AYUDANTE DE VILNIUS

Las moscas escriben y nosotros escribimos para mirar cómo muere una mosca. Eso afirma Marguerite Duras en su libro Escribir. ¿Somos nosotros mismos esa mosca y escribimos para ver cómo se desarrolla la historia de nuestra muerte de mosca?  Ignoro qué sentido exacto (suponiendo que lo tenga) tiene esa frase de Duras. Ella, en Escribir, cuenta cómo un día, mientras esperaba en su casa de Neauphle-le-Château la visita de Michelle Porte, se entretuvo mirando los movimientos de una mosca  moribunda que agonizaba en el jardín de la casa. Cuando llegó su amiga, Marguerite le comunicó la hora exacta en que había fallecido el pobre insecto. “La  mosca ha muerto a las tres y veinte de la tarde”, le dijo. Y  Michelle Porte tuvo un ataque de risa. Duras, imperturbable, escribiría unos días después: “Se escribe sin saberlo. Se escribe para mirar cómo muere una mosca. Tenemos derecho a hacerlo”. Y más adelante: “Escribir es intentar saber qué escribiríamos si escribiéramos”. Y finalmente una conclusión tajante que nos deja sin saber si reir o emocionarnos:  “Todo escribe a nuestro alrededor, eso es lo que hay que llegar a percibir: todo escribe, la mosca, la mosca escribe (…) La escritura de la mosca podría llenar una página entera. Entonces sería una escritura. Desde el momento en que podría ser una escritura, ya lo es”.

Si estoy a solas en casa y entra una solitaria y banal mosca me acuerdo inmediatamente de Kafka cuando en un relato decía que su quinto hijo era tan insignificante que uno se sentía literalmente solo en su compañía.

Todas las moscas son distintas. Pero el parentesco general entre ellas es innegable. Augusto Monterroso, gran experto en insectos, solía decir: “La mosca que hoy se posó en tu nariz es descendiente directa de la que se paró en la de Cleopatra”. El mundo de las moscas sin ley  siempre le atrajo y planeó una antología universal sobre ese enmarañado universo. Finalmente abandonó el proyecto porque vio que el volumen iba forzosamente a tener que ser infinito. Pero en Movimiento perpetuo ofreció a sus lectores una pequeña muestra de la historia mundial de las moscas. Movimiento perpetuo se iniciaba así: “Hay tres temas: el amor, la muerte y las moscas”. Un categórico comienzo para un libro inclasificable, escrito mucho antes de que hubiera tantos libros híbridos o inclasificables como ahora. En él, Monterroso zigzaguea de un género a otro, y pasa del ensayo al relato, y de éste a la digresión o el divertimiento. El zigzagueo está a la altura del mejor vuelo de la mejor mosca mundial. Los diferentes fragmentos están unidos por citas literarias en las que las moscas tienen su protagonismo. No hay un solo escritor profundo que no haya escrito alguna vez sobre las moscas. Ahí tenemos, por ejemplo, a Ludwig Wittgenstein, que escribió en Investigaciones filosóficas:  “¿Qué se propone uno con la filosofía? Enseñar a la mosca a escapar del frasco”.

A mi paso por Bogotá, entre varios controles policiales de cocaína y dinamita,  veo en el aeropuerto a una mujer que tiene una nariz como la de Cleopatra  (con el añadido de una peca de color castaño) y me acuerdo de la famosa frase de Pascal: “Si la nariz de Cleopatra hubiese sido más corta, la historia del mundo habría cambiado”

En verano las moscas humanas  se reúnen en  balnearios, apartamentos y hoteles. En su  pulcro concierto, bailan a medianoche. O atacan, sin uñas. Su zumbada  música es inconfundible. Marcel Proust decía que ellas componían pequeñas sinfonías que eran como la música de cámara del estío.

Escribo desde el Hotel Charleston de Cartagena de Indias. Aquí, frente al Pacífico y sitiado por moscas tropicales, rodeado de un mundo alucinante  de moscas sin ley,  encuentro amigos mallorquines y les hablo de Biel Mesquida, al que, poco antes de salir de Barcelona, vi en Saló de lectura, el formidable programa de Emilio Manzano. Les explico a los mallorquines que en su nuevo libro, Els detalls del mon, Mesquida  ha llevado a cabo un implacable retrato moral de Mallorca. Me miran como si mi  nariz fuera la de Cleopatra.  Su escritura sensorial, les digo,  está pensada  para lectores que lean con todo el cuerpo. El libro apuesta fuerte y brillantemente por el fragmento, como si quisiera descubrir el secreto del mar meditando sobre gotas de rocío. Contiene ochenta píldoras, ochenta  gotas de escarcha con las que el autor confía en dar a los lectores una energía saludable. Si en la sopas siempre hay una mosca, Els detalls del mon  también tiene la suya. La mosca está en la página 87 y escala la cima de un pastelito de té. Aquí, en Cartagena de Indias,  los pastelitos son pastelazos, el sol calienta y  las moscas  se beben  nuestro ron.

“¿Alguien oyó alguna vez toser a las moscas?”, preguntaban los hermanos Grimm en un cuento que leí de niño y cuyo título he olvidado, pero no así  aquella pregunta  que me ha acompañado siempre y me persigue ahora aquí en esta terraza del Charleston mientras una mosca me zumba por la oreja y trata de posarse sobre mi nariz. Un serio incordio hasta que comienza a ahogarse imprevistamente en un zumo de tomate. La remato de forma criminal, la mato con  toneladas de sal y  pimienta. No soy Cleopatra, me digo satisfecho. La mosca ha muerto, a las doce y cinco de la mañana.

-¿Hay algo que haga reír a Marlon Brando?

-Marlon Brando.

Liam Hendry:  «Indochina Song,» by Enrique Vila-Matas, was originally published in El Urogallo, Issue 126, November 1996. It is presented here in English for the first time in a translation by Liam Hendry. Thanks to Mr. Vila-Matas for granting permission to translate and re-publish. Marguerite Duras’s India Song (1975) is now showing April 4 – May 3, 2020 in the United States.

 1.

Now, today, with everything already in the past and no way to go back, now that I am a man far removed from my younger self and have more time to think and to feel, I tell myself that everything could have been different and that I could have been closer to her, that I could have spent much more time with her during those days in the ‘70s when I knew her without truly knowing her, as, by not paying attention, I never noticed how heavily she drank—I thought that if she said strange things it was because she and her writing were strange, it never occurred to me to think that she was living her life drunk—and how she lived in a constant state of misery—I could have noticed the day I met her on Rue de Rennes and she confessed to me, point-blank, that she wrote to avoid killing herself, and I walked away thinking: another strange thing to say—and she lived very alone at that time, a time when I saw her frequently without getting to know hardly anything about her at all, because of which in reality it would be better that I now keep quiet and stop talking of her, but I won’t, I refuse to, I need to; after everything, after her death, I have devoted myself to reading her with a greater intensity than ever, I have devoted myself to reading the books she looked out and gave me in the Neauphle-le-Château granary: Spanish translations of her books that had been resting under layers of dust on the granary floor of that country house to which she went to write and to film Nathalie Granger; “the writing house,” as she called it that day she gave me the Spanish translations of her books, those translations that lately I have devoted myself to reading with nostalgia, regretting that they lack any inscription from her, an inscription which, that afternoon in Neauphle-le-Château, it did not occur to me to ask for, which I now deeply regret, now, with everything already in the past and no way to go back, now, when the only thing I can do to find out anything about her is to read those books, now that it’s all over, now that it’s already too late for anything except to read her and to write that I knew her without truly knowing her, to write that and not keep quiet, to avoid keeping quiet above all, I can’t, I need to write about her, to call out Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert: Marguerite Duras.

2.

One Sunday in Madrid, unaware that a year later I would know her without truly knowing her, I went with Michi Panero to see Nathalie Granger. The cinema was packed with a Francoist audience, who, misled by the appearance of Lucía Bosé and Jeanne Moreau in the film, had entered the screening with monumental oversight. As the film went on, people became increasingly anxious, to the point that one audience member came to believe Michi was moving his seat, threatening him with a monumental smack. For our own safety, we changed row, and the violent audience member—no doubt anxious at not understanding anything of the film—realised that it was not Michi who was moving his seat but his own anguish, an anguish at not understanding anything of what was happening on the screen.

3.

A year later, I found myself inside of that screen. I found myself in Neauphle-le-Château, in the house Bosé, Moreau and Depardieu wandered through in that cinema in Madrid. “In a house,” wrote Duras, “one is so alone as to sometimes be lost. Only now do I realise that I’ve spent ten years here. Alone. And to write books that have let me know, and others know, that I was the writer that I am. How did it happen? And how to explain it? I can say only that the solitude of Neauphle was a solitude I had constructed, I made it myself. For me. And that only in this house am I alone. To write.”

It is this house where Duras witnessed the sudden agony of a poor fly, a fly that died at twenty past three in the afternoon. Duras met Michelle Porte that day. When she told her the exact time the fly had died, Michelle Porte burst into laughter. Duras would write a few days later: “One writes without knowing it. One writes watching the death of a fly. We have the right to do so.” And later still: “To write is to attempt to find out what we would write if we were to write.” And this conclusion: “Around us, everything is writing; that’s what we must finally perceive. Everything is writing. The fly, the fly writes. […] The writing of a fly could fill an entire page. And it would be writing. From the moment it could be writing, it already is.”

4.

I left Neauphle-le-Château as if leaving words in a sentence, and like that, for me, “the writing house” became words in a sentence: “My books come from this house. From this light as well, and from the garden. From the light reflecting off the pond. It’s taken me twenty years to write what I just said.” Thinking about this last sentence of Duras, I realise that it’s taken me twenty years to remember that I left that house with several of her books under my arm. And also to say that, just as one can return to words in a sentence, I returned to Neauphle-le-Château, where I found myself caught up in a protest organised by Duras against a man who had recently moved to the village while waiting to return, as if his country were words in a sentence, to Iran. That man was Ayatollah Khomeini, and the protest, made up mostly of women, took place in front of the imam’s house. I helped out by writing placards, and it was there that I heard—an unforgettable memory—Duras’s strange Berber cry, a cry that almost burst Khomeini’s eardrums; a cry she immediately explained by turning to me and saying: “It’s the Vice-Consul’s cry.” Another strange thing to say, I thought. And I remember, on that second visit of mine to the village, I left Neauphle-le-Château after hearing those words. Today, when I think back on it all, I feel as if I witnessed a truly remarkable scene that day, if not surreal; Duras against Khomeini, two Ayatollahs face-to-face. But my most enduring memory is the Berber cry and those words of Duras that followed, words which stayed with me after I left the village, words through which I am now able to return, like one returns to words in a sentence, to the village and to the strange and Berber cry.

5.

In Café de Flore, sat with Duras and her friend Raúl Escari, I remember having asked, out of the blue, what it was that really made her laugh. Duras looked at me, smiled, finished off her cigarette and said: “Banana skins. People slipping and breaking their noses. I’m very classic.”

6.

She used to say that the solitude of Neauphle-le-Château was something she had constructed herself. And that she was alone only in that house. Alone to write, for example, about finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. In February 1974, having known Marguerite Duras for only a short time, renting an attic room in her house on Rue Saint-Benoît, I was introduced by my new landlady to the idea of writing as salvation. She concluded a half-hour lecture on the stairwell landing by saying: “Do as I do and follow the advice I was given by a friend: Don’t do anything but write.”

With time, I’ve come to realise that this friend was Raymond Queneau. With regards to the advice, I’ve tried to keep to it. I write, but I try to do other things too, because I know that writing isn’t going to save me from anything.

I’ve known this since Marguerite died.

7.

Solitude, for her, meant either death or literature. She said this, one day, to me and Javier Grandes (uncle of Almundena Grandes and another resident of the Durasian attics); these were her exact words about solitude. But when she published Writing, I found out that above all solitude for her meant alcohol. She wrote that when she went to bed, she would cover her face: “I was afraid of myself. I don’t know how and I don’t know why. That’s why I drank alcohol before going to sleep. To forget about myself.”

I’ll forget about myself before forgetting Duras. When I met Marguerite, who in the past had read a lot, she no longer read anything. She would laugh at Sollers, Lacan, and the rest. She trusted only a few women. Isabelle Adjani, for example, whose presence would sometimes brighten the nights on Rue Saint Benoît. But in her distrust of everything there was a great humanity. I’ll forget about myself before forgetting Duras. I was moved by what she wrote in No More, her goodbye to the world. In the end, she doubted the idea of literature as salvation: “I don’t know if I’m afraid of death. I know hardly anything since coming to the sea.” “To spend a life writing,” she added, “is to learn how to write. But it does not save us from anything.”

8.

I left her life as if leaving a sentence. [Salí de su vida como se sale de una frase]

9.

I knew her without truly knowing her. I stopped seeing her twenty years ago. When I went to Paris, I didn’t call her, mostly because when Javier Grandes visited her, a good friend of hers, she told him that she’d become once more like a young child and could no longer recall anything nor remember anyone. If she could not remember Javier, she was even less likely to remember me. No doubt she would say that she hadn’t known me. I’d known her without truly knowing her. In reality, she never really knew me.

(café perec de enero 2019, que en ocasiones parece haber sido escrito en plena pandemia)

A László Krasznahorkai la palabra futuro le remite a un utópico deseo: que a partir de una buena mañana los lectores abran siempre el periódico por un lugar insólito, por la sección de Cultura. Por cierto, no había prensa escrita el pasado martes, primer día de este año, y me pregunté seriamente –aunque sonriendo a la manera de La Gioconda– si algo había frenado para siempre el tiempo. No había que descartarlo. En aquellas primeras horas de la mañana, el silencio era absoluto, sencillamente brutal, y nada impedía pensar que el mundo había dejado de rodar. Hasta que creí oír el silbido de la cafetera del vecino. ¿Era la vida que volvía? No estaba tan claro. Miré por la ventana y no se movía nada, ni una hoja. Miré en Internet en el digital de un periódico local y allí un titular decía: El mundo da la bienvenida al año nuevo. Quedé estupefacto. ¿Dónde podía estar sucediendo aquello? Aún más temible se volvió el titular cuando cesó de golpe el silbido de la cafetera, un sonido que comprendí que había engendrado yo mismo, es decir, que era pura “cosa mentale”, aquel concepto que manejara Da Vinci para definir al arte como un proceso intelectual y con el que 400 años después iba a conectar Marcel Duchamp para revolucionarlo todo.

Cuando en 1919 llegó el cuarto centenario de la muerte de Da Vinci, fue memorable la sucesión inacabable de elogios y cavilaciones que acaparó su figura. Sigmund Freud, por ejemplo, fue exhaustivo analizando detalladamente las neurosis de Leonardo. Y Paul Valéry le consideró nada menos que “el primer pensador capaz de resolver el conflicto entre inteligencia y emoción”. Da Vinci se convirtió en un genio tan supremo y universal que al entonces dadaísta Duchamp le entraron ganas de discutirle tanto boato y tanta popularidad extrema, alcanzada sobre todo después del extravagante robo, años antes, de su Gioconda. La Mona Lisa robada y luego restituida se había convertido en algo tan adorado en todas partes que en una tarjeta postal Duchamp le pintó bigote y perilla y reveló al mundo que lo curioso de aquel retoque era que, cuando mirabas a la Mona Lisa, esta se convertía en un hombre. Años más tarde diría Duchamp: “No es una mujer disfrazada de hombre; es un hombre de verdad, y ahí estaba mi descubrimiento, aunque entonces no me diera cuenta de ello”.

Al recordar esto el pasado martes, temí que el fin de los tiempos fuera a impedirme presenciar, no tanto los festejos del quinto centenario de Leonardo –que se preveían inmensos–, sino el atractivísimo Año Duchamp que, vía Marie-Pierre Bonniol (de la Internacional duchampiana), me había sido anunciado por correo dos días antes. Y justo andaba lamentándome de ir a perderme todo aquello cuando volví a oír el silbido. ¿Era la vida reiniciándose? No. Volvía a tratarse de nuevo de aquel “proceso mental”, de la “cosa mentale”, que seguía ahí, como el dinosaurio, o como el propio mes de enero, en la incertidumbre misma, en ciernes, y yo no sabía si deseaba que volviera a rodar la vida y empezara el año.