Dublinesque (4 page)

“I’m thinking about my catalog,” says Riba, lowering his head.

Since he stopped drinking, he barely has any domestic quarrels with Celia. This has been a great step forward in their relationship. Before, they used to have really awful fights, and he never once tried to rule out the thought that he, with his damned drinking, was always the guilty party. When the arguments were really bad, Celia used to pack a few things in her suitcase, which she then took out of the apartment to the landing. Afterward, if she got tired, she went to bed, but left the suitcase out there. In this way the neighbors always knew when they’d had a fight: the suitcase reflected what had gone on the night before. Shortly before he had his collapse, Celia really did leave him and spent two nights away from home. If he hadn’t had health problems and been forced to stop drinking, it’s more than likely he would have ended up losing his wife.

Suddenly he tells her that he’s thinking of going to Dublin on the sixteenth of June.

He tells her about his parents’ wedding anniversary and also about Joyce’s
Ulysses
, and finally about his dream, his premonition, especially about being drunk outside a pub called the Coxwold, the two of them weeping copiously and inconsolably, sitting on the ground at the end of an Irish side street.

He has tried to tell her too much too quickly. What’s more, he has the feeling that Celia is only one step away from telling him that, although the absence of alcohol in his life and his daily fourteen hours of isolation in front of the computer have calmed him down and are without doubt a blessing, they are making him increasingly autistic. Or, to be precise, more
hikikomori
.

“Dublin?” she asks, surprised. “And what are you going to do there? Start drinking again?”

“But Celia —” he makes a gesture as if arming himself with patience, “ — the Coxwold is just a pub in a dream.”

“And if I’ve understood correctly, it’s also the place of a premonition, dear.”

Riba has been interested for days in everything surrounding the subject of the
hikikomori
, young Japanese people who suffer from autism in front of the computer, and who, in order to avoid outside pressures, react by withdrawing completely from society. In fact, the Japanese word
hikikomori
means “isolation.” They shut themselves up in a room in their parents’ house for prolonged periods of time, usually years. They feel sad and have hardly any friends, and the vast majority spend the day sleeping or lying down, and at night watch television or concentrate on the computer. Riba is very interested in the topic because, since he left publishing and stopped drinking, he has been withdrawing into himself, and in effect, turning into a Japanese misanthrope, a
hikikomori
.

“I’m going to a funeral in Dublin for the age of print, for the golden age of Gutenberg,” he tells Celia.

He doesn’t know how it happened, but it just came out. Her eyes burrow into him. Silence. Unease. Before she starts shouting, he begins to explain.

“What I mean is the funeral, ever delayed, of literature as an endangered art. Although really the question should be: what danger?”

He notes that he has got himself tied into knots.

“I would understand perfectly,” he continues, “if you asked me that question. Because the fact is the thing that interests me most about this danger is its literary nuances.”

He thinks that now his wife will unleash her anger; instead the opposite happens, as he starts to sense a sudden warmth, a certain sort of loving intensity. But it’s also as if Celia has taken pity on him. Can that be it? Or maybe she’s taken pity on the golden age of Gutenberg, which perhaps in this case is the same thing? Or is she fond of danger, seen from a literary point of view?

Celia looks at him, and asks him if he remembers asking her some days ago to rent the only David Cronenberg film he hasn’t yet seen. She shows him the DVD of
Spider
she has just got out, and affectionately suggests they watch it before dinner.

He does indeed like Cronenberg, one of cinema’s last real directors. But it all seems a little strange to him, because he never asked to watch this film. He glances at the DVD and reads that the film is about “a lonely man failing to communicate in an inhospitable world.”

“Is that me?” he asks.

Celia doesn’t even answer.

In the opening sequence of the film, a young man called Spider is the last person to get off the train, and it’s clear right away that he’s different from the other passengers. Something seems to have seriously clouded his brain, and he stumbles as he alights with his small, strange suitcase. He is handsome, but he has all the signs of being highly mentally-disturbed, maybe a lonely man failing entirely to communicate with an inhospitable world.

Celia asks Riba if he’s noticed that, in spite of the heat, Spider is wearing four shirts. Well, no, he hadn’t noticed this peculiar detail. He excuses this by saying he hasn’t yet had time to focus on the film. Besides, he says, he doesn’t normally notice those kinds of details.

Now he troubles himself to count the shirts. And he sees it’s true. The man is wearing four in the middle of summer. And what about the suitcase? It’s very small and old, and when Spider opens it, we see it contains only useless objects and a little notebook where, in minuscule handwriting, he writes down his illegible impressions.

Celia asks him about Spider’s handwriting, she wants to know if it doesn’t remind him of Robert Walser’s when it became microscopic. Well it’s true, that is what it’s like. The introverted, microscopic calligraphy of the frail young man who answers to the name of Spider makes one think of the days when, before he entered the first lunatic asylum, the handwriting of the author of
Jakob von Gunten
became gradually smaller and smaller, due to his obsession with disappearance and eclipse. Then Celia wants to know if he’s noticed that there is scarcely anyone on the streets of London’s gloomy, inhospitable East End, through which Spider is wandering.

He notices that Celia hasn’t stopped asking him questions since the film began.

“Has someone asked you to find out if I can still concentrate and notice things in the outside world?” he finally asks her.

Celia seems used to him talking to her like this and his answers coming at her from unexpected directions, not necessarily connected to his questions.

“What you have to do is to love me. The rest doesn’t matter,” she says, emphatically.

Riba makes a mental note of the phrase, jotting everything down this way. He wants to type it up later in a Word document he keeps open on his computer where he collects phrases.

What you have to do is to love me. The rest doesn’t matter. This is new, he thinks. Or maybe what’s happened is that she used to put it a different way. It may well be a Buddhist saying, who knows.

Soon it seems to him that Spider is listening in and spying on his conversation, even his thoughts. Might he himself be Spider? He can’t deny he feels drawn to the character. What’s more, deep down, he would like to be Spider, because he completely identifies with him in some aspects. For him, he’s not just a poor madman, but also the bearer of a subversive kind of wisdom, the sort of wisdom Riba has found very interesting since closing down the publishing house. Maybe it’s an exaggeration to think he’s Spider. But hasn’t he been accused many times of reading his life as if it were the manuscript of an unknown author? How many times has he had to listen to people tell him he reads his life anomalously, as if it were a literary text?

He sees Spider look at the camera, then close his suitcase, and walk for a while through cold and deserted streets. He sees him act as if he’d come into his living room. He moves around in it as if it were a rundown neighborhood in London. Spider has come from a mental hospital and is headed for a place that is theoretically less harsh, just a little less harsh, to a hospice or a halfway house, coincidentally situated in the same neighborhood of London where he spent his early years; this will be the direct cause of his starting fatally to reconstruct his childhood.

When Riba sees that Spider is reconstructing his childhood with deceptive faithfulness to the facts, he wonders if it might not also be the case that his own tangled mental life never strays far from his childhood neighborhood. Because he himself is now thinking of his early years too, and the blessed innocence he had back then. He sees a straw hat in the sun, a pair of tan shoes, a pair of turned-up trousers. He sees his Latin teacher, who was an Englishman. And then he doesn’t see him. Oh, as everyone knows, there are people who, just as they appear, disappear very shortly afterward. The Latin teacher was a consumptive man who had a spittoon next to his blackboard. These are snippets from his childhood in El Eixample, the neighborhood near the center of Barcelona. In those days, he often felt stupid, Riba remembers. He does now, too, but for different reasons: now he feels stupid because it seems he only possesses
moral
intelligence; that is, an intelligence that isn’t scientific, or political, or financial, or practical, or philosophical. . . . He could have a more rounded intelligence. He always believed he was intelligent and now he sees he’s not.

“Mad people are very strange,” says Celia. “But they’re interesting, aren’t they?”

It seems once again as if his wife is trying to see how he reacts to the figure of Spider, perhaps to measure his own degree of dementia and stupidity. Perhaps she’s even reading his mind. Or who knows, perhaps she just wants to know if he identifies in a highly emotional way with this very isolated, engrossed individual, lost in an inhospitable world. The film is a walk around the East End, taken by a disturbed man. We see life just as this madman registers and captures it. We see life just as it is filtered through the wretched mind of this young man with his strange suitcase and his notebook with microscopic handwriting. It is a life that the poor lunatic sees as dreadful and criminal, terribly limited, and horrifyingly sad and gray.

“And have you seen what he’s writing in his notebook?” asks Celia, as if she suspects he’s so wrapped up in his thoughts that he’s not even watching the film.

It occurs to Riba suddenly that he’s missing something. A notebook, for example. Like Spider’s. Although he soon realizes he actually already has a notebook; it’s the Word document where he occasionally writes down random sentences he likes.

If it were up to him, he’d now start adding the music of Bob Dylan to the images from
Spider
. Dylan singing, for example, “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine),” a song he’s always found encouraging.

“No, I can’t see what he’s writing in his notebook. Why would I need to?” he finally answers Celia.

She pauses the film so he can see what Spider is writing in his damn notebook. They are primitive signs, bent sticks or little matchsticks, so incomplete they’re not even really sticks or matchsticks, and of course, could never form part of any hieroglyphic alphabet. They are genuinely frightening. However you look at them, the only thing those little sticks spell out are the clinical symptoms of the absurdity of madness.

Although only vaguely, Spider reminds him of the character from
A Man Asleep
, by Georges Perec, one of his favorite books on his list. Why is he so drawn to the figure of Spider, this poor, destitute, feeble-minded man who walks around confused and puzzled by a life he doesn’t comprehend? Maybe because there is something in Spider, and also in part in Perec’s character, which is common to everyone. This means he sometimes identifies with Spider, and at other times with “the man asleep,” who in turn reminds him of
Red Desert
, Antonioni’s film from 1964, where Monica Vitti plays a stray character, a female version of Spider
avant la lettre
, a woman lost in an inscrutable industrial landscape in which the apparent calm does nothing to help her establish adequate communication with things surrounding her. This constant failure, this emotional collapse, means she is doomed to become a fearful creature who, incapable of confronting a reality that completely escapes her comprehension, moves through empty spaces, through a metaphysical desert.

From what he has seen so far, the moody atmosphere in
Spider
seems to be establishing subtle links — in particular through the cinematography of Peter Suschitzky, which reflects a depressed state of mind — to the style he has always admired in
Red Desert
. Here too, as in the Italian film, one sees proof of how the futility of any attempt rationally to construct the outside world necessarily implies the inability to create an identity for oneself. And once he has arrived at this point, Riba again wonders if he himself might not be Spider. Just like the man in the film, he sometimes has dealings with ghosts.

When, in the most memorable sequence, Spider tries to find out who he is, we see him weave a tangle of string in his bedroom, like a mental spider’s web that appears to reproduce the horrific workings of his brain. But it soon becomes clear that these awkward attempts to reconstruct his own personality are ineffective. He walks through the inhospitable streets of London’s East End, down the cold, distant pathways of his irretrievable childhood: he has lost every connection to the world, he doesn’t know who he is; perhaps he never knew.

Now Riba thinks he can hear strange voices in the darkness, and wonders if it might not be the spirit of childhood that, one day, just seemed to disappear forever. Or maybe the ghost of the brilliant writer who, as a publisher, he always wished he could discover? A profound unease has hung over him for his whole life due to these absences. Nevertheless, the muffled sound of a certain presence is much worse, the murmur of the
writer’s malady
, for example, a ceaseless buzzing, a real pest.