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

used to be at 10, Rue Delambre, the address of the Italian restaurant we’d seen earlier and had thought, in all fairness, that it looked dreadful.
    “L’Auberge de Venise, remember?” I remembered perfectly. On the sidewalk across the street from the restaurant we had seen a
clochard
who looked a lot like Hemingway, and she’d said: “He really does look like him, unlike you, who look nothing like him.”
    She also brought another interesting piece of information from the internet café: at number 15 on the same street, where the Hotel Lennox is now, there is a studio, which was rented by my esteemed Marcel Duchamp, after he gave up his New York life forever. Duchamp, the last remaining artistic legend of my youth that hasn’t been completely shattered.
    “Rue Delambre might be small, but it certainly has more charm and class than we suspected, don’t you think?” said my wife. I didn’t reply. Outside it was still raining. There was undoubtedly a cat in the rain out there. I was still half absorbed in my newspaper. Like in a Hemingway story.

21
     
    A quote from Rilke: “Scale the depths of things; irony will never descend there.” And one from Jules Renard: “Irony is humanity’s sense of propriety.” I’m going to be honest: I think both quotes, debatable though they might seem, are perfect. But the one I like best is my own: “Irony is the highest form of sincerity.”

22
     
    Occasionally my sense of irony reaches Paris itself, and then I like New York. I would go further: every time someone mentions Duchamp, I think my life has been a mistake from the start and, instead of living in Barcelona and being in love with Paris, I should have quit bothering about such nonsense and lived in New York from day one, in Duchamp’s apartment, for example. And I should have read Hemingway there, sitting in a comfortable armchair reading about his exploits as a hunter, fisherman, lover, boxer, war reporter, and drinker. And thinking the whole time: What a brute!

23
     
    Each paragraph of
The Lettered Assassin
was a struggle for me to write. However, when my father sent a letter from Barcelona to tell me he wasn’t going to wait any longer for me to finish my damned novel and had decided to shut off forever the merry flow of money, I wrote a letter of such literary agility, in sharp contrast to the agonizing stiffness when writing my novel. Whenever I re-read that letter, I am surprised how it’s written: my style is far superior to that of the dubious
Lettered Assassin
. This letter proves the old Spanish expression that says hunger sharpens the wit.
    “Dear Father: I have reached the age at which one is in full command of one’s own qualities, and the intellect reaches its maximum strength and capacity. It is therefore the time to carry out my literary work. To do so, I need peace and quiet and freedom from distractions, not to have to ask Marguerite Duras for money, or to spend all my time worrying about how to convince you of the value of financing the writing of this novel, which eventually, when it is finished and published and receiving acclaim, will fill you with paternal pride and great satisfaction for your generosity to me. With love from your son . . .”
    With this letter I managed to delay the definitive end of the money orders for a while. My father, equipped with an undeniable sense of humor and a very restrained and sparse style, replied:
    Dear son: I have reached the age at which one finds oneself obliged to admit that one’s son has turned out to be an imbecile. I am giving you three months to finish your masterpiece. By the way, who is Marguerite Duras?”

24
     
    Without Javier Grandes’s joie de vivre, my two years in Paris would have been an even bigger disaster. I’d met Javier at a party thrown by Lucía Bosé in Puerta de Hierro, Madrid, where Michi Panero introduced us. Javier was a very cheerful person, but at the same time he had a very scandalous view of life. He starred in