He looks down from the balcony, and just like last night, there’s nobody in the street. Yesterday’s great muddle began in exactly the same way. Someone rang the bell at the same time. He looked out and there was nobody there. History repeats itself.
Whoever has just said that Malachy Moore is dead might be the same person who yesterday, in Spanish and with a Catalan accent, called and explained that they were conducting an evening survey and wanted to ask him just one single question, and without giving him time to respond, said:
“We just want to know if you know why Marcel Duchamp came back from the sea.”
But no, it doesn’t seem to be the same person as yesterday. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that the two calls came twenty-four hours apart. This person tonight has spoken in French without the slightest trace of a Catalan accent, and it could just as easily be Verdier as Fournier, one of the brand-new friends he made last night in the bar. As for last night’s call on the intercom, it had to have been perpetrated by an expert in The Exception of My Parents, his friend Ricardo’s autobiographical novel. Because that question about Duchamp appears hidden within the pages of that book.
Whoever called yesterday can’t be the same person as today, a moment ago. The man on the intercom last night was someone who read The Exception of My Parents and could only be that Catalan friend of Walter’s they’d met two days earlier and to whom they’d given their address. Yesterday’s caller couldn’t have been anyone else, unless it were — something unlikely, surely — Walter himself with a Catalan accent. The strange thing was that whoever buzzed last night didn’t come back later — if only to laugh at his cleverness — to reveal himself. Riba still doesn’t know why this friend of Walter’s, who went to the trouble of making that midnight joke, then vanished from the scene. And he understands even less why whoever just rang also now vanished. They do resemble each other in that respect.
He goes back to the intercom and demands again that whoever’s down there identify himself.
Silence. Just like last night at midnight. Nothing but quiet, quiet under the infernal leaden light of the front hall that harbors two sad chairs and a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, along with that suitcase and carry-on bag with which Celia threatens to leave tomorrow.
At midnight yesterday, when he didn’t see anybody, he thought Walter’s friend must have taken refuge in McPherson’s. Absolutely everything arose from that misunderstanding. McPherson’s is a pub run by a man from Marseille and a number of his regulars are French. He and Celia had sat out on the patio of this establishment a couple of times, always in the daytime. Yesterday he ended up there, believing that he’d find Walter’s friend and would be able to ask him why he’d played that late-night joke.
Although he doesn’t want to remember too precisely — he’s afraid it’ll upset him — he’s gradually getting back his memory of what happened, and all at once he remembers how, at this very time, after the question about Duchamp and after having seen there was nobody down in the street, he was seized by a huge sense of anxiety and decided to go and see how Celia was doing and thus feel in some way supported by her company. He’d left her sleeping and didn’t know if the intercom would have woken her, or whether her face would still be wreathed in the beatific expression she’d been wearing recently. He needed her to help him get over his bewilderment caused by the call about the sea and Marcel Duchamp. So he went into the bedroom and got quite a surprise. He remembers quite clearly now, it was a distressing moment. The incredibly harsh expression on Celia’s sleeping face shocked him, so rigid and paralyzed and more like a lifeless soul than anything else. He was left literally terrified. She was sleeping, or she was dead. She looked dead, or maybe she was petrified. Although everything indicated that she badly needed to be reborn, he preferred to think that Celia was near a divine spirit, some god of hers. After all, he thought, religion is useless, but sleep is very religious, it will always be more religious than any religion, perhaps because when one is sleeping one is closer to God. .
He had stayed there in the bedroom for a while, still hearing the echo of the question about Marcel Duchamp and wondering if the time hadn’t arrived to overcome his fear and to head down — it was an old, private metaphor of his — the metaphysical avenue of the dead. It has always seemed, thought Riba, that, on that general avenue, one single deceased person isn’t anything or anybody. Everything’s relative and so it’s easier to see that there’s more than one crooked cross, more than one headstone surrounded by barren thorns in this world so big and so wide, where the rain falls ever slowly upon the universe of the dead. .
Oh! He realized that, aside from a certain desire to be absurdly poetic, he wasn’t controlling what was going through his mind very well, and stopped. The world big and wide, the universe of the dead. . As if a logical consequence of how complicated everything was, and also another more than likely consequence of last month’s funeral in Dublin and his world ending in London and the enigmatic words coming through the intercom, Riba ended up thinking of the scene in John Huston’s The Dead where the husband watches his wife on the stairway of a Dublin house, still, stiff but unexpectedly lovely and rejuvenated — lovely and youthful on account of the story she’d just remembered — paralyzed at the top of the stairs by the voice singing that sad Irish ballad, “The Lass of Aughrim,” which always reminded her — giving her a sudden beauty — of a young man who died in the cold and rain of love for her.
And he couldn’t help it. Last night, Riba associated that scene in The Dead with that young man from Cork who, two years before he’d met her, fell in love with Celia and then, after a number of diabolical misunderstandings, left Spain and returned to his own country, where soon afterward he killed himself by jumping off the furthest pier in the port of his home town.
Cork. Four letters to a fatal name. He always associated that city with a vase in their home in Barcelona. The vase always struck him as a nuisance, but he’d never gone so far as getting rid of it due to Celia’s strong opposition. Sometimes, when he was depressed, he found that he got much more depressed if he looked at old photographs, the cutlery, the paintings inherited from Celia’s grandmother. And that vase. By God, that vase.
Riba had never been able to tolerate the sinister story of that suicidal young man. When occasionally it occurred to him to remind Celia of that poor boy from Cork, she always reacted by breaking into a smile, as if the memory made her feel young again and profoundly happy.
Yesterday, watching her sleep so rigidly but so beautifully, and unsure whether she was alive or petrified, he couldn’t resist a depraved temptation, a vengeful urge, and imagined her in those days of her youth, closer to a prostitute on the jetty at the end of the world than to the serene Buddhist she was today. He imagined her that way and then said mentally to his sleeping wife, with that strange softness of imagined but unspoken words:
Celia, my love, you cannot suspect how slowly the snow is falling through the universe and upon all the living and the dead and upon that young imbecile from Cork.
That’s what he said mentally, though she remained immersed in her indecipherable dreams, faintly illuminated by the light from the hall: her hair all messy, her mouth half open, breathing deeply. The rain lashed wildly against the windows. In the bathroom, one of the taps hadn’t been turned off properly and was dripping, and Riba went to turn it off. The light grew a little dimmer and then began to tremble, as if the world were ending. Although the door to the apartment was closed, it seemed like all that remained was to wait for Duchamp to come back from the sea, come back to get rid of that blasted vase.
It would be best to get used to the idea that Malachy Moore has died. He’d rather think that than speculate on the idea that the Frenchmen he’d met yesterday, Verdier and Fournier, might have played a trick on him to get him to come to the pub again tonight. He doesn’t really know why, but he thinks the voice that told him Malachy Moore was dead had meant it.
But as soon as he’s giv
en him up for dead, he notices that something, in a vague and indistinct tone of protest, has gently begun to deflate in the atmosphere. It’s as if the space through which his shadow normally wanders were emptying itself, and as if with this absence, the previously chilly nape of his neck and his back had begun to heat up. In some part of this room, something is giving way at quite a pace. At such a pace that it already seems to be entirely gone. Someone has left. Maybe that’s why now, for the first time in a long time, it seems there is no longer somebody there lying in wait. Not a single shadow, no trace of the specter of his author, or of the novice who uses him as a guinea pig, no God, no spirit of New York, no sign of the genius he always sought. He feels panic in the midst of this sudden stillness, so extraordinarily flat. And he remembers the flat instant that followed the moment Nietzsche announced that God had died, and then the whole world started living at ground level, miserably.
He could swear he’s entered an ambiguous realm of the deceased, a region that dazzles him in such a way that he can’t look straight at it, as with the sun, which no one can look at for very long. Although at heart, like the sun, this region is no more than a benign force, a source of life. One can be born into it, because one can be born into death. He will try. After all, yesterday that rebirth was possible. He will try to get his faded retired publisher’s life back on track and improve it. But something has completely given way in the room. Someone has left. Or been erased. Someone, perhaps indispensable, is no longer here. Someone is laughing on his own somewhere else. And the rain lashes more and more wildly against the windowpanes and also through the empty and deep-blue air, and what is nowhere and is never-ending.
Since he has a tendency to interpret the events of his world each day with distortions typical of the reader he has been for so long, he now remembers the days of his youth when it was common to argue about the death of the author and he read everything relating to this thorny issue, which worried him more from one day to the next. Because if there was one thing he wanted to be in life it was a publisher and he was already taking the first steps to becoming one. And it seemed like very bad luck that just as he was preparing to find authors and publish them, the figure of the author should be questioned so strongly that people were even saying that, if it hadn’t already, it was going to disappear. They could have waited a little longer, young Riba lamented every day back then. Some friends tried to encourage him, telling him not to worry, because it was only a dubious trend of the French and American deconstructionists.
“Is it true the author has died?” he asked Juan Marsé, who he occasionally bumped into in his neighborhood. That morning Marsé was accompanied by a tall, dark-haired girl with an unforgettable apple-shaped face, and the poet Jaime Gil de Biedma.
Marsé threw young Riba a frightful look, which he still hasn’t forgotten.
“How funny, that’s like asking if it’s true we have to die,” he heard the girl say.
He remembers that he really fancied that woman — facially so similar to Bev Dew, now that he thinks of it — and he also remembers that he even fell suddenly in love with her, the very same as what happened not long ago with Bev. He was especially enamored of her face. Her fresh, fragrant apple face. And also because hanging over her furrowed brow, an impalpable shadow on her face, was an expression that struck him as a direct invitation to love.
“The author is the ghost of the editor,” said Gil de Biedma, half smiling.
And Marsé and the tall girl with the apple face laughed a lot, probably at a private joke he couldn’t share.
Certain scenes from last night come back to him in violent flashes. He remembers when, having already had quite a bit to drink, he was talking to those two Frenchmen at the bar in McPherson’s and at a certain point, after they’d talked of the beauty of the Irish Sea and about the Spanish victory in the European Championship and asked Riba something about the decor of Irish houses, the conversation slid, though he can’t remember why, toward Samuel Beckett.
“I know someone who’s lined his house with Beckett,” said
Verdier.
A house lined with Beckett. He’d never heard of such a thing. In its day — in the days when the publishing house received so many manuscripts — it would have been a good title for one of those novels certain weak and indecisive authors used to submit with titles even feebler and more faltering than they were.
The two Frenchmen, Verdier and Fournier, knew so much about Beckett’s appalling squandered years in Dublin that, between one shot of gin and another, at some point he started calling them Mercier and Camier, the names of two Beckett characters.
Verdier, a great Guinness drinker, was explaining precisely why the key to Beckett’s personality lay in his Dublin years. Sitting in his rocking chair, Riba could not now recall many of the things Verdier told him, but he did remember perfectly hearing about the extremely dangerous game the writer used to play from an early age, when he’d climb to the top of one of the pine trees surrounding the house where he was born and jump down, grabbing a branch just before he crashed to the ground.
Riba remembers perfectly Verdier telling him this, probably because it impressed him more than the other things and perhaps also because it reminded him of what he tended to do with the rocking chair when he rocked it as far back as possible and then dropped back so he could feel himself almost falling, closely linked to the calamitous pretension of the world that he now associated with the death of the author and of everything.
Fournier was also very talkative, and at a certain moment, emphasized again and again that Beckett has always been an example of a writer who risks everything, has no roots, and shouldn’t have any: no family, no brothers or sisters. He comes from the void, said Fournier. Several times he said that he came from the void. The ravages
of alcohol. Riba suddenly remembers the exact moment when he asked Verdier and Fournier if they’d ever seen an individual in Dublin who resembled the young Beckett.
He remembers telling them that, since he’d seen that guy twice over the course of Bloomsday in two different places; it was very likely that they might have bumped into that young Beckett lookalike on more than one occasion.
Verdier and Fournier, almost in unison, told him they knew someone like that. In Dublin this Beckett double was relatively famous, said Fournier. The young double was a great walker, studying at Trinity College, but he was seen all over the city, in the most unexpected places. Many people knew him, yes. He stood out precisely because of his resemblance to the young Beckett; they didn’t think there was anything mysterious about it and believed he was the young Beckett himself, simple as that. Although many in Dublin knew him as Godot. But that wasn’t his name, of course. His name was Malachy Moore.
“But it’s Beckett himself, I’m telling you,” concluded Verdier.
Still somewhat scared, he is gradually completing the forced reconstruction of what might have happened yesterday. As the hangover subsides, new fragments of his night out begin to appear and now, crystal-clear, the terrifying memory arrives of the instant when last night at home, after the question about Duchamp over the intercom, he decided to make some enquiries outside, far from his labyrinthine room and that crushing solitude. And he remembers the mad moment when, after leaving a note for Celia, he decided to make a move and called the elevator and a few seconds later stepped out into the street. The rain hit him in the face and he suddenly felt like he was back in the harsh solitude of the night and the elements. He was walking very slowly so his flimsy umbrella wouldn’t take off, and take him off with it, when all of a sudden he saw the great danger that was just around the corner, beside the only unlit streetlamp.
He feared it, but maybe he didn’t imagine it could be such an obvious danger, right out of an Irish film, complete with rain and even a bit of fog. He felt, for a moment, that if he managed fully to recover the daring bravery of his youth, he would regain some of the spirit of those times when he wasn’t afraid of anything. He plucked up coura
ge as he analyzed the situation. No matter how much he wanted to, it wasn’t advisable for him to turn back now, because he’d already been seen. Faced with such a fate, all he could do was hope to emerge unscathed. Obviously, terribly, those two potential villains were there, those two scary guys on the corner acting as if they were there because it was the best place they could be on a rainy night like this. One was skinny and blond, dressed in a really outdated punk style, with a big, very crooked nose. The other was fat and black with a big paunch and messy dreadlocks hanging down over his shoulders.
The blond with the crooked nose was especially frightening. Neither of the two looked at him although there was nobody else in the street. Riba didn’t know what to do. He thought the best thing would be to just keep walking as if nothing was wrong, speed up a little as he passed them until he reached the entrance to the pub, which was only fifty meters beyond the danger: walk right past them without even looking their way, as if they didn’t make him at all suspicious or it hadn’t occurred to him that they might have been the ones who’d left the message on the intercom, or anything like that.
Although, thinking it through, it was more than obvious that those two guys were not the kind of people to mention Marcel Duchamp on an intercom. The closer he got to the corner, the more Riba felt panic growing inside him, but he kept walking, it was clear he had no choice. He turned up the collar of his raincoat and walked on. And the biggest problem arose from his own mind when, as he got closer to the two undesirables, he began to feel more insecure and old than ever. He was shattered, he noticed his heart was beating very rapidly and he felt a very powerful fear spread throughout his body. He had to admit he was really old, quite grossly old. Never had the words to the poem “Dublinesque” suited him so well as in that moment, because, as if by magic, his brief nocturnal stroll to the pub was turning him into the old whore in the mackintosh at the end of the world, that is, into the unexpected reincarnation of the last spark of wretched literature and at the same time into a washed-up old man freezing to death walking down stucco sidestreets, where the light is pewter and down which he was walking himself, the last literary publisher in history, turned into his very own funeral.
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