Dublinesque (19 page)

He watches the footsteps of the man in the gray Burberry and for a moment fears, and at the same time wishes, that this individual will come over to the front door of his building and press the intercom. It might be that the man wants to congratulate him for planning a requiem for the Gutenberg age, but also that he wants, as well as this, to tell him there’s no reason to look at things in such a short-term way and that he should intone a funeral song for the digital age too — which one day will disappear — and not be afraid, moreover, of time-traveling and intoning another requiem for everything that will come after the apocalypse of the internet, including not just the end of the world but the end of the world that follows that one. After all, life is an enjoyable and serious journey round the most diverse funerals.

Will the second end of the world include the brilliant blue dress with silver needlework, the white gloves and the little cocked hat his mother used to wear every Saturday night in the fifties when she went out with her husband to dance at the Flamingo? Back then no one in the family asked about the unfathomable dimension.

He looks out of the window again and sees that the man in the gray Burberry isn’t on his street anymore. What if it was Swedenborg? No, it wasn’t him. Just as it wasn’t that guy he one day thought might be directing everything under a weary light. It was someone who’s walked right by, although it’s strange, because at first that hadn’t seemed to be his intention.

His insomnia leads him to sit and read in his armchair. Like in the old days, when the computer didn’t limit his time so drastically. The music on the radio is still French, as if the English leap is up against curious domestic resistance from his favorite station.

He’s rescued from the shelf a book by W. B. Yeats, one of his favorite poets. It wasn’t planned, but reading this book might also contribute perfectly to the preparations for his trip to Dublin. Time goes by very quickly, and his insomnia adds even more to a sensation of time flying, but the fact is there are now only five days left until his trip. Everything has gone by really quickly and it seems like only yesterday when, in order to avoid his mother finding out he had absolutely no plans for the future, it occurred to him to say he had to go to Dublin.

He dives into the Yeats, into a poem where it clearly says that everything is falling apart, and that turns out to be ideal for the bloodshot eyes of a profoundly sleepless reader. Letting the verses carry him along, he imagines that the bright light of day is blinding him and that he’s turned into a skilled pilot who flies quickly over the geography of infinite life. A pilot who very soon leaves behind all the stages of humanity — the Iron age, the Silver age, the Gutenberg age, the digital age, the definitive, mortal age — and arrives just in time to witness the universal flood and the grand end, the funeral of the world, although in reality it would be more accurate to say that the world itself had been gradually burning through the ages and traveling toward its grand finale and funeral, previously announced in these lines of Yeats’s that carried Riba so far along this morning: “
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold
;/
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
,/
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
. . .”

There his flight ends. He comes back to reality, which is not so different from where his imagination has transported him. He shuts the book of the great Yeats and looks out of the window and follows the course of a cloud extremely curiously and then his head nods and he feels he might soon fall asleep, and then, to stop this from happening, he reopens the book he’d closed and finds in what he reads traces of the cloud he’s just been looking at, he finds it in a fragment of Vilém Vok’s prologue to Yeats’s book: “The winds that shake the coast and the woods where the
sidhe
talk, emissaries of the fairies, allude to a lost, but recoverable splendor.” And later: “It said that the world was once all perfect and kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth.” And he suddenly realizes what the real content of his father’s words were when he asked, the other day, if someone could explain the mystery to him.

If he hadn’t read those lines of Yeats’s, he surely wouldn’t have thought this just now. But he did read them and he can’t help but think that he’s just understood what exactly might have been behind those words of his father’s. Maybe the winds battering the Catalan coast at that moment disturbed his father’s unconscious, until he was driven to ask, indirectly, about a lost splendor. And the thing is that maybe his father wasn’t really asking about the mystery of life in general, or about the mystery of the storm, but rather about everything close to his emotional world, everything that, with time, he’d come to see was buried, like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of the dampest earth.

This could have been the true and fundamental cause of his father’s worries about the storm. And if this was the cause then Riba can’t deny that it was insomnia that helped him realize it, that his insomnia was hiding a visionary power he was previously unaware of, and by leading him to understand the true meaning of those words of his father’s, it was able to widen his outlook.

He goes to the kitchen, and lapsing once more into the mundane, makes himself a sandwich with ham and two layers of cheese in it. He wonders if it might not be the case that, when he thinks of New York, really what he’s interested in — a worthy successor to his father — is a perfect, kindly world, which as a child he lost very early on, and which he hopes to find again in this city one day. Is it symbolically concentrated in New York — his whole search for that great part of his life buried like a mass of roses under tons of earth? It’s possible. He takes a bite from the sandwich, then another one. He hates himself for having base needs, but the cheese is superb. He recalls a quote of Woody Allen’s about reality and steak. He’s feeling wider and wider awake. Wasn’t this what he was after? If so, then he’s achieving it, and he’s
seeing
more than ever. It’s as if he were approaching the experience of Swedenborg, the man who spoke totally naturally to angels. At times it seems to him that insomnia is capable of having the same effect on him as alcohol once did. Alcohol, which he needs so much sometimes. Who’s there? He smiles. He detects a presence again, although this time it might be merely wild intuition, provoked by his sleep-deprived state. The presence ends up seeming so obvious and large that he grows sad wondering what would become of him if reality suddenly showed him evidence of a great absence.

He starts reading
The Dalkey Archive
by Flann O’Brien, which is simply another way of conscientiously preparing for the trip to Dublin. What’s more, Finnegans pub, where Nietzky is planning to found the Order of Knights, is in Dalkey, a small town some twelve miles south of Dublin, on the coast.

Flann O’Brien says: “It is an unlikely town, huddled, quiet, pretending to be asleep. Its streets are narrow, not quite self-evident as streets and with meetings which seem accidental.”

Dalkey, a town of accidental meetings. And also of strange appearances. In
The Dalkey Archive
, St. Augustine appears alive and kicking, talking to an Irish friend. And James Joyce also appears, working as a bartender in a tourist pub outside Dublin and refusing to be associated with
Ulysses
, which he considers “a dirty book, that collection of smut.”

A violent wave of exhaustion now jolts his head forward. And again he has the sensation of being
watched
. Has Celia come back without him hearing her? He calls her, but no one answers. Total silence.

“James?”

Well, he doesn’t really know why he’s asking for James, but he hopes it’s not actually Joyce who’s now walking around out there.

He’s afraid of falling asleep, and if that’s true he suspects it’s because he’ll be assailed by that recurring nightmare where a sightless god with the look of a weary primate wants to shake his hand and so is forced to raise his elbow as high as he can. Riba looks at him from above, but it can’t be said he’s in a better position, as the two of them are locked in this cage in which they’re condemned for all eternity to be eaten away by an intimate Hydra, by a fearsome pain: the author’s ache.

Just after eleven o’clock in the morning, he starts to feel overcome by sleepiness. He wavers between going meekly to sleep falling victim to what his friend Hugo Claus called
the sorrow of the publisher
, or resisting a bit longer. He’s annoyed that sleep threatens just when, only a few moments ago, he felt most lucid.

In exactly five days, at this very hour, his plane will be landing in Dublin. Javier, Ricardo, and Nietzky will already have been there for a day when he arrives. Javier and Ricardo still don’t know that, apart from taking part in Bloomsday and the founding ceremony of the Order of the Knights of Finnegans, they’re going to participate in a funeral for the Gutenberg age. They have a tight schedule. Maybe Nietzky will explain it to them over the course of that first day the three of them spend together. Perhaps when he, Riba, gets to Dublin, Nietzky will already have thought of a way to celebrate this funeral and found the ideal place to hold it.

For quite a while, he resists the ravages of tiredness and fatigue by thinking about the imminent Irish trip. He’s worried, above all else, that even though he stopped being a
hikikomori
a few hours ago, now he seems more like one than ever. While he’s stopped being one in spirit, he knows that when Celia comes home, if she finds him asleep, the first thing she’ll think is that he’s turned, tragically and once and for all — unjustly, but it’s what she’ll think — into one of those Japanese people who spend their time in front of the computer all night and sleep all day.

It seems quite clear that if people say that as well as being respectable one must have the appearance of respectability, then it’s not enough to stop being a
hikikomori
, he also has to stop acting like one. But what can he do to avoid it? Sooner or later, he’ll give in. He’s had enough. He’ll sleep, he’s got no alternative. He leaves the idea of continuing experimenting with reason and madness for another time. But immediately he sees that he can’t interrupt them. He makes a huge effort and gets to his feet, he’s decided he won’t let sleep win, much less let Celia think he’s still a stubborn computer nerd.

He gets dressed, picks up his umbrella, hesitates for a few seconds, but finally goes out to the landing, takes the elevator, and goes down into the street. He’s spent days lazily avoiding buying some medication he needs. Now he has time to take care of some errands. He goes to the same pharmacy as usual and buys the pills he’s nearly run out of and which he’s been taking on prescription ever since his physical collapse two years ago. Pills to control high blood pressure: Atenolol, Astudal, Carduran, Tertensif. Then, in the bakery he buys a Roquefort pizza — which he’ll eat cold on the way home — and some croutons for the soup Celia made yesterday.

He can be seen all over the neighborhood, in the rain, with a bag from the pharmacy and eating a pizza. His oversized sunglasses hide physical deterioration caused by his insomnia. Comical and touching, from time to time, he glances furtively at the croutons. Today, despite his evident outlandishness, he looks more normal than on other occasions, at least he’s on his way from the bakery and the pharmacy, and might seem — indeed he is — just like one more local. The last time he was in this area there were a lot of people who saw him walking around in the rain in his old raincoat, his shirt with its torn collar turned up, those hideous short trousers, his hair completely plastered to his head. It was a strange picture he made, a poor, formerly prestigious publisher, dressed to be taken straight to a psychiatrist. A dreadful picture of an unhinged eccentric. Because of his behavior that day, lots of people in the neighborhood now look at him dubiously, and this despite the fact they’ve seen him more than once on TV talking sensibly about the books he published and which brought him such great fame.

He walks slowly, with his Roquefort pizza and his croutons and his umbrella held up straight and the pills he’s just bought from the pharmacy. I’m normal, look at me, his appearance seems to be saying. Of course the sunglasses give him away, and the raincoat is the same one he wore the other night, and his slightly meandering walk also gives him away, as do his anxious bites of the pizza. Actually, everything puts him in his neighbors’ sights. In the glass window of the florist, he studies himself and gives a start as he sees a strange passerby, with short trousers on under his raincoat. But he’s not wearing short trousers. Why did he think he was? Who is this fucking old man; who’s this comic character reflected in the glass?

He starts to laugh at himself and to walk like a tramp from a silent film. He plays at being his shadow, that comic character he saw in the shop window. He walks in a deliberately erratic way and then, outside the deli, imagines he’s not a common tramp — he has a house, a stable home where, it’s true, he does trample around. While he carries on walking in a funny way, he imagines it’s night time already and that he’s in his house, the rain lashing against the windowpanes, where there’s a reflection of his shadow, the shadow of another shadow. Because in this imagined house he is an ex-publisher waiting to meet the man he was before he created — with the books he published and the catalog life he’s led — a false personality for himself.