Dublinesque (33 page)

He remembers telling them that, since he’d seen that guy twice over the course of Bloomsday in two different places; it was very likely that they might have bumped into that young Beckett lookalike on more than one occasion.

Verdier and Fournier, almost in unison, told him they knew someone like that. In Dublin this Beckett double was relatively famous, said Fournier. The young double was a great walker, studying at Trinity College, but he was seen all over the city, in the most unexpected places. Many people knew him, yes. He stood out precisely because of his resemblance to the young Beckett; they didn’t think there was anything mysterious about it and believed he was the young Beckett himself, simple as that. Although many in Dublin knew him as Godot. But that wasn’t his name, of course. His name was Malachy Moore.

“But it’s Beckett himself, I’m telling you,” concluded Verdier.

Still somewhat scared, he is gradually completing the forced reconstruction of what might have happened yesterday. As the hangover subsides, new fragments of his night out begin to appear and now, crystal-clear, the terrifying memory arrives of the instant when last night at home, after the question about Duchamp over the intercom, he decided to make some enquiries outside, far from his labyrinthine room and that crushing solitude. And he remembers the mad moment when, after leaving a note for Celia, he decided to make a move and called the elevator and a few seconds later stepped out into the street. The rain hit him in the face and he suddenly felt like he was back in the harsh solitude of the night and the elements. He was walking very slowly so his flimsy umbrella wouldn’t take off, and take him off with it, when all of a sudden he saw the great danger that was just around the corner, beside the only unlit streetlamp.

He feared it, but maybe he didn’t imagine it could be such an obvious danger, right out of an Irish film, complete with rain and even a bit of fog. He felt, for a moment, that if he managed fully to recover the daring bravery of his youth, he would regain some of the spirit of those times when he wasn’t afraid of anything. He plucked up courage as he analyzed the situation. No matter how much he wanted to, it wasn’t advisable for him to turn back now, because he’d already been seen. Faced with such a fate, all he could do was hope to emerge unscathed. Obviously, terribly, those two potential villains were there, those two scary guys on the corner acting as if they were there because it was the best place they could be on a rainy night like this. One was skinny and blond, dressed in a really outdated punk style, with a big, very crooked nose. The other was fat and black with a big paunch and messy dreadlocks hanging down over his shoulders.

The blond with the crooked nose was especially frightening. Neither of the two looked at him although there was nobody else in the street. Riba didn’t know what to do. He thought the best thing would be to just keep walking as if nothing was wrong, speed up a little as he passed them until he reached the entrance to the pub, which was only fifty meters beyond the danger: walk right past them without even looking their way, as if they didn’t make him at all suspicious or it hadn’t occurred to him that they might have been the ones who’d left the message on the intercom, or anything like that.

Although, thinking it through, it was more than obvious that those two guys were not the kind of people to mention Marcel Duchamp on an intercom. The closer he got to the corner, the more Riba felt panic growing inside him, but he kept walking, it was clear he had no choice. He turned up the collar of his raincoat and walked on. And the biggest problem arose from his own mind when, as he got closer to the two undesirables, he began to feel more insecure and old than ever. He was shattered, he noticed his heart was beating very rapidly and he felt a very powerful fear spread throughout his body. He had to admit he was really old, quite grossly old. Never had the words to the poem “Dublinesque” suited him so well as in that moment, because, as if by magic, his brief nocturnal stroll to the pub was turning him into the old whore in the mackintosh at the end of the world, that is, into the unexpected reincarnation of the last spark of wretched literature and at the same time into a washed-up old man freezing to death walking down stucco sidestreets, where the light is pewter and down which he was walking himself, the last literary publisher in history, turned into his very own funeral.

Actually, thinking about it now, even that sordid Dublin street was marvelous if he compared it to the dull reality of Spain and its terrible landscape. As he advanced toward the two probable thugs, he felt nostalgic for the times when the night held no secrets for him and he sailed through the most difficult situations practically unnoticed. And all of a sudden, as if humor could save him from everything, he began to hear, as an unexpected echo, Milly Bloom’s song, and it was as if the ghost of poor Milly was trying to come to his aid. Then he started remembering other situations when, as now, he’d consigned the danger to the background by thinking of things other than those that should really be worrying him. For example, as a boy, he’d been on the verge of drowning, because the sea at Tossa de Mar had carried him out beyond safety, and not knowing how to swim, he’d clung onto an air mattress; but instead of thinking he was going to die, he’d started conjuring up a scene from
El Jabato
, his favorite comic, in which the hero goes through a similar situation and at the last minute is rescued by Noodle the skinny poet, another character in the comic strip.

And when he came up to the likely thugs, he was so distracted and concentrating so hard on recalling the skinny poet Noodle — whose name struck him at that moment as an allusion to the fragility of human life — that he passed the two guys without even noticing he’d left them quite easily behind. They didn’t seem to see him either, or maybe they just saw a specter pass, or a dead man, and didn’t want to bother him. The fact is that he suddenly realized he hadn’t even noticed them as he walked right past, and now, he had to get used to the idea that he had completely left them behind. Looking back might be fatal, so he kept going, now thinking of his youth and the great many dull nights he’d wasted holding a glass of whiskey, leaning forward to listen to other people’s nonsense. He had so much free time back then that he squandered completely, stupidly away to nothing.

Seconds later, like a ghost lost in the night, he reached the door of McPherson’s. There weren’t too many people inside. No sign of Walter’s Catalan friend. He realized immediately it had been a mistake to look for him there. But now it was too late. The few customers in the bar were watching him, waiting to see if he’d come in or not, so he took two more steps and walked inside. He immediately felt that he’d sunk down into the deepest recess of a buried memory. Whatever the case, the best thing he could do was to carry on as if nothing was wrong. “Once you’re in, you’re in it up to your chin,” as Céline used to say.

At the bar he could see only a middle-aged man at one end of it, scratching his crotch with a meditative air, and beside him a very skinny guy with a classic boozer’s look, cloth cap, and hobnailed boots, staring furiously at the spark of golden light at the bottom of his glass of whiskey. There were also a few amorous couples on the velvet benches, red and black benches that smelled of railway carriages. He didn’t yet know that the two guys at the bar were French and that he’d end up christening them Mercier and Camier.

He remembered he walked into McPherson’s feigning self-confidence and that, even before wondering what he’d have to drink, he leaned on the bar and decided that he’d concentrate and try to get his brain to start the process of conceiving himself the same way Murphy did his own self. He then imagined his brain as a big empty sphere, hermetically sealed against the exterior universe, which, as Beckett would say, was not an impoverishment, since it didn’t exclude anything not contained within it, because nothing ever existed or ever would exist in the exterior universe that wasn’t already present as virtuality or as actuality — as virtuality elevating itself to actuality, or actuality falling into virtuality — in the interior universe of his mind.

After this considerable and futile mental effort, he felt almost devastated. He thought of the reproduction of “Stairway,” the small Hopper painting in the apartment that had been obsessing him since the first day. The painting itself had told him not to go out. It was a painting that invited one not to go outside. Even so, he had decided to open the door and brave the rain and the street. Hopper, having painted a door open to the outside, invited him, quite clearly if paradoxically, to stay indoors, not to budge an inch. But now it was too late. He had defied the painting and left.

“You, sir, are the essence of vulgarity,” he remembered a rejected author had once told him in his own office. Why had this phrase remained so deeply ingrained in his mind and why did it reappear at the trickiest moments, when he needed more self-confidence than usual?

He timidly asked for a gin with water. Marcel, the bartender from Marseille, said something to him in French to show him he remembered him from when he’d been there with Celia on the patio. Then he served him the gin. Riba drank it down in one gulp. Two years’ thirst, he thought. And from then on he didn’t think anything clearly anymore. The alcohol went straight to his head. One goes away suddenly, he thought. And in a flash returns. With the intention of changing. Head hung. Head in hands. The head, headquarters of everything. Motionless in the full moon the last publisher.

It’s difficult to know — for Riba himself — what exactly it was he’d just thought. Eventually, you have to pay for two years of abstinence. Anyway, he understood more or less the way things were going. Motionless, in the full moon, the last publisher. Wasn’t he the last publisher? He had been spending his nights in the rocking chair facing the moon, with the Gutenberg galaxy buried, and believing that all the stars were deceased souls, old relatives, acquaintances, charlatans. But no, this wasn’t the right interpretation. It was just the ruthless effects of alcohol. A drinker’s thoughts. Head hung. Head in hands.

“Another gin,” said Riba.

Was he the last publisher? That would be ideal, but no. In the paper every day he saw photos of all those new, young independent publishers. Most of them looked to him like insufferable, uneducated beings. He never thought he’d be replaced by such idiots and it was hard for him to accept, a long and painful process. Four idiots had dreamed of replacing him and had finally achieved it. And he himself had ended up making way for them, had helped them prosper by speaking well of them. It served him right for having been such a bastard, for being far too gracious and generous with the falsely discreet young lions of publishing.

One of those new publishers, for example, spent all his time proclaiming that we’re living in a transitional period toward a new culture and, wishing to prosper without effort, made claims for quite obtuse prose writers he claimed had found a goldmine in the “new language of the digital revolution,” so useful for covering up their lack of imagination and talent. Another one tried to publish foreign authors with the same taste and style as poor Riba and in fact succeeded only in imitating what he’d already done much more competently. Another wanted to copy the most spectacular heads of the Spanish publishing world; he dreamt of being a media star and his authors were mere pawns of his glory. In any case, none of the three seemed shrewd enough to endure the thirty years he’d endured. He’d heard they were planning some sort of homage to him in September and that the digital revolutionary, the imitator, and the aspiring superstar were at the head of it. But Riba thought only of fleeing from them. Behind that move were hidden motives, very little genuine admiration.

He gulped down a second gin, which was followed by others. After a short time, he felt like he was Spider, or rather, an arrow in a cobwebbed cellar of steel-gray light. There were so few people in the place that there was no point in looking for Walter’s Catalan friend among the clientele. In any case, no one there could be suspected of having called him on the intercom. And it began to seem obvious that someone had managed to get him mixed up in a little mystery, which he might be able to clear up the next day, or maybe he never would. It was, in any case, futile to look for the solution to the enigma between the four walls of that place. And he had made a huge mistake by going out at night. His gaze fell again on the two men in Irish caps he’d seen on his way in and who were sitting quite close to him at the bar. He thought he heard them speaking French and timidly approached them. Just then, one of them said:

“
Souvent, j’ai supposé que tout
. . .”

He stopped as he saw Riba approach and the phrase hung half-finished in the air. He supposed that everything what? That phrase turned into another mystery, probably forever now.

When minutes later, Riba nobly tackled his fifth gin, he was totally absorbed in a long chat with the Frenchmen. For a while he talked about cocktails he’d drunk in days gone by in bars all around the world and of sapphire swimming pools and white-jacketed waiters who served cold gin at certain clubs in Key West. Until in the mirror over the bar he began to see multi-colored rows of bottles of alcoholic beverages, as if he were on a carousel. And suddenly, with the first whiskey — he’d decided to abandon the gin in a flash — he asked the two Frenchmen a question about the decor of Irish houses, and without really knowing how, ended up causing Samuel Beckett to appear in the conversation.

“I know someone who has his house lined with Beckett,” said Verdier.

“Lined?” said Riba, surprised.

Although he asked him to explain this, Verdier refused to do so point blank.