Never Any End to Paris (5 page)

20

When I went to Paris this past August, I went out one afternoon with my wife to Rue Delambre, in Montparnasse, to see if the Dingo Bar was still there, the place where, in April, 1925, Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway first met.

Rue Delambre is quite short, full of bars and hotels, behind the legendary Le Dôme Café. We walked the length of it in five short minutes and verified that no trace remains of the Dingo Bar, which is not really too surprising, given that seventy-seven years have gone by since Hemingway was sitting there one day “with some completely worthless characters” when suddenly Scott Fitzgerald practically fell on top of him, saying he’d heard of him and liked his stories and introducing the tall, pleasant man with him as Dunc Chaplin, the famous baseball pitcher, a man Hemingway, not really a fan of that sport, had never heard of.

It was the start of a friendship, one that began well and ended very badly. In
A Moveable Feast,
it says that a few days after this first encounter the two men took a train trip to Lyon, going to this city to pick up a convertible the successful writer had left there and off they went, the rich, brilliant and already very famous writer (Scott Fitzgerald) and one who was a bit younger and still a novice (Hemingway), a writer without money and anxious for success and happy to have met this big literary star. And we also hear how the train journey was a huge disaster and the drive back in the convertible even worse and we learn the young writer had to nurse the older man, taking care of him in a hotel room in a little village called Châlon-sur-Saône: where the acclaimed writer, reeling from the alcohol he had drunk, said he was dying, but that he was dying from a cold, and the ambitious, novice writer had to take care of everything, try to keep the acclaimed writer calm, mix him lemonade and whisky and give it to him with a couple of aspirins, then sit down and read the newspaper and wait for the successful author to sober up.

While poor Hemingway was reading the paper, he heard Fitzgerald say to him: “You’re a cold one, aren’t you?” Looking at him, Hemingway understood that, if not in his diagnosis, at least in his prescription he had been wrong, and the whisky was going to work against them. “How do you mean, Scott?” “You can sit there and read that dirty French rag of a paper and it doesn’t mean a thing to you that I am dying.”

Fitzgerald was not dying. All that had happened was that he’d got drunk and very wet because of the rain that had fallen relentlessly on his infamous convertible, the top of which — due to the express wishes of his wife Zelda — had been removed. It’s curious to note that the dialogue that took place in this hotel room in Châlon-sur-Saône, and that Hemingway recounts in
A Moveable Feast
, recalls the scene and dialogue in “Cat in the Rain.” Fitzgerald seems to take on the female role while Hemingway attempts to read quietly in the hotel room and wait for the downpour to pass. In the story of the cat in the rain the wife wants to have longer hair so she can put it up in a bun, and she also wants a kitty to sit on her lap, and moreover, wants to eat at a table with candles and her own silver and she wants it to be spring; in the hotel in Châlon-sur-Saône, a demanding Scott Fitzgerald, through the mists of alcohol, speaks in a tone identical to that of the little woman in “Cat in the Rain”: “I want my temperature taken,” Fitzgerald says, “then I want my clothes dried and for us to get an express train to Paris, and to go to the American Hospital at Neuilly.” Hemingway tries not to get worked up and tells him their clothes aren’t dry yet. And Fitzgerald interrupts him: “I want my temperature taken.” The only thing missing now is for him to add: “And I want a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her. And I want to grow my hair long and eat at a table with my own silver and candles. And most of all I want a cat, I want a cat, I want a cat now. And to go as quickly as possible to the American Hospital.”

Back in Paris, Hemingway would confess to his wife that he hadn’t learned anything from the famous writer on the trip. And if there was one thing he’d learned, it was never to go on a trip with anyone you do not love.

The Hemingway-Fitzgerald episode is one of the most outlandish in the history of meetings and misunderstandings between two talented writers. In general, one writer can learn very little from another. And then there is the matter of rivalry and inflated egos and the envy a poorer writer feels towards a richer one, and so on. The relationship between the episode in the hotel in Châlon-sur-Saône and the story “Cat in the Rain” is demonstrated to a certain extent by the soft sound (“like a cat”) Hemingway’s wife makes when, in
A Moveable Feast
, he tells her he plans never again to travel with anyone he doesn’t love and proposes they should go to Spain. “Poor Scott,” Hemingway finally says to his wife. “Poor everybody. Rich feathercats with no money,” she adds.

“Poor Scott,” I also said to my wife in Paris in the middle of August this year, back in our hotel again without having found any trace of the Dingo Bar on Rue Delambre. “Poor, poor Scott,” said my wife then, “you know what? I’ll be back in a minute, I’m going to look up the Dingo on the internet, I’ll go to that internet café on the corner, I’m sure I can find out the bar’s address.”

I was stretched out on the bed, half absorbed in reading a newspaper. “Don’t get wet,” I told her, without noticing I sounded just like the character from “Cat in the Rain.” She came back a little while later, with all the information. The Dingo Bar used to be at 10, Rue Delambre, the address of the Italian restaurant we’d seen earlier and had thought, in all fairness, that it looked dreadful.

“L’Auberge de Venise, remember?” I remembered perfectly. On the sidewalk across the street from the restaurant we had seen a
clochard
who looked a lot like Hemingway, and she’d said: “He really does look like him, unlike you, who look nothing like him.”

She also brought another interesting piece of information from the internet café: at number 15 on the same street, where the Hotel Lennox is now, there is a studio, which was rented by my esteemed Marcel Duchamp, after he gave up his New York life forever. Duchamp, the last remaining artistic legend of my youth that hasn’t been completely shattered.

“Rue Delambre might be small, but it certainly has more charm and class than we suspected, don’t you think?” said my wife. I didn’t reply. Outside it was still raining. There was undoubtedly a cat in the rain out there. I was still half absorbed in my newspaper. Like in a Hemingway story.

21

A quote from Rilke: “Scale the depths of things; irony will never descend there.” And one from Jules Renard: “Irony is humanity’s sense of propriety.” I’m going to be honest: I think both quotes, debatable though they might seem, are perfect. But the one I like best is my own: “Irony is the highest form of sincerity.”

22

Occasionally my sense of irony reaches Paris itself, and then I like New York. I would go further: every time someone mentions Duchamp, I think my life has been a mistake from the start and, instead of living in Barcelona and being in love with Paris, I should have quit bothering about such nonsense and lived in New York from day one, in Duchamp’s apartment, for example. And I should have read Hemingway there, sitting in a comfortable armchair reading about his exploits as a hunter, fisherman, lover, boxer, war reporter, and drinker. And thinking the whole time: What a brute!

23

Each paragraph of
The Lettered Assassin
was a struggle for me to write. However, when my father sent a letter from Barcelona to tell me he wasn’t going to wait any longer for me to finish my damned novel and had decided to shut off forever the merry flow of money, I wrote a letter of such literary agility, in sharp contrast to the agonizing stiffness when writing my novel. Whenever I re-read that letter, I am surprised how it’s written: my style is far superior to that of the dubious
Lettered Assassin
. This letter proves the old Spanish expression that says hunger sharpens the wit.

“Dear Father: I have reached the age at which one is in full command of one’s own qualities, and the intellect reaches its maximum strength and capacity. It is therefore the time to carry out my literary work. To do so, I need peace and quiet and freedom from distractions, not to have to ask Marguerite Duras for money, or to spend all my time worrying about how to convince you of the value of financing the writing of this novel, which eventually, when it is finished and published and receiving acclaim, will fill you with paternal pride and great satisfaction for your generosity to me. With love from your son . . .”

With this letter I managed to delay the definitive end of the money orders for a while. My father, equipped with an undeniable sense of humor and a very restrained and sparse style, replied:

Dear son: I have reached the age at which one finds oneself obliged to admit that one’s son has turned out to be an imbecile. I am giving you three months to finish your masterpiece. By the way, who is Marguerite Duras?”

24

Without Javier Grandes’s joie de vivre, my two years in Paris would have been an even bigger disaster. I’d met Javier at a party thrown by Lucía Bosé in Puerta de Hierro, Madrid, where Michi Panero introduced us. Javier was a very cheerful person, but at the same time he had a very scandalous view of life. He starred in the underground films his friend Arrieta made and he was also a painter and a bullfighter and the very incarnation of bohemia. I’d gone to Paris just to see him, with no other aim than to spy, as much as possible, on his bohemian life. Without this modest intention of observing Javier’s Parisian world I don’t think I’d ever have met Duras and so my garret would not have existed and the novel of my life would have taken a different path, perhaps a bullfighting or political path, why not? I was so open to life that any mad idea could infiltrate and change mine.

Speaking of politics, I should say that a month after taking possession of my
chambre
, my anti-Francoist Spanish student stance had changed and I became a firm radical leftist, of the
situationist
line, with Guy Debord as my master. I began to think that being anti-Franco was of very little consequence indeed and, under the influence of situationist ideas, with my pipe and my two pairs of fake glasses, I began to walk around the neighborhood converted into the prototype of the secretly revolutionary, poetic intellectual. But in fact, being a situationist without having read a single line of Guy Debord, I was on the most radical extreme left, but only through hearsay. And, as I’ve said, I didn’t practice, I devoted myself to
feeling
extremely left-wing and that was it. What really interested me was the noble idea of forgetting the stifling atmosphere of Barcelona and being able to enjoy, in self-imposed exile, the free French air. But I soon gathered it was reactionary to consider yourself an exile instead of being a real exile, that is, a political exile from Franco’s Spain. There was, it seemed, a subtle difference, or at least this was what my terrifying compatriots started pointing out to me when I went to see them in the bars where they met up and plotted. The atmosphere I’d left behind in Barcelona was stifling, but that of my exiled compatriots in Paris (none of whom, moreover, were situationists) seemed just as bad, if not worse, and so finally I stopped going to see them, and avoided those bars that left me feeling bitter and depressed by their obsessive, unbending conversations about what would happen when Franco died, worn out by their leaden political analyses, and, above all, disheartened at how ground down many of them were by heroin or dire Spanish wine.

I concentrated on making foreign friends and gradually cut myself off from the awful world of my exiled compatriots, a world revolving exclusively around the anti-Franco movement, which didn’t attract me in the slightest. I found politics unattractive, and saw it as a pastime or activity ultimately demanding you choose between idealism and pragmatism, something that seemed not only rather dull but also repugnant. I only ever went to one anti-Franco event, an homage to Rafael Alberti, and was paralyzed when I found myself in a corridor face to face with María Teresa León, who was on her own and asked me suddenly — I was very shy and also on my own and, moreover, a situationist — if I had seen her husband. “Rafael Alberti,” she added solemnly, pronouncing her
R
s in a spectacular, unforgettable way. She stood there waiting for my reply. “Over there,” I said, pointing to a spot as far away I could see.

Everything about Spain began to feel very far away to me, but so did Guy Debord, who soon seemed not very near at all, although I was still a situationist and felt I was his disciple, but a disappointed disciple, since I had gone to see his movie
La société du spectacle
, a cinematic version of his books, and had been profoundly bored, as it was a film to be
read
. The only thing that appeared on the screen were texts, very occasionally punctuated by the fleeting vision of a few images intended to illustrate the horror of the world of show business but which came from movies I really liked, such as
Johnny Guitar
; it was only at these moments, when the fleeting images of great fictional films appeared, that I enjoyed myself; which led me to feel somewhat disconcerted and to distance myself from Debord, at least as a filmmaker, although I didn’t renounce his religion and remained his follower, I didn’t want to be just a vulgar anti-Francoist. Everything about Spain began to feel very far away, apart from my friends Javier Grandes and Adolfo Arrieta, who I saw as two
pure
artists and, moreover, they seemed brilliant to me — and I don’t think I was wrong. Everything Spanish was gradually fading away, but to be honest I have to admit there were nights when this disciple of Guy Debord returned to his garret alone and sad and somewhat drunk and started reading Luis Cernuda aloud and suddenly felt very Republican and emotional and ending up crying at the lines: “
soy español sin ganas / que vive como puede bien lejos de su tierra / sin pesar ni nostalgia
.”

That was how I lived in those days and perhaps that’s why I cried: I lived as best I could, far away from my country, and I didn’t know — how could I? — that I was protagonizing my novel about the years of my literary apprenticeship; I didn’t know much, at times I knew only that I was a Spaniard with two pairs of fake glasses and a pipe, a young Catalan who didn’t really know what to do with his life, a writer who turned into a young Republican if he read Cernuda, an unenthusiastic young Spaniard who lived as well as he could, far from his country, in a Paris that was not exactly a moveable feast.