Dublinesque

by Enrique Vila-Matas

  In the same way that death shelters the malady of death inside itself, that is, its own malady, there are publishers whose most intimate tormentor, the writer’s malady, gnaws away at them, a background noise, whose sound recalls the crunching of dry leaves.

  One day in Antwerp, Riba spoke of this crunching sound to Hugo Claus. He spoke of how he was doomed to live with the writer’s malady, and mentioned that his head was forever pierced with sorrow, due to that persistent, intimate monster and its goddamned buzzing, reminding him constantly that apparently nothing in life could exist without it, without the malady, without that background noise, without that savage, relentless crunching; always reminding him that the malady, the murmur of dry leaves, was a vital cog in the diabolical mechanism of his mental clockwork.

  Hugo Claus, so famous for The Sorrow of Belgium, silently sympathized with him and then remarked simply:

  “The sorrow of the publisher.”

  The anguish that gives every sign of being dementia is gradually causing him to feel lost, drifting strangely through that dangerous childlike area on the edges of his mind, where he knows he might lose himself forever at any moment. But at the last second he manages to escape the danger by thinking of something else, remembering, for instance, that he has a moral intelligence, even though at times he feels this is not much, though sometimes he feels it’s quite a lot. And he escapes from the danger at last by remembering too that next month he’ll go to Dublin. And by recalling a line of Monica Vitti’s in Red Desert, a line that, he now realizes, is almost as dangerous as the most feverish and most obsessively particular wanderings around London’s East End might be for anyone:

  “My hair is hurting me.”

  He could say the same thing too. Spider would certainly say it. Spider, who walks through life so lost, doesn’t know Riba could imitate him and reconstruct his personality by adapting other people’s memories — he could turn into John Vincent Moon, one of Borges’s heroes, for example, or into an accumulation of literary quotations; he could become a mental enclave where several personalities could find shelter and coexist, and thus, perhaps without even any real effort, manage to shape a strictly individual voice, an ambiguous support for a nomadic, heteronymous profile. .

  There’s no doubt Riba has a certain facility for going off on mental tangents and making life more complicated than necessary. He is like a follower of the Italian writer, three of whose books he published, Carlo Emilio Gadda, who was a neurotic as admirable as he was phenomenal: Gadda threw himself into the page he was writing, with all his obsessions. And everything he did was incomplete. In a short article about risotto alla milanese, he made things so complicated that he ended up describing the grains of rice, one by one — including the moment when each one was still enveloped in its little husk, the pericarp — and naturally, he was unable to ever finish the text.

  Riba has a tendency to read life like a literary text and sometimes to see the world like a tangled mess or a ball of wool. So that when Celia interrupts the film and his reflections on Gadda and the risotto, and his digression about John Vincent Moon, so she can say, in the most prosaic tone possible, that afterward she will heat up the leftover potatoes au gratin in the oven, he remembers a Jules Renard quote, a perfect snippet: “A young woman from London left this note the other day: ‘I’m going to kill myself, father’s dinner is in the oven.’”

  Celia seems to him to be acting as if she’s already a Buddhist, and also as if she’s convinced that everything he thinks leads him to get dangerously lost on the edges of his East End.

  So as not to get so lost, Riba turns slightly and looks to the left, at the kitchen. The potatoes au gratin are, in effect, already in the oven. But it doesn’t escape his notice that this is merely a relative truth, as at any time a madwoman, or Spider himself, could come through the door and dispute this piece of evidence and all others, every single one, including the simple truth of the potatoes au gratin.

  When they have finished watching Spider, he hurls himself at the computer like a desperate man. The hours of computer abstinence have brought him to the brink of a nervous breakdown. And a serious hairache. On the other hand, not sitting in front of the computer has meant that the pain in his right knee has abated slightly, pain he attributes to an excess of uric acid, although in reality it might simply be arthritis, the onset of old age, why kid himself?

  He sits down in front of the computer screen wearing the same expression Spider does that clearly demonstrates his failure to communicate with a world he doesn’t understand. First, he searches for the latest news about himself on Google. Within the last few days, there is none. He then spends some time looking at a huge range of websites and finally comes across an article that seems oddly related to his decision to hold a funeral in Dublin. The writer of the article claims we will arrive sooner than expected at the digitalization of all written knowledge and the disappearance of literary authors, in the interests of producing a single universal book, an almost infinite flow of words, which will be reached, naturally, the writer says, by means of the internet.

  The disappearance of literary authors is a topic that touches him deeply. This reality that the web announces for the future, becoming clearer every day, never fails to move him. “But perhaps,” says the writer, “instead of surprise, the predicted end of the printed book might now provoke rejection in the traditional reader. What to say about the writer who sees in this vertigo a sort of attack on the purpose and the nature of his work? However, it would appear that the course has been set and the die cast for paper and ink. No argument will divert its terrible fate, nor is there any clairvoyant or prophet who can predict its survival. The funeral march has begun, and it is futile for those of us who remain loyal to the printed page to protest and rage in the midst of our despair.”

  He is struck by the writer saying the funeral march has begun. Then, he decides to open his email and finds the email he expected from a friend, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, who finally tells him in detail about the installation she is preparing for the end of July in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern. They have been good friends since he published a very comprehensive book on Dominique’s work five years ago. He feels that amidst the general decline of his life, his friendship with the French artist is one of the few things that hasn’t turned into a disaster.

  He has always been fascinated by the way Dominique’s installations connect literature and cities, films and hotels, architecture and abysses, mental geographies and authors’ quotations. She is a great lover of the art of quotation and very specifically of Godard’s technique from his early period, when he inserted quotations, the words of others — real or invented — into the action of his films.

  Recently, Dominique has been filled with passion for other people’s phrases and is trying to create an apocalyptic culture of the literary quotation, a culture of the end of the line, and as a matter of fact, of the end of the world. In her installation for the Turbine Hall, Dominique, with her dynamic relationship to quotations, wants in part to situate herself in Godard’s wake, while at the same time locating the visitor in a London of 2058, where it has been raining cruelly, without let-up, for years.

  The idea — Dominique tells him in her email — is that one sees how a great flood has transformed London, where the incessant rainfall over the last few years has had strange effects; there have been mutations in the urban sculptures, which, invaded by damp, have not just eroded, but have also grown monumentally, as if they were tropical plants or thirsty giants. In order to stop this tropicalization or organic growth, they are stored in the Turbine Hall, surrounded by hundreds of metal bunks that, day and night, cradle men who sleep, and other vagabonds and refugees from the flood.

  Dominique plans to project a strange film, more experimental than futuristic, onto a giant screen, which will bring together scenes from Alphaville (Godard), Toute la mémoire du monde (Resnais), Fahrenheit 451 (Truffaut), The Jetty (Chris Marker), and Red Desert (Antonioni): quit
e an end-of-the-world aesthetic, very much in keeping with the apocalyptic feeling Riba himself has had for some time now.

  On each bunk there will be at least one book, a volume that, with modern corrective treatments, will have survived the excessive dampness caused by the rains. There will be English editions of books by authors almost all published in Spanish by Riba: books by Philip K. Dick, Robert Walser, Stanislaw Lem, James Joyce, Fleur Jaeggy, Jean Echenoz, Philip Larkin, Georges Perec, Marguerite Duras, W. G. Sebald. .

  And playing an undefined sort of music between the metallic bunks, there will be musicians who will be like an echo of the orchestra that went down with the Titanic but playing acoustic string instruments along with electric guitars. Maybe what they play will be the distorted jazz of the future, perhaps a hybrid style that, one day, will be called electric Marienbad.

  The coexistence of the music with the rain, the books, the sculptures, the literary quotations, and the metal bunks in the exhibit — where Riba imagines, he doesn’t know why, replicas of Spider appearing, phantoms walking everywhere — might produce a strange result, as if — Dominique ends up telling him — the spectral hour had arrived and we were all walking lost among the ruins of a great disaster, in an unmistakable apocalyptic state.

  He sits absorbed in front of the computer when suddenly he remembers that terrible day last week when, simultaneously sweet and ridiculous, he went for a walk at dusk, in a light rainstorm, wearing his old raincoat, his shirt with its torn collar turned up, his hideous short trousers, his hair completely plastered to his head. Car headlights were blinding him, but he carried on walking through the streets of the neighborhood, focusing on his thoughts. He was aware how strange his appearance was in the rain — mainly due to the short trousers — but also that there was no longer any solution, that it was too late now to try to put things right. He had spent hours hypnotized in front of the computer, and in a fit of lucidity, had decided to dash out into the street to get some air no matter what. He went out just as he was, in exactly the same clothes he wore around the house. Seven whole hours he had spent shut up in his study. It was actually not so much time, considering that his daily ration of confinement was usually much more extreme. But that day he had felt especially sensitive to being confined. Worried about himself and his excessive isolation, he had launched himself into the street carrying his old raincoat, but he had made the mistake of forgetting his umbrella, and then it was too late to go home, to go back upstairs to get it, and while he was at it change his trousers, so short and ridiculous under the raincoat. He must have presented a forlorn image to the neighbors, one he couldn’t even justify by explaining that, as a publisher fallen on hard times, he had an understandable touch of madness to him. For a while, as if indifferent to the rain, he could be seen advancing, phantom-like, like one of those guys who showed up in so many of the most celebrated novels he used to publish: those desperate men with a romantic air, always alone, sleepwalking in the rain, walking always along lost highways.

  He has always admired writers who each day begin a journey toward the unknown, and who nevertheless spend all their time sitting in a room. The doors to their rooms are closed, they never move, and yet the confinement provides them with absolute freedom to be who they want to be, to go wherever their thoughts take them. Sometimes he links this image of solitary writers in their writing rooms with one that has been his lifelong obsession: the need to catch a genius, a young man highly superior to the others and who travels in his room better than anyone. He would’ve liked to have discovered and published him, but he didn’t find him, and it seems less and less likely he will do so now. He has never doubted the existence of this young genius. It’s just that, Riba thinks, he remains in the shadows: in solitude, in doubt, in question; that’s why I can’t find him.

  Celia is sitting right beside him, and when she sees with a certain degree of alarm how completely he has sunk into self-absorption, she decides to intervene, to bring him back — as far as possible — into the real world.

  “Let’s return, if you don’t mind,” she says, “to this requiem in Dublin. A requiem in honor of whom did you say?”

  He is going to repeat that it is a requiem for the age of print, a funeral for one of the pinnacles of the Gutenberg galaxy, when suddenly from Ulysses, the funeral Bloom attends in Dublin on June 16, 1904, springs to mind, and he recalls the sixth episode in the book, when at eleven in the morning Bloom joins a group on its way to the cemetery to bid farewell to the dead man, Paddy Dignam, crossing the city to Prospect Cemetery in a carriage with Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, and John Power. Bloom is still an outsider. Bloom, for his part, joins the group quite reluctantly, because he is aware they don’t trust him, because they know of his freemasonry and Jewishness. After all Dignam was a patriotic Catholic who boasted of his own past and that of Ireland. And moreover, he was such a good man he let alcohol kill him.

  — Liquor, what?

  — Many a good man’s fault, Mr Dedalus said with a sigh.

  He remembers when they stop in front of the mortuary chapel. It is a sad chapel, a meditation on death, the saddest he has seen in his life. This is the gray burial of a working-class alcoholic. All the details of the cortège are described and one expects that at any moment happiness will appear in the form of a rose, an unending rose, as Borges would have said. But this happiness is a long time coming, in fact it never arrives. The process of burying the dead man is long and complex. And the grave is deep and endless, as the rose. Nothing is truer than that he has never read anything so sad as that perfectly gray chapter of Joyce’s book. In the end, tin wreaths are left hung on knobs, garlands of bronzefoil. Roses would have been better, the narrator remarks, flowers are more poetical.

  “A requiem for whom?” repeats Celia.

  He wants to avoid at all costs her seeing him as still alienated, or as a now permanently unhinged hikikomori, but his reply doesn’t let her see him any other way.

  “For Paddy Dignam,” he says.

  “For Paddy who?”

  “Dignam, Paddy Dignam, the one with the red nose.”

  It would have been better if he’d said nothing at all.

  Before going to bed, they watch TV for a while. They catch the end of an American film, in which there is a rainy burial. Lots of umbrellas. With great satisfaction, he recognizes Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx, where he went on his second and most recent trip to New York. He went to this cemetery to see Herman Melville’s grave. He recognizes it by the style of the tombstones and because the place etched itself deeply on his memory, and also because visible in the background is the elevated train station he disembarked from to visit the place. Although he sees Celia is very absorbed in the burial scene, he intervenes to say he has been to that cemetery, that he recognizes it by the train station in the background and that it is very familiar to him. Celia doesn’t know what to say.

  “Are you impressed that you’re seeing somewhere I’ve been, or is the funeral scene making more of an impression?” he asks her in a somewhat provocative tone of voice.

  Celia chooses to remain absorbed in the film.

  He doesn’t know why he wants to go to Dublin. He doesn’t think it’s just because he’s fascinated by the idea of waiting around until June 16 to travel to a place where no one has invited him. He doesn’t believe it’s only because he thinks he should go there and then tell his parents about it, to make it up to them for not having said anything about Lyon. And nor does he believe he wants to go to Dublin simply because, if the premonition is true, it might be that he will find himself at the gateway to a great revelation about the secret of the world, a revelation that will be waiting for him in Cork. Nor does he think it’s simply because, if he goes to Dublin he will somehow get a little closer to his beloved New York, although this is another reason he wants to go there. He doesn’t even believe he wants to go to Dublin because he wishes to say a requiem for the culture of the Gutenberg age and at the same time say a requiem for hi
mself, literary publisher very much in decline.

  Maybe he wants to go to Dublin for all these reasons and also for others that escape him and will go on escaping him forever.

  Why do I want to go to Dublin?

  He asks himself silently twice in a row. It’s possible there is an answer to this question, but also possible that he may never find out exactly what it is.

  And it is even possible that the very fact of not knowing the reasons he is going to Dublin in their entirety forms part of the meaning of the journey, in the same way that still not knowing the exact number of words of his requiem may help him to deliver a good eulogy in Dublin.

  He will go to Dublin.

  The following morning, an hour after waking up and with her time already minutely planned out, Celia is getting ready to go to her office at the museum where she works. Her face radiates peace, serenity, tranquility. It might be that these are a consequence of her imminent conversion to Buddhism.

  Celia always goes about things enthusiastically, with enviable drive. She appears helpless and at the same time possesses a frightening strength — both extremes are necessary. Occasionally, he is reminded of what his grandfather Jacobo used to say: “Nothing important was ever achieved without enthusiasm!” Celia is enthusiasm itself and always has an air of giving importance to what she does, whatever it might be, and at the same time of denying all this importance with a simple smile. She says she learned all this from the Oklahoma Theater, that theater whose stage, according to her, was directly connected to the void.

  Oklahoma and Celia seem to be inseparable. Buddha will be the third side to the triangle. Celia often says there is no better place for enthusiasm than the United States. And that life there — she once went to Chicago — is pure theater to her, permanently connected to the void. But she wouldn’t mind going to live in New York if he would only stop obsessing about it and finally decide to move to that place he so yearns for, to the supposed center of the world.