Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas Page A

time. Nevertheless, as you see, I’ve heard from him, I’ve actually known him for thirty years; I know he scarcely moves from that spot where one day, almost two centuries ago, he was seen to disappear, only now he looks different, he’s no longer a demon, now he’s an
odradek
. The fact is he’s still in the same place where he disappeared. As Kafka would have said,
he went far away to stay right here.
    In days gone by, the
Monstre Vert
lived in his own castle, the Castle Vauvert, in the center of Paris, but his luxurious abode was destroyed by fire, and then he hid, according to Nerval, “in the cellar of a vacant house, at one end of the Jardin du Luxembourg, on Boulevard de Montparnasse, by Avenue de l’Observatoire,” in other words — though Nerval never knew it — exactly where La Closerie des Lilas was built years later, a bar where Fitzgerald and Hemingway, sometime back in the 1920s, often met, first as colleagues and friends and later as rivals and enemies.
    We know that in Nerval’s time the devil Vauvert caused a lot of trouble, a specialist in orgies and in bewitching the bottles of wine till they danced, wine from the cellar of that vacant house demolished years later to make way for — perhaps not by chance — the bar where Fitzgerald and Hemingway resolved their differences so many times and which, today, is the perfect hiding place for the old devil, bewitcher of bottles, Vauvert, an ideal spot for our
odradek
, the secret ghost of La Closerie des Lilas.
    Scott the
odradek
(that’s what I call him, and I’m the only person in the world who has anything to do with him) is the living memory of the relationship between Fitzgerald and Hemingway. He’s nothing more than this, which, when you think about it, is quite a lot. Isn’t it a lot
to be
the memory of the friendship between those two writers?
    I suspect his old, broken-off threads must belong to a magnetic strip on which he has, to his despair, recorded every one of the pair’s meetings and misunderstandings. He knows everything that passed between them. He calls himself Scott and identifies with the author of
The Great Gatsby,
arguing so that Hemingway (who, for him, is me) will never forget what happened.
    Walter Benjamin said that an angel reminds us of everything we have forgotten. Scott,
odradek
that he is, always to be found between the door and the bar of La Closerie, reminds me, when I go to this café, of every last detail of what went on between the two friends. He is the soul, he is the devil, he is the
odradek
, he is the memory of this relationship between Hemingway and Fitzgerald. When I was young and went often to La Closerie, he, thinking I was Hemingway, would always remind me, as Fitzgerald, of the most forgotten anecdotes in our history of confrontation. And there were nights when he tragically took on
in person
— or would it make more sense to say
in object
? — the whole sad saga of the enmity between the two writers, and then he would become impossible, sinking into a foul mood, and repeating the most ironic phrases Hemingway had used about his old friend in that bar, and then he would imitate the other’s equally ironic answers. And he would end up embittered by so much irony, in such a terrible state between the door and the bar, diabolically inciting me to leave the premises without paying, something I started to do almost as a matter of course on my last visits to this place where, convinced that after such a long time no one would remember me, I dared to return in the middle of August this year, understandably nervous, mainly because — though I knew perfectly well I’d see him — I wondered, after such a long time, if Scott would still be there.
    I went to La Closerie this August and at first I didn’t see him. I went without my wife, to avoid her reproaching me yet again for going on believing I looked like Hemingway, and above all so that she wouldn’t find out that my imagination had created