Never Any End to Paris (8 page)

33

Think of what the fundamental reasons for despair might be. Each of you will have your own. I propose mine: the fickleness of love, the fragility of our bodies, the overwhelming meanness that dominates our social lives, the tragic loneliness in which, deep down, we all live, the ups and downs of friendship, the monotony and insensitivity the habit of living brings along with it.

On the other side of the scales, we find Paris. This city, perhaps because there is never any end to it and because it is wonderful as well, can take anything, it can counter any of the causes a man can come up with to be unhappy. If one is young in Paris, as I was in those days, and still hasn’t really discovered the true and essential causes for despair, it is incomprehensible that I felt so unhappy in Paris. My God, what was I doing in despair in Paris? I couldn’t have been stupider.

I reflect on this and remember this
pensée
of Cioran’s: “Paris: city in which there may be certain interesting people to see, but where you see anyone but them. You’re crucified by the annoying ones.”

And I think when I lived in Paris I never learned to distinguish between interesting and annoying people, very probably because, weighed down by my stupid despair, I belonged to the large group of those annoying ones.

34

I believed that living in despair was very elegant. I believed it for the entire two years I spent in Paris, and in fact have believed it nearly all my life. I’ve been mistaken until August of this year, which is when this cherished belief in the elegance of despair teetered and came crashing down for good. When it fell like a house of cards, other no less picturesque beliefs began to collapse as well. Such as, for example, the belief that it is essential to be thin in order to be an intellectual and that fat people — as I was growing fatter, with a huge guilt complex, I thought this more and more every day — are not poetic, nor can they be intelligent.

I went to Paris this August and, while waiting for my wife, who was going to join me there the following day, I left the hotel at dusk and walked down Rue de Rennes until I got to the Café de Flore, blending in with the crowds in the streets, walked towards number 5, Rue Saint-Benoît. I acted as if I still lived there and I was just coming home like on any other evening. But I suddenly realized there was something ghostly about me, something a little like a corpse who’d been granted permission to rise from the tomb for a few hours and return to the abandoned streets of his youth and discover none of them were as they had been, that everything was very different.

I walked through the streets of my neighborhood like a sad ghost and soon discovered how inelegant despair could be, especially if the one in despair was a ghost. Lost in the crowds, I walked through those so familiar streets of old, lost and not recognizing anybody in the neighborhood and not even able to go into my building and up to the garret, since I didn’t live there any more; I felt like a dead man on leave, a ghost, and this was a devastating feeling, because I saw the deep and insurmountable gap that separated my youth from my adulthood, and verifying this was very painful; I realized the incessant and vast universe of Paris had been moving away from me for a very long time.

I walked around like a ghost at dusk and never have I comprehended so fully the notion we all have of the tragic loneliness of the dead. In the past, walking about like a ghost would have seemed very elegant to me. But that August evening, seeing I was no longer anybody in my neighborhood in Paris, I discovered just what kind of great disaster was hidden inside an “elegant” despair. It was not at all pleasant to walk in despair through the streets of my old neighborhood. If it wasn’t elegant to want to die, it was even less so to be dead and walking through the places where you had once been alive.

I recalled a British film in which Napoleon was put off a ship at Paris while a double took his place on Saint Helena. Bonaparte’s problem was that nobody in Paris recognized him and he soon realized if he insisted too much on his identity, he ran the risk of ending up like the dozens of lunatics who filled the asylums of Paris each claiming to be the one and only real Napoleon.

And I thought too of a strange friend from those days, a young Parisian who lived on Rue Jacob, near my garret, I thought a lot about this friend who would walk through the neighborhood believing he was Napoleon when he fell into the black pit of dementia. I’d sometimes find him sitting
à la
Bonaparte in the small, comfortable garden of the Delacroix Museum in Place de Furstenberg, and occasionally I talked to him. “You see,” I remember he said to me one day, “yesterday I was a pataphysicist while today I’m only Napoleon.”

What was this about being a pataphysicist? I was a
situationist
, but I’d never heard of the pataphysicists. Were they related to the situationists? When I found out something about the pataphysicists a few days later, I decided to remain a mere situationist to avoid excessive confusion in my literary and political personality.

I began to take the route of madness of my strange friend from Rue Jacob, the neighborhood Napoleon, and I started to dress as a young man with the air of a lettered assassin, with intellectual glasses and a ridiculous Sartresque pipe (I didn’t realize the pipe made me look even more bourgeois, instead of giving me the image of a
poète maudit
), rigorously black shirt and trousers, black glasses, too, my face inscrutable, absent, terribly modern: all black, even my future. I only wanted to be a
maudit
writer, the most elegant of those in despair. I shoved Hemingway brusquely aside and started to read, on the one hand, Hölderlin, Nietzsche and Mallarmé, and on the other what could be called the
noir pantheon of literature:
Lautréamont, de Sade, Rimbaud, Jarry, Artaud, Roussel.

In those days, I started walking around the neighborhood streets believing myself to be an
interesting
person. Sometimes I sat on the terrace of the Café Flore or Chez Tonton and tried to get passersby to notice me, to observe me, with my Sartresque pipe, reading with the air of a young, dangerous French poet. Sometimes — I was well practiced — I looked up from the book I was pretending to read and at that moment my penetrating
maudit
writer look was at its most piercing.

In those days, I would often say I couldn’t bear life and that, more than anything, I wanted to die. “Basically, a trick to avoid the humiliation of accepting that, after the death of God, you’re no longer anybody,” commented my intelligent friend, Raúl Escari, years later from Montevideo (birthplace of Lautréamont). But now, for the first time, I realized that perhaps elegance could be something different from what I had always thought, perhaps elegance was living in the happiness of the present, which is a way of feeling immortal.

No one is asking us to live
life in the pink
, but they’re not asking for black despair either. As the Chinese proverb says, you cannot prevent the dark birds of sorrow from passing over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair. “I do nothing without happiness,” Montaigne said. At the beginning of
Anti-Oedipus
we find this great sentence by Foucault: “Do not believe that because you are a revolutionary you must feel sad.”

But in my youth in Paris in those days I believed that happiness was stupid and vulgar and, with notable falsity, I pretended to read Lautréamont and kept on irritating my friends by forever implying that the world was sad and it wouldn’t be long before I killed myself, since all I thought about was being dead. Until one day I met Severo Sarduy in La Closerie des Lilas and he asked me what I was going to do on Saturday night. “Kill myself,” I replied. “Well, let’s meet up on Friday then,” said Sarduy. (Years later I heard Woody Allen say the same thing and I was flabbergasted, Sarduy had beat him to it.)

From that day on, I annoyed my friends less with this idea of dying by my own hand, but for a long time I maintained my belief — which wasn’t completely destroyed until August of this year — in the intrinsic elegance of despair. Until I discovered how inelegant it is to walk, sad, in despair, dead, through the streets of your neighborhood in Paris. I realized it this August. And ever since I’ve been finding elegance in happiness. “I have embarked on the study of metaphysics several times, but happiness always interrupted,” said Macedonio Fernández. Now, I think going through the world without experiencing the joy of living, rather than elegant, is just so humdrum. Fernando Savater said that the Castilian saying
to take things philosophically
does not mean to be resigned to things, or to take things seriously, but rather to take them happily. Of course. After all, we have all eternity in which to despair.

35

One June evening in 1974, in a restaurant on Rue Saint-Benoît (Barthes had returned from China and the days in Paris were starting to get hot), Marguerite Duras asked me which literary destiny I preferred.

“Mallarmé or Rimbaud?” she asked.

I choked on my coffee.

I had no idea what she was talking about. I’d read both poets quite carefully and been dazzled, but I was far from understanding that each represented a literary alternative, one sedentary and one nomadic: Mallarmé not moving from his home in Paris his whole life, never once leaving his desk, conceiving of language as a creative and transformative force born to craft enigmas rather than explain them; Rimbaud, leaving Paris and writing behind at a very young age to lose himself in an African life of adventure, becoming a businessman who liked “above all to smoke and drink liquor as strong as molten metal.”

Adolfo Arrieta, who was dining with us, saw my anxious face and quickly came to my aid, explaining in a few seconds exactly what sort of dilemma Marguerite had just presented. This dilemma has accompanied me my whole life. On that day, my first impulse was to choose the Rimbaud option, close to Hemingway’s apologia of ways of life based on risk and the mythification of
virile
conceptions of existence, to let myself be seduced by adventure, put myself on Rimbaud’s side, a poet who “wrote silences, nights, noted the inexpressible, nailed vertigo.” But straightaway I thought, dull and boring as it might seem, I should choose Mallarmé, since an enthusiastic declaration of nomadic principles could lead Marguerite to ask teasingly why the hell, if I liked Abyssinia and Rimbaud so much, did I not leave Paris and free up the garret. Additionally, it wouldn’t do to forget that the man who had written that he liked smoking and strong liquor had become a sober, stingy hypocrite in Africa: “I drink only water, fifteen francs a month, everything is so expensive. I never smoke.”

I was about to choose the Mallarmé option when I started to doubt dangerously, and I’ve been doubting to this day, which is really more like Mallarmé than Rimbaud, since home and one’s desk are ideal places for doubting, and have the added advantage of keeping one from going mad, which, when you look at it, is not a bad thing at all, above all if you believe, as I do, that what makes us mad can never be doubt, but rather certainty, any certainty, even if it’s as simple as the one I have now that this first of three sessions comprising this three-day lecture is but a fragment away from reaching its end. I will now read you my fragment on the order and disorder of desks, and finish for the day.

36

I think I unconsciously reflected this dichotomy between Rimbaud and Mallarmé in
The Lettered Assassin
, where I invented two diametrically opposed writers. The first, Juan Herrera, was a writer of a certain category who had distinguished himself throughout his whole life for being fanatical about order, bourgeois order to be more precise. He had written many pages on the attacks of disorder (the totalitarianisms of the 1930s) on order. The other was called Vidal Escabia and was a dreadful writer and the living image of disorder. The first was rather sedentary and the other a recalcitrant nomad. They had, obviously, very different desks.

Herrera arranged his (the same one he’d had for his whole life, in Paris, Sète, and Trouville) according to an unchanging scheme: pens, pencils, ashtray, magnifying glass, letter opener, dictionaries, paper, glass of mineral water, and a little box of aspirin, sleeping pills, and appetite suppressants. Herrera — fictional counterpoint of Thomas Mann, a bourgeois writer who I, as a situationist, despised — was superstitious and tended to attribute his moments of scant literary inspiration to the inexact placement of one of the objects on his work table. Vidal Escabia, on the other hand, had never had a desk (nor did he need one, because other people wrote most of his novels for him), and was tremendously absent-minded, and would forget the manuscripts of his books, written by others, in taxis; he wrote (or, rather, pretended to write) at the busiest beaches or bars, a pen never lasted him three days, the only dictionary he’d ever owned was one of synonyms he’d been given in Lima and lost in a brothel (nobody ever knew why he’d taken it there), he was a passionate promoter of any idea of chaos and an enthusiast of his own disorder.

I think Vidal Escabia was a lot like me, since I’d never had a desk until I got to Paris and, what’s more, I’d spent my life paying homage to disorder and writing nonsense at busy bars and beaches, never at a desk. I loved chaos and detested
bourgeois
stability and I think I identified with Escabia, and felt very fond of him, even though he was a bad writer, I wouldn’t say he was my model writer, but I would always prefer him, if pressed, to Thomas Mann, that is, to Juan Herrera, the unbearably serious, sedentary writer, always checking to make sure everything was precisely in order.

The irony of fate. When I described in
The Lettered Assassin
the orderly arrangement of objects on Juan Herrera’s desk, I could hardly have imagined, as time went by, I would end up having the same desk in Barcelona for more than a quarter of a century, and would go to pathological extremes, following all kinds of superstitions, to keep the objects on my desk arranged just so, that is, I would turn into a sedentary writer, into any old Thomas Mann.

So, am I a lecture or a novel? Am I Thomas Mann or Hemingway?