Dublinesque

by Enrique Vila-Matas

  He tries to hear a conversation between the ghosts closest to him, the ones in the hallway — they seem easier to hear than the ones stirring up a fuss on the patio — and he thinks he hears something, but it’s so indistinct it’s not really anything at all, and then he remembers that famous description of the ghost to be found in Ulysses:

  What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.

  He remembers one day in this very place his maternal grandfather, Jacobo, saying with slightly forced emphasis: “Nothing important was ever achieved without enthusiasm!”

  “Right then. And what have you managed to find out about Ireland?”

  He doesn’t answer his mother straight away, he’s amusing himself too much looking around the living room. Suddenly, the voices start growing softer and considerably lower in tone, as if falling asleep, and finally, after a brief process of almost total disintegration, all that remains is the silence and the hazy smoke from some ghostly straggler’s cigarette. He thinks there couldn’t be a more opportune moment to tell his mother that Ireland is essentially a country of storytellers, full of ghosts of its own. He wants to give a weight to the word ghosts, winking at his mother, but it’s useless; for years now she’s pretended to ignore the subject of the family ghosts, probably because she’s spent so many years living in more than stable harmony with the specters and doesn’t want to argue about something as obvious as their gentle existence.

  “Imagine,” he says to his mother, “that an Irish politician or bishop commits a terrible act. Fine. You’d want to know exactly how things had happened. Isn’t that right?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well for the Irish, this is secondary. What they care about is how the politician or the bishop is going to explain himself. If they’re able to justify themselves with grace, that is, with a gripping, human story, they’ll get out of their predicament without much trouble.”

  Old age, illness, gray weather, centuries-old silence. Boredom, rain, net curtains cutting them off from the outside. The oh-so familiar ghosts of Calle Aribau. There’s no reason to try to play down his parents’ drama and his own; growing old is disastrous. The logical response would be for everyone who sees their life waning to shout out in fright, not resign themselves to a future of drooping jaws and hopeless dribbling, still less to this brutal tearing apart that is death, because to die is to be ripped up into a thousand pieces that are scattered dizzily forever, with no witnesses. This would be logical, but it’s also true that sometimes he feels pretty good listening to the soft, ghostly murmur of voices and spectral footsteps that lull him and which deep down, being so furiously familiar, even win him over.

  “And what else do you know about Ireland?”

  He’s about to tell his mother that the country is the closest thing there is to this living room. His father gently reproaches his wife for overwhelming their son with so many questions about Ireland. And before long they’re embroiled in an argument. “I won’t make you your coffee for two days,” she says. Senile shouts. The two of them have very different characters, different in every way. They’ve always loved each other, but for this very reason they hate each other. In reality they hate themselves. His parents remind him of something the poet Gil de Biedma once said to him in the Tuset bar in Barcelona. An intimate relationship between two people is an instrument of torture between them, whether they’re people of opposite sexes or the same. Each human being carries within himself a certain amount of self-hatred, and this hatred, this not being able to stand oneself, is something that has to be transferred to another person, and the person you can best transfer it to is the person you love.

  When he thinks about it, the same thing happens with him and his wife. There are days when he feels like he’s lots of people at the same time, that his brain is peopled with more ghosts than his parents’ house. And he can’t stand any of these people, he thinks he knows them all. . He hates himself because he has to get older, because he’s aged a lot, because he has to die: this is precisely what he remembers very promptly every Wednesday when he visits his parents.

  “What are you thinking about?” his mother interrupts him.

  Old age, death. And not a single one of these normal net curtains can block the funereal view of a gloomy future, or the present. In the living room mirror, as he looks deep into his own eyes, he’s horrified to see, for a fraction of a second, Irish light inside his retinas, and in these, dozens of tiny different insects, moths of many varied species, all dead. It could be said that his eyes are like that mental cobweb seemingly reproduced by the terrifying workings of Spider’s brain. He is terrified, and looks away, but he remains petrified, frightened, on the verge of crying out.

  He goes over to the window in search of a livelier landscape, and as he looks out at the world, sees a young man walking down the street quite quickly; just as he walks past, under the window, the man looks up at Riba with one irate eye and stares hard, softened only by his comical limp.

  Who can this irate, limping man be? Riba feels he’s known him all his life. He remembers the same thing happened with the young genius who for so many years he dreamed he’d find one day for his publishing house. He always believed he was out there and that in fact he’d known him all his life, and then it turned out there was no way of finding him, as he either didn’t exist or Riba didn’t know how to find him. Would having found the genius have justified his whole life? He doesn’t know, but nothing would have seemed more glorious than to have been able to announce to the world that it wasn’t true that all the greats of literature were dead already. It would have been fantastic, because then he would have been able to abandon his quaint practice of referring to the lack of young geniuses by forever quoting — once drunkenly and now with all the serenity and treachery in the world — the first line of a poem by Henry Vaughan, which he knew full well was really about something else:

  “They are all gone.”

  When he looks back at the one-eyed man, he finds he’s no longer out there limping around. Maybe the irate, ethereal man has stepped into a doorway, but in any case the fact is he’s no longer there. How strange, Riba thinks. He’s sure he saw him a moment ago, but it’s also true that some of the people he’s come across recently disappear too fast.

  He goes back to the living room and feels there’s no conversation left here, just a wake-like atmosphere growing ever more profound, the leaden air of a waiting room. Then, he doesn’t know how, he remembers something Vilém Vok said in The Center: “To have a mother and not to know what to talk about with her!”

  He has to leave, he thinks, he can’t spend any more time in this house. If he does he’ll end up totally mute and buried, and days later he’ll be walking around sharing cigarettes with the ghosts.

  “They are all gone, Mama,” he mumbles, head bowed.

  And his mother, who’s heard him perfectly well, laughs happily as she nods her head.

  The day he said goodbye to his vocation as a publisher seems very far off now. The thing he remembers most perfectly is that, after years of familiar, spectral silence, literature came to him alone, completely alone. How can he say it, how can he describe it? It’s not easy. Even if he were a writer it wouldn’t be easy to explain. Because it was strange, literature came to him lightly, with a graceful step, in red high heels, a cocked Russian hat and a beige raincoat. Even so, he wasn’t interested until he consciously confused literature with Catherine Deneuve, whom he’d recently seen in a trench coat, under an umbrella, in a very rainy movie that took place in Cherbourg.

  “I don’t think you know anything about Dublin,” says his mother, interrupting his thoughts.

  He’d forgotten he was at his parents’ house. It feels like Wednesday of last week, when, head bowed, he said they are all gone, and his mother nodded in agreement. But this is another Wednesday.

  It’s undoubtedly regrettable that, in the middle
of a great muddle in his head, just as he was recalling how he thought that literature was Catherine Deneuve and afterward was never able to correct the misunderstanding, just as he was imagining her, alone and erotic, with her red shoes, naked underneath the trench coat, and with her cocked hat and her slight despair on a rainy day, his mother left him unable to complete this vision, which, once again, was getting him so excited. Because, in the end, when he met Celia, she too had looked to him like the spitting image of Deneuve in Cherbourg.

  “It’s true, all I know is that it sometimes rains in Dublin,” he says, annoyed. “And then the city fills with trench coats.”

  Has he been talking about raincoats? His mother reminds him that as a child he always loved them, was always waiting for it to rain so he could put one on. His mother wants to know if he really can’t remember this penchant of his. Well no, he doesn’t. But now that he thinks about it, it’s possible that this penchant for raincoats led to his fascination with Deneuve. No one knows about this great confusion of his between literature and Deneuve, not even Celia. It would be awful if someone found out, especially if the information fell into his enemies’ hands. They’d undoubtedly laugh at him. But what can he do if that’s how things are, and in reality it’s not so terrifying? Since time immemorial he’s associated Deneuve with literature itself. So what? Other people associate their lover with some rancid piece of chocolate cake they ate at the office. As long as it remains a secret, nothing will happen. Other people have more ridiculous secrets, and they certainly keep quiet about them. Although it’s also true that there are some people who don’t keep quiet, whose secrets aren’t ridiculous. Samuel Beckett, for example. One March night in Dublin, the Irish writer had a decisive vision, the sort of revelation that causes envy:

  At the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, I saw the whole. The vision at last.

  It was night time, and as he so often did, the young Beckett was wandering around on his own. He found himself at the end of a pier buffeted by a storm. And then it was as if everything found its place again: years of doubt, searching, questions, failures, suddenly made sense and the vision of what he had to carry out established itself like a piece of evidence. He saw that the darkness he’d always striven to reject was in reality his most precious ally, and he glimpsed the world he had to create in order to breathe. A kind of indestructible association with the light of consciousness took shape. An association of storm and night until the last breath.

  As far as Riba remembered, this nocturne on the Dublin pier appeared later, a little altered, in Krapp’s Last Tape:

  What will become of all this misery of ours? In the end, only an old whore walking around in an absurd raincoat, on a lonely dike in the rain.

  In an essay — probably mistakenly, because he was often mistaken in his essays — Vilém Vok pointed out that this woman in the rain was the same one who appeared in Murphy and who was called Celia, the prostitute that the young writer-protagonist lived with, although she was much younger.

  He’s always thought it quite a coincidence that this prostitute was called Celia, like his wife. Depending on how one looks at it, thanks to a simple rule of three, the old woman in the absurd raincoat from Krapp’s Last Tape could, due to her Deneuvesque trench coat, be literature and at the same time Celia from Murphy, very old by now, and also Celia, his wife, also very old.

  All this leaves him quite confused, as if wandering around on a Dublin pier buffeted by a storm, wet with passion and from the waves. Until he remembers the raincoat, the mackintosh that appears in the sixth chapter of Ulysses. He remembers it’s a stranger attending the burial of Paddy Dignam who wears it. And it’s odd. Because nowadays, a Mac would just be a famous computer, but in those days it was a raincoat, a garment invented by Charles Macintosh, a name which somehow had a “k” added to it over the years when it came to refer to the coat.

  He can’t help thinking that while he’s been a privileged witness to the leap from the Gutenberg to the digital age, he’s also observed the transition of the mackintosh coat to the Macintosh computer. Should he organize a requiem in Dublin for the age of this brand of raincoat? Immediately he congratulates himself on being able to cruelly satirize his projects, his efforts.

  The stranger at Prospect Cemetery is someone we meet eleven times over the course of Joyce’s book, but who makes his first mysterious appearance in chapter six. Commentators on Ulysses have never been able to agree on his identity.

  Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I’d like to know? Now, I’d give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of [Ulysses, chapter six].

  “What are you thinking about?” interrupts his mother.

  Once again, in his parents’ house, that feeling of forgetting where he is. He’s annoyed they’ve interrupted his journey through the Dublin cemetery. Of course, there isn’t much difference between the atmosphere of the Prospect Cemetery and that of his parents’ house.

  “Dublin has dead people everywhere,” he answers angrily.

  And it’s the beginning of the end. Of today’s visit at least.

  “What?” his mother almost sobs.

  “I said that death and children”—he’s growing more and more enraged — “look very similar over there. The gravediggers touch their caps after burying them. And some people still say ‘mackintosh’ when they’re talking about raincoats. It’s another world, Mama, another world.”

  He hails a taxi. There are always lots on Calle Aribau. All you have to do is raise your hand and one stops automatically. Today he’s out of luck, inside the taxi it stinks. But it’s too late to change and the car is already on its way to his house. It’s also too late to put right the falling out with his parents. Maybe he shouldn’t stick to this unwavering commitment every Wednesday. Today, once more, the overwhelming impression of a wake and that intimate familiarity with ghosts have made him a nervous wreck. After his inappropriate remark, his apologies did no good.

  “What was that shout?”

  “I didn’t shout, Mama.”

  He ended up slamming the door on his way out, and then feeling full of anguish and remorse. Now he’s trying to get away from his sense of unease and concentrate on this sixth chapter he wants to revive in Dublin, and which starts just after eleven o’clock in the morning, when Bloom gets on the tram at the baths on Leinster Street and goes to the dead man Paddy Dignam’s house, number 9 Newbridge Avenue, southeast of the Liffey, from where the funeral procession will leave. Instead of heading directly westward, toward the center of Dublin, and then northwest toward Prospect Cemetery, the cortège goes in the direction of Irishtown, turning northeast and then west. Obeying an old custom, they parade Dignam’s body first through Irishtown, toward Tritonville Road, north of Serpentine Avenue, and only after crossing Irishtown do they turn west down Ringsend Road and Brunswick Street, then afterward crossing the River Liffey and carrying on northwest toward Prospect Cemetery.

  As the taxi drives down Calle Brusi, he sees a man walking fast. He reminds him of the young man who stormed out of La Central bookshop the other day. Riba looks away for a moment and when he looks back again, the stranger isn’t there anymore, he’s disappeared. Where can he have gone? Who was he?

  A man full of life, he thinks, and at the same time ethereal as a ghost. Who the hell can it be? Could it not be me? No, because I’m not young.

  As of today, Celia is a Buddhist. He still hasn’t entered the house, but he’s already been informed of the news. Fine, he says, somewhat bewildered, resigned. And crosses the threshold. And he thinks: once upon a time, marquises went out at five o’clock in the afternoon, and now they become Buddhists.

  He’d like to say to Celia that she’s not the only one who can change her personality from one day to the next, to tell her that he feels a little perturbed, as if he were an arrow in a cobwebbed cellar of steel-gray light. But he holds back. “Fine,” he repeats, “it’s
fine. I congratulate you, Celia.” He notices the Buddhist decision has affected him more than he thought it would, although he was already convinced that Celia would end up converting to another religion, he saw it coming quite clearly. He lowers his head, goes straight to his study, feeling he needs to take refuge there.

  It feels like everything in the house is turning oriental.

  He’s a hikikomori, she’s a Buddhist.

  “What’s the matter? Where are you off to?” Celia asks in her most affectionate voice.

  He decides not to let himself feel duped and shuts himself up in his study. Once he’s there, he looks out of the window and starts meditating. Outside, the daylight is dying. He’s always admired Buddhism, he’s got nothing against it. But arriving home has annoyed him. It feels as if his experience has come out of a novel, and if there’s anything guaranteed to make him genuinely uncomfortable these days it’s things happening in his life that could turn out to be appropriate for a novelist to put in a novel. The way Celia has decided to tell him she’s become a Buddhist seems like the start of a classic conflict story: a wife who all at once has a different ideology than her husband, the first fights and serious disagreements after years of happiness.

  If he’s gained anything from giving up the publishing house it’s no longer having to waste hours reading so much garbage: manuscripts with conventional plots, stories that need a conflict in order to be anything. Manuscripts telling the same old pernicious, traditional stories have disappeared from his view, and he doesn’t want to feel he’s inside one of them now. It’s a source of irritation to him that, having been so peaceful for two years — for twenty-six months to be precise — his life has taken this unexpected fictional turn. He loves the daily life he’s been leading recently, and more than most things, he loves his daily world, so tranquil and boring. If someone came to examine his day-to-day life they’d find it hard to see anything exciting about it, let alone to tell anyone else, because really it’s one of those lives in which scarcely anything happens. He leads an existence like a character in a book by Gracq, the writer he chose as the model for his theory in Lyon. That’s why it’s so irritating that this melodramatically inclined event has occurred now. He’s annoyed that everything has suddenly sped up, as if someone wanted him involved in a less slow novel.