Dublinesque (11 page)

When he wakes up, still embarrassed as much as for having believed he really was on this beach, as for having unconsciously revived the sickness hidden inside every publisher, he dresses at top speed — he doesn’t want to waste time — and goes to his regular branch of the Bilbao Vizcaya bank, knowing there’ll be hardly any customers at this hour and he’ll be able to resolve a tiresome matter as quickly as possible. He’s seen by the smiling bank manager, whom he abruptly informs that he wishes to transfer half the money he has in an investment fund to another account in the same bank, one called External Cash Fund. First he confirms with the bank manager that the bonded capital in this new account is fully guaranteed. Then he carries out the transaction. Then he instructs her to transfer some of the money in his current account to another bank, the Santander. The manager knows she can’t ask him to explain this treacherous gesture, but it’s very likely she’s wondering what they’ve done wrong to make him undertake it. Finally, he signs some more forms and asks for the checkbook they forgot to give him on his last visit. He takes his leave very politely and cynically. Out on the street, he hails a taxi and goes to the other end of the city, to the neighborhood of Sants, to a branch of the Santander bank where Celia’s younger brother, who has worked there for a while, has offered him a pension plan with an excellent seven percent return. Having a pension plan already depresses him, as he’d never imagined growing old, but he prefers to be practical about it.

In the branch of Santander, with the money he’s transferred from Bilbao Vizcaya, he takes out the plan and also signs a good number of forms. The bank manager appears, Celia’s brother’s immediate boss, and shows polite interest in Riba’s longstanding, famous, and now finished publishing work. Riba distrusts so much politeness and suspects it is actually because the manager is on the verge of asking him straight out if the whole book trade is going really badly now. He looks at him almost rudely, and then abruptly starts to talk about New York and about how much he’d like to live there. His excessive praise of this city ends up irritating even the phlegmatic manager, who interrupts him:

“Listen, just one question, and forgive me, sir, but I’m dying to know. . . . Couldn’t you be happy living in Toro, in the province of Zamora? What is Toro or Benavente lacking to make you not want to go and live there? And sorry for asking — it’s probably because I’m from Toro.”

Riba thinks for just a few seconds, and finally embarks upon the rocky Zamoran path of his answer. He replies in a deliberately gentle, poetic, anti-banking, vindictive tone of voice considering the financial space in which he finds himself.

“It’s a difficult question, but I’ll answer it. I’ve always thought that, when it gets dark, we all need somebody.”

A formidable silence.

“I get the impression,” Riba goes on, “that in New York, for instance, if it gets dark and you’re all alone, the loneliness would always be less dramatic than in Toro or Benavente. Now do you see what I mean?”

The bank manager looks at him, his face almost expressionless, as if he hasn’t understood a thing. He slides some more forms across for Riba to sign. Riba signs and signs. And then, in the same soft voice as a moment ago, Riba requests that tomorrow they withdraw the amount still in the Bilbao Vizcaya fund, and transfer it to one in Santander itself.

An hour later, and he’s carried out all the transfers. It’s better this way, he thinks. Better to have the money spread about than all in one place. He gets into another taxi and goes home. He finds he’s rather exhausted, because it’s been two years since he’s carried out financial transactions or set foot in a bank. It seems to him he’s made a superhuman effort this morning. He starts noticing how incredibly thirsty he is. He’s tired and incredibly thirsty. He has a thirst for evil, for alcohol — well, for water, for calm, for being home again — but above all a thirst for doing wrong, for alcohol. He’d like to have a drink and launch back into his evil ways. After two years of abstinence, he’s confirming an old suspicion: the world is very dull, or — and this is the same — what happens to him is devoid of interest if not told by a good writer. But it was a real drag having to go out and hunt for all those writers, and on top of that never finding one who was truly great.

What logic is there in things? None really. We’re the ones who look for links between one segment of our lives and another. But this attempt to give form to that which has none, to give form to chaos, is something only good writers know how to do successfully. Luckily, Riba’s still friends with a few, although it’s also true he’s had to organize this trip to Dublin in order not to lose them. In terms of friends and creativity, he’s been in a critical situation ever since he closed his business. Deep down he misses the continuous contact with writers, such strange, ludicrous beings, so self-centered and complicated, and such idiots, most of them. Ah, writers. Yes, it’s true he misses them, although they were such a pain. All so obsessive. But it can’t be denied they’ve always amused and entertained him a lot, above all when — here he smiles maliciously — he paid them lower advances than he could have afforded and contributed to their being ever poorer. Ungrateful wretches.

Now he needs them even more than he used to. He’d like one or two of them to think to call and invite him to a book launch, or a conference on the future of the book, or simply show a bit of interest in him. Last year several of them still took the trouble to call (Eduardo Lago, Rodrigo Fresán, Eduardo Mendoza), but this year no one has. He’ll be really careful never to beg one of them, it would be the last thing he’d ever do in his life. Beg to be allowed to take part in some launch, or yet another swansong for the book! But he thinks there are a lot of people who owe part of their success to him and might remember him for some event of this sort or for anything. Although it’s a well-known fact: writers are resentful, jealous to the point of sickness, always penniless, and finally a load of ungrateful wretches, whether they’re poor or completely poverty-stricken.

As he doesn’t drink anymore, there’s no danger of him turning into a blabbermouth and going around letting one of his secrets slip. The best-kept one of all is about how much he enjoyed feeling like a real bastard every time he bragged about the number of reduced advances he paid to novelists, who are by far the most unbearable — more than poets or essayists — when they become truly insufferable. Of course, if he reduced their advances it was because he thought that, as he wasn’t very gifted in financial matters, if he didn’t haggle and earn himself a reputation for being stingy, he would have been ruined even sooner. If he hadn’t put a stop to his alcohol consumption and his business, he undoubtedly would have been well on his way to ending up like Brendan Behan: totally impoverished and an eternal drunk. He thinks about this Irish writer and the New York bars he used to visit. And he thinks again that today, after so much banking activity, if it wasn’t for the fact he himself has prohibited it, he’d knock back a glass of the strongest liquor right now.

“
Strong liquors
/
like molten metal
,” said Rimbaud, probably his favorite writer.

It’s a suicidal impulse, but what can he do? His thirst is great and the shadow of temptation long. And long too this life that’s so brief.

Riba imagines that Nietzky actually has something of the fleeting spirit that accompanied him in his childhood of continuous sessions of soccer on the Aribau patio. Those early years, the shadow of the spirit was always with him, but he soon lost sight of it, and has only seen it again in that dream he had the day he arrived in New York for the first time. He imagines Nietzky is a kind of guardian angel, this
angelo custode
. And he also imagines that now he’s speaking to this sort of relative of that lost spirit and that he’s doing so in a joyous realm of white cricket trousers, tartan socks, binoculars slung over one’s shoulder, and English languages.

You should lead a more healthy life, says Nietzky, you should go for walks in the fresh air. I’d like to see you walking around your neighborhood, or else out in the countryside. Tire yourself out in the natural world. Or else try to have other goals, instead of devoting yourself to your computer, or spending all your time thinking now you’re old and washed-up, that you’ve become very boring. But do something. Action, action. I have nothing else to say.

It seems to him that thinking about Brendan Behan is a more than suitable way of preparing for his trip to Dublin. For a time — long ago now — this Irish writer was an enigma to him, a mystery from the moment Augusto Monterroso said in
Journey to the Center of the Fable
that “travel writing such as
Brendan Behan’s New York
is the greatest happiness.”

For a long time he asked himself who the hell this Behan could be, but without going so far as actually looking him up. And now he remembers that whenever he saw Monterroso, he forgot to ask him. And he remembers too that, one day, when he least expected it, he found the name of Brendan Behan in an article about famous guests of the Chelsea Hotel in New York. All it said was that he had been a brilliant Irish writer who used to describe himself as “a drinker with writing problems.”

This last was etched into his mind; at the same time, an intensity yet scarcity of information made the enigma of this drinking saint still greater, until one day, many years later, he discovered Behan camouflaged behind the character of the garrulous Barney Boyle at a bar in
Christine Falls
, a novel written by John Banville under his pseudonym Benjamin Black. Still surprised by this discovery, he devoted himself to spying on the environment of this Boyle, Behan’s counterpart: an atmosphere of fog, coal fires, whiskey vapors, and stale cigarette smoke. And he began to think that each day he found himself ever closer to the authentic Behan. He wasn’t wrong. A few weeks ago, he went into a bookshop, and as if it had been there waiting for him his whole life, he suddenly came across the Spanish edition of
Brendan Behan’s New York
. The first thing he regretted was not having published it himself. And he regretted it more when he discovered that Behan’s book was a wonderful monologue about the city of New York, which he considered “the greatest city on the face of God’s earth.” To Behan, nothing compared to the electric city of New York, the center of the universe. The rest was silence, glaring darkness. After having been in New York, everything else was awful. And so London, for instance, must seem to a Londoner returning from New York like “a wide flat pie of redbrick suburbs with the West End stuck in the middle like a currant.”

Brendan Behan’s New York
, the book he wrote at the end of his life, turned out to be a tour of the infinite genius of a city’s human landscape, a city with a lucky star. What’s more,
Behan’s New York
confirmed that this city and happiness were the same thing. Behan wrote his book in the Chelsea Hotel, when he was already a total alcoholic, at the start of the sixties. They were days of great parties, where people were always dancing the recently invented twist and the Madison, but also days of incipient revolutions. Some years earlier, the Welshman Dylan Thomas had turned up at the Chelsea Hotel on the night of November 3, 1953, announcing he’d drunk eighteen straight whiskeys and thought this was probably a record (he died six days later).

Ten years later, as if he were the very same “drunken boat” from Rimbaud’s poem, “hurled by the hurricane into the birdless ether,” the Irishman Behan turned up at that hotel too in as inebriated a state as the Welshman had been; he was assisted by Stanley Bard, the owner of the Chelsea, who put him and his wife up, even though he knew that the writer, who was always drunk, had been thrown out of every other hotel. The great Stanley Bard knew that if there was one place where Behan might start writing again it was the Chelsea. And so it was. The hotel on 23rd Street, which had always been considered a place conducive to creativity, turned out to be crucial to Behan, whose book was composed on the same floor where Dylan Thomas had lived.

The book speaks of the euphoria induced in Behan by this energetic city in which, as evening fell — probably the eve of his own life — it always became clear to him that in the end the only important thing to do is “to get something to eat and something to drink and someone to love you.” In terms of the book’s style, it could be summarized as follows: to write and to forget. The two verbs sound like an echo of the well-known relationship between drinking and forgetting. Behan himself used to say that he had decided this: “I will have forgotten this book long before you have paid your money for it.”

Although he was Irish, Behan was never an administrator, perhaps the exception to Vilém Vok’s rule that New York belongs to the Jews, is administered by the Irish, and enjoyed by the Negroes. Because the last thing Brendan Behan wanted was to have to administer anything in his beloved city. Maybe this is why the style in
Brendan Behan’s New York
is made up of opinions that are shots with no intention of reaching beyond that shot itself, of deliberately furtive volleys, judgments about, all the humans he had within his reach: blacks, the Scottish, waiters, homosexuals, Jews, taxi drivers, beggars, beatniks, bankers, Latinos, Chinese, and of course, the Irish, who went around the entire city in family clans keeping an eye on each other and creating their own culture; it’s as if this were just a ballad about their rainy native land.

Throughout
New York
, at no point does Behan forget the inspiration of his literary masters. “Shakespeare said pretty well everything, and what he left out, James Joyce put in.” For example, Behan’s way of approaching each of New York’s bars recalls Joyce’s
Ulysses
when the day is drawing to a close and the people and scenery around Stephen start to disappear from his sight, perhaps because the drinks he’s consumed over lunch and the intellectual excitement of the conversation in the library — actually trivial and stultifying — are gradually making them sometimes clearer or sometimes more blurred. In the same way, the bars of early sixties New York gradually appear in Behan’s book, with transparent or hazy alternative names according to the level of his private enthusiasm. And the names, like some fascinating and disquieting litany, fall one after the other, inexorable, Irish, legendary: McSorley’s Old Ale House, Ma O’Brien’s, Oasis, Costello’s, Kearney’s, Four Seasons, and the Metropole on Broadway, where the twist was born.