11
In Key West, once disqualified and expelled from the Hemingway look-alike contest, I started to think, quite intensely, about Marguerite Duras and above all about the evening in the house at Neauphle-le-Château where, as she explained the pallid but intense plot of her novel
The Afternoon of Monsieur Andesmas
, she actually became that book. If it’s true we become the stories we tell about ourselves, this is exactly what happened to Marguerite that evening, she turned into that story which takes place on a plateau halfway up a hill where, aging and immobile, M. Andesmas, able to see only the edge of a ravine filled with light and crisscrossed by birds, resting in a wicker armchair, waits for Michel Arc. It is a story of waiting, waiting for death, perhaps. It’s hot. Rising from the chasm, the bottom of which M. Andesmas cannot see, comes music from a record player. It’s the summer’s hit song: “When the lilacs will bloom, my love, / when the lilacs will bloom forever.” The record player is in the village square. People are dancing. A reddish-brown dog walks past and disappears into the forest. Michel Arc keeps him waiting, he takes a long, long time, too long. M. Andesmas falls asleep and the shadow of a nearby beech tree moves toward him. There is a gust of wind. The beech tree trembles . . .
There are no half-measures in the literature of Marguerite Duras. You either love it or hate it profoundly. Her writing is no interlude, this seems clear to me. That day, in Key West, I remember that I suddenly began to think first about Marguerite Duras and then — I suppose in order to stop agonizing over being disqualified — I began to think of the many writers who were better than Hemingway. For years I’d known deep down that there were many better writers. In fact, within a few months of moving to Paris, I’d stopped reading Hemingway in order to devote my time to other writers, some of whom immediately seemed better; though he has always been like a great father to me,
Papa
Hemingway, whom I’ve never wished to entirely dethrone, and the proof is in my insistence on believing I look like him. After all, he influenced my vocation with these lines that drove me to be unhappy in Paris: “There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other . . . Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.”
There is never any end to Paris.
I remember the days when I started to plan the first book of my life, that novel I was going to write in the sixth-floor garret of number 5, Rue Saint-Benoît and which would be called, from the moment I discovered the plot in a book by Unamuno,
The Lettered Assassin
. Even though I had the most idiotic relationship with death in those days, or precisely because of that, the novel proposed to kill anyone who read it, killing the reader seconds after he or she finished it. It was an idea inspired by reading Unamuno’s
How to Make a Novel
, which I discovered in one of the book stalls on the banks of the Seine; the title caught my attention, since I thought it would be about the very thing I didn’t know how to do. But it wasn’t, it was about everything except how to write a novel. However, in a paragraph where Unamuno speculates about books that provoke the death of their readers, I found a good idea for a story.
One day, I bumped into Marguerite Duras on the stairs — I was on my way up to my
chambre
and she was on her way down to the street — and she suddenly showed great interest in what I was up to. And I, trying to sound important, explained that I intended to write a book that would cause the death of all who read it. Marguerite looked stunned, sublimely astonished. When she was able to react, she said to me — or at least I understood her to say, because she was speaking her
superior
French again — that killing the reader, apart from absurd, was quite impossible, unless, for example, a swift and sharp poisoned arrow were to fly out of the book directly into the heart of the unsuspecting reader. I was very annoyed and even began to worry I’d be out of the garret, fearing her discovery that I was a dreary novice would lead her to evict me. But no, Marguerite simply detected in me a colossal mental confusion and wanted to help. She lit a cigarette slowly, looked at me almost with compassion and eventually said, if I wanted to murder whoever read the book, I would have to do it using a
textual effect
. She said this and carried on down the stairs leaving me more worried than before. Had I understood correctly or had I misunderstood her
superior
French? What was this about a
textual effect
? Perhaps she had been referring to a
literary effect
that I would have to construct within the text to give readers the impression that the book’s very letters had killed them. Perhaps that was it. But then, how could I achieve a literary effect that would pulverize the reader in a purely textual way?
After a week of tough questions and black shadows that, to my despair, hovered over my literary endeavors, I bumped into Marguerite on the stairs again. This time, she was on her way up — like so many buildings in Paris, this one had no elevator — to the third floor, where her apartment was. And I was heading down from the sixth floor, from my modest
chambre
, on my way out. Employing her
superior
French once more, Marguerite asked me, or I seemed to understand her to be asking me, if I had managed to kill off my readers yet. In contrast to our previous exchange, this time I decided not to give myself airs, that is, not to make a fool of myself, to try not only to be humble, but also to take advantage of whatever lesson I might learn from her. I told her, with difficulty, in my
inferior
or, if you will, muddled French, the trouble I was having getting my novel started. I tried to explain to her that, following her advice, I now wished only to cause the death of the reader by carrying out the crime within the strict confines of the writing. “It’s very hard to do, though, but I’m on the case,” I added.
I saw then that if I didn’t really understand Marguerite, she didn’t understand me either. A serious silence fell. “But I’m on the case,” I said again. Silence again. Then, trying to ease the tension, I attempted to sum up what I was going through, and stammered out the following: “Advice, that’s what I need, some help with the novel.” This time Marguerite understood perfectly. “Ah, some advice,” she said, and invited me to sit down right there in the lobby (as if I looked very tired); slowly she put out her cigarette and left it in the ashtray at the entrance, and went, a little mysteriously, to her office, returning after a minute with a piece of paper that looked like a doctor’s prescription containing some instructions that might — she said, or I thought I understood her to say — be useful to me for writing novels. I took the paper and went straight out. I read those instructions not long after, still on Rue Saint-Benoît, and felt as if the whole weight of the world had landed on my shoulders, I still recall the immense panic — the shudder of fear, to be more exact — I felt as I read them:
1. Structural problems. 2. Unity and harmony. 3. Plot and story. 4. Time. 5. Textual effects. 6. Verisimilitude. 7. Narrative technique. 8. Characters. 9. Dialogue. 10. Setting(s). 11. Style. 12. Experience. 13. Linguistic register.
12
And why was I so taken with the idea of killing my readers when I didn’t yet have even one? Today I tell myself that perhaps I chose this idea out of the suspicion that there couldn’t be anybody anywhere who, when they read me, wouldn’t easily be able to tell that I was a novice writer. That’s why I wanted to kill the reader. I did, however, look for various arguments to justify to myself this violent, textual crime. I remember, when people asked back then (and they asked me quite often) what I had against readers of my
text,
concealing the real reason for my murderous instincts, I would pompously reply: “I want to write like Miles Davis, who always plays the trumpet with his back to the audience.” People would then ask me, “So you like Miles Davis?” And then I went quiet. I went quiet because I didn’t actually know whether I liked Miles Davis or not. I’d seen him play in Barcelona, that much was true, in the Palau de la Música Catalana and what had impressed me, more than the jazz, was that his performance had caused a scandal among the bourgeoisie of my city because, unlike all the other American musicians who had passed through that musical sanctuary, he had played with his back to the audience. The fact was he only did it so he could concentrate better, and not to show disdain for his public (which would have been stupid), but the sensitive, bourgeois Barcelona audience took it as an insult.
In those days, I think I turned my back on the world, on everybody in it. Readerless, with no concrete ideas about love or death, and, to top it all off, a pretentious writer hiding his beginner’s fragility, I was a walking nightmare. I identified youth with despair and despair with the color black. I dressed in black from head to toe. I bought myself two pairs of glasses, two identical pairs, which I didn’t need at all, I bought them to look more intellectual. And I began smoking a pipe, which I judged (perhaps influenced by photos of Jean-Paul Sartre in the Café de Flore) to look more interesting than taking drags on mere cigarettes. But I only smoked the pipe in public, as I couldn’t afford to spend much money on aromatic tobacco. Sometimes, sitting on the terrace of some café, as I pretended to read some
maudit
French poet, I played the intellectual, leaving my pipe in the ashtray (sometimes the pipe wasn’t even lit) and taking out what were apparently my reading glasses and taking off the other pair, identical to the first and with which I couldn’t read a thing either. But this didn’t cause me too much grief, since I wasn’t trying to read the wretched French poets in public, but rather to
feign
being a profound Parisian café terrace intellectual. I was, ladies and gentlemen, a walking nightmare. It wasn’t entirely my fault, this is also true. We all encounter a small world at birth, a world that is generally the same wherever we are born. Mine, though, seemed to have been smaller than most. I soon saw that my minimal world required urgent expansion, and had traveled to Paris for no other reason and managed to stay and live there. I was partly right to be desperate, as I didn’t know where to go, or what to be in this life. It occurred to me to solve this awkward problem by becoming the first thing that made sense, and that had been — after I happened to read
A Moveable Feast
— to be a writer, something which actually increased my desperation even more, since, don’t ask me why, I spent a long time convinced that in order to be a good writer you had to be completely desperate.
Anyway, in those days, ladies and gentlemen, I was, I insist, a walking nightmare. There were people in my neighborhood who, quite rightly, crossed the street when they saw me coming. Raúl Escari, for example (“an intelligent and refined being, a true writer who refused to write, the most brilliant of Marguerite Duras’s circle of young friends in the 1970s,” the poet José Miguel Ullán wrote), the great Raúl Escari, who avoided me at first when he saw me in the street, and later ended up being my best friend in Paris. Today Raúl lives in Montevideo, near his native Buenos Aires, and occasionally he calls me up and, across the distance, from a phone booth near where Lautréamont was born, sends me phrases that spring spontaneously from his unsurpassable intellect.
13
Reading the words the poet Ullán wrote about Marguerite Duras, it’s as if I were seeing her now: “Marguerite was always asking questions. They were echoes, a filtering of what she wondered herself. She brought discord and persuasion, melodrama and comedy. She demanded to be told she was right when that was not really what she wanted at all. Glass in hand, smoking constantly, she went from coughing fits to interminable pauses. She twisted her ring-laden hands, played with her glasses, or improvised some gentle flirting with the aid of her silk
foulard
. She laughed and cried often. Easily? Who knows! In fact, less was known there all the time. Less, in any case, than she wanted to know.”
I will always remember her as a violently free and audacious woman, who wholeheartedly and openly embodied — with her intelligent use of verbal license, for example, which in her case consisted of sitting in an armchair in her house and, with real ferocity, speaking her mind — I remember she embodied all the monstrous contradictions to be found in human beings, all those doubts, that fragility and helplessness, fierce individuality, and a search for shared grief, in short, all the great anguish we’re capable of when faced with the reality of the world, that desolation the least exemplary writers have in them, the least academic and edifying ones, those who aren’t concerned with projecting a right and proper image of themselves, the only ones from whom we learn nothing, but also those who have the rare courage to literally
expose
themselves in their writing — where they speak their minds — and whom I admire deeply because only they lay it on the line, only they seem to me to be true writers.
14
I used to read a lot of Perec, though I barely took it in. It would have done me a lot of good to pay more attention to this writer, as I would have discovered back then the charm and joyful irony of, for example,
Species of Spaces
, the book Perec published in Paris in February of that year, 1974, the very month I arrived in the city and bought the book at the Gare d’Austerlitz, and, while I did like it — the alternative the book offered of living in a single place or many stuck in my mind — I thought this Perec was nowhere near as good as, for example, Lautréamont, or all the French
poètes maudits
.
Yesterday I thought again of the alternatives Perec’s book offers of living in a single place or many, of being sedentary or a traveler, of being a rank nationalist or a spiritual nomad:
“To put down roots, to rediscover or fashion your roots, to carve the place that will be yours out of space, and build, plant, appropriate, millimeter by millimeter, your ‘home’: to belong completely in your village, knowing you’re a true inhabitant of the Cévennes, or of Poitou.
Or else to own only the clothes you stand up in, to keep nothing, to live in hotels and change them frequently, and change towns, and change countries; to speak and read any one of four or five languages; to feel at home nowhere, but at ease almost everywhere.”
I enjoyed myself hugely yesterday when I again met those lines of Perec’s, which I summarized on a sheet of paper like this: “In short, going out with one’s grandchildren to pick blackberries along the narrow paths of the nationalists, or traveling and losing countries, losing them all traveling in the lit-up trains of the nocturnal world, being forever a foreigner.”