Dublinesque (3 page)

“What, Dad? The storm’s over. What else do we have to explain to you? The unfathomable dimension?”

Unperturbed, his father continues what he’s started, and now he wants to know why exactly they’ve chosen his son to speak in Dublin about the decline of the Gutenberg constellation. And he also wants to know why his son still hasn’t said anything at all about his trip to Lyon. Perhaps he didn’t really go there and wants to hide this from his parents. They are used to him telling them about his trips, and his behavior today is alarmingly anomalous.

“I don’t know, it could be you’ve got a lover and you didn’t go to Lyon with her, but up Tibidabo,” he says. “You’re really doing some things badly lately, and as your father I feel obliged to point this out.”

Riba is about to tell him that he went to Lyon simply to hold a funeral for all the literary theories still in the world, including the one he himself managed to devise in a hotel room there. He’d like to be able to say something like this to his father, because he doesn’t appreciate those last paternal words one bit. But he holds back, he controls himself. He stands up, and begins the ceremony of saying goodbye. After all, it’s not raining anymore. And in any case he knows that when his parents start telling him off, it’s usually just a trick to keep him in the house a little longer. He can’t stay there a minute longer. He realizes that sometimes he lets his father control his life too much. Not having had children and being, moreover, an only child has led to this ongoing state of strange childish submission, but there’s a limit to everything. Years ago, he used to fight a lot with his father. Later on, they made peace. But he thinks that, at times like these, he can sense a certain nostalgia for that period of big arguments, great clashes. As if his father enjoyed hand-to-hand combat more than the current haven of peace and mutual comprehension. What’s more, it’s possible that arguing makes his elderly father feel better, and he unconsciously seeks out confrontation.

Although it’s a recent feeling, in some ways he adores his father: his intelligence, his secret goodness, his unexploited writing talent. He would have liked to have published a novel of his. He adores this man, always so strict, so entrenched in his role as a nineteenth-century father, that he has created in his son the need to be a subordinate, to be such an obedient person that he often even finds himself thanking his father for trying to direct his steps.

“Do you really not want to tell us anything about Lyon? It’s very strange, son, very strange,” says his mother.

They seem determined to keep him there with trifling matters for as long as possible, as if they wanted to delay him from going home, maybe because deep down they have always believed that, even though he is married and a highly respected publisher of almost sixty years of age, when he’s here he is still in short trousers.

Marco Polo is leaving, he thinks of saying. But he keeps quiet, he knows this would make it worse. His father looks at him angrily. His mother reproaches him for having spoiled such a firmly established custom as that of telling them about his latest trip. They walk him to the door, but they don’t make it easy for him to get to the exit, practically blocking him with their bodies. “You’re grown up now,” says his father, “and I can’t understand why you’d want to go to Dublin just to see this friend of yours from the Ulysses family.”

The Ulysses family! This must be another touch of last-minute paternal humor or sarcasm. He calls the elevator which, as always, takes its time arriving, despite only having to come up one floor. His parents have never accepted that, given the short distance to the lobby, he might walk down the stairs, and he, meanwhile, never wished to be the callous son who breaks with the sacred tradition of always leaving in the same clunky old elevator, once so luxurious.

While they wait, he asks his father with childish sarcasm if he doesn’t like the fact his son has a friend. And he reminds him that as a child he didn’t let him have friends, and was always jealous of them. He is exaggerating, but in a way he is right to do so. Isn’t his father exaggerating too? Doesn’t his father, in his heart of hearts, want to forbid him to go to Dublin? So he rebels against him, against his father’s secret wish to stop him going to Ireland. But really he is acting as a small child would do, unable to seriously hurt his father, let alone kill him, as he thinks he remembers Freud recommended earnestly.

No matter how great his tendency or vocation for patience might be, and no matter how much heroic fiber he might be made of, the wait for the elevator seems to go on forever. Finally the hulking old thing comes, he says goodbye again to his parents, steps into the elevator, presses a button, and goes down. Such a huge relief; he breathes deeply. The descent to the lobby is, as ever, very slow; the elevator is very old. As he descends, he feels like he is leaving behind the whole saga of the patio of this mezzanine apartment on Calle Aribau, where as a child he played soccer, always eternally alone. Later on, this patio became the center of his happiest dream, his dream linked to New York.

Out on Calle Aribau, as he gets into a taxi, he realizes it’s about to start raining again. He had thought that after the great storm the rain would ease up. Maybe he could say this to the taxi driver? He hopes he’s not like the somewhat Shakespearean Portuguese taxi driver he met in Lyon, the most theatrical taxi driver in the world.

“It’s going to rain some more,” Riba says.

For a moment, he worries that the taxi driver is going to answer like the character from
Macbeth
and give the famous reply:

“Let it come down.”

But he doesn’t always — if ever — come across taxi drivers in Barcelona who speak like characters from Shakespeare.

“You said it,” replies the man.

In the taxi he finally finds time to glance through the day’s newspaper, and comes across some comments by Claudio Magris about
The Infinite Journey
, his latest book. He’s interested in whatever Magris writes. Almost too long ago to remember, he published his book
Clarisse’s Ring
, and has been good friends with the writer ever since.

The taxi glides along the apparently lifeless streets of Barcelona under a dirty light after the storm. He always worries absurdly that taxi drivers — it’s probably a very childish feeling — will see him barricaded behind his newspaper and get a false impression that, despite having already talked about the weather, he is not in the least bit interested in them and in what they might tell him about their lives of drudgery. He doesn’t know whether to bury himself in his newspaper and read Magris’s comments or talk to the driver and ask him something slightly odd: for example, if he’s been through the forest yet today, or if he’s played backgammon, or watched much television.

This fear that taxi drivers will think him so very indifferent means he sometimes turns the pages of his newspaper very furtively, but this isn’t the case today, since he’s just decided that nothing and no one will be able to distract him from Claudio Magris, whose article is about — a very striking double coincidence —
Ulysses
and Joyce and about precisely what he is doing now: going home.

He feels he should read this reappearance of
Ulysses
as a not at all insignificant coded message. As if secret forces — one of them Magris himself with his comments — are nudging him ever closer toward Dublin. He looks up and gazes out of the window; the taxi has just left Calle Aribau and is turning onto Vía Augusta. When they reach the intersection of Avenida Príncipe de Asturias and Rambla de Prat, he sees a young man on a street corner wearing an electric-blue Nehru jacket. He looks a lot like the man he saw earlier, standing in the rain in front of his parents’ house. Two Nehru jackets in such a short space of time is surely a coincidence.

He sees the young man only fleetingly because, almost immediately, as if fearing he’d been discovered, the man turns the corner and vanishes with astonishing speed.

How strange, thinks Riba, he’s disappeared almost too quickly. Although it’s not so strange really, he’s used to such things by now. He knows that sometimes people one didn’t expect at all can appear.

He goes back to reading the newspaper, he wants to concentrate on the interview with Magris, but ends up calling Celia on his cell phone to tell her he’s on his way home. The short conversation calms him down. When he hangs up, he thinks he could have told her that he’s seen two Nehru jackets in a short space of time. But no, maybe it was better just to have said he was coming home.

He goes back to the newspaper and reads that Claudio Magris believes Ulysses’s circular journey as he returns triumphantly home — Joyce’s traditional, classic, Oedipal, conservative journey — was replaced halfway through the twentieth century by a rectilinear journey: a sort of pilgrimage, a journey always moving forward, toward an impossible point in infinity, like a straight line advancing hesitantly into nothingness.

He could see himself now as a rectilinear traveler, but doesn’t want to create too many problems for himself, and decides that his journey through life is traditional, classic, Oedipal, conservative. He’s going home in a taxi, isn’t he? Doesn’t he go to his parents’ house whenever he comes back from a trip, and on top of that, visit them without fail every Wednesday? Isn’t he planning a trip to Dublin and the very center of
Ulysses
to then come home good-naturedly days later to Barcelona and to his parents and tell them about the trip? It’s hard to deny his life is following the pattern of a strictly orthodox circular journey.

“After Calle Verdi, you said?” asks the taxi driver.

“Yes, I’ll tell you where.”

When he finally gets home, he says hello to his wife and gives her a kiss. He smiles happily, like a simpleton. They have known or loved each other for thirty years, and except for very critical moments — such as during the final escalation of his drinking two years ago that ended in physical collapse — they haven’t grown too tired of living together. He tells her straight away that his father suffered an attack of melancholy and asked his son to explain the mystery of “the dimension.”

What dimension? she asks. He knew she might ask this. Well, the unfathomable dimension no less, he replies. They look at each other, and an air of mystery appears between them as well. The mystery his father was talking about? He can’t help but let his attention wander to other questions. Isn’t there essentially an unfathomable dimension between him and her?

“
Without asking who you were
, /
I fell in love
. /
And whoever you might be
, /
I will always love you
,” go the ridiculous, naïve lyrics to the song by Les Surfs that was playing when they met, and fell in love. Back then Celia looked more like Catherine Deneuve than anyone he had ever seen. Even the raincoats she wore that made her look sluttish recalled the ones Deneuve wore in
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
.

And what do we know about ourselves, he wonders. Less and less every day, because on top of everything, Celia has been studying for some time now the possibility of becoming a Buddhist; she’s been contemplating for a few months what she calls the
sweet eventuality
. By now she’s almost convinced that she has within her the potential for reaching Nirvana, and believes she is close to seeing, with clarity and conviction, the true nature of existence and of life. It hasn’t escaped his notice that these first signs of Buddhism could end up being a big problem, in the same way that the escalation in his drinking was, two years ago, leading Celia seriously to consider leaving him. The fact is, he’d be in danger of being left on his own if one day he had the crazy idea of abusing alcohol again.

Now the two of them are motionless, as if both preoccupied with the same four questions, and this has paralyzed them: life, alcohol, Buddhism, and above all, their ignorance of each other.

They have been gripped by an unexpected coldness, as if they have suddenly realized that deep down they are strangers to each other, and to themselves, although — as well he knows — she is confident that Buddhism can lend her a hand and help her to take a spiritual step forward.

They smile nervously, trying to minimize the tension of this odd moment. Maybe he loves her so madly because she is someone he will never know everything about. It has always fascinated him, for example, that Celia is one of those women who never turn off taps properly. Dripping taps have been a constant in his marriage, in the same way — if such a comparison is possible — as his problems with alcohol.

He thinks he has always combined superbly well this relative ignorance about Celia with his total ignorance about himself. As he remarked once in an article for
La Vanguardia
: “I don’t know myself. The list of books I have published seems to have obscured forever the person behind the books. My biography is my catalog. But the man who was there before I decided to become a publisher is missing. I, in short, am missing.”

“What are you thinking about?” asks Celia.

Being interrupted annoys him and he reacts strangely and tells her he was thinking about the dining-room table and the hall chairs, which are perfectly real, and about the fruit basket that belonged to his grandmother, but that, however, he is also thinking that any madman could step through the door at any point and remark that things aren’t so clear.

He is immediately filled with dismay, as he realizes he has muddled things up unnecessarily. Now his wife is indignant.

“What chairs?” says Celia. “What hall? And what madman? You must be hiding something from me. I’ll ask you again. What are you thinking about? You haven’t started drinking again, have you?”