Never Any End to Paris Read Free Page B

rain?” asks the maid, and laughs. When she returns to the room, she tells her husband that the cat was gone and then studies her profile in the mirror, first one side and then the other, and she looks at her throat and the nape of her neck and asks her husband if he doesn’t think it would be a good idea if she grew her hair out. “I like it the way it is,” the husband says, and carries on reading. Someone knocks at the door and it’s the maid who is holding a cat struggling to free itself from her arms. It is a gift from the owner of the hotel.
    I invited the audience to interpret the story and their interpretations were quite varied; I retained the following: 1) The story recalls another also by Hemingway concerning white elephants and the secret story is really about a woman’s pregnancy and her unspoken wish to have an abortion. 2) The story seems to be talking about the young woman’s sexual frustration, which leads her to want a cat. 3) The story actually just portrays the sordid atmosphere of Italy recently emerged from a war in which it had required American help. 4) The story describes post-coital tedium. 5) The newlywed woman is tired of cutting her hair short
à la garçon
in order to satisfy her husband’s homosexual desires. 6) The woman is in love with the owner of the hotel. 7) The story demonstrates that men are incapable of reading a book and listening to their wives at the same time, and all this dates back to the Stone Age, when men went out to hunt and women stayed at home cooking in the cave: men learned to think in silence and women to speak about things that affected them and to develop relationships based on feelings.
    Finally, a woman of a certain age said: “And what if the story is what it is and nothing more? What if there is nothing to interpret? Maybe the story is totally incomprehensible and that is where its charm lies.”
    I had never thought of this, and it gave me a good idea for how to end the story I planned to write in Paris the next day.
    “Tomorrow,” I said to the audience, "I will write my story about what has happened here today and I will end it with what this woman has said, her words have reminded me that I always feel very happy when I don’t understand something and it works the other way around: when I read something that I understand perfectly, I put it aside in disappointment. I don’t like stories with understandable plot lines. Because understanding can be a sentence. And not understanding, a door swinging open.”
    I felt these words had come out just right. But then a young woman raised her hand, smiling with a strange happiness. “It’s all very well,” she said, “that you have found the ending to your story, but since your lecture was going to be on irony allow me now, Mr. Hemingway, to be ironic and request, for the good of all your readers, that this story you plan on writing tomorrow be comprehensible, please, so that we can all understand it.”

10
     
    The next day, on my way back on the TGV, as the train rushed through the Loire valley, I read, almost in homage, the first volume of a collection of essays by Julien Gracq, a writer born in this part of France, in the village of Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, in the very center of the region of Mauges. The speed of the train made the marvelous landscape impossible to see, though luckily I already know it quite well. Between the Loire and the Sèvre, between the Layon vineyards and those of Muscadet, the plain, where one can get lost, is characterized by dense woodland, ash woods, grasslands, deep valleys, hamlets nestled together, and the slopes flanking the longest river in France. I was reading the first volume of
Lettrines
, and suddenly, not long after the train had sped past Gracq’s own village, I discovered, not without some surprise, that this writer, whom I had imagined would only be concerned with authors of serious artistic stature, was talking about Hemingway.
    His not at all condescending