Never Any End to Paris (25 page)

111

Many years later, Marguerite Duras also withdrew into herself. This happened twenty years after I left my garret. My biography of those years shouldn’t end the moment I left the city but rather twenty years later, when Marguerite withdrew into herself, she drifted away from the world and left off writing forever, left off her hand-to-hand combat with writing, left off seeing her friends. I received the news in Barcelona when Javier Grandes, now living in Majorca, told me that on a visit to Paris he’d called at her house to say hello and she’d told him she didn’t know him, she didn’t remember him, she’d returned to the savage state of childhood and no longer remembered anyone, she only remembered Saigon.

She said the same thing to many other people, and in her last days she spoke only of death and of the savage years of childhood and the sweetness of her native land. One night, she put her hands to her throat and spoke the name of one of her characters. “Anne-Marie Stretter,” she said. It was only a preview of what would happen, a preview of the arrival of the mortal monsoon and the final deathbed scene, where they say she said that after death nothing remains. “Only the living who smile and support each other.” And to hell with it.

112

When I started
Th
e Lettered Assassin
I’d planned to write the book starting with the first chapter, then the second, and so on, but very quickly I let fate lead me, proceeding at times even in a zigzag so that, as I said before, the eight pages of the murderer’s notebook (which come in the middle of the book) and the book’s opening sentence ended up being written at the very end, something that will not surprise anyone who remembers Pascal’s words: “The last thing one finds when writing a work is what must appear at the beginning.”

The eighth and final page of the central notebook describes the death of that poet, who at heart, without my knowledge, was a likeness of myself, representing my tragic move to
criminal
prose after renouncing poetry. I wasn’t sure this eighth page would be the last I’d write of the manuscript, but I guessed it, since after all I was narrating the death of a poet, any poet, which was the objective the previous pages had been leading up to. On this last page I wrote: “Wine trickled from his ears, and his legs thrashed the floor like two blind masts. It all ended at dawn . . . I embraced him, spoke his name. Like his sister in days gone by, on the long winter nights, I called to him in a familiar tone of voice. But he could no longer hear me. Everything was calm, the first morning birds arrived. A shut-in smell of pipe tobacco and old silk and old parchments. I was (I now knew) embracing a corpse.”

It was a very rainy day, I remember quite well, when I wrote these sentences of the murderer’s manuscript; I wrote these sentences that spoke of the withdrawal of a writer grown old, I wrote them and understood that the novel had surely reached its end. It was January 30, I remember perfectly. Before going out for a walk and something to eat and to think about whether the central manuscript of my book was finished or not, I went to the Relais Odéon to see if I could find Martine Simonet and wish her a happy saint’s day. It was January 30, 1976, Saint Martine’s Day. It was raining hard and people hesitated before crossing the street, as if they were torrents rather than streets. The cars moved slowly, scared of skidding. I, for my part, was scared of having finished the novel, but then I told myself if that was the case I ought to face reality. I didn’t find Martine and ended up going into a bistro on Rue de Seine I’d never been to before. It must have been a bad restaurant, because it was half empty. The set menu was written in chalk on a large blackboard, the tablecloths were made of paper, the tables very small, and the serving girls wore black and white uniforms. As I ate a steak with potatoes, I thought I might be mistaken for the terrorist Carlos again. But it didn’t take me long to realize how ridiculous it was to think a thing like that. I ordered another
pichet
of
rouge
. The pitcher made a stain with glints of ruby on the white paper tablecloth, and this reminded me of what I’d just written on the eighth manuscript page: “Wine trickled from his ears, and his legs thrashed the floor like two blind masts . . .” I realized that in a way as simple as it was unexpected, some hidden Muse had given me a sign that I shouldn’t agonize over the matter any further: the novel was finished.

Should I see that moment as the most extraordinary in my life? I’d just completed my first novel (I didn’t yet know I lacked one more sentence, the one that came first in the book). I must have started to become aware of finding myself at one of the crucial stages of my existence. Or not? I thought hard and saw that, for the sake of truth, I had to admit, nothing seemed important about the moment, since no matter how hard I tried to see it that way, it was all happening without any solemnity or emotion whatsoever. I brought the wine to my lips and caught the young waitresses exchanging glances. There were so few customers they must have been bored and noticed how strange I was and were laughing. I thought: Oh, if only you knew I’ve just finished a novel. I drew myself up. I thought, many years later,
Th
e Lettered Assassin
will be translated into French and someone will write: “Paradoxically, this attempt at killing the reader marked the birth of a writer.”

When I left the restaurant, it had stopped raining, the wind had died down, the sky was clearing. I started walking back to the garret. But when I got to Rue Saint-Benoît I felt I no longer had anything to do up there, in my house. After all, the novel was finished. Did I have the famous feeling of emptiness they say seizes a writer upon completion of a book? No, I felt none of that. I did however feel a great desire to find Martine and wish her a happy saint’s day. I headed back toward the Relais Odéon; I thought perhaps now the weather had changed she’d have finally decided to go out and I’d find her there. And I was heading back to the Relais, walking down Boulevard Saint-Germain, when driving past me like a force of evil, with the music at full blast, too close to the curb on purpose, went Paloma Picasso’s Mercedes convertible and my pants were totally soaked. I didn’t see who was driving, but Paloma was in the car and beside her, under spectacular hats, were the Argentinian playwrights. It all happened very fast. They splashed my pants deliberately and then drove away laughing hard, mocking the stupefied expression on my poor, humiliated, bohemian face.

113

A few days later, at dusk, I was in the garret calmly getting ready to clean my pipe when all the lights went out. At first, I even joked to myself that this was like saying goodbye to the lights of bohemia. But as the minutes went by and night began to fall, I gradually realized this was serious. My black neighbor reluctantly lent me a candle and I spent the night with the whole
chambre
in semidarkness, waiting for daybreak to go and see Marguerite and tell her what had happened. Should I be indignant? Not with her, of course. After all, I owed her seven or eight months’ rent. What did I expect? Not to pay and have the lights of bohemia burning eternally in my garret?

About ten in the morning, I went down to the third floor and rang Marguerite’s bell; she must have been right behind the door, because she opened it that very second. She was surprised to see me at that time of day. Unless I’m mistaken, I remember she asked me about my novel. “I’ve finished it,” I said. She found this very amusing, as if she thought it incredible or improbable that books could end. She laughed in that unforgettable way, a malicious, childlike, mocking laugh, one that deep down tried to convey a certain feeling of friendship. However, soon after there was a jug of cold water. “And have you come just to tell me you finished your novel?” she asked. I didn’t know how to broach the subject of the electricity. Besides, the expression on her face had changed, she wasn’t laughing at all anymore, now she looked rather scary. “I’m not in for anyone, not even for myself,” she said, confirming my fears. I could have died right there. “Come back later,” she said, and shut the door.

About half past twelve, I tried again. My hand shook as I rang the bell. When I least expected it, the door opened. “What’s the matter?” she asked me. A little scared, I told her the electricity meter wasn’t working. I had to explain it to her, in my
inferior
French, about five times before she finally understood what had happened. She then stood still, looking at me. She stood there for quite a while, looking at me. Still. Suddenly, she said, “Wait a minute, I’ll be right back.” She soon returned with a leather document case, which contained a great many electricity bills and receipts. She handed me the document case and I didn’t know what to do with it. With one of her typical energetic gestures, she snatched it out of my hands and said, “Fine, let’s go to EdF.”

A few minutes later, with the leather document case, we were at number 69, Rue de Rennes, outside the monstrous EdF building, Électricité de France. On the first floor we were received by an employee who spoke for a few minutes to Marguerite in a bureaucratic language impenetrable to me. They were shuffling a lot of papers back and forth with lots of figures on them and talking for a long time in more and more complicated terms until the woman practically ordered us — as if she suddenly felt offended by something Marguerite had said — up to the second floor, where we were received in an office by a very well-dressed man, I remember, above all, his strange obsession of constantly introducing the name of the actor Gérard Depardieu into the conversation. Every now and then, Marguerite raised her voice, annoyed at something. Everything was very confusing. “How long is it since you last paid?” she asked me suddenly. But I’m not sure this was exactly what she said to me, she’d started to speak in her
superior
French. She didn’t wait for my reply. The well-dressed man took out more papers and launched into an impenetrable explanation that ended with the recommendation we go to an office on the first floor, where a very polite official directed us back to a window next to the window where the first employee had attended us when we arrived. At this new window, after a conversation I’d swear was basically about an umbrella store at number 73, Rue de Rennes, a man who looked like the actor Lino Ventura finally gave Marguerite a piece of paper, a single, simple piece of paper, though absolutely covered, it was true, with numbers and symbols in red.

After we left the building, in the middle of Rue de Rennes, she gave me the piece of paper and said something I didn’t understand at all, it seemed as if she was deliberately speaking her
superior
French. I didn’t understand what she said to me, but I did understand what was written on the piece of paper. I understood perfectly that I had to pay over forty years’ worth of electricity bills, that is, not only was I responsible for paying for the lights of bohemia used by Copi, Javier Grandes, the transvestite Amapola, the filmmaker Milosevic, the Bulgarian theatre actress, and the friend of the magus Jodorowsky, but I also had to pay the outstanding electricity bill from the French Resistance, that of Comrade Mitterrand for the two days he spent in the garret.

Marguerite made some remarks to me in her
superior
French that I didn’t understand at all, I only understood the last thing she said, I understood it clearly, it was the very same famous piece of advice that years before Raymond Queneau had given her, that criminal piece of advice — deep down I knew I more than deserved it for having written a criminal book — it was passed down as an inheritance that had tied her forever to a chair and a desk and condemned me to the same thing. “You must write,” she said, “don’t do anything but write.”

I think it could be said I went to Paris solely to learn how to type, but also to receive Queneau’s criminal advice.

But, of course, back then I didn’t know that yet. I listened to Queneau’s advice but, overwhelmed at the thought of having to pay for the lights of bohemia for at least three generations of artists, I was unable to thank Marguerite for it; I accompanied her to the doorway of the building on Rue Saint-Benoît and with a silent bow thanked her for her negotiations with Électricité de France. Though I wasn’t to know it, it was the last time I’d see her. I bowed and then added humorously, timidly, remembering the bohemian Bouvier: “Tonight, in the garret, I’ll light a match so I won’t see a thing.”

I slipped out of her life as I might have slipped out of a sentence.

Afterwards, I went and ate a
croque-monsieur
in the Flore, drank a blackberry liqueur and analyzed the situation. I spent six days analyzing it and on the seventh I returned to Barcelona. When my father asked why I’d come back, I told him it was because I’d fallen in love with Julita Grau and, besides, Paris was always rainy and cold and so dark and foggy. And so gray, added my mother, meaning me, I guess.