Dublinesque (7 page)

A moment

At the center of the world.

Things being as they are, it isn’t at all strange that he started to suspect the recurring dream contained a message telling him how a great, thrilling moment of happiness and extraordinary enthusiasm for the things of this world could only be awaiting him in New York.

One day, already past the age of forty, he was invited to a global conference of publishers in this city he had never set foot in, and naturally the first thing he thought was that he was finally going to travel to the very center of his dream. After the long and tedious flight, he arrived in New York as the day was drawing to a close. He was amazed at once by the great physical extent of American spaces. A taxi sent by the organization dropped him at the hotel, and once in his room, he watched in fascination how the skyscrapers gradually lit up as night fell. He felt deeply uneasy, expectant. He spoke on the phone to Celia, in Barcelona. Afterward, he got in touch with the people who had invited him to the city, and arranged to meet them the following day. Then, he busied himself with his dream. I’m at the center of the world, he thought. And looking out at the skyscrapers, he sat and waited for the sensations of enthusiasm, of emotion, of fulfilment, of happiness. It became clear that the wait, however, was just a wait, nothing more. A straightforward wait, with no surprises, with no enthusiasm at all. The more he looked at the skyscrapers in search of a certain kind of intensity, the clearer it became that he wasn’t going to feel any special sensation whatsoever. Everything in his life was still the same, nothing was happening that might seem different or intense. He found himself inside his own dream, and at the same time the dream was real. But that was all.

Even so, he persevered. He looked out at the street again and again, attempting unsuccessfully to feel happy while surrounded by skyscrapers, until he realized it was absurd to behave like the people Proust spoke of: “people who set out on a journey to see with their own eyes some city they’ve always longed to visit, and imagine they can taste in reality what has charmed their fancy.”

When he realized it was useless to carry on waiting to be inside that dream, he decided to go to bed. Tired from the journey, he fell asleep in no time. He dreamed then that he was a child in Barcelona playing soccer on a patio in New York. Total bliss. He had never felt so ebullient in his life. He discovered that the spirit of the dream, in contrast to what he had thought, was not the city, but the child playing. And he’d had to go to New York to find this out.

Today it’s raining less than yesterday and Barcelona is more visible through the window. Riba thinks about it: no matter what, at nearly sixty, wherever one looks, one has already been there.

Then he corrects himself and thinks almost the opposite: nothing tells us where we are and each moment is a place we have never been. He oscillates between feeling dejected and excited. Suddenly, he’s only interested in how he has managed to bring about this sort of rare calm, this new calmness he seems to be treating with the same level of interest he used to treat new manuscripts that seemed promising.

In the background, on the radio he has just turned on, a Billie Holiday song is playing, melancholy and drowsy, infinitely slowly, while he wonders if one day he’ll be able to think like his admired Vilém Vok used to when he reflected on those who lived in a dreamworld and then returned unscathed from their long travels.

New York’s beauty and greatness lie in the fact that each one of us carries a story that turns immediately into a New York story. Each one of us is able to add a layer to the city, conscious of the fact that it is in New York where the synthesis between a local story and a universal story can be found
[Vilém Vok,
The Center
].

He has always been a passionate reader of Vok, although he never managed to publish him due to an absurd misunderstanding he would rather not even remember now. But there was a time when he had an almost ferocious desire to have Vok in his catalog.

With each day that passes, the thought of New York makes him feel more enthusiastic. Under its spell he feels capable of anything. But his daily life doesn’t correspond well to his dreams. In this he is not exactly different from most mortals. He struggles along with his local Barcelona story that, when possible, turns from a private performance, into a universal, New York one.

Without New York as a myth and final dream, his life would be much harder. Even Dublin seems like just a stopover on the way to New York. Now, after having summoned up his imagination, he walks away from the window in quite a good mood and goes to the kitchen to drink a second cappuccino, and shortly afterward, goes back to the computer, where the search engine offers him thirty thousand results in Spanish for
Dubliners
, James Joyce’s book of short stories. He read it a long time ago, and re-read it years later, and still remembers many details, but he’s forgotten, for example, the name of the bridge in Dublin cited in the great story “The Dead”; the bridge on which, if he’s not mistaken, one always sees a white horse.

He feels wrapped up in a stimulating atmosphere of preparations for his trip to Dublin. Joyce’s book is helping him to open up to other voices and environments. He realizes that, if he wants to verify the name of the bridge, he will have to choose between flicking through the book — that is, remaining, heroically, in the Gutenberg age — or else surfing the net and entering the digital world. For a few moments, he feels he’s right in the middle of the imaginary bridge linking the two epochs. And then he thinks in this case it’d be faster to look at the book, as he has it there, in his study. He leaves the computer again and rescues an old copy of
Dubliners
from the bookshelves. Celia bought it in August 1972 from Flynn bookshop, in Palma de Mallorca. Back then, he didn’t know her. Possibly Celia read about the white horse appearing in “The Dead” before he did.

As the cab drove across O’Connell Bridge Miss O’Callaghan said:

“They say you never cross O’Donnell Bridge without seeing a white horse.”

“I see a white man this time,” said Gabriel.

“Where?” asked Mr Bartell D’Arcy.

Gabriel pointed to the statue, on which lay patches of snow. Then he nodded familiarly to it and waved his hand.

This snippet reminds him of a phrase of Cortázar’s overheard mysteriously one day on the Paris Metro: “A bridge is a man crossing a bridge.” And shortly afterward, he wonders if when he goes to Dublin he wouldn’t like to go to see this bridge, where in an imaginary space he’s just located the link between the Gutenberg and the digital ages.

He observes that one of the two names of the bridge transcribed in the Spanish translation has to be wrong. It’s either O’Connell, or O’Donnell. Anyone who knows Dublin would surely resolve this in a fraction of a second. Yet more proof that he is still very green when it comes to Dublin, which isn’t an issue, but a stimulus, and — retired and dull teetotaller that he is — he needs incitements of all kinds. So now he decides that nothing would please him more than going into new subjects in depth; studying places he has yet to visit, and returning from these trips, continuing to study, studying then what has been left behind. He must make choices like this if he is to flee from being a computer nerd, and from the deep social hangover his years as a publisher have left him with.

In terms of finding the name of the bridge, the digital world is more use to him than the print one. He has no choice but to turn to Google, which isn’t serious, since it offers him the perfect excuse to hurl himself at the computer again. There he very quickly finds his answer. He searches first for O’Connell and the search result resolves everything straight away: “The walks and places of interest in the north of Dublin are mainly all clustered around the main street, O’Connell Street. It is the widest and busiest road in the city center, although not exactly the longest. It starts at O’Connell Bridge, mentioned in
Dubliners
by James Joyce.” He realizes he has another more modern edition of
Dubliners
in the study, which he could now take the trouble to consult and see if it has the same mistake of the bridge’s name. He gets up, leaves the computer for a few minutes — this morning he seems condemned to go from Gutenberg to Google, from Google to Gutenberg, moving back and forth between the two, between the world of books and that of the web — and he pounces on this more recent edition. Here the translation is not by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, but María Isabel Butler de Foley, and there is no confusion about the name of the bridge:

As the cab drove across O’Connell Bridge Miss O’Callaghan said:

“They say you never cross O’Connell Bridge without seeing a white horse.”

. . .

Gabriel pointed at the statue of Daniel O’Connell, on which patches of snow had settled. Then he greeted it familiarly waving his hand.

Compare two translations and this sort of thing happens. Mr. Daniel O’Connell, the Dublin statue, has just made a dazzling appearance in Riba’s life. Where has he been up till now? Who is he? Who was he? Any excuse to go back to the computer screen, the only place where, without leaving the house, he has a chance of finding the text of “The Dead” in English, and so discover if Daniel O’Connell was there.

He goes back to his
hikikomori
position. He searches, and solves the mystery in no time. Daniel O’Connell does not appear in the original: “Gabriel pointed to the statue, on which lay patches of snow. Then he nodded familiarly to it and waved his hand.”

He recalls that someone once suggested that the truly mysterious path always leads within. Was it Celia who said this in a profound Buddhist outburst? He doesn’t know. He’s here now, in their little apartment, awaiting possible events. He has an aptitude for waiting, and has started waiting for this trip to Dublin to somehow take shape. He considers waiting the essential human condition and sometimes will act accordingly. He knows that from today onward, until the sixteenth of June, he will do nothing but be in a state of waiting to go to Dublin. He will wait conscientiously. He has no doubts about managing to prepare himself for the journey.

Now he’s really focused, as if he were a samurai about to go on a long journey. He’s in his
hikikomori
pose, but ignoring the screen and heading deeper down an inner path, strolling about through a few memories. The memory of the times he’s read
Ulysses
in the past. Dublin is at the end of the path and it’s pleasant to recall the old music of this splendid book he read with a mixture of amazement and fascination. He’s not quite sure, but he’d say that Bloom, at heart, is very similar to him. He’s the personification of the classic outsider. He has some Jewish roots, as does Riba. He’s a stranger and a foreigner at the same time. Bloom is too self-critical and not imaginative enough to be successful, but too much of a hard worker and teetotaller to fail completely. Bloom is far too foreign and cosmopolitan to be accepted by the provincial Irish, and too Irish not to worry about his country. Riba likes Bloom a lot.

•

“Downtown Train,” by Tom Waits, is playing. He can’t understand English, but it seems to him that the lyrics are about a train heading for the city center, a train carrying its passengers away from the remote neighborhood they grew up in and where they’ve been trapped for their whole lives. The train is going to the center. Of the city. It might be going to the center of the world. To New York. It’s the train to the center. He can’t even conceive that this song is not about a center.

Believing this is the subject of that Tom Waits song, he has never grown tired of listening to it. Waits’s voice has for him the poetry of a local train linking his childhood neighborhood to New York. Every time he listens to the song, he thinks of past trips, of everything he had to leave behind in order to devote himself to publishing. Now, the older he feels, he remembers his old zeal, his initial literary preoccupations, how for years he devoted himself endlessly to the dangerous business of publishing, so often ruinous. He relinquished youth for the honest labor of an imperfect catalog. And what’s happening now that everything has come to an end? He is left feeling very puzzled and with an empty wallet. Wondering why. A wild remorse at night. But no one can take away the fact that he toiled, and it took him far. And that is no small thing. In the end, as W. B. Yeats said, in luck or out, the toil has left its mark.

I’m all washed up, he thinks. But it would be worse if someone decided to light the lamps of my existence. It would be no good at all if something happened and everything livened up and the house turned into an exalted sideshow and I turned into the center of a vibrant novel. Nevertheless I can see it coming, something will happen soon, I’m sure of it. Suddenly, someone will burst into my monotonous life as an old man who walks barefoot around the house, without turning on any lights, and stands still sometimes, leaning against some piece of furniture in the dark while listening to the mice scurrying about. Something’s going to happen, I’m sure, my life will be turned upside down and my world will turn into a sparkling novel. If that happened, it would be awful. I don’t think I’d like to be separated from the unsurpassable charm of my current life. I would be happy only to go and live in New York, but leading a simple existence there too, always in contact with the sedate ordinariness of everyday life.