Never Any End to Paris Read Free

— a little girl — and expecting another when the painter died of alcohol and various illnesses.
    Jeanne had lots of problems with the bourgeoisie, with her family. The day after Modigliani’s death, nine months pregnant, she opened the fifth-floor window in her parents’ apartment at number 8, Rue Amyot, Paris, and let herself fall backwards. I read the story of her suicide thirty years ago, when I was young and living in Paris, I read it and I remember imagining the street and the fall, I imagined the whole scene, and then forgot it. But Jeanne came back to me this August in Paris, when I happened to read an article about her love affair with Modigliani and her desperate death. And that suicide at the age of nineteen again made a deep impression on me, except this time I intended not to forget. I read her story again while in Paris and I realized I could look for number 8, Rue Amyot and, if the building and the street still existed, examine the place where Jeanne bid farewell to life.
    Not only did the street and the house still exist but they were near my hotel. After walking through narrow alleyways, aided by a map of the city, I ended up on that short street with its solid, old buildings, which can’t have changed much in the last eighty-two years. From the street I looked up at Jeanne’s window on the fifth floor, I looked at it from the place, possibly the exact place, where her suicidal body landed, and I felt as if my entire youth and my entire summer were encapsulated in that moment of life and death, encapsulated in Rue Amyot, Paris, a city teeming with commemorative plaques, but without a single one here at the site where Jeanne took her own life. Today, nothing in Rue Amyot recalls the tragedy that took place eighty-two years ago. Not even a bouquet of flowers from someone secretly cultivating her legend, not one sad piece of graffiti on the wall. Nothing. It seemed clear she wasn’t considered an important enough artist, even though her death was possibly more artistic than Modigliani’s entire oeuvre. However, she committed suicide, and suicides, as we know, do not get plaques, aren’t celebrated or commemorated.
    Directly across the street from number 8, Rue Amyot, where Jeanne, drawing a tragic and gymnastic line in the air, threw herself into space, a clean, bright gym has been set up for the bourgeois residents of the neighborhood, who are bound to be advocates of exercise and family values and not too fond of art, bohemianism or pirouetting oneself to death. Perhaps the people working out installed themselves there on purpose. Like those enemies of tobacco who plant themselves with a morally reproachful look in front of the first poor suicide case they see smoking. *
    * Once I had written this passage for my lecture, I found out by chance — to my great surprise — that “La cena,” a marvelous story by Augusto Monterroso that I had read many times, takes place in an apartment at number 8, Rue Amyot, Paris: an address that, despite having read the story many times, I’d never really noticed, probably paying more attention to what went on in the story. It seems that the second-floor left-hand apartment was occupied for quite a while by the writer Alfredo Bryce Echenique, who held a dinner party one day — the dinner that gives the story its title — and invited Monterroso, but also Kafka, whom they awaited unsuccessfully in Rue Amyot.
    Although, many years later, I found that street with a certain amount of difficulty “after walking through narrow alleyways, aided by a map of the city,” for Monterroso it proved rather simple: “Just as in every big city, in Paris, there are streets that are hard to find; but Rue Amyot is easy to find if one gets off the Metro at the Monge stop and then asks for Rue Amyot.”

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    The past, said Proust, is not only not fleeting, it doesn’t move at all. It’s the same with Paris, it has never gone on a journey. And on top of that it’s