6
Am I a lecture or a novel? God, what a question. I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen. It’s as if I were going back to the days when I was young, desperate, living in Paris, and never stopped asking myself questions. Horizons of hope usually open up before young people, but there are some who choose despair, and I was one of those, since I didn’t know very well which way to go through life and, what’s more, I had the impression that despair was more elegant, it
looked
better than being a pathetic, young man filled with hope. The fact is today I have the impression I’m turning back into that young man who used to ask himself so many questions. Am I a lecture or a novel? Am I? Suddenly, everything is a question. Am I someone? What am I? Do I look like Hemingway, or am I nothing like him? From the looks on your faces, esteemed audience, it seems you share the opinion of my wife and friends. You’re of that same tendency, just like the organizers in Key West. I don’t know why, but it feels as though you’re disqualifying me too. Doubtless you’re doing so guided by good sense. I, however, need to believe that every day I look more like the idol of my Parisian years, since this is now the only link I have back to the days of my youth. Besides, I think I have a right to be able to see myself differently from how others see me, to see myself however I want, not to be forced
to be
this person other people have decided I am. We are how others see us, granted. But I resist accepting such an injustice. I have spent years trying to be as mysterious, as unpredictable, as reserved as possible. I have spent years trying to be
an enigma to everyone
. To this end, I adopt a different attitude with every single person, striving so that no two people see me in the same way. However, this difficult task is proving futile. I continue to be as others wish to see me. And from the looks of things everyone sees me the same way, however they want to. If at least someone — I’m no longer saying everyone — but just someone, could see my likeness to Hemingway . . .
7
Jeanne Hébuterne killed herself.
On this most recent visit to Paris I walked around chasing her shadow, reading other people’s ideas about her, interested in the youth of this unhappy artist, Modigliani’s lover, mother of his child — a little girl — and expecting another when the painter died of alcohol and various illnesses.
Jeanne had lots of problems with the bourgeoisie, with her family. The day after Modigliani’s death, nine months pregnant, she opened the fifth-floor window in her parents’ apartment at number 8, Rue Amyot, Paris, and let herself fall backwards. I read the story of her suicide thirty years ago, when I was young and living in Paris, I read it and I remember imagining the street and the fall, I imagined the whole scene, and then forgot it. But Jeanne came back to me this August in Paris, when I happened to read an article about her love affair with Modigliani and her desperate death. And that suicide at the age of nineteen again made a deep impression on me, except this time I intended not to forget. I read her story again while in Paris and I realized I could look for number 8, Rue Amyot and, if the building and the street still existed, examine the place where Jeanne bid farewell to life.
Not only did the street and the house still exist but they were near my hotel. After walking through narrow alleyways, aided by a map of the city, I ended up on that short street with its solid, old buildings, which can’t have changed much in the last eighty-two years. From the street I looked up at Jeanne’s window on the fifth floor, I looked at it from the place, possibly the exact place, where her suicidal body landed, and I felt as if my entire youth and my entire summer were encapsulated in that moment of life and death, encapsulated in Rue Amyot, Paris, a city teeming with commemorative plaques, but without a single one here at the site where Jeanne took her own life. Today, nothing in Rue Amyot recalls the tragedy that took place eighty-two years ago. Not even a bouquet of flowers from someone secretly cultivating her legend, not one sad piece of graffiti on the wall. Nothing. It seemed clear she wasn’t considered an important enough artist, even though her death was possibly more artistic than Modigliani’s entire oeuvre. However, she committed suicide, and suicides, as we know, do not get plaques, aren’t celebrated or commemorated.
Directly across the street from number 8, Rue Amyot, where Jeanne, drawing a tragic and gymnastic line in the air, threw herself into space, a clean, bright gym has been set up for the bourgeois residents of the neighborhood, who are bound to be advocates of exercise and family values and not too fond of art, bohemianism or pirouetting oneself to death. Perhaps the people working out installed themselves there on purpose. Like those enemies of tobacco who plant themselves with a morally reproachful look in front of the first poor suicide case they see smoking.
*
*
Once I had written this passage for my lecture, I found out by chance — to my great surprise — that “La cena,” a marvelous story by Augusto Monterroso that I had read many times, takes place in an apartment at number 8, Rue Amyot, Paris: an address that, despite having read the story many times, I’d never really noticed, probably paying more attention to what went on in the story. It seems that the second-floor left-hand apartment was occupied for quite a while by the writer Alfredo Bryce Echenique, who held a dinner party one day — the dinner that gives the story its title — and invited Monterroso, but also Kafka, whom they awaited unsuccessfully in Rue Amyot.
Although, many years later, I found that street with a certain amount of difficulty “after walking through narrow alleyways, aided by a map of the city,” for Monterroso it proved rather simple: “Just as in every big city, in Paris, there are streets that are hard to find; but Rue Amyot is easy to find if one gets off the Metro at the Monge stop and then asks for Rue Amyot.”
8
The past, said Proust, is not only not fleeting, it doesn’t move at all. It’s the same with Paris, it has never gone on a journey. And on top of that it’s interminable, there is never any end to it.
9
This summer, while in Paris reviewing my past, I went to Nantes one day with my wife, on the TGV, invited to give a lecture on irony, that is, on the same theme that I am speaking of today, except in Nantes. Since I only had a few notes destined to become what is now
Never Any End to Paris
, I gave the lecture a different focus.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, “as you can see, I bear a certain resemblance to Hemingway and I like to think I look more like him every day, which doesn’t mean that, like him, I lack a sense of irony, on the contrary, irony is my forte.”
I looked around to see how the audience would react and the first thing I saw was my furious wife, she’s never been able to tolerate my insistence — pathetic, she calls it — on believing I look more like the idol of my youth every day.
As for the audience, I saw that some were taking my resemblance to Hemingway as a joke I was playing on them, while others were looking as if they hadn’t even heard me correctly. The smiles and absent gazes of the people in the audience — I didn’t know which were worse — contrasted with my wife’s rage.
“Irony is my forte,” I continued, “irony and the ability to predict what is going to happen. I have come to Nantes to tell you all that it is going to rain.”
There was absolutely no threat of rain, but I said that so the audience would begin to sense the rainy ambience of the story I planned to read them. “First and foremost,” I said, “I’d like to tell you that I have come to Nantes so that you can all help me comprehend ‘Cat in the Rain,’ a story by Hemingway that I have never really understood. And I’d also like to tell you that my ability to foretell what is going to happen enables me to reveal that tomorrow, back in Paris, I plan to write a story called ‘What They Said About the Cat,’ a story about what takes place here, about the interpretations you give me of the story I will now read to you.”
When they found out that they were about to become literary material, the members of the audience glared at me defiantly (to reproach my audacity), or in anguish at the uncomfortable prospect of seeing themselves turned into characters in a story.
“Hemingway’s story,” I said, “according to Gabriel García Márquez, is the best story in the world. I read it and didn’t understand a word, not a single word, of what happens in it, and what I understood least was how it could be the best story in the world. I am going to read it to you. In order to interpret it, keep in mind that Hemingway was a master of the art of the ellipsis and in all his stories, his trick was that the most important part of what he was telling does not appear in the text: the secret story of the tale is constructed out of the unsaid, out of implication and allusion. This would explain why the story might seem very trivial to you if you aren’t aware that Hemingway uses these techniques of implication and allusion.”
I read them the story where a young American couple, probably newlyweds, on a trip to Italy after the Second World War, are in a hotel room feeling bored. Outside it is raining; they have a room on the second floor, overlooking the sea and a plaza with a war monument in the middle of a garden with large palm trees and green benches. While the husband reads calmly on the bed, she seems nervous, worrying about a cat outside, under one of the green benches, that is trying to avoid the drops of water falling on all sides of its hiding place. “I’m going to go down and get that kitty,” she says. “I’ll do it,” offers the husband from the bed. “No, I’ll get it,” she says. A banal, though sparkling, conversation is struck up, constructed with Hemingway’s celebrated talent for writing dialogue. In the end, she goes outside with a maid and doesn’t find what she was looking for. “There was a cat,” she says. “A cat in the rain?” asks the maid, and laughs. When she returns to the room, she tells her husband that the cat was gone and then studies her profile in the mirror, first one side and then the other, and she looks at her throat and the nape of her neck and asks her husband if he doesn’t think it would be a good idea if she grew her hair out. “I like it the way it is,” the husband says, and carries on reading. Someone knocks at the door and it’s the maid who is holding a cat struggling to free itself from her arms. It is a gift from the owner of the hotel.
I invited the audience to interpret the story and their interpretations were quite varied; I retained the following: 1) The story recalls another also by Hemingway concerning white elephants and the secret story is really about a woman’s pregnancy and her unspoken wish to have an abortion. 2) The story seems to be talking about the young woman’s sexual frustration, which leads her to want a cat. 3) The story actually just portrays the sordid atmosphere of Italy recently emerged from a war in which it had required American help. 4) The story describes post-coital tedium. 5) The newlywed woman is tired of cutting her hair short
à la garçon
in order to satisfy her husband’s homosexual desires. 6) The woman is in love with the owner of the hotel. 7) The story demonstrates that men are incapable of reading a book and listening to their wives at the same time, and all this dates back to the Stone Age, when men went out to hunt and women stayed at home cooking in the cave: men learned to think in silence and women to speak about things that affected them and to develop relationships based on feelings.
Finally, a woman of a certain age said: “And what if the story is what it is and nothing more? What if there is nothing to interpret? Maybe the story is totally incomprehensible and that is where its charm lies.”
I had never thought of this, and it gave me a good idea for how to end the story I planned to write in Paris the next day.
“Tomorrow,” I said to the audience, "I will write my story about what has happened here today and I will end it with what this woman has said, her words have reminded me that I always feel very happy when I don’t understand something and it works the other way around: when I read something that I understand perfectly, I put it aside in disappointment. I don’t like stories with understandable plot lines. Because understanding can be a sentence. And not understanding, a door swinging open.”
I felt these words had come out just right. But then a young woman raised her hand, smiling with a strange happiness. “It’s all very well,” she said, “that you have found the ending to your story, but since your lecture was going to be on irony allow me now, Mr. Hemingway, to be ironic and request, for the good of all your readers, that this story you plan on writing tomorrow be comprehensible, please, so that we can all understand it.”
10
The next day, on my way back on the TGV, as the train rushed through the Loire valley, I read, almost in homage, the first volume of a collection of essays by Julien Gracq, a writer born in this part of France, in the village of Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, in the very center of the region of Mauges. The speed of the train made the marvelous landscape impossible to see, though luckily I already know it quite well. Between the Loire and the Sèvre, between the Layon vineyards and those of Muscadet, the plain, where one can get lost, is characterized by dense woodland, ash woods, grasslands, deep valleys, hamlets nestled together, and the slopes flanking the longest river in France. I was reading the first volume of
Lettrines
, and suddenly, not long after the train had sped past Gracq’s own village, I discovered, not without some surprise, that this writer, whom I had imagined would only be concerned with authors of serious artistic stature, was talking about Hemingway.
His not at all condescending comments on the writer led me to think that if one day I happened to visit Monsieur Gracq, I would try to ensure that he wasn’t the first person ever to notice that I bear or might bear a certain resemblance to Hemingway. I wouldn’t want him to throw me out of his house in a rage.
Julien Gracq writes: “If I had to write a study on Hemingway, I would entitle it
On Talent Considered as a Limit
. He sets up dialogue with the same certainty with which Sacha Guitry takes the stage: he knows he will never bore us; he puts marks on paper as naturally as others walk down stairs. His mere presence bewitches us; then we go outside to smoke and stop thinking about him. This sort of talent, repeated in book after book, does not allow for incubation or maturation, for risk or defeat: it is nothing more than an interlude.”
And he adds: “In the hunt for the exact word, there are two breeds: the trappers and the stalkers: Rimbaud and Mallarmé. The second group invariably has a higher percentage of successes, their yield might not bear comparison
. . . but they never come back with live specimens
.”
(Rimbaud and Mallarmé. For a moment I recalled a terrifying question that Marguerite Duras had asked me about them one day when my guard was down . . .)