Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas Read Free Book Online

everything, try to keep the acclaimed writer calm, mix him lemonade and whisky and give it to him with a couple of aspirins, then sit down and read the newspaper and wait for the successful author to sober up.
    While poor Hemingway was reading the paper, he heard Fitzgerald say to him: “You’re a cold one, aren’t you?” Looking at him, Hemingway understood that, if not in his diagnosis, at least in his prescription he had been wrong, and the whisky was going to work against them. “How do you mean, Scott?” “You can sit there and read that dirty French rag of a paper and it doesn’t mean a thing to you that I am dying.”
    Fitzgerald was not dying. All that had happened was that he’d got drunk and very wet because of the rain that had fallen relentlessly on his infamous convertible, the top of which — due to the express wishes of his wife Zelda — had been removed. It’s curious to note that the dialogue that took place in this hotel room in Châlon-sur-Saône, and that Hemingway recounts in
A Moveable Feast
, recalls the scene and dialogue in “Cat in the Rain.” Fitzgerald seems to take on the female role while Hemingway attempts to read quietly in the hotel room and wait for the downpour to pass. In the story of the cat in the rain the wife wants to have longer hair so she can put it up in a bun, and she also wants a kitty to sit on her lap, and moreover, wants to eat at a table with candles and her own silver and she wants it to be spring; in the hotel in Châlon-sur-Saône, a demanding Scott Fitzgerald, through the mists of alcohol, speaks in a tone identical to that of the little woman in “Cat in the Rain”: “I want my temperature taken,” Fitzgerald says, “then I want my clothes dried and for us to get an express train to Paris, and to go to the American Hospital at Neuilly.” Hemingway tries not to get worked up and tells him their clothes aren’t dry yet. And Fitzgerald interrupts him: “I want my temperature taken.” The only thing missing now is for him to add: “And I want a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her. And I want to grow my hair long and eat at a table with my own silver and candles. And most of all I want a cat, I want a cat, I want a cat now. And to go as quickly as possible to the American Hospital.”
    Back in Paris, Hemingway would confess to his wife that he hadn’t learned anything from the famous writer on the trip. And if there was one thing he’d learned, it was never to go on a trip with anyone you do not love.
    The Hemingway-Fitzgerald episode is one of the most outlandish in the history of meetings and misunderstandings between two talented writers. In general, one writer can learn very little from another. And then there is the matter of rivalry and inflated egos and the envy a poorer writer feels towards a richer one, and so on. The relationship between the episode in the hotel in Châlon-sur-Saône and the story “Cat in the Rain” is demonstrated to a certain extent by the soft sound (“like a cat”) Hemingway’s wife makes when, in
A Moveable Feast
, he tells her he plans never again to travel with anyone he doesn’t love and proposes they should go to Spain. “Poor Scott,” Hemingway finally says to his wife. “Poor everybody. Rich feathercats with no money,” she adds.
    “Poor Scott,” I also said to my wife in Paris in the middle of August this year, back in our hotel again without having found any trace of the Dingo Bar on Rue Delambre. “Poor, poor Scott,” said my wife then, “you know what? I’ll be back in a minute, I’m going to look up the Dingo on the internet, I’ll go to that internet café on the corner, I’m sure I can find out the bar’s address.”
    I was stretched out on the bed, half absorbed in reading a newspaper. “Don’t get wet,” I told her, without noticing I sounded just like the character from “Cat in the Rain.” She came back a little while later, with all the information. The Dingo Bar