Dublinesque

by Enrique Vila-Matas

  He leaves the window and goes to the kitchen and as he walks down the hall he thinks about the opening of Ulysses, so apparently flat, although really this beginning gives off a harmony rarely forgotten. It takes place up on the gun platform of the Martello tower, built in Sandycove in 1804 by the British army to defend against a possible Napoleonic invasion:

  Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

  — Introibo ad altare Dei.

  Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

  — Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful Jesuit.

  Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest.

  He’s sure that, when the moment comes, he’ll enjoy being up on the circular gun platform, where this legendary scene from Ulysses takes place. Moreover, very near to there, in Finnegan’s pub in the village of Dalkey, is where his young friend proposes that the first meeting take place of the Order of Knights — to be named the Order of Finnegans after this very pub, and not after Joyce’s book of the same name — which his friend wants to found on June 16 itself.

  The news that this will take place has just arrived in an instantaneous electronic reply from Nietzky. Simply because it comes from Nietzky, the creation of this kind of Finnegansean club strikes him as a good idea. Couldn’t he, in his melancholy, stand to be in a few clubs and some meetings? In any case, anything Nietzky comes up with or writes usually seems pertinent. What’s more, the email has arrived at just the right time, and has made him very happy because it’s arrived in the middle of a series of messages from other people in which — with no change in the trend that’s established itself in the messages he’s received lately — no one invites him to anything, not one conference or publishers’ meeting, nothing at all; they just pester him with trivial matters or ask him for favors. In a way, they’re forgetting about him without forgetting him.

  He’s been prudent with Ricardo and Javier, but with Nietzky he’s going to act in a very different way. He will dare to tell Nietzky that in Dublin he wants to hold a requiem for the Gutenberg galaxy, for this galaxy, now a pale fire, of which Joyce’s novel was one of the great stellar moments. And it’s not just that he plans to tell Nietzky this; he’s telling him right now in the email he’s writing.

  Without any sort of preamble or overly complicated explanation, he tells Nietzky he wants to take the English leap — he hopes he gets what he means, and that in the long run, with his particular talent, he might even broaden the expression’s meaning — and he explains, moreover, that he’s thought of holding a requiem for the end of the Gutenberg era, offering a requiem about which all he knows, for now, is that it should have something to do with the sixth chapter of Ulysses. A funeral in Dublin, he says, and stresses this. A funeral not just for the extinct world of literary publishing, but also for the world of genuine writers and talented readers, for everything that’s needed nowadays.

  He’s sure that sooner or later Nietzky will come up with some ideas for the funeral rites, will suggest, for example, where to hold them. St. Patrick’s, the cathedral, is a seemingly appropriate place for the ceremony, but there may be others. He’s also sure Nietzky will end up telling him which words to use to give a dignified send-off to the Gutenberg era. In any case, it would be good and opportune to link the funeral with Ulysses’ chapter six. It’s the only thing that seems self-evident to Riba, especially when he sees — although he keeps this to himself — how Javier, Ricardo, and young Nietzky have already started to seem like living replicas of the three characters — Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, and John Power — who accompany Bloom in the funeral procession crossing the city to Glasnevin Cemetery on the morning of June 16, 1904.

  It doesn’t escape Riba that it’s characteristic of the imagination always to consider itself to be at the end of an era. For as long as he can remember he’s heard it said that we are in a period of maximum crisis, a catastrophic transition toward a new culture. But the apocalyptic has always been there, in every era. We find it, for instance, in the Bible, in the Aeneid. It exists in every civilization. Riba understands that in our time the apocalyptic can only be dealt with parodically. If they manage to hold this funeral in Dublin, it can’t be anything other than a great parody of the weeping of a few sensitive souls for the end of an era. The apocalyptic demands a lack of excessive seriousness. After all, ever since he was a boy he’s been sick and tired of hearing that our historical and cultural situation is uncharacteristically terrible and in a certain way privileged, a cardinal point in time. But is this really true? It seems doubtful that our “terrible” situation is so different from that of our ancestors, as many of them felt the same as we do, and as Vok puts it, if our criteria seem satisfactory to us it would have been the same for them. Any crisis, after all, is just a projection of our existential anxiety. Perhaps our only privilege is to be alive and know we’re all going to die together or separately. In the end, thinks Riba, the apocalyptic has a splendid fictional veneer, but it shouldn’t be taken too seriously, because actually, if I look at it properly, what it offers me is the joyful, emphatic, and happy paradox of a funeral in Dublin, that is, it offers me what I’ve been most in need of recently: something to do in the future.

  Nietzky doesn’t always reply to emails straight away. He soon sees that Nietzky’s speedy reply to his previous email was an exception to the rule. The minutes go by and he starts to see that Nietzky isn’t prepared to reply so swiftly now.

  Two whole days of certain amounts of anxiety.

  During those days, moments of intense impatience and bewilderment. Like a good hikikomori, Riba believes the emails he sends will always be answered immediately. And it rarely happens. With Nietzky he’s been left feeling more disconcerted than he should be, knowing as he does that his young New York friend has never been a man of instantaneous email replies.

  He spends two days waiting for the reply. And finally even Celia seems to be waiting for Nietzky to deign to reply, perhaps because she wishes with all her heart that her hikikomori husband would take some sort of exercise for once — even if it’s only getting onto a plane — and get as much air as possible in Dublin.

  From time to time, over these two days of waiting, Celia expresses an interest in knowing if his friend from New York, young Nietzsche — she calls him this by mistake, without malice — has shown any signs of life.

  “No, not one, it’s as if the earth has swallowed him up. But he’s already promised to come to Dublin, and that’s enough,” Riba replies, hiding from Celia his fear that Nietzky might not like, for instance, the idea of having to come up with ideas about how and where to hold the requiem.

  When finally, after two long anxious days, Nietzky’s reply arrives, night has fallen in Barcelona, and Celia is asleep. So Riba can’t tell her the good news straight away. Nietzky writes from a hotel in Providence, not too far from New York, and tells him that, just as he said in his previous email, he’s really enthusiastic about repeating the trip to Dublin he took last year. Regarding the English leap, he says he thinks he knows what it refers to. And he remarks, with neurotic energy, that out of the Protestant and the Catholic religions, he prefers the latter: “Both are false. The first is cold and colorless. The second is forever associated with art; it’s a beautiful lie, that at least is something.” Then comes a disconcerting sentence: “You were Jewish, weren’t you?” And immediately afterward, for no real reason whatsoever, he starts talking about New York, and begins a long and unexpected string of personal complaints. He writes of the appalling changes the city is constantly subjected to and says his “own requiem for the days when, wherever you lived, you could always find a few blocks from home a grocery store, a barbershop, a newsstand, a dry cleaner’s, a florist, a liquor store, a shoe store. .”

  Then there is a P.
S. in which he mentions a meeting he’s set up with a society of Finnegans Wake fans, the strange and, according to Nietzky, not at all unsuccessful last book by James Joyce: “On Wednesday I’m going to a gathering the members of the Finnegans Society of Providence have held on the fourth Wednesday of every month for sixty-one years. They have a website. I rang them up and the guy who answered seemed very surprised by my Hispanic accent. He asked me if I had any experience with the text. I said I did. He said it wasn’t necessary. He gave me the address of the place they meet, which isn’t on their website: number twenty-seven and a half (that’s what he said), Edison Street. When I told him my Polish surname, he started doubting I was Spanish again.”

  And not a word about the funeral?

  Unsettled by this piece of information about the sixty-one years of the Finnegans Society, it takes Riba a while to realize there’s a P.S. to Nietzky’s P.S., which he doesn’t notice until he stops thinking about the curious coincidences between his parents’ marriage and that of the Providence Finnegansean society: they have the same number of years, sixty-one.

  In the P.S. to the P.S., he reads: “There’ll be time for everything in Dublin, even I think to find a good place for our heartfelt eulogy for the glorious, annihilated age of Gutenberg.”

  Perfect, thinks Riba. I hope that when Nietzky says the “heartfelt eulogy,” he’s doing so mockingly, as if sensing the most ideal way to handle the funeral is to do it parodically. I await his concrete ideas for the requiem, the ones I need. I couldn’t have a better collaborator for Dublin. And now that he’s confirmed his complicity he’s brightened up my day.

  But it’s a strange way that Riba feels this happiness. He celebrates by starting to worry that his “there’ll be time for everything” might refer to going to lots of pubs in Dublin. If this suspicion is true, he’s in real danger. He could end up succumbing to the temptation of alcohol and drinking in a pub called the Coxwold, and then crying dejectedly, hopelessly drunk and full of remorse, sitting on the pavement down an alleyway, maybe consoled by Celia, or by her phantom, since Celia won’t be going to Dublin, but her phantom might very well do so. .

  Enough, he thinks. These are ridiculous fears. And he stops being paranoid. Although his strange way of celebrating Nietzky’s reply doesn’t stop. Because now he starts to celebrate Nietzky’s complicit wink by imagining that it takes the color and weight away from life and strips away almost everything until it seems like a delicate shadow, lit by a distorted light, an imaginary anemic lunar shining. This shadow is Riba himself. And it remains logical that this is what he is. After all, doesn’t he now just seem like a poor old man, a simple assistant to Nietzky in this whole story?

  On the trip to Dublin, Nietzky sees himself acting solely as his friend’s protector over there. Riba has secretly handed command of the trip over to him. It matters little that Nietzky’s actually an inexperienced young man. A few weeks ago, in spite of Nietzky’s age, Riba secretly named him “his second father.” And the thing is that he has a very similar relationship with Nietzky to that which he’s had his whole life with any “paternal figure”: when he’s with him, just as with his father, he’s nearly always surprisingly meek, and despite being almost sixty, open to all kinds of instructions and orders.

  In fact, he feels a quiet and huge fundamental admiration for his father as well as for Nietzky, and an infinite sense of calm in knowing he’s at their service, knowing he’s controlled and guided by their ideas. He doesn’t know any other father as conscientious as his own. Nietzky, meanwhile, has no idea what it means to act as the head of a family; maybe this is why he seems ideal as a second father. They complement each other: the paternal shortcomings of one are compensated by the excesses of the other.

  In any case, it’s clear that we’re dealing with quite an embarrassment of fathers. Maybe caused, as he comes to think more and more insistently, by the fact that he doesn’t know himself. He doesn’t know himself at all. Because of his brilliant catalog, he doesn’t know who he is, and instinct tells him it’s unlikely he ever will. And it’s likely that it’s due to this self-neglect that the need for protection from certain heights arises, for protection from those summits supposedly inhabited by a warm — and in this case two-headed — father, good-natured at times and at others a talented, constant creator of neurotic excitement in New York.

  Maybe he has a vague yearning for a concealed architect of his days, and so is forever on the hunt for him, in the family home or the bright streets of New York. He always walks around as if he were about to run into an almighty omnipotent father, that abstract figure he sometimes imagines as a stranger — maybe just a young man with a ridiculous Nehru jacket — someone who’d be directing everything under a weary light.

  At night, he remembers a phrase of Mark Strand’s he might add to the Word document where he notes down everything that catches his interest during the day, a document that’s growing almost on its own, as if the phrases, slowly crossing paths with each other, are falling like snowflakes, “as flakes of snow / on Alpine summit, when the wind is hush’d,” as Dante said in the Inferno.

  Mark Strand’s phrase goes like this: “The search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living.” Does he really seek lightness? He realizes that everything this evening seems to be directed toward a loss of gravity and heading toward the very moment he has decided to get some air and take the nimble English leap once and for all; he understands that he has actually become someone waiting for this leap, which began as just a pleasant image, a rhetorical figure.

  He walks down the hall; he’s going to consult a book by Italo Calvino, which also mentions lightness. And there he discovers the episode of the poet Cavalcanti’s leap. Cavalcanti. In this case, an Italian leap. He’s quite struck by the relative coincidence, and is literally rooted to the spot in the study. And when he finally manages to move, he takes the book and sits down in his favorite armchair. Celia is asleep, probably happy, if one goes by the last words she said to him: “You must always love me like you do today.”

  He’d forgotten this leap the nimble Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti performs in an episode of the Decameron by Boccaccio, and in this casual discovery thinks he’s found one more reason, in his furious obsession and need to be more foreign every day, to take the English leap. To Calvino, nothing better illustrates his idea that there must be a necessary lightness that can be inserted into life and literature than the story in the Decameron by Boccaccio, in which the poet Cavalcanti appears, an austere philosopher who walks around in meditation among the marble tombs of a Florentine church.

  Boccaccio tells us that the jeunesse dorée of the city — youths who ride around in a group and who have it in for Cavalcanti because he will never go out on a bender with them — they surround him and try to mock him. “Guido, thou wilt be none of our company,” they say, “but lo now, when thou hast proved that God does not exist, what wilt thou have achieved?” Cavalcanti, seeing he is surrounded by them, presently answers: “Gentlemen, you may say to me what you please in your own house.” And resting his hand on one of the great tombs and being very nimble, he vaults over it, and landing on the other side, he evades them, and goes on his way.

  He’s surprised by this visual image of Cavalcanti freeing himself in one leap “si come colui che leggerissimo era.” He’s surprised by the image, and what’s more, the Boccaccio extract immediately makes him want to land on the other side. It occurs to him that, if he had to choose an auspicious image for the new rhythms his life is moving to, he would choose that one: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times — noisy, aggressive, revving, roaring — belongs to the realm of death — like a cemetery for rusty old cars.

  And shortly afterward he remembers a few words from a book which, just as with Calvino’s collection of essays, was decisive during his
first few years as a reader. This book was Short Letter, Long Farewell by Peter Handke. He read it in the seventies, and thinks he remembers finding in it his generation’s tone of voice, or at least the one he was looking for when he started publishing, because right from the start he believed it wasn’t exclusively writers who had the privilege of choosing a voice, but that the publisher also more than deserved the right to acquire a certain tone and to allow this tone, this style, always to come across in all the books on his list.

  And now Riba remembers too that what surprised him most about Handke’s book was that, at the end of the novel, the two young protagonists — the narrator and his girlfriend Judith — speak with the filmmaker John Ford, a character who’s a real person. So characters such as Ford could appear in fiction, even if they weren’t exactly themselves and didn’t say exactly what they might have said in real life? It was the first time he realized doing something like that was possible. And he thought it very shocking, almost as much as the fact that in the novel Ford always speaks in the first person plural: