Dublinesque (12 page)

An essential and secular litany. Riba thinks that remembering Behan’s book has been a good way to continue preparing for his trip to Dublin, to move further away each day from the interior space that’s holding him hostage, and so slowly approach wider horizons. He devoured Behan’s book on the train from Lyon back to Barcelona, imagining many times that he was reading it at a table by the iron door of the amazing Oakland Bar, the one on the corner of Hicks and Atlantic from
When You Wound Brooklyn
, the beautiful novel by his young friend Nietzky.

And he remembers too that in the last few minutes of reading this book of Behan’s, as evening fell, still imagining himself to be in the Oakland, he even thought he shared with the author this dark, unrepeatable moment, this moment, somewhere between Joycean and elegiac, when Behan’s daydreams gradually absorb the world around him. Daylight fades and the impressions of the day are gathered together in a harmony of urban sounds and a touching blend of feelings and dying light that reaches the very doors of the Chelsea Hotel, where they never turn out the lights.

Without New York he would be nothing. Like eau de vie, he needs the happiness he feels whenever he remembers that this city is out there, waiting for him. Right now, thinking about the Chelsea Hotel and Behan has made him slowly sink into a state of happy New York melancholy, a sort of strange nostalgia for something unlived. Thinking about the Chelsea Hotel and Behan is a way of feeling closer to the magic and warmth of New York and to certain moments from an unlived past and to everything that, for reasons that usually escape him, brings a happiness as mysterious as it is necessary to his continued existence.

When it gets dark we all need someone. That’s just as true as that when dawn breaks, we always need to remember that we still have some goal in life. New York fulfills all the requirements for being a real driving force for staying in the world. The most agreeable and also the strangest memory of this city he’s visited twice — and where he thinks he should go and live soon — that night in the Brooklyn house of Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster. He turned up there in the company of young Nietzky. He’ll always remember this night out, among many other things because he hasn’t had an evening out since; he’s banned himself from going out at night, to not feel too tempted by alcohol and to preserve his health. For the Austers he made an exception that he’s not repeated. Now he remembers perfectly how on that day when he made that great exception, at around six o’clock in the evening, he and Nietzky left the bar of the Morgan Museum, on Madison Avenue, and walked slowly all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge, which they crossed on foot over the course of an unforgettable half hour. While crossing it, he was able to confirm what some friends in Barcelona had told him, that
feeling
the city from the bridge during the time it takes to cross it on foot is an intense experience.

“Going from Manhattan to Brooklyn over the bridge,” said Nietzky, “is like entering another world. I really like this bridge. And I also like the great poem Hart Crane wrote about it before he committed suicide. Every time I cross over this bridge I feel happy. It’s a route that does me good.”

Marching over the bridge, it was impossible not to remember that, when he was young and dreamed of one day traveling to New York, he had wished a thousand times he could walk over this bridge, which he associated with Saul Bellow. When he was a new arrival to the city, Bellow felt like master of the world there. This story was told many years later by one of his friends, who actually witnessed this moment of great imaginary might and narrated it years later thus: “He looked over the city from the bridge with astonishing generosity and seemed to be measuring the hidden strength of all things in the universe, measuring the world’s power to resist
him
: he expected the world to come to him. He had pledged himself a great destiny.”

“You know, I feel really good walking across this bridge too,” he said to Nietzky.

And then, without mentioning Bellow, he said that for him, walking to Brooklyn meant seeking out again old hidden strengths, and evoking certain days of his youth when he still expected the world to come to meet him.

“Did you think the world would come to you?” asked young Nietzky. And he burst out laughing. Nietzky had lived in the city for years and nothing like this had ever occurred to him.

Later, walking down tranquil streets, they headed further into the historic neighborhood of Park Slope. And Brooklyn slowly revealed itself as a place with a very special atmosphere. As they walked, Nietzky explained to him that this mysterious neighborhood gets under one’s skin and stays there forever. Brooklyn, Nietzky said, is a bit like an inventory of the universe and one of its particular characteristics is that, whereas in many parts of the city ethnic differences are a potential source of conflict, here people live side by side in harmony and with a more human, older rhythm than in, say, Manhattan. It’s a great place, Nietzky concludes.

They walked farther and farther into Park Slope, where the red-brick house was, the three-story brownstone belonging to the Austers, very good friends of Nietzky’s.

In that house in Brooklyn — and this he couldn’t even have suspected — the happiness he’d looked for in vain on his first trip to that city awaited him. It came to him suddenly, at midnight, when he realized he was in the Austers’ house in that wonderful city. What more could he ask for? The Austers were the very incarnation of New York. And he was in their house, he was at the very center of the world.

It was a moment of happiness he remembers as very intense, similar to that of his recurring dream. Everything seemed so agreeable; he felt in the best mood at that moment. But something he never expected happened. Because of his jet lag, and despite his fantastically happy state, he couldn’t help yawning a few times, which he tried to hide with his hands, and this made it even worse. Body and soul were completely divided, each with their own language. And it was clear that the body, with its own codes, found itself radically disconnected from that moment of his spirit’s happiness. “When the spirit soars, the body kneels down,” said Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.

He’ll never forget the moment that night when he thought about telling Paul Auster that, according to something he’d read in a magazine a while ago, when we yawn it doesn’t mean we’re bored or sleepy, but rather the opposite, that we want to clear our heads and so manage to be even more awake than the wide-awake and happy people we are. He remembers this moment very clearly and also when he realized afterward it would be better not to say anything and not complicate things even further, and then, without being able to help it, he yawned again and had to cover his wretched mouth with his hands.

“Will you leave something as a deposit?” Auster asked him.

He didn’t understand the question at the time, or over the following days. Since they were speaking in French, he started to think he hadn’t understood because of the language. But Nietzky has confirmed on several occasions now that that’s what happened, that Auster did, in fact, ask him if he was going to leave something as a deposit.

Maybe Auster was asking if he was going to leave the memory of his yawns as a deposit, a supposed advance on the rent. The rent for that brownstone? Did Auster know that his guest that night wanted, more than anything in the world, to live in that house? Maybe Nietzky had told him?

Over the last few months, he’s turned over this strange question of Auster’s many times in his head, but it remains an unsolved mystery. Sometimes, he’s at a bus stop, or sitting at home in front of the TV, and he thinks about this and still hears the question, as if charged with an inexplicable energy.

“Will you leave something as a deposit?”

On YouTube he comes across a very young Bob Dylan singing “That’s Alright Mama” with Johnny Cash, and observes, with a mixture of surprise and curiosity, that the acclaimed Cash sings here with a resigned expression, as if he’d had no choice that day but to accept the sudden company of the unknown young genius, who’d jumped up onto the stage without anyone’s permission.

Riba observes that the presence of the young Dylan at his side doesn’t irritate Cash, but even so he seems to be wondering why he has to sing with this young genius who’s latched onto him. Perhaps young Dylan is trying to become Cash’s guardian angel? Maybe Dylan is an impromptu guardian of Cash’s creations?

He ends up thinking something similar occurred with him and Nietzky, who for months he confused with the genius he was always searching for among young writers. Later, when he realized Nietzky had great talent but wasn’t the special writer he would so like to have found, he resigned himself to seeing him just as he was, which was a pretty good writer anyway. He wasn’t the giant of literature he’d been looking for as a publisher, but he found traces of a lively, exciting creativity in him, which was more than enough.

Riba published
When You Wound Brooklyn
, Nietzky’s only novel, and has always thought it very good. A story about Irish characters in modern-day New York. A splendid piece in which his young friend had managed to give a new and unexpected turn of the screw, offering a world of heteronyms, a world of characters unable to be unified, compact, or perfectly outlined subjects. An amusing, strange book, in which the New York Irish seem like Lisboans who have just awoken from one of Pessoa’s highly anxious siestas. There were never stranger Irish people in a novel.

Because of all this and many other things, because of his ever-increasing admiration for Nietzky, a young man of indisputable talent, he doesn’t give it another thought and fires off an email, one he hopes will be as direct as a bolt of lightning, filled with energy like the tormented psyche of this promising Spanish New York writer. An email to Nietzky’s apartment on West 84th Street and Riverside Drive. In it he asks him to be the fourth member of the Bloomsday expedition. He ends up saying: “After all, you went there last year — and other times, I think — I know you flew from New York to go to the Bloomsday celebrations, and so it wouldn’t be at all strange for you to want to repeat the experience. Come on!”

This “come on!” has a special power, because suddenly, as if he too were given the fleeting ownership of a certain neurotic energy, he feels as if he’s penetrating the essence of the wind that’s blowing outside with the rainwater spreading throughout Barcelona: he believes for a few moments — a sensation without a doubt totally unknown to him — that he’s inside the wind’s thoughts, until he understands that the wind’s mind could never be his or anyone else’s, and then he contents himself — a sad fate — with a deeply ridiculous thought: the world always feels more spacious in the spring.

For years now he’s led his life through his catalog. And in fact he now finds it very hard to know who he really is. And above all, what’s even harder: to know who he really might have been. Who was the man who was there before he began publishing? Where is this person who gradually became hidden behind the brilliant catalog and the systematic identification with the most interesting voices contained within it? Now some words of Maurice Blanchot spring to mind, words he’s known well for a long time: “Would writing be to become, in the book, legible for everyone, and indecipherable for oneself?”

In his work as a publisher, he recalls the day he read these words of Blanchot’s as a turning point, and from that moment on, began to observe how, with each book published, his authors gradually became more and more dramatically indecipherable to themselves at the same time as they shadily became very visible and legible to the rest of the world, starting with him, their publisher, who saw in the drama of his authors one more consequence of the occupational hazards of his job, in this case, the hazards of publishing.

“Oh,” he said very cynically one day during a meeting with four of his best Spanish writers, “your problem has been getting published. You’ve been very foolish to do so. I don’t understand how you didn’t sense that publishing was going to make you all indecipherable to yourselves, and what’s more, would place you on the path of a writer’s fate, which in the best of cases always contains the strange seeds of a sinister adventure.”

Riba was hiding his own drama behind these cynical words. Leading a publisher’s life kept him from finding out who the person gradually hidden behind the brilliant catalog might have been.

Nietzky might be the perfect companion for the trip to Ireland, and could even be the brains of the expedition, as he always has original ideas, and despite his youth, is a real expert on the work of James Joyce. In Spain the Irish writer’s importance tends to be downplayed, and what’s more, it’s become grotesquely commonplace to brag about not having read
Ulysses
, and also to say it’s an incomprehensible and boring book. But Nietzky has been out of the country for ten years, and can’t exactly be considered a
Spanish
Joyce specialist anymore. Really, Nietzky can now only be seen as a young writer and citizen of New York, a man well versed in local Irish topics as filtered through the color of Lisbon tiles.

He thinks about Nietzky and ends up thinking of Celia. He wouldn’t like her to find him, once again, engrossed in front of the computer when she gets back from work at a quarter to three. He doesn’t switch it off, but stops looking at it and sits there trying to decide what to do, looking at the ceiling. Then he checks his watch and realizes that it doesn’t matter, as Celia will soon be home. He goes to look out the window and then to stare at a stain on the roof, in which he suddenly thinks he can see a map of his native country. He remembers, he remembers quite well the culture of his compatriots that became dangerously oppressive and familiar to him. He remembers his desperate leap to France, his by now so outdated
French
leap. Paris allowed him to flee from Franco’s eternal uncultured summer, and later on to meet writers such as Gracq, Philippe Sollers, and Julia Kristeva, or Romain Gary, one of the friendships he feels most proud of. It doesn’t escape his notice now that many of those who find
Ulysses
unbearable haven’t even bothered to get past the first page of a book they assume is leaden, complicated, foreign, lacking the “authentic and proverbial Spanish wit.” But he assumes that this first page of Joyce’s book, just the first page, is enough on its own to dazzle. It’s an apparently trivial page, which nevertheless presents a complete and extraordinary world. He knows it by heart in the now legendary version by that first translator of the book into Spanish, that translator as brilliant as he was strange, the great adventurer J. Salas Subirat, an Argentine autodidact who worked as an insurance broker and wrote a strange manual,
Life Insurance
, which Riba published as a curiosity, at the start of the ’90s.