Dublinesque (29 page)

Perhaps Celia should be here now, and a couple of good drinks should have left the two of them crying emotionally, collapsed in an embrace on the floor, at the entrance to this hellish pub: fallen, but together forever in their love and in their essential weeping, and with Buddha’s permission, going through an intense experience of great epiphany, a moment right in the center of the world.

The noise inside the Gravediggers is so loud that now he’s talking to Walter using only signs. No one can understand him, not even Walter, an expert in sign language. But Riba on the other hand knows very well what he’s saying. He’s telling Walter that all life is a demolition job, but the blows that carry out the
dramatic
part of this task — the sudden hard blows that come, or seem to come, from outside — the ones that a person remembers and that make him blame things, and those that, in moments of weakness, a person tells his friends about, don’t reveal their effects immediately. The blows come from inside, those blows that furtively encroached upon your interior self from the moment you decided to become a publisher and look for writers, and especially for a genius. These blows are related to a dull, muted pain a person doesn’t really notice until it’s too late to do anything, until you realize once and for all that in a certain sense you’ll never again be who you were and that the blows were well-aimed.

•

He doesn’t touch a drop, but perhaps because he’s returned, after twenty-six months, to a completely alcohol-infused environment, he remembers that his greatest error, linked to his love of drink, was his inexcusable need to show others the most abject side of his being, and the fact that he always he used to make an effort to speak the truth about what he was thinking, whether or not this hurt whoever might be listening. Taking for granted that his charming side was always visible, he took pains to reveal his abject side. And he did this driven by a need, on the one hand, to escape all social protocols (which made him feel ill) and on the other, because of a desire to align himself with the purest and most original surrealist movement, that which held that any idea that passed through one’s head should be immediately put out there and doing so constituted a moral obligation, because this way the most intimate side of everyone’s personality was put on display. Naturally this, shall we say, aggressive compulsion brought him numerous problems, lost him contracts and friendships and destroyed his public image. Now, since he stopped drinking and went over to the other side and reveals only, in a positively overwhelming way, the most attractive side of his being, he has the feeling he’s lost the suicidal but brilliant “open country” of his previous experiences. He’s remained in a state of stifling serenity and politeness and cleanliness that sickens him. It’s as if now he were merely an elegant impostor who pilfered the genuine, moving images from the minds of others. Of course he couldn’t feel less inclined to have a few drinks and return uselessly to being abject. He’d much rather feel that, for some time now, sobriety has been helping him to recover his tragic conscience, as well as to look for his center, his algebra and his key, as Borges would say, and his mirror.

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.”

T
he 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 discreet 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.