An hour later, imagination and memory transport Riba to the end of the sixties and the edge of a forest on the Costa Brava battered by gale-force winds. He finds himself on this confused forest edge, the sky grown dark and a wind rising, blowing dust over the surface of the scorched earth, creating, at first swirls, and then freak cobwebs that gradually formed a persistent and obsessive geometric poem in his mind. He remembers that back then he was still very young and hadn’t yet published even one book or knew what he was going to do with his life. He would have been very surprised to learn that, forty years later, he’d want to be in that situation once more, that is, to be again in front of the forest battered by gale-force winds without yet having done anything with his life.
The hurricane in this memory having blown over, Riba goes back to the Dublin night, which now, compared to this memory, seems a mild one. He’s in the doorway to the pub, he came out to get some fresh air.
This is my country now, he thinks again.
As he opens the door to the place, he hears “Walk on the Wild Side,” the song that always evokes New York for him. His friends are coming out of the pub and it looks as if they’re bringing the party into the street. Suddenly they all realize the temperature has dropped and they need to find taxis and go back into the town center. A fog obscures the railings of the cemetery, where visitors are still leaving.
Riba’s gaze darts among those present and stops at a group not from the pub but from the graveyard. Near these people, as if he’d come from nowhere, is a tall, lanky, solitary man. He’s not with anyone. Where the hell did he come from? It’s the same guy he saw this morning in Meeting House Square. He looks like a young Samuel Beckett. Round tortoiseshell glasses. A lean, bony face. Eagle-eyed, the eyes of a bird that flies high, that sees everything, even at night. He’s wearing a scruffy beige raincoat and is looking at Riba intensely, as if he can sense his spirit soaring, and also as if he doesn’t want to transmit a certain dark unhappiness emanating from his birdlike face.
He doesn’t look happy, but Riba prefers to think that the young man has just felt for the first time the emotion that any mortal with literary pretensions experiences when he discovers that the practice of his art makes him sense the fluttering of brilliance. Could it be that this young man’s art consists of the intimate humility of learning to observe in order to then try to narrate and decipher? If this is true, there would be no more mystery. But Riba doubts this is the case and so, fearfully, he asks Ricardo if he has any idea who the lanky-looking fellow in the mackintosh might be. Amalia hails a taxi. Walter scans the foggy horizon in search of a second vehicle. Bev and Nietzky argue politely about who’s going to get into the car Amalia has stopped. Finally Nietzky loses the battle and stands watching the first taxi leave with the resignation of a man watching a gravedigger help attach the ropes to a coffin to lower it into the grave. Walter, who is the one who seems to have best understood Nietzky’s deathly expression, carries on looking for a second taxi.
Riba’s gaze follows the stranger in the raincoat and after a short while he sees him walk slowly into the fog and soon afterwardvanish, disappear into it. He doesn’t see him again. What could have become of the guy swallowed up by the mist? Dracula disappeared like this too. What’s more, Dracula had the ability to turn himself into fog. Is Riba the only one who saw him? He asks Ricardo again if he noticed the young man in a raincoat who was also there this morning in Meeting House Square. “What selfinvolved enigma did Bloom risen, going, gathering multicoloured multiform multitudinous garments, voluntarily apprehending, not comprehend?” Such ease, incidentally, to disappear, like Dracula in the mist. In this same graveyard, in another time, Bloom saw his creator.
If I have an author, it’s possible he has a face like that, he thinks.
“Well, what do you know,” Ricardo says. “Always someone turns up you never dreamt of.”
July
The moon shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
It’s raining. It’s midnight. He feels that the more time he spends in this rocking chair, the more it will take on the shape of his body. An enormous hangover. He has a terrible fear that his kidneys will explode and he’ll die here, right now. Cold sweat. He fears that first thing tomorrow morning Celia will leave him. Fear of fear. Even colder sweat. Twelve o’clock on the dot on the clock of anguish.
Time: Midnight.
Place: A fifth-floor apartment in a building in north Dublin.
Atmosphere: Dissatisfaction. He hates himself for yesterday’s mistake, but also for having been so clumsy and not having been able to find a writer truly able to dream in spite of the world; to structure the world in a different way. A great writer: at once anarchist and architect. It wouldn’t have mattered if he were dead. A real genius, just one would have been enough. Someone able to undermine and reconstruct the banal landscape of reality. Someone, dead or alive. . An even colder sweat.
Physical state: Glacial. A massive headache. A feeling of “what for?”
Details: A suitcase and a carry-on bag in the hall — not on the landing, because the neighbors aren’t trustworthy here. They indicate that Celia, who’s asleep now, is very angry about yesterday and also about today; she’d wanted to give him one last chance this afternoon when she’d returned from her long Buddhist meeting, but he had been so comatose and stupid that she must have decided at that moment to leave tomorrow.
Action: Mental, unmitigating. Out of an obvious professional obsession — reading too many manuscripts, and to top it all, not a single masterpiece — he reads the events of his life more and more literarily. Riba is now in his rocking chair, and after having slept off his hangover all day long and having drunk two Bloody Marys a while ago to try to get over it, he’s attempting to reconstruct the terrifying events of the night before. He is doing so in a panic that he might remember too well what happened and die as soon as he does. His remorse at having started drinking again makes him wonder if it mightn’t be better to give the slip to the disagreeable and emotional memory of last night’s events and take refuge in a book that he has close at hand, an old copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s lectures on literature to his students at Cornell. He hopes that by reading these wise lectures, he’ll end up feeling sleepy again, which he doesn’t now because he’s slept all day. He doesn’t want to fall under the dangerous hypnosis of the computer, sit in front of it and risk Celia waking up and finding him in hikikomori mode again, which is the last thing, rightly or wrongly, she’ll be able to stand now.
After twenty-six months of abstinence, he’d completely forgotten how bad a hangover feels. How horrendous. Now the headache seems to be letting up a bit. But an uncontrollable buzzing and remorse are drilling into him. The buzzing — probably very closely related to his old writer’s malady — is disconcerting, because it brings back, absurdly and obsessively, the memory of the list of wedding gifts from when he married Celia, so many years ago now: that miserable and discouraging assortment of lamps, vases, and crockery. It’s all very strange. If he doesn’t do something, the rocking chair will take on the shape of his body.
More details: The rocking chair is unvarnished teak, guaranteed against cracks, rot, and nocturnal creaking. The sky he glimpses through the curtains is strangely orange, with violet tints. The rain starts to get heavier and now lashes the windowpanes. Since he arrived at this house, he’s been obsessed by the reproduction of “Stairway,” a small Edward Hopper painting the owner of the apartment has hung next to the window. It’s a painting in which the viewer looks down a staircase to a door open onto a dark, impenetrable mass of trees and mountains. He feels he has been denied what the geometry of the house offers. The open door is not a candid passage to the outside, but an invitation paradoxically extended to stay where he is.
“Go,” says the house.
“Where to?” says the landscape outside.
This feeling, once again, is unhinging him, disorienting him, making him very nervous. He decides to ask for some discre
et help from Nabokov’s book, which is beside him. And then, for a moment or two, he stares at the hazy moon again and at everything he can see out there. The hangover, the abundant rain, “Stairway,” and that atrocious sky have him bound to a terrifying anguish. But also directly to a feeling that this is a game. For a moment, “anguish” and “game” intertwine perfectly, as they have so many times in his life. His feet are cold and that could be related as much to the hangover as to the game and the anguish and the stairway that seems to descend inside his own mind.
“Go,” says the house.
He covers his dramatic feet with a checked blanket, quite a ridiculous blanket, and pretends to write a sentence mentally, to write it in his head — he has that unusual and luxurious feeling of writing in his head — five times in a row:
It’s midnight and the rain lashes the windowpanes.
It’s midnight and the rain. .
Then, he starts other games.
The next one is even simpler. It consists of going through all the authors he’s published and studying why not even one of them ever presented his readers with a true, authentic masterpiece. Also to examine why none of them, in spite of occasionally showing signs of almost supernatural talent, was an anarchist and at the same time an architect.
Here he pauses and remembers that in one of the letters received from Gauger, who writes to him, every once in a while, from the Chateau Hotel in Tongariro, his secretary attributed the absence of genius in all the writers they published to the profound despondency prevalent in our times, to the absence of God, and definitively — he said — to the death of the author, “announced back in the day by Deleuze and Barthes.”
Marginal note: The ongoing correspondence from that hotel in Tongariro is particularly worrying for Riba, who can’t understand why his former secretary keeps writing to him, unless it’s simply to keep up appearances, and even more, hold at bay suspicions that he embezzled a substantial amount of money from the publishing company.
Other details: From this game of going through all the authors and studying why not even one ever submitted a true masterpiece is derived another even more perverse game, which consists of asking himself the painful question of whether the brilliant author for whom he’d searched so long and hard wasn’t actually himself, and if he hadn’t become a publisher in order to have to look exclusively for that great talent in others, and thus to be able to forget the dramatic case of his own personality; he’s actually hopeless at being brilliant as well as hopeless at writing. It’s very possible that he turned to editing in order to avoid this baggage and be able to dump his disappointment on others, not exclusively on himself.
He immediately feels he has to contradict himself and remembers that he also took up publishing because he’s always been an impassioned reader. He discovered literature by reading Marcel Schwob, Raymond Queneau, Stendhal, and Gustave Flaubert. He became a publisher after a long time; and then there’s the time he now considers black in which he betrayed his first literary loves, reading only novels with protagonists who earned more than a hundred thousand dollars a year.
A commentary: It’s well known that when a person sees a glint of gold in books, he’s taking a qualitative leap in his editorial vocation. And some of that could apply to Riba, except that, beforehand, he was a reader of good novels, and also a committed reader; he didn’t just go into the business to make a lot of money, that is, for what is vulgarly referred to in Spanish with the verb forrarse. Ah, forrarse! What a strange expression. Was there any equivalent in English? To make a mint? To line one’s pockets? In fact, he soon realized he was heading for ruin and still didn’t want to give it up, and the miracle was that he lasted in his profession for thirty years.
He always had good relationships with foreign publishers, whom he usually saw at the Frankfurt Book Fair and with whom he exchanged information and books. With editors in his own country, however, he never had a great rapport. They always seemed fatuous to him, less knowledgeable about literature than they pretended to be: bigger celebrities and more egocentric than their authors whom they branded as egomaniacs to delirious extremes. Curiously, his friends in Spain have usually been writers, and the vast majority younger than him.
Even though he never stumbled upon a truly great genius, he had a deep respect for the vast majority of his authors, especially those who understood literature as a force directly linked to the subconscious. Riba has always believed that one loves most books that produce the sensation, when opened for the first time, that they’ve always been there: places never visited appear in them, things never seen or heard before, but the sense of having a personal memory of those places or things is so strong that somehow you end up thinking you’ve been there.
Today he takes it for granted that Dublin and the Irish Sea have been in his mental landscape forever, forming part of his past. If one day, now that he’s retired, he goes to live in New York, he’d like to begin a new life, he’d like to feel like a son or a grandson of an Irishman who emigrated to that city. He’d like to be called Brendan, for example, and for the memory of his work as a publisher to be easily forgotten in his native land, forgotten with the malice and treachery so typical of his tight-fisted and indolent compatriots.
Could he, if he so desired, go back to that night when he danced that foxtrot until dawn, go back to his wedding day, go back to being the brilliant and heartless publisher who, at the height of his success — it didn’t last long — made caustic declarations and pointed out the ideal way forward for literature? Or is he going to be left forever staring, like an idiot, at the electric light and wondering whether to have a third Bloody Mary and thus liberate himself from the rocking chair? Is he going to remain forever unable even to get up and walk normally through the house? The buzzing comes again. Obsessively, he goes back to the discouraging and truly obsessive trousseau, the wedding gift list: lamps, vases, old-fashioned crockery. An author’s trousseau, he thinks.
The rain is getting heavier and heavier and is now too persistent to be a summer shower. Since yesterday the downpour has been interrupting the usual fine weather at this time of year in Ireland. For weeks it hasn’t rained in Dublin. He’s into the second week of a twenty-day holiday with Celia in an apartment in the north of the city, the area on the other side of the Royal Canal, not very far from Glasnevin Cemetery, where he’s wanted to return for days now, perhaps to see if he might again glimpse that ghost who vanished before his very eyes on that afternoon of June 16 in front of The Gravediggers pub; that ghost, a relative of Dracula’s, with the great ability to turn himself into fog.
During their first days on the island, he and Celia stayed on Strand Street in the coastal town of Skerries, a pleasant place with a great variety of sea and coast and a long, curved harbor full of shops and pubs. But Celia felt too disconnected from her Buddhist contact in Dublin — she’d been having long meetings every afternoon since they arrived with a religious society or club — and they moved to the pretty town of Bray, near Dalkey, where they also felt uncomfortable; they finally ended up in this apartment in a building near the Royal Canal.
The thing keeping Riba entertained now is trying to avoid remembering in too much detail what happened yesterday. He fears remembering yesterday’s horrors. So he looks again at the book of Nabokov’s lectures as if this might be his only hope, finally deciding to fully enter the Nabokovian commentary on one of the chapters, chosen at random (the first chapter of Part Two), of Joyce’s ever-difficult Ulysses:
Part Two, Chapter I
Style: Joyce logical and lucid.
Time: Eight in the morning, synchronized with Stephen’s morning.
Place: 7 Eccles Street, where the Blooms live, in the northwest part of town.
Characters: Bloom, his wife; incidental characters, the pork-butcher Dlugacz, from Hungary like Bloom, and the maid servant of the Woods family next-door, 8 Eccles St. .
Action: Bloom in the basement kitchen prepares breakfast for his wife, talks charm
ingly to the cat. .
Riba ends up closing the book of lectures, because the theme of Ulysses now sounds antiquated to him, as if the funeral on June 16 in Dublin had been so effective as to draw to a close an entire era, and now he is living only at ground level, or at rocking-chair level, as if he were a Beckettian vagabond; as if he were now resigned to the inevitable, preferring to remain at the mercy of the memory of last night’s tragic alcoholic relapse.
Fortunately, this rain today is not the terrible London flood, it’s not the same apocalyptic storm as when he was there with his parents, fifteen days ago, that savage rain. He’ll never go back to that city. Deep down the trip was a concession to his elderly parents, an attempt to assuage his guilt for not having been in Barcelona for their sixty-first wedding anniversary. And also a way of saving himself, even if just once, the hateful task of having to tell them about his visit to a foreign city.
“So you’ve been to London.”
He just couldn’t be bothered, when he got back, to have to answer his mother’s question and tell them things about that city, so he decided to take both of them, his father and mother, to London.
It was complicated — he thinks now, almost motionless in his rocking chair — that trip to London, because his parents hadn’t moved from Calle Aribau for years. But if anything, the excursion confirmed that they have a free-flowing communication with the great beyond wherever they are. In London, gatherings occasionally formed around his parents: agglomerations they pretended not to notice, perhaps because since time immemorial they’d always known how to bear the weight of so many ancestors naturally.
Perhaps he’s become very Irish. The thing is he didn’t feel comfortable in London. He didn’t like many things, but he has to admit that he did love the double-decker buses and the three elegant and solitary green-and-white-striped deck chairs he photographed in Hyde Park. He was sorry his friend Dominique wasn’t there because he would have liked to see the Tate installation with her; but she’d had to leave quite suddenly for Brazil, where she lives most of the time. He didn’t like many things about London, even though other things amused him. The strangest was when he saw his parents in the middle of the very street that Hammershøi depicted in “The British Museum.” Riba hadn’t been able to find this street on his previous trip, but he suddenly discovered that it did exist and it was called Montague Street and was in such plain view that Celia had found it as soon as they approached the British Museum. She was carrying the photocopy of the painting that Riba had brought to London for that very reason: a very wrinkled photocopy Riba kept in his pants pocket. Right there, in Montague Street, was where the greatest ghostly turmoil gathered around his parents, who seemed to know everybody and to have been living in that neighborhood their whole lives.
Dublinesque Page 22