15
I do think irony is a powerful device for de-activating reality. But what happens when we see something we’ve seen, for example, in a photograph, and suddenly we see it
in real life
? Is it possible to be ironic about reality, to disbelieve it, when we are seeing something that’s
real
?
Perec in
Species of Spaces
: “Seeing something in real life that for a long time was just an image in an old dictionary: a geyser, a waterfall, the bay of Naples, the place where Gavrilo Princip was standing when he shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sofia, the Duchess of Hohenberg, on the corner of Franz Josef Street and Appel Quay, in Sarajevo, across from the Simie Brothers’ Tavern, on June 28, 1914, at a quarter past eleven.”
Ironic or not, the questions I now ask myself are these: Does reality really exist? Can you really see something
in real life
? In terms of reality, I share Proust’s opinion, who said that unfortunately our sad, fragmented, far-sighted eyes can perhaps allow us to measure distances, but they don’t give us directions: the infinite
field of possibilities
stretches out, and if by chance reality appeared before us it would be so far removed from possibility that, in a sudden faint, we would collide with this wall that suddenly appeared and fall down stunned.
What do we see, then, when we think we are seeing something
in real life
? I would say that, when this happens, when it looks like we are faced with reality, we are more than permitted to be ironic about it, even if only to ward off the possible chance appearance of what is really real and the wall that would leave us knocked out, without any irony at all.
I can think of lots of occasions when it could be said that I
saw
something
in real life
, visions I later wondered whether I should treat ironically — in essence a way of admitting I believed in this truth — commenting, for example, on the luck I’d had in not really having seen this reality, since I would have been knocked unconscious; or else I could do without irony entirely and take very seriously what I’d just
seen in real life
, then try and move towards an irony without words, that is, make use of a silence of profound stupor,
reinvent
irony.
One night I dreamed I went down in history as the man who reinvented irony. I lived in a book that was a huge cemetery where, on most of the tombstones, the names of the different kinds of irony had worn away.
16
“I saw eternity the other night,” wrote Henry Vaughan in a daring line. Whether he saw it or not, I hereby send the poet my utmost respect. This line of his appears indisputable, mainly because, as Celan would say, nobody bears witness for the witness. The syntactic crack of the whip recalls the unforgettable ending of the movie
Blade Runner
when the character who’s about to die begins his poetic sermon with the tremulous, moving and very true
“I’ve seen . . .”
I’ve seen
in real life
the study in the house in Coyoacán, Mexico, where Trotsky was killed. I’d seen it before in the cinema. The movie Joseph Losey made about Trotsky’s assassination was filmed on location, as the scene was still intact thirty years after the crime. Trotsky’s family continued to live in the house for a while after the assassination, and after them, there was no one else. Identical to the day of the assassination, Trotsky’s study was kept in very good shape with, for example, the entire library complete. The only thing missing from the crime scene was the ice pick the Stalinist Ramón Mercader had used to kill him. I’d seen the film and visualized, memorized the murder scene, but I never imagined, as I was watching the film, that one day I would be there in person, at the very scene of the crime, I never imagined I would see Trotsky’s study
in real life
, that room where something happened that changed the course of history.
I went to see the study with my friend Christopher, a Mexican writer who lived in Coyoacán, a few steps away from the crime scene. There was nobody else in the house, so, at a certain moment, we found ourselves alone in front of Trotsky’s desk, not knowing what to do or say. You could hear the buzzing of a mosquito. I found it hard to disassociate that study from the one that appeared in the fiction of Losey’s movie. Even so, I tried not to forget that this was the
real
place where Trotsky had been assassinated. So — I thought — this is a historic place. I couldn’t think of anything else. I just kept repeating obtusely to myself, this is a historic place. I looked down at the floor, just for something to do, I looked at the carpet and then, in the middle of the silence and overcome by a strange sensation that fluctuated between anodyne and transcendental (what we feel when faced with any supposedly important historic event), I saw, or thought I saw, one of Trotsky’s bloodstains on the carpet, not completely cleaned up, or else not darkened enough by the passing of time.
I focused on the bloodstain, felt a grotesque temptation — in order to do something — to cross myself. I realized I was silently practicing a new form of irony. “I saw the stain the other day,” I imagined saying when I returned to Barcelona and people asked me how things had gone in Mexico. “What stain?” they would ask me, and then, instead of keeping quiet and sinking completely into my new re-invented irony, that is, into the silence of a wordless irony, I would return to classic irony. “Oh nothing,” I would reply, “I was just saying that I saw Trotsky’s blood
in real life
.”
17
I’ve also seen Paris
in real life
. Although I haven’t lived in the city for years, I always have the feeling that I’m still there. Remember the slogan of the idol of my youth, the writer Hemingway: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you.”
Naturally, I don’t know every single street in Paris, but I’ve at least heard them all mentioned or read their names somewhere. Even if I wanted to, I would find it very hard to get lost in Paris. I have lots of reference points. I almost always know which direction to take in the Metro. In Barcelona, since the dizzying changes leading up to the Olympic Games and afterwards that have transformed this once elegant and secretive city into an overwhelming touristy place, I’m much more likely to get lost. If I were dropped, for example, in an empty street in the Olympic Village, it would take me a long time to get my bearings, let alone find a bus or a subway station.
In Paris I know the bus timetables very well and I know how to explain my desired route to a taxi driver. Paris is fantastic among other reasons because, unlike, say, German or Spanish cities, it has retained the names of many of its streets for centuries. Aside from this, I’m familiar with the characteristics of the neighborhoods in Paris, I can easily identify churches and other monuments, and I know where the stations are. Many places are linked to precise memories: there are houses where friends I haven’t seen for ages used to live — the old Hotel des Pyrénées on Rue de l’Ancienne Comedie, for instance, where Adolfo Arrieta and Javier Grandes lived, and which today is divided into modern apartments — or cafés where strange things happened to me: Café de la Paix, for example, next to L’Ópera, where one day a strange man at the next table tried to convince me that with my figure I would really suit a jacket identical to the one worn by Yves Montand in his latest movie; Café de Flore, where I struck up a brief conversation with Roland Barthes, who told me that, after thirty years of being a customer at the bar, the cashier had seen him on television and found out he was a writer and asked him for a signed copy of one of his books and he’d decided — since she’d seen him on television, a visual medium — to give her
Empire of Signs
, his only book that was lavishly illustrated; Café Blaise, where under the effects of a remarkably potent tab of LSD I was very nearly murdered by a very evil girlfriend; Café Les Deux Magots, where the architect Ricardo Bofill inexplicably told me, I don’t know how many times, that it was very easy to stand out in Barcelona but very difficult — “as I am doing at the moment,” he repeated over and over again — to triumph in Paris; La Closerie des Lilas, where I got into the habit of sitting at what had once been Hemingway’s regular table and of slipping out without paying every time; Café Bonaparte, where, in the company of Marie-France (a transvestite who dressed like Marilyn Monroe and with whom I was filming
Tam Tam
, an underground movie by Adolfo Arrieta), I watched in astonishment as an enraged madman came into the place with a hammer, picked one of the customers at random and gave him a resounding blow to the head that left him stone dead; the café near the crossroads of Rue du Bac and Boulevard Saint-Germain, where Perec recommended sitting and watching the street with rather systematic attention and writing down what one saw, what caught one’s attention, forcing oneself to write down even “what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colorless.”
I like to sit on the terraces of Paris cafés, and I also like to walk through the city, sometimes for a whole afternoon, with no fixed destination, although not exactly at random or aimlessly, trying instead to let myself be carried along. Sometimes I take the first bus that stops in front of me (as Perec pointed out, you can no longer hop on a bus while it’s moving). Or else I walk deliberately down the Rue de Seine and come out under the arch that leads to the Quai de Conti, where I might discover the silhouette of my friend La Maga leaning against the iron parapet of the Pont des Arts.
I like Paris — the Place de Furstenberg, number 27, Rue Fleurus, the Moreau Museum, Tristan Tzara’s tomb, the pink arcades on Rue Nadja, the bar Au Chien qui Fume, the blue façade of the Hotel Vaché, the bookstalls on the riverbank. And above all I like a back street, near the Château de Vincennes, where there is a modest ancient signpost informing you, as if you were just approaching a village, that you’re about to enter Paris. I like walking through a part of the city I haven’t seen for a while. But I also like doing the opposite: walking through a place I’ve just walked through. I like Paris so much that there is never any end to the city for me. I like Paris very much, because it doesn’t have any Gaudí houses or cathedrals.
18
I also saw Perec himself
in real life
. It was halfway through 1974, the year he published
Species of Spaces
. I’d seen lots of photographs of him, but that day, in a bookshop on Boulevard Saint-Germain, I saw him arrive for the launch of a book by Philippe Sollers and do some very strange things I won’t go into now. What is certain is that for quite a while, so impressed to be
seeing him in real life
, I watched him intently, so intently that, at one moment, his face was a hair’s breadth from mine. Perec noticed this anomaly — a stranger was a whisker away from his goatee — and reacted by commenting out loud, as if trying to let me know I should take my face elsewhere: “The world’s a big place, young man.”
19
There was no table in my garret. Only a wardrobe, a big old mirror, and a mattress on the floor. One Sunday morning two weeks after renting this
chambre
, I went with Javier Grandes to the Marché aux Puces and bought a dilapidated, woodworm-ridden table for eighty francs and, with Javier’s help, took it on the metro back to my
chambre
. That day I stopped being a writer without a desk. When I think of this today, I find it hard to even imagine myself without a table to write at. But I shouldn’t feel too surprised. After all, there is always a first desk, there is always a first time for everything.
The concierge didn’t like the table, she had no time for the inhabitants of the sixth floor, the garret
locateurs
. She had to clean the communal washroom every week and nobody paid her, and this drove her literally out of her mind. Apart from this, she hated Marguerite Duras. The concierge was from Valencia, in exile since the Spanish Civil War. But she didn’t want anything to do with me, no matter how Catalan I declared myself to be, compatriots though we may have been. She had become very French and, what’s more, thought there were considerable differences between Catalans and Valencians. In honor of all the concierges of Paris, she was in a permanently bad mood. When she saw my table, she made a huge effort not to fly into a rage, saying something I’ve found difficult to forget: “The French don’t want to work any more, they all want to
write
. Now all we need is for the Catalans to start imitating them.”
The old wooden table, together with the typewriter that had traveled with me from Barcelona, lent a distinctive air to my garret, which began to look more like a writer’s
chambre
. And it looked even more like one when I bought a few notebooks, two pencils and a pencil sharpener. Now I had everything I needed to write. “The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener . . . , the marble-topped tables, the smell of early morning, sweeping out and mopping, and luck were all you needed,” I’d read in
A Moveable Feast.
So now, according to Hemingway, I had everything necessary for writing and, what’s more, a desk (which he perhaps took for granted) and a typewriter (something he didn’t mention because he wrote in longhand), a little Olivetti that came from my father’s office. I had a table and a typewriter and pencils and a pencil sharpener and also — the luck Hemingway mentioned came in here — money that my father had said he would wire me for a few months, just a few months, “so you won’t starve to death,” and in the hope that I would change my mind and decide to return to Barcelona and my Law studies.
Thanks to Unamuno, it hadn’t taken me long to find the plot of my novel (the story of a manuscript that was passed around and caused the death of whoever read it), but, as Duras had indicated in her list of instructions, I lacked all sorts of details: knowing, for example, what kind of
structure
to give my story. I soon found it, I found it the day I realized I could just copy the structure of an already existing book, one I liked, if possible. It was that simple, or so it seemed to me. I couldn’t spend too much time worrying about
structural problems
when there were still other issues to resolve that seemed even more complicated, such as
unity and harmony
or
narrative technique
, not to mention
linguistic register
, which seemed to me the most enigmatic of all. So, as far as structure was concerned, it was better not to have too many scruples. After all, I told myself, young writers copy models, they imitate the writers they like, and it’s not worth the risk of complicating things even further, otherwise I might never write anything at all.
And which book did I like? I decided to choose one that wasn’t exactly to my taste (and this was because I didn’t understand it at all), but that had a structure that seemed to be of a high intellectual standard, of this I was sure. And I chose Vladimir Nabokov, who had used a voluminous
corpus
of notes on a mediocre poem as a clever and complex way to construct his novel
Pale Fire
. I didn’t think twice about it and set to work. I decided my novel would be organized in the form of a prologue and commentaries on a manuscript of poetic prose that would appear in the middle of the book. I wrote the prologue, and then, one after another, with exasperating slowness due to my being a novice writer, came the diabolical notes or commentaries, behind which crouched the Death of the unsuspecting reader who, towards the middle of the book, would unknowingly read the manuscript that, as my malevolent narrator would reveal at the end of the book, caused the death of all who read it.
Once
The Lettered Assassin
was finished — no easy task, it took me two years to write fifty pages: the two years that are the subject of this ironic lecture on my years of literary apprenticeship — I submitted it, feeling terrified (terrified of publishing, above all), in Barcelona to the editor Beatriz de Moura, who was a friend of mine. She took the manuscript, gazed at it with astonishment for a few seconds, looked at me and said: “What have you done?” I didn’t know if she was telling me off for something. Now I was twice as terrified as before. “Pale Fire,” I said in a choked voice, as if revealing my own “pale fire” as a novice writer rather than the title of a book. “So you’re going to be a writer,” she said. “Well, yes,” I replied. She stared at me, I didn’t know whether furiously or pitying me in some way. I felt I had to add something. A humorous note, for example, that would ease the tension hanging in the air. “A writer like Hemingway, after all I’m five foot ten like he was,” I said. She went on staring at me, I didn’t know where to hide. I swallowed and added: “Though my shoulders aren’t as broad.”