Dublinesque (2 page)

Today his father, as on previous occasions when they’ve spoken of Eisenhower’s visit, denies he was so excited, and says it’s a misunderstanding of his mother’s, who thought that he got far too worked up about the American president’s visit. He also denies that for a while his favorite film was Charles Walters’s
High Society
with Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, and Frank Sinatra. They watched it at least three times, at the end of the fifties, and Riba remembers this film always used to put his father in an excellent mood. He was crazy about everything that came from the United States; the films and the glamour fascinated him; he was drawn to the lives led by human beings who were like them but in a place that seemed as remote as it was inaccessible. And it’s very likely Riba inherited from him, from his father, his fascination with the New World, the distant charm of those places that, back then, seemed so unattainable, maybe because the people who lived there seemed like the happiest people on earth.

They talk about Eisenhower’s visit and
High Society
and the D-Day landings, but his father continues stubbornly to deny he felt such enthusiasm. Just when it seems as if, to avoid getting stuck on the subject, his parents will soon return to the Lyon question, night falls on Barcelona with unusual speed; it grows dark very quickly, and a violent downpour arrives with a big flash of lightning. It falls just at the moment he is getting ready to leave the house.

The dreadful crash of a solitary clap of thunder. The rain falls on Barcelona with a rage and force never before seen. Suddenly he has the feeling of being trapped and at the same time of being perfectly capable of walking through walls. Somewhere, at the edge of one of his thoughts, he discovers a darkness that chills him to the bone. He isn’t too surprised, he’s used to this happening to him in his parents’ apartment. The most likely explanation is that, a few moments ago, one of the numerous damp ghosts — peaceful ghosts of some ancestor or other who inhabit this dark mezzanine — has slipped inside him.

He wants to forget about the domestic specter chilling him to the bone, so he goes over to the window and there he sees a young man who, with no umbrella in the rain, standing right in the middle of Calle Aribau, seems to be spying on the house. He is perhaps a superior ghost. But in any case, the young man is without a doubt a phantom from outside, not one of the family. Riba exchanges a few glances with him. The young man has an Indian-looking face, and wears an electric-blue Nehru jacket with gold buttons down the front. What can he be doing out there and why is he dressed like that? When the strange young man sees that the traffic lights have changed and the cars are starting to move along the street again, he crosses to the other side. Is it really a Nehru jacket he’s wearing? It could just be some kind of fashionable jacket, but it’s not at all clear. Only someone like Riba, who has always been such an attentive reader of newspapers and is now of a respectable age, would remember people such as Srî Pandit Jawâharlâl Nehru, a politician from another age, the Indian leader who was spoken of so much forty years ago, and now not at all.

Suddenly his father turns around in his armchair, and in a gloomy tone of voice, as if consumed by a feverish melancholy, says he’d like someone to explain something to him. And he repeats it twice, very anxiously. Riba’s never seen him in such a dismal mood: he’d like someone to explain something to him.

“What, Dad?”

Riba thinks he’s referring to the great peals of thunder, and patiently starts to explain the origin and cause of certain types of storms. But he soon realizes what he’s saying sounds ridiculous, and moreover, his father is looking at him as if he’s stupid. He pauses tragically and the pause becomes eternal, he can’t carry on talking. Perhaps now he might resolve to tell them something about Lyon. As things stand, it might even be an opportune moment to distract them by describing the literary theory he put together there. He could say he wrote the theory on a cigarette paper and then smoked it. Yes, he should tell them things like that. Or instead, to stir things up even more, ask them that question he hasn’t asked for years now: “Why did Mom convert to Catholicism? I need an explanation.”

He knows it’s useless, that they’ll never answer this.

He could also tell them about Julien Gracq and about the day he visited him and went out with the writer onto the balcony of his house in Sion, and Gracq contemplated bolts of lightning, and with particular attention, what he called
the unleashing of erroneous energy
.

His father interrupts the long pause to tell him, with a smug smile, that he is perfectly aware of the existence of altocumulus clouds and so forth, but he isn’t asking his son to tell him about things he learned in his long-ago school days.

A new silence follows, this time even longer. Time passes extraordinarily slowly. Mixed with the rain and “the unleashing of erroneous energy” is the ticking of the clock on the wall that, when it was in a different room of this apartment, witnessed his birth, almost sixty years ago. Suddenly all three of them stop moving and stay almost motionless, stiff, exaggeratedly stern — not at all exuberant, very Catalan, expecting who knows what, but definitely waiting. They have just begun the tensest wait of their lives, as if listening for the thunderclap that must arrive. Then suddenly the three of them are totally motionless, more expectant than ever. His parents are shockingly old, this is patently obvious. It’s not surprising they haven’t found out that he no longer has the publishing house and that he sees far fewer people than he used to.

“I was talking about the mystery,” says his father.

Another long pause.

“Of the unfathomable dimension.”

An hour later, the rain has stopped. Riba is preparing to escape the trap of the parental home when his mother asks him, almost innocently:

“And what plans do you have now?”

He says nothing, not having expected that question. He has no plans for the immediate future, not even a wretched invitation to some publishers’ conference; no book launch to at least show his face at; no new literary theory to write in a hotel room in Lyon; nothing, absolutely nothing at all.

“I can see you don’t have any plans,” his mother says.

His self-esteem wounded, he lets Dublin come to his rescue. He remembers the strange, striking dream he’d had in the hospital when he fell seriously ill two years ago: a long walk through the streets of the Irish capital, a city he has never been to, but which, in the dream, he knew perfectly well, as if he’d lived there in another life. Nothing astonished him as much as the extraordinary precision of the dream’s many details. Were they details from the real Dublin, or did they simply seem real due to the dream’s unparalleled intensity? When he woke up, he still knew nothing about Dublin, but he felt totally, strangely certain he had been walking through the streets of this city for a long time, and found it impossible to forget the only difficult part in the dream, the one where reality became strange and upsetting: the moment his wife discovered he had started to drink again, there, in a pub in Dublin. It was a difficult moment, more intense than any other in that dream. Caught by surprise by Celia on his way out of a pub called the Coxwold, in the midst of his latest unwelcome drinking binge, he embraced her sadly, and the two of them ended up crying, sitting on the curb of a Dublin side street. Tears were shed in the most disconsolate situation he had ever experienced in a dream.

“Oh my God, why have you started drinking again?” asked Celia.

A difficult moment, but a strange one too, maybe related to his having recovered from physical collapse and being reborn. A difficult, strange moment, as if there was some kind of message in their pathetic weeping. A singular moment due to how especially intense the dream became — an intensity he had only known before when, on repeated occasions, he dreamt he was happy because he was in New York — and because suddenly, almost brutally, he felt he was linked to Celia beyond this life, an incommunicable feeling it was impossible to demonstrate, but as powerful and personal as it was genuine. A moment like a stab of pain, as if for the first time in his life he felt alive. A very subtle moment, because it seemed to contain — like a puff of air, the dream coming from someone else’s mind — a hidden message that placed him just one step away from a great revelation.

“We could go to Cork tomorrow,” Celia was saying.

And that’s where it all ended. As if the revelation were waiting for him in the port city of Cork, in the south of Ireland.

What revelation?

His mother clears her throat impatiently when she sees him so pensive. And now Riba is worried that she is reading his mind — he has always suspected that, being his mother, she can read it perfectly — and she has discovered that her poor son is destined to fall off the wagon again.

“I’m planning a trip to Dublin,” Riba says, this time getting straight to the point.

Up until this precise moment it has rarely, if ever, crossed his mind to go to Dublin. Not speaking English well has always put him off. For business, he always felt it was enough to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair. He used to send his secretary Gauger to the London Book Fair. Gauger was always a huge asset whenever the English language proved essential. But perhaps now the time has come for everything to change. Didn’t it change two years ago for Gauger, who took his life savings and a sum of money Riba suspects he stole from him, and left to go and live in a great big hotel in the Tongariro region of New Zealand, where his stepsister was waiting for him? And anyway, didn’t Celia’s young lover, the one she had before she met Riba, come from Cork?

With charming innocence, his mother asks what he is going to do in Dublin. And he answers with the first thing that comes into his head: that he is going on the sixteenth of June, to give a lecture. Only once he has answered does he realize that this is precisely the day of his parents’ sixty-first wedding anniversary. And what is more, he also realizes that “61” and “16” are like heads and tails of the same number. The sixteenth of June, meanwhile, is the day on which Joyce’s
Ulysses
takes place, the Dublinesque novel
par excellence
and one of the pinnacles of the age of print, of the Gutenberg galaxy, the twilight of which he is having to live through.

“What’s the lecture about?” asks his father.

Brief hesitation.

“It’s about James Joyce’s novel
Ulysses
, and the Gutenberg constellation giving way to the digital age,” he replies.

It was the first thing that occurred to him. Afterward he pauses, and then, as if dictated by an inner voice, he adds:

“They actually want me to speak about the end of the age of print.”

Long silence.

“Are the presses closing down?” his mother asks.

His parents, who — as far as he knows — have not the slightest idea who Joyce is and even less what kind of novel lies behind the title
Ulysses
and who, moreover, have been caught off guard by the topic of the end of the age of print, look at him as if it’s just been confirmed that, even though it’s beneficial for his health, he’s been very odd lately, owing to his permanent sobriety since giving up alcohol so radically two years ago. He senses this is what his parents are thinking and fears greatly that they are not entirely in the wrong, since his constant sobriety
is
affecting him, why pretend otherwise? He is too connected to his thoughts and sometimes disconnects fatally for a few seconds and gives answers he should have thought through more, such as the one he has just given them about
Ulysses
and the Gutenberg galaxy.

He ought to have given them a different answer. But as Céline said, “Once you’re in, you’re in it up to your neck.” Now that he’s announced he is going to Dublin, he’s going to push on into the tangled affair, up to his neck, as far as is necessary. He will go to Dublin. No doubt about it. This will also allow him to verify whether or not the many extraordinarily precise details in his strange dream were real. If, for instance, he sees that in Dublin there is a pub called the Coxwold with a big red and black door, this will mean nothing less than that he really did cry with Celia, in an emotional scene, sitting on the ground, in Dublin, perhaps before he was ever there.

He will go to Dublin, capital of Ireland, a country he doesn’t know much about, only that, if he remembers correctly — he tells himself he’ll look it up later on Google — it has been an independent state since 1922, the very year — another coincidence — his parents were born. He knows very little about Ireland, although he knows a good deal about its literature. W. B. Yeats, for example, is one of his favorite poets. 1922 is, moreover, the year in which
Ulysses
was published. He could go and hold a funeral for the Gutenberg galaxy in Dublin Cathedral, which is called St. Patrick’s, if he remembers rightly; there, on that holy site, Antonin Artaud finally went completely mad when he saw no difference between the saint’s cane and the one he was using himself.

His parents are still looking at him as if thinking that his permanent sobriety has led him perilously down the pathways of autism; they seem to be reproaching him for daring to talk about someone called Joyce when he knows perfectly well they have no idea who this gentleman is.

His father turns around in his chair and appears to be about to protest, but finally says only that he would like someone to explain something.

Again? Now it seems like he’s parodying himself. Could it be a touch of humor on his part?