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Authors: Enrique Vila-Matas

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BOOK: Never Any End to Paris
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37

 

Irony undoubtedly already existed in Ancient Greece. We find it in Socrates, Plato’s
Symposium
actually being the first modern novel. In the Middle Ages, however, irony was seen as dangerous, inconceivable, inappropriate, you could be burned at the stake if you chose to practice it. We find it again in Cervantes, Renaissance man. He introduces irony into the heart of the novel, into its very structure. And then, it’s there right on up to our own time. “If reality is a plot,” says Ricardo Piglia, “irony is a private plot, a conspiracy against that plot.” Irony isn’t an addition, it’s part of the mechanisms of representation of the world, offering a shadow angled over that world. In any case, irony is a rhetorical figure, it belies language. And yet, I don’t want to belie anything I’ve just said about it. Everything I’ve said about irony is not at all ironic. The fact is, after all, art is the only method we have of pronouncing certain truths. And I can’t think of a greater way of stating truth than being ironic about our own identity, which is what I’ve been doing in this lecture since yesterday, always with the best of intentions.

38

 

One day, I was sitting with Martine Simonet (
la plus belle pour aller danser
, the most beautiful woman in the neighborhood, my platonic love), Javier Grandes, and Jeanne Boutade on the terrace of the Café de Flore (Sarduy called it the Flora) and none of us had said anything for quite a while, seriously absorbed in observing and studying the people around us and those who walked by on the street, when it suddenly occurred to me to ask Martine what was guaranteed to make her roar with laughter.

“Banana peels,” she said, “when people slip and fall flat on their faces. I’m very traditional.”

In those days I divided the customers in Café de Flore into three groups: the exiled writers, the French writers, and the mixed and rather extravagant clientele who were extraneous to literature, but not to quirkiness. It’s possible that since then I’ve never seen so many eccentrics gathered together anywhere else in the world.

“The facile trope applies: the Flora has its fauna: regular, almost immovable, cloying and sure,” wrote Sarduy around that time. I well remember some of those who made up that extravagant and sickening fauna: the young blond man, for example, who could only sit where Jean-Paul Sartre had written
Nausea
; the Zsa Zsa Gabor impersonator, who arrived, every day at dusk, with her seven little white dogs; the young Mallorcan millionaire Tomás Moll and his eternal secretary, working on a book that became infinite; the American painter Ruth Stevens, haggard and scurvy-ridden; Roland Barthes hiding behind
Le Monde
so no one would bother him; the fat transvestite there every night, obvious and black; David Hockney, with a falsely absent look in his eye; the unbearable Muscovite grandmother, disheveled and diabolical; Paloma Picasso and her Argentinian boyfriend, and so on.

I spent hours there in the Flore with my friends laughing at the customers and especially at the people we saw walking past on the street, in front of the café. Of course, depending on where my table was, there were some days, when I decided to leave and go back to the garret (just a few steps away), that I was quite capable of walking around the whole block just so I wouldn’t have to pass the terrace and become the latest victim of the commentaries and jokes.

Of course, it wasn’t always like this, for it actually took me a long time to get up the nerve to go into the Flore, and even longer to learn how to laugh at the people in the street and inside the café. In fact, the day I asked Martine that question, in a way, I’d really been finally, fully integrated into the fauna of the Flore for just a few hours. That day I was aware, just as I’d suspected the first time I walked into the Flore, that I hadn’t really been exiled to France or to Paris, but to one area of Paris, the Latin Quarter, and very specifically to one of its cafés, the Flore.

The first time I went to the Flore I already suspected that going there meant asking for literary asylum in the café, forming part of a long line of generations of writers who had gone into exile
right there
, in that exact place. I felt on that first day that entering the Flore meant embracing an order of
displaced
writers, accepting membership of something resembling a continuous delegation. The Flore seemed to contain every language, to be every literary café in the world. “To be exiled in the Latin Quarter,” I had heard Sarduy say, “is like belonging to a clan, to be included in a coat of arms, to be marked by this heraldry of alcohol, absence, and silence in which generations of writers and poets have followed each other.” I was excited by this responsibility of embracing the order of those who are forever foreign, but at the same time I worried I wasn’t up to the task, that I wouldn’t be worthy of the writers who’d preceded me, as I was already aware that to write as well as them, or even better, my writing would have to start acquiring consistency and texture. How would I do it? With difficulty, I thought. I had a long way to go. Would I ever be worthy of this tradition of café writing and exile? Perturbed by all this, the following days I ended up imagining that the stateless tradition of the Flore was speaking to me, and even thought I heard some of the lucid and also tragic voices of those who had gone before, voices that seemed to make up a chorus named Exile. It’s your turn, I heard them say.

My turn? For a long time, I used to wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, lying there on the horrible mattress in the garret, still seeing the walls and tables of the Flore that had shown up in my dream. And I remember perfectly that many times, although I’d already woken up, I could still hear the voices of the chorus. The chorus of the displaced, of exile.

Now it’s your turn, Exile said. And, drying my sweat, I thought that Marguerite should have added an item called
Responsibility
to her list.

39

 

Is it advisable to leave Paris? No, I don’t really think it is. For the woman who accompanies the intrepid Harry in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” it’s not advisable at all. Deep in dangerous Africa, she says to Harry at one point in Hemingway’s story: “I wish we’d never come. You never would have gotten anything like this in Paris. You always said you loved Paris. We could have stayed in Paris.” This woman, if only because she is fickle, and slight, and didn’t like leaving Paris at all, reminds me at times of Kikí, the only person in the world who I know for certain wanted to murder me.

“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is a story in which Hemingway relates, in an elliptical way, that he’d already had a narrow escape, that he sees a portent of death in the snowy peaks of this proud mountain, whose “western summit is called the Masai
Ngaji Ngai
, the House of God.” Hemingway was convinced that the snows of Kilimanjaro, which he identified with death, were definitive, perpetual. We too were convinced of this until very recently. In an accelerated world with everything changing, it was comforting to know that death, like the snow on Kilimanjaro’s summit, would always be there, untouchable, deliciously cold and stable. Nevertheless, all our calm certainty of the eternity of the snow on that African peak collapsed not long ago when we learned that within twenty years not a trace will be left there. This piece of twenty-first century news is comparable to one from the nineteenth, similar to news of the death of God that Nietzsche then divulged.

Within twenty years the eternal snows of Kilimanjaro will die. I wonder what Hemingway would have said if he’d known what we now know, that is, if he’d found out that after God it would be Death that dies. I remember a photograph of Hemingway with his wife in Africa, with the majestic Kilimanjaro in the background, his wife Mary looking at the camera holding a shotgun. And I also remember him in another African photograph, next to the great adventurer Philip Percival, whose bravery he admired so much.

Harry looked, and “all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.” Hemingway had a very brave and dignified way of heading toward death, toward the snowcapped peaks. But it’s clear that, if it were possible for him to come back to this world in twenty years’ time, it would be impossible for him to write that line: “then he knew that there was where he was going.” By that time, the place that gave his story its title, that space of silence and its imposing, high-altitude climate (there where he was going), having lost its perpetual snows, won’t be the same, it won’t be Death.

In twenty years, it will be necessary to go back to Paris to look for something more eternal, admit that the woman in Hemingway’s story was right, that it wasn’t advisable to leave that city. It seems to me that she, despite her fickle nature and slightness, was able to sense that Paris, unlike the condemned snows of Kilimanjaro, will always be immortal, will never end. Because, isn’t it true, ladies and gentlemen, that there is never any end to Paris?

40

 

It must have been September 1974, we were in the Café Blaise, at the top of the Eiffel Tower, and suddenly reality for me stopped being what it was, and as I looked at the city I saw only an intersection of four roads, one of which clearly led to the summit of Kilimanjaro. My absolute astonishment at this sight and my sudden and devastating farewell to a reality that until then had seemed unique and immutable are among the most enduring memories of that day when, accompanied and guided by Kikí, I took my first tab of acid.

Shortly after noticing its first effects, I began to feel — still doubtful, but growing less so by the second — that perhaps I was immortal, and finally I felt this with full force. I suddenly had the nearly unequivocal impression that I was
something more than alive
and if it occurred to somebody at that moment to shoot me in the heart, for example, it wouldn’t kill me, at least not at that moment, since I felt in my body an infinite surge of uncontrollable power.

With doubts about my immortality diminishing by the second, I started to wonder what would happen if I leapt into space from the Café Blaise. I was so far gone I was quite capable of doing it. I looked at Kikí and she seemed distracted, observing the movements of some children as they played with balloons on the terrace. “Right now what I’d like,” I told her, “is to throw myself into space and land on my feet, safe and sound, on the asphalt. Do you think with the strength of the acid I could manage a miracle like that? What do you think would happen if I did that, you think I’d kill myself?”

Kikí loved Indian philosophy and adored the musician Ravi Shankar; Katmandu was the center of her tormented hippy world and she often talked to me about certain crossroads with snow-covered mountains in the background, crossroads of different
spiritual pathways of life
in which Buddhist wisdom would help you choose the one true way. Kikí was a fickle, slight and frivolous young woman I was hopelessly in love with until that day at the Eiffel Tower when I luckily started to get my first intimations of the existence of irony, an activity I believe sometimes endows us with a selfish prudence, fortunately inoculating us against sentimental exaltation. Thanks to irony — which allows us to avoid disappointment for the simple reason that it refuses to entertain any hopes — after that, I’d never get my hopes up about any Kikí — who today, incidentally, is a mother in Reims, as well as obese, alcoholic, and not at all Buddhist — thanks to irony I no longer get my hopes up. For a long time, my slogan has been a phrase from Cervantes which when applied, for example, to the now fat Kikí, leaves one in love with irony: “There is no heavier burden than a slight and fickle woman.”

“You wouldn’t kill yourself, you wouldn’t die, you’d just go far away from Paris, but you wouldn’t kill yourself,” Kikí replied that day in a hypnotic and very persuasive tone. “Oh, really?” I said, somewhat puzzled. And she said: “You won’t croak if you focus properly on the fall with the right karma, understand? You have to brake mentally in the air as you fall. If you do that, you might even land on your feet, you’ll see.” “But I wouldn’t land on my feet on the ground in Paris?” I asked. “You’ll land on your feet, but it won’t be in Paris,” she replied.

I was in love with her. I’d listened so closely to all the instructions she’d given me about how to act under the effects of LSD that I nearly threw myself confidently into space from the top of the Eiffel Tower. But at the last minute something stopped me believing I could mentally slow down my body as I fell. And that something — not just a timely intervention on the part of my natural intelligence — was the discovery that Kikí was monstrous, since she, knowing as she did that acid opens up dangerous breaches in the mind, was openly trying to get me to kill myself. I saw that not only did she not love me at all, but what she said was an attempt to get rid of me, perhaps because she wanted to make off with what little money I had in the garret, or perhaps simply, just as I’d suspected, because she found me odious. Luckily, irony came to my rescue at the last minute and endowed me with a selfish prudence, immunizing me against the murderous and persuasive voice of the terrible Kikí.

“I don’t understand why you think leaving Paris would be advisable,” I told her. “What?” she asked somewhat surprised, as if she hadn’t expected me to still be there, perhaps she thought I was already dead. “Nothing,” I said, “I just want you to know that eternity isn’t that much longer than life.” I spun on my heels and left, walked out of the Blaise and left her, left her forever, which is just a manner of speaking, because actually the callous Kikí had already left me months before. I went down in the elevator of the Eiffel Tower and shortly afterwards, in the street, at the crossroads, I went down a road that went beyond even the reality that had replaced the previous reality; I went, to the rhythm of acid, toward a different reality where time and space didn’t exist: I went, in a manner of speaking, beyond the perpetual snows of Kilimanjaro; I went to the country where things have no name and there are no gods, no men, no world, where in the background there’s only the abyss.

Many hours later, back in the garret, the drug’s effect had almost worn off; I was looking distractedly at the ceiling when suddenly I shuddered in terror, as if at that precise instant I’d returned to normality, to reality. And I realized the seriousness of what had happened.

“Damn,” I said in fright, “it’s not every day someone tries to murder you.”

BOOK: Never Any End to Paris
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