Dublinesque (25 page)

He tries to remember that he has to go through the day completely enthused, but it’s hard to convince himself this will be possible. Where did that Morgan go? He found him deeply upsetting, but he hadn’t given him permission to disappear like that. He feels even more annoyed than when he was a child and his spirit abandoned him. And absurdly vindictive toward this Morgan who has left.

That young man — he thinks — so full of life, and at the same time insubstantial as a ghost. Recently, lots of people have been in the habit of disappearing a few seconds after having appeared.

And he remembers a little girl he used to play with in the summer holidays, in Tossa de Mar. Time flies like an arrow, the child used to say, and fruit flies fly too.

Back in his room, waiting for the revelers to wake up, he takes refuge in the book he’s brought with him and starts to read a biography of Beckett, by James Knowlson. He published it but didn’t read it at the time, and decided the trip to Dublin would provide an ideal opportunity to do so. The time has come to read this book he published five years ago and which, by the way, lost him so much money. He knows he could do other things. For instance, go to the executive lounge on the first floor and check his emails. But he wants to stick to his decision to undergo travel therapy and to distance himself from the internet and computers. He’s come to Dublin with this book on Beckett because he always thought one day an opportune moment to read it would arrive, but also because, shortly before leaving Barcelona, it struck him that Beckett was a great friend of Joyce’s — he’s heard it said he was his secretary too, but this isn’t true — and was born in Foxrock, County Dublin, on April 13, 1906, twenty-six months after the day on which
Ulysses
takes place. Precisely twenty-six months have passed since Riba suffered his physical collapse. Twenty-six months was also exactly how long his parents’ engagement lasted.

Now he reads the section where Knowlson comments on how the young Beckett fled Ireland and above all escaped from May, his mother, but didn’t have a much better time in London. He was depressed and jobless the whole time he was there. He applied without success for the post of assistant curator at the National Gallery. He suffered all sorts of physical discomforts in the form of cysts and eczema. He soon saw that he’d be forced to return to his Dublin home. The worst thing was that he went back, and his mother, convinced he was behaving strangely and had psychological problems, tortured him by making him return to London and paying for two years of intensive psychotherapy for him there, which led him to end up detesting forever the old capital of the empire and the empire itself. He was never a good Irishman, but he acted like it when it came to despising England. He traveled around Germany afterward, where he learned — Knowlson says — to be silent in another language, absorbed in front of Flemish paintings.

Even so, he did return to Dublin and to life with his mother. Uncomfortable in the house where he was born, in Cooldrinagh, in the village of Foxrock. Long walks at dusk to Three Rock and Two Rock, always returning home via Glencullen, generally accompanied by his mother’s two Kerry Blue terriers. Days of fog and lethargy, of indecision. Long hikes around the beautiful coast of the county: lighthouses, wind, harbors. Long strolls around one of the most beautiful areas on earth. And one single conviction during those days of much indecision: now he would hate London forever. And a question preyed on the no-longer-so-young Beckett: what if I went to France and fled from the beauty of the lighthouses and the last piers of the ports at the end of the world of my noble, beloved, sweet, revolting native land?

Two days later, Beckett says goodbye to Dublin once and for all and sets off for Paris, which soon becomes his life’s destiny. He experiences something there he forever calls a
revelation
and that he once summed up thus: “Molloy and the others came to me the day I realized my stupidity. Only then did I start to write what I felt.” When the biographer Knowlson asked him to be less cryptic about the matter, Beckett didn’t mind explaining it further:

I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than adding.

With this
revelation
of Beckett’s, the Gutenberg age and of literature in general had started to seem like a living organism that, having reached the peak of its vitality in Joyce, was now, with his direct and essential heir, Beckett, experiencing the irruption of a more extreme sense of the game than ever, but also the beginning of a steep decline in physical form, ageing, the descent to the opposite pier to that of Joyce’s splendor, a freefall toward the port’s murky waters and its poverty, where in recent times, and for many years now, an old whore walks in an absurd worn-out raincoat at the end of a jetty buffeted by the wind and the rain.

Reading makes him sleepy again, perhaps because he woke up too early. But he doesn’t attribute this sudden low to that, but rather to the fact that he’s started reading on the other bed, the one he didn’t sleep in last night. He remembers Amy Hempel, whose character says in one of her stories that she’d discovered a trick to get to sleep: “I sleep in my husband’s bed. That way, the empty bed I look at is my own.”

He looks at his empty bed and puts himself in the shoes of whoever might be observing him from the place he is now. The rumpled sheets on the adjacent bed would induce first boredom and then an instant loss of consciousness in this person. He imagines he gets right under the skin of the man and he ends up falling asleep, and a recurring nightmare of a cage gets to him too, except this time God is outside the cage. He’s a scruffy guy who’s always mechanically smoothing down his hair. He imagines that, under the gaze of the messy-haired man, he says to the absentee, the one who slept last night in the now empty bed:

“It was never a problem, but it’s starting to be one now, and it unsettles me. I try to communicate with myself, but it’s impossible to do so. There’s no greater distance than the space between two minds. As much as if you suspect I’m that
first person
who existed in you and vanished so early on, or if you think I’m the author of your days, or the spirit of your childhood, or simply the shadow cast by your publisher’s sorrow; the most distressing thing of all would be for you to think that I am happy. If only you knew.”

•

No one was further from suicide than Beckett. When he visited the grave of Heinrich von Kleist he felt a deep unease and scant admiration for this Romantic artist’s final suicidal gesture. Beckett, who loved the world of words and loved gambling, led a life where he wrote ever shorter, more minimal novels, works that were more and more stripped down and sparse. Always worstward. “Name, no, nothing is nameable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don’t know, I shouldn’t have begun.” A stubborn walk toward silence. “So leastward on. So long as dim still. Dim undimmed. Or dimmed to dimmer still. To dimmost dim. Leastmost in dimmost dim.”

He changed his language to impoverish his expression. And in the end his texts appeared more and more purged. The lucid delirium of poverty. Going through life forever hindered, precarious, inert, deformed, unsettled, numb, terrified, unwlecomed, naked, sickly, shaky, defenceless, exiled, inconsolable, playful. Beckett, skinny and smoking in his room in Tiers-Temps, a nursing home in Paris. His pockets full of cake for the pigeons. Retired, like any other elderly person with no family, to an old people’s home. Thinking of the Irish Sea. Waiting for the final darkness. “Much better, in the end, if sorrow disappears and silence returns. In the end, it’s how you’ve always been. Alone.”

So far from New York.

“I’d like to be born,” he hears someone say in the next room.

He interrupts his reading of the biography. It might be true that he’d heard this if it weren’t for the fact there’s no one in the adjacent room. Not a single sound has been heard there since he arrived. He hasn’t heard anyone go into the room. And anyway, the sentence was uttered in Spanish. It’s his imagination. It’s not exactly serious. He’ll continue to talk to it, to his imagination. He invents any name and says it before challenging it to come in.

“If you’re out there, knock three times.”

Enter ghost. Perhaps who’s come in is this first person he’s obsessed with, this first good man who became hidden thanks to his catalog.

It’s well known that ghosts come from our memories, they almost never arrive from distant lands, or outside us. They are our tenants.

“What about the red suitcase?”

“I never travel,” the ghost says. “I’m forever trying to be born. And to learn English, which it’s about time I did.”

Time
: Eleven o’clock in the morning.

Date:
Bloomsday.

Place
: Meeting House Square, a square that developed from the place where a century ago a large part of the Quaker community of Dublin was concentrated.

Characters
: Riba, Nietzky, Ricardo, Javier, Amalia Iglesias, Julia Piera, Walter, and Bev Dew.

Style
: Theatrical and festive.

Action
: The traditional public reading of
Ulysses
on the stage of the theater built in one corner of the square. A seated audience occupies all the chairs in Meeting House Square. More of the audience is on the terrace outside a café. Occasional passersby and people stand and talk, some of them very animatedly. A well-expressed pleasure at the costumes of the readers.

Riba finds himself with Julia Piera, a Spanish poet who’s lived in Dublin for two years and is also a friend of Javier and Ricardo and who immediately offers to add them to the list of people who will take their turn to read a section from the book on the little stage. They’re already at the end of chapter five, so the most likely thing is that, thanks to a curious coincidence, they’ll get to read bits from chapter six. Nietzky and Ricardo put their names on the list and are given readings at around half past twelve.

With anxious curiosity, Riba observes all the people dressed up as Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, Stephen Dedalus. He’s attaining small degrees of unsuspected happiness. Everything, absolutely everything, seems new to him, and life does too. He thinks the feeling must be similar to that of having traveled to another world. There’s an air of wonderful unreality. Of being somewhere else.

He records everything in a commonplace book he’s bought in a bookshop of the nearby photography gallery and that he’s decided to inaugurate with a list of the things that catch his eye this morning.

A word-for-word account of what he has written down up to now:

A man dressed as the “inner landscape of a skull.”

A wonderful fat girl who thinks she’s Molly Bloom.

The Israeli writer David Grossman, who’s put himself down on the list to read a fragment of
Ulysses.

Bev Dew, the young daughter of the South African ambassador, in a wide-brimmed flowery hat and an ankle-length dress. Very beautiful. Fragrant face. Apple-faced. Accompanied by her laconic and strange brother Walter, a friend of Nietzky’s from school and shadowy owner of the Chrysler.

The poet Amalia Iglesias, who waves to Javier, who was her neighbor years ago in Madrid.

A Portuguese man dressed up as David Hockney!

“Full devotion to funerals!” Nietzky says. He’s probably been drinking again.

An anonymous, bony figure. To employ a Beckettian description: haughty forehead nose ears white holes mouth white threadlike finished invisible stitching.

Julia Piera again. Sensuality, beauty, vivaciousness.

A few more than obvious ghosts, even one wearing a white sheet. Me, comically reflected in a shop window again.

A sort of Finnish ogre with a straw hat and silver-handled cane.

A man in a raincoat bearing a quite astonishing resemblance to Beckett as a young man.

A Jesuit called Cobble, friend of Nietzky’s, who suddenly stops dead and starts talking in a suspiciously low voice to Amalia Iglesias.

The reading is running conspicuously late, as if from their Irish vantage point they wanted to poke fun at British punctuality. They’re so behind that Nietzky doesn’t take the floor until 1:10 p.m. He reads in a ridiculous, very correct and lilting English. His friend Walter’s sister, however, seems almost moved listening to him. Riba feels unexpectedly jealous, and then this reaction worries him. Extreme beauty, youth. He likes Bev, he can’t deny his arousal, his sudden sexual desire. Above all he likes her voice. In the middle of this sort of euphoria he’s experiencing, in the middle of unexpected levels of happiness, he thinks that maybe Bev reminds him of one of those girls with beautiful, glittering voices from the novels of Scott Fitzgerald: that timbre in which the jingle of coins can be heard, the beautiful cascade of gold in every fairy tale. Yes, he likes Bev, among other things because in some way her glamour brings her closer to New York. Or maybe he just likes her, and that’s it.

Meanwhile, up on the stage, the reading of Joyce’s novel continues. Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, and John Power are already sitting in the hearse and chapter six is trotting along at the same pace as the horses toward Prospect Cemetery.