Dublinesque

by Enrique Vila-Matas

  Who is this Quilty? Was he wearing a Nehru jacket in the film? He doesn’t know if it’s because he’s had severe insomnia and hasn’t slept for many hours or because he’s still got The British Museum on his computer screen, but he’s acting more and more disturbed. Carried along by the rhymes the rain is gradually spinning in the unknown street of the painting, thinking about the rainy installation his friend Dominique is preparing at the Tate, he’s mentally writing phrases and wondering in one of them what London will be like when he and all the people he loves are dead. There will be days — he can be sure of this now — when all his dead will have become pure vapor and will speak from their wild, remote solitude; they’ll speak just as the rain in Africa does, and won’t remember anything anymore. Everything will have been forgotten. Even the rain beneath which all the dead once fell in love will have faded away. And lost too, the memory of the moon beneath which they once walked along an also forgotten road like lost souls.

  And although, once more, things are getting occasionally complicated, he thinks he knows that, as long as everything still depends only on him, as long as he’s still in control of the action and can make sure things are pure and exclusively mental, he won’t be fazed. This is why he gets lost with a certain amount of calm down the foggy, presumably unknown street, next to the British Museum, and gets trapped at a strange bend, what at first sight had seemed like a street corner. It’s not a street corner, it’s a blot, and in it there’s a shadow that seems to want to escape from the screen.

  Alarmed at this threatening shadow, he clicks the mouse and in two moves gets to the page with his emails, where he finds one containing the poem “Dublinesque,” by Philip Larkin, which young Nietzky has just sent him from New York. It’s a poem that talks of an old Dublin prostitute, who in her last hour is accompanied only by a few co-workers along the city streets. Nietzky says he’s sent Riba this poem because there’s a funeral in it and it takes place in Dublin: a deliberate wink at the funeral ceremony they’re preparing for June 16. A poem that begins:

  Down stucco sidestreets,

  Where light is pewter

  And afternoon mist

  Brings lights on in shops

  Above race-guides and rosaries,

  A funeral passes.

  He stops reading to turn on the radio and think about other, less funereal things, and he hears “Partir Quand Même” sung by Françoise Hardy. It’s been years since he’s heard this song that he’s always liked. It looks like it’s stopped raining. It must be past seven already. He memorizes the first line of Larkin’s poem, Down stucco sidestreets, so he can pretend he’s starting to know English, so he can say it at the slightest opportunity. His insomnia now seems to be irrepressible. Celia sees this for herself. She’s there all of a sudden, standing in the doorway, looking threateningly at him, although at the same time with what might be an air of despair. I didn’t know, thinks Riba, that Buddhists could experience anxiety too. But he’s wrong, it’s not despair, it’s just that Celia has to go to work and isn’t helped by seeing her husband so outrageously wide-awake. Riba puts his head down and hides in “Dublinesque.” He reads the rest of the poem, hoping that this might protect him from the telling-off that could come from Celia at any moment. And as he reads, he wonders what would happen now if that blot were to reappear on the screen, that threatening shadow.

  Celia is about to leave and he — so she can see he’s not hypnotized — switches off the computer, avoiding several problems at once. Celia still hasn’t left and is trying on a new shirt in front of the mirror. He realizes that, as soon as he turned off the computer and lost the possibility of seeing the shadow, he started to feel hugely, strangely, most unexpectedly sad. Absurdly sad, because he doesn’t think it’s the absence of the shadow that’s caused his spirits to sink, but still he can’t find a better explanation. He decides to evade this odd sadness with one that’s more clear; he starts thinking about the sad — but not so sad, because it’s associated with a trip with good prospects — funeral ceremony awaiting him in Dublin, this ceremony about which all he knows is that it will have to uphold some sort of connection with the sixth chapter of Ulysses.

  Now that he thinks about it, his life over the last two days seems to have points of contact with this chapter. He decides to re-read it, to check if what he senses is true. And shortly afterward he’s closely examining the pages of Paddy Dignam’s burial and in particular the moment when a lanky guy appears at the last moment in the cemetery. He’s a man who seems to have come from nowhere at the very minute the coffin drops into the hole in Prospect Cemetery. Bloom is thinking about Dignam, the dead man they’ve just lowered into the hole, and as his gaze flits among the living, it pauses for a moment on the stranger. Who is he? Who can this man in a mackintosh be?

  “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,” thinks Bloom, and lets his thoughts drift to other matters. At the end of the ceremony, Joe Hynes, a reporter who’s taking the names of everyone attending the burial for the funeral report, asks Bloom if he knows “that fellow in the. .” and just at that moment, as he’s asking the question, he realizes the individual he’s referring to has vanished, and the sentence goes unfinished. The missing word is raincoat (macintosh). Bloom completes the phrase a moment later: “Macintosh. Yes, I saw him. Where is he now?” Hynes misunderstands and thinks the man’s surname is Macintosh, and notes it down for his report of the burial.

  Rereading this passage reminds Riba that in Ulysses there are ten more allusions to the enigmatic man in the raincoat. One of the last appearances of this mysterious character occurs when, after midnight, Bloom orders a coffee for Stephen in the cabman’s shelter and picks up a copy of the evening Telegraph and reads the short report on the burial of Paddy Dignam written by Joe Hynes. In it the journalist gives the names of thirteen mourners, and the last of them is. . Macintosh.

  Macintosh. This could also be the name of the dark shadow he saw before on his screen. And as he thinks this, perhaps involuntarily, the link between his computer and Paddy Dignam’s funeral is strengthened.

  He’s not exactly the first person in the world to wonder this.

  “Who was M’Intosh?” he remembers from the second chapter of the third part of Ulysses, a chapter formed of questions and answers.

  One of these questions, intriguing and thorny, has always appealed to him: “What selfinvolved enigma did Bloom risen, going, gathering multicoloured multiform multitudinous garments, voluntarily apprehending, not comprehend?”

  He goes over all the debates about who this M’Intosh was. The widest range of interpretations exists. There are those who think that he is Mr. James Duffy, the indecisive companion of Mrs. Sinico in “A Painful Case” from Dubliners, who commits suicide overwhelmed by lovelessness and solitude. Duffy, tormented by the consequences of his indecision, wanders around the tomb of the woman he could have loved. And there are those who think he is Charles Stewart Parnell, who’s risen from the grave to continue his fight for Ireland. And there are also those who think it might be God, disguised as Jesus Christ, on his way to Emmaus.

  Nietzky has always been especially fond of Nabokov’s theory. After reading the opinions of so many researchers, Nabokov deduced that the key to the enigma of the stranger was to be found in the fourth chapter of the second part of Ulysses, in the library scene. In this scene, Stephen Dedalus is talking about Shakespeare and maintains that he included himself in his plays. Very tensely, Stephen says that Shakespeare “has hidden his own name, a fair name, William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas.”

  This, according to Nabokov, is what Joyce managed to do in Ulysses: to set his face in a dark corner of his canvas. The man in the macintosh who crosses the book’s dream is none other than the author himself. Bloom actually sees his creator!

  He wonders whether he should make an effort to st
ay awake, or give in to sleep — he doesn’t think that is such a good idea because his insomnia is giving him a special sort of lucidity, although Celia’s already gotten seriously annoyed with him because of it. They had a morning argument, so she hasn’t gone back to the old days, that is, to the times when she used to get so annoyed she’d end up putting a few things in a suitcase and leaving it on the landing. She hasn’t acted like that this time, but it’s clear that if things get worse, she might do so later, when she gets home from work at lunch time. It’s terrible. Everything’s always hanging from a thread with Celia.

  He leaves the computer and goes over to the window, looks out at the street. He hears Celia slamming the door loudly as she goes to work. She’s gone at last. It’s ridiculous, but it seems as if the thing that’s really irritated her, that’s made her explode with rage, is when a moment ago, he flippantly quoted W. C. Fields at her: “The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep.” This little phrase drove her crazy. “Excuses are worthless,” she said.

  He went too far with the Fields quote, he thinks now, uselessly repentant. When will he learn to control his words better? When will he realize that there are certain inappropriate remarks that might seem witty in many settings outside the conjugal one? Celia was probably more than justified in slamming the door. For a while, from the big window, he stands and watches what happens when nothing is happening. When he turns his eyes away from the general view of Barcelona and looks down to focus on what’s going on nearby, he realizes that a man in a gray Burberry coat is walking down his street, a man who reminds him — who has an air — of the stranger in the raincoat with his hair plastered to his head that Riba and Ricardo saw in La Central bookshop. At first this seems strange and then less so. The fact is he ends up feeling a mysterious emotional affinity with him. Couldn’t he have come to tell him to persist in his search for “the unfathomable dimension,” the dimension that, in the middle of a storm, his father asked about in a low voice the other day? He feels dizzy. And he remembers the Swedish thinker Swedenborg who, one day, finding himself by the window of his London house, noticed a man walking down the street for whom he felt instant empathy. To his surprise, this man came over to his door and knocked at it. And when he opened it, Swedenborg felt from the first moment absolute trust in this individual, who introduced himself as the son of God. They took tea together, and over the course of the encounter, the man told Swedenborg that he saw in him the most suitable person to explain the right path to the world. Borges always said that lots of mystics could pass as madmen, but that the case of Swedenborg was special, as much for his enormous intellectual capacity and great scientific prestige, as for the radical change in his life and work brought about by the visions that came from the hand of this unexpected visitor, who connected him directly to celestial life.

  He watches the footsteps of the man in the gray Burberry and for a moment fears, and at the same time wishes, that this individual will come over to the front door of his building and press the intercom. It might be that the man wants to congratulate him for planning a requiem for the Gutenberg age, but also that he wants, as well as this, to tell him there’s no reason to look at things in such a short-term way and that he should intone a funeral song for the digital age too — which one day will disappear — and not be afraid, moreover, of time-traveling and intoning another requiem for everything that will come after the apocalypse of the internet, including not just the end of the world but the end of the world that follows that one. After all, life is an enjoyable and serious journey round the most diverse funerals.

  Will the second end of the world include the brilliant blue dress with silver needlework, the white gloves and the little cocked hat his mother used to wear every Saturday night in the fifties when she went out with her husband to dance at the Flamingo? Back then no one in the family asked about the unfathomable dimension.

  He looks out of the window again and sees that the man in the gray Burberry isn’t on his street anymore. What if it was Swedenborg? No, it wasn’t him. Just as it wasn’t that guy he one day thought might be directing everything under a weary light. It was someone who’s walked right by, although it’s strange, because at first that hadn’t seemed to be his intention.

  His insomnia leads him to sit and read in his armchair. Like in the old days, when the computer didn’t limit his time so drastically. The music on the radio is still French, as if the English leap is up against curious domestic resistance from his favorite station.

  He’s rescued from the shelf a book by W. B. Yeats, one of his favorite poets. It wasn’t planned, but reading this book might also contribute perfectly to the preparations for his trip to Dublin. Time goes by very quickly, and his insomnia adds even more to a sensation of time flying, but the fact is there are now only five days left until his trip. Everything has gone by really quickly and it seems like only yesterday when, in order to avoid his mother finding out he had absolutely no plans for the future, it occurred to him to say he had to go to Dublin.

  He dives into the Yeats, into a poem where it clearly says that everything is falling apart, and that turns out to be ideal for the bloodshot eyes of a profoundly sleepless reader. Letting the verses carry him along, he imagines that the bright light of day is blinding him and that he’s turned into a skilled pilot who flies quickly over the geography of infinite life. A pilot who very soon leaves behind all the stages of humanity — the Iron age, the Silver age, the Gutenberg age, the digital age, the definitive, mortal age — and arrives just in time to witness the universal flood and the grand end, the funeral of the world, although in reality it would be more accurate to say that the world itself had been gradually burning through the ages and traveling toward its grand finale and funeral, previously announced in these lines of Yeats’s that carried Riba so far along this morning: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.. .”

  There his flight ends. He comes back to reality, which is not so different from where his imagination has transported him. He shuts the book of the great Yeats and looks out of the window and follows the course of a cloud extremely curiously and then his head nods and he feels he might soon fall asleep, and then, to stop this from happening, he reopens the book he’d closed and finds in what he reads traces of the cloud he’s just been looking at, he finds it in a fragment of Vilém Vok’s prologue to Yeats’s book: “The winds that shake the coast and the woods where the sidhe talk, emissaries of the fairies, allude to a lost, but recoverable splendor.” And later: “It said that the world was once all perfect and kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth.” And he suddenly realizes what the real content of his father’s words were when he asked, the other day, if someone could explain the mystery to him.

  If he hadn’t read those lines of Yeats’s, he surely wouldn’t have thought this just now. But he did read them and he can’t help but think that he’s just understood what exactly might have been behind those words of his father’s. Maybe the winds battering the Catalan coast at that moment disturbed his father’s unconscious, until he was driven to ask, indirectly, about a lost splendor. And the thing is that maybe his father wasn’t really asking about the mystery of life in general, or about the mystery of the storm, but rather about everything close to his emotional world, everything that, with time, he’d come to see was buried, like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of the dampest earth.

  This could have been the true and fundamental cause of his father’s worries about the storm. And if this was the cause then Riba can’t deny that it was insomnia that helped him realize it, that his insomnia was hiding a visionary power he was previously unaware of, and by leading him to understand the true meaning of those words of his father’s, it was able to widen his outlook.

  He goes to the kitchen, and lapsing once more into the mundane,
makes himself a sandwich with ham and two layers of cheese in it. He wonders if it might not be the case that, when he thinks of New York, really what he’s interested in — a worthy successor to his father — is a perfect, kindly world, which as a child he lost very early on, and which he hopes to find again in this city one day. Is it symbolically concentrated in New York — his whole search for that great part of his life buried like a mass of roses under tons of earth? It’s possible. He takes a bite from the sandwich, then another one. He hates himself for having base needs, but the cheese is superb. He recalls a quote of Woody Allen’s about reality and steak. He’s feeling wider and wider awake. Wasn’t this what he was after? If so, then he’s achieving it, and he’s seeing more than ever. It’s as if he were approaching the experience of Swedenborg, the man who spoke totally naturally to angels. At times it seems to him that insomnia is capable of having the same effect on him as alcohol once did. Alcohol, which he needs so much sometimes. Who’s there? He smiles. He detects a presence again, although this time it might be merely wild intuition, provoked by his sleep-deprived state. The presence ends up seeming so obvious and large that he grows sad wondering what would become of him if reality suddenly showed him evidence of a great absence.

  He starts reading The Dalkey Archive by Flann O’Brien, which is simply another way of conscientiously preparing for the trip to Dublin. What’s more, Finnegans pub, where Nietzky is planning to found the Order of Knights, is in Dalkey, a small town some twelve miles south of Dublin, on the coast.

  Flann O’Brien says: “It is an unlikely town, huddled, quiet, pretending to be asleep. Its streets are narrow, not quite self-evident as streets and with meetings which seem accidental.”

  Dalkey, a town of accidental meetings. And also of strange appearances. In The Dalkey Archive, St. Augustine appears alive and kicking, talking to an Irish friend. And James Joyce also appears, working as a bartender in a tourist pub outside Dublin and refusing to be associated with Ulysses, which he considers “a dirty book, that collection of smut.”