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

didn’t understand a word of what they said. Then, the car pulled off and disappeared into the distance, finally vanishing at the other end of the boulevard. Then suddenly Marguerite said: “They’re going to China.”
    Once again, I thought, she’s speaking in her
superior
French. They’re going to China, repeated Raúl in a very solemn and ironic tone, and couldn’t hold back a cheerful giggle. And I laughed so as not to contradict him. The strange thing is it was true. In April and May of 1974, a French delegation made up of three members of the magazine
Tel Quel
(Sollers, Kristeva, and Pleynet), together with François Wahl and Roland Barthes, visited China. They went from Peking to Shanghai and from Nanking to Sian. On his return, Barthes published a famous article in
Le Monde
, where he revealed his disappointment with what he had seen and heard. He thought Chinese tea was as bland as the landscape. This and certain reflections on Maoism are what I remember most about this article, which I read on the day it appeared — May 24, 1974, another extraordinary spring day — in my garret, secretly astonished at what it said there. The article was called “Alors la Chine,” and there are some who swear it has passed into the history of twentieth-century French literature.

33
     
    Think of what the fundamental reasons for despair might be. Each of you will have your own. I propose mine: the fickleness of love, the fragility of our bodies, the overwhelming meanness that dominates our social lives, the tragic loneliness in which, deep down, we all live, the ups and downs of friendship, the monotony and insensitivity the habit of living brings along with it.
    On the other side of the scales, we find Paris. This city, perhaps because there is never any end to it and because it is wonderful as well, can take anything, it can counter any of the causes a man can come up with to be unhappy. If one is young in Paris, as I was in those days, and still hasn’t really discovered the true and essential causes for despair, it is incomprehensible that I felt so unhappy in Paris. My God, what was I doing in despair in Paris? I couldn’t have been stupider.
    I reflect on this and remember this
pensée
of Cioran’s: “Paris: city in which there may be certain interesting people to see, but where you see anyone but them. You’re crucified by the annoying ones.”
    And I think when I lived in Paris I never learned to distinguish between interesting and annoying people, very probably because, weighed down by my stupid despair, I belonged to the large group of those annoying ones.

34
     
    I believed that living in despair was very elegant. I believed it for the entire two years I spent in Paris, and in fact have believed it nearly all my life. I’ve been mistaken until August of this year, which is when this cherished belief in the elegance of despair teetered and came crashing down for good. When it fell like a house of cards, other no less picturesque beliefs began to collapse as well. Such as, for example, the belief that it is essential to be thin in order to be an intellectual and that fat people — as I was growing fatter, with a huge guilt complex, I thought this more and more every day — are not poetic, nor can they be intelligent.
    I went to Paris this August and, while waiting for my wife, who was going to join me there the following day, I left the hotel at dusk and walked down Rue de Rennes until I got to the Café de Flore, blending in with the crowds in the streets, walked towards number 5, Rue Saint-Benoît. I acted as if I still lived there and I was just coming home like on any other evening. But I suddenly realized there was something ghostly about me, something a little like a corpse who’d been granted permission to rise from the tomb for a few hours and return to the abandoned streets of his youth and discover none of them were as they had been, that everything was very different.
    I walked through the