Celia is going to work, but first she drops a hint by means of a terrifying piece of information. Sensing that it won’t be long before her dear autistic husband goes and sits in front of the computer, she tells him that people who regularly use Google gradually lose the ability to read literary works with any kind of depth, which serves to demonstrate how digital knowledge can be linked to the recent stupidity in the world.
Riba accepts the dig, but prefers not to take it personally. When she leaves, he has his first cappuccino of the morning. Really, coffee was devised as a way of concentrating better on the internet, he thinks. Over the last two years, in the absence of alcohol, coffee has been his only stimulant. Today he drinks it faster than ever, at top speed: standing up in the kitchen, gloriously anxious. Then, in an almost desperate attempt not to let a single effect of the caffeine escape, he turns his back on Celia’s words and seats himself at the computer.
For a moment, he considers not spending as many hours as usual in front of the screen, not exactly because of what Celia said, although this has a strong influence, but rather because he has been telling himself for some time now he should set himself life challenges far removed from his recent obsessive tendency to sit motionless at the computer. But he immediately changes his mind. Being almost sixty years old he doesn’t really have any ideas for life challenges. So eventually he decides to delve once more into the internet, where he is unable ever to avoid giving free rein to a certain narcissism by typing into Google first his name, and then that of the publishing house. He knows that, aside from being egocentric, all of this is clearly obsessive. But even so, he doesn’t want to give up this daily habit. The flesh is weak.
This obsessive activity in fact serves to soothe his nostalgia for the time when he used to go to his office and, with his secretary Gauger, inspect every mention in the press about the books they published. He knows that, as a substitute for what he used to do in his office, his current mania is verging on the grotesque, but he feels it is necessary for his mental health. He looks at lots of blogs to find out what they are saying about the books he published. And if he comes across someone who has written something even slightly unpleasant, he writes an anonymous post calling the author ignorant or an idiot.
Today he spends a long time doing this activity and ends up insulting a guy from Barcelona who says on his blog that he took a Paul Auster book on holiday to Tokyo and feels disappointed. What a bastard this blogger is! Riba only published The Invention of Solitude by Auster, and although the book the tourist is putting down is The Brooklyn Follies, he feels just as affronted by this mistreatment of Auster, whom he considers a friend. When he finishes insulting the blogger, he feels more refreshed than ever. Recently he has been so very sensitive and had such low morale that he thinks if he had overlooked this unjust comment on Auster’s book he would have become even more depressed than he was before.
•
He interrupts the hypnotic state the computer has lulled him into for yet another day and stands up. He goes over to the big window for a few moments and from there looks out at the great view over the city of Barcelona, not as fantastic today as it usually is, due to the alarmingly persistent rain. In fact, the whole city has disappeared from his window, disappeared behind a heavy curtain of water. May rain, although a little excessive for this time of year. It is as if up there, in the clouds, someone has begun to collaborate on Dominique’s future installation in the Tate Modern in London.
He senses that this short journey over to the window, this modest, fleeting liberation from the digital world, will turn out to be beneficial. Right away, standing here, even though he’s facing the disappeared view of Barcelona, his hikikomori guilt has diminished. And he starts to see that Celia’s words as she left today are having quite an effect on him. In general, he barely takes a break from the computer until she gets home at a quarter to three. Today he makes an exception and devotes part of his time to standing there in front of the window from which, nevertheless, he can see nothing. Perhaps he hasn’t picked the best moment. What is certain is that today there is nothing to see, except the rubbed-out city and the mist. He stays there for a while, listening to the almost religious, monotonous murmur of the rain. He somewhat loses track of time.
He hardly ever sets foot on the streets of Barcelona. Recently, he merely contemplates the city from up here, but today, with the rain and the mist, he can’t even do this. To think that he used to have a busy social life. Now he has become down in the mouth, melancholy, shy — more than he ever thought — shut up between these four walls. A good drink would liberate him from feeling so misanthropic and timid. But it’s not worth his while because it would endanger his health. He wonders if there is a pub called the Coxwold in Dublin. Deep down he has a burning desire to break his own internal rules and have a good slug of whiskey. But he won’t do it, he knows better. He is convinced that Celia would be capable of leaving him if she saw he was drinking again. She wouldn’t stand for a return to the days of the great alcoholic nightmare.
He won’t have even one drink, he’ll endure stoically. Nevertheless, there’s not a day when he’s not seized by an indefinable nostalgia for bygone evenings, when he used to go out to dinner with his authors. Unforgettable dinners with Hrabal, Amis, Michon. . Writers are such great drinkers.
He leaves the window and goes back to the computer and googles the words Coxwold pub Dublin. It’s a way like any other to make him believe he is quenching his great thirst. He searches and soon sees there’s no pub with this name there, and again feels like going into one for real. Again, he is holding back. He goes to the kitchen and drinks two glasses of water one after the other. There, by the fridge, suddenly leaning on it, he remembers how he sometimes imagines — only imagines — that, instead of spending all his time shut up in the house, a computer addict, he is a man open to the world and to the city at his feet. It is then he imagines he is not a retired, reclusive publisher and a perfect computer nerd, but a man of the world, one of those guys from 1950s Hollywood movies his father wanted so much to resemble, and did. A sort of Clark Gable or Gary Cooper. That kind of very sociable man who used to be called an “extrovert” and who was friends with hotel porters, waitresses, bank clerks, fruit sellers, taxi drivers, truck drivers, and hairdressers. One of those admirable, uninhibited, really open guys who are constantly reminding us that life is essentially wonderful and should be approached with pure enthusiasm, as there’s no better remedy against terrible anguish, such a European disorder.
From the fifties, that time linked to the period of his childhood, he still retains — directly inherited from his father, although much deformed and hidden by his shyness and also by his leftist tendencies and his quite rigorous intellectual veneer — a powerful fascination with the “American way of life.” What’s more, he never forgets that if there is one place where he might one day find happiness, this place is New York. In fact, on the two occasions he’s been there, he came very close to it. This conviction is not at all unconnected to a recurring dream that pursued him for a while. In the dream, everything was as it had been when he used to play soccer eternally alone as a child, out on the family patio of the apartment on Aribau, imagining he was both the visiting and the home team at the same time. The patio was identical to the one at his parents’ apartment, and the general atmosphere of desolation, characteristic of the post-war years, was also similar to the one back then. Everything was the same in the dream, apart from the fact that the gray apartment buildings overlooking the patio were replaced by skyscrapers from New York. This New York setting gave him a feeling of being at the center of the world, and transmitted a special emotion to him — the same one he’d later recognize when he dreamt of being at the center of the world on his way out of a pub in Dublin — and the warm sense of experiencing a moment of intense happiness.
The dream always ended up being a strange one about happiness in New York, a dream about a perfect moment at the center of the world, a moment he
sometimes related to these lines by Idea Vilariño:
It was a moment
A moment
At the center of the world.
Things being as they are, it isn’t at all strange that he started to suspect the recurring dream contained a message telling him how a great, thrilling moment of happiness and extraordinary enthusiasm for the things of this world could only be awaiting him in New York.
One day, already past the age of forty, he was invited to a global conference of publishers in this city he had never set foot in, and naturally the first thing he thought was that he was finally going to travel to the very center of his dream. After the long and tedious flight, he arrived in New York as the day was drawing to a close. He was amazed at once by the great physical extent of American spaces. A taxi sent by the organization dropped him at the hotel, and once in his room, he watched in fascination how the skyscrapers gradually lit up as night fell. He felt deeply uneasy, expectant. He spoke on the phone to Celia, in Barcelona. Afterward, he got in touch with the people who had invited him to the city, and arranged to meet them the following day. Then, he busied himself with his dream. I’m at the center of the world, he thought. And looking out at the skyscrapers, he sat and waited for the sensations of enthusiasm, of emotion, of fulfilment, of happiness. It became clear that the wait, however, was just a wait, nothing more. A straightforward wait, with no surprises, with no enthusiasm at all. The more he looked at the skyscrapers in search of a certain kind of intensity, the clearer it became that he wasn’t going to feel any special sensation whatsoever. Everything in his life was still the same, nothing was happening that might seem different or intense. He found himself inside his own dream, and at the same time the dream was real. But that was all.
Even so, he persevered. He looked out at the street again and again, attempting unsuccessfully to feel happy while surrounded by skyscrapers, until he realized it was absurd to behave like the people Proust spoke of: “people who set out on a journey to see with their own eyes some city they’ve always longed to visit, and imagine they can taste in reality what has charmed their fancy.”
When he realized it was useless to carry on waiting to be inside that dream, he decided to go to bed. Tired from the journey, he fell asleep in no time. He dreamed then that he was a child in Barcelona playing soccer on a patio in New York. Total bliss. He had never felt so ebullient in his life. He discovered that the spirit of the dream, in contrast to what he had thought, was not the city, but the child playing. And he’d had to go to New York to find this out.
Today it’s raining less than yesterday and Barcelona is more visible through the window. Riba thinks about it: no matter what, at nearly sixty, wherever one looks, one has already been there.
Then he corrects himself and thinks almost the opposite: nothing tells us where we are and each moment is a place we have never been. He oscillates between feeling dejected and excited. Suddenly, he’s only interested in how he has managed to bring about this sort of rare calm, this new calmness he seems to be treating with the same level of interest he used to treat new manuscripts that seemed promising.
In the background, on the radio he has just turned on, a Billie Holiday song is playing, melancholy and drowsy, infinitely slowly, while he wonders if one day he’ll be able to think like his admired Vilém Vok used to when he reflected on those who lived in a dreamworld and then returned unscathed from their long travels.
New York’s beauty and greatness lie in the fact that each one of us carries a story that turns immediately into a New York story. Each one of us is able to add a layer to the city, conscious of the fact that it is in New York where the synthesis between a local story and a universal story can be found [Vilém Vok, The Center].
He has always been a passionate reader of Vok, although he never managed to publish him due to an absurd misunderstanding he would rather not even remember now. But there was a time when he had an almost ferocious desire to have Vok in his catalog.
With each day that passes, the thought of New York makes him feel more enthusiastic. Under its spell he feels capable of anything. But his daily life doesn’t correspond well to his dreams. In this he is not exactly different from most mortals. He struggles along with his local Barcelona story that, when possible, turns from a private performance, into a universal, New York one.
Without New York as a myth and final dream, his life would be much harder. Even Dublin seems like just a stopover on the way to New York. Now, after having summoned up his imagination, he walks away from the window in quite a good mood and goes to the kitchen to drink a second cappuccino, and shortly afterward, goes back to the computer, where the search engine offers him thirty thousand results in Spanish for Dubliners, James Joyce’s book of short stories. He read it a long time ago, and re-read it years later, and still remembers many details, but he’s forgotten, for example, the name of the bridge in Dublin cited in the great story “The Dead”; the bridge on which, if he’s not mistaken, one always sees a white horse.
He feels wrapped up in a stimulating atmosphere of preparations for his trip to Dublin. Joyce’s book is helping him to open up to other voices and environments. He realizes that, if he wants to verify the name of the bridge, he will have to choose between flicking through the book — that is, remaining, heroically, in the Gutenberg age — or else surfing the net and entering the digital world. For a few moments, he feels he’s right in the middle of the imaginary bridge linking the two epochs. And then he thinks in this case it’d be faster to look at the book, as he has it there, in his study. He leaves the computer again and rescues an old copy of Dubliners from the bookshelves. Celia bought it in August 1972 from Flynn bookshop, in Palma de Mallorca. Back then, he didn’t know her. Possibly Celia read about the white horse appearing in “The Dead” before he did.
As the cab drove across O’Connell Bridge Miss O’Callaghan said:
“They say you never cross O’Donnell Bridge without seeing a white horse.”
“I see a white man this time,” said Gabriel.
“Where?” asked Mr Bartell D’Arcy.
Gabriel pointed to the statue, on which lay patches of snow. Then he nodded familiarly to it and waved his hand.
This snippet reminds him of a phrase of Cortázar’s overheard mysteriously one day on the Paris Metro: “A bridge is a man crossing a bridge.” And shortly afterward, he wonders if when he goes to Dublin he wouldn’t like to go to see this bridge, where in an imaginary space he’s just located the link between the Gutenberg and the digital ages.
He observes that one of the two names of the bridge transcribed in the Spanish translation has to be wrong. It’s either O’Connell, or O’Donnell. Anyone who knows Dublin would surely resolve this in a fraction of a second. Yet more proof that he is still very green when it comes to Dublin, which isn’t an issue, but a stimulus, and — retired and dull teetotaller that he is — he needs incitements of all kinds. So now he decides that nothing would please him more than going into new subjects in depth; studying places he has yet to visit, and returning from these trips, continuing to study, studying then what has been left behind. He must make choices like this if he is to flee from being a computer nerd, and from the deep social hangover his years as a publisher have left him with.
In terms of finding the name of the bridge, the digital world is more use to him than the print one. He has no choice but to turn to Google, which isn’t serious, since it offers him the perfect excuse to hurl himself at the computer again. There he very quickly finds his answer. He searches first for O’Connell and the search result resolves everything straight away: “The walks and places of interest in the north of Dublin are mainly all clustered around the main street, O’Connell Street. It is the widest and busiest road in the city center, although not exactly the longest. It starts at O’Connell Bridge, mentioned in Dubliners by James Joyce.” He realizes he has another more modern edition of Dubliners in the study, which he could now take the trouble to consult and see if it has t
he same mistake of the bridge’s name. He gets up, leaves the computer for a few minutes — this morning he seems condemned to go from Gutenberg to Google, from Google to Gutenberg, moving back and forth between the two, between the world of books and that of the web — and he pounces on this more recent edition. Here the translation is not by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, but María Isabel Butler de Foley, and there is no confusion about the name of the bridge:
As the cab drove across O’Connell Bridge Miss O’Callaghan said:
“They say you never cross O’Connell Bridge without seeing a white horse.”
. .
Gabriel pointed at the statue of Daniel O’Connell, on which patches of snow had settled. Then he greeted it familiarly waving his hand.
Compare two translations and this sort of thing happens. Mr. Daniel O’Connell, the Dublin statue, has just made a dazzling appearance in Riba’s life. Where has he been up till now? Who is he? Who was he? Any excuse to go back to the computer screen, the only place where, without leaving the house, he has a chance of finding the text of “The Dead” in English, and so discover if Daniel O’Connell was there.
He goes back to his hikikomori position. He searches, and solves the mystery in no time. Daniel O’Connell does not appear in the original: “Gabriel pointed to the statue, on which lay patches of snow. Then he nodded familiarly to it and waved his hand.”
He recalls that someone once suggested that the truly mysterious path always leads within. Was it Celia who said this in a profound Buddhist outburst? He doesn’t know. He’s here now, in their little apartment, awaiting possible events. He has an aptitude for waiting, and has started waiting for this trip to Dublin to somehow take shape. He considers waiting the essential human condition and sometimes will act accordingly. He knows that from today onward, until the sixteenth of June, he will do nothing but be in a state of waiting to go to Dublin. He will wait conscientiously. He has no doubts about managing to prepare himself for the journey.
Dublinesque Page 5