His father interrupts the long pause to tell him, with a smug smile, that he is perfectly aware of the existence of altocumulus clouds and so forth, but he isn’t asking his son to tell him about things he learned in his long-ago school days.
A new silence follows, this time even longer. Time passes extraordinarily slowly. Mixed with the rain and “the unleashing of erroneous energy” is the ticking of the clock on the wall that, when it was in a different room of this apartment, witnessed his birth, almost sixty years ago. Suddenly all three of them stop moving and stay almost motionless, stiff, exaggeratedly stern — not at all exuberant, very Catalan, expecting who knows what, but definitely waiting. They have just begun the tensest wait of their lives, as if listening for the thunderclap that must arrive. Then suddenly the three of them are totally motionless, more expectant than ever. His parents are shockingly old, this is patently obvious. It’s not surprising they haven’t found out that he no longer has the publishing house and that he sees far fewer people than he used to.
“I was talking about the mystery,” says his father.
Another long pause.
“Of the unfathomable dimension.”
An hour later, the rain has stopped. Riba is preparing to escape the trap of the parental home when his mother asks him, almost innocently:
“And what plans do you have now?”
He says nothing, not having expected that question. He has no plans for the immediate future, not even a wretched invitation to some publishers’ conference; no book launch to at least show his face at; no new literary theory to write in a hotel room in Lyon; nothing, absolutely nothing at all.
“I can see you don’t have any plans,” his mother says.
His self-esteem wounded, he lets Dublin come to his rescue. He remembers the strange, striking dream he’d had in the hospital when he fell seriously ill two years ago: a long walk through the streets of the Irish capital, a city he has never been to, but which, in the dream, he knew perfectly well, as if he’d lived there in another life. Nothing astonished him as much as the extraordinary precision of the dream’s many details. Were they details from the real Dublin, or did they simply seem real due to the dream’s unparalleled intensity? When he woke up, he still knew nothing about Dublin, but he felt totally, strangely certain he had been walking through the streets of this city for a long time, and found it impossible to forget the only difficult part in the dream, the one where reality became strange and upsetting: the moment his wife discovered he had started to drink again, there, in a pub in Dublin. It was a difficult moment, more intense than any other in that dream. Caught by surprise by Celia on his way out of a pub called the Coxwold, in the midst of his latest unwelcome drinking binge, he embraced her sadly, and the two of them ended up crying, sitting on the curb of a Dublin side street. Tears were shed in the most disconsolate situation he had ever experienced in a dream.
“Oh my God, why have you started drinking again?” asked Celia.
A difficult moment, but a strange one too, maybe related to his having recovered from physical collapse and being reborn. A difficult, strange moment, as if there was some kind of message in their pathetic weeping. A singular moment due to how especially intense the dream became — an intensity he had only known before when, on repeated occasions, he dreamt he was happy because he was in New York — and because suddenly, almost brutally, he felt he was linked to Celia beyond this life, an incommunicable feeling it was impossible to demonstrate, but as powerful and personal as it was genuine. A moment like a stab of pain, as if for the first time in his life he felt alive. A very subtle moment, because it seemed to contain — like a puff of air, the dream coming from someone else’s mind — a hidden message that placed him just one step away from a great revelation.
“We could go to Cork tomorrow,” Celia was saying.
And that’s where it all ended. As if the revelation were waiting for him in the port city of Cork, in the south of Ireland.
What revelation?
His mother clears her throat impatiently when she sees him so pensive. And now Riba is worried that she is reading his mind — he has always suspected that, being his mother, she can read it perfectly — and she has discovered that her poor son is destined to fall off the wagon again.
“I’m planning a trip to Dublin,” Riba says, this time getting straight to the point.
Up until this precise moment it has rarely, if ever, crossed his mind to go to Dublin. Not speaking English well has always put him off. For business, he always felt it was enough to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair. He used to send his secretary Gauger to the London Book Fair. Gauger was always a huge asset whenever the English language proved essential. But perhaps now the time has come for everything to change. Didn’t it change two years ago for Gauger, who took his life savings and a sum of money Riba suspects he stole from him, and left to go and live in a great big hotel in the Tongariro region of New Zealand, where his stepsister was waiting for him? And anyway, didn’t Celia’s young lover, the one she had before she met Riba, come from Cork?
With charming innocence, his mother asks what he is going to do in Dublin. And he answers with the first thing that comes into his head: that he is going on the sixteenth of June, to give a lecture. Only once he has answered does he realize that this is precisely the day of his parents’ sixty-first wedding anniversary. And what is more, he also realizes that “61” and “16” are like heads and tails of the same number. The sixteenth of June, meanwhile, is the day on which Joyce’s Ulysses takes place, the Dublinesque novel par excellence and one of the pinnacles of the age of print, of the Gutenberg galaxy, the twilight of which he is having to live through.
“What’s the lecture about?” asks his father.
Brief hesitation.
“It’s about James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, and the Gutenberg constellation giving way to the digital age,” he replies.
It was the first thing that occurred to him. Afterward he pauses, and then, as if dictated by an inner voice, he adds:
“They actually want me to speak about the end of the age of print.”
Long silence.
“Are the presses closing down?” his mother asks.
His parents, who — as far as he knows — have not the slightest idea who Joyce is and even less what kind of novel lies behind the title Ulysses and who, moreover, have been caught off guard by the topic of the end of the age of print, look at him as if it’s just been confirmed that, even though it’s beneficial for his health, he’s been very odd lately, owing to his permanent sobriety since giving up alcohol so radically two years ago. He senses this is what his parents are thinking and fears greatly that they are not entirely in the wrong, since his constant sobriety is affecting him, why pretend otherwise? He is too connected to his thoughts and sometimes disconnects fatally for a few seconds and gives answers he should have thought through more, such as the one he has just given them about Ulysses and the Gutenberg galaxy.
He ought to have given them a different answer. But as Céline said, “Once you’re in, you’re in it up to your neck.” Now that he’s announced he is going to Dublin, he’s going to push on into the tangled affair, up to his neck, as far as is necessary. He will go to Dublin. No doubt about it. This will also allow him to verify whether or not the many extraordinarily precise details in his strange dream were real. If, for instance, he sees that in Dublin there is a pub called the Coxwold with a big red and black door, this will mean nothing less than that he really did cry with Celia, in an emotional scene, sitting on the ground, in Dublin, perhaps before he was ever there.
He will go to Dublin, capital of Ireland, a country he doesn’t know much about, only that, if he remembers correctly — he tells himself he’ll look it up later on Google — it has been an independent state since 1922, the very year — another coincidence — his parents were born. He knows very little about Ireland, although he knows a good deal about its literature. W. B. Yeats, for example, is one of his favorite
poets. 1922 is, moreover, the year in which Ulysses was published. He could go and hold a funeral for the Gutenberg galaxy in Dublin Cathedral, which is called St. Patrick’s, if he remembers rightly; there, on that holy site, Antonin Artaud finally went completely mad when he saw no difference between the saint’s cane and the one he was using himself.
His parents are still looking at him as if thinking that his permanent sobriety has led him perilously down the pathways of autism; they seem to be reproaching him for daring to talk about someone called Joyce when he knows perfectly well they have no idea who this gentleman is.
His father turns around in his chair and appears to be about to protest, but finally says only that he would like someone to explain something.
Again? Now it seems like he’s parodying himself. Could it be a touch of humor on his part?
“What, Dad? The storm’s over. What else do we have to explain to you? The unfathomable dimension?”
Unperturbed, his father continues what he’s started, and now he wants to know why exactly they’ve chosen his son to speak in Dublin about the decline of the Gutenberg constellation. And he also wants to know why his son still hasn’t said anything at all about his trip to Lyon. Perhaps he didn’t really go there and wants to hide this from his parents. They are used to him telling them about his trips, and his behavior today is alarmingly anomalous.
“I don’t know, it could be you’ve got a lover and you didn’t go to Lyon with her, but up Tibidabo,” he says. “You’re really doing some things badly lately, and as your father I feel obliged to point this out.”
Riba is about to tell him that he went to Lyon simply to hold a funeral for all the literary theories still in the world, including the one he himself managed to devise in a hotel room there. He’d like to be able to say something like this to his father, because he doesn’t appreciate those last paternal words one bit. But he holds back, he controls himself. He stands up, and begins the ceremony of saying goodbye. After all, it’s not raining anymore. And in any case he knows that when his parents start telling him off, it’s usually just a trick to keep him in the house a little longer. He can’t stay there a minute longer. He realizes that sometimes he lets his father control his life too much. Not having had children and being, moreover, an only child has led to this ongoing state of strange childish submission, but there’s a limit to everything. Years ago, he used to fight a lot with his father. Later on, they made peace. But he thinks that, at times like these, he can sense a certain nostalgia for that period of big arguments, great clashes. As if his father enjoyed hand-to-hand combat more than the current haven of peace and mutual comprehension. What’s more, it’s possible that arguing makes his elderly father feel better, and he unconsciously seeks out confrontation.
Although it’s a recent feeling, in some ways he adores his father: his intelligence, his secret goodness, his unexploited writing talent. He would have liked to have published a novel of his. He adores this man, always so strict, so entrenched in his role as a nineteenth-century father, that he has created in his son the need to be a subordinate, to be such an obedient person that he often even finds himself thanking his father for trying to direct his steps.
“Do you really not want to tell us anything about Lyon? It’s very strange, son, very strange,” says his mother.
They seem determined to keep him there with trifling matters for as long as possible, as if they wanted to delay him from going home, maybe because deep down they have always believed that, even though he is married and a highly respected publisher of almost sixty years of age, when he’s here he is still in short trousers.
Marco Polo is leaving, he thinks of saying. But he keeps quiet, he knows this would make it worse. His father looks at him angrily. His mother reproaches him for having spoiled such a firmly established custom as that of telling them about his latest trip. They walk him to the door, but they don’t make it easy for him to get to the exit, practically blocking him with their bodies. “You’re grown up now,” says his father, “and I can’t understand why you’d want to go to Dublin just to see this friend of yours from the Ulysses family.”
The Ulysses family! This must be another touch of last-minute paternal humor or sarcasm. He calls the elevator which, as always, takes its time arriving, despite only having to come up one floor. His parents have never accepted that, given the short distance to the lobby, he might walk down the stairs, and he, meanwhile, never wished to be the callous son who breaks with the sacred tradition of always leaving in the same clunky old elevator, once so luxurious.
While they wait, he asks his father with childish sarcasm if he doesn’t like the fact his son has a friend. And he reminds him that as a child he didn’t let him have friends, and was always jealous of them. He is exaggerating, but in a way he is right to do so. Isn’t his father exaggerating too? Doesn’t his father, in his heart of hearts, want to forbid him to go to Dublin? So he rebels against him, against his father’s secret wish to stop him going to Ireland. But really he is acting as a small child would do, unable to seriously hurt his father, let alone kill him, as he thinks he remembers Freud recommended earnestly.
No matter how great his tendency or vocation for patience might be, and no matter how much heroic fiber he might be made of, the wait for the elevator seems to go on forever. Finally the hulking old thing comes, he says goodbye again to his parents, steps into the elevator, presses a button, and goes down. Such a huge relief; he breathes deeply. The descent to the lobby is, as ever, very slow; the elevator is very old. As he descends, he feels like he is leaving behind the whole saga of the patio of this mezzanine apartment on Calle Aribau, where as a child he played soccer, always eternally alone. Later on, this patio became the center of his happiest dream, his dream linked to New York.
Out on Calle Aribau, as he gets into a taxi, he realizes it’s about to start raining again. He had thought that after the great storm the rain would ease up. Maybe he could say this to the taxi driver? He hopes he’s not like the somewhat Shakespearean Portuguese taxi driver he met in Lyon, the most theatrical taxi driver in the world.
“It’s going to rain some more,” Riba says.
For a moment, he worries that the taxi driver is going to answer like the character from Macbeth and give the famous reply:
“Let it come down.”
But he doesn’t always — if ever — come across taxi drivers in Barcelona who speak like characters from Shakespeare.
“You said it,” replies the man.
In the taxi he finally finds time to glance through the day’s newspaper, and comes across some comments by Claudio Magris about The Infinite Journey, his latest book. He’s interested in whatever Magris writes. Almost too long ago to remember, he published his book Clarisse’s Ring, and has been good friends with the writer ever since.
The taxi glides along the apparently lifeless streets of Barcelona under a dirty light after the storm. He always worries absurdly that taxi drivers — it’s probably a very childish feeling — will see him barricaded behind his newspaper and get a false impression that, despite having already talked about the weather, he is not in the least bit interested in them and in what they might tell him about their lives of drudgery. He doesn’t know whether to bury himself in his newspaper and read Magris’s comments or talk to the driver and ask him something slightly odd: for example, if he’s been through the forest yet today, or if he’s played backgammon, or watched much television.
This fear that taxi drivers will think him so very indifferent means he sometimes turns the pages of his newspaper very furtively, but this isn’t the case today, since he’s just decided that nothing and no one will be able to distract him from Claudio Magris, whose article is about — a very striking double coincidence — Ulysses and Joyce and about precisely what he is doing now: going home.
He feels he should read this reappearance of Ulysses as a not at all insignificant coded message. As if secret forces — one of them Magris himself with his comments
— are nudging him ever closer toward Dublin. He looks up and gazes out of the window; the taxi has just left Calle Aribau and is turning onto Vía Augusta. When they reach the intersection of Avenida Príncipe de Asturias and Rambla de Prat, he sees a young man on a street corner wearing an electric-blue Nehru jacket. He looks a lot like the man he saw earlier, standing in the rain in front of his parents’ house. Two Nehru jackets in such a short space of time is surely a coincidence.
He sees the young man only fleetingly because, almost immediately, as if fearing he’d been discovered, the man turns the corner and vanishes with astonishing speed.
How strange, thinks Riba, he’s disappeared almost too quickly. Although it’s not so strange really, he’s used to such things by now. He knows that sometimes people one didn’t expect at all can appear.
He goes back to reading the newspaper, he wants to concentrate on the interview with Magris, but ends up calling Celia on his cell phone to tell her he’s on his way home. The short conversation calms him down. When he hangs up, he thinks he could have told her that he’s seen two Nehru jackets in a short space of time. But no, maybe it was better just to have said he was coming home.
He goes back to the newspaper and reads that Claudio Magris believes Ulysses’s circular journey as he returns triumphantly home — Joyce’s traditional, classic, Oedipal, conservative journey — was replaced halfway through the twentieth century by a rectilinear journey: a sort of pilgrimage, a journey always moving forward, toward an impossible point in infinity, like a straight line advancing hesitantly into nothingness.
He could see himself now as a rectilinear traveler, but doesn’t want to create too many problems for himself, and decides that his journey through life is traditional, classic, Oedipal, conservative. He’s going home in a taxi, isn’t he? Doesn’t he go to his parents’ house whenever he comes back from a trip, and on top of that, visit them without fail every Wednesday? Isn’t he planning a trip to Dublin and the very center of Ulysses to then come home good-naturedly days later to Barcelona and to his parents and tell them about the trip? It’s hard to deny his life is following the pattern of a strictly orthodox circular journey.
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