Read Online Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Enrique Vila-Matas
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Unamuno as if they were writers of self-help books. It seems, just as with Unamuno’s
How to Make a Novel
, I had Rilke’s book there in my garret with the basic idea that, just as the title hinted, it would show me how to write. I’d bought it in La Hune bookshop like a man who acquires a pearl, thinking it will solve all his problems. I can only see this purchase as touching and it makes me think that possibly here today, in this room, there might be a young poet in the audience listening to this lecture thinking he can learn something from this ironic account of my years of apprenticeship.
If this is the case, I would recommend this young poet not make such a lamentable mistake. If we come into this world in order to learn, and yet, learn nothing — we leave it knowing less than ever — the young poet is even less likely to learn anything from a lecture where the only certainty the lecturer has — well, maybe this young man will learn something, maybe he’ll learn what I’m about to tell him, which is no small thing — the only certainty I have is that perseverance in the habit of writing is usually in direct relation to its absurdity, while we usually do brilliant things quite spontaneously.
I don’t think there’s any harm in saying that if I learned nothing from the book by Rilke, it’s also true, and odd, that this book
in its own way
did help me with something, it helped me not only to find the names of a German city and village, but also to write the first sentences of the letter written by my assassin, sentences exactly the same as those of the fourth letter from Rilke to the young poet, a letter sent from
Worpswede, near Bremen
, July 16, 1903, which begins like this: “
About ten days ago I left Paris and traveled to this great northern plain, where the vastness and silence and sky ought to help me rest.
”
And if these two places have indeed been accompanying me over the years, it never occurred to me that one day I might travel to them, as in fact happened a few months ago when I was invited by some professors to give a reading of my work in Bremen; inadvertently, they were offering me the chance to go to the first city and the first village I named in my whole body of work. I accepted the invitation immediately but it didn’t take me long to start wondering whether they would put me up
in an old hotel in Bremen
and above all to speculate about the possibility, as literary as it was terrifying, that, whether the hotel was old or not, the number of my room might be 666.
If 666 was the number of my room — something I believed or wanted to believe was highly unlikely — I would have to accept from that moment that I was a dead man. Perhaps my entire oeuvre — I said to myself — had consisted of this, writing for thirty years just to end up returning to its origins, to finally return, in a diabolical closed circle — let’s not forget that 666 is the number of the Beast — to the first sentences I wrote in my first book, returning and becoming a fatal victim of those sentences, just as my manuscript had made a victim of Vidal Escabia, the first character I ever killed.
I went to Bremen and the hotel was modern and the room number (as was only to be expected after all) was very far from being 666. Relaxed, that very night I liberated myself at once from my ghosts and, when I’d finished my reading in the city, over dinner, I joked rashly about my now dispelled fears. “And what if 666, where the Beast really is waiting for you is in Worpswede?” I will never know who asked this question. The fact is that the following day I decided to go to Worpswede, partly because I wanted to defy the Beast, but also because I was curious to see this village with the strange name that had infiltrated the first pages of my first book. On the bus, on my way to the village, I had the strange feeling that I was entering, thirty years after having written it, the first page of
The Lettered Assassin
. Once
How to Make a Novel
, I had Rilke’s book there in my garret with the basic idea that, just as the title hinted, it would show me how to write. I’d bought it in La Hune bookshop like a man who acquires a pearl, thinking it will solve all his problems. I can only see this purchase as touching and it makes me think that possibly here today, in this room, there might be a young poet in the audience listening to this lecture thinking he can learn something from this ironic account of my years of apprenticeship.
If this is the case, I would recommend this young poet not make such a lamentable mistake. If we come into this world in order to learn, and yet, learn nothing — we leave it knowing less than ever — the young poet is even less likely to learn anything from a lecture where the only certainty the lecturer has — well, maybe this young man will learn something, maybe he’ll learn what I’m about to tell him, which is no small thing — the only certainty I have is that perseverance in the habit of writing is usually in direct relation to its absurdity, while we usually do brilliant things quite spontaneously.
I don’t think there’s any harm in saying that if I learned nothing from the book by Rilke, it’s also true, and odd, that this book
in its own way
did help me with something, it helped me not only to find the names of a German city and village, but also to write the first sentences of the letter written by my assassin, sentences exactly the same as those of the fourth letter from Rilke to the young poet, a letter sent from
Worpswede, near Bremen
, July 16, 1903, which begins like this: “
About ten days ago I left Paris and traveled to this great northern plain, where the vastness and silence and sky ought to help me rest.
”
And if these two places have indeed been accompanying me over the years, it never occurred to me that one day I might travel to them, as in fact happened a few months ago when I was invited by some professors to give a reading of my work in Bremen; inadvertently, they were offering me the chance to go to the first city and the first village I named in my whole body of work. I accepted the invitation immediately but it didn’t take me long to start wondering whether they would put me up
in an old hotel in Bremen
and above all to speculate about the possibility, as literary as it was terrifying, that, whether the hotel was old or not, the number of my room might be 666.
If 666 was the number of my room — something I believed or wanted to believe was highly unlikely — I would have to accept from that moment that I was a dead man. Perhaps my entire oeuvre — I said to myself — had consisted of this, writing for thirty years just to end up returning to its origins, to finally return, in a diabolical closed circle — let’s not forget that 666 is the number of the Beast — to the first sentences I wrote in my first book, returning and becoming a fatal victim of those sentences, just as my manuscript had made a victim of Vidal Escabia, the first character I ever killed.
I went to Bremen and the hotel was modern and the room number (as was only to be expected after all) was very far from being 666. Relaxed, that very night I liberated myself at once from my ghosts and, when I’d finished my reading in the city, over dinner, I joked rashly about my now dispelled fears. “And what if 666, where the Beast really is waiting for you is in Worpswede?” I will never know who asked this question. The fact is that the following day I decided to go to Worpswede, partly because I wanted to defy the Beast, but also because I was curious to see this village with the strange name that had infiltrated the first pages of my first book. On the bus, on my way to the village, I had the strange feeling that I was entering, thirty years after having written it, the first page of
The Lettered Assassin
. Once
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