Dublinesque

by Enrique Vila-Matas

  A violent wave of exhaustion now jolts his head forward. And again he has the sensation of being watched. Has Celia come back without him hearing her? He calls her, but no one answers. Total silence.

  “James?”

  Well, he doesn’t really know why he’s asking for James, but he hopes it’s not actually Joyce who’s now walking around out there.

  He’s afraid of falling asleep, and if that’s true he suspects it’s because he’ll be assailed by that recurring nightmare where a sightless god with the look of a weary primate wants to shake his hand and so is forced to raise his elbow as high as he can. Riba looks at him from above, but it can’t be said he’s in a better position, as the two of them are locked in this cage in which they’re condemned for all eternity to be eaten away by an intimate Hydra, by a fearsome pain: the author’s ache.

  Just after eleven o’clock in the morning, he starts to feel overcome by sleepiness. He wavers between going meekly to sleep falling victim to what his friend Hugo Claus called the sorrow of the publisher, or resisting a bit longer. He’s annoyed that sleep threatens just when, only a few moments ago, he felt most lucid.

  In exactly five days, at this very hour, his plane will be landing in Dublin. Javier, Ricardo, and Nietzky will already have been there for a day when he arrives. Javier and Ricardo still don’t know that, apart from taking part in Bloomsday and the founding ceremony of the Order of the Knights of Finnegans, they’re going to participate in a funeral for the Gutenberg age. They have a tight schedule. Maybe Nietzky will explain it to them over the course of that first day the three of them spend together. Perhaps when he, Riba, gets to Dublin, Nietzky will already have thought of a way to celebrate this funeral and found the ideal place to hold it.

  For quite a while, he resists the ravages of tiredness and fatigue by thinking about the imminent Irish trip. He’s worried, above all else, that even though he stopped being a hikikomori a few hours ago, now he seems more like one than ever. While he’s stopped being one in spirit, he knows that when Celia comes home, if she finds him asleep, the first thing she’ll think is that he’s turned, tragically and once and for all — unjustly, but it’s what she’ll think — into one of those Japanese people who spend their time in front of the computer all night and sleep all day.

  It seems quite clear that if people say that as well as being respectable one must have the appearance of respectability, then it’s not enough to stop being a hikikomori, he also has to stop acting like one. But what can he do to avoid it? Sooner or later, he’ll give in. He’s had enough. He’ll sleep, he’s got no alternative. He leaves the idea of continuing experimenting with reason and madness for another time. But immediately he sees that he can’t interrupt them. He makes a huge effort and gets to his feet, he’s decided he won’t let sleep win, much less let Celia think he’s still a stubborn computer nerd.

  He gets dressed, picks up his umbrella, hesitates for a few seconds, but finally goes out to the landing, takes the elevator, and goes down into the street. He’s spent days lazily avoiding buying some medication he needs. Now he has time to take care of some errands. He goes to the same pharmacy as usual and buys the pills he’s nearly run out of and which he’s been taking on prescription ever since his physical collapse two years ago. Pills to control high blood pressure: Atenolol, Astudal, Carduran, Tertensif. Then, in the bakery he buys a Roquefort pizza — which he’ll eat cold on the way home — and some croutons for the soup Celia made yesterday.

  He can be seen all over the neighborhood, in the rain, with a bag from the pharmacy and eating a pizza. His oversized sunglasses hide physical deterioration caused by his insomnia. Comical and touching, from time to time, he glances furtively at the croutons. Today, despite his evident outlandishness, he looks more normal than on other occasions, at least he’s on his way from the bakery and the pharmacy, and might seem — indeed he is — just like one more local. The last time he was in this area there were a lot of people who saw him walking around in the rain in his old raincoat, his shirt with its torn collar turned up, those hideous short trousers, his hair completely plastered to his head. It was a strange picture he made, a poor, formerly prestigious publisher, dressed to be taken straight to a psychiatrist. A dreadful picture of an unhinged eccentric. Because of his behavior that day, lots of people in the neighborhood now look at him dubiously, and this despite the fact they’ve seen him more than once on TV talking sensibly about the books he published and which brought him such great fame.

  He walks slowly, with his Roquefort pizza and his croutons and his umbrella held up straight and the pills he’s just bought from the pharmacy. I’m normal, look at me, his appearance seems to be saying. Of course the sunglasses give him away, and the raincoat is the same one he wore the other night, and his slightly meandering walk also gives him away, as do his anxious bites of the pizza. Actually, everything puts him in his neighbors’ sights. In the glass window of the florist, he studies himself and gives a start as he sees a strange passerby, with short trousers on under his raincoat. But he’s not wearing short trousers. Why did he think he was? Who is this fucking old man; who’s this comic character reflected in the glass?

  He starts to laugh at himself and to walk like a tramp from a silent film. He plays at being his shadow, that comic character he saw in the shop window. He walks in a deliberately erratic way and then, outside the deli, imagines he’s not a common tramp — he has a house, a stable home where, it’s true, he does trample around. While he carries on walking in a funny way, he imagines it’s night time already and that he’s in his house, the rain lashing against the windowpanes, where there’s a reflection of his shadow, the shadow of another shadow. Because in this imagined house he is an ex-publisher waiting to meet the man he was before he created — with the books he published and the catalog life he’s led — a false personality for himself.

  He imagines that in his house he’s not tired — this last tallies with his own reality — and his old lamp is illuminating him as he starts preparing a report on his situation in life, a report he imagines he must finish before dawn breaks. So as not to feel bored out on the street — he’s never bored except when he walks around places as familiar as the ones in his neighborhood — he slowly elaborates mentally, painfully, sentence by sentence, as he advances in a decidedly pathetic way, with his silent cinema actor’s air, spitting a tide of garbage from his mind:

  “Soon I will turn sixty. For two years now I’ve been haunted by the reality of death, at the same time as I devote myself to observing how bad things are in the world. As a friend says, it’s all over, or coming to an end. There is nothing else left but a great illiterate throng deliberately created by the powers that be, a kind of amorphous crowd that’s sunk us all into a general state of mediocrity. There must be a huge misunderstanding. And a tragic jumble of gothic stories and despicable publishers, guilty of a monumental mess. A funeral is already being prepared in Dublin for the literary publishing I gave my life to. And now all I can do is to devote myself to trying to breathe, to opening as many spaces as possible in the days I have left, to trying to search for an art of my own being, an art that maybe one day I can perfect by making an inventory of my main errors as a publisher. I have the impression — one last project, merely imaginary — that it would be great if other publishers wanted to do the same, and for there to be a book containing the confessions of publishers who described what it was they believe went awry in their publishing policy; independent publishers who told how extraordinary the books were that they dreamed of bringing to light one day; publishers who described their greatest hopes and how it was that these did not materialize (it would be good for a publisher such as the great Sensini to speak on this, someone who only published stories of brave characters who are adrift, who ended up standing trial in the United States); literary publishers who described the poverty of literature, now a whole symphony of crows lost in the funereal center of the corrupt jungle of their industry. In short, publishers who wou
ld agree to publish the great map of their disappointments and who would confess the truth and say once and for all, to top it all, that not one of them ever discovered a true genius along the way. A map like this would allow us to move deeper into the quicksand of truth. Riba thinks, I’d like one day to have the audacity to go deeper into these sands and to make an inventory of everything I tried to achieve in my catalog and never did. I’d like one day to have the honesty to reveal the great shadows hiding behind the lights of my work that was so absurdly praised. . ”

  He decides to speed up on his way home because he’s exhausted, and what’s more, realizes his insomniac’s lucidity might start to wane at any moment, as even the outline of his laughable but ultimately pathetic silent cinema figure is dissolving and dangerously transforming itself in the shop windows. The only thing that matters to him now is that, when Celia gets home from work, she finds him with lunch made, nicely laid out on the tablecloth, and the TV on so they don’t have to talk as they eat. For now, he’ll have another coffee. She has to find him awake, as if there were nothing wrong. He must seek a prompt reconciliation. Become a Buddhist, if necessary. He has no faith in people with faith — even if it’s a Buddhist faith — but he’ll pretend to have it; his relationship with Celia is more important than anything else. Although it is also true he greatly distrusts people with faith. When he thinks of these matters, he always recalls something he heard Juan Carlos Onetti say toward the end of the seventies at the French Institute in Barcelona. Onetti, who seemed enormously, joyously drunk, was saying that Catholics, Freudians, Marxists, and patriots should all be lumped together. Anyone — he said — with faith, it didn’t matter in what; anyone who spouted opinions, who believed they knew or acted according to repeated, learned, or inherited thoughts.

  Those words lingered for a long time in his mind. He recalls Onetti said, that day, that a faithful man was more dangerous than a hungry beast and that faith should be placed in what is most insignificant and subjective. In the woman you happen to be in love with at the moment, for example. Or a dog, a soccer team, a number on a roulette wheel, a lifelong vocation. This is what he believes Onetti said on that evening now so long ago in Barcelona.

  Since the woman, in his case, is Celia and as such not exactly a woman of the moment, and since, not so long ago, he gave up publishing, which was always his lifelong vocation, and besides he has no dog or soccer team, it seems more than obvious that all he’s got left is a number. A roulette number, if he’s got anything left at all, and this number might well be on the wheel of life itself, that is, his destiny.

  For a moment and without panicking, he stands in a daze looking at the croutons, as if they were his only true future.

  As he walks past the patisserie, standing in the doorway smoking, is the transsexual who works there, the only person in the world who still makes passes at him, at least in such a brazen way. The tragedy of growing old, thinks Riba, leads to these things: nowadays this kindly transsexual is the only woman who still notices him. A man knows he’s grown old when age spots appear on his hands and he realizes he’s become invisible to women. Celia sometimes talks to this shop assistant, when she goes to buy dessert on Sundays. The patisserie is so bad that she hardly has any work to do and is usually stationed in the doorway, smoking. Since Riba knows she does tarot readings, whenever he sees her he imagines asking her to tell his fortune. He imagines her inside the patisserie, dressed as a gypsy after having made a huge effort to read his future, as if she were Marlene Dietrich in Touch of Evil. A very serious laugh. Tell me my future once and for all, please, says Riba. There’s barely any light at all in the back of the patisserie. You have no future, she replies. And laughs conclusively.

  Back home, the rain lashes against the windows. It’s as if he’s arrived at his imagined house from earlier, except this is his real house, luckily. Thinking about the character Bloom, he wonders what sort of face he’d have had. Joyce doesn’t provide too many clues in this respect. He’s the typical modern man, that much is clear. Modern, of course, if one compares him to Homer’s Ulysses. (Inner laughter.) Supposedly, Joyce devised him to seem like any provincial European citizen. A man without qualities. Bloom is outstripped by the two other main characters in the book: Stephen Dedalus and Molly Bloom. Stephen, who represents the intellect, the creative imagination, surpasses him, illuminating him from above. And Molly, who represents the body, the earth, supports him. But in the long run Bloom is neither worse nor better than either of them, as Stephen has an excess of intellectual pride, and Molly finds herself at the mercy of the flesh; Bloom, on the other hand, although lacking their robustness, has the power of humility. And what’s more, Bloom was certainly — this is certainly true today — more charming than his author.

  He looks over his bookshelves and stops here and there; he picks up a volume, flips through it nervously, puts it back. He stands hypnotized looking at the rain. He goes into the kitchen to make lunch. The sound of the rain reminds him of that day in his youth when he walked around without an umbrella, and even so, wasted time staring at the faces of passersby, on the hunt for the unique essence of each one, and ended up very wet. His ridiculous youth could be summed up in this one episode, but he prefers to forget it forever, he’s not prepared to be depressed by the rain and his memories.

  He stops paying attention to the heavy downpour, and for a moment, it seems as if that strange feeling has come back, as if someone had started walking silently at his side, someone different, obviously, although at times seeming almost familiar. It’s a silent walker who has perhaps always been there. He goes back to the window. He sees the silvery gleam of the rain. He thinks he should tell someone, but Celia is clearly not the best person. When she gets in, she’ll probably still be annoyed with him. With no one to tell, he decides to note it down in the Word document where he collects phrases. He turns on his computer, opens the document and writes down his impression from a moment ago:

  The silvery gleam of the rain.

  He can’t resist adding something else and writes, in smaller type:

  The author’s ache, my intimate Hydra.

  Celia gets home and finds him awake, and what’s more, euphoric, listening to Liam Clancy singing “Green Fields of France.” And she also sees that, as incredible as it seems, he has very helpfully set the table and put lunch out on the checked tablecloth they were given as a wedding present that February day over thirty years ago. He’s made a huge effort, he’s stayed awake, although his mental acuity is on a steep decline. Luckily, Celia has come in peace. And even better, with mind-blowing remedies for insomnia and stress.

  “Relaxation gadgets!” she cries with a smile.

  Buddhism seems to be agreeing with her. She’s come back with a product someone at the office sold her, a sort of digital machine using audiovisual stimulations, with a pair of multicolored glasses, a mask, and headphones. She tells him that, by way of its twenty-two programs, the machine uses light, color, and sound models to calm the user’s brain and create sensations conducive to relaxation.

  “Now all we need to do is figure out the frequencies of your brainwaves,” Celia says somewhat mischievously.

  The what waves? He smiles. He can’t help thinking of Spider and his mental cobwebs. She insists on asking what his frequencies are. The salespeople have promised the product will make you mentally sharp, relaxed, and less stressed, leading to a pleasant sleep.

  Now Celia asks him to try the digital relaxation machine.

  “It’s not good for you to get no sleep. This music! Liam Clancy! What is it with you and Liam Clancy?”

  “I find it moving, I think it’s a patriotic song and it’s moving, I’m turning Irish.”

  “I don’t think it’s really that patriotic. Come on. You can’t go to Dublin on Sunday without having slept,” she says in a tender, maternal tone, but one that is also deliberately banal, carnal, provocative.

  She shows him her cleavage. She asks him an apparently trivial or, at leas
t, incongruous question.

  “Why don’t you take the odd Wednesday off from going to your parents’ house? Do you feel you owe them something?”

  “It’s filial duty, a perfectly natural sentiment in the human species.”

  She ruffles his hair.

  “Don’t get annoyed,” she says.

  She moves closer still and caresses him.

  They make love, Celia’s ass on a red cushion, legs wide open. A tangle of bedsheets. Liam Clancy, still singing. And with a great racket, the digital machine smashing violently onto the floor.

  Barcelona, noon on Friday the thirteenth, two days before the plane leaves for Dublin.

  From a place where he can’t be seen, he carefully observes, with a jolt of astonishment how two pseudo-friends, or rather acquaintances from his generation, prepare to walk very solemnly down La Rambla. Their ceremonial gestures leave little room for doubt: they are about to begin a ritual they’ve been performing for years. Indeed, he saw them forty years ago, getting ready to do the very same thing. They are preparing themselves for a conversation about the world and the vicissitudes of their lives as they walk elegantly down La Rambla.

  A jolt of astonishment, but also a certain amount of envy. All their gestures and this air of preparing for an old ritual sends him back to the idea that they have all the time ahead of them to talk about the world. And they’ve probably attracted his attention more than usual because their slow, solemn ritual contrasts with the people rushing about all around them. It seems there’s no one else who has the time to think or simply talk about the world, but rather people must walk quickly with barely enough time, people hurrying, but without thought.