’s no longer the same. Funes the memorious, the skilful forgeries of works of art, the
being in others
(as Pessoa would say), the belief that “perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal,” the
aleph
and the suspicion that poetry might be the elusive name of the world. If up till then I’d seen photographs of people or places I occasionally ended up seeing
in real life
, now this story of Borges’s
aleph
represented a real step forward in my vision of the world. I saw that not only could one see certain people or places
in real life
, but, also, there existed the possibility — let’s call it the wonder — of
seeing more
.

In a review Borges wrote of
Citizen Kane
, I found some lines that helped me discover a new weak spot of Hemingway’s. Borges said that Welles’s film had at least two plots and one of these was so stupid it was almost banal, chronicling the life of a millionaire who accumulated statues, gardens, palaces, swimming pools, vehicles, libraries, men and women, and ended up discovering that all his collections were vanity of vanities and, finding himself at death’s door, yearned for one object alone in the universe: the humble sled he’d played with when he was a poor and happy child.

Since I’d started reading the world by Borges’s standards, I found it impossible not to feel a certain compassion for Hemingway, who’d had a thrilling life, won the Nobel Prize and been adored or envied by half of humanity and, nevertheless, at the end of his days, with the same, almost banal, stupidity as citizen Kane, he wrote in
A Moveable Feast
that he felt nostalgic for the days of his youth in Paris, for the time when he was poor and happy. All he needed to say then was that he dreamed of a sled.

I kept finding ideas in Borges’s writing — and also in writing about his work, for example, I read once that he was referring to a tradition, because the modern world appeared as a place of loss and decline; at the same time he was referring to the notion of literary change, because literature affirms the value of the new. Borges rewrote the old, this is something I, as a novice, understood straightaway. With the help of some texts Boutade lent me, I seemed to sense that Borges had invented the possibility that we modern writers could, in rare proximity to the genuinely literary, practice the art as well, that is, we could keep writing, no less.

In those days, since I kept finding ideas in Borges, it wasn’t long before I associated him with Orson Welles again, the night Jeanne Boutade and I went to see
F for Fake
, which, through interviews with the painter and forger Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving (author of an apocryphal biography of Howard Hughes), played with the notions of truth and lies in art. The film’s subjects were Borgesian: falsification and the slippery border between reality and fiction, for example.
F for Fake
reminded me of Vicky Vaporú in line at the bakery, asking me if it wasn’t true that she was a genuine counterfeit. The film, though it never mentioned Borges, revealed plots, frauds, labyrinths I could write about if I still wanted to become a real writer. To do so I’d have to welcome the invention of the real, in the same way as I’d have to invent myself if I really wanted to be a writer.
F for Fake
increased my passion for apocryphal books, for reviews of fake books, for the world of the great impostors, of men who pass themselves off as someone else, of men who are someone, and those who are no one.

The influence, the shadow of that film was to be a long one, and would change the direction of my apprenticeship. It began to influence me the very moment I left the cinema and my friend Boutade commented enthusiastically: “I told you. No man knows who he is, no man is anyone. Not even Epimenides knew.” I asked if Epimenides was her new boyfriend. She laughed, shook her head. “He’s an ancient sage,” she said, and then quoted his words that had gone down in history: “The next sentence is false. The previous sentence is true.”

I went back to the garret that night transformed into a man who didn’t know who he was. And shortly afterwards, after reading a story by Borges about knife-fighters, I imitated the forgers and fakers in Welles’s film in
The Lettered Assassin
and, quoting Borges without quotes, I wrote of “a knife-fighter who gradually leaves his strength in his weapon and in the end the weapon has a life of its own (as Krespel’s diabolical violin did for Hoffman) and it is the weapon that kills, not the arm that wields it.” It was the first time that, with a steely resolve, without acknowledging him, I quoted a man named Borges,
I was in another
, I quoted a man who was someone, and I was a man who was no one.