Dublinesque (21 page)

Goodbye to this city, this country, goodbye to all that.

Two old professionals over there at the start of the stately, commercial avenue. They don’t seem aware that all life is a process of demolition and that the hardest blows await them. He thinks about all this from a spot where he can’t be seen by them. Without them knowing it, he’s a traitor, he represents one more blow of the many that will hit them. Here he is now, saying goodbye in his own way to Barcelona, in his shadowy corner, crouching down as he waits for absolute darkness. It will be much better if, at the end of everything, sorrow disappears and silence returns. He’ll carry on as he always has done. Alone, without a generation, and without even a modicum of pity.

Time
: Just past eleven in the morning.

Day
: June 15, 2008, Sunday.

Style
: Linear. Everything can be understood, displaying an air similar to that of the sixth chapter of
Ulysses
, in which we find a lucid and logical Joyce, who introduces the occasional thought from Bloom that the reader can easily follow.

Place
: Dublin Airport.

Characters
: Javier, Ricardo, Nietzky, and Riba.

Action
: Javier, Ricardo, and Nietzky, who have already spent a day in Dublin, meet Riba at the airport. The idea is to hold the funeral ceremony for the Gutenberg galaxy at dusk tomorrow before visiting the Martello tower. Where? Riba delegated this decision to Nietzky days ago now, and he, with good judgement, thinks that the Catholic cemetery of Glasnevin — formerly Prospect Cemetery, where Paddy Dignam is buried in
Ulysses
— might be a suitable place. But Ricardo and Javier still know nothing of the funeral. And because they don’t know, they don’t know it’s been included in the informal itinerary Riba and Nietzky have been putting together.

Meanwhile, Riba’s friends, the three writers, are already, unbeknownst to them, living replicas of the three characters — Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, and John Power — who accompany Bloom in the funeral procession in the sixth chapter of
Ulysses
. To Riba’s secret satisfaction.

Themes
: The usual ones. The now unalterable past, the fleeting present, the nonexistent future.

First, the past. This suffering relates to what Riba might have done and what he didn’t do and left buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth, and his need to not look back, to attend to his heroic urges and take the
English leap
, to direct his gaze forward, toward the insatiable quality of his present.

Then, the present, fleeting, but in some way graspable in the shape of a great need to feel
alive
in a
now
that is giving him the gift of feeling joyously free at last, without being criminally hindered by publishing fiction, a task that in the long run became a torment, with the sinister competition of books filled with gothic stories and Holy Grails, holy shrouds, and all the paraphernalia of illiterate modern publishers.

And finally, the question of the future, of course. Dark. You have no future, as the transsexual from the patisserie downstairs would say. The famous future is the main theme, which turns out to be not exactly a unique one: Riba and his destiny. Riba and the destiny of the Gutenberg galaxy. Riba and the heroic urge. Riba and his suspicion a few hours ago that he was being watched by someone who maybe wants to do some sort of experiment on him. Riba and the decline of literary publishing. Riba and the grand old whore of literature, already now out in the rain on the last pier. Riba and the angel of originality. Riba and the croutons. Riba and whatever you like.
As you like it
, as Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, his friend Boswell, and so many others said.

“Where shall we celebrate?” asks Riba, as soon as he arrives at the terminal and meets up with his friends.

He’s referring to the funeral for the Gutenberg world, for the world he knew and idolized and which has worn him out. But he’s caused a misunderstanding. As Javier and Ricardo still haven’t been informed of the requiem, they think Riba is talking about celebrating the fact that the four of them have just met up in Dublin and is suggesting they go for a few drinks, that is, they assume he’s decided to start drinking again. It’s odd, but they’re excessively thrilled by the idea of their former publisher supposedly having fallen off the wagon. And so they laugh happily.

“In Glasnevin Cemetery itself,” Nietzky interrupts tersely.

“Is there a bar in the cemetery?” Javier asks, surprised.

State of the sky
: It’s not raining like in Barcelona. But a cloud is starting to cover the sun and plunges the land around the airport into a darker shade of green. Riba’s memories melt into the dark, refreshing waters of the shadows.

They get into the Chrysler that Walter, a friend of Nietzky’s from Dublin, has lent them. Ricardo drives, since he’s an expert in driving on the left and the only one of them, moreover, who is dressed as an Irishman, although an Irishman who is, if anything, straight out of the John Ford film
Donovan’s Reef
, that is, in a flowery shirt with Polynesian designs, hidden, however, under a very long, old-fashioned raincoat that recalls those used by Sergio Leone in his spaghetti westerns. In comparison, Javier is dressed in a very sober, almost British way. Depending how one looks at it, they make an unwittingly comic pair.

They head for Morgans hotel, the quartet’s headquarters. A strange place, as Javier explains to Riba, a place full of solitary executives, individuals in suits and ties whom they’ve decided to call “Morgans.” It’s a place on the road leading from the airport to the city of Dublin and that belongs to the same chain as the sophisticated Morgans hotel in New York, on Madison Avenue. The bar of the Morgan Museum, next to Morgans hotel in New York, was precisely where Nietzky and Riba set out from a few months ago to visit the Austers’ house.

“Oh, have you two been to the Austers’ house?” asks Javier mockingly, as he’s heard Riba tell this story a thousand times.

Ricardo found this Dublin highway hotel on the internet and booked the rooms because of its proximity to the airport, never imagining it would be so hip, especially since it looked like a motel on the website. They all protest, because Ricardo seems to have had no qualms about putting them up in a motel like that.

Riba tells them his wife had been on the verge of coming with him, but luckily she couldn’t make it. While Celia’s intentions were good, her presence on the trip would have made the unfortunate scene he’d witnessed in his dreams far too likely to come true, a terrible sequence resulting from cold, hard alcoholism on the way out of the Coxwold pub. Perhaps a pub with this name doesn’t exist in Dublin, but he believes that, if his wife had come with him, the terrifying, prophetic vision from his dream might have come true: Celia, appalled when she discovers the undesirable fact that he’s fallen off the wagon, embracing him emotionally, the two of them crying in the end, sitting on the curb of a Dublin side street.

Everyone is quiet. They’re probably thinking malicious thoughts.

Nietzky interrupts the silence to say that no one has noticed it, but the bar of Morgans hotel is called the John Cox Wilde pub, which sounds a lot like Coxwold. At first Riba chooses not to believe him, but when the others confirm that this is, in fact, the name of the bar, he says he’d actually be in favor of staying at a different hotel. He says it quite seriously, because he believes that, in general, dreams come true. Then he changes his mind, just as they get to Morgans and he finds he likes the foyer, decorated with large black and white tiles, and the statuesque receptionists as well. They’re extremely tall and look like fashion models, maybe they are. They’re also very friendly, although he can’t understand what they’re saying, or why they’re receptionists and not models.

In the large black and white foyer, several strangely tormented guests can be seen, their heads bowed, sad “Morgans” wearing dark glasses and impeccable business suits, thinking of impenetrable matters. Sophisticated background music. It doesn’t seem as though they’re on the road from the airport, or even near Dublin, you’d think they were in the very center of New York. It seems like Ireland’s economic situation has improved recently, thinks Riba, as he notices with some surprise that the foyer of this Dublin Morgans is almost identical to that of the hotel on Madison Avenue.

Javier de Galloy’s version of “Walk on the Wild Side” is playing. Whenever Riba hears this song — and especially when the singer pronounces the syllables of the words “New York City” — he thinks he’s listening to the background music for his
English leap
, for his great Sternean sentimental journey, his Odyssey in search of his original enthusiasm.

He’s not lacking in enthusiasm; although, at the sight of the closed John Cox Wilde, he is momentarily lost down depressing paths, evoking the brutal alcoholic life he led for many years so as to be able to get his independent publishing house off the ground and to have life experiences that would help him create a catalog disconnected from the academic formalism and the reactionary life of the people of his generation.

He needs to see alcohol as something monstrous, something to which he can never go back, because if he does so he’ll seriously risk his health. All in all, he needs to remember that he had to drink a lot to make the publishing house a success and that he paid a very high price, his health to be precise, for his alcoholic adventures. In any case, he doesn’t regret anything. It’s just that he no longer wants or is able to repeat that experience. After his great physical collapse, everything became calm and now he’d like to think that he’s come back to life, that he’s gradually forgotten this hardened period of alcoholic activity. As he left the hospital a new man, he started to listen in astonishment to what people were saying about his work as a publisher; at first he listened and pretended to believe that it was someone else who had done this work, his double, as if he’d just now inherited it as a surprise. And by pretending like this, he ended up believing, for a while, in his own farce.

Only when he was conscious once more that he had founded the publishing house and it had cost him his health did he start to feel old and washed up and depressed, and he began to sink into melancholy; this is a world where he doubts publishers with a passion for literature like his own will ever exist again. With every day that goes by it seems more and more to him that these kinds of passions have already begun receding into history and will soon fall into oblivion. The world he once knew is ending, and he knows full well that the best novels he published were practically only about this, worlds that would never exist again, apocalyptic situations that were mainly projections of the authors’ existential angst and that nowadays raise a smile, because the world has continued on its course despite meeting with an inexhaustible number of grand finales. Riba thinks, if the world doesn’t quickly fall into oblivion, it won’t be long before the tragedy of the decline of the print age (the decline of a great and brilliant period of human intelligence) will also raise a smile. Distancing oneself from fleeting dramas seems, at the very least, the most sensible option.

Morgans hotel looks different when one starts to explore the long corridors and discovers that the numbering of the floors and rooms is not the slightest bit logical. There is a phenomenal disorder inside the building. What’s more, the corridors are full of workers who seem to be adding the final touches to the hotel, as if the place weren’t finished yet. An aggressive hammering can be heard everywhere. And there is an exceptional amount of chaos, which has always been a famous source of creativity, and which recalls certain scenes from American films from the years of New York’s great economic optimism, when a certain kind of world was under construction and there was a simple, pure enthusiasm everywhere.

Riba wheels his suitcase to his room , and because of the strange numbering system he gets lost several times; he thinks that, among so many workers spread through all the corners of the great building, he wouldn’t be surprised if he suddenly came across Harpo Marx with a hammer, ready to bash in a nail then and there. This place, still in the middle of being built, is the ideal place to bump into Harpo, but he wouldn’t know how to explain why. It must be the general chaos that’s given him this idea.

In his room, next to the telephone, there’s a card inviting guests to the John Cox Wilde pub. It opens at six in the evening; in other words, somewhat to Riba’s relief, there are still a few hours to go. The room smells of perfume and it looks as if it’s been recently tidied, everything is in its place. There’s a slightly ridiculous token from the hotel, a lonely chocolate, on the bedside table. Do those businessmen like these little chocolatey gestures? The view from the window is a sad one, but he’s fascinated by the gray air, the smoke from the chimneys, the brownish color of the bricks of the houses opposite. He loves the view, because it is not at all Mediterranean, which allows him to feel properly abroad. This is what he’s wanted for weeks. He couldn’t feel any better. He’s got what he came for: to
land on the other side
. Finally he’s in an environment where strangeness and also — for him at least — mystery prevail. And he notices the joy surrounding everything new; he is almost looking at the world with enthusiasm again. In countries like this, a person can reinvent himself, mental horizons open up.