Never Any End to Paris (6 page)

25

Anyone who wants the island of Key West — coastal and tropical, a little decrepit, hot and humid — can have it as far as I’m concerned. It’s just as horrible today as when Hemingway set himself up in that old stone house, a belated wedding present from his second wife Pauline’s uncle. Although not an ideal spot, it didn’t totally disappoint Hemingway, it was a good place to come home to after tarpon fishing in the Tortugas waters or bear hunting in Wyoming. Even so, no matter how you look at it, Key West has little going for it; if anything, it might be that, as in Hemingway’s day, sailors still fight bare-knuckled in rumba bars.

Apart from these bars, I was so bored in Key West (I guess being disqualified didn’t help), I spent many hours imagining in great detail the story of my friendship with a “thingamajig” called Scott, who in a previous life had been a Parisian demon, the demon Vauvert.

I say thingamajig and, maybe to be more precise, I should say
odradek
, that Kafkaesque creature in the shape of a spool with old, broken-off bits of thread of various sorts and colors wound around it. No more than a wooden object, but also an animate creature, with a real and eternal life, who, in the case at hand, will outlive all the customers of his place of residence, La Closerie des Lilas, Paris: that’s where he resides, unobserved by everyone except me. I’ve talked to him whenever I’ve been to this café over the last thirty years.

“So, what’s your name? I asked the first time I saw him. “It used to be Vauvert, now it’s Scott,” he said in a voice that sounded like the rustling of fallen leaves. “And where do you live?” I asked. “Always here, on this site, which is called La Closerie these days, always between the door and the bar; a while ago I was in the cellar of an abandoned house here.” He laughed a strange laugh, the laugh of someone with no lungs.

I did some investigating, asked who the devil Vauvert had been.

“What ever happened to the
Monstre Vert
, to the devil Vauvert? No one ever found out and now no one ever will,” the lunatic Gérard de Nerval wrote at the end of an intense, romantic text dedicated to the legend of this ancient Parisian monster and devil. Today it’s taken for granted that no one ever knew and no one ever will find out what became of the devil Vauvert since the moment, sometime back in the 1820s, when a police sergeant saw him for the last time. Nevertheless, as you see, I’ve heard from him, I’ve actually known him for thirty years; I know he scarcely moves from that spot where one day, almost two centuries ago, he was seen to disappear, only now he looks different, he’s no longer a demon, now he’s an
odradek
. The fact is he’s still in the same place where he disappeared. As Kafka would have said,
he went far away to stay right here.

In days gone by, the
Monstre Vert
lived in his own castle, the Castle Vauvert, in the center of Paris, but his luxurious abode was destroyed by fire, and then he hid, according to Nerval, “in the cellar of a vacant house, at one end of the Jardin du Luxembourg, on Boulevard de Montparnasse, by Avenue de l’Observatoire,” in other words — though Nerval never knew it — exactly where La Closerie des Lilas was built years later, a bar where Fitzgerald and Hemingway, sometime back in the 1920s, often met, first as colleagues and friends and later as rivals and enemies.

We know that in Nerval’s time the devil Vauvert caused a lot of trouble, a specialist in orgies and in bewitching the bottles of wine till they danced, wine from the cellar of that vacant house demolished years later to make way for — perhaps not by chance — the bar where Fitzgerald and Hemingway resolved their differences so many times and which, today, is the perfect hiding place for the old devil, bewitcher of bottles, Vauvert, an ideal spot for our
odradek
, the secret ghost of La Closerie des Lilas.

Scott the
odradek
(that’s what I call him, and I’m the only person in the world who has anything to do with him) is the living memory of the relationship between Fitzgerald and Hemingway. He’s nothing more than this, which, when you think about it, is quite a lot. Isn’t it a lot
to be
the memory of the friendship between those two writers?

I suspect his old, broken-off threads must belong to a magnetic strip on which he has, to his despair, recorded every one of the pair’s meetings and misunderstandings. He knows everything that passed between them. He calls himself Scott and identifies with the author of
The Great Gatsby,
arguing so that Hemingway (who, for him, is me) will never forget what happened.

Walter Benjamin said that an angel reminds us of everything we have forgotten. Scott,
odradek
that he is, always to be found between the door and the bar of La Closerie, reminds me, when I go to this café, of every last detail of what went on between the two friends. He is the soul, he is the devil, he is the
odradek
, he is the memory of this relationship between Hemingway and Fitzgerald. When I was young and went often to La Closerie, he, thinking I was Hemingway, would always remind me, as Fitzgerald, of the most forgotten anecdotes in our history of confrontation. And there were nights when he tragically took on
in person
— or would it make more sense to say
in object
? — the whole sad saga of the enmity between the two writers, and then he would become impossible, sinking into a foul mood, and repeating the most ironic phrases Hemingway had used about his old friend in that bar, and then he would imitate the other’s equally ironic answers. And he would end up embittered by so much irony, in such a terrible state between the door and the bar, diabolically inciting me to leave the premises without paying, something I started to do almost as a matter of course on my last visits to this place where, convinced that after such a long time no one would remember me, I dared to return in the middle of August this year, understandably nervous, mainly because — though I knew perfectly well I’d see him — I wondered, after such a long time, if Scott would still be there.

I went to La Closerie this August and at first I didn’t see him. I went without my wife, to avoid her reproaching me yet again for going on believing I looked like Hemingway, and above all so that she wouldn’t find out that my imagination had created an
odradek
in La Closerie that speaks to me as if I were Hemingway. I sat down at the bar, waiting for a table. I looked around several times and saw nothing, perhaps he wasn’t there anymore. Until suddenly, when I least expected it, I heard someone behind me say with a laugh: “You owe a lot of money.” I thought immediately of all the times I had left that place without paying. Terrified, I turned around but couldn’t see him, it seemed as if he wasn’t there. I looked everywhere, but he had to be between the bar and the entrance. But he wasn’t there, or else I couldn’t see him. The voice, in any case, was his, unmistakable, like the rustling of fallen leaves. And his laugh was the same, the laugh of someone with no lungs. “Remember I was your supporter, remember I introduced you to Max Perkins,” I heard him say all of a sudden. And then I saw him. He was in the darkest corner of the bar. He looked like he’d drunk every single bottle in the cellar of the old vacant house. “What are you doing here, Scott?” I asked him, perhaps using too thuggish a tone of voice. He was silent for a long time, holding out against time just as the wood he’s made of also resisted. I was already seated and talking to the waiter when, coming out of the very wood of my table, I heard his unsettling voice again. “You owe me lots of money, Hemingway. I helped you succeed,” he said, and laughed somewhat bitterly. I could have sworn that for a fraction of a second, under the direction of the
Monstre Vert
, all the bottles in La Closerie des Lilas did a little dance.

Though I could see he was drunker than ever, essentially he was still the same as always, still laughing without lungs, but laughing like the immortal being he was, and the old broken threads of this beautiful and damned thingamajig hadn’t aged at all, the old threads of my beloved, secret Scott.

26

One evening, I went to Raúl Escari’s apartment planning to get him to give me some guidance on the meaning of the expression
linguistic register
, the greatest enigma as far as I was concerned on the sheet Marguerite Duras had given me with instructions on how to write a novel. “You really want to know that?” Raúl responded when I asked him about it. “So you know what it is?” I said hopefully. “I know, but I can’t be bothered to tell you,” he replied. And he added: “Act instead of asking.” This last clearly disconcerted me, I wanted to know what he’d meant. “I mean you ask too many questions when really you should be doing something, in this case just start writing. Once you do that without asking yourself so many questions you’ll come face to face with
linguistic register
.”

We were back where we’d been at the beginning of the conversation. “Couldn’t you tell me what a
linguistic register
is like, what sort of characteristics it has?” With great annoyance at having to explain this to me, Raúl said at last: “You don’t speak the same way in the living room as you do in the barracks, with your family as you do with students, in a political meeting, in church, or the bar on the corner. You get the picture now? By the way, why don’t we go to the bar on the corner?”

Once we were at the bar, he deigned to say: “We change the language we use when our surroundings change. Get it?” “But,” I said, “you talk the same way in this bar as you do at home.” “Well, if, for example, your mother came and sat down with us now, I would speak in a different
register
.” “I get it,” I said. Then, as if annoyed that I got it so quickly, he added: “We shouldn’t really be talking about
linguistic registers
in this bar so much as
diaphasic varieties
, which are the various idiomatic styles individuals adopt according to the communicative situation they find themselves in.”

“And isn’t a
linguistic register
the same thing as a
diaphasic variety
?” I asked. “Of course it is,” he replied, “see, now you know what a
register
is!” Indeed, now I knew, though I had found out by a tortuous, though actually very subtle, intelligent route. I changed the subject. I decided to investigate why he, so obviously a writer, hadn’t written for years. Out of the blue, I asked him which register he’d write in if he did write. He didn’t reply. I insisted and he kept quiet, I got no reply. Just a smile, a perfect smile. His register, the most elegant I have ever known, was a close relation to laughter and silence.

27

Nothing in life is immutable, everything can be modified. I, for example, could go and live in New York, which is what, deep down, I really want. I could set myself up in an apartment in New York instead of being in Barcelona talking about how there is never any end to Paris. Nothing is immutable, everything can be modified. Think of the works of Flaubert. We can easily transform them with our imagination. It’s enough to entertain the suspicion that had Flaubert had a little more time and sufficient money to put his literary legacy in order, it would be quite a different oeuvre today, as he certainly would have finished
Bouvard et Pécuchet
, suppressed
Madame Bovary
(the annoyance the book’s tyrannical fame caused its author should be taken seriously), and changed the ending of
A Sentimental Education
.

Admitting the unmissable disparity between our work, but with the understanding that everything can change, I tell myself now that, before it’s too late, I should, for instance, change the ending to my seventh novel, improve the ninth (I didn’t take advantage of the many possibilities of the plot), suppress the third, and so on. But, above all, the most urgent thing would be to revise
The Lettered Assassin
, a poisonous and criminal book, my funereal literary debut. Perhaps I would change only the title, and call the book ironically
Pipe-smoking and Despair: The Errors of Youth
. I don’t know. I think it might be good to put a bit of a spring in my first literary steps, to beautify something that was a rather sinister coming-out. Since it’s so like a funereal monument — like Tutankhamun’s tomb: whoever opens it dies — I should do to that book what the surrealists proposed to cheer up the sinister and solemn Pantheon of Paris a little: slice it down the middle and pull the two halves fifty centimeters apart.

28

Speaking of pantheons, the most ironic phrase I know — perhaps
the
ironic phrase
par excellence
— is the epitaph Marcel Duchamp wrote for his own tombstone:

D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent.

(After all, it’s always other people who die.)

29

Is the person who just asked me to speak up deaf or an excessive admirer or trying to sabotage this lecture?

Anyway, whatever the reason, I’ll speak louder.

I live in Barcelona, I’m attracted and fascinated by this never-ending Paris, but I don’t kid myself, I’d like to spend more time in New York, where, by the way, I’ve spent only one night in my life.

New York is a desire that comes from far away. For many years I had a recurring dream in which I saw myself as a child in the fifties standing in the large patio of the building where I lived with my parents in a mezzanine flat on Calle Rosellón in Barcelona, opposite the Cinema Chile. In this dream I saw myself playing soccer on my own (as I used to do as a child), in the shadow of the eight- or ten-story buildings that surrounded the patio. But there was something different from the past: these apartment buildings had been transformed into the skyscrapers of a city with something undeniably magical about it, New York City. And having skyscrapers, instead of the normal houses of my neighborhood, gave me a powerful feeling of complete fulfillment and happiness, the feeling that comes from living not in a backwater, but in the capital of the world, New York. I had this dream of grandness so many times I figured I must want to get to know this big city, to exchange the modest splendor of my provincial childhood world of post-war Spain for the center of the world.

One day, out of the blue, I was invited to spend a night in New York.

I was asked to take part in a conference in a library in Manhattan. Though a single night wasn’t much — the following days I had to be in Providence and Boston for two other conferences — I accepted the invitation and traveled to New York, above all I traveled to find out what happened when one finds oneself in real life inside one’s most recurring and happiest dream.

Shortly after arriving in New York, at night in the solitude of my hotel room with my suitcase not yet unpacked, I looked out the window and contemplated the skyscrapers surrounding me. Visually it was like in my patio dream, but nothing special happened. I was inside my dream and at the same time everything was real. But, as was to be expected, my sense of fulfillment or happiness hadn’t increased because I was there. I was in New York, and that was all. I got into bed, fell asleep, and then dreamed I was playing in a patio in New York, surrounded by houses from Barcelona. And suddenly I discovered that the
duende
of the dream was never New York City, but rather the child playing in the dream. The child I had been was what had caused that particular dream to be my dream of dreams. The next morning, despite the fact that I was in New York, I was hugely upset when I found myself awake. New York was the least of it, with its skyscrapers and undeniable allure. What mattered least was confirming that, actually, I did like New York better than Paris. And what mattered most was that on waking up, the child had disappeared, I had lost the true
duende
of the dream. I walked around like a sleepwalker the whole day, the only day of my life that I spent in New York.