Dublinesque

by Enrique Vila-Matas

  We Americans always say “we” even when we’re talking about our private affairs. We see everything we do as part of a common effort. . We don’t take our egos as seriously as you Europeans.

  Whether solemnly or not, the narrator of Short Letter, Long Farewell always used his “I,” probably because he had studied in Europe. The kind of “I” Handke used was one Riba could immediately imagine influencing him. Since then, in his private life, he has always used a first person singular, although his has been an unnatural “I,” probably because he lost his childhood spirit, that first person inside him that disappeared so early on. And maybe it’s also due to this lamentable absence — because of which he now uses this artificial “I” — that he seems always to be perfectly ready to make the leap over to the other side, that is, fully prepared to become a multiple “I,” in the style of John Ford in the novel, who speaks in the first person plural.

  And the fact is, when Riba thinks, he is simply commenting on the world, something he always does away from home mentally and in search of his center. And on these occasions it’s not strange that he suddenly feels he’s John Ford, and also Spider, Vilém Vok, Borges, and John Vincent Moon, and in short, all the men that all the men in this world have been. Essentially, his plural “I” — adopted because of the circumstances, that is, because he has never been able to find the original spirit again — is not that far from Buddhism. Essentially, his plural “I” was always ideal for the job he did. Isn’t a literary publisher a ventriloquist who cultivates the most varied different voices through his catalog?

  “Do you dream a lot?” Judith asked.

  “We hardly dream at all any more,” said John Ford. “And when we do have a dream, we forget it. We talk about everything, so there’s nothing left to dream about.”

  When he was a publisher he never spoke in interviews about the plurality of his first person singular. It would have been good if, for example, he’d said something like this at some point: “You won’t understand, but really I’m like an Irishman who lives in New York. I combine the American ‘we’ with a furiously European ‘I.’”

  Would it really have been worthwhile to say something like that? He’s always weighed down by doubt, never sure of anything. But it’s true that with the topic of the plural “I” he could have excelled perfectly. Actually, there were so many things he didn’t say in interviews when he was in publishing. He let himself down, for instance, by trying to be diplomatic and not always saying what he thought of certain dreadful authors he didn’t publish. He probably let himself down, wasted his life, by his ridiculous desire to be too sensitive. He was let down by this and also, obviously, by having the spirit of a son instead of the customary protective fatherly temperament that seems so typical in publishers, although it’s also true that there are quite a few who pretend to have it when they actually lack the most basic paternal instinct.

  He remembers that it has been no time at all since he spent an entire morning going around to branches of two different banks and making changes to his investment funds, and yet he sometimes has the impression that an eternity has gone by since that morning. And he observes that even the time when he used to publish all the great literature he could is starting to drift into the distance.

  How old he looks, how old he feels since he retired. And how dull it is not to drink. The world, in itself, is often tedious and lacks true emotion. Without alcohol, one is lost. Although he’d do well not to forget that it’s a wise person who monotonizes existence because then each small incident, if one knows how to read it in a literary way, has a wondrous quality. Never to forget this possibility of consciously monotonizing his life is the only or best solution he has left. Drinking might seriously damage his health. What’s more, he never found anything in alcohol, at the bottom of all those glasses, and nowadays can’t very well explain to himself what it was he was looking for there. Because he didn’t actually manage to avoid boredom, a feeling that always came back relentlessly. Although in interviews he had at times pretended he led an exciting publisher’s life; he used to make things up like crazy back then. Now he wonders what for. What good did it do him to make out that he had an extraordinary occupation and that he enjoyed it so much? Of course it was always better to be a publisher than to do nothing, like now. . Nothing? He’s planning a trip to Dublin, an homage, a funeral for a disappearing era. Is that nothing? How boring everything is, except thinking, thinking one is doing something. Or thinking what he’s thinking now: that it would be good to monotonize his life and try, wherever possible, to look for those hidden wonders in his daily life that, deep down, if he wants to, he’s perfectly capable of finding. Because isn’t he capable of seeing much more than what’s there in everything he experiences? At least all those years are worth something, all those years of understanding reading not just as a practice inseparable from his occupation as a publisher, but also as a way of being in the world: an instrument for interpreting, sequence after sequence, his day-to-day life.

  He carries on getting ready for Dublin, and as his mind drifts, he ends up thinking about Irish writers. Nothing’s truer than the fact that he admires them more every day. He only ever published a couple of them, but it wasn’t because he wasn’t keen to publish more. For a long time, without success, he went after the rights for John Banville and Flann O’Brien. He thinks Irish writers are the most intelligent in terms of monotonizing and finding wonder in everyday tedium. In the last few days he’s read and re-read a few Irish authors — Elizabeth Bowen, Joseph O’Neill, Matthew Sweeney, Colum McCann — and his amazement at their capacity for writing astonishingly well has not diminished.

  It’s as if the Irish had the gift of literature. He remembers that four years ago he saw one of them at a book fair in Guanajuato, Mexico, and discovered, among other things, that they didn’t have the Latin habit of talking about themselves. At a press conference, Claire Keegan replied almost angrily to a journalist who wanted to know what topics she wrote about in her novels: “I’m Irish. I write about dysfunctional families, miserable, loveless lives, illness, old age, winter, the gray weather, boredom, and rain.”

  And at her side, Colum McCann concluded his colleague’s contribution, speaking in an exquisite plural, à la John Ford: “We don’t usually talk publicly about ourselves, we prefer to read.”

  He sits thinking about how much he’d like to speak in the plural like this all the time, like John Ford, like the Irish writers. To say to Celia, for instance:

  “We don’t think it’s a bad idea that you’re thinking of becoming a Buddhist. But we also think it might become a point of dispute and rupture.”

  •

  He knows Ricardo once felt like he was at the gates to the center of the world, but that he was ejected from this place by a radical slam of the door by Tom Waits. He doesn’t know, meanwhile, what Javier’s center might be. He phones him.

  “Sorry,” he says, “but even though it’s not an odd-numbered day I wanted to talk to you, I want you to tell me if you remember any especially great moments in your life, some moment when you felt at the center of the world.”

  An imposing silence at the other end of the phone. Maybe his sarcastic remark about the odd-numbered day has annoyed his friend. There is a silence that seems as if it might go on forever. Until at last, after a terrible, long sigh, Javier says:

  “My first love, Riba, my first love. When I saw her for the first time, it was love at first sight. The center of the universe.”

  Riba asks him what she was doing, his first love, when he saw her that first time. Was she perhaps walking like Dante’s Beatrice down a Florentine street?

  “No,” Javier says, “I fell in love watching her peeling sweet potatoes in her parents’ kitchen, and I remember she was missing a tooth. . ”

  “A tooth?”

  Riba decides to take it all tragically seriously, despite the fact that Javier might just be joking. It’s not long before he realizes he’s made the right choice. His fri
end isn’t joking at all.

  “Yes, you heard right,” Javier says, his voice quivering. “She wasn’t even peeling potatoes, but sweet potatoes, mind you, and the poor girl was missing a tooth.”

  “Love’s like that,” Javier adds, faraway and philosophical. “The first sight of the beloved, although it might seem trivial, is capable of leading us to the strongest of passions, and even at times to suicide. Nothing’s as irrational as passion, believe you me.”

  Since Riba has the impression of having inappropriately unearthed a dark drama, he takes the first opportunity in the conversation to say goodbye, thinking it’s always better to talk to Javier on odd-numbered days, when it’s he, on his own initiative, who calls.

  “Have you ever eaten sweet potato?” Javier asks when they’ve practically already finished their farewells, and were both about to hang up.

  Riba doesn’t like the thought of not replying. But the fact is he doesn’t answer. He hangs up. He pretends the line has been cut off. My god, he thinks, imagine, talking to me about sweet potatoes. Poor Javier. A love affair is always an interesting topic, but mixed with food it’s indigestible.

  He already knows that, at the center of the world, Ricardo had a door harshly slammed in his face by Tom Waits. And that good old Javier, meanwhile, saw a girl peeling something. As for young Nietzky, in his case it might all be different, and the question of the center of things may not be important, given that, after all — almost without realizing it Riba slips into a torrential inner world at the mere mention of New York — he already lives in this center, lives there without any trouble, lives right in the very center of the world. But who knows what’s happening in his mind when young Nietzky’s left alone in the center of the center of the center of his world, and thinks. What might go through his head, for example, when the light’s purity bathes the windows of the skyscrapers, which are like blue, transparent skies pointing toward a superior sky over there in Central Park? What does he really know about Nietzky? And about the superior sky of Central Park in New York?

  He tries to forget all this, because it’s complicated and because it’s Wednesday and now he’s at his parents’ house and hasn’t properly heard what his mother’s just said.

  “I asked you if everything’s all right,” she repeats. “You look distracted.”

  How fast time goes by, he thinks. It’s Wednesday again. Love, illness, old age, gray weather, boredom, rain. All the Irish writers’ themes seem to be highly topical in his parents’ living room. And outside, the drizzle adds to this impression.

  Illness, old age, boredom, unbearable grayness. Nothing that’s not common knowledge on the face of the earth. The stark contrast between the wake-like atmosphere in his parents’ house and Nietzky’s torrential inner world seems enormous.

  Thinking of his talented young friend, twenty-seven years his junior, reminds him that, right now, Nietzky must be on his way to number 27 ½ Edison Street in Providence. Although Nietzky is in North America and he’s in Europe, at this moment they’re both in almost identical parallel situations, situations that are both preludes to the same trip to Ireland.

  And he thinks that, when he first met Nietzky, no one could have predicted that one day they’d end up being friends. He can’t get the idea out of his head that their meeting fifteen years ago in Paris bore a certain resemblance — mainly in regard to Nietzky’s age difference and unpleasant farewell phrase — to the meeting that took place in Dublin between W. B. Yeats and James Joyce.

  At that first meeting, after having reproached him for even the most impeccable side of his publishing policy, his future friend Nietzky said to him: “We might have been contemporaries, and perhaps even the best two members of our generation, I as a writer and you as a publisher. But that’s not how it turned out. You’re pretty old now, and it really shows.”

  He didn’t bear a grudge, just as, the many differences aside, Yeats didn’t hold a grudge against the very young Joyce when they met in the smoking room of a restaurant on O’Connell Street in Dublin, and the future author of Ulysses, who’d just turned twenty, read the thirty-seven-year-old poet a collection of his own brief and eccentric prose descriptions and meditations, beautiful though immature. He had thrown over metrical form, young Joyce told him, that he might get a form so fluent it would respond to the motions of the spirit.

  Yeats praised this endeavor, but the young Joyce said arrogantly: “I really don’t care whether you like what I am doing or not. Indeed I don’t know why I’m reading to you.” And then, putting his book down on the table, he proceeded to set out his objections to everything Yeats had done. Why had he concerned himself with politics, and above all, why had he concentrated on ideas and condescended to make generalizations? These things, he said, were all the sign of the cooling of the iron, of the fading out of inspiration. Yeats was puzzled, but then was confident again. He thought: “He’s from the Royal University, and thinks that everything’s been settled by Thomas Aquinas — no need to trouble about it. I have met so many like him. He would probably review my book in the newspaper if I sent it there.”

  But his cheer disappeared when a minute later the young Joyce spoke badly of Wilde, who was a friend of Yeats’s.” Presently — although this was later refuted by Joyce who classified it as “café gossip,” claiming that, in any case, his parting words were never as disdainful as might be inferred from the anecdote — he got up to go, and as he was going out, said: “I am twenty. How old are you?” Yeats replied saying he was a year younger than he actually was. Joyce said with a sigh: “I thought as much. I have met you too late. You are too old. . ”

  He talks to his parents, while imagining the parallel action that might be unfolding in Providence, near New York: Nietzky walking into the Finnegans Society at that very moment and greeting the Joyceans who welcome him as a new and unexpectedly Spanish member of their society, asking him if it’s true that he’s read Finnegans Wake in its entirety and also if it’s true that he’s a fan of this work. He can imagine Nietzky smiling and wildly launching into a recital of the whole book from memory: “Riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay. .” And he can also imagine the other members, overcome with horror, having to interrupt him.

  “So what the hell happened in Lyon? We still don’t know anything about what happened there,” asks his mother suddenly.

  “Oh, no! Please, Mama! Since very early this morning, until just before coming over here to see you two, I’ve been sitting at my computer reading all kinds of things about Dublin and studying the core” — brief pause, he swallows — “of all things Irish. And now. .”

  He stops in his tracks, suddenly. He’s embarrassed to have said the core, because he thinks that the essence would have been a more suitable, more accurate term. But it doesn’t matter. Surely his parents can forgive him this sort of mistake. It’s all right. Or is it?

  “The core? You’re so strange, son,” says his mother, who at times really does seem to be able to read his mind.

  “The essence of all things Irish,” he grumpily corrects himself. “Right now, Mama, right now when I know I’m brimming with facts about Dublin and I wanted to tell you some things about this city, now that I even know what sort of trees I’ll find on the highway from the airport to my hotel in Dublin, you go and ask me about Lyon. What do you want me to tell you about Lyon? I said farewell to France there for a long time. I think that was all that happened. I said goodbye to France. I’ve studied it, tramped around it, looked at it for long enough.”

  As long as he’s been tramping around and looking at this place, Riba was going to add, but held back.

  “Tramped around France?” his father says.

  Today more than ever a wake-like atmosphere can be sensed in this familiar living room. And although very early on in his adolescence he became aware of the strange stagnation of air and even the paralysis of everything alive that seemed to have taken possession of the room, never before has he had such a stron
g feeling of time being blocked, stopped, absolutely dead.

  In this house, which seems more and more Irish to him, everything happens at a snail’s pace, and what’s more — perhaps so no entrenched custom can be altered in any way, nothing happens at all. It’s as if his parents were constantly holding a wake for their ancestors and precisely today, with maximum gravity, this ghostly family tradition falls heavily on the home. Indeed, he’d swear that more than ever, as so many times before, he’s seeing the ghosts of some of his ancestors. They are beings as blurry as they are out of place — they’re a little short-sighted — who act threateningly and resentfully toward the living. It’s important to acknowledge that at least they’re quite well mannered. And the proof is in the fact that, as if polite enough not to want to disturb things, some have discreetly left the wake, and are now standing over by the door, smoking and blowing the smoke out into the hallway. Riba wouldn’t be surprised if there were even a few of them playing soccer out on the patio right now. What good guys, he thinks suddenly. Today he’s taken to seeing them as if they were adorable ghosts. Indeed, they are. He’s been accustomed to them his whole life. They’re familiar to him in every sense. His childhood was swarming with these ghosts, laden with signs from the past.

  “What are you looking at?” his mother says.

  The spirits. This is what he should reply. Uncle Javier, Aunt Angelines, Grandpa Jacobo, little Rosa María, Uncle David. This is what he should say to her. But he doesn’t want trouble. He falls silent as a dead man, while thinking he’s hearing voices coming from the patio, maybe directly connected to that other patio, the one in New York. He amuses himself recalling in his mind wisps of the dead he’s seen before in other places. But he stays quiet, as if he himself were just another family apparition.