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

the underground films his friend Arrieta made and he was also a painter and a bullfighter and the very incarnation of bohemia. I’d gone to Paris just to see him, with no other aim than to spy, as much as possible, on his bohemian life. Without this modest intention of observing Javier’s Parisian world I don’t think I’d ever have met Duras and so my garret would not have existed and the novel of my life would have taken a different path, perhaps a bullfighting or political path, why not? I was so open to life that any mad idea could infiltrate and change mine.
    Speaking of politics, I should say that a month after taking possession of my
chambre
, my anti-Francoist Spanish student stance had changed and I became a firm radical leftist, of the
situationist
line, with Guy Debord as my master. I began to think that being anti-Franco was of very little consequence indeed and, under the influence of situationist ideas, with my pipe and my two pairs of fake glasses, I began to walk around the neighborhood converted into the prototype of the secretly revolutionary, poetic intellectual. But in fact, being a situationist without having read a single line of Guy Debord, I was on the most radical extreme left, but only through hearsay. And, as I’ve said, I didn’t practice, I devoted myself to
feeling
extremely left-wing and that was it. What really interested me was the noble idea of forgetting the stifling atmosphere of Barcelona and being able to enjoy, in self-imposed exile, the free French air. But I soon gathered it was reactionary to consider yourself an exile instead of being a real exile, that is, a political exile from Franco’s Spain. There was, it seemed, a subtle difference, or at least this was what my terrifying compatriots started pointing out to me when I went to see them in the bars where they met up and plotted. The atmosphere I’d left behind in Barcelona was stifling, but that of my exiled compatriots in Paris (none of whom, moreover, were situationists) seemed just as bad, if not worse, and so finally I stopped going to see them, and avoided those bars that left me feeling bitter and depressed by their obsessive, unbending conversations about what would happen when Franco died, worn out by their leaden political analyses, and, above all, disheartened at how ground down many of them were by heroin or dire Spanish wine.
    I concentrated on making foreign friends and gradually cut myself off from the awful world of my exiled compatriots, a world revolving exclusively around the anti-Franco movement, which didn’t attract me in the slightest. I found politics unattractive, and saw it as a pastime or activity ultimately demanding you choose between idealism and pragmatism, something that seemed not only rather dull but also repugnant. I only ever went to one anti-Franco event, an homage to Rafael Alberti, and was paralyzed when I found myself in a corridor face to face with María Teresa León, who was on her own and asked me suddenly — I was very shy and also on my own and, moreover, a situationist — if I had seen her husband. “Rafael Alberti,” she added solemnly, pronouncing her
R
s in a spectacular, unforgettable way. She stood there waiting for my reply. “Over there,” I said, pointing to a spot as far away I could see.
    Everything about Spain began to feel very far away to me, but so did Guy Debord, who soon seemed not very near at all, although I was still a situationist and felt I was his disciple, but a disappointed disciple, since I had gone to see his movie
La société du spectacle
, a cinematic version of his books, and had been profoundly bored, as it was a film to be
read
. The only thing that appeared on the screen were texts, very occasionally punctuated by the fleeting vision of a few images intended to illustrate the horror of the world of show business but which came from movies I really liked, such as
Johnny Guitar
; it was only at these moments, when the fleeting images of