Vila-Matas - Never any end to Paris

Enrique Vila-Matas

Never Any End to Paris

Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

NEW DIRECTIONS PUBLISHING

For Paula de Parma

Never Any End to Paris

I went to Key West in Florida this year to enter the annual Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest. The competition took place at Sloppy Joes, the writers favorite bar when he lived in Cayo Hueso, at the southern tip of Florida. It goes without saying that entering this contest full of sturdy, middle-aged men with full gray beards, all identical to Hemingway, identical right down to the stupidest detail is a unique experience.

I dont know how many years I spent drinking and fattening myself up believing contrary to the opinions of my wife and friends that I was getting to look more and more like Hemingway, the idol of my youth. Since no one ever agreed with me about this and since I am rather stubborn, I wanted to teach them all a lesson, and, having procured a false beard which I thought would increase my resemblance to Hemingway I entered the contest this summer.

I should say that I made a ridiculous fool of myself. I went to Key West, entered the contest and came last, or rather, I was disqualified; worst of all, they didnt throw me out of the competition because they discovered the false beard which they did not but because of my absolute lack of physical resemblance to Hemingway.

I would have been satisfied with just being admitted to the contest; it would have been enough to prove to my wife and friends that I have a perfect right to believe Im looking more like the idol of my youth every day, or, to put it a better way, it would have been the last thing left that allowed me to still feel in any way sentimentally linked to the days of my youth. But they practically kicked me out.

After this humiliation, I traveled to Paris and met up with my wife and in that city we spent the whole of this past August, which she devoted to museum visits and excessive shopping and I, for my part, devoted to taking notes towards an ironic revision of the two years of my youth I spent in that city where, unlike Hemingway, who was very poor and very happy there, I was very poor and very unhappy.

So we spent this August in Paris and on September 1, as I boarded the plane that would take us back to Barcelona, on my seat, row 7 seat B, I found a couple of pages of notes for a lecture entitled Never Any End to Paris that someone had forgotten, and I was extremely surprised. It was a lecture to be delivered at a symposium in Barcelona on the general theme of irony, in three two-hour sessions over the course of three days. I was very surprised because in Paris I had just written a bunch of notes for a lecture with the same title that was to be delivered at the same symposium and was also planned to last three days. So I felt like a real idiot when I realized that I was the one who had just dropped those notes on my seat, the same way others throw down the morning paper to take possession of their assigned places in the plane. How could I have forgotten so quickly that I was the one whod just thrown those notes down? All I can tell you now is that they were destined to become Never Any End to Paris, the lecture I have the honor of delivering to all of you over the next three days.

Youll see me improvise on occasion. Like right now when, before going on to read my ironic revision of the two years of my youth in Paris, I feel compelled to tell you that I do know that irony plays with fire and, while mocking others, sometimes ends up mocking itself. You all know full well what Im talking about. When you pretend to be in love you run the risk of feeling it, he who parodies without proper precautions ends up the victim of his own cunning. And even if he takes them, he ends up a victim just the same. As Pascal said: It is almost impossible to feign love without turning into a lover. Anyway, I propose to ironically review my past in Paris without ever losing sight of the dangers of falling into the chattiness that every lecture entails and, most of all, without forgetting at any moment that a chatterbox showing off is precisely the sort of thing that constitutes an excellent target for the irony of his listeners. That said, I must also warn you that when you hear me say, for example, that there was never any end to Paris, I will most likely be saying it ironically. But, anyway, I hope not to overwhelm you with too much irony. The kind that I practice has nothing to do with that which arises from desperation I was stupidly desperate enough when I was young. I like a kind of irony I call benevolent, compassionate, like what we find, for example, in the best of Cervantes. I dont like ferocious irony but rather the kind that vacillates between disappointment and hope. Okay?

I went to Paris in the mid-seventies and there I was very poor and very unhappy. I would like to be able to say that I was happy like Hemingway, but then I would go back to being the poor, young man, handsome and stupid, who fooled himself on a daily basis and believed hed been very lucky to be able to live in that filthy garret that Marguerite Duras rented him for the symbolic sum of a hundred francs a month, and I say symbolic because thats how I understood it or how I wanted to understand it, since I never paid any rent despite the logical, though luckily only sporadic, protests of my strange landlady, and I say strange because I presumed to understand everything anyone said to me in French, except when I was with her. Not always, but often, when Marguerite spoke to me I remember having mentioned it with much concern to Ral Escari, who was to become my best friend in Paris I didnt understand a word, not a single word she said to me, not even her demands for the rent. Its because she, great writer that she is, speaks a superior French, Ral said, though his explanation didnt strike me as terribly convincing at the time.

And what was I doing in Durass garret? Well, basically trying to live a writers life like the one Hemingway recounts in A Moveable Feast. And where had the idea that Hemingway should be my virtually supreme reference come from? Well, when I was fifteen years old I read his book of Paris reminiscences in one sitting and decided Id be a hunter, fisherman, war reporter, drinker, great lover, and boxer, that is, I would be like Hemingway.

A few months later, when I had to decide what I was going to study at university, I told my father that I wanted to study to be a Hemingway and I still remember his grimace of shock and incredulity. You cant study that anywhere, theres no such university degree, he told me, and a couple of days later enrolled me in Law School. I spent three years studying to be a lawyer. One day, with the money hed given me to spend over the Easter vacation, I decided to travel to a foreign country for the first time in my life and went directly to Paris. I went there entirely on my own and Ill never forget the first of the five mornings I spent in Paris, on that first trip to the city where a few years later something I couldnt have known at the time I would end up living.

It was cold and raining that morning and, having to take refuge in a bar on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, it didnt take me long to realize that by a strange twist of fate I was going to repeat, to protagonize the situation at the beginning of the first chapter of A Moveable Feast, when the narrator, on a cold and rainy day, goes into a pleasant caf, warm and clean and friendly, on the Place Saint-Michel and hangs up his old waterproof on the coat rack to dry, puts his hat on the rack above the bench, orders a caf au lait, begins to write a story and gets excited by a girl who comes into the caf and sits by herself at a table near the window.

Though I went in without a waterproof or a hat, I ordered a