I didn’t learn much about his life. He had always worked for French companies, but after his retirement he had decided to stay in Bogotá, where his children and grandchildren were. He was a widower. His wife had committed suicide while he was in a motel with another woman. He was forty-two when that happened. His wife found out through his secretary, who, I don’t know why, although I can imagine, had promised to inform the wife when he had an appointment with his new lover. She did so and the wife, instead of showing up and causing a scene, cut her wrists in another hotel. The secretary broke down and admitted everything. Monsieur Echenoz assumed the guilt, gave up work, and never saw his lover again. His wife had left a note in which she asked just one question: “Why?” Several times he had a Browning pistol in his hand, but never summoned the courage. His wife was Belgian and had been in Colombia because of him, they had met in Africa. They had done everything together. When I asked him if his lover had been Colombian, he said no, she was Hungarian, and added: I’ll tell you the whole story another day, but in the end he never did. What he did tell me was that a man needs the company of several women, and women, too, although for different reasons. Marriage and monogamy are really stupid, he would say, and above all, the biggest source of unhappiness; a mammal needs to exercise his sexuality, and in both men and women there is a very strong life principle: curiosity. Do you have a boyfriend? he asked, and I said no, I have lovers, people who come and go but nothing more, and he said, good for you, you’re not tying anybody down, young people are quite stupid by definition, but it’s not their fault; they’re stupid because of something that’s been inculcated in them by adults, which is faith in the future; they’re stupid because they have hopes, something that sorts itself out with the passing of years; that’s why the worst thing is for a young woman to marry a young man, because that’s like two idiots uniting their idiocies; the best thing a young woman can do is be with an older man, but not get married, I’m not saying that, I’m saying be with someone older, and listen to my advice: use young men to enjoy yourself, for pleasure, and to obtain material things, let them flatter you, all that’s quite normal, don’t believe the feminists when they say that a woman defends her dignity by being independent, that’s nonsense, women don’t need money because they have something that’s much more powerful than money, and you know what it is. I’ve seen the most powerful men on the planet go to pieces over a vagina: Kennedy, Onassis, Rockefeller, and what about Paris and Menelaus? Now that’s power, and I’ll give you a piece of advice: when you want something, use it, and don’t be ashamed, many people are going to say horrible things to you, especially the feminists and the lesbians, they’re going to insult you, they’ll say it’s because of people like you that women suffer, and maybe they’re right, but you just keep going because we live life as individuals. Men do the same when they’re lucky enough to be desired, especially by older women. Who are they harming? They attract those who are already starting menopause, and they obtain money, gifts, travel. Everyone is happy, but such cases are rare. The opposite is more common. Nobody asks a man to be handsome. They ask him to be powerful or rich. To be famous, to be an alpha male. When I was young and went to the seaside, in Europe, I’d look at the sports cars pulling up at the beach clubs. Their occupants were always rich men, usually fat and vulgar, and they always had beautiful women with them. It never failed. Almost all of them were blondes, even though their eyebrows and the down on their arms were black.
Every night, Monsieur Echenoz had a new story to tell, something to give his opinion about or to teach me, something to contradict, always with the same shameless cynicism. He asked me to tell him about my course, and I talked to him about authors like Mario Bunge, Ernst Cassirer, and György Lukács, especially The Destruction of Reason, and he knew them, reduced them to comprehensible phrases, rejected them, and criticized them in a lucid way that I’d then repeat in class, and the other students would look at me in surprise, where does she get these ideas from? Sometimes Monsieur Echenoz would be interrupted by a violent coughing fit that would drain the color from his face. He had pulmonary emphysema. He had been an alcoholic three or four times during his life. He was dying and would say to me: if only I could get up and go out to buy cigarettes and alcohol, nothing worse can happen to me, I’m going to die soon anyway; I thought to bring them myself, but if his children found out they might report me and I would go to prison for identity theft.
One day I asked him if he had known Malraux and he said yes: when he was very young, in Hong Kong, he’d had to accompany him during an official visit, when Malraux was minister of culture. That was when he had dedicated his book to him. And he added: an arrogant, unscrupulous man. He would have given anything to be richer, more famous, and more powerful than he was, but deep down he never stopped being a parvenu. He actually despised him, and the only reason he kept that book was to remember the irritation such people aroused in him. Who did he admire? I asked, and he said: Céline, a writer who had the courage to say what all of France thought, and who kept saying it right to the end, when saying it earned him a prison sentence. Or Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly, accused of being a pornographer and a monarchist in a country where everybody is a monarchist and a pornographer. He liked Jarrès and Pierre Loüys. Jean Genet too, except when he campaigned for noble causes, and he said, angrily: I can’t stand writers who support noble causes! They’re opportunists who thrive on other people’s blood, hypocrites. When the streets are running with blood, the only sensible advice is that of Baron Rothschild: to buy property. Among contemporaries he admired Houellebecq, because in him he recognized that same spirit unconstrained by conservative morality. France had always had writers like that, according to him, because that crudeness and coldness was part of the Gallic chromosome. He took as an example the language itself, and said: French, which people think is a pretty, sonorous language, is one of the hardest and most hostile. You just have to look at its cruel expressions for referring to cruel things: elle s’est fait violer! (“She had herself raped” instead of “she was raped.”) It’s a language of brute peasants! Only the wicked and the homicidal can get beauty from it, people like Rimbaud or Baudelaire, or like the Marquis de Sade, who was confined to a dungeon and who, according to a very bad film, wrote with his own shit, which is quite ridiculous, of course.
As I climbed the steep, dark, gloomy streets of Upper Chapinero, I would ask myself, what will Monsieur Echenoz tell me about today? Then I started to do my classwork with him. He would tell me to reach him this or that book, and read it to him. Sometimes he himself looked at the index. Of course he couldn’t read aloud, because he didn’t have enough air in his lungs, but I could, and in this way we advanced. I would write and he would read. He would make comments, help me with my writing. He was very strict about words. He always said that ideas were an illusion of language and that’s why in writing you had to be hypnotic, precise, and direct. That’s the one truth, he would say: that which is well expressed, which convinces through its form. I took note of this and then read over what I’d written and realized the number of extraordinary things I was learning with him.