Read Online Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas - Free Book Online
Authors: Enrique Vila-Matas
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know what a
register
is!” Indeed, now I knew, though I had found out by a tortuous, though actually very subtle, intelligent route. I changed the subject. I decided to investigate why he, so obviously a writer, hadn’t written for years. Out of the blue, I asked him which register he’d write in if he did write. He didn’t reply. I insisted and he kept quiet, I got no reply. Just a smile, a perfect smile. His register, the most elegant I have ever known, was a close relation to laughter and silence.
27
Nothing in life is immutable, everything can be modified. I, for example, could go and live in New York, which is what, deep down, I really want. I could set myself up in an apartment in New York instead of being in Barcelona talking about how there is never any end to Paris. Nothing is immutable, everything can be modified. Think of the works of Flaubert. We can easily transform them with our imagination. It’s enough to entertain the suspicion that had Flaubert had a little more time and sufficient money to put his literary legacy in order, it would be quite a different oeuvre today, as he certainly would have finished
Bouvard et Pécuchet
, suppressed
Madame Bovary
(the annoyance the book’s tyrannical fame caused its author should be taken seriously), and changed the ending of
A Sentimental Education
.
Admitting the unmissable disparity between our work, but with the understanding that everything can change, I tell myself now that, before it’s too late, I should, for instance, change the ending to my seventh novel, improve the ninth (I didn’t take advantage of the many possibilities of the plot), suppress the third, and so on. But, above all, the most urgent thing would be to revise
The Lettered Assassin
, a poisonous and criminal book, my funereal literary debut. Perhaps I would change only the title, and call the book ironically
Pipe-smoking and Despair: The Errors of Youth
. I don’t know. I think it might be good to put a bit of a spring in my first literary steps, to beautify something that was a rather sinister coming-out. Since it’s so like a funereal monument — like Tutankhamun’s tomb: whoever opens it dies — I should do to that book what the surrealists proposed to cheer up the sinister and solemn Pantheon of Paris a little: slice it down the middle and pull the two halves fifty centimeters apart.
28
Speaking of pantheons, the most ironic phrase I know — perhaps
the
ironic phrase
par excellence
— is the epitaph Marcel Duchamp wrote for his own tombstone:
D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent.
(After all, it’s always other people who die.)
29
Is the person who just asked me to speak up deaf or an excessive admirer or trying to sabotage this lecture?
Anyway, whatever the reason, I’ll speak louder.
I live in Barcelona, I’m attracted and fascinated by this never-ending Paris, but I don’t kid myself, I’d like to spend more time in New York, where, by the way, I’ve spent only one night in my life.
New York is a desire that comes from far away. For many years I had a recurring dream in which I saw myself as a child in the fifties standing in the large patio of the building where I lived with my parents in a mezzanine flat on Calle Rosellón in Barcelona, opposite the Cinema Chile. In this dream I saw myself playing soccer on my own (as I used to do as a child), in the shadow of the eight- or ten-story buildings that surrounded the patio. But there was something different from the past: these apartment buildings had been transformed into the skyscrapers of a city with something undeniably magical about it, New York City. And having skyscrapers, instead of the normal houses of my neighborhood, gave me a powerful feeling of complete fulfillment and happiness, the feeling that comes from living not in a backwater, but in the capital of the world, New York. I had this dream of grandness so many times I figured I must want to get to know this big city,
register
is!” Indeed, now I knew, though I had found out by a tortuous, though actually very subtle, intelligent route. I changed the subject. I decided to investigate why he, so obviously a writer, hadn’t written for years. Out of the blue, I asked him which register he’d write in if he did write. He didn’t reply. I insisted and he kept quiet, I got no reply. Just a smile, a perfect smile. His register, the most elegant I have ever known, was a close relation to laughter and silence.
27
Nothing in life is immutable, everything can be modified. I, for example, could go and live in New York, which is what, deep down, I really want. I could set myself up in an apartment in New York instead of being in Barcelona talking about how there is never any end to Paris. Nothing is immutable, everything can be modified. Think of the works of Flaubert. We can easily transform them with our imagination. It’s enough to entertain the suspicion that had Flaubert had a little more time and sufficient money to put his literary legacy in order, it would be quite a different oeuvre today, as he certainly would have finished
Bouvard et Pécuchet
, suppressed
Madame Bovary
(the annoyance the book’s tyrannical fame caused its author should be taken seriously), and changed the ending of
A Sentimental Education
.
Admitting the unmissable disparity between our work, but with the understanding that everything can change, I tell myself now that, before it’s too late, I should, for instance, change the ending to my seventh novel, improve the ninth (I didn’t take advantage of the many possibilities of the plot), suppress the third, and so on. But, above all, the most urgent thing would be to revise
The Lettered Assassin
, a poisonous and criminal book, my funereal literary debut. Perhaps I would change only the title, and call the book ironically
Pipe-smoking and Despair: The Errors of Youth
. I don’t know. I think it might be good to put a bit of a spring in my first literary steps, to beautify something that was a rather sinister coming-out. Since it’s so like a funereal monument — like Tutankhamun’s tomb: whoever opens it dies — I should do to that book what the surrealists proposed to cheer up the sinister and solemn Pantheon of Paris a little: slice it down the middle and pull the two halves fifty centimeters apart.
28
Speaking of pantheons, the most ironic phrase I know — perhaps
the
ironic phrase
par excellence
— is the epitaph Marcel Duchamp wrote for his own tombstone:
D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent.
(After all, it’s always other people who die.)
29
Is the person who just asked me to speak up deaf or an excessive admirer or trying to sabotage this lecture?
Anyway, whatever the reason, I’ll speak louder.
I live in Barcelona, I’m attracted and fascinated by this never-ending Paris, but I don’t kid myself, I’d like to spend more time in New York, where, by the way, I’ve spent only one night in my life.
New York is a desire that comes from far away. For many years I had a recurring dream in which I saw myself as a child in the fifties standing in the large patio of the building where I lived with my parents in a mezzanine flat on Calle Rosellón in Barcelona, opposite the Cinema Chile. In this dream I saw myself playing soccer on my own (as I used to do as a child), in the shadow of the eight- or ten-story buildings that surrounded the patio. But there was something different from the past: these apartment buildings had been transformed into the skyscrapers of a city with something undeniably magical about it, New York City. And having skyscrapers, instead of the normal houses of my neighborhood, gave me a powerful feeling of complete fulfillment and happiness, the feeling that comes from living not in a backwater, but in the capital of the world, New York. I had this dream of grandness so many times I figured I must want to get to know this big city,
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