They are all gone, as Henry Vaughan said. “They are all gone into the world of light,” is how the first line of that seventeenth-century English poem actually reads. But from the pigsty he’s holed up in now, worstward ho, that illuminated kingdom is not exactly visible. And this is undoubtedly one of the great disadvantages of the hovel the apartment has finally turned into. So Henry Vaughan’s line is reduced to a foul and miserable: “They are all gone.” End of story.
The nostalgia for the lost or never found genius returns. There was a time, while devoting himself to searching one out, that he took it for granted that one obvious sign of the presence of that genius in a piece of writing, or in an action written in life, would be the ability to choose themes far removed from one’s own circumstances. Until not long ago, Riba had always imagined that genius busying himself with his daily life as a retired publisher, a life that would be precisely quite far removed from the life of that novice. Until not a moment ago, he had the impression that for a novel to have genius, it was essential that throughout, a superior spirit, more intuitive and more intimately aware than the characters themselves, should be placing the whole of the story under the gaze of future readers; this, without participating in its passions, motivated only by the agreeable excitement produced by the energetic approval of one’s spirit to expose what one has been so attentively contemplating.
Whether or not it’s a coincidence, the fact is, since he’s given up Malachy Moore for dead, he doesn’t sense that the person who’s been lying in wait for him so fervently is still there, the one who has been observing him with maniacal, perhaps professional interest. Nostalgia for the genius. Or for the absentee. Nostalgia even for the novice. The truth is that, more or less as Henry Vaughan was saying, they are all gone. They have all vanished, and perhaps for a long time, maybe forever. He remembers the youngsters who made fun of Cavalcanti because he never wanted to go on a bender with them. “You refuse to be of our company. But when you’ve proved there is no God, then what will you do?”
The rain falls, as if trying to flood the entire earth at last, including this house in north Dublin, this almost tragic house with a rocking chair and a big window and a painting of a stairway, in front of the Irish Sea, this house so well appointed for going worstward ho, and if I may be allowed to say so — forgive the interruption, I do need to distance myself somewhat, but if I don’t say it I’ll burst out laughing — so completely lined with Beckett.
What will he do now that he’s discovered that neither God nor the brilliant author exist and that, furthermore, no one looks at him anymore, and on top of that, there is nothing but misery in his ground-level Beckettian world. As he listens to the rain falling, he again senses, realizing that not only has something given way in the room, but also someone has now literally gone. There is no longer a shadow, not a trace of the specter of his author, or of the novice, or of God, or of the New York duende, or of the genius he always sought. It’s only intuition, but it seems clear that, ever since he’s felt settled into the worst of the worst, he’s been heading toward something even lower. No one’s lying in wait for him any longer, no one’s watching him, there isn’t even anyone hidden or invisible behind the deep blue interminable air. No one’s out there. He imagines slipping a smooth watch into his trouser pocket and starting down the stairs of a remote presbytery. But soon he wonders why he is making such an effort to imagine so much if no one, absolutely no one, sees him. Desolation, solitude, misery at the ground level. Settled into the worst of the worst, the world now only resembles a tiny mound of shit in the most rotten, least pure, least fragrant space. Nostalgia for perfumed faces, for apple faces. Things have gotten so bad; perhaps it would be best if Malachy Moore hadn’t died and continued to be a presence — a shadow if you will — that at heart, even if only a shadow, at least he was a presence with some sort of encouraging force.
He knows Malachy Moore was a great walker and that many called him Godot. That he’d been seen all over Dublin, in the most unexpected places. That he had Dracula’s great ability of turning himself into fog. He doesn’t know much else, but doesn’t think he’s so hard to imagine: Malachy Moore grew in an irregular way, especially his bone structure. Everyone was immediately struck by his eyes. Although he was short-sighted, his eyes were sharp and expressive, and gleamed with the profound light of intelligence behind the round lenses of his glasses. His hands were cold and lifeless and he never gave a firm handshake. When he roamed the streets, his legs resembled a stiff pair of compasses. He was an absolutely brilliant author, even though he’d never even written anything. He was the author Riba would have liked to discover. He seemed taller than he actually was. And if one caught a glimpse of him up close — before, following his most notorious custom, he disappeared into the fog — one would see straight away that he was not such a tall person, although his stature was above average. The impression of height came from his thin build, his mackintosh all buttoned up, and his tight trousers. Something in his appearance, with the fundamental contribution of his head, reminded one of some highland eagle — watchful, restless — soaring over valleys. A bird to keep an eye on.
Although he’s stuck in his rocking chair, he keeps hearing the gradual and almost irresistible call of his computer and after a while, knowing that Google sometimes works just like a police file, he gives in to temptation and goes and sits in front of the screen, like a perfect hikikomori, trying to discover in the entries on Malachy Moore, the young man in the mackintosh he saw in Glasnevin who made him think he might be looking at his author.
He looks at the entries, but only finds information on baseball or soccer players of that name, none of whom could ever be the genius in the raincoat he thought he saw a few weeks ago. He clicks on Images to see if by chance anyone pops up resembling a young Beckett, but there’s nothing of the sort, although there is a photo of three gentlemen, the caption of which has nothing at all to do with anyone called Malachy Moore: Sean McBride, Minister of External Affairs Irish Republic, Bernard Deeny, and Malachy McGrady at the 1950 Aeridheacht.
In order to carry on doing something before his two sleeping pills kick in, he checks the word Malachy, without the Moore, and there he finds information about an honorable Irishman, St. Malachy, a character completely unknown to him, but whom he has the impression he’s heard spoken of a thousand times. He reads about this St. Malachy of Armagh of Ireland, who was born Maelmhaedhoc O’Morgair in the year 1094 and was a Catholic archbishop, who is remembered ten centuries later for the two prophecies supposedly revealed to him at the end of a pilgrimage to Rome.
St. Malachy’s prophecies take Riba to Benedictus, the mysterious current Pope. And looking up the latest news on him, he discovers that Benedictus alias Ratzinger is a pope who spends most of his time in his room, reading and writing and preparing encyclicals. He travels much less than his energetic predecessor. As they used to say John Paul’s apartment looked like a Polish tabernacle, because there were always people coming in and out, they say the papal apartment of Benedictus/Ratzinger resembles a vault, that it’s reminiscent of the room in which the poet Hölderlin shut himself up for forty years. Why that room specifically? He tries to find out, unsuccessfully, to whom it would have occurred to link Ratzinger with the sublime Hölderlin. And he ends up thinking of Hölderlin’s room in Tübingen, that room lent to him by the carpenter Zimmer and in which the poet lived for forty years. He thinks of The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster, where it’s said that Hölderlin’s madness was faked and that the poet retired from the world in response to the ridiculous political attitude that racked Germany after the French Revolution. According to this, Hölderlin’s most deranged texts had been written in a secret, revolutionary code, and furthermore, with the private joy of a confined man.
“Confining oneself to a room. .” he remembers Paul Auster wrote.
He thinks how someone who could observe him from outside would see him. Someone like Malachy Moore, for example, who has now died. No one
was ever able to prove that the dead can’t see us. . A great clap of thunder. . Again, he feels entirely awake. A shame, now that he was starting to enter into a restorative dream, a dream that would take place entirely on Hopper’s stairway.
Mixed with fear, his yawns are imaginative curves taken by a slow, imaginary racing car that sometimes speeds up suddenly. On one of these curves, at the wheel of this strange car, he’s just discovered that his personality has things in common with that of Simon of the Desert, that anchorite who spent his life on top of a pillar in a Buñuel film. Simon stood in penance on top of the eight-meter-high pillar, while he has been doing the same, for a while now, with a more modern touch: sitting in front of a computer and with the feeling that the more time he spends in front of the screen, the more the computer, in a very Kafkaesque way, is imprinting itself on his body.
He suddenly realizes — no one is safe from the racing car’s whims — that a crippled dwarf and his goats are surrounding him. The devil appears to him dressed as a woman and tries to tempt him. Suddenly the feminine demon, as if in an imitation of what happened to Simon of the Desert, takes him on a trip — swifter than swift — to a cabaret in New York, and he’s glad to have arrived in that city so quickly, and what’s more, to have been unexpectedly liberated from the Gutenberg galaxy and the digital galaxy, both at once. It’s as if he’d approached the world beyond them, which can be nothing but the final cataclysm. After all, as John Cheever said: “We are never in our own times, we’re always somewhere else.”
In the cabaret, the voice of Frank Sinatra rings out at a thousand revolutions per minute, a song with lyrics that, depending on how you look at it, are terrible: “The best is yet to come.”
Everyone in the cabaret has insomnia. Outside, it’s pouring. Although New York is the most spectacular place he’s ever seen in his life, he’d rather be in Dublin. New York resembles a holiday more than anything and Dublin is more like a working day. He remembers those lines of Gil de Biedma’s that marked his youth: “After all, we don’t know / if things are not better this way, / limited on purpose. . Maybe, / maybe working days are right.”
“Go on, drink. It’s the end of the world.”
Black dancers attempt impossible dances.
New York’s very grand, but maybe, maybe it’s true that working days are right. And Dublin. Maybe Dublin is right too.
He’s always admired writers who each day begin a voyage into the unknown and yet who are sitting in a room the whole time. He goes back to thinking about rooms for recluses. He thinks of the philosopher Pascal, for starters, maybe because he was the first one Auster quoted in that chapter of The Invention of Solitude about rooms — square, rectangular, or circular — in which some took refuge. Pascal was the one who came up with that memorable idea that all our misfortunes stem from the fact that we are unable to stay quietly in our own room. What happened to Riba yesterday in McPherson’s is living proof of this, a clear demonstration that a rocking chair is preferable to the elements and the rain.
Auster mentioned many other rooms. The one in Amherst, for example, in which Emily Dickinson wrote her entire oeuvre. Van Gogh’s in Arles. Robinson Crusoe’s desert island. Vermeer’s rooms with natural light. .
Actually where Auster says Vermeer, he could just as well have said Hammershøi, that Danish painter of the obsessive portraits of deserted rooms. Or Xavier de Maistre, that man who traveled around his room. Or Virginia Woolf, with her demand for a room of her own. Or the hikikomoris in Japan who shut themselves up in their rooms in their parents’ houses for prolonged periods of time. Or Murphy, that character who didn’t move from the rocking chair in his room in London. . The sleeping pills seem to be taking effect again, and as he dozes, he feels he is getting into the skin of Malachy Moore when he knew how to slip away into the fog, and he is soon seeing all sorts of things in the deepest darkness. . But has Malachy Moore died? Google doesn’t know anything. It’s futile to search any further in Google. . He wants to believe it was a joke played on him by Verdier and Fournier, who took a shine to him last night. He can imagine the scene. Verdier saying: “Let’s go tell the whiskey king that his Malachy Moore was murdered at midnight. . ” He imagines things like that, until finally he falls asleep. He dreams that Google knows nothing.
He never thought he’d attend another funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery, and much less so soon. An altar boy, carrying a brass bucket of something no one can guess, is coming out of a door. The priest, in a white tunic, has come out behind him adjusting his stole with one hand and balancing a little book in the other against his toad’s belly. They both stop next to Malachy Moore’s coffin.
If I believed I was being pursued by an author, thinks Riba, it’s now entirely possible that he’s right there, four meters away from me, on that catafalque. And a moment later he wonders if he’d be able to admit to anyone that he is thinking such a thing. Would they take him for a lunatic? Surely it would be useless to explain that he’s not crazy, and that all that happens is that sometimes he senses or picks up too much, he detects realities no one else perceives. But it would probably be useless to explain all this, much less to say that his wife has left him and that’s why he’s so deranged. It’s the penultimate Tuesday in July and it’s only just stopped raining a couple of hours ago. It’s strange. So many days — months, even — with so much rain. Now even the disappearance of the clouds seems odd, such calm weather.
Yesterday, just as he feared, Celia left him. It didn’t matter that he was already awake when she woke up, because he failed to prevent her leaving. He tried everything and it was impossible to stop her.
“You can’t go, Celia.”
“I’m not staying.”
“Where will you go?”
“My people are waiting for me.”
“I’m sorry for being such an idiot. And anyway, who are your people?”
“You still reek of alcohol. But that’s not the only problem.”
“What is the problem?”
“You don’t love me.”
“I do love you, Celia.”
“No. You hate me. You don’t see the horrible things you do or how you look at me. And that’s not the only problem either. You’re a disgusting drunk. You never leave that rocking chair. You live in a pigsty. You always throw your dirty clothes on the floor and I have to pick them up after you. Who do you think I am?”
A long list of complaints followed in which, among other things, Celia accused him of endless stupid behavior and of encouraging cobwebs to grow in his brain and of not having accepted getting old and taking the loss of his publishing house and the power it used to give him so badly. And finally she again accused him of having fallen off the wagon just because he didn’t know what to do with his life anymore.
“You live without a god and your life lacks meaning. You’ve turned into a poor little man,” she sentenced finally.
At that moment, Riba couldn’t help but remember the previous day when, as soon as he gave Malachy Moore up for dead, something had given way swiftly in his room and he had settled into the worst of the worst. Now he was still in this place, the lowest of all. He was only saved by inhabiting the same paradox that united so many poor men like him: that sensation of being trapped in a place that only makes sense if it were actually possible to leave.
From Celia’s point of view, the whole conflict didn’t originate from her at all, nor was it caused indirectly by her change of religion, because she saw this change as completely normal, not at all problematic. The conflict had to come from somewhere else, surely from the meaningless life he was leading and also as the most direct consequence of this: his lamentable tendency recently toward extreme melancholy. Of course the life they’d lived before wasn’t exactly ideal either, despite the fact that, helped immeasurably by alcohol, he’d been more sociable. She, in any case, had long felt by then that literature had nothing to say to her; it didn’t change her vision of the world or make her see things in a different way. Instead, a
ll that hot air depressed her profoundly without any author who was close to God or to anything. Andrew Breen, Houellebecq, Arto Paasilinna, Derek Hobbs, Martin Amis. She felt distant from all those names, which for her had simply increased a list — Riba’s catalog — a list now lost in time: former guests who once came to dine at her house; people who believed in nothing and who drank till dawn and who it was very difficult to get rid of.
A taxi was waiting downstairs for Celia, and almost from the moment she reached the landing and put her suitcase and bag in the elevator, Riba began to think how he could get her back. He spent all day calling her cell phone, but there was never any answer. And his anguish at her absence was increasing, and by a long way, exceeding any other anguish he’d had for any other absence. Yesterday, when Celia left with a loud Buddhist slam of the door — even now the slam still strikes Riba as Buddhist — he stood in the house trembling with fear, fearing everything, including the unwanted emotions that might get to him through the enigmatic intercom. And he regretted never having once taken note of the address of the place in Dublin where she attended her Buddhist meetings. Without Celia, he was filled with such an absolute fear of the world that he spent longer than ever sitting motionless in the rocking chair, staring at the reproduction of the small Hopper painting.
“Leave,” the house said to him.
And he stayed in the rocking chair, half terrified, half obligingly, and even pretending that the painting of the stairway really had trapped him.
But as evening fell, as if he’d suddenly remembered that when it gets dark we all need someone, he got his strength back and began to move around the house, almost frenetically, until this unexpected restlessness ended up taking him all the way outside, where he trusted a stroke of luck would lead him to Celia, perhaps still walking round and round Dublin dragging her suitcase, in search of some society for the protection of Buddhists.
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