Read Never Any End to Paris Online

Authors: Enrique Vila-Matas

Tags: #Fiction, #General

Never Any End to Paris (7 page)

30

 

The Lettered Assassin
(a book written by the assassin herself, though the reader shouldn’t know it until the end) opens with an almost perfect first sentence that speaks of how occasions for laughter and tears are intertwined in the narrator’s life (a sentence that’s actually the last one I wrote in the whole book and of that more later). Then it goes on: “It was last year, in an old hotel in Bremen, I was in search of Vidal Escabia. Through a labyrinth of corridors I had arrived at his room, number 666, and since the door was ajar . . .”

The murderess tells the reader that in room 666, in the old hotel in Bremen, she discovers the lifeless body of Vidal Escabia, and next to the corpse she finds, dropped on the floor, as if death had struck as he read it, the original manuscript of
The Lettered Assassin
. And a little further on the murderess reveals that in May 1975 she sent the victim a personal letter from Worpswede, near Bremen, along with the manuscript of
The Lettered Assassin
and some notes on the text.

The reason I chose Bremen and Worpswede — a city and village I knew nothing about, only that they were German — was really very simple. Due to the demands of the plot, I needed the name of a city that wasn’t too far from Paris. At that moment, the book I had closest at hand in the garret was
Letters to a Young Poet,
by Rainer Maria Rilke. I opened the book with my eyes closed and there was the fourth letter, dated July, 1903, in
Worpswede
,
near Bremen
. I realized straightaway that I had found the city I was looking for, but also a village with a strange name it would be a shame not to use. And that’s how it happened that these two places, the strange-named village, Worpswede, and the city of Bremen, appeared on the first page of my first book and as time went by — there are few pages I have visited more frequently than the first page of
The Lettered Assassin
— they ended up becoming mythical names for me, two names that became
part of me
.

Allow me to leave aside irony for a few moments and to recall tenderly what I was reading in those long-ago days. I think I saw Rilke and Unamuno as if they were writers of self-help books. It seems, just as with Unamuno’s
How to Make a Novel
, I had Rilke’s book there in my garret with the basic idea that, just as the title hinted, it would show me how to write. I’d bought it in La Hune bookshop like a man who acquires a pearl, thinking it will solve all his problems. I can only see this purchase as touching and it makes me think that possibly here today, in this room, there might be a young poet in the audience listening to this lecture thinking he can learn something from this ironic account of my years of apprenticeship.

If this is the case, I would recommend this young poet not make such a lamentable mistake. If we come into this world in order to learn, and yet, learn nothing — we leave it knowing less than ever — the young poet is even less likely to learn anything from a lecture where the only certainty the lecturer has — well, maybe this young man will learn something, maybe he’ll learn what I’m about to tell him, which is no small thing — the only certainty I have is that perseverance in the habit of writing is usually in direct relation to its absurdity, while we usually do brilliant things quite spontaneously.

I don’t think there’s any harm in saying that if I learned nothing from the book by Rilke, it’s also true, and odd, that this book
in its own way
did help me with something, it helped me not only to find the names of a German city and village, but also to write the first sentences of the letter written by my assassin, sentences exactly the same as those of the fourth letter from Rilke to the young poet, a letter sent from
Worpswede, near Bremen
, July 16, 1903, which begins like this: “
About ten days ago I left Paris and traveled to this great northern plain, where the vastness and silence and sky ought to help me rest.

And if these two places have indeed been accompanying me over the years, it never occurred to me that one day I might travel to them, as in fact happened a few months ago when I was invited by some professors to give a reading of my work in Bremen; inadvertently, they were offering me the chance to go to the first city and the first village I named in my whole body of work. I accepted the invitation immediately but it didn’t take me long to start wondering whether they would put me up
in an old hotel in Bremen
and above all to speculate about the possibility, as literary as it was terrifying, that, whether the hotel was old or not, the number of my room might be 666.

If 666 was the number of my room — something I believed or wanted to believe was highly unlikely — I would have to accept from that moment that I was a dead man. Perhaps my entire oeuvre — I said to myself — had consisted of this, writing for thirty years just to end up returning to its origins, to finally return, in a diabolical closed circle — let’s not forget that 666 is the number of the Beast — to the first sentences I wrote in my first book, returning and becoming a fatal victim of those sentences, just as my manuscript had made a victim of Vidal Escabia, the first character I ever killed.

I went to Bremen and the hotel was modern and the room number (as was only to be expected after all) was very far from being 666. Relaxed, that very night I liberated myself at once from my ghosts and, when I’d finished my reading in the city, over dinner, I joked rashly about my now dispelled fears. “And what if 666, where the Beast really is waiting for you is in Worpswede?” I will never know who asked this question. The fact is that the following day I decided to go to Worpswede, partly because I wanted to defy the Beast, but also because I was curious to see this village with the strange name that had infiltrated the first pages of my first book. On the bus, on my way to the village, I had the strange feeling that I was entering, thirty years after having written it, the first page of
The Lettered Assassin
. Once in Worpswede, where I discovered that Rilke had traveled to this tranquil village in 1903 because he was friends with Paula Modersohn-Becker, I visited the museum-house of this interesting but ill-fated painter. And I bought several books about the artistic history of the place and also a German edition of
Letters to a Young Poet
, Rilke’s book I’d had in my garret in Paris and that I’d lost a long time ago and where the writer speaks of
the vastness, silence and sky
of that
great northern plain
where oddly (or not) I found myself at that moment.

Modersohn-Becker painted people as if they were still lifes. When she died, Rilke dedicated a poem to her, “Requiem for a Friend.” She had a spark of genius that death snatched away at the age of thirty-one, leaving Rilke devastated: “Somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work . . .” I spent a long time in the museum and then walked through the village and, with the help of the landscape paintings I had seen in the museum, began to imagine I was walking through Worpswede in the early twentieth century, walking through the
great northern plain
, as dusk fell, pushed on by a light wind. Under an immense sky the fields spread out in dark tones; rolling heather-covered hills stirred in the distance, bordered by fields of stubble and newly harvested buckwheat. And all this gradually appeared to me so forcefully and so realistically, that I actually felt scared. Then I remembered the number 666 and also the fact that I had come to this village knowing I risked finding myself face to face with this number and that the diabolical circle of my work could suddenly close at any moment. But the number 666 was nowhere to be found. I had some trivial strawberry ice cream on the terrace of a roadside café, next to the stop for the bus that took me back to Bremen.

My fear of the Beast ended there, ended in that strawberry ice cream.

31

 

Strawberry ice cream?

Two weeks went by and Bremen and Worpswede had been left behind when I had to travel from Barcelona to Malaga: this involved a couple of busy hours of work, then a night in the Hotel Larios and returning home the next day. It’s common knowledge that things happen, end up happening, or sometimes happen when you least expect them to. On the return leg of this short trip, I had to fly from Malaga to Barcelona on Spanair flight JKK666. I could hardly believe it. How dare they give the number of the Beast to an airplane? For a long while, waiting for the diabolical flight to be called, I worried that what I’d presumed could happen to me in Bremen might happen on this very plane. Because it’s also common knowledge that, as both God and the Devil have recently demonstrated far too well, they are anything but perfect and instead, very clumsy, and are often known to arrive late to their operating theatre. But then I thought the opposite, I told myself it was absurd to fall into the trap of believing in things with such a pronounced literary charge and there was absolutely no reason anything should happen to me. So I boarded the plane.

The young man in the seat next to mine was one of those nervous youths we’ve all come across at one time or another on planes, one of those who don’t stop moving, as if they’ve just drunk an awful lot or taken a strong hit of cocaine. The stewardess tells us to fasten our seatbelts, and we think we’re going to get a break. But this isn’t what happens at all, because they carry on fidgeting restlessly and nervously with that seatbelt fastened, they even start to make us feel as upset as they do. He managed to affect me so much I couldn’t help giving him an angry glance, while also trying to repress my most primal instinct, which was to slap him across the face and put a triple safety belt on him. The guy was still uncontrollable and fidgeting in his seat, picking up the airline magazine, for example, then putting it back, doing this I don’t know how many times. Not to mention the absurd questions he kept asking the stewardesses, the nervous glances towards the little window and other charming touches. I took a good look at him; he was dressed all in black, from head to toe. I looked carefully at his head, examined his face in detail, and shuddered: this young man with a diabolical air and somewhat murderous aspect looked a lot like me at the time when I wrote
The Lettered Assassin
.

At that moment, the plane took off.

Was he an imposter, or someone completely unrelated to me, or was he me myself, quite a few years younger? Doubtless the second, and apart from the fact of traveling on flight JKK666 and his looking rather demonic, there wasn’t too much to get alarmed about. But just in case, I tried to keep him in line. I shot him another defiant glance. I gave him — as far as possible — the same icy and terrifying look I’d imagined my lettered assassin to have when I was writing the book. I thought I had stunned and confused him, but that was only wishful thinking. I was planning on not looking at him or worrying about him anymore, when he resumed his nervous habit, picking up the airline magazine and giving it a compulsive glance before putting it back in its place again. More irritated than ever, I was about to give him one last very serious and threatening reproachful glance when the thought came to me clearly that if in the 1970s, following Hemingway’s example or letting the despair of youth take him over, if this man had committed suicide, I would not be alive. I realized I had always depended on this young assassin and if he forgot about me, I would die. And vice versa, of course.

I made a note in my diary about this and tried to get him to read it. I wrote: “Sensation of being in two times and two places at once.” The diabolical youth was too nervous to read what I was writing. I wondered what would happen if, for example, I said to him: “When you get to my age, you will want at any cost for someone to recognize that you look like Hemingway.” He would certainly take me for a madman or think I wanted to strike up an amorous relationship with him, anything but guess he was the same as me when I was young. I traveled beside him in a rigorous and repressed silence until we got to Barcelona. And when we landed in that city I let him go ahead of me in the aisle so he could get off first. “Youth first,” I said to him, venting my frustration, trying to make up with these words for what I’d suffered throughout the interminable flight. “And the devil is everywhere,” he replied insolently, almost pushing me over. I’ve never seen anyone in such an immense hurry to get off a plane, and I’ve seen some pretty nervous people.

32

 

Hemingway said that when spring arrives in Paris, even if it’s a false spring, the only problem is to find the place where you can be happiest. I well remember the first day of the spring of 1974, not the first official day of spring, but a splendid April day. I even remember the date, April 9, a day when the rain stopped completely and everyone left their winter clothes at home and the terraces of the cafés filled up. Everything invited happiness, a grave setback for my habitual state of youthful despair. Paris is a gray and rainy city, but when spring arrives and the terraces fill and street singers seem to emerge from every corner singing
La Vie en Rose
, the city turns into the best place in the world to be happy (even if a person might not want it to be and prefers
la vie en noir
).

On that April 9, I was about to cross Boulevard Saint-Germain with Marguerite Duras and Raúl Escari when suddenly a large black car, almost funereal and not at all spring-like, braked hard and stopped in front of us. I looked inside and saw Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, Marcelin Pleynet, and a fourth person I wasn’t able to identify. Sollers rolled the car window down and spoke with Marguerite for a few seconds. I didn’t understand a word of what they said. Then, the car pulled off and disappeared into the distance, finally vanishing at the other end of the boulevard. Then suddenly Marguerite said: “They’re going to China.”

Once again, I thought, she’s speaking in her
superior
French. They’re going to China, repeated Raúl in a very solemn and ironic tone, and couldn’t hold back a cheerful giggle. And I laughed so as not to contradict him. The strange thing is it was true. In April and May of 1974, a French delegation made up of three members of the magazine
Tel Quel
(Sollers, Kristeva, and Pleynet), together with François Wahl and Roland Barthes, visited China. They went from Peking to Shanghai and from Nanking to Sian. On his return, Barthes published a famous article in
Le Monde
, where he revealed his disappointment with what he had seen and heard. He thought Chinese tea was as bland as the landscape. This and certain reflections on Maoism are what I remember most about this article, which I read on the day it appeared — May 24, 1974, another extraordinary spring day — in my garret, secretly astonished at what it said there. The article was called “Alors la Chine,” and there are some who swear it has passed into the history of twentieth-century French literature.

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