Never Any End to Paris Read Online Free PDF Page A

other reason and managed to stay and live there. I was partly right to be desperate, as I didn’t know where to go, or what to be in this life. It occurred to me to solve this awkward problem by becoming the first thing that made sense, and that had been — after I happened to read
A Moveable Feast
— to be a writer, something which actually increased my desperation even more, since, don’t ask me why, I spent a long time convinced that in order to be a good writer you had to be completely desperate.
    Anyway, in those days, ladies and gentlemen, I was, I insist, a walking nightmare. There were people in my neighborhood who, quite rightly, crossed the street when they saw me coming. Raúl Escari, for example (“an intelligent and refined being, a true writer who refused to write, the most brilliant of Marguerite Duras’s circle of young friends in the 1970s,” the poet José Miguel Ullán wrote), the great Raúl Escari, who avoided me at first when he saw me in the street, and later ended up being my best friend in Paris. Today Raúl lives in Montevideo, near his native Buenos Aires, and occasionally he calls me up and, across the distance, from a phone booth near where Lautréamont was born, sends me phrases that spring spontaneously from his unsurpassable intellect.

13
     
    Reading the words the poet Ullán wrote about Marguerite Duras, it’s as if I were seeing her now: “Marguerite was always asking questions. They were echoes, a filtering of what she wondered herself. She brought discord and persuasion, melodrama and comedy. She demanded to be told she was right when that was not really what she wanted at all. Glass in hand, smoking constantly, she went from coughing fits to interminable pauses. She twisted her ring-laden hands, played with her glasses, or improvised some gentle flirting with the aid of her silk
foulard
. She laughed and cried often. Easily? Who knows! In fact, less was known there all the time. Less, in any case, than she wanted to know.”
    I will always remember her as a violently free and audacious woman, who wholeheartedly and openly embodied — with her intelligent use of verbal license, for example, which in her case consisted of sitting in an armchair in her house and, with real ferocity, speaking her mind — I remember she embodied all the monstrous contradictions to be found in human beings, all those doubts, that fragility and helplessness, fierce individuality, and a search for shared grief, in short, all the great anguish we’re capable of when faced with the reality of the world, that desolation the least exemplary writers have in them, the least academic and edifying ones, those who aren’t concerned with projecting a right and proper image of themselves, the only ones from whom we learn nothing, but also those who have the rare courage to literally
expose
themselves in their writing — where they speak their minds — and whom I admire deeply because only they lay it on the line, only they seem to me to be true writers.

14
     
    I used to read a lot of Perec, though I barely took it in. It would have done me a lot of good to pay more attention to this writer, as I would have discovered back then the charm and joyful irony of, for example,
Species of Spaces
, the book Perec published in Paris in February of that year, 1974, the very month I arrived in the city and bought the book at the Gare d’Austerlitz, and, while I did like it — the alternative the book offered of living in a single place or many stuck in my mind — I thought this Perec was nowhere near as good as, for example, Lautréamont, or all the French
poètes maudits
.
    Yesterday I thought again of the alternatives Perec’s book offers of living in a single place or many, of being sedentary or a traveler, of being a rank nationalist or a spiritual nomad:
    “To put down roots, to rediscover or fashion your roots, to carve the place that will be yours out of space, and build, plant, appropriate, millimeter by