Dublinesque (10 page)

They head for the Bar Belvedere, a place that once upon a time — when he wasn’t a
hikikomori
and left the house more often — he frequented quite regularly.

“You’ve been really reclusive recently, don’t you think?” Ricardo says in a tone of voice that is exquisitely friendly, yet also caustic.

Ricardo’s question is too impudent, and Riba falls silent. He likes the shiny orange umbrella, damp with rain, which his friend is carrying today. It’s the first time he’s seen an umbrella this color. He says this to Ricardo, and then laughs. He stops in front of the window of a men’s clothing shop and looks at some suits and shirts he’s sure he’d never wear, especially with the rain that’s falling now. Ricardo laughs affectionately, making fun of his friend’s umbrella, and Riba, in turn, asks him if he happens to be insinuating that his own umbrella doesn’t measure up to the orange one.

“No, no,” Ricardo excuses himself, “I didn’t mean that, but maybe you haven’t seen an umbrella for months. You never go out, do you? What does Celia have to say about that?”

No answer. They walk in silence down Calle Mallorca, until Ricardo asks him if he’s read Larry O’Sullivan’s poems yet. Riba doesn’t even know who this O’Sullivan might be, he’s usually only interested in writers he’s at least heard of; he always has this feeling that any others are made up.

“I didn’t know O’Sullivan wrote poetry,” he says to Ricardo.

“But O’Sullivan’s always written poetry! You’re turning into a badly informed ex-publisher.”

As they step onto the terrace of the Belvedere, Ricardo points out a young tree, whose round, firm trunk thrusts itself, almost bodily, into the air with an undulating movement halfway up, sending out young branches in all directions.

“It could be in one of O’Sullivan’s poems,” says Ricardo, lighting one of his customary Pall Malls.

They are now leaning against the bar in the Belvedere, and Ricardo is still talking about the tree O’Sullivan might have written a poem about. Before long he’s just talking about the Boston poet.

“For O’Sullivan, Boston is a city of great extremes,” says Ricardo, without anyone having asked for his opinion on the matter. “A city of heat and cold, passion and indifference, wealth and poverty, masses and individuals —” he smokes agitatedly and talks as if he were writing a review of this poet or had just written it and is now reciting it from memory, “ — a city to live shut in with double locks on every door or to feel excited by its energy . . . I see you don’t know O’Sullivan at all. Later, in La Central, I’ll show you something by him. He’s very American, you’ll see.”

Outside, the rain seems to be getting heavier, but it’s just an illusion.

Ricardo, too, is very American, however Colombian he may be by birth. Now he’s assuring Riba, with admirable conviction, that this O’Sullivan is a master of putting the trivial close to the lyrical, and so that Riba might understand him better, he recites a few lines about walking through downtown Boston: “
I go get a shoeshine
/
and walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
/
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
/
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
/
in Ghana are doing these days
.”

He’d like to ask Ricardo what a
New World Writing
is, but he holds back and merely tries to find out what Ricardo thinks the poets in Ghana might have been doing on that day when O’Sullivan was so inspired. Ricardo looks at him with sudden compassion, almost as if he were looking at a new species of extraterrestrial. But Ricardo is even more Martian-like. At least, his blessed Colombian parents always were, and Ricardo inherited more than a few things from them. Ricardo’s taste for being two-faced probably originated in those parents, his constant leaning toward side A of things, but then his tendency to see its coexistence with side B. All their lives his parents were stubborn progressives, who instilled in him a sort of love-hate feeling toward left-wing revolutionary iconography. Even though they were fiercely
gauchistes
, his parents were friends — in flagrant, scandalous contradiction — with people as rich as Andrew Sempleton, the investor and philanthropist, known as
the good-humored millionaire
.

“Loads of money and a big laugh. Very American,” Ricardo always says when he evokes this outstanding man, who was his magnanimous and affectionate godfather. Riba has always suspected Ricardo will end up writing a novel about Sempleton. Despite managing large sums of money, his rich godfather never fell prey to avarice and was generous with many people, including Ricardo’s parents, above all, when they went to jail in Bogotá for political reasons. With parents like that, Ricardo was destined to have a double face and personality, and that’s what happened: a heavy pipe smoker (domestically, only at home) and (in public places) smoker of Pall Mall cigarettes; a solemn and frivolous writer, depending on the day; a home-loving man and at the same time dangerously nocturnal; a Hyde who was a most wildly modern Colombian, yet a quietly American Jekyll. It would be magnificent if he could persuade him to come to Dublin. Why hasn’t he tried yet?

While he waits for the ideal moment to propose the trip, he recalls some of Ricardo’s stories. From his adolescence, the most memorable is the one about Tom Waits and in a hotel room in New York. The daughter of a friend of some friends of his parents had an appointment to interview Waits in his hotel. Ricardo managed to convince her to let him come along. He just wanted to see — he was dying of curiosity to find out — what Waits did when he was alone in a hotel room. They knocked at the door. Waits opened it with a grumpy look on his face. He had black sunglasses on and was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of very faded jeans.

“Sorry,” Waits said, “but there’s no room for anyone else.”

Ricardo experienced his own particular and somewhat unfortunate great moment there. He experienced it in the center of Waits’s world, a place he was ejected from by a slamming door. There was no interview. His friend cried and blamed him for Waits having acted that way.

The fact is, the most avant-garde poetics in Ricardo’s work, as he himself has always acknowledged, is nourished from the same sources as Waits’s: the lyrics of Irish ballads, the blues of the cotton fields, the rhythms of New Orleans, the lyrics of German cabaret from the 1930s, rock and roll, and country music. It’s a poetics that always fails, although with dignity, in its attempt to imitate, to put down on paper no more than the barroom register of Waits’s voice.

This phrase of the singer’s, spoken in the doorway to his hotel room, really stuck in Ricardo’s head. The phrase stuck in his memory, but so did the Hawaiian shirt and the dark glasses. And more than once he used this phrase to get rid of someone.

It’s what Ricardo uses now in his attempt to leave the Belvedere to go to La Central to buy some books. He says he’s sorry, but there’s no room for anyone else.

“Eh?”

Ricardo always needs movement. He’s monstrously frenetic. Something must be done quickly to detain him. Riba still hasn’t proposed going to Dublin. Why not, for God’s sake? When does he plan on doing it? Not now, because Ricardo is physically trying to project himself toward the street to flee from the Belvedere, where there really is
no room for anyone else
.

Half an hour later, Ricardo finally gets the proposal. And he claims to have only one question before he accepts the invitation to travel with Javier and Riba to Dublin. He wants to know if it’s just to be there for Bloomsday, or if there’s some dark motive he sould be warned about beforehand.

He still thinks it would be suicide to give Ricardo any kind of clue about his intentions to hold a requiem for the Gutenberg galaxy. Ricardo might think, and he wouldn’t be far off either, that Riba wanted to hold the funeral for himself: a funeral ceremony for his current unemployed state of half-failed publisher, embarrassing idler and computer nerd.

“Look, Ricardo. There is another motive, in fact. I want to take the English leap.”

After agreeing to travel with them, Ricardo is quiet for a long time at first and then starts telling him — almost in passing and without giving it the slightest importance — that he was in New York not long ago, where he interviewed Paul Auster in his house for the magazine
Gentleman
. He says it as if it’s nothing. At first, Riba can’t even believe it.

“You were in Auster’s house? And how was it? When did you go to New York?”

His eyes have become like saucers and he’s genuinely stunned just by the idea that Ricardo has also managed to visit this three-story brownstone in Park Slope that he once went to and that has since become so legendary in his mind. Straight away he asks Ricardo, doesn’t he think the house was really nice and weren’t Paul and Siri very likeable, pleasant people? He says it with almost childlike wonder and in the belief he has shared a similar experience.

Ricardo practically shrugs. He has not the slightest opinion on the neighborhood, or the Austers’ hospitality, or the house or even the red bricks of the façade. In fact, he has nothing to tell about his visit to the old neighborhood of Park Slope. He hadn’t given his foray into Auster’s house a second thought. For him, it was just another interview. He had more fun the other day, he says, interviewing John Banville in London.

Could it be that having grown up in New York has left Ricardo immune to have any sense of fascination for this city? Quite likely. For him, walking around there is natural, inconsequential.

How different two people can be, even though they’re friends. The city of New York, the Austers, the English wavelength, for Ricardo all this is the most normal thing in the world, it holds no secrets and no special attraction for him. It’s something he’s had ever since he was a child.

Quite easily, Ricardo changes the subject, and above all the character, and tells Riba that in Boston, the day after his visit to Auster, he interviewed O’Sullivan. And then he starts talking about Brendan Behan, who he says was one of the most tremendous Irishmen who passed through New York back in the day.

He doesn’t want to point out to Ricardo it’s useless to tell him things about Behan, as he already knows everything about the man. He lets him talk about the Irishman, until, in a brief lapse of concentration, he brings up the topic of Auster again.

“Do you think Paul Auster’s considered a good novelist in Ghana?” he asks Ricardo provocatively.

“Oh, how should I know?” He looks at him strangely. “You’re behaving really oddly today. You never go out, do you? It’s not that you don’t go out much, you just don’t go out, you’re not used to talking to people. It’s good you’re going to get some fresh air in Dublin. Believe me, you’re a bit unhinged. You should start up the publishing house again. You can’t just do nothing. Auster in Ghana! Well, let’s go to La Central.”

They leave the Belvedere. There’s a strong wind. Water’s flooding everything. They’re out in the open. They walk slowly. The rain grows more and more violent. The wind bends their umbrellas. They’ve heard a few apocalyptic voices speaking of a universal flood. Reality is becoming more and more like the installation Dominique is preparing in London.

In the end it’ll turn out to be true that the end of the world isn’t far off. In fact it’s always been clear that the end couldn’t be too far off. While they wait for the end, human beings amuse themselves holding funerals, little imitations of
the great end
that is to come.

As they’re about to go into La Central, Ricardo throws away his Pall Mall and doesn’t even bother to stamp it out, because the downpour instantly takes care of the butt. As they close their respective umbrellas, a gust of wind hits them with such force that they’re pushed forward and burst into the bookshop, falling comically on their butts on the doormat, just at the moment when a young man is leaving La Central wearing round tortoiseshell glasses, a blue Nehru jacket beneath an old raincoat, and with the collar of his white shirt quite torn.

Riba thinks he knows him by sight, although he can’t manage to place him. Who is it? The man walks insolently past them, indifferent to their ridiculous fall. An unflappable guy. He acts with astonishing coldness, as if he hadn’t noticed that Ricardo and Riba have just fallen over. Or as if he thinks they are two comedians from a silent film. A strange guy. Although he’s come from inside the bookshop, his hair is plastered to his head from the rain.

“We nearly killed ourselves,” comments Riba, still on the floor.

Ricardo doesn’t even reply, perhaps dazed by what’s happened.

It’s quite striking. The indifferent young man looks like the same one who was spying outside his parents’ house the other day, and also the same one he saw from a taxi at the intersection of Rambla de Prat and Avenida Príncipe de Asturias. He tells Ricardo that recently he’s seen the guy with the Nehru jacket everywhere, and for a minute fears his friend won’t even know who he’s talking about. Who knows, maybe he didn’t even notice the young man with the round glasses who walked passed them so indifferently. But this isn’t the case, he soon realizes he saw him perfectly well.

“Well, you know,” Ricardo says. “Always someone turns up you never dreamt of.”

I
f one day he were to find this much-searched-for author, this phantom, this genius, it would be difficult for such a person to improve on what’s already been said by so many others, about the rifts between the expectations of youth and the reality of one’s later years, what’s been said about the illusory nature of our choices, about how our search for success culminates in disappointment, about the present as fragile and the future as representing a need for control over old age and death. And what’s more, it will always be an annoyance, a malaise of the soul for every perceptive publisher, to have to go out in search of those phantoms, those damned authors. He’s thinking of all this now lying on a beach in front of blue water, surrounded by towels, red bathing caps, gentle waves lapping the warm yellow sand, near the center of the world. A strange beach in a corner of New York’s harbor.