Dublinesque (17 page)

Huge contrasts between greatness and the prosaic, between the heroic urge and chicken curry. He laughs. Maybe heroic urges nowadays are something completely vulgar and common. What is a heroic urge anyway? He thinks of it as if it were something very obvious when in fact he doesn’t really know what it is.

“Did you know that in Buddhist monasteries one of the exercises is to meet each moment of your life by living it to the full?” asks Celia.

She’s come into the study, and it doesn’t look like on her first day as a Buddhist she’s going to let him be much of a
hikikomori
. Riba is surprised because Celia never comes into his room without knocking.

“In Buddhist monasteries they help you to think,” says Celia completely naturally, as if she hasn’t infringed one of their house rules by coming into his study.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Really? I’ll explain. In Buddhist monasteries they help you say to yourself, for instance: now it’s noon, now I’m walking across the patio, now I’m going to meet the abbot, and at the same time you have to think that noon, the patio, and the abbot are unreal, they’re as unreal as oneself and one’s own thoughts. Because Buddhism denies the
I
.”

“That’s something
I
am not unaware of.”

He observes that the conflict he wanted to avoid is about to happen, and thinks again that in no way does he want to live in a novel. But the fact is, what he feared is happening: it won’t be easy living with someone who’s changed a lot in the last few weeks and who now has a markedly religious world view very different from his own.

Celia thinks she can guess what he’s thinking, and calms him down. She says he mustn’t worry, because Buddhism is gentle, it’s good, and what’s more, Buddhism is just a philosophy, a way of life, essentially just a technique for personal improvement.

One of Buddhism’s meditation themes, Celia explains, is the idea that there is no subject, but rather a series of mental states. Another theme is that our past life is illusory. He should calm down, Celia tells him. Riba doesn’t know what to reply, and says he’s prepared to calm down but he’s not inside a novel.

“I don’t understand,” Celia says.

“Nor I you.”

“But let’s see if you at least understand this. If, for example, you were a Buddhist monk, you’d think at this moment that you’ve started to live now. Are you listening?”

“I’ve started to live now?”

“You’d think that all of your life before now, that alcoholic period of yours and the very one you hate so much and feel so proud of having escaped, was a dream. This is what you’d think, do you follow? You’d think this and also that all of universal history is a dream. Are you listening?”

He is, sort of. The irruption of Buddhism into his life has overwhelmed him. The truth is he preferred her when she used to talk to her mother on the phone every evening, or to her siblings, or her work colleagues about the problems at the museum. Buddhism has come to complicate everything.

“You’d gradually liberate yourself by doing mental exercises,” Celia continues. “And once you understood for real that the
I
doesn’t exist, you wouldn’t think that the
I
can be happy, or that your task is to make it happy, you wouldn’t think any of that.”

He thinks that all that remains for her to say is: And don’t get so excited about your trip to Dublin, or your search for enthusiasm and lost genius, or about New York, which represents your hope of abandoning your mediocre life, or about the idea that you’re not that old, or about the English leap.

But being a Buddhist, he wonders, would she be able to say something so incredibly cruel? He prefers to think not. Buddhism isn’t merciless. Buddhism is gentle, Buddhism is good. Isn’t it?

His eyes round as saucers, he’s sitting in front of the computer. He doesn’t know how many hours he’s been here. Relentless insomnia. He gets the impression he’s being
observed.
Maybe by someone not visible. By someone who has faded into impalpability, whether through death or through a change of manners.

It’s well known that every man shows a different face when he feels he’s being spied on, and now Riba, sensing he might be watched, changes even his gestures. He should go to bed, maybe that’s all it is. Tiredness. It’s almost five o’clock in the morning. He should get some rest, but he’s not convinced it’s the right thing to do. He turns back to the computer.

He discovers via Google that on February 2, 1922, the day his father was born, other things happened in the world. One of them is astonishingly related to a very important event for Dublin. On this day Sylvia Beach, the publisher of
Ulysses
, was walking restlessly along the platform of the Gare de Lyon in Paris for a long time. Shrouded in the chilly morning air, she awaited the arrival of the train from Dijon. The express arrived at seven o’clock on the dot. And Sylvia Beach ran toward the ticket inspector who was holding a packet and looking for the person to give those first two copies of
Ulysses
to, sent by the printer Maurice Darantière, who had worked his fingers to the very bone on every correction of every paragraph of every galley that had been crossed out, rewritten, and manhandled to ridiculous extremes. There were the first and the second copies of the first edition, with their Greek blue cover and the title and author’s name in white lettering. It was James Joyce’s birthday, and Sylvia Beach’s present to him would be unforgettable. Perhaps this was one of the great secret moments of the age of print, of the Gutenberg galaxy.

That same day, at the same time that Joyce received his first copy of
Ulysses
, at a strange age — he’d been in the world a mere four hours — Riba’s father let out a huge resounding grunt, which went right through the walls of the house where he was born.

He writes a really long email to Nietzky to say that every day he feels more predestined to go to Dublin, but in the end he doesn’t send it. He goes back to Google and after looking at a few random pages ends up with the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershøi on the screen, which leave him even more wide awake than he was before. He always finds this Danish artist immensely hypnotic, a man who for his entire career limited himself to a few motifs: portraits of his relatives and close friends, paintings of the inside of his home, monumental buildings in Copenhagen and London, and Sjælland landscapes. He likes these canvases where the same motifs appear again and again. And although their creator projects great peace and calm in all of them, Hammershøi might be reproached for being obsessive. But he thinks that in art this is often precisely what matters, unbridled obsession, the fastidiousness behind the work.

In Hammershøi’s works the painter is always present, with his persistent images circling around his insistent empty spaces, and nothing apparently happens though nevertheless, a lot does — what happens — unlike a subject in a painting by someone like Edward Hopper for example — would never catch on as material for an orthodox novelist. There is no action in his paintings. And without exception, they are all impregnated with a very solid atmosphere: behind the extreme calm and motionlessness, one senses something indefinable and maybe threatening lying in wait.

His palette is very limited and is dominated by a range of gray tones. He’s the painter of what happens when it looks like nothing’s happening. All this turns his interiors into places of hypnotic stillness and melancholic introspection. Happily, in these paintings there is no place for fictions, for novels. One can relax comfortably in them, however much an obsessive mind sweeps over all the canvases.

But what’s more, Riba likes this painter precisely because, in the midst of the lethargic stillness of his empty spaces, everything in him is obstinate, insistent. Hammershøi lives in a permanent state of
quiet obsession
— to use the title of one of Vok’s books, given in English. The peaceful man’s universe seems to revolve around his restrained fascination.

He has always liked this expression —
quiet obsession
— coined by Vok’s English translator. Riba also believes he has obsessions of a similar style. His quiet passion for New York, for instance. His tranquil obsession with a funeral in Dublin, with bidding farewell — he doesn’t yet know whether with a gunfire salute or with tears — to the age of print. His tranquil obsession with experiencing one more moment in the center of the world, traveling to the center of himself, and reaching significant degrees of enthusiasm, and not dying of shame after having lost almost everything.

He’s especially gripped by an obsession with
The British Museum
, the strangest, most obsessive Hammershøi painting he knows. A painting of an almost aggravated gray tone and in which a thick morning fog can be seen spreading down a totally deserted street in Bloomsbury. As in so many paintings by this artist, the canvas has no people in it. It belongs to a series of works by Hammershøi in which foggy, deserted streets in this area of London that must have hypnotized the painter appear with marked insistence.

He’s only set foot in London once, five years ago, when he was invited to a publishers’ conference. He never visited the book fair in this city because he was worried he would feel self-conscious about his non-existent English, so he always used to send Gauger there instead. On this first and only trip to London, he was put up in a little family-hotel in Bloomsbury, next to the British Museum, near the building of the enigmatic Swedenborg Society. The conference meetings took place in a Bloomsbury theater. And during his brief three-day stay he barely had time to look around anywhere other than his hotel and the museum. He got to know the streets of that district so exhaustively that he’s been under the impression ever since that he knows it really well, in depth. This has been his way of trying to take possession of the area. Maybe that is why, when he watched the film
Spider
, the rundown streets of the East End surprised him, because he didn’t want to accept something as basic as the fact that in London there were areas quite different from Bloomsbury.

On that journey five years ago he took great care not to say to anyone it was the first time he’d visited the city. He knew it would make a terrible impression that a publisher such as himself, with all his prestige, was such a yokel and hadn’t set foot in London, and moreover, had not set foot there purely out of embarrassment at having no idea how to speak English.

On that journey five years ago he carefully and meticulously studied the streets around the British Museum. He walked up and down them many times and ended up memorizing them and when he got home was able, almost immediately, to identify the street in any of Hammershøi’s London paintings he saw, and even knew, almost by heart, the street’s name. This was the case with all the paintings except
The British Museum
. The same thing happens to him today. It’s strange, but he still loses himself, gets confused, drowns in this painting. The more he sees the street that features in this painting, the less he knows which one must have served as a model for the painter, and the more he wonders if Hammershøi invented it himself. Nevertheless, the bit of the building that can be seen on the left of the canvas must be one side of the museum, and as such, he should recognize this street, which is probably no great mystery and is very possibly a street that exists and that is there — one more quiet obsession, for when he decides to return to London and see it.

In any case, he has a relationship with the painting
The British Museum
as strange as the one he’s always had with London. Because, in actual fact, if he hasn’t been to London more than once, it’s not just because of his lack of a command of English, but also because for years a strange fear has been growing inside him caused by the fact that on several occasions, having been on the verge of traveling to this city, something odd always prevented him at the last minute. The first time was in Calais, at the start of the seventies. His car was already on the ferry due to drop him on the other side of the Channel, when an unexpected argument with a female friend — a somewhat fatuous argument about Julie Christie’s miniskirts — had him backing out of the trip. In the eighties, the plane ticket already bought, a colossal storm blocked his path and ended up stopping him from crossing the English Channel.

He started thinking London was that place to which, for obscure reasons, we know we should never go, because death awaits us there. That’s why, five years ago, when the invitation to London he’d always feared arrived, he felt genuine panic. After quite a few doubts, he finally left his house in Barcelona, convinced, however, that before taking the plane, the most unforeseeable event would prevent him from setting foot on English soil. But nothing stood in his way, and he ended up landing at Heathrow, where, with extreme suspicion, he was able to verify that he remained perfectly alive.

Feeling threatened by strange, dark forces, he began walking very apprehensively through the airport. For a moment, he even thought he’d lost his sense of direction. An hour later, when he got to his hotel room, he sat on the bed for a long time, in silence, surprised nothing had happened to him yet and that he hadn’t even felt the slightest possibility of a visit from Death. After a short while, seeing that everything remained in a state of normality almost as vulgar as it was obscene, he turned on the television, found the news, and despite not understanding a word of English, very quickly deduced that Marlon Brando had just died.

He was filled with terror, because he understood that, due to an error by a distracted Death, so predisposed to getting muddled, Brando had died in his place. Afterward, he rejected the idea as inconsistent. But he spent quite a while holding a private funeral for poor Brando and at the same time keeping alert for any possible movements in the third-floor corridor outside his room, as he felt enormously afraid that Death might come down that narrow hallway with the aim of paying him a visit.