As in The Purple Rose of Cairo, the narrator-character of the new novel by Enrique Vila-Matas (Barcelona, 1948), Montevideo (Seix Barral), crosses the screen –in his case, the page– to investigate, in the manner of a detective, the connections between the worlds of reality and fiction. On the terrace of a Barcelona bookstore, the real Vila-Matas-"reborn", after a kidney transplant whose donor was his wife Paula- talks about that fictional narrator and the strange things that happen to both of them.
What was the initial impetus for this book?
I go back twenty years ago, when my friend, the Argentine writer Vlady Kociancich (1941-2022), told me that Bioy Casares and Cortázar had each written a very similar story, in both a gray character takes the steam of the race, a ferry that connects Buenos Aires with Montevideo, and both characters stay at the Cervantes hotel, where they hear things on the other side of the adjoining door of their room. Bioy's is a ladies' man who hears a couple having sex, which torments him, while Cortázar's listens to the crying of a child. I investigated if that hotel existed, I saw that it had even been a place for swingers or couples exchange, that one person complained that there were cockroaches... Beatriz Sarlo said that, in that story by Cortázar, reality and fiction were mixed there , at that doomed door. I decided to go to that hotel and see what happens when you see reality and fiction at the same time. I put a detective to work and that's the book.
Did you go to that hotel?
I distinguish between the self that appears in the book and the author. The author was in the hotel but they did not let him see the room, they were very uncomfortable, I deduce that they feared that Cortázar would eclipse the memory of Carlos Gardel, his illustrious guest, whom they celebrate. They took me to the front door of the room. So far alone, I couldn't see anything else.
Don't you know more?
When I was going to finish the book, I found on the internet a report from the La Nación newspaper about the renovated hotel a couple of years ago. And there they offered something like a “Cortázar suite”, with lots of light and white sheets and no “doomed doors”, a room that Cortázar had described –not only in his story but in interviews about the story– as a claustrophobic place, without hardly room to move and with little outside light. In the photograph of La Nación it appeared spacious and luminous. They had converted it into a standard room, which did not fit Cortázar's or the image of that room that I had had very present in my head for three years while I was writing Montevideo. The new hotel manager said no, that the next door didn't exist, but that she wasn't sure either that she would have been there one day, or that it was just the product of Cortázar's imagination. What she could say, affirmed the manager, was that, in the original plan of 1927, that door is not drawn. And she added “but you never know”.
Here's something unusual about you: that part has the atmosphere of a horror novel.
So much so that I scared myself.
But you are not, or were not until now, Stephen King. Why the terror and the ghosts?
Today's horror movies surpass Lovecraft, it is impossible to imagine a greater horror. In the end, when I opened the last door, I wanted the horror to be felt, that horror, but precisely if you describe it you spoil everything.
The narrator claims to be creatively blocked...
He writes a kind of essay diary, aspires to be a new Paul Valéry and sinks when he sees that he does not reach that height, so he even stops writing. Coincidentally, from the first moment he stops writing, surprising stories begin to happen to him and generally enigmatic background. They place my work in autofiction, something that doesn't exist for me. Autofiction seems to me to be a redundant concept with that of fiction. In fact, I write fiction from a space that essayists often occupy: "a visible literary self." What is staged in any of my books is not exactly a plot or a series of ideas but myself plotting, thinking or writing under the avatar of a narrator. Although, yes, the avatar, the personality of each of my narrators, is different in each novel and possibly the only thing that unites them all is the Voice, that "visible literary self" that reappears in each new book and gives continuity to the work
As in other of his books, contemporary art appears. If in Kassel he does not invite logic (2014), they sent him to a Chinese restaurant as a performance, here they place him in the middle of the Pompidou, no less.
That, in reality, the author lived it.
Was he in the middle of the Pompidou?
On the occasion of the first retrospective of his work, the artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster set up a hotel there with various departments that evoked his old works. In that hotel there was only one room, and it was going to be her, she said (and she fulfilled it), for me, to the point that only I was going to have the key. My real room, she got to call it.
Did you only see that place? What was there?
An empty red suitcase. Nothing more. And a door at the back that, as I supposed, I couldn't open. A nod to a suitcase that I had found in a room in Toulouse when I entered my newly made room. I remember that, when I met again with the Spanish literary delegation, I told José Carlos Llop about my surprise at that suitcase and he told me that he would surely end up writing about it.
The artist in the novel is called Madeleine Moore.
The author admires her but she is terrible, perverse, charming and a great writer. The characters are quite double, they all have light and shadow. Normal, because Montevideo is basically a treatise on the ambiguity of the world. Madeleine Moore is Gonzalez-Foerster's evil doppelganger.
Bogota is hell.
I went there before the end of the century, the worst moment, I had a very bad time. The street was scary. It was not the Bogotá of today. There were security guards everywhere, but you knew they weren't going to intervene if you had a mishap, they were just minding their own business. They had declared a state of siege the night I arrived, and I had to drive around with a pass.
The narrative voice is afraid of sounding too paranoid, but she doesn't realize that's part of her charm, like her obsessions.
If you want to conclude that the narrator is paranoid, I won't deny it. It's true: paranoia is important to writing, see Philip K. Dick. But it is difficult to justify, for example, that two hotel rooms disappear in one night. Justifying it, furthermore, would diminish the mystery. Instead of trying to explain them (which would be like wanting to explain the mystery of the universe) I sometimes give clues so that some enigmas can be discovered by the reader himself.
Here, of course, there are long corridors that connect with Bartleby and company (2000) and with Paris Never Ends (2003)...
It's to create the impression that I'm doing autofiction... but I'm not. Martin Amis has invented various things in his memoir. The best game is that the doubt remains, that they ask me if the book is true or false.
It is true?
It is a true fiction.
The narrator says: "We were weird, we only noticed the anomalous and the incomprehensible."
I always found everything weird. But then they told me: 'No, you're the weird one because you only look at the weird!' That has never been clarified... There are people to whom strange things also happen, but they happen to me continuously. At the Ondarribia airport, I was on the plane with a rugby team, all drunk, we couldn't get out, they did a judo lock on the stewardess and the police had to go. Isn't that weird?
Sometimes, the narrator responds with other people's phrases.
It is the game of Je est autre. It's not that difficult: it simply consists of reacting quickly when someone asks you if it's true that you don't write anymore and answering on behalf of someone other than yourself, choosing for the imposition whoever reminded you of the tone used in the question. And the tone, for example, in which a Barcelonan asks the narrator the question in question at Austerlitz station is so dark that the narrator decides to transform into Lovecraft and answer him.
The thing about the two twins singing Senza un perché seems like it's going to be the start of a big rampage, but she holds back.
In another time, I might have gotten out of hand, but it would have been a mistake. In the book I hold back, but Senza un perché I wear it all day to cheer me up. “E tutta la vita / Infinite tour senza un perchè / E tutto come dal niente / E niente rimane senza di te...”
I have underlined “Montevideo is a city but also a state of mind”.
Oh! I love that phrase, I had it prepared for the interview but it hasn't let me say it.
We'll put it on as well.
But put it all whole, eh? Don't cut it.
He talks about French writers.
I say that every good writer is French, even if he is not by birth. I don't know if the French will be angry...
That is the highest compliment to a culture.
Everything is French, in general, and in this book even more so. After writing it, I saw that it always seemed to be written from Paris.
Another novelty: you speak of terrorism and Islamist attacks.
Yes, that was the reality of 2015, when the book ends. I'm looking. Every book is a search for its own style. Kafka stayed on the search, that is the most reasonable attitude, nobody finds anything. In fact, if you do the perfect deed you are dead.
Another underlined: 'Making a book is the sign that I am alive'.
I write a book basically to find my way out of it, like moving through a maze.
The narrator is accompanied at all times by the latest generation of mobile phones, which he uses like a magic wand.
As far as I know, there is no such night mode, capable of seeing the invisible door, it is a mobile that sees beyond, and sees the door that will be there the next day but is not there at that moment. They haven't invented that yet, have they?
And the Parisian clochard...
There is, totally, yes, yes. He was a clochard that I saw a lot in front of the Café de Flore, he smoked cigars, and he was a well-read guy. One day when it was snowing and when Antonio Tabucchi felt lonely, he sat on the ground with him and the beggar told him: 'Look, from here you can see the men go by, and you see that they are always sad'.
He points to a phrase by Bolaño: 'A man can bear many things, but a poet can bear everything'.
Since I'm not a poet...
Have you ever written poetry?
At 17, I keep it because I keep it but nothing, nothing... I feel like a poet but I don't write poetry. In Cascais they gave me an award for film directing, something that fills me with pride but that I have never done.
Wouldn't you make a movie?
I proposed my books to David Cronenberg's producer, but I am not adaptable to cinema, unless someone did something else with my stories. The Catalan adaptation of one of my novels, El viaje vertical, allowed me to see the problems that my books had when they were transferred to the cinema. The lack of action, for example. A man thinking about a bathtub doesn't seem like the plot of a great movie...
I disagree: Paris never ends could never be a good movie.
That yes, perhaps, with a good young actor...
Why do blockbusters appear here? And, specifically, a box office seducer.
They evoke the post-war period, all the power that the box office sellers had in Barcelona. On Christmas Eve and Christmas the cinemas were full and, to get into them, you had to meet a box office girl who would give you a ticket. The power of the box office was brutal. It looked bad not having movie tickets on those two days. It was like in our days not going on vacation in August.
