Free Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas

in Worpswede, where I discovered that Rilke had traveled to this tranquil village in 1903 because he was friends with Paula Modersohn-Becker, I visited the museum-house of this interesting but ill-fated painter. And I bought several books about the artistic history of the place and also a German edition of
Letters to a Young Poet
, Rilke’s book I’d had in my garret in Paris and that I’d lost a long time ago and where the writer speaks of
the vastness, silence and sky
of that
great northern plain
where oddly (or not) I found myself at that moment.
    Modersohn-Becker painted people as if they were still lifes. When she died, Rilke dedicated a poem to her, “Requiem for a Friend.” She had a spark of genius that death snatched away at the age of thirty-one, leaving Rilke devastated: “Somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work . . .” I spent a long time in the museum and then walked through the village and, with the help of the landscape paintings I had seen in the museum, began to imagine I was walking through Worpswede in the early twentieth century, walking through the
great northern plain
, as dusk fell, pushed on by a light wind. Under an immense sky the fields spread out in dark tones; rolling heather-covered hills stirred in the distance, bordered by fields of stubble and newly harvested buckwheat. And all this gradually appeared to me so forcefully and so realistically, that I actually felt scared. Then I remembered the number 666 and also the fact that I had come to this village knowing I risked finding myself face to face with this number and that the diabolical circle of my work could suddenly close at any moment. But the number 666 was nowhere to be found. I had some trivial strawberry ice cream on the terrace of a roadside café, next to the stop for the bus that took me back to Bremen.
    My fear of the Beast ended there, ended in that strawberry ice cream.

31
     
    Strawberry ice cream?
    Two weeks went by and Bremen and Worpswede had been left behind when I had to travel from Barcelona to Malaga: this involved a couple of busy hours of work, then a night in the Hotel Larios and returning home the next day. It’s common knowledge that things happen, end up happening, or sometimes happen when you least expect them to. On the return leg of this short trip, I had to fly from Malaga to Barcelona on Spanair flight JKK666. I could hardly believe it. How dare they give the number of the Beast to an airplane? For a long while, waiting for the diabolical flight to be called, I worried that what I’d presumed could happen to me in Bremen might happen on this very plane. Because it’s also common knowledge that, as both God and the Devil have recently demonstrated far too well, they are anything but perfect and instead, very clumsy, and are often known to arrive late to their operating theatre. But then I thought the opposite, I told myself it was absurd to fall into the trap of believing in things with such a pronounced literary charge and there was absolutely no reason anything should happen to me. So I boarded the plane.
    The young man in the seat next to mine was one of those nervous youths we’ve all come across at one time or another on planes, one of those who don’t stop moving, as if they’ve just drunk an awful lot or taken a strong hit of cocaine. The stewardess tells us to fasten our seatbelts, and we think we’re going to get a break. But this isn’t what happens at all, because they carry on fidgeting restlessly and nervously with that seatbelt fastened, they even start to make us feel as upset as they do. He managed to affect me so much I couldn’t help giving him an angry glance, while also trying to repress my most primal instinct, which was to slap him across the face and put a triple safety belt on him. The guy was still uncontrollable and fidgeting in his seat, picking up the airline magazine, for example, then putting it back, doing this I don’t know