Dublinesque (30 page)

Other details
: From this game of going through all the authors and studying why not even one ever submitted a true masterpiece is derived another even more perverse game, which consists of asking himself the painful question of whether the brilliant author for whom he’d searched so long and hard wasn’t actually himself, and if he hadn’t become a publisher in order to have to look exclusively for that great talent in others, and thus to be able to forget the dramatic case of his own personality; he’s actually hopeless at being brilliant as well as hopeless at writing. It’s very possible that he turned to editing in order to avoid this baggage and be able to dump his disappointment on others, not exclusively on himself.

He immediately feels he has to contradict himself and remembers that he also took up publishing because he’s always been an impassioned reader. He discovered literature by reading Marcel Schwob, Raymond Queneau, Stendhal, and Gustave Flaubert. He became a publisher after a long time ; and then there’s the time he now considers
black
in which he betrayed his first literary loves, reading only novels with protagonists who earned more than a hundred thousand dollars a year.

A commentary
: It’s well known that when a person sees a glint of gold in books, he’s taking a qualitative leap in his editorial vocation. And some of that could apply to Riba, except that, beforehand, he was a reader of good novels, and also a committed reader; he didn’t just go into the business to make a lot of money, that is, for what is vulgarly referred to in Spanish with the verb
forrarse
. Ah,
forrarse
! What a strange expression. Was there any equivalent in English? To make a mint? To line one’s pockets? In fact, he soon realized he was heading for ruin and still didn’t want to give it up, and the miracle was that he lasted in his profession for thirty years.

He always had good relationships with foreign publishers, whom he usually saw at the Frankfurt Book Fair and with whom he exchanged information and books. With editors in his own country, however, he never had a great rapport. They always seemed fatuous to him, less knowledgeable about literature than they pretended to be: bigger celebrities and more egocentric than their authors whom they branded as egomaniacs to delirious extremes. Curiously, his friends in Spain have usually been writers, and the vast majority younger than him.

Even though he never stumbled upon a truly great genius, he had a deep respect for the vast majority of his authors, especially those who understood literature as a force directly linked to the subconscious. Riba has always believed that one loves most books that produce the sensation, when opened for the first time, that they’ve always been there: places never visited appear in them, things never seen or heard before, but the sense of having a personal memory of those places or things is so strong that somehow you end up thinking you’ve been there.

Today he takes it for granted that Dublin and the Irish Sea have been in his mental landscape forever, forming part of his past. If one day, now that he’s retired, he goes to live in New York, he’d like to begin a new life, he’d like to feel like a son or a grandson of an Irishman who emigrated to that city. He’d like to be called Brendan, for example, and for the memory of his work as a publisher to be easily forgotten in his native land, forgotten with the malice and treachery so typical of his tight-fisted and indolent compatriots.

Could he, if he so desired, go back to that night when he danced that foxtrot until dawn, go back to his wedding day, go back to being the brilliant and heartless publisher who, at the height of his success — it didn’t last long — made caustic declarations and pointed out the ideal way forward for literature? Or is he going to be left forever staring, like an idiot, at the electric light and wondering whether to have a third Bloody Mary and thus liberate himself from the rocking chair? Is he going to remain forever unable even to get up and walk normally through the house? The buzzing comes again. Obsessively, he goes back to the discouraging and truly obsessive trousseau, the wedding gift list: lamps, vases, old-fashioned crockery. An author’s trousseau, he thinks.

The rain is getting heavier and heavier and is now too persistent to be a summer shower. Since yesterday the downpour has been interrupting the usual fine weather at this time of year in Ireland. For weeks it hasn’t rained in Dublin. He’s into the second week of a twenty-day holiday with Celia in an apartment in the north of the city, the area on the other side of the Royal Canal, not very far from Glasnevin Cemetery, where he’s wanted to return for days now, perhaps to see if he might again glimpse that ghost who vanished before his very eyes on that afternoon of June 16 in front of The Gravediggers pub; that ghost, a relative of Dracula’s, with the great ability to turn himself into fog.

During their first days on the island, he and Celia stayed on Strand Street in the coastal town of Skerries, a pleasant place with a great variety of sea and coast and a long, curved harbor full of shops and pubs. But Celia felt too disconnected from her Buddhist contact in Dublin — she’d been having long meetings every afternoon since they arrived with a religious society or club — and they moved to the pretty town of Bray, near Dalkey, where they also felt uncomfortable; they finally ended up in this apartment in a building near the Royal Canal.

The thing keeping Riba entertained now is trying to avoid remembering in too much detail what happened yesterday. He fears remembering yesterday’s horrors. So he looks again at the book of Nabokov’s lectures as if this might be his only hope, finally deciding to fully enter the Nabokovian commentary on one of the chapters, chosen at random (the first chapter of Part Two), of Joyce’s ever-difficult
Ulysses
:

Part Two, Chapter I

Style:
Joyce logical and lucid.

Time:
Eight in the morning, synchronized with Stephen’s morning.

Place:
7 Eccles Street, where the Blooms live, in the northwest part of town.

Characters:
Bloom, his wife; incidental characters, the pork-butcher Dlugacz, from Hungary like Bloom, and the maid servant of the Woods family next-door, 8 Eccles St . . .

Action:
Bloom in the basement kitchen prepares breakfast for his wife, talks charmingly to the cat . . .

Riba ends up closing the book of lectures, because the theme of
Ulysses
now sounds antiquated to him, as if the funeral on June 16 in Dublin had been so effective as to draw to a close an entire era, and now he is living only at ground level, or at rocking-chair level, as if he were a Beckettian vagabond; as if he were now resigned to the inevitable, preferring to remain at the mercy of the memory of last night’s tragic alcoholic relapse.

Fortunately, this rain today is not the terrible London flood, it’s not the same apocalyptic storm as when he was there with his parents, fifteen days ago, that savage rain. He’ll never go back to that city. Deep down the trip was a concession to his elderly parents, an attempt to assuage his guilt for not having been in Barcelona for their sixty-first wedding anniversary. And also a way of saving himself, even if just once, the hateful task of having to tell them about his visit to a foreign city.

“So you’ve been to London.”

He just couldn’t be bothered, when he got back, to have to answer his mother’s question and tell them things about that city, so he decided to take both of them, his father and mother, to London.

It was complicated — he thinks now, almost motionless in his rocking chair — that trip to London, because his parents hadn’t moved from Calle Aribau for years. But if anything, the excursion confirmed that they have a free-flowing communication with the great beyond wherever they are. In London, gatherings occasionally formed around his parents: agglomerations they pretended not to notice, perhaps because since time immemorial they’d always known how to bear the weight of so many ancestors naturally.

Perhaps he’s become very Irish. The thing is he didn’t feel comfortable in London. He didn’t like many things, but he has to admit that he did love the double-decker buses and the three elegant and solitary green-and-white-striped deck chairs he photographed in Hyde Park. He was sorry his friend Dominique wasn’t there because he would have liked to see the Tate installation with her; but she’d had to leave quite suddenly for Brazil, where she lives most of the time. He didn’t like many things about London, even though other things amused him. The strangest was when he saw his parents in the middle of the very street that Hammershøi depicted in “The British Museum.” Riba hadn’t been able to find this street on his previous trip, but he suddenly discovered that it did exist and it was called Montague Street and was in such plain view that Celia had found it as soon as they approached the British Museum. She was carrying the photocopy of the painting that Riba had brought to London for that very reason: a very wrinkled photocopy Riba kept in his pants pocket. Right there, in Montague Street, was where the greatest ghostly turmoil gathered around his parents, who seemed to know everybody and to have been living in that neighborhood their whole lives.

Riba thought that, if he had been a poet or a novelist, he would have exploited the great narrative goldmine he had at his disposal in his parents’ animated ghostly gatherings: gatherings not restricted, as he’d always thought, to the closed space of the apartment on Calle Aribau, but taking place — as was now perfectly obvious — anywhere in the world, in broad daylight, in any bustling city street in any suburb of the universe, including London.

He didn’t like that city, but he walked around with interest, for a long time, through the surly and labyrinthine East End, the center of Spider’s gray life. And he was fascinated by the huge and somewhat ancient railway stations, especially Waterloo. He went into ecstasies for a few moments, in Bloomsbury, in front of the building of the enigmatic Swedenborg Society, and recalled the extraordinary revelation that occurred to the Swedish philosopher one day as he stood on the second-floor balcony of that house: if he wasn’t mistaken, the revelation was that, when a man dies, he doesn’t realize he’s died, since everything around him stays the same, for he is at home, his friends visit him, he walks the streets of his city; he doesn’t think he’s died, until he begins to notice that in the other world everything is as it is in this one, except it’s slightly more spacious.

They were good moments he spent there in front of the Swedenborg Society, but in general he didn’t like London; although that didn’t stop him doing things all over the city. Patiently, Celia and his parents accompanied him around Chelsea as he whimsically tracked down the two houses where Beckett had lived as a young man in the 1930s. One was situated at 48 Paultons Square, a beautiful spot just off the King’s Road. And the other at 34 Gertrude Street, where the writer rented a room from the Frost family and went out every day to the sessions of psychoanalysis his mother paid for from Dublin and which little by little created in him a mood favorable to hating that city, although not writers like Samuel Johnson, about whom he wanted to write a play. “You can’t imagine how much I hate London,” Beckett wrote to his friend Thomas McGreevy, a key person in his life because he was the one who put him in touch with James Joyce. For the young Beckett, that letter, in which he explained in detail how very much he hated London, was nothing more than the preamble to his decision, the next day, to pack his bag and return to Dublin, where the martyrdom of his difficult relationship with his mother awaited him.

There was a great photograph to commemorate 34 Gertrude Street. A big, suddenly youthful smile from Riba looking at the camera Celia was pointing at him. Glorious moment. He felt happy and almost proud of having been able to find the two lodgings of the young Beckett so easily.

“And without knowing a word of English!” he repeated happily, forgetting the none too minor detail that Celia, who spoke the language with ease, had figured it all out.

That photo of 34 Gertrude Street was one of the key mementos of the trip and also one of its few memorable events. Because, for the rest of the time, London put him in a very bad mood. Almost nothing he saw in that city seemed to amuse him. He discovered that he was still fascinated, and would be for a long time — much more than anywhere else — by New York and this wild sea of Ireland that he now had so close to home and on which the rain beat down tonight with relentless cruelty.

Now, as his hangover slowly, very slowly recedes, he reaffirms his old idea that anyone who has visited New York and this rough Irish Sea must look down on London with superiority and stupor. He ends up seeing it as Brendan Behan did that day when, comparing it with many other much better places, he described it as a wide flat pie of redbrick suburbs, with a currant in the middle for the West End.

He’s turned into one of those Irishmen who amuse themselves with their constant and ingenious cutting remarks about the English. He guesses that he’ll soon forget London, but never Dominique’s brilliant installation, which he visited with his parents and Celia in the Tate Modern. It was an experience at the edge of reason, because his parents were so literal and seeing, with natural astonishment, the end of the world, they were left impressed and mute for a long time.

It was raining especially hard and cruelly outside the installation, while inside loudspeakers reproduced the sound of the rain artificially. And when they were about to leave that place of refuge for “survivors of the catastrophe,” they rested for a while on the metal bunkbeds that accommodated, day and night, refugees from the flood of 2058, a year when undoubtedly all the people Riba loved, without exception, would be dead.