Riba feels a nostalgia for the Protestants. He loves their work ethic. He’s commented on this more than once to Javier himself, who, conversely, is fascinated by cold, hard Catholicism. Now that he thinks of it, Javier would be a good person to accompany him on this trip to Catholic Ireland.
Another odd-numbered day comes around and Javier calls at the same time as always. Why not ask him if he fancies coming to Dublin? There’s still time. He hesitates, but finally does. He tells him the day he’s picked to go to Dublin is June 16, and asks him to look at his diary and see if he can join him on his trip. He’s asking him, he stresses that, he asks him. Javier is silent, disconcerted. His reply takes a while. Finally he promises he’ll think about it, but he doesn’t understand why Riba asks him like this, as if he’s begging him. He’ll come if he can, but it’s strange that he’s begging him. Before when they used to go out in the evening together, he never asked for anything; instead he used to insult him for being published by houses other than Riba’s and for even more trivial things.
“It’s so we could be there for Bloomsday,” interrupts Riba in a little voice, designed to elicit sympathy that he has no one who wants to go with him. For a moment, he worries that the word “Bloomsday” might have ruined everything and Javier will start sounding off about James Joyce and his novel Ulysses, which he has never held in particularly high regard, because he was against Joyce’s intellectualism and in favor of a more orthodox kind of writing, along the lines of Dickens or Conrad.
But today it seems Javier has nothing against Joyce, he just wants to know if Riba won’t want to go out at night in Dublin either. No I won’t, Riba says, but I have thought about suggesting the trip to Ricardo too, and as you well know he’s a night owl. A long silence. Down the line Javier seems pensive. Finally, he asks if it’s just about going for Bloomsday.
Here’s danger. The question resounds in Riba’s ears for a fraction of a second. It would be complete suicide to tell Javier about the funeral for the Gutenberg galaxy; he wouldn’t understand right away and perhaps, not understanding, he’d go back on his decision to travel. Javier asks again.
“Is it just about going for Bloomsday?”
“It’s about, first and foremost, going over to the English wavelength,” he replies.
He worries he’s got it completely wrong saying this, but soon discovers just the opposite, as the phrase has had a surprising effect. He hears Javier cough, enthusiastically. He remembers the other day, when they spoke of taking a leap, a nimble English leap, landing on the other side.
On the other end of the line it sounds like a party is going on. He can’t remember the last time so few words did so much. Shortly afterward Javier says that clearly he has been able to reflect on how good it would be for him to distance himself from the culture that has dominated his life up to now. Even, he adds, if it’s just to go in search of other voices and other environments. And he talks, in a strange fury, about taking away the weight of language until it looks like moonlight. And he also talks about the English language, which he says he’s completely sure that in prose as much as in poetry is more malleable and ethereal than French. And as an example he recites a poem by Emily Dickinson, who is certainly aerial and nimble: “A sepal, petal, and a thorn / Upon a common summer’s morn — / A flask of Dew — A Bee or two — / A Breeze — a caper in the trees — / And I’m a Rose!”
A long pause.
I’m only against the French, says Javier as he breaks the silence. At least this morning, he explains. Do you want me to say it again? No, says Riba, that’s not necessary. Fine, says Javier, let’s not talk anymore about it, I want to take the English leap with you, I’ll come to Dublin and may poor old France be well and truly buried.
Minutes later, they’re talking about the endless rain that’s starting to become an alarming fact for everyone, when they change, almost without noticing, to talking about Vilém Vok, a writer they both admire so much, each for different reasons. To Riba, Vok is, first and foremost, the author of the fictional essay The Center, to the point where he sometimes relates paragraphs from the book to his desire to undertake a third trip to New York very soon, as this city has always held for him the exact magic of the myths some people need to live by. And in turn The Center has been like a Bible reinforcing this magic, helping him through the times when he needed the idea of New York, not just to live by but to survive. What would become of him without New York? Javier knows the book well and says he thinks he understands why it exerts such a direct influence over his old friend and editor, but also says he himself has always preferred snippets from Vok’s other narrative essay, Some Returned From Long Crossings (The Quiet Obsession is the altered, though beautiful and elegant title of the English translation).
As always, they end up talking about soccer. It’s a tacit rule between them, but when they start talking about soccer, this just means that the conversation has entered its final stage. They discuss the upcoming European Championship. Javier states categorically that France won’t get very far this year. And Riba is about to ask him if he doesn’t think he’s really got something against the French today, but decides not to complicate things any further. Bye, Javier says suddenly, talk to you soon. And when his friend hangs up, he understands that the Irish trip is no longer an unknown, but rather has started to take shape on the horizon. He goes to the kitchen to drink another coffee and think about it all calmly. A trip with Javier and perhaps with Ricardo — he promised Javier he’d call Ricardo tomorrow — could be just the thing. Ultimately it will help, for example, Celia to stop seeing him as so autistic and closed off, so chained to his computer and indolence. This is one of his main objectives, thinks Riba. That Celia sees he is active, sees he still wants to meet up with people, communicate outside of the web, not live off the memory of the great books he has published, not be content to see himself every day old and stagnant in the mirror.
On the radio, as if the outside world evolves along with his life, “Just Like the Rain,” sung by Richard Hawley, is playing. He observes with amused surprise how he’s gone from a French song, almost without noticing, to music in English. Outside, as if the radio knew the state of the weather or vice versa, it’s still raining, just like the rain. He registers the fact that by now he can almost whisper the titles of songs in English, and suddenly feels as if his name is Spider and he’s lost weight and is already in a bunk in the great Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in his friend Dominique’s installation. As he gradually approaches, in a way, his sentimental and Sternean center, in search of some sort of equilibrium, the rain in Barcelona becomes still heavier.
He goes over to the largest window in the house. Barcelona is below, at his feet, invisible again. The rain’s persistence over the last few days is strange. He considers what he’d say to someone who asked him what the English leap was. Maybe he’d reply the way St. Augustine did when asked what time was to him: “If no one asks me, I know: If I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not.” But he thinks that, pressed to respond in some other way, he would end up saying that the English leap is landing on the other side, a pastime it’s up to him to invent on his next trip.
In the Eixample district of Barcelona, like anywhere else, there are many casual encounters. It’s a well-known fact: life is governed by coincidences. Although at first glance it might seem so, the encounter Riba just had with Ricardo on Calle Mallorca is not at all casual.
“Well, what do you know. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of,” Ricardo says with a broad smile.
No, not a casual encounter, although Ricardo might think it is. They’ve just practically collided head on and actually bumped into each other, their two umbrellas nearly flying out of their hands. Riba calculated it all so it would happen like this, and now pretends to Ricardo that he was simply heading to La Central, the bookshop a couple of steps from here, on the same street. The truth is different: he’s spent over an hour across the street waiting for his friend to come out of his h
ouse so he could feign a fortuitous encounter. What he is about to propose could never be achieved over the phone. He knows it will turn out well only if there’s a conversation in some café, or in the bookshop itself; a conversation that paves the way so that, when the opportune moment arrives, the proposal of Ricardo coming to Dublin appears quite spontaneous. After all, he’s the most ardent Anglophile of all his friends, a tireless reviewer of books from English-speaking countries. Surely it might interest him to attend his first Bloomsday. Ricardo, moreover, is a world authority on writers such as Andrew Breen and Derek Hobbs, modest Irish writers whom Riba, following Ricardo’s advice, had translated and published in Spanish when they were — they still are — completely unknown.
Apart from being a reviewer and discoverer of English-speaking talents, Ricardo is also an interesting novelist: ultra postmodern at times, more conventional at others. He likes to have, at least, two literary faces: the avant-garde and the conservative. His best work is The Exception of My Parents, an original autobiographical book that Riba published in its day.
They share literary tastes, from Roberto Bolaño (who both of them were friendly with for a time) to Vilém Vok. For this and for a thousand other reasons, Ricardo might be a very suitable person for the trip, even an ideal participant in the funeral for Gutenberg and his galaxy, although Riba doesn’t plan on mentioning anything about this requiem for the moment, because he thinks that, just as with Javier, speaking about all that would be total suicide. Whether one likes it or not, a funeral can always cause bad vibes and scare people. And anyway, Ricardo might think it’s an event organized by publishers nostalgic for the world of the printing press, or something along those lines.
Better, he thinks, not to mention the funeral, at least for now.
“Is your mother well?” asks Ricardo.
Has he confused him with someone else? It’s then that he remembers a month ago he used his mother as an excuse not to attend an evening out Ricardo organized for two English translators of his work.
“My mother is perfectly well,” he replies, somewhat uncomfortably.
He doesn’t ask Ricardo about his own mother, because he already knows she isn’t very well — not in any sense — he’s heard him say so in a thousand different ways, including in The Exception of My Parents, a book where he tirelessly comments on and analyzes his disaster of a mother. Ricardo is from Bogotá, and has lived with his wife and their three children in Barcelona for eleven years. He feels like a stateless writer, and if it’d been up to him to choose a nationality, he’d undoubtedly have opted for an American one. Just as his admired Cortázar as a child traveled slowly with his finger across the maps of atlases, savoring the heady taste of the incomprehensible, as a child Ricardo traveled rapidly through the poems within his grasp in his grandparents’ house in Barranquilla and was eventually drawn to one, which led him to feel an immense desire to grow up and be able to leave Colombia forever, actually to be able to leave behind everything that might cross his path, to be constantly leaving everything behind, to be free and on the move, without ever slowing down.
Even today Ricardo remembers that poem by William Carlos Williams which says that most artists stop, or adopt a style, and in doing so they establish a convention, and that’s the end of them; while, for one who moves, everything always contains an idea, because the one who moves, runs without stopping, the one who moves simply keeps stirring things up. . Leaping in the English way, Riba adds now.
Ricardo is the man in motion par excellence. He can even give the impression he is always on the move, without ever pausing at all. His eldest son, Samuel — named in honor of his father’s old publisher — is seven years old, and was born in Barcelona, close to this house, by La Central bookshop. His three sons will be the main obstacle in convincing Ricardo to join them on the Bloomsday trip, but he’s got nothing to lose by trying; he’ll make the attempt, but not right now, rather when he sees that the most appropriate moment has arrived.
They head for the Bar Belvedere, a place that once upon a time — when he wasn’t a hikikomori and left the house more often — he frequented quite regularly.
“You’ve been really reclusive recently, don’t you think?” Ricardo says in a tone of voice that is exquisitely friendly, yet also caustic.
Ricardo’s question is too impudent, and Riba falls silent. He likes the shiny orange umbrella, damp with rain, which his friend is carrying today. It’s the first time he’s seen an umbrella this color. He says this to Ricardo, and then laughs. He stops in front of the window of a men’s clothing shop and looks at some suits and shirts he’s sure he’d never wear, especially with the rain that’s falling now. Ricardo laughs affectionately, making fun of his friend’s umbrella, and Riba, in turn, asks him if he happens to be insinuating that his own umbrella doesn’t measure up to the orange one.
“No, no,” Ricardo excuses himself, “I didn’t mean that, but maybe you haven’t seen an umbrella for months. You never go out, do you? What does Celia have to say about that?”
No answer. They walk in silence down Calle Mallorca, until Ricardo asks him if he’s read Larry O’Sullivan’s poems yet. Riba doesn’t even know who this O’Sullivan might be, he’s usually only interested in writers he’s at least heard of; he always has this feeling that any others are made up.
“I didn’t know O’Sullivan wrote poetry,” he says to Ricardo.
“But O’Sullivan’s always written poetry! You’re turning into a badly informed ex-publisher.”
As they step onto the terrace of the Belvedere, Ricardo points out a young tree, whose round, firm trunk thrusts itself, almost bodily, into the air with an undulating movement halfway up, sending out young branches in all directions.
“It could be in one of O’Sullivan’s poems,” says Ricardo, lighting one of his customary Pall Malls.
They are now leaning against the bar in the Belvedere, and Ricardo is still talking about the tree O’Sullivan might have written a poem about. Before long he’s just talking about the Boston poet.
“For O’Sullivan, Boston is a city of great extremes,” says Ricardo, without anyone having asked for his opinion on the matter. “A city of heat and cold, passion and indifference, wealth and poverty, masses and individuals —” he smokes agitatedly and talks as if he were writing a review of this poet or had just written it and is now reciting it from memory, “ — a city to live shut in with double locks on every door or to feel excited by its energy. . I see you don’t know O’Sullivan at all. Later, in La Central, I’ll show you something by him. He’s very American, you’ll see.”
Outside, the rain seems to be getting heavier, but it’s just an illusion.
Ricardo, too, is very American, however Colombian he may be by birth. Now he’s assuring Riba, with admirable conviction, that this O’Sullivan is a master of putting the trivial close to the lyrical, and so that Riba might understand him better, he recites a few lines about walking through downtown Boston: “I go get a shoeshine / and walk up the muggy street beginning to sun / and have a hamburger and a malted and buy / an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days.”
He’d like to ask Ricardo what a New World Writing is, but he holds back and merely tries to find out what Ricardo thinks the poets in Ghana might have been doing on that day when O’Sullivan was so inspired. Ricardo looks at him with sudden compassion, almost as if he were looking at a new species of extraterrestrial. But Ricardo is even more Martian-like. At least, his blessed Colombian parents always were, and Ricardo inherited more than a few things from them. Ricardo’s taste for being two-faced probably originated in those parents, his constant leaning toward side A of things, but then his tendency to see its coexistence with side B. All their lives his parents were stubborn progressives, who instilled in him a sort of love-hate feeling toward left-wing revolutionary iconography. Even though they were fiercely gauchistes, his parents were friends — in flagrant, scandalous contradiction — with people as rich
as Andrew Sempleton, the investor and philanthropist, known as the good-humored millionaire.
“Loads of money and a big laugh. Very American,” Ricardo always says when he evokes this outstanding man, who was his magnanimous and affectionate godfather. Riba has always suspected Ricardo will end up writing a novel about Sempleton. Despite managing large sums of money, his rich godfather never fell prey to avarice and was generous with many people, including Ricardo’s parents, above all, when they went to jail in Bogotá for political reasons. With parents like that, Ricardo was destined to have a double face and personality, and that’s what happened: a heavy pipe smoker (domestically, only at home) and (in public places) smoker of Pall Mall cigarettes; a solemn and frivolous writer, depending on the day; a home-loving man and at the same time dangerously nocturnal; a Hyde who was a most wildly modern Colombian, yet a quietly American Jekyll. It would be magnificent if he could persuade him to come to Dublin. Why hasn’t he tried yet?
While he waits for the ideal moment to propose the trip, he recalls some of Ricardo’s stories. From his adolescence, the most memorable is the one about Tom Waits and in a hotel room in New York. The daughter of a friend of some friends of his parents had an appointment to interview Waits in his hotel. Ricardo managed to convince her to let him come along. He just wanted to see — he was dying of curiosity to find out — what Waits did when he was alone in a hotel room. They knocked at the door. Waits opened it with a grumpy look on his face. He had black sunglasses on and was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of very faded jeans.
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