Never Any End to Paris (24 page)

104

It felt like
Th
e Lettered Assassin
was coming to an end; to boost my morale a little, I told myself that at least the
plot
of my book was original. But then suddenly, on January 12, 1976, I read in
Le Monde
that Agatha Christie had just died and I was filled with dismay to learn from a footnote that she’d written a detective novel,
Th
e Murder of Roger Ackroyd
, in which the reader discovers at the end that the narrator of the book was in fact the murderer. I hadn’t expected something like this. Had I wasted the last two years of my life writing
Th
e Lettered Assassin
? I believed my idea of killing the reader with a narrator who doesn’t reveal she’s the murderer until the very last line was highly
original and unique. My heart sank when I saw this wasn’t the case; I was really under the impression that if there was anything of interest to the book, it was the originality of this trap set for the reader.

What did I have to do? Start over again?

Everything’s been invented, I told myself. Or did I perhaps believe that someone could still be original?
^†
I spent a few downcast days, until one evening, all of a sudden, in a fit of good humor, I decided to swap the photo of Virginia Woolf (presiding as a poster over the garret, reminding me that I too had
a room of my own
) for a gigantic photo of Saint Agatha Christie, the true lettered assassin and the grand old lady of Crime. And I joked to myself that the next tenant of this garret would be a crime writer. Then I realized that in days gone by it would never have occurred to me to think about the next tenant of this
chambre
. It was as if, just like
Th
e Assassin
, my time in Paris was coming to an end.*

105

Do we invent nothing? Was the narrator of
Molloy
telling the truth? What about learning? Do we learn nothing either? Are the
writer’s
years of apprenticeship
, for instance, so exalted and so hackneyed, merely a fallacy? Do we live without learning a thing and then simply, as Beckett said, go to hell? Is the fact that we invent nothing perhaps the only thing we can learn in this world? The
coup de grâce
came when Arrieta presented me with the novel
Jacob von Gunten
,
by Robert Walser. I opened it to the first page, and began to read: “One learns very little here, there is a shortage of teachers, and none of us boys in the Benjamenta Institute will come to anything, that is to say, we shall all be something very small and subordinate later in life.”

What an outlook.

I remember one rainy day, sitting on the terrace of the Café Rien de la Terre on Rue Sainte-Anne, toward the end of January 1976, agonizing over Walser’s book and wondering if the famous
years of apprenticeship
might not actually be a false myth.

“I have learned one thing, I’ve learned how to type, that’s for sure,” I thought shortly before calling the waiter over, paying the bill, leaving the café and at the same time leaving behind my apprenticeship years. “And to hell with it,” I remember thinking.

106

A few days later, I went to the theater for the opening night of a play called
Cairo
, written by two inseparable young friends, the Argentinians Javier Arroyuelo and Rafael López Sánchez. I went with Raúl Escari, who knew both of them very well, and with Julita Grau, a friend from Aiguafreda, a village in Catalonia where as a teenager I’d spent summer vacations with my parents. Julita, who’d always stood out as a precocious intellectual, had just arrived from Barcelona and came to see me in the garret. Although this worried me because I didn’t know what she was after, I was very happy to see her and we recalled some parties and certain gardens of awful Aiguafreda. After inventing a thousand excuses in case she wanted to stay the night in the garret, I eventually invited her to come to the theater.

Paloma Picasso, who would soon marry López Sánchez (and years later divorce him, the division of property costing her a real fortune), collaborated in the staging of
Cairo
, designing the jewelry the actors wore and at the same time bringing glamour and an audience to the work of these two young Argentinians, who were part of the Paris theater counterculture and playwrights for the Theater
TSE
, which was run by another Argentinian, Alfredo Rodríguez Arias.

From the first moment, I realized I wasn’t going to understand the play very well. Julita Grau contributed invaluably to my understanding absolutely nothing at all when, at the end of the first act, trying to help, she told me the play was very much part of the
psychoanalytical trend in its severest, most Lacanian aspect
and the very fact that the title in Spanish,
Cairo
, was missing the article
El
was a clue in itself. A clue to what? I didn’t get an answer. When the performance was over, Raúl went backstage to congratulate the writers, and we went with him. And, I don’t know how, we ended up in Paloma Picasso’s grandiose Mercedes convertible smoking gigantic Havana cigars and driving along the freshly sprayed streets of Paris with her and Raúl and Julita and the authors of
Cairo
on our way to Le Sept nightclub, on Rue Sainte-Anne. Never in my life have I felt so grand. There, sitting in the back seat of the magnificent convertible, with Glenn Miller playing on the radio, I pretended to see myself as the king of the Parisian
dolce vita
, as if I’d just conquered the city and was, in every sense, Pablo Picasso’s heir.

The triumphant Catalan Ricardo Bofill was a loser compared to me! There’s never any end to Paris, I thought. And I took my time over the agreeable thought that I was king of Paris, a young god way above the vulgar folk, scourge of the idiots. And I remembered Jacques Prévert, who used to say he had one foot on the Rive Droite, the other on the Rive Gauche, and the third up the ass of all the imbeciles. And I also remembered Martine Simonet and thought how great it would be if she were walking the streets at this hour like a poor Cinderella and saw us go by and was impressed at how much my bohemian life had improved. And I also thought how perfect it would be if waiting to cross at a traffic light was my garret neighbor, the impertinent black man. “Goodbye,
tubab
, goodbye,” I’d say to him, blowing Havana cigar smoke in his face.

I was thinking all this when Julita Grau asked me if I was writing anything at the moment and I told her I was just finishing a novel that would slay its readers. And when she asked what I was planning to write next, I took a long pull on my Havana and suddenly came up with the title of a play I would write called
South of the Eyelids
. And when she asked what this play was about, I made the most of a pause in the conversation between Paloma Picasso and the two Argentinian writers to look up at the starry sky of Paris and say with false modesty, though unable to disguise the haughty voice of one who believes himself to be light years ahead of his contemporaries: “Well, let’s not talk it up just yet, but I have a feeling it’s going to be an interesting piece, a psychoanalytical study of the gaze.” Picasso and the playwrights looked strangely at me. I wasn’t at all embarrassed, quite the contrary. “A psychoanalytical study of the gaze,” I repeated, totally convinced I was a real big shot.

107

The following morning, Julita Grau came to the garret again. I immediately wondered: What does she want this time? I thought: I should have gone to bed with her last night. The fact is, I thought, women only want one thing, for men to want to go to bed with them. But if you go to bed with a woman, she can screw you over. And if you don’t, she’ll screw you over anyway for not wanting to.

I recalled an English novella I’d read not long before that described the iridescent feminine fantasy of sitting in a garden at the end of the afternoon, reading and waiting for the man who returns every day to her home and to her arms. Could that be what Julita wanted? I wondered. And if she admitted that’s what she wants, should I believe her? And besides, did my fantasy involve coming home on a commuter train weighed down with a heavy briefcase to find an intellectual little woman who’d been lazing around all day reading Unamuno?

“What are you thinking about?” she asked. “Nothing. Have you come to say goodbye?” “No,” she replied tersely. I got very nervous. “Tell me the truth, what do you see in me?” She didn’t seem surprised. “Probably an improved version of yourself,” she replied with great aplomb. “I don’t understand.” “I see you,” she said, “as a complete person, and not the confused mess you see yourself.”

She stayed seven days in the garret. From Saturday to the following Friday. On the morning of that Friday, I found out by chance that my father had hired her to get me to fall in love with her and convince me to go back to Barcelona. I found this out and was dumbfounded, mentally destroyed. She cried.

108

In January of the year he would kill himself, Hemingway, a frail old man, white-headed, pale, meagre-limbed, but apparently somewhat recovered from his latest crises, was allowed by his doctors to return to Ketchum. His friend Gary Cooper had recently said that a happy man is one who, busy with his work during the day, and tired at night, has no time to think of himself. But Hemingway did have time. He’d been asked to contribute a sentence to a presentation volume for the newly inaugurated president of the United States, John F. Kennedy.

He worked for a whole day and didn’t come up with the sentence. “It just won’t come anymore,” he stammered to his friend George Saviers. And he wept. He never wrote again. When spring came, they say he saw nothing of it and didn’t even realize it had come. Always dressed in black, head bowed, he lived in a permanent state of despair. Some of the heroes of his books, with their stoic endurance in the face of adversity, with the extraordinary
elegance
of their suffering, would go down in history and live on, at least for a while, in humanity’s memory. But he was in despair and his stoic endurance was foundering. And he couldn’t do much about it. When one is in the midst of adversity it’s too late to protect oneself. He took an old hunting rifle and two cartridges from the gun rack to stash in a closet. His wife caught him and called the doctor and the doctor asked Hemingway to put the rifle back in the gun room. He had to be readmitted to the hospital. Before getting into the car that would take him to the plane that would take him to the hospital, he made a dash to the gun rack and put a loaded gun to his throat. “Shanghaied,” he said. Just a preview of what he would finally do in July.

109

I don’t think it’ll be long before I absent myself from here. I’ll leave with my conscience, which for me has always been a growing irony, which as it became big and strong, tended at the same time, paradoxically, to disappear. It was something I gradually discovered as I’ve gone through life and it’s grown ever larger, this conscience that would be nothing without irony. I’ll leave here to dissolve, dissociate, disintegrate, smash to bits every little outbreak of personality or conscience, any nostalgia for Paris. After all, to be ironic is to absent oneself.

110

Hemingway came back from the hospital and withdrew even more into himself. As Jeanne Boutade said, there are many writers who, no matter how successful they’ve been, end up recluses, hiding away when they get old. But what exactly happened to Hemingway? “Possibly growing gloom,” says Anthony Burgess, “at his failure to be his own myth; more possibly a sexual incapacity which, considering his prowess in other fields of virile action, deeply baffled him. . . . With fame, anyway, any kind of sense of recognized achievement, the incursion of a chronic melancholy may be expected, expressible as a death urge. Or, simpler, Hemingway saw himself as an exception to the Thoreauvian rule of, like all men, having to live a life of quiet desperation: he could not cope with the stress that most men endure gracefully; he was too godlike to be expected to have to cope.”

“At the end of his life,” says Borges of Hemingway, “he was beset by the inability to continue writing and by madness. It pained him to have dedicated his life to physical adventures and not to the single and pure exercise of his intelligence.”

“Last week he tried to commit suicide,” an old waiter says of a customer in Hemingway’s story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”. And when the young waiter asks why, he receives this reply: “He was in despair.” “What about?” the young man asks again. “Nothing.”

Hemingway exchanged the sun and cheerfulness of the clean, well-lighted cafés of Cuba for his desolate house in Ketchum, Idaho, the perfect house for suicide. On the morning of Sunday, July 2, 1961, he got up very early while his wife was still asleep, found the key to the storage room where the guns were kept, and loaded a double-barreled shotgun. In “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” there is a prayer: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada.” He put the twin barrels to his forehead and fired. And to hell with it.