Never Any End to Paris (23 page)

99

There are passages in Paris in which the closed atmosphere seems to presage the end of something. Of our world, for example. Of our time in Paris, as happened to me. Those
passages
Walter Benjamin studied at length — covered galleries, which might sometimes seem very beautiful to us, but their asphyxiating atmosphere can also remind us of our soul when reality hits us in melancholy moments and tells us the truth, announcing that the end is nigh. Louis-Ferdinand Céline said in
Death on the Installment Plan
that the sinister Passage Choiseul — the passage itself — had ended up becoming aware of its filthy asphyxia. And he also said that with its stink of urine and leaking gas and other subtleties, this alley, where his mother sold lace and where he’d spent half his life, was fouler than the inside of a prison, and, moreover, a bad omen. One day, when I was least expecting it and in the last place I would have expected, the Passage des Panoramas, I bumped into Petra, whom I hadn’t seen for months. As soon as I saw her, I don’t know how, but I immediately smelled urine and gas leaks, and sensed the asphyxiation of that covered passage, as if not wanting to contradict Céline. Petra, so ugly and so belittled by me, was arm in arm with a burly pimp, a real pimp, not one like I’d thought myself when I was with her.

As if she’d immediately seen all the worry in the world on my face and, perhaps prompted by an urge for revenge, Petra said something she’d said to me once before and, though it had then had little impact on me, this time it shattered my fragile morale: “You should go back to Barcelona, you’re wasting your time here. I’m wasting mine too, but at least I’ve got a boyfriend and a job.” The worst thing was that I didn’t answer her, I didn’t reply because pathetically I feared a violent reaction from the pimp. Despite not being aware of it at that time, I now think that this cruel and depressing incident was a little like an omen that something was going to end for me, it was surely the beginning of the end of my time in Paris.

100

On October 29, 1965, Ben Barka, the leader of the Moroccan opposition to King Hassan II, had arranged to have lunch with a journalist and a filmmaker in the Brasserie Lipp on Boulevard Saint-Germain, across the street from the Flore. As he was on his way into the restaurant, two policemen from the
brigade mondaine
— Inspector Souchon and his subordinate Voitot — identified themselves and politely invited him to get into the car where Antoine Lopez, agent of the French counterespionage services, awaited him, and said he had orders to put him in contact with a high-ranking official. It is known that they headed for a villa in Fontenay-le-Vicomte, where all trace of the Moroccan politician was lost forever.

Ten years later, at the end of October 1975, I went to have lunch, as I often did, at the café-restaurant in the Drugstore Saint-Germain, which was right next to the Lipp, and also across from the Flore. I always used to eat there alone, sheltering behind the Spanish sports papers
Marca
and
Dicen
, which I’d read from cover to cover. That day, I’d just finished my first course and was waiting for the waitress to bring me the second when two tall, burly men approached me, two remarkably broad-chested gorillas who identified themselves as secret police and discreetly invited me to follow them to the restroom, where, noticeably nervous, they pinned me up against the wall, frisked me and asked why
I
was so nervous. “And you,” I asked them, “why are you both so nervous?” They had their reasons to be nervous, since they thought I was the Venezuelan terrorist Carlos, the same man who not long before had planted a bomb that left a trail of death and destruction in this very establishment; the same man who, according to the waitresses’ statements, had been seen before the attack having lunch several times in the restaurant, reading newspapers in Spanish.

The two policemen, who soon realized they must have made a mistake, finally asked me to take them to my garret on Rue Saint-Benoît (which I, trying to let them know I had connections, had told them I rented from Marguerite Duras), they wanted to verify that I wasn’t in fact manufacturing bombs there and was only, as I’d said, the innocent writer of a first novel entitled
Th
e Lettered Assassin
.

This incident also had something of the beginning of the end of my time in Paris about it. This is what I sensed when, escorted by the two immense gorillas, I was about to cross Boulevard Saint-Germain on the way to the garret. A touch of humor now punctuates the memory of what at the time felt like a difficult moment. Luckily I had no idea that exactly ten years before, in similar circumstances and also across the street from the Flore, two policemen had made a man on his way to have lunch at the Lipp disappear forever. I think if I’d been aware of the precedent of Ben Barka’s disappearance I would have died of fright. As it is, the memory of that day is punctuated by a touch of humor — as we passed the Flore, a friend of Arrieta’s — a gay painter who tried his utmost to look like Andy Warhol — not realizing my two escorts were policemen, shouted as I passed: “Well, aren’t we in good company today!”

Did they have evil intentions, like Souchon and Voitot, those policemen who frisked me in the restroom of the drugstore and then came up to my garret and, after a quick look around, stayed for a few minutes reading the opening pages of the manuscript of
Th
e Lettered Assassin
, perhaps thinking my as yet unfinished book might be a collection of secret documents on international terrorism? I don’t think so; once the business was over, they seemed quite inoffensive to me. In any case I’ll never know, just as I’ll never know if they were the two policemen killed a few weeks later by the terrorist Carlos as they tried to arrest him in a Paris apartment.

The two gorillas searched the garret, saw that no one was making bombs there, took a long look at
Th
e Assassin
, and finally the tall gorilla asked me if I’d read any Simenon. I didn’t know what would be the best thing to say and decided to tell the truth, I said I hadn’t. “Well,” said the short gorilla, “we’ll be leaving now.” They seemed to be in a good mood all of a sudden, as if they’d managed to get out of an awkward situation. And, although they didn’t apologize to the innocent young man whose lunch they’d interrupted, the short guy did something quite thoughtful once they’d left the garret and were out on the landing on their way to the stairwell. He turned around suddenly and with all the ironic kindness a policeman is capable of, said: “Living alone in a dive like this is not such a good idea.” And the other policeman added: “It’s not good to live in the dense solitude of criminals.” This last came as quite a surprise. It was a strange sentence to hear spoken by a policeman, or by anybody for that matter. Anyway, did he think because I was writing about a lettered assassin I was potentially a solitary criminal? Many years later someone told me that “the dense solitude of criminals” was an expression Simenon often used.

101

One winter morning, walking with Arrieta through the Jardin du Luxembourg, down a tree-lined side avenue we spied a solitary, almost motionless, black bird reading the newspaper. It was Samuel Beckett. Dressed in black from head to toe, there he was on a bench, very still, looking desperate; it was scary. And it almost seemed like a lie that it was him, that it was Beckett. I’d never imagined I might run into him. I knew he wasn’t one of the dead legends, rather someone who lived in Paris; but I’d always imagined him as a dark presence flying over the city, never as someone you might come across reading the newspaper in despair in a cold, lonely, old park. From time to time he turned a page, seemingly with such anger and intense energy that if the entire Jardin du Luxembourg had shuddered we wouldn’t have been at all surprised. When he got to the last page, he sat there both engrossed and distracted. It was even scarier than before. “He’s the only one brave enough to show that our despair is so great we don’t even have words to express it,” said Arrieta.

102

In
Vita nuova
, Dante tells us that he once listed the names of sixty women in an epistle just so he could secretly slip in Beatrice’s name. Borges thinks Dante repeated this melancholy game in the
Comedia
; he suspects that he constructed the best book literature has managed to achieve just to be able to insert a few encounters with the long-lost Beatrice. And I have the impression that — admitting the all too unmissable disparities — I unconsciously played this melancholy game in
Th
e Lettered Assassin
, I have the impression I wrote the whole book just to be able to insert a poem into it, a single poem, the last one I ever wrote and only one I’ve ever published. Seen from this angle, all of
Th
e Lettered Assassin
would be an excuse for me to be able to bid farewell to poetry through these lines: “Exile, you’ll walk with neither tears nor tomb / and sail close to time past and from there, / further away and into the distance, / eyes towards the Never Seen, / heading for Circe, dead beauty, / where, silently passing / the sunless cities, you will find me. / I’ll be the wrecked ship that lands / on the beach of my friend, / who is celebrated in vain.”

These days I see
Th
e Lettered Assassin
basically as my farewell to poetry. The hidden plot of the book would be the quiet tragedy of a youth who’s bidding farewell to poetry to succumb to the vulgarity of narrative. While Hemingway hadn’t worried even the slightest about this shift from poetry to prose (“the lyric facility of boyhood that was as perishable and as deceptive as youth was”), I on the other hand was seriously affected.
Th
e Lettered Assassin
, with its tormented description of the death of a poet, bears full witness to this fact, it speaks not only of my personal drama but also of the drama of many young writers who, at the start of their creative process, if they are imaginative, tend to construct poetic worlds of their own, shaped to a large extent by their reading; but later on, as the intensity of their imagination gradually diminishes, they fall into everyday prose and feel they’ve betrayed their early poetic principles. Some, the most intelligent and stubborn of them, resist giving in so easily and keep faith with poetry for some years more, but what they don’t know is that, no matter what they do, poetry already abandoned them a long time ago. No one can escape this devastating law of poetic life, no one. Although, the vast majority of humanity escapes it, all these people battered and crushed by the tyranny of reality who’ve had the debatable luck of never having even distinguished between poetry and prose.

103

“M. D., qui a beaucoup lu, aujourd’hui lit très peu”
(“M. D., who has read a lot, today reads very little”), begins Benoît Jacquot’s essay in a book the French publisher Albatros had just published on Marguerite Duras, and which I bought to catch up on my landlady’s creative world. Lacan and Maurice Blanchot, among others, contributed to this volume. I remember Raúl Escari got unusually excited by this first sentence of Jacquot’s essay, and for several days he went around repeating it to everybody, including Duras. And I also remember in the book there was a kind of collective celebration of the film
India Song
, which had just opened to acclaim in several Paris cinemas. Her second husband, Dyonis Mascolo, said, for example, that
India Song
, even with Dreyer as a precedent, represented the true birth of cinema, and heralded a great future for this young art. Duras had blazed a trail with this film. Maurice Blanchot wondered what
India Song
was. Could it be said to be a film or perhaps a book or not one thing or the other? After reading Blanchot’s essay, I had the impression I knew less about Marguerite than I knew before starting to read the essay. Jacques Lacan, meanwhile, said he was left open-mouthed when he’d read
Th
e Ravishing of Lol V. Stein.
And he also said other things I’ve forgotten or, rather, that I didn’t understand, not that this worried me too much, since by then I was used to not understanding Lacan.

This anthology opened with some words from Duras herself where she confessed that she wrote in order to be busy with something. And she added: “If I had the courage to do nothing, I’d do nothing. It’s because I don’t have the courage to do nothing that I write. There is no other reason. It’s the truest thing I can say on the matter.” I was impressed by the sincerity of these words. A few days after reading the book, I ran into Marguerite on Rue Saint-Benoît and when our short conversation in the street drifted towards literary terrain, it occurred to me — already knowing what she’d reply — to ask her why she wrote. I thought that, as soon as she began to answer me with her predictable reply (“it’s because I don’t have the courage to do nothing . . .”), I’d interrupt her with a broad smile on my lips to tell her I knew how the sentence went on, since I’d read it in the compilation of essays on her work I’d just bought, interested as I was in all books about her (and this way she’d see I was interested in her world).

But I was in for a big surprise, because I was expecting one answer and got another. “I write to keep from killing myself,” she said laconically. Stunned, I mumbled a few semi-coherent words; I didn’t know what to say or how to go on. Luckily, Duras practically ordered me out of her way, as she had to go to the Flore, she added: “It’s awful, because I have to meet Peter Brook, who always brings me bad luck, the last time I saw him I was almost run over by a car in front of the Flore.”

Did she write to keep busy or to keep from killing herself? Which was it? Was she entirely sincere, or was she practicing literature all the time? Do we have to wait until an author dies so a biographer can recount the life as it’s been lived and not just as the writer claims it has been? I’d read, I don’t know where, that André Gide used to say an artist shouldn’t recount his life exactly as he’s lived it, but rather live it exactly as he is going to recount it. And, in the middle of all this, what was I planning to do? Live my life as I planned on recounting it? And how did one manage something like that?

I walked along reflecting on all this, until I got to the garret and went up exhausted by so many questions. Later, with time, I’ve discovered that Duras was a great specialist in the negative, a professional of
pathos
or its precise simulation. Few sentences are as seductive, as hypnotizing as the one we find in her book
Écrire:
“Writing: writing arrives like the wind, it is naked, it is ink, it’s the written word, and it passes like nothing in life passes, nothing except, of course, for life itself.” It’s a fascinating sentence. But should we believe it to the letter? Besides, what does it say? If it’s saying anything at all, it’s actually something very simple. It’s something truly simple — simply that literature is the same as the wind. You have to admit that’s particularly well put. Marguerite always liked to play with fire, I know this now, I didn’t know it then. Marguerite, I now know, loved to lay bare the challenge of the incessant futility of words.

That day, exhausted by so many questions, I went up to the garret, looked again at the book on Duras and
India Song
, and suddenly experienced a few minutes of unexpected happiness when my attention alighted distractedly on the caption of a photo in the book: “Marguerite Duras, aged seventeen. Sadec (Cochinchina).” All my attention centered on the last word, the one naming a legendary country. I’d never until then been aware of it, but my landlady had been born in Saigon, a city linked to my maternal great-grandfather, who had participated in the Spanish punitive expedition that fought alongside the French in the mid-nineteenth century in that distant place and had entered Saigon, though the French raised their flag and kept the spoils and regarded the Spanish as auxiliary troops. But my great-grandfather was there in Saigon with Colonel Palanca, and there he stayed for some years.

As a child, my mother — like so many other Spanish mothers of the time — used to threaten to send me to Cochinchina if I misbehaved. But, unlike the others’, my mother’s threat was not entirely empty given the connection tying us to this remote country, a connection that all of a sudden seemed ongoing in my contact with Duras, the writer arrived from Cochinchina.

The discovery of this oriental connection gave rise to a long scene of deceptive happiness when in the following minutes, stretched out on the mattress on the floor — that horrible bed where I wasted away my days — I speculated on the mysterious contact linking my family to Cochinchina, and some strange, exotic, passionate stories came into my head. It was as if I were writing, but having much more fun than I did writing, since I didn’t have to comply with the rigid rules of Duras’s list. Suddenly, on the journeys of my imagination, I discovered for a few unforgettable minutes that my mental prose could sail over tranquil surfaces like a ship quickly gliding, with a favorable wind in its sails. The stories of my relatives and Cochinchina glided along, and wrote themselves in this wind, free and unfettered. I discovered the virtues of combining imaginary writing on wind with “the courage to do nothing,” as Marguerite would say. I felt delighted with life and suddenly fell asleep, as if the joy of not writing had the power to send me to sleep.

Hours later, I woke up. I stayed in bed and kept very still, looked at the window, looked at my knees, remembered my happiness before falling asleep, listened to the sounds — as incomprehensible as ever — of the black man in the room next door. The happiness with which I’d fallen asleep soon switched to regret for not actually having written anything, only imaginary strokes in the wind. If I thought about it properly, it was appalling. I’d fallen asleep from happiness, that was true. But also from stupidity and sheer idleness. I thought if I was so lazy about writing, why didn’t I travel to the far away foreign light of Cochinchina? Nobody there would force me to write, I could inscribe stories on the wind. Could I really inscribe them? Cochinchina’s name had changed some time ago and it was now called Vietnam and it was hell and not a place for idlers. While it was true no one would force me to write there, what was certain was that they wouldn’t let me drift off to sleep from happiness and, moreover, I’d be forced to work. I remembered when my mother, finding out I sympathized with left-wing ideas, said to me: “Very well, if you’re a Communist go to Russia. You’ll soon see how they make you work over there.”