Dublinesque (8 page)

If he didn’t sit in front of the all-consuming computer screen, what else could he do? Well, he could carry on researching Dublin, or go back to scaring the neighbors by walking in the rain in short trousers, or else play dominoes with the retired men in the bar downstairs, or get drunk again like in the old days, supremely, savagely drunk; he could go to Brazil or Martinique, convert to Judaism, reap a wheat field, go and screw a casual girlfriend, jump into a swimming pool of freezing water. Although maybe the most sensible thing to do would be to put all his energy into preparing for a future trip to New York, the first stage of which will be in Dublin.

One day, while traveling through Mexico with José Emilio Pacheco, a book of whose he had just published — he would go on to publish another two — they arrived at the port of Veracruz in a friend’s convertible and went straight down to look at the sea. Those shapes I see by the sea, said Pacheco, shapes that immediately give rise to metaphorical associations, are they instruments of inspiration or of false literary quotes?

Riba asked him to repeat the sentence and the question. And when Pacheco did so, he saw he had understood them perfectly. Something similar always happened to him. He made associations between ideas, and always had a remarkable tendency to read his own life like a book. Publishing, and consequently having to read so many manuscripts, contributed still more to this tendency of his to imagine that metaphorical associations and an often highly enigmatic code lay concealed behind any scene in his daily life.

He considers himself as much a reader as he is a publisher. It was basically his health that forced him to retire from publishing, but it seems to him it was also partly the golden calf of the gothic novel, which created the stupid myth of the passive reader. He dreams of the day when the spell of the best-seller will be broken, making way for the reappearance of the talented reader, and for the terms of the moral contract between author and audience to be reconsidered. He dreams of the day when literary publishers can breathe again, those who live for an active reader, for a reader open enough to buy a book and allow a conscience radically different from his own to appear in his mind. He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn’t deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies. As Vilém Vok says, it’s not so simple to feel the world as Kafka felt it, a world in which movement is denied and it becomes impossible even to go from one village to the next. The same skills needed for writing are needed for reading. Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it. . . .

The phone rings.

What was he saying to himself? He was thinking about the arrival of a new time that might bring with it this revision of the demanding pact between writers and readers and that the return of the talented reader might be possible. But it could be that this dream is already unrealizable. Better to be realistic and think about the Irish funeral.

He will go to Dublin. Partly to do something. To feel a little busier in his retirement.

On odd-numbered days, and always at this time, Javier calls on the phone, a faithful friend and thoroughly methodical man. Riba still hasn’t picked up and he already knows perfectly well it can only be Javier. He turns down the volume on the radio, where Brassens’s “Les Copains d’Abord” is playing, coincidental background music he thinks most appropriate to his friend’s phone call. He picks up.

“I’m going to Dublin in June, did you know?”

Due to the fact that in the last two years he has stopped drinking and avoids going out at night, he has recently seen little of Javier, a very nocturnal man. Nevertheless, their relationship is still active, although now it’s nurtured only by telephone conversations every other day at noon and the occasional lunch date. Maybe over time the absence of nights out together will gradually erode the friendship, but he doesn’t think so, because he is one of those who thinks that friendships are strengthened by people seeing one another very infrequently. He’s not sure that friends exist, exactly. Javier himself usually says that there are no friends, only moments of friendship.

Javier calls on odd days. And he always does so around midday, thinking, perhaps, that for moments of friendship this time of day might offer more guarantees than others. He’s very methodical. But after all, so is Riba. Does he not, for example, systematically visit his parents every Wednesday afternoon? Does he not sit punctually in front of his computer every day?

Now Javier is asking him how the talks about selling his business are going, and Riba is explaining that he feels disheartened and that in the end he might not sell his assets, might leave things as they are, in the hope of better times. There are precedents, he says, for other glorious ruins in the Barcelona publishing industry. The case of Carlos Barral, for example. Javier interrupts him to dispute the idea that Barral was ruined. Riba has no desire to waste his energy arguing, Riba doesn’t even bother to pursue the topic. Then they talk about
Spider
and he tells Javier he’s come to identify entirely with the main character of this strange film. And Javier, who suddenly remembers he’s seen it too, says he doesn’t understand what Riba saw in the film, as he remembers it as being terribly depressing, and very dull. By now Riba is used to Javier taking the opposite view to him on everything. Their friendship or, rather, their moments of friendship are based on them differing almost completely on questions of art. Riba published Javier’s first five novels, before Javier ran off to more commercial publishers. And although he has always disagreed with some aspects of his literary aesthetic, Riba has always had absolute respect for the power of his friend’s realist style.

When the topic of
Spider
wanes, they talk about the incessant, even disturbing rain of the past few days. Then, Riba tells him — he told him before — how he spent an entire day in Lyon without speaking to anyone and set out a general theory of the novel. And Javier ends up getting very nervous. Writers don’t put up at all well with publishers taking literary baby steps, and Javier ends up interrupting Riba to say indignantly that he already told him, the other day, that he was glad he’d managed to write something in Lyon, but there’s nothing more
French
than a general theory for novels.

“I didn’t know theories were just a French thing,” says Riba, surprised.

“They are, I’m telling you. What’s more, it’d do you good to stop being a café thinker. A French café thinker, I mean. You should forget about Paris. That’s my impartial piece of advice for today.”

Javier is from Asturias, from a town near Oviedo, although he’s lived in Barcelona for over thirty years. He’s fifteen years younger than Riba and has a remarkable tendency to give advice and above all to be unequivocal. He’s very inclined to use a categorical tone. But today Riba can’t understand what he’s getting at and asks what he’s got against the cafés of Paris.

Riba starts to remembering that his vocation as a publisher began during a trip to Paris after May ’68. As he was stealing left-wing essays with unusual happiness from the François Maspero bookshop — where the booksellers looked kindly upon people looting the place — he decided to devote himself to a profession as noble as that of publishing avant-garde novels and rebellious books that later enthusiasts would steal from the Maspero and other left-wing bookshops. Some years afterward, he changed his mind and gave the revolutionary dream up for dead and decided to be reasonable and charge for the books he published.

On the other end of the line, his friend Javier is silent, but he can tell he’s still indignant. He’d be even more so if he knew his friend had mentally associated his diatribe against French cafés with his Asturian background.

Riba, to calm him down, changes the subject and talks about his growing interest in Dublin. Javier interrupts him and asks if he’s not timidly gravitating toward an English landscape. Or Irish, if he prefers. If he is, there’s no doubt he’s taking the first step toward the great betrayal.

The music now playing on the radio is Les Rita Mitsouko, “Le Petit Train.” The first step toward the great betrayal of everything French, shouts Javier enthusiastically. And Riba has no choice but to hold the telephone away from his ear. Javier is too excited. A betrayal of everything French? Is it possible to betray Rimbaud and Gracq?

It’s great you’ve gone over to England, Javier says just a few minutes later. And as he congratulates him for having taken the leap, he manages to surprise Riba.

What leap?

Javier says nearly everything in a highly unequivocal tone, totally convinced it can be no other way. It’s as if he’s talking about someone who’s swapped soccer teams. But Riba hasn’t taken any leap, nor has he gone over to England. Everything indicates that Javier would be pleased if he left French culture behind, maybe because he’s never had much contact with it and feels inferior in this respect. Maybe because he never stole anything in the Maspero bookshop, or because his father — this is not something easy to forget about Javier — was the anonymous author of the libelous article “Against the French” published in 1980 by a Valencian press: an amusing collection of swipes at the smugness of much of French culture and which began thus: “Their vanity was always their greatest talent.”

“It’d be good for you to lose some weight,” Javier says suddenly, “take the English leap. Get out of the Frenchified muddle you’ve been in for so long. Be lighter, more fun. Become English. Or Irish. Take the leap, my friend.”

Javier is methodical and sometimes categorical. But above all he’s stubborn, incredibly stubborn. He seems like he’s from Aragon in that way. Of course, you could probably say there are the same proportion of stubborn people in Aragon as anywhere else. Today, it seems, Javier is directing all his obstinacy against Riba’s French influence in his formative years. And he seems to be advising him to leave his Frenchification behind if he wants to get back his sense of humor and lose weight.

Riba timidly reminds him that, in the end, Paris is the capital of the Republic of Letters. And it still is, says Javier, but that’s exactly the problem, that culture has too much weight and can’t bear the slightest comparison to English liveliness. What’s more, the French don’t know how to communicate as well as the British nowadays. You just have to look at the phone booths in London and Paris. It’s not just that the English ones are much prettier, but they offer a comfortable and better designed space in which to actually talk, unlike the French ones, which are strange and designed for the outrageously pedantic aesthetics of silence.

Javier’s argument doesn’t convince him at all, among other things because there are hardly any phone booths left in Europe. But he doesn’t want to argue. He makes up his mind now to be agile and take a leap, a light English leap,
to land on the other side
, to start thinking about something else, to turn around, to move. And he ends up thinking to himself of some words of Julian Barnes’s, which seem very opportune at this moment: words where Barnes comments that the British have always been obsessed with France, as it represents for them the beginning of difference, the start of the exotic: “It’s curious: the English are obsessed with France while the French are merely intrigued by England.”

He remembers these words of Julian Barnes’s in
Cross Channel
and thinks that for him, on the other hand, it is precisely everything English that is the start of difference, the beginning of the exotic. New York intrigues him and when he thinks of this city he always remembers the words of his friend, the young writer Nietzky, who for years now has had a place there: “I live in the perfect city for dissolving your identity and reinventing yourself. Mobility’s hard in Spain: people pigeonhole you for life in the box where they think you belong.”

Deep down he’d like nothing more than to escape his pigeonhole of the prestigious retired publisher he’s been put in — quite firmly, it seems — by his colleagues and friends in Spain. Perhaps the time has come to take a step forward, to cross the bridge — in this case a metaphorical English Channel — that will lead him to other voices, other environments. Maybe it’d be a good idea to remove French culture from his life for a time: he’s so close to it now it almost disgusts him, and so it doesn’t even seem foreign anymore, but seems as familiar to him as Spanish culture, the very first culture he fled from.

Riba is starting to think that Englishness is where difference begins, where the exotic starts. It’s obvious that at the moment, only what is alien to his familiar world, only what is foreign, can draw him in a different direction. He knows he needs to venture into topographies where strangeness reigns and also the mystery and joy that surround the new: he needs to look at the world with enthusiasm again, as if seeing it for the first time. In short, to take the English leap, or something that looks like the leap that a moment ago, in such an eccentric, British fashion, Javier suggested to him.

A way to be even less Latin occurs to him: to stand in front of the mirror, to lose his instinct for melodrama and exaggeration and become a cold, dispassionate gentleman who doesn’t wave his arms around when he gives an opinion. And soon he hears the call of the difficult countries, the places and climates where no one — not even he — ever dreamed they would explore with such interest: places he imagined as inaccessible his whole life or, rather, took it for granted that, if only because of the language barrier, they would never be within his reach. He will look, once again, for the impossible. Nothing will be as good for him as to gravitate once more toward the
foreign
, because only then will he be able to get closer to the center of the world he’s looking for. A sentimental center, sought by the traveler from the Laurence Sterne book. He needs to be a
sentimental traveler
, to go to English-speaking countries, where he might regain the strangeness of things, where he might recover that whole special way of
feeling
he never found in the comfort of the intimately familiar: to see a wider range of possibilities opening up, of cultures, of strange signs to decipher. He needs to go to a place where he can regain the intense feeling of euphoria, to hear once more the voice of his grandfather Jacobo when he used to say nothing important was ever achieved without enthusiasm. He needs to take the English leap, although actually, he needs to leap in the opposite direction as that taken by Sterne’s
sentimental traveler
, who, being an Irish-born Englishman, left England precisely to take a leap that was French.