Dublinesque (14 page)

Mark Strand’s phrase goes like this: “The search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living.” Does he really seek lightness? He realizes that everything this evening seems to be directed toward a loss of gravity and heading toward the very moment he has decided to get some air and take the nimble English leap once and for all; he understands that he has actually become someone waiting for this leap, which began as just a pleasant image, a rhetorical figure.

He walks down the hall; he’s going to consult a book by Italo Calvino, which also mentions lightness. And there he discovers the episode of the poet Cavalcanti’s leap. Cavalcanti. In this case, an Italian leap. He’s quite struck by the relative coincidence, and is literally rooted to the spot in the study. And when he finally manages to move, he takes the book and sits down in his favorite armchair. Celia is asleep, probably happy, if one goes by the last words she said to him: “You must always love me like you do today.”

He’d forgotten this leap the nimble Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti performs in an episode of the
Decameron
by Boccaccio, and in this casual discovery thinks he’s found one more reason, in his furious obsession and need to be
more
foreign every day, to take the English leap. To Calvino, nothing better illustrates his idea that there must be a necessary lightness that can be inserted into life and literature than the story in the
Decameron
by Boccaccio, in which the poet Cavalcanti appears, an austere philosopher who walks around in meditation among the marble tombs of a Florentine church.

Boccaccio tells us that the
jeunesse dorée
of the city — youths who ride around in a group and who have it in for Cavalcanti because he will never go out on a bender with them — they surround him and try to mock him. “Guido, thou wilt be none of our company,” they say, “but lo now, when thou hast proved that God does not exist, what wilt thou have achieved?” Cavalcanti, seeing he is surrounded by them, presently answers: “Gentlemen, you may say to me what you please in your own house.” And resting his hand on one of the great tombs and being very nimble, he vaults over it, and landing
on the other side
, he evades them, and goes on his way.

He’s surprised by this visual image of Cavalcanti freeing himself in one leap “
si come colui che leggerissimo era
.” He’s surprised by the image, and what’s more, the Boccaccio extract immediately makes
him
want to
land on the other side
. It occurs to him that, if he had to choose an auspicious image for the new rhythms his life is moving to, he would choose that one: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times — noisy, aggressive, revving, roaring — belongs to the realm of death — like a cemetery for rusty old cars.

And shortly afterward he remembers a few words from a book which, just as with Calvino’s collection of essays, was decisive during his first few years as a reader. This book was
Short Letter, Long Farewell
by Peter Handke. He read it in the seventies, and thinks he remembers finding in it his generation’s tone of voice, or at least the one he was looking for when he started publishing, because right from the start he believed it wasn’t exclusively writers who had the privilege of choosing a voice, but that the publisher also more than deserved the right to acquire a certain tone and to allow this tone, this style, always to come across in all the books on his list.

And now Riba remembers too that what surprised him most about Handke’s book was that, at the end of the novel, the two young protagonists — the narrator and his girlfriend Judith — speak with the filmmaker John Ford, a character who’s a real person. So characters such as Ford could appear in fiction, even if they weren’t exactly themselves and didn’t say exactly what they might have said in real life? It was the first time he realized doing something like that was possible. And he thought it very shocking, almost as much as the fact that in the novel Ford always speaks in the first person plural:

We Americans always say “we” even when we’re talking about our private affairs. We see everything we do as part of a common effort. . . . We don’t take our egos as seriously as you Europeans.

Whether solemnly or not, the narrator of
Short Letter, Long Farewell
always used his “I,” probably because he had studied in Europe. The kind of “I” Handke used was one Riba could immediately imagine influencing him. Since then, in his private life, he has always used a first person singular, although his has been an unnatural “I,” probably because he lost his childhood spirit, that
first person
inside him that disappeared so early on. And maybe it’s also due to this lamentable absence — because of which he now uses this artificial “I” — that he seems always to be perfectly ready to make the leap
over to the other side
, that is, fully prepared to become a multiple “I,” in the style of John Ford in the novel, who speaks in the first person plural.

And the fact is, when Riba thinks, he is simply commenting on the world, something he always does
away from home
mentally and in search of his center. And on these occasions it’s not strange that he suddenly feels he’s John Ford, and also Spider, Vilém Vok, Borges, and John Vincent Moon, and in short, all the men that all the men in this world have been. Essentially, his plural “I” — adopted because of the circumstances, that is, because he has never been able to find the original spirit again — is not that far from Buddhism. Essentially, his plural “I” was always ideal for the job he did. Isn’t a literary publisher a ventriloquist who cultivates the most varied different voices through his catalog?

“Do you dream a lot?” Judith asked.

“We hardly dream at all any more,” said John Ford. “And when we do have a dream, we forget it. We talk about everything, so there’s nothing left to dream about.”

When he was a publisher he never spoke in interviews about the plurality of his first person singular. It would have been good if, for example, he’d said something like this at some point: “You won’t understand, but really I’m like an Irishman who lives in New York. I combine the American ‘we’ with a furiously European ‘I.’”

Would it really have been worthwhile to say something like that? He’s always weighed down by doubt, never sure of anything. But it’s true that with the topic of the plural “I” he could have excelled perfectly. Actually, there were so many things he didn’t say in interviews when he was in publishing. He let himself down, for instance, by trying to be diplomatic and not always saying what he thought of certain dreadful authors he didn’t publish. He probably let himself down, wasted his life, by his ridiculous desire to be too sensitive. He was let down by this and also, obviously, by having the spirit of a
son
instead of the customary protective
fatherly
temperament that seems so typical in publishers, although it’s also true that there are quite a few who pretend to have it when they actually lack the most basic paternal instinct.

He remembers that it has been no time at all since he spent an entire morning going around to branches of two different banks and making changes to his investment funds, and yet he sometimes has the impression that an eternity has gone by since that morning. And he observes that even the time when he used to publish all the great literature he could is starting to drift into the distance.

How old he looks, how old he feels since he retired. And how dull it is not to drink. The world, in itself, is often tedious and lacks true emotion. Without alcohol, one is lost. Although he’d do well not to forget that it’s a wise person who monotonizes existence because then each small incident, if one knows how to read it in a literary way, has a wondrous quality. Never to forget this possibility of consciously monotonizing his life is the only or best solution he has left. Drinking might seriously damage his health. What’s more, he
never found
anything in alcohol, at the bottom of all those glasses, and nowadays can’t very well explain to himself what it was he was looking for there. Because he didn’t actually manage to avoid boredom, a feeling that always came back relentlessly. Although in interviews he had at times pretended he led an exciting publisher’s life; he used to make things up like crazy back then. Now he wonders what for. What good did it do him to make out that he had an extraordinary occupation and that he enjoyed it so much? Of course it was always better to be a publisher than to do nothing, like now. . . . Nothing? He’s planning a trip to Dublin, an homage, a funeral for a disappearing era. Is that nothing? How boring everything is, except thinking, thinking one is doing something. Or thinking what he’s thinking now: that it would be good to monotonize his life and try, wherever possible, to look for those hidden wonders in his daily life that, deep down, if he wants to, he’s perfectly capable of finding. Because isn’t he capable of seeing much more than what’s there in everything he experiences? At least all those years are worth something, all those years of understanding reading not just as a practice inseparable from his occupation as a publisher, but also as a way of being in the world: an instrument for interpreting, sequence after sequence, his day-to-day life.

He carries on getting ready for Dublin, and as his mind drifts, he ends up thinking about Irish writers. Nothing’s truer than the fact that he admires them more every day. He only ever published a couple of them, but it wasn’t because he wasn’t keen to publish more. For a long time, without success, he went after the rights for John Banville and Flann O’Brien. He thinks Irish writers are the most intelligent in terms of monotonizing and finding wonder in everyday tedium. In the last few days he’s read and re-read a few Irish authors — Elizabeth Bowen, Joseph O’Neill, Matthew Sweeney, Colum McCann — and his amazement at their capacity for writing astonishingly well has not diminished.

It’s as if the Irish had the gift of literature. He remembers that four years ago he saw one of them at a book fair in Guanajuato, Mexico, and discovered, among other things, that they didn’t have the Latin habit of talking about themselves. At a press conference, Claire Keegan replied almost angrily to a journalist who wanted to know what topics she wrote about in her novels: “I’m Irish. I write about dysfunctional families, miserable, loveless lives, illness, old age, winter, the gray weather, boredom, and rain.”

And at her side, Colum McCann concluded his colleague’s contribution, speaking in an exquisite plural, à la John Ford: “We don’t usually talk publicly about ourselves, we prefer to read.”

He sits thinking about how much he’d like to speak in the plural like this all the time, like John Ford, like the Irish writers. To say to Celia, for instance:

“We don’t think it’s a bad idea that you’re thinking of becoming a Buddhist. But we also think it might become a point of dispute and rupture.”

•

He knows Ricardo once felt like he was at the gates to the center of the world, but that he was ejected from this place by a radical slam of the door by Tom Waits. He doesn’t know, meanwhile, what Javier’s center might be. He phones him.

“Sorry,” he says, “but even though it’s not an odd-numbered day I wanted to talk to you, I want you to tell me if you remember any especially great moments in your life, some moment when you felt at the center of the world.”

An imposing silence at the other end of the phone. Maybe his sarcastic remark about the odd-numbered day has annoyed his friend. There is a silence that seems as if it might go on forever. Until at last, after a terrible, long sigh, Javier says:

“My first love, Riba, my first love. When I saw her for the first time, it was love at first sight. The center of the universe.”

Riba asks him what she was doing, his first love, when he saw her that first time. Was she perhaps walking like Dante’s Beatrice down a Florentine street?

“No,” Javier says, “I fell in love watching her peeling sweet potatoes in her parents’ kitchen, and I remember she was missing a tooth. . . .”

“A tooth?”

Riba decides to take it all tragically seriously, despite the fact that Javier might just be joking. It’s not long before he realizes he’s made the right choice. His friend isn’t joking at all.

“Yes, you heard right,” Javier says, his voice quivering. “She wasn’t even peeling potatoes, but sweet potatoes, mind you, and the poor girl was missing a tooth.”

“Love’s like that,” Javier adds, faraway and philosophical. “The first sight of the beloved, although it might seem trivial, is capable of leading us to the strongest of passions, and even at times to suicide. Nothing’s as irrational as passion, believe you me.”

Since Riba has the impression of having inappropriately unearthed a dark drama, he takes the first opportunity in the conversation to say goodbye, thinking it’s always better to talk to Javier on odd-numbered days, when it’s he, on his own initiative, who calls.

“Have you ever eaten sweet potato?” Javier asks when they’ve practically already finished their farewells, and were both about to hang up.

Riba doesn’t like the thought of not replying. But the fact is he doesn’t answer. He hangs up. He pretends the line has been cut off. My god, he thinks, imagine, talking to me about sweet potatoes. Poor Javier. A love affair is always an interesting topic, but mixed with food it’s indigestible.

He already knows that, at the center of the world, Ricardo had a door harshly slammed in his face by Tom Waits. And that good old Javier, meanwhile, saw a girl peeling something. As for young Nietzky, in his case it might all be different, and the question of the center of things may not be important, given that, after all — almost without realizing it Riba slips into a torrential inner world at the mere mention of New York — he already lives in this center, lives there without any trouble, lives right in the very center of the world. But who knows what’s happening in his mind when young Nietzky’s left alone in the center of the center of the center of his world, and thinks. What might go through his head, for example, when the light’s purity bathes the windows of the skyscrapers, which are like blue, transparent skies pointing toward a superior sky over there in Central Park? What does he really know about Nietzky? And about the superior sky of Central Park in New York?