Actually, thinking about it now, even that sordid Dublin street was marvelous if he compared it to the dull reality of Spain and its terrible landscape. As he advanced toward the two probable thugs, he felt nostalgic for the times when the night held no secrets for him and he sailed through the most difficult situations practically unnoticed. And all of a sudden, as if humor could save him from everything, he began to hear, as an unexpected echo, Milly Bloom’s song, and it was as if the ghost of poor Milly was trying to come to his aid. Then he started remembering other situations when, as now, he’d consigned the danger to the background by thinking of things other than those that should really be worrying him. For example, as a boy, he’d been on the verge of drowning, because the sea at Tossa de Mar had carried him out beyond safety, and not knowing how to swim, he’d clung onto an air mattress; but instead of thinking he was going to die, he’d started conjuring up a scene from El Jabato, his favorite comic, in which the hero goes through a similar situation and at the last minute is rescued by Noodle the skinny poet, another character in the comic strip.
And when he came up to the likely thugs, he was so distracted and concentrating so hard on recalling the skinny poet Noodle — whose name struck him at that moment as an allusion to the fragility of human life — that he passed the two guys without even noticing he’d left them quite easily behind. They didn’t seem to see him either, or maybe they just saw a specter pass, or a dead man, and didn’t want to bother him. The fact is that he suddenly realized he hadn’t even noticed them as he walked right past, and now, he had to get used to the idea that he had completely left them behind. Looking back might be fatal, so he kept going, now thinking of his youth and the great many dull nights he’d wasted holding a glass of whiskey, leaning forward to listen to other people’s nonsense. He had so much free time back then that he squandered completely, stupidly away to nothing.
Seconds later, like a ghost lost in the night, he reached the door of McPherson’s. There weren’t too many people inside. No sign of Walter’s Catalan friend. He realized immediately it had been a mistake to look for him there. But now it was too late. The few customers in the bar were watching him, waiting to see if he’d come in or not, so he took two more steps and walked inside. He immediately felt that he’d sunk down into the deepest recess of a buried memory. Whatever the case, the best thing he could do was to carry on as if nothing was wrong. “Once you’re in, you’re in it up to your chin,” as Céline used to say.
At the bar he could see only a middle-aged man at one end of it, scratching his crotch with a meditative air, and beside him a very skinny guy with a classic boozer’s look, cloth cap, and hobnailed boots, staring furiously at the spark of golden light at the bottom of his glass of whiskey. There were also a few amorous couples on the velvet benches, red and black benches that smelled of railway carriages. He didn’t yet know that the two guys at the bar were French and that he’d end up christening them Mercier and Camier.
He remembered he walked into McPherson’s feigning self-confidence and that, even before wondering what he’d have to drink, he leaned on the bar and decided that he’d concentrate and try to get his brain to start the process of conceiving himself the same way Murphy did his own self. He then imagined his brain as a big empty sphere, hermetically sealed against the exterior universe, which, as Beckett would say, was not an impoverishment, since it didn’t exclude anything not contained within it, because nothing ever existed or ever would exist in the exterior universe that wasn’t already present as virtuality or as actuality — as virtuality elevating itself to actuality, or actuality falling into virtuality — in the interior universe of his mind.
After this considerable and futile mental effort, he felt almost devastated. He thought of the reproduction of “Stairway,” the small Hopper painting in the apartment that had been obsessing him since the first day. The painting itself had told him not to go out. It was a painting that invited one not to go outside. Even so, he had decided to open the door and brave the rain and the street. Hopper, having painted a door open to the outside, invited him, quite clearly if paradoxically, to stay indoors, not to budge an inch. But now it was too late. He had defied the painting and left.
“You, sir, are the essence of vulgarity,” he remembered a rejected author had once told him in his own office. Why had this phrase remained so deeply ingrained in his mind and why did it reappear at the trickiest moments, when he needed more self-confidence than usual?
He timidly asked for a gin with water. Marcel, the bartender from Marseille, said something to him in French to show him he remembered him from when he’d been there with Celia on the patio. Then he served him the gin. Riba drank it down in one gulp. Two years’ thirst, he thought. And from then on he didn’t think anything clearly anymore. The alcohol went straight to his head. One goes away suddenly, he thought. And in a flash returns. With the intention of changing. Head hung. Head in hands. The head, headquarters of everything. Motionless in the full moon the last publisher.
It’s difficult to know — for Riba himself — what exactly it was he’d just thought. Eventually, you have to pay for two years of abstinence. Anyway, he understood more or less the way things were going. Motionless, in the full moon, the last publisher. Wasn’t he the last publisher? He had been spending his nights in the rocking chair facing the moon, with the Gutenberg galaxy buried, and believing that all the stars were deceased souls, old relatives, acquaintances, charlatans. But no, this wasn’t the right interpretation. It was just the ruthless effects of alcohol. A drinker’s thoughts. Head hung. Head in hands.
“Another gin,” said Riba.
Was he the last publisher? That would be ideal, but no. In the paper every day he saw photos of all those new, young independent publishers. Most of them looked to him like insufferable, uneducated beings. He never thought he’d be replaced by such idiots and it was hard for him to accept, a long and painful process. Four idiots had dreamed of replacing him and had finally achieved it. And he himself had ended up making way for them, had helped them prosper by speaking well of them. It served him right for having been such a bastard, for being far too gracious and generous with the falsely discreet young lions of publishing.
One of those new publishers, for example, spent all his time proclaiming that we’re living in a transitional period toward a new culture and, wishing to prosper without effort, made claims for quite obtuse prose writers he claimed had found a goldmine in the “new language of the digital revolution,” so useful for covering up their lack of imagination and talent. Another one tried to publish foreign authors with the same taste and style as poor Riba and in fact succeeded only in imitating what he’d already done much more competently. Another wanted to copy the most spectacular heads of the Spanish publishing world; he dreamt of being a media star and his authors were mere pawns of his glory. In any case, none of the three seemed shrewd enough to endure the thirty years he’d endured. He’d heard they were planning some sort of homage to him in September and that the digital revolutionary, the imitator, and the aspiring superstar were at the head of it. But Riba thought only of fleeing from them. Behind that move were hidden motives, very little genuine admiration.
He gulped down a second gin, which was followed by others. After a short time, he felt like he was Spider, or rather, an arrow in a cobwebbed cellar of steel-gray light. There were so few people in the place that there was no point in looking for Walter’s Catalan friend among the clientele. In any case, no one there could be suspected of having called him on the intercom. And it began to seem obvious that someone had managed to get him mixed up in a little mystery, which he might be able to clear up the next day, or maybe he never would. It was, in any case, futile to look for the solution to the enigma between the four walls of that place. And he had made a huge mistake by going out at night. His gaze fell again on the two men in Irish caps he’d seen on his way in and who were sitting quite close to him at the bar. He thought he heard them speaking French and tim
idly approached them. Just then, one of them said:
“Souvent, j’ai supposé que tout. .”
He stopped as he saw Riba approach and the phrase hung half-finished in the air. He supposed that everything what? That phrase turned into another mystery, probably forever now.
When minutes later, Riba nobly tackled his fifth gin, he was totally absorbed in a long chat with the Frenchmen. For a while he talked about cocktails he’d drunk in days gone by in bars all around the world and of sapphire swimming pools and white-jacketed waiters who served cold gin at certain clubs in Key West. Until in the mirror over the bar he began to see multi-colored rows of bottles of alcoholic beverages, as if he were on a carousel. And suddenly, with the first whiskey — he’d decided to abandon the gin in a flash — he asked the two Frenchmen a question about the decor of Irish houses, and without really knowing how, ended up causing Samuel Beckett to appear in the conversation.
“I know someone who has his house lined with Beckett,” said Verdier.
“Lined?” said Riba, surprised.
Although he asked him to explain this, Verdier refused to do so point blank.
A little while after the third whiskey, Riba interrupted Verdier somewhat nervously, just when Verdier was at the most critical stage of his predictions for Saturday’s races. Verdier looked stunned, as if he could barely understand why he’d been interrupted in such a way. Taking advantage of the confusion, Riba asked — and it seemed like he was asking the entire neighborhood — if they’d ever seen a guy in Dublin who looked a lot like the writer Beckett when he was young.
That was when, almost in unison, Verdier and Fournier told him that they knew someone just like that. In Dublin that double of Beckett’s was relatively famous, said Fournier. And the conversation entered a more animated phase, and at one point, Verdier even had a lovely memory of Forty Foot, a Beckettian location found in Sandycove, right in front of the Martello tower, which in fact appears in Ulysses. It’s the spot with steps carved into the breakwater from which, since time immemorial, Dubliners enjoy diving in all the seasons of the year. That’s where Beckett’s father taught his sons, Sam and Frank, to swim, by throwing them in, with tough cruelty. Both stayed afloat and became fiercely fond of swimming. In fact, whenever he returned to Ireland, Beckett always went to Forty Foot, although the place he swam in more frequently, his favorite spot among all those of his native land, was a marvellous inlet under the hill of Howth.
“A truly Beckettian place. Windy, radical, drastic, deserted,” said Verdier.
“Abode of gulls and coarse sailors, an end of the world scenario,” added Fournier.
When they were at their most animated, Celia entered the pub like a gale-force wind, shouting at Riba with a thunderous rage that seemed endless. For a while, Celia seemed like a bottomless pit of insults and wailing.
“This is the end,” she said when she managed to calm down a little, “you’ve committed the mistake of your life. The mistake of your life, you stupid man.”
While Verdier and Fournier instinctively withdrew to the part of the pub farthest away from the bar, Riba suddenly discovered it was again possible for him to experience an intense moment at the center of the world: a moment that, in spite of having already been foreseen in the prophetic dream, arrived now with the same volcanic force and energy he had already felt in the apocalyptic vision that, at the time, served as a warning that one day in Dublin he might find himself on the edge of a strange happiness.
It wasn’t exactly the ideal scenario; Celia wouldn’t stop shouting and the situation was embarrassing. But he guessed, allowing himself to be guided by the model of the dream he’d had two years before in the hospital, that Celia would soon become more affectionate. And what he guessed turned out to be true. When she tired of shouting, she hugged him. And they went on to experience a moment at the center of the world. There was a reason that moving embrace was in the premonitory Dublin dream. They hugged each other so hard that, as they left the pub, they staggered and lost their balance, and just as the dream had predicted, they fell to the ground, where they remained in each other’s arms, as if they were a single body. It was an embrace at the center of the world. A horrible hug, but also spectacular, emotional, serious, sad, and ridiculous. It was an essential embrace, right out of — never truer — a dream. The two of them sat there afterward on the curb on the south side of that north Dublin street. Tears for a disconsolate situation.
“My God! Why have you started drinking again?” said Celia.
A strange moment, as if there were a hidden sign bearing some message in their pathetic crying and the surprising fact that Celia’s question was identical to the one in the dream.
Then, a partly logical reaction, he sat waiting for Celia to continue acting with great fidelity to the scene in the prophetic dream and to say:
“Tomorrow we could go to Cork.”
But Celia didn’t go so far as to say that. In contrast, the word “Cork,” the great absentee, strolled onto the stage, but as if completely suspended in the air, as if it were floating there in order to reappear perhaps later on, in an even more terrifying situation. In the shape of that vase at home in Barcelona, for example.
Riba seemed to understand fully at that moment that the fundamental essence of that strange dream he’d had in the hospital two years ago was simply regaining the awareness and the joy of being alive.
Celia did not say they could go to Cork the next day, but that didn’t make the moment any less strange, unique, any less a moment at the center of the world. Because he suddenly felt that he was linked to his wife beyond everything, beyond life, and beyond death. And that feeling was so serious in its most profound truth, it was so intense and so intimate, that he could only relate it to a possible second birth.
She, however, didn’t really share these feelings, was merely indignant about his ill-fated fall off the wagon. Even so, in the scene of the mortal embrace there was also emotion on Celia’s part and he saw that she too — although not to the same extent as he did — she appreciated the unexpected intensity of this unique moment at the center of the world.
“When the dead cry it’s a sign that they’re beginning to get better and to recover the awareness of being alive,” he said.
“When the dead cry it’s because they’ve drunk themselves to death on whiskey,” answered Celia, perhaps more realistically.
He took a while to respond.
“What a shame,” he said, “that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.”
“That we get old and die,” she corrected him.
And so the spell of the moment was gradually broken.
But the moment had occurred. It was, in fact, an instant at the center of the world. Although there was nothing at all central about the moment that followed, the one in which she gave him a terrible look and their lives returned to an ordinary state. Now she wouldn’t stop looking at him, with hatred once again. But mostly with contempt.
And what did he do? Was he able to look at her with contempt? Was he able to tell her she was a simpleton because she’d become a Buddhist? No, he couldn’t, and didn’t dare. He was still under the effects, the echoes of the great emotion he’d experienced. He heard the deep murmur of the Irish Sea and some words that told him it would always be better to be held in contempt by everyone than to be held on high. Because if one settled into the worst position, the lowest, and most forgotten by fortune, one could always still hope and not live in fear. Now he understood why he’d had to situate himself at ground level to manage to have some sense of survival. It didn’t matter that he’d grown old and been ruined and was at the end of everything because, after all, this drama had been useful in helping him understand why — within the so well-known incompetence of man in general and the no less famous incompetence of his time on this earth — there still existed a few privileged moments that one must be able to capture. And that had been one of them. And what’s more, he’d already expe
rienced it in a dream of almost incomparable emotion, two years ago in the hospital. That was one of those precious moments he’d surely been fighting for, unknowingly, over the past few months.
Hugging Celia, he imagined right then and there, for a few moments, and very much in spite of their uncomfortable position on the ground, that just like other times he was wandering the streets of the world alone, and all at once found himself at the end of a pier swept by a storm, and there everything fell back into place: years of doubt, searching, questions, and failures suddenly made sense, and the vision of what was best for him asserted itself like a great fact; it was clear he didn’t have to do anything, except go back to his rocking chair, and begin there a discreet existence, worstward ho.
“The lamentable change is from the best.” He remembered, then and there, Edgar, the Earl of Gloucester’s son in King Lear, saying, that it always happens to us when we’re settled into the best. “The worst returns to laughter. Welcome, then, thou insubstantial air that I embrace! The wretch that thou hast blown unto the worst owes nothing to thy blasts.”
Now he is in the worst way, but something’s not working because the worst is not returning him to laughter. He’s paid a high price for his nocturnal epiphany on the final pier and nevertheless nothing is as he expected it to be. Without realizing, he has settled into the worst of the worst, a lower stratum than anticipated. His hangover is not abating. And the small Hopper painting will not look any different for love nor money.
With horror he’s beginning to see the first consequences of his mistake. To begin with, he’s clearly sensing that both God and the genius he always sought have died. To put it another way, without having given his consent, he sees himself now settled in a deplorable pigsty within a repugnant world.
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