Dublinesque (34 page)

A little while after the third whiskey, Riba interrupted Verdier somewhat nervously, just when Verdier was at the most critical stage of his predictions for Saturday’s races. Verdier looked stunned, as if he could barely understand why he’d been interrupted in such a way. Taking advantage of the confusion, Riba asked — and it seemed like he was asking the entire neighborhood — if they’d ever seen a guy in Dublin who looked a lot like the writer Beckett when he was young.

That was when, almost in unison, Verdier and Fournier told him that they knew someone just like that. In Dublin that double of Beckett’s was relatively famous, said Fournier. And the conversation entered a more animated phase, and at one point, Verdier even had a lovely memory of Forty Foot, a Beckettian location found in Sandycove, right in front of the Martello tower, which in fact appears in
Ulysses
. It’s the spot with steps carved into the breakwater from which, since time immemorial, Dubliners enjoy diving in all the seasons of the year. That’s where Beckett’s father taught his sons, Sam and Frank, to swim, by throwing them in, with tough cruelty. Both stayed afloat and became fiercely fond of swimming. In fact, whenever he returned to Ireland, Beckett always went to Forty Foot, although the place he swam in more frequently, his favorite spot among all those of his native land, was a marvellous inlet under the hill of Howth.

“A truly Beckettian place. Windy, radical, drastic, deserted,” said Verdier.

“Abode of gulls and coarse sailors, an end of the world scenario,” added Fournier.

When they were at their most animated, Celia entered the pub like a gale-force wind, shouting at Riba with a thunderous rage that seemed endless. For a while, Celia seemed like a bottomless pit of insults and wailing.

“This is the end,” she said when she managed to calm down a little, “you’ve committed the mistake of your life. The mistake of your life, you stupid man.”

While Verdier and Fournier instinctively withdrew to the part of the pub farthest away from the bar, Riba suddenly discovered it was again possible for him to experience an intense moment at the center of the world: a moment that, in spite of having already been foreseen in the prophetic dream, arrived now with the same volcanic force and energy he had already felt in the apocalyptic vision that, at the time, served as a warning that one day in Dublin he might find himself on the edge of a strange happiness.

It wasn’t exactly the ideal scenario; Celia wouldn’t stop shouting and the situation was embarrassing. But he guessed, allowing himself to be guided by the model of the dream he’d had two years before in the hospital, that Celia would soon become more affectionate. And what he guessed turned out to be true. When she tired of shouting, she hugged him. And they went on to experience a moment at the center of the world. There was a reason that moving embrace was in the premonitory Dublin dream. They hugged each other so hard that, as they left the pub, they staggered and lost their balance, and just as the dream had predicted, they fell to the ground, where they remained in each other’s arms, as if they were a single body. It was an embrace at the center of the world. A horrible hug, but also spectacular, emotional, serious, sad, and ridiculous. It was an essential embrace, right out of — never truer — a dream. The two of them sat there afterward on the curb on the south side of that north Dublin street. Tears for a disconsolate situation.

“My God! Why have you started drinking again?” said Celia.

A strange moment, as if there were a hidden sign bearing some message in their pathetic crying and the surprising fact that Celia’s question was identical to the one in the dream.

Then, a partly logical reaction, he sat waiting for Celia to continue acting with great fidelity to the scene in the prophetic dream and to say:

“Tomorrow we could go to Cork.”

But Celia didn’t go so far as to say that. In contrast, the word “Cork,” the great absentee, strolled onto the stage, but as if completely suspended in the air, as if it were floating there in order to reappear perhaps later on, in an even more terrifying situation. In the shape of that vase at home in Barcelona, for example.

Riba seemed to understand fully at that moment that the fundamental essence of that strange dream he’d had in the hospital two years ago was simply regaining the awareness and the joy of being alive.

Celia did not say they could go to Cork the next day, but that didn’t make the moment any less strange, unique, any less a moment at the center of the world. Because he suddenly felt that he was linked to his wife beyond everything, beyond life, and beyond death. And that feeling was so serious in its most profound truth, it was so intense and so intimate, that he could only relate it to a possible second birth.

She, however, didn’t really share these feelings, was merely indignant about his ill-fated fall off the wagon. Even so, in the scene of the mortal embrace there was also emotion on Celia’s part and he saw that she too — although not to the same extent as he did — she appreciated the unexpected intensity of this unique moment at the center of the world.

“When the dead cry it’s a sign that they’re beginning to get better and to recover the awareness of being alive,” he said.

“When the dead cry it’s because they’ve drunk themselves to death on whiskey,” answered Celia, perhaps more realistically.

He took a while to respond.

“What a shame,” he said, “that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.”

“That we get old and die,” she corrected him.

And so the spell of the moment was gradually broken.

But the moment had occurred. It was, in fact, an instant at the center of the world. Although there was nothing at all central about the moment that followed, the one in which she gave him a terrible look and their lives returned to an ordinary state. Now she wouldn’t stop looking at him, with hatred once again. But mostly with contempt.

And what did he do? Was he able to look at her with contempt? Was he able to tell her she was a simpleton because she’d become a Buddhist? No, he couldn’t, and didn’t dare. He was still under the effects, the echoes of the great emotion he’d experienced. He heard the deep murmur of the Irish Sea and some words that told him it would always be better to be held in contempt by everyone than to be held on high. Because if one settled into the worst position, the lowest, and most forgotten by fortune, one could always still hope and not live in fear. Now he understood why he’d had to situate himself at ground level to manage to have some sense of survival. It didn’t matter that he’d grown old and been ruined and was at the end of everything because, after all, this drama had been useful in helping him understand why — within the so well-known incompetence of man in general and the no less famous incompetence of his time on this earth — there still existed a few privileged moments that one must be able to capture. And that had been one of them. And what’s more, he’d already experienced it in a dream of almost incomparable emotion, two years ago in the hospital. That was one of those precious moments he’d surely been fighting for, unknowingly, over the past few months.

Hugging Celia, he imagined right then and there, for a few moments, and very much in spite of their uncomfortable position on the ground, that just like other times he was wandering the streets of the world alone, and all at once found himself at the end of a pier swept by a storm, and there everything fell back into place: years of doubt, searching, questions, and failures suddenly made sense, and the vision of what was best for him asserted itself like a great fact; it was clear he didn’t have to do anything, except go back to his rocking chair, and begin there a discreet existence, worstward ho.

“The lamentable change is from the best.” He remembered, then and there, Edgar, the Earl of Gloucester’s son in
King Lear
, saying, that it always happens to us when we’re settled into the best. “The worst returns to laughter. Welcome, then, thou insubstantial air that I embrace! The wretch that thou hast blown unto the worst owes nothing to thy blasts.”

Now he is in the worst way, but something’s not working because the worst is not returning him to laughter. He’s paid a high price for his nocturnal epiphany on the final pier and nevertheless nothing is as he expected it to be. Without realizing, he has settled into the worst of the worst, a lower stratum than anticipated. His hangover is not abating. And the small Hopper painting will not look any different for love nor money.

With horror he’s beginning to see the first consequences of his mistake. To begin with, he’s clearly sensing that both God and the genius he always sought have died. To put it another way, without having given his consent, he sees himself now settled in a deplorable pigsty within a repugnant world.

They are all gone, as Henry Vaughan said. “They are all gone into the world of light,” is how the first line of that seventeenth-century English poem actually reads. But from the pigsty he’s holed up in now, worstward ho, that illuminated kingdom is not exactly visible. And this is undoubtedly one of the great disadvantages of the hovel the apartment has finally turned into. So Henry Vaughan’s line is reduced to a foul and miserable: “They are all gone.” End of story.

The nostalgia for the lost or never found genius returns. There was a time, while devoting himself to searching one out, that he took it for granted that one obvious sign of the presence of that genius in a piece of writing, or in an action written in life, would be the ability to choose themes far removed from one’s own circumstances. Until not long ago, Riba had always imagined that genius busying himself with his daily life as a retired publisher, a life that would be precisely quite far removed from the life of that novice. Until not a moment ago, he had the impression that for a novel to have genius, it was essential that throughout, a superior spirit, more intuitive and more intimately aware than the characters themselves, should be placing the whole of the story under the gaze of future readers; this, without participating in its passions, motivated only by the agreeable excitement produced by the energetic approval of one’s spirit to expose what one has been so attentively contemplating.

Whether or not it’s a coincidence, the fact is, since he’s given up Malachy Moore for dead, he doesn’t sense that the person who’s been lying in wait for him so fervently is still there, the one who has been observing him with maniacal, perhaps professional interest. Nostalgia for the genius. Or for the absentee. Nostalgia even for the novice. The truth is that, more or less as Henry Vaughan was saying, they are all gone. They have all vanished, and perhaps for a long time, maybe forever. He remembers the youngsters who made fun of Cavalcanti because he never wanted to go on a bender with them. “You refuse to be of our company. But when you’ve proved there is no God, then what will you do?”

The rain falls, as if trying to flood the entire earth at last, including this house in north Dublin, this almost tragic house with a rocking chair and a big window and a painting of a stairway, in front of the Irish Sea, this house so well appointed for going worstward ho, and if I may be allowed to say so — forgive the interruption, I do need to distance myself somewhat, but if I don’t say it I’ll burst out laughing — so completely lined with Beckett.

What will he do now that he’s discovered that neither God nor the brilliant author exist and that, furthermore, no one looks at him anymore, and on top of that, there is nothing but misery in his ground-level Beckettian world. As he listens to the rain falling, he again senses, realizing that not only has something given way in the room, but also someone has now literally gone. There is no longer a shadow, not a trace of the specter of his author, or of the novice, or of God, or of the New York
duende
, or of the genius he always sought. It’s only intuition, but it seems clear that, ever since he’s felt settled into the worst of the worst, he’s been heading toward something even lower. No one’s lying in wait for him any longer, no one’s watching him, there isn’t even anyone hidden or invisible behind the deep blue interminable air. No one’s out there. He imagines slipping a smooth watch into his trouser pocket and starting down the stairs of a remote presbytery. But soon he wonders why he is making such an effort to imagine so much if no one, absolutely no one, sees him. Desolation, solitude, misery at the ground level. Settled into the worst of the worst, the world now only resembles a tiny mound of shit in the most rotten, least pure, least fragrant space. Nostalgia for perfumed faces, for apple faces. Things have gotten so bad; perhaps it would be best if Malachy Moore hadn’t died and continued to be a presence — a shadow if you will — that at heart, even if only a shadow, at least he was a presence with some sort of encouraging force.

He knows Malachy Moore was a great walker and that many called him Godot. That he’d been seen all over Dublin, in the most unexpected places. That he had Dracula’s great ability of turning himself into fog. He doesn’t know much else, but doesn’t think he’s so hard to imagine: Malachy Moore grew in an irregular way, especially his bone structure. Everyone was immediately struck by his eyes. Although he was short-sighted, his eyes were sharp and expressive, and gleamed with the profound light of intelligence behind the round lenses of his glasses. His hands were cold and lifeless and he never gave a firm handshake. When he roamed the streets, his legs resembled a stiff pair of compasses. He was an absolutely brilliant author, even though he’d never even written anything. He was the author Riba would have liked to discover. He seemed taller than he actually was. And if one caught a glimpse of him up close — before, following his most notorious custom, he disappeared into the fog — one would see straight away that he was not such a tall person, although his stature was above average. The impression of height came from his thin build, his mackintosh all buttoned up, and his tight trousers. Something in his appearance, with the fundamental contribution of his head, reminded one of some highland eagle — watchful, restless — soaring over valleys. A bird to keep an eye on.