Never Any End to Paris (22 page)

94

One night in the garret I read that in the thirteenth century Kubla Khan dreamed of a palace and built it according to the vision he’d had. Then I read that in the eighteenth century, the English poet Coleridge, who knew nothing of this Mongolian emperor’s dream, took a narcotic one day so he could sleep and dreamed a poem about the palace and woke with the certainty that he’d composed or
received
a three-hundred-line poem that he remembered with singular clarity, fifty of which he was able to transcribe — a fragment survives in his oeuvre under the title “Kubla Khan,” fifty lines, because the rest was lost due to the arrival of an unexpected visitor.

I fell asleep after reading the story of the dictated poem and I dreamed my mother was my sister, that she was a very young older sister with whom I had incestuous experiences. When I woke up, I felt I could remember with singular clarity the sexual episode I’d just dreamed and leapt to my desk to transcribe it in its entirety. But, as soon as I sat down at the table, I forgot a large part of what a supposedly inspired voice had dictated to me. Using the remains of the dream, that is, the only image I more or less retained, and adding elements of my own, I composed page three of the central manuscript of
The Lettered Assassin
, a page I’m proud of, since for the first time — despite the fact it wasn’t a real event but a dream — I managed to reconstruct and distort something I’d previously lived through, because a dream should be considered something lived, in the same way that dreams infiltrate our daily reality and even help us know how to manipulate it through writing: “And then he remembered an episode from his life: as a child he went into his sister’s room one day without knocking and surprised her naked in front of the mirror. Ariadna, who was twice his age, flew into a rage and harshly inflicted a cruel punishment. She tied his hands and feet and whipped him as hard as she could until blood ran down his little body. She then agreed to untie him on the express condition that, on bended knee before her, he kiss her feet and thank her for the punishment he’d received. He did so and it was then, beneath the whip and kneeling before his sister’s remarkable beauty, that a sensation of enjoyment and pleasure was aroused in him for the first time, intimately linked to his discovery of the female form. He always thought this episode would gradually fade from his memory but he was wrong. Because he had no other desire than to find his dead sister again and find himself back between those long-lost walls once more, to hear Ariadna still calling him in the tone of voice that had been so familiar ever since the long fevers of his childhood.”

95

Of all my memories of youthful tedium, I don’t know why, the same moment of profound boredom always surfaces, just one, from an afternoon in Paris that seems to be unforgettable. I can easily place myself back in the precise moment of boredom that day: I’m in my garret looking out through the miniscule window toward the belfry of the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I’m telling myself, one more time, that I live at the center of the world, and suddenly I realize I’ve said this to myself a thousand times now and I’m repeating myself, which is a clear sign of boredom. I remember then that someone once said the center of the world is the place where a great artist has worked, and not Delphi. Am I a great artist to think I’m at the center of the world? And do I really believe that Saint-Germain-des-Prés is the center of something? It seems like naivety on my part. But it’s not good for me to be so lucid, so I push these questions away. And go back to being bored.

How awful. Don’t I know how to be with myself anymore? At school I was told that, according to Erasmus, one who knows the art of coexisting with oneself is never bored. It seems I’ve forgotten this art. I’m not at the center of the world and, what’s more, I’m bored. Isn’t intelligence for escaping boredom? This is the only thing that can help me. I clear my mind, make a game of finding a way out of my moment of boredom. I tell myself suddenly that to be bored is a waste of time. I write down this sentence on a blank page earmarked for
The Lettered Assassin
, the famous blank page that’s supposed to scare writers so much. I wrote it down with the pencil I found a year ago, when I first arrived in the garret, in the top drawer of the little dresser, beneath the window where a few seconds ago I felt bored. This stub of a pencil must have belonged to one of the former tenants of the garret. Did it belong to Copi? Or to Javier Grandes? Or to the friend of the magus Jodorowsky, who lived there before Copi? Or to the Bulgarian theatre actress? Or did my black neighbor leave it here when he slept with the Bulgarian actress? Or did the pencil belong to the cineaste Milosevic, another former tenant? Or to Amapola, the transvestite who’d spent five months here? Or to Mitterrand, and since then generations of tenants have preserved the pencil from destruction in homage to the most illustrious of the former occupants of this small bohemian space?

I’m almost not bored anymore! Focused on this mental exercise, I imagine what
Comrade Morand
— that is, Monsieur Mitterrand — did for the two days he was shut up between these four melancholy walls. He must have had a pistol to defend himself. And a pencil, the pencil that’s still here and could be in a museum of artefacts of the French Resistance. I imagine Mitterrand facing this same mirror. He’s got the pencil behind his ear and he’s smiling. He writes down something Comrade René Char said not long before that delighted him: “The downfall of the believer is finding his Church.”

Afterwards, he stows the heroic pencil in the drawer so it can be found and preserved like a relic by the unfortunate bohemians who will pass through the garret over the years to come. He laughs again, turns back to the mirror, draws his pistol — now I’m not bored at all — he likes himself in this pose. (As for me, I discover that this uncontrolled or unconscious flow of the tide of my imagination in the mirror is like the practice of literature, with the invention of characters, for example.) Mitterrand looks at himself, laughs, plays with his pistol,
pow pow
, and says out loud: “People with no imagination think that everyone else’s life is mediocre too.”

96

I heard Romain Gary say in a lecture that for the writer, characters must always have a real presence. Were any of
The Lettered Assassin
’s real to me? None of them, actually; they almost all bore my initials the right or wrong way around, and were like extensions of my personality. Maybe my narrator assassin, having Adjani’s eyes, was slightly real to me. And perhaps my mother, whom I presented as my sister. And perhaps also poor Ana Cañizal, who unlike the others didn’t have my initials and moreover had a certain life of her own because at least I’d been able to imagine her, or rather, locate her in a reproduction of a Balthus painting I’d seen in Vicky Vaporú’s house.

The mysterious atmosphere of that painting — a female dwarf drawing open a curtain, and the light coming in through the window reveals a beautiful murdered woman — was what I wanted to achieve in my novel. Was it atmosphere Duras was referring to in her list of instructions with the enigmatic
setting(s)
section? It wasn’t entirely clear to me. And what about the
dialogue
section? It was the least enigmatic of all, although still, just like the rest of them, highly problematic, at least for a novice like myself. Because dialogue generally demanded the reproduction of trivialities and this seemed difficult to combine with good literature. Apparently it was the easiest to solve of the items on Duras’s list, it seemed easy to reproduce dialogue, and, nevertheless, it could end up being the most difficult of all. This is what I thought, while wondering, besides, whether it was justifiable to use dashes for dialogue and thereby fill up the pages quickly. Or should one use a pen and not a typewriter, employing quotation marks, in order to get dense, full pages, like great stains of writing, where the ink occupies every space, with the least white space possible on a page of compact handwriting, and no obvious gaps?

I was young, I opted for the first, for dashes. The other system, using quotes, filling the entire page as if it were a battlefield, I quite logically found terrifying. But then one day I read in the magazine
Tel Quel
that including dialogue in novels was the most antiquated and reactionary thing in existence, no matter whether with dashes or quotes, it was retrograde. I read this while drinking a cup of tea with milk in the Café Bonaparte, near my house. I thought this went even further than I’d anticipated on the matter of dialogue. My bewilderment was such that I took Duras’s crumpled list of instructions, which I always had with me, out of my back pocket. Beside the word
dialogue
I wrote: “reactionary.” Then, not wanting to totally disorient myself, I went in search of some sort of certainty and thought of Hemingway, master of the art of dialogue in stories. Then, I looked around me and confirmed that there were people at every table in the Bonaparte engaged in dialogue. However, this second certainty didn’t change things that much. All these people engaged in dialogue surely voted for the right-wing politician Giscard d’Estaing and, what’s more, there was obviously nothing poetic about them, they were overwhelmingly vulgar, and what they were saying probably was as well. I tried to keep calm before making a radical decision with respect to dialogue in my novel. I paid for my tea and went back to the garret and, after some nervous reflection, I cut out all the dialogue I’d written up till then, apart from three I considered essential; I’d pay a little price for being reactionary, but I wasn’t prepared to change my entire novel.

97

I needed to have the odd secret and be wicked sometimes, feel perverse, perceive myself to be quite different on the inside to the
situationist
I was on the outside, have a bit of Jekyll and Hyde about me. Or, I should say, to be Hyde every once in a while, not to be such an innocent, radical leftist, a good guy. I believe I was perfectly correct to think specifically of Hyde for my transgressive plans, since over time I’ve discovered that in reality the fundamental theme of Stevenson’s novel — back then in Paris, I hadn’t read it, but, like everyone, I
knew
the story — is the envious fascination the conventionally good person feels for his
wasted
opportunities for evil.

Perhaps this also explains why, for example, on one particular occasion, one day when I cashed my father’s money order in the morning, I pretended to be rich and rotten and capitalist to the core and went deliberately to Café La Rotonde to drink champagne and there, without anyone noticing, naturally, I devoted myself to inwardly letting off steam and flirting with the idea of transforming my mind into something monstrous in an attempt — now I see this very clearly — not to
waste
all the opportunities to be the great son of a bitch I thought I could be if I wanted.

However, deep down I was so good, so innocent and stupid that every time I attempted this I ended up feeling ashamed of myself, which is, without going into too many details, what happened that day. I went to La Rotonde and on my seventh glass of champagne decided to free my mind of all moral and political ties, and summoned up the figure of a former customer of that café, the artist Domergue — a painter of elongated women, star of what we might call
calendar art.
I then evoked the figure of his domestic servant — “my housemaid,” Domergue called him — a little man with a bulging forehead and a black goatee, who sometimes sat with Domergue’s painter friends in the café and had a drink with them, though he never said a word.

I devoted myself to laughing inwardly at this little man — I’d gone to La Rotonde exclusively for this — I laughed away like a son of a bitch at that poor “housemaid.” I spat on the little man’s memory, but then I remembered an anecdote about him and grew ashamed of my spitting, regretting the excessive irreverence with which I’d treated the little man who never spoke in La Rotonde; or rather, he spoke once when Domergue’s painter friends asked him if he cleaned any other bathrooms, to which the little man replied that he didn’t. And when Domergue’s friends asked him what, in that case, he spent the rest of his time doing, he said, looking at painters and overthrowing the Russian government. They all laughed at the doubly witty remark. “That’s what we do, too,” they said. What they didn’t know was that this man was Lenin.

98

For quite a while I took the word
experience
on Duras’s list as a humorous touch she’d included so as not to completely overwhelm me, but one day I began to suspect that perhaps
experience
was also meant to be serious, there was no reason to believe otherwise. If this were true, it was really annoying. The word
experience
always sounds dreadful, but when you’re young it sounds even worse. I’d once heard someone say: “Experience is like a comb for a bald man.” I couldn’t agree more. I was sure experience was absolutely useless. What I didn’t yet know was that you needed to have experience to know why it was absolutely useless. Besides, did I really know I didn’t have any? I neither knew nor didn’t know it, I simply didn’t want to think about it, since I found the subject hugely annoying, typical of the no less annoying adult world.

But one day I ran smack into
experience,
and it was an unrepeatable experience. I went to Studio des Ursulines to watch a documentary on American writers in Paris, on the
lost generation
, and heard Hemingway talk about his
iceberg principle
. I’d read about this principle, but had never heard it spoken about live, in Hemingway’s very own voice. Though he was no longer my absolute idol, I was impressed by his presence on the screen and by his words. “I try to write,” I heard him say, “on the principle of the iceberg. What we see of the iceberg is only a tenth of it, the rest is under water. The story that isn’t there in the story, the part under water, is constructed out of the unsaid, out of implication and allusion.”

And later something else: “
The Old Man and the Sea
could have been over a thousand pages long, but this wasn’t what I wanted to do. First I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying the experience to the reader, in spite of the fact that experience at sea, for example, was something I had a lot of. But this experience does not explicitly appear, though of course
it is there
, but it can’t be seen. This is very hard to do and I’ve worked at it very hard. For example, I’ve seen the marlin mate and know about that. So I leave that out. I’ve seen a school (or pod) of more than fifty sperm whales, and once harpooned one nearly sixty feet long and lost him. So I left all that out. But the knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg.”

As I left Studio des Ursulines, I had the impression I’d just learned more about
experience
than at any time up till then. But having this impression didn’t make me exactly jump for joy. I walked out with this question ringing in my head: What sort of personal experience of mine, when it comes time to write, can I leave in the submerged part of the iceberg? To be honest, I had to acknowledge that if experience were a class, the grade I’d earned the hard way was an
F
. Just what sort of experience did I think I was gaining with my farcical garret life?

To spare myself some anguish, so I could carry on writing
The Lettered Assassin
, I set about convincing myself that all this stuff about experience was entirely debatable and surely one could write without it, there was no shortage of examples. All one had to do was exchange Hemingway’s Kilimanjaro for that of Raymond Roussel, author of
Impressions of Africa
and an extremely cerebral writer who never exploited his personal experiences, but instead devoted himself, thanks to a method of phonetic combinations he’d invented, to telling stories that emerged from the prose itself, a kind of chilly poetic narrative directly connected to his strange way of traveling, the polar opposite of Hemingway’s.

The author of
Impressions of Africa
didn’t travel in order to have experiences he would then use in his books or leave quietly in the invisible part of the iceberg. Roussel traveled not to discover anything new, but rather to see up close the exotic universes that had filled his childhood in the form of stories and novels — not to have stories to tell or to hide while he told parts of them, but just to verify that what he’d read about as a child really existed. These marvelous words are his: “It seems apt that I should mention here a rather curious fact. I have traveled a great deal. Notably in 1920-1921 I traveled around the world by way of India, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific archipelagos, China, Japan, and America. I already knew the principal countries of Europe, Egypt and all of North Africa, and later I visited Constantinople, Asia Minor, and Persia. Now, from all these travels I never took anything for my books. It seems to me that this is worth mentioning, since it clearly shows just how much imagination accounts for everything in my work.”

Agonizing over the matter of the creative imagination and whether or not experience is necessary to writing, I went to consult Raúl Escari about my doubts. “You ask me everything,” said Raúl, “have you noticed that?” I ignored the affectionately impertinent remark and set about telling him that, due to my lack of experience and to keep this from harming me when I came to write, I was starting to feel inclined to align myself with Raymond Roussel and his concept of literature, and therefore practice a cold and very cerebral kind of writing in clear opposition to the fireworks of the classic expert-in-everything, bon vivant Hemingway.

Since Raúl remained silent and everything appeared to indicate he didn’t really approve of my plan to tell stories that emerged from the prose itself, I asked him if he thought I was being unfair to Hemingway. Then, with an expression I’ll never forget, he resolved the matter like this: “Look, it’s quite simple. If Hemingway had really been a scrawny little weed who spent his life fantasizing or inventing the stories in his books he said he’d experienced or that were behind what he described, this wouldn’t change things one bit, he’d still be the great writer he was. But he wasn’t a weed, and he wasn’t scrawny.