Dublinesque

June

If one day he were to find this much-searched-for author, this phantom, this genius, it would be difficult for such a person to improve on what’s already been said by so many others, about the rifts between the expectations of youth and the reality of one’s later years, what’s been said about the illusory nature of our choices, about how our search for success culminates in disappointment, about the present as fragile and the future as representing a need for control over old age and death. And what’s more, it will always be an annoyance, a malaise of the soul for every perceptive publisher, to have to go out in search of those phantoms, those damned authors. He’s thinking of all this now lying on a beach in front of blue water, surrounded by towels, red bathing caps, gentle waves lapping the warm yellow sand, near the center of the world. A strange beach in a corner of New York’s harbor.

When he wakes up, still embarrassed as much as for having believed he really was on this beach, as for having unconsciously revived the sickness hidden inside every publisher, he dresses at top speed — he doesn’t want to waste time — and goes to his regular branch of the Bilbao Vizcaya bank, knowing there’ll be hardly any customers at this hour and he’ll be able to resolve a tiresome matter as quickly as possible. He’s seen by the smiling bank manager, whom he abruptly informs that he wishes to transfer half the money he has in an investment fund to another account in the same bank, one called External Cash Fund. First he confirms with the bank manager that the bonded capital in this new account is fully guaranteed. Then he carries out the transaction. Then he instructs her to transfer some of the money in his current account to another bank, the Santander. The manager knows she can’t ask him to explain this treacherous gesture, but it’s very likely she’s wondering what they’ve done wrong to make him undertake it. Finally, he signs some more forms and asks for the checkbook they forgot to give him on his last visit. He takes his leave very politely and cynically. Out on the street, he hails a taxi and goes to the other end of the city, to the neighborhood of Sants, to a branch of the Santander bank where Celia’s younger brother, who has worked there for a while, has offered him a pension plan with an excellent seven percent return. Having a pension plan already depresses him, as he’d never imagined growing old, but he prefers to be practical about it.

In the branch of Santander, with the money he’s transferred from Bilbao Vizcaya, he takes out the plan and also signs a good number of forms. The bank manager appears, Celia’s brother’s immediate boss, and shows polite interest in Riba’s longstanding, famous, and now finished publishing work. Riba distrusts so much politeness and suspects it is actually because the manager is on the verge of asking him straight out if the whole book trade is going really badly now. He looks at him almost rudely, and then abruptly starts to talk about New York and about how much he’d like to live there. His excessive praise of this city ends up irritating even the phlegmatic manager, who interrupts him:

“Listen, just one question, and forgive me, sir, but I’m dying to know. . Couldn’t you be happy living in Toro, in the province of Zamora? What is Toro or Benavente lacking to make you not want to go and live there? And sorry for asking — it’s probably because I’m from Toro.”

Riba thinks for just a few seconds, and finally embarks upon the rocky Zamoran path of his answer. He replies in a deliberately gentle, poetic, anti-banking, vindictive tone of voice considering the financial space in which he finds himself.

“It’s a difficult question, but I’ll answer it. I’ve always thought that, when it gets dark, we all need somebody.”

A formidable silence.

“I get the impression,” Riba goes on, “that in New York, for instance, if it gets dark and you’re all alone, the loneliness would always be less dramatic than in Toro or Benavente. Now do you see what I mean?”

The bank manager looks at him, his face almost expressionless, as if he hasn’t understood a thing. He slides some more forms across for Riba to sign. Riba signs and signs. And then, in the same soft voice as a moment ago, Riba requests that tomorrow they withdraw the amount still in the Bilbao Vizcaya fund, and transfer it to one in Santander itself.

An hour later, and he’s carried out all the transfers. It’s better this way, he thinks. Better to have the money spread about than all in one place. He gets into another taxi and goes home. He finds he’s rather exhausted, because it’s been two years since he’s carried out financial transactions or set foot in a bank. It seems to him he’s made a superhuman effort this morning. He starts noticing how incredibly thirsty he is. He’s tired and incredibly thirsty. He has a thirst for evil, for alcohol — well, for water, for calm, for being home again — but above all a thirst for doing wrong, for alcohol. He’d like to have a drink and launch back into his evil ways. After two years of abstinence, he’s confirming an old suspicion: the world is very dull, or — and this is the same — what happens to him is devoid of interest if not told by a good writer. But it was a real drag having to go out and hunt for all those writers, and on top of that never finding one who was truly great.

What logic is there in things? None really. We’re the ones who look for links between one segment of our lives and another. But this attempt to give form to that which has none, to give form to chaos, is something only good writers know how to do successfully. Luckily, Riba’s still friends with a few, although it’s also true he’s had to organize this trip to Dublin in order not to lose them. In terms of friends and creativity, he’s been in a critical situation ever since he closed his business. Deep down he misses the continuous contact with writers, such strange, ludicrous beings, so self-centered and complicated, and such idiots, most of them. Ah, writers. Yes, it’s true he misses them, although they were such a pain. All so obsessive. But it can’t be denied they’ve always amused and entertained him a lot, above all when — here he smiles maliciously — he paid them lower advances than he could have afforded and contributed to their being ever poorer. Ungrateful wretches.

Now he needs them even more than he used to. He’d like one or two of them to think to call and invite him to a book launch, or a conference on the future of the book, or simply show a bit of interest in him. Last year several of them still took the trouble to call (Eduardo Lago, Rodrigo Fresán, Eduardo Mendoza), but this year no one has. He’ll be really careful never to beg one of them, it would be the last thing he’d ever do in his life. Beg to be allowed to take part in some launch, or yet another swansong for the book! But he thinks there are a lot of people who owe part of their success to him and might remember him for some event of this sort or for anything. Although it’s a well-known fact: writers are resentful, jealous to the point of sickness, always penniless, and finally a load of ungrateful wretches, whether they’re poor or completely poverty-stricken.

As he doesn’t drink anymore, there’s no danger of him turning into a blabbermouth and going around letting one of his secrets slip. The best-kept one of all is about how much he enjoyed feeling like a real bastard every time he bragged about the number of reduced advances he paid to novelists, who are by far the most unbearable — more than poets or essayists — when they become truly insufferable. Of course, if he reduced their advances it was because he thought that, as he wasn’t very gifted in financial matters, if he didn’t haggle and earn himself a reputation for being stingy, he would have been ruined even sooner. If he hadn’t put a stop to his alcohol consumption and his business, he undoubtedly would have been well on his way to ending up like Brendan Behan: totally impoverished and an eternal drunk. He thinks about this Irish writer and the New York bars he used to visit. And he thinks again that today, after so much banking activity, if it wasn’t for the fact he himself has prohibited it, he’d knock back a glass of the strongest liquor right now.

“Strong liquors / like molten metal,” said Rimbaud, probably his favorite writer.

It’s a suicidal impulse, but what can he do? His thirst is great and the shadow of temptation long. And long too this life that’s so brief.

Riba imagines that Nietzky actually has something of the fleeting spirit that accompanied him in his childhood of continuous sessions of soccer on the Aribau patio. Those early years, the shadow of the spirit was always with him, but he soon lost sight of it, and has only seen it again in that dream he had the day he arrived in New York for the first time. He imagines Nietzky is a kind of guardian angel, this angelo custode. And he also imagines that now he’s speaking to this sort of relative of that lost spirit and that he’s doing so in a joyous realm of white cricket trousers, tartan socks, binoculars slung over one’s shoulder, and English languages.

You should lead a more healthy life, says Nietzky, you should go for walks in the fresh air. I’d like to see you walking around your neighborhood, or else out in the countryside. Tire yourself out in the natural world. Or else try to have other goals, instead of devoting yourself to your computer, or spending all your time thinking now you’re old and washed-up, that you’ve become very boring. But do something. Action, action. I have nothing else to say.

It seems to him that thinking about Brendan Behan is a more than suitable way of preparing for his trip to Dublin. For a time — long ago now — this Irish writer was an enigma to him, a mystery from the moment Augusto Monterroso said in Journey to the Center of the Fable that “travel writing such as Brendan Behan’s New York is the greatest happiness.”

For a long time he asked himself who the hell this Behan could be, but without going so far as actually looking him up. And now he remembers that whenever he saw Monterroso, he forgot to ask him. And he remembers too that, one day, when he least expected it, he found the name of Brendan Behan in an article about famous guests of the Chelsea Hotel in New York. All it said was that he had been a brilliant Irish writer who used to describe himself as “a drinker with writing problems.”

This last was etched into his mind; at the same time, an intensity yet scarcity of information made the enigma of this drinking saint still greater, until one day, many years later, he discovered Behan camouflaged behind the character of the garrulous Barney Boyle at a bar in Christine Falls, a novel written by John Banville under his pseudonym Benjamin Black. Still surprised by this discovery, he devoted himself to spying on the environment of this Boyle, Behan’s counterpart: an atmosphere of fog, coal fires, whiskey vapors, and stale cigarette smoke. And he began to think that each day he found himself ever closer to the authentic Behan. He wasn’t wrong. A few weeks ago, he went into a bookshop, and as if it had been there waiting for him his whole life, he suddenly came across the Spanish edition of Brendan Behan’s New York. The first thing he regretted was not having published it himself. And he regretted it more when he discovered that Behan’s book was a wonderful monologue about the city of New York, which he considered “the greatest city on the face of God’s earth.” To Behan, nothing compared to the electric city of New York, the center of the universe. The rest was silence, glaring darkness. After having been in New York, everything else was awful. And so London, for instance, must seem to a Londoner returning from New York like “a wide flat pie of redbrick suburbs with the West End stuck in the middle like a currant.”

Brendan Behan’s New York, the book he wrote at the end of his life, turned out to be a tour of the infinite genius of a city’s human landscape, a city with a lucky star. What’s more, Behan’s New York confirmed that this city and happiness were the same thing. Behan wrote his book in the Chelsea Hotel, when he was already a total alcoholic, at the start of the sixties. They were days of great parties, where people were always dancing the recently invented twist and the Madison, but also days of incipient revolutions. Some years earlier, the Welshman Dylan Thomas had turned up at the Chelsea Hotel on the night of November 3, 1953, announcing he’d drunk eighteen straight whiskeys and thought this was probably a record (he died six days later).

Ten years later, as if he were the very same “drunken boat” from Rimbaud’s poem, “hurled by the hurricane into the birdless ether,” the Irishman Behan turned up at that hotel too in as inebriated a state as the Welshman had been; he was assisted by Stanley Bard, the owner of the Chelsea, who put him and his wife up, even though he knew that the writer, who was always drunk, had been thrown out of every other hotel. The great Stanley Bard knew that if there was one place where Behan might start writing again it was the Chelsea. And so it was. The hotel on 23rd Street, which had always been considered a place conducive to creativity, turned out to be crucial to Behan, whose book was composed on the same floor where Dylan Thomas had lived.

The book speaks of the euphoria induced in Behan by this energetic city in which, as evening fell — probably the eve of his own life — it always became clear to him that in the end the only important thing to do is “to get something to eat and something to drink and someone to love you.” In terms of the book’s style, it could be summarized as follows: to write and to forget. The two verbs sound like an echo of the well-known relationship between drinking and forgetting. Behan himself used to say that he had decided this: “I will have forgotten this book long before you have paid your money for it.”

Although he was Irish, Behan was never an administrator, perhaps the exception to Vilém Vok’s rule that New York belongs to the Jews, is administered by the Irish, and enjoyed by the Negroes. Because the last thing Brendan Behan wanted was to have to administer anything in his beloved city. Maybe this is why the style in Brendan Behan’s New York is made up of opinions that are shots with no intention of reaching beyond that shot itself, of deliberately furtive volleys, judgments about, all the humans he had within his reach: blacks, the Scottish, waiters, homosexuals, Jews, taxi drivers, beggars, beatniks, bankers, Latinos, Chinese, and of course, the Irish, who went around the entire city in family clans keeping an eye on each other and creating their own culture; it’s as if this were just a ballad about their rainy native land.

Throughout New York, at no point does Behan forget the inspiration of his literary masters. “Shakespeare said pretty well everything, and what he left out, James Joyce put in.” For example, Behan’s way of approaching each of New York’s bars recalls Joyce’s Ulysses when the day is drawing to a close and the people and scenery around Stephen start to disappear from his sight, perhaps because the drinks he’s consumed over lunch and the intellectual excitement of the conversation in the library — actually trivial and stultifying — are gradually making them sometimes clearer or sometimes more blurred. In the same way, the bars of early sixties New York gradually appear in Behan’s book, with transparent or hazy alternative names according to the level of his private enthusiasm. And the names, like some fascinating and disquieting litany, fall one after the other, inexorable, Irish, legendary: McSorley’s Old Ale House, Ma O’Brien’s, Oasis, Costello’s, Kearney’s, Four Seasons, and the Metropole on Broadway, where the twist was born.

An essential and secular litany. Riba thinks that remembering Behan’s book has been a good way to continue preparing for his trip to Dublin, to move further away each day from the interior space that’s holding him hostage, and so slowly approach wider horizons. He devoured Behan’s book on the train from Lyon back to Barcelona, imagining many times that he was reading it at a table by the iron door of the amazing Oakland Bar, the one on the corner of Hicks and Atlantic from When You Wound Brooklyn, the beautiful novel by his young friend Nietzky.

And he remembers too that in the last few minutes of reading this book of Behan’s, as evening fell, still imagining himself to be in the Oakland, he even thought he shared with the author this dark, unrepeatable moment, this moment, somewhere between Joycean and elegiac, when Behan’s daydreams gradually absorb the world around him. Daylight fades and the impressions of the day are gathered together in a harmony of urban sounds and a touching blend of feelings and dying light that reaches the very doors of the Chelsea Hotel, where they never turn out the lights.

Without New York he would be nothing. Like eau de vie, he needs the happiness he feels whenever he remembers that this city is out there, waiting for him. Right now, thinking about the Chelsea Hotel and Behan has made him slowly sink into a state of happy New York melancholy, a sort of strange nostalgia for something unlived. Thinking about the Chelsea Hotel and Behan is a way of feeling closer to the magic and warmth of New York and to certain moments from an unlived past and to everything that, for reasons that usually escape him, brings a happiness as mysterious as it is necessary to his continued existence.

When it gets dark we all need someone. That’s just as true as that when dawn breaks, we always need to remember that we still have some goal in life. New York fulfills all the requirements for being a real driving force for staying in the world. The most agreeable and also the strangest memory of this city he’s visited twice — and where he thinks he should go and live soon — that night in the Brooklyn house of Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster. He turned up there in the company of young Nietzky. He’ll always remember this night out, among many other things because he hasn’t had an evening out since; he’s banned himself from going out at night, to not feel too tempted by alcohol and to preserve his health. For the Austers he made an exception that he’s not repeated. Now he remembers perfectly how on that day when he made that great exception, at around six o’clock in the evening, he and Nietzky left the bar of the Morgan Museum, on Madison Avenue, and walked slowly all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge, which they crossed on foot over the course of an unforgettable half hour. While crossing it, he was able to confirm what some friends in Barcelona had told him, that feeling the city from the bridge during the time it takes to cross it on foot is an intense experience.

“Going from Manhattan to Brooklyn over the bridge,” said Nietzky, “is like entering another world. I really like this bridge. And I also like the great poem Hart Crane wrote about it before he committed suicide. Every time I cross over this bridge I feel happy. It’s a route that does me good.”

Marching over the bridge, it was impossible not to remember that, when he was young and dreamed of one day traveling to New York, he had wished a thousand times he could walk over this bridge, which he associated with Saul Bellow. When he was a new arrival to the city, Bellow felt like master of the world there. This story was told many years later by one of his friends, who actually witnessed this moment of great imaginary might and narrated it years later thus: “He looked over the city from the bridge with astonishing generosity and seemed to be measuring the hidden strength of all things in the universe, measuring the world’s power to resist him: he expected the world to come to him. He had pledged himself a great destiny.”

“You know, I feel really good walking across this bridge too,” he said to Nietzky.

And then, without mentioning Bellow, he said that for him, walking to Brooklyn meant seeking out again old hidden strengths, and evoking certain days of his youth when he still expected the world to come to meet him.

“Did you think the world would come to you?” asked young Nietzky. And he burst out laughing. Nietzky had lived in the city for years and nothing like this had ever occurred to him.

Later, walking down tranquil streets, they headed further into the historic neighborhood of Park Slope. And Brooklyn slowly revealed itself as a place with a very special atmosphere. As they walked, Nietzky explained to him that this mysterious neighborhood gets under one’s skin and stays there forever. Brooklyn, Nietzky said, is a bit like an inventory of the universe and one of its particular characteristics is that, whereas in many parts of the city ethnic differences are a potential source of conflict, here people live side by side in harmony and with a more human, older rhythm than in, say, Manhattan. It’s a great place, Nietzky concludes.

They walked farther and farther into Park Slope, where the red-brick house was, the three-story brownstone belonging to the Austers, very good friends of Nietzky’s.

In that house in Brooklyn — and this he couldn’t even have suspected — the happiness he’d looked for in vain on his first trip to that city awaited him. It came to him suddenly, at midnight, when he realized he was in the Austers’ house in that wonderful city. What more could he ask for? The Austers were the very incarnation of New York. And he was in their house, he was at the very center of the world.

It was a moment of happiness he remembers as very intense, similar to that of his recurring dream. Everything seemed so agreeable; he felt in the best mood at that moment. But something he never expected happened. Because of his jet lag, and despite his fantastically happy state, he couldn’t help yawning a few times, which he tried to hide with his hands, and this made it even worse. Body and soul were completely divided, each with their own language. And it was clear that the body, with its own codes, found itself radically disconnected from that moment of his spirit’s happiness. “When the spirit soars, the body kneels down,” said Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.

He’ll never forget the moment that night when he thought about telling Paul Auster that, according to something he’d read in a magazine a while ago, when we yawn it doesn’t mean we’re bored or sleepy, but rather the opposite, that we want to clear our heads and so manage to be even more awake than the wide-awake and happy people we are. He remembers this moment very clearly and also when he realized afterward it would be better not to say anything and not complicate things even further, and then, without being able to help it, he yawned again and had to cover his wretched mouth with his hands.

“Will you leave something as a deposit?” Auster asked him.

He didn’t understand the question at the time, or over the following days. Since they were speaking in French, he started to think he hadn’t understood because of the language. But Nietzky has confirmed on several occasions now that that’s what happened, that Auster did, in fact, ask him if he was going to leave something as a deposit.

Maybe Auster was asking if he was going to leave the memory of his yawns as a deposit, a supposed advance on the rent. The rent for that brownstone? Did Auster know that his guest that night wanted, more than anything in the world, to live in that house? Maybe Nietzky had told him?

Over the last few months, he’s turned over this strange question of Auster’s many times in his head, but it remains an unsolved mystery. Sometimes, he’s at a bus stop, or sitting at home in front of the TV, and he thinks about this and still hears the question, as if charged with an inexplicable energy.

“Will you leave something as a deposit?”

On YouTube he comes across a very young Bob Dylan singing “That’s Alright Mama” with Johnny Cash, and observes, with a mixture of surprise and curiosity, that the acclaimed Cash sings here with a resigned expression, as if he’d had no choice that day but to accept the sudden company of the unknown young genius, who’d jumped up onto the stage without anyone’s permission.

Riba observes that the presence of the young Dylan at his side doesn’t irritate Cash, but even so he seems to be wondering why he has to sing with this young genius who’s latched onto him. Perhaps young Dylan is trying to become Cash’s guardian angel? Maybe Dylan is an impromptu guardian of Cash’s creations?

He ends up thinking something similar occurred with him and Nietzky, who for months he confused with the genius he was always searching for among young writers. Later, when he realized Nietzky had great talent but wasn’t the special writer he would so like to have found, he resigned himself to seeing him just as he was, which was a pretty good writer anyway. He wasn’t the giant of literature he’d been looking for as a publisher, but he found traces of a lively, exciting creativity in him, which was more than enough.

Riba published When You Wound Brooklyn, Nietzky’s only novel, and has always thought it very good. A story about Irish characters in modern-day New York. A splendid piece in which his young friend had managed to give a new and unexpected turn of the screw, offering a world of heteronyms, a world of characters unable to be unified, compact, or perfectly outlined subjects. An amusing, strange book, in which the New York Irish seem like Lisboans who have just awoken from one of Pessoa’s highly anxious siestas. There were never stranger Irish people in a novel.

Because of all this and many other things, because of his ever-increasing admiration for Nietzky, a young man of indisputable talent, he doesn’t give it another thought and fires off an email, one he hopes will be as direct as a bolt of lightning, filled with energy like the tormented psyche of this promising Spanish New York writer. An email to Nietzky’s apartment on West 84th Street and Riverside Drive. In it he asks him to be the fourth member of the Bloomsday expedition. He ends up saying: “After all, you went there last year — and other times, I think — I know you flew from New York to go to the Bloomsday celebrations, and so it wouldn’t be at all strange for you to want to repeat the experience. Come on!”

This “come on!” has a special power, because suddenly, as if he too were given the fleeting ownership of a certain neurotic energy, he feels as if he’s penetrating the essence of the wind that’s blowing outside with the rainwater spreading throughout Barcelona: he believes for a few moments — a sensation without a doubt totally unknown to him — that he’s inside the wind’s thoughts, until he understands that the wind’s mind could never be his or anyone else’s, and then he contents himself — a sad fate — with a deeply ridiculous thought: the world always feels more spacious in the spring.

For years now he’s led his life through his catalog. And in fact he now finds it very hard to know who he really is. And above all, what’s even harder: to know who he really might have been. Who was the man who was there before he began publishing? Where is this person who gradually became hidden behind the brilliant catalog and the systematic identification with the most interesting voices contained within it? Now some words of Maurice Blanchot spring to mind, words he’s known well for a long time: “Would writing be to become, in the book, legible for everyone, and indecipherable for oneself?”

In his work as a publisher, he recalls the day he read these words of Blanchot’s as a turning point, and from that moment on, began to observe how, with each book published, his authors gradually became more and more dramatically indecipherable to themselves at the same time as they shadily became very visible and legible to the rest of the world, starting with him, their publisher, who saw in the drama of his authors one more consequence of the occupational hazards of his job, in this case, the hazards of publishing.

“Oh,” he said very cynically one day during a meeting with four of his best Spanish writers, “your problem has been getting published. You’ve been very foolish to do so. I don’t understand how you didn’t sense that publishing was going to make you all indecipherable to yourselves, and what’s more, would place you on the path of a writer’s fate, which in the best of cases always contains the strange seeds of a sinister adventure.”

Riba was hiding his own drama behind these cynical words. Leading a publisher’s life kept him from finding out who the person gradually hidden behind the brilliant catalog might have been.

Nietzky might be the perfect companion for the trip to Ireland, and could even be the brains of the expedition, as he always has original ideas, and despite his youth, is a real expert on the work of James Joyce. In Spain the Irish writer’s importance tends to be downplayed, and what’s more, it’s become grotesquely commonplace to brag about not having read Ulysses, and also to say it’s an incomprehensible and boring book. But Nietzky has been out of the country for ten years, and can’t exactly be considered a Spanish Joyce specialist anymore. Really, Nietzky can now only be seen as a young writer and citizen of New York, a man well versed in local Irish topics as filtered through the color of Lisbon tiles.

He thinks about Nietzky and ends up thinking of Celia. He wouldn’t like her to find him, once again, engrossed in front of the computer when she gets back from work at a quarter to three. He doesn’t switch it off, but stops looking at it and sits there trying to decide what to do, looking at the ceiling. Then he checks his watch and realizes that it doesn’t matter, as Celia will soon be home. He goes to look out the window and then to stare at a stain on the roof, in which he suddenly thinks he can see a map of his native country. He remembers, he remembers quite well the culture of his compatriots that became dangerously oppressive and familiar to him. He remembers his desperate leap to France, his by now so outdated French leap. Paris allowed him to flee from Franco’s eternal uncultured summer, and later on to meet writers such as Gracq, Philippe Sollers, and Julia Kristeva, or Romain Gary, one of the friendships he feels most proud of. It doesn’t escape his notice now that many of those who find Ulysses unbearable haven’t even bothered to get past the first page of a book they assume is leaden, complicated, foreign, lacking the “authentic and proverbial Spanish wit.” But he assumes that this first page of Joyce’s book, just the first page, is enough on its own to dazzle. It’s an apparently trivial page, which nevertheless presents a complete and extraordinary world. He knows it by heart in the now legendary version by that first translator of the book into Spanish, that translator as brilliant as he was strange, the great adventurer J. Salas Subirat, an Argentine autodidact who worked as an insurance broker and wrote a strange manual, Life Insurance, which Riba published as a curiosity, at the start of the ’90s.

He leaves the window and goes to the kitchen and as he walks down the hall he thinks about the opening of Ulysses, so apparently flat, although really this beginning gives off a harmony rarely forgotten. It takes place up on the gun platform of the Martello tower, built in Sandycove in 1804 by the British army to defend against a possible Napoleonic invasion:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

— Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

— Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful Jesuit.

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest.

He’s sure that, when the moment comes, he’ll enjoy being up on the circular gun platform, where this legendary scene from Ulysses takes place. Moreover, very near to there, in Finnegan’s pub in the village of Dalkey, is where his young friend proposes that the first meeting take place of the Order of Knights — to be named the Order of Finnegans after this very pub, and not after Joyce’s book of the same name — which his friend wants to found on June 16 itself.

The news that this will take place has just arrived in an instantaneous electronic reply from Nietzky. Simply because it comes from Nietzky, the creation of this kind of Finnegansean club strikes him as a good idea. Couldn’t he, in his melancholy, stand to be in a few clubs and some meetings? In any case, anything Nietzky comes up with or writes usually seems pertinent. What’s more, the email has arrived at just the right time, and has made him very happy because it’s arrived in the middle of a series of messages from other people in which — with no change in the trend that’s established itself in the messages he’s received lately — no one invites him to anything, not one conference or publishers’ meeting, nothing at all; they just pester him with trivial matters or ask him for favors. In a way, they’re forgetting about him without forgetting him.

He’s been prudent with Ricardo and Javier, but with Nietzky he’s going to act in a very different way. He will dare to tell Nietzky that in Dublin he wants to hold a requiem for the Gutenberg galaxy, for this galaxy, now a pale fire, of which Joyce’s novel was one of the great stellar moments. And it’s not just that he plans to tell Nietzky this; he’s telling him right now in the email he’s writing.

Without any sort of preamble or overly complicated explanation, he tells Nietzky he wants to take the English leap — he hopes he gets what he means, and that in the long run, with his particular talent, he might even broaden the expression’s meaning — and he explains, moreover, that he’s thought of holding a requiem for the end of the Gutenberg era, offering a requiem about which all he knows, for now, is that it should have something to do with the sixth chapter of Ulysses. A funeral in Dublin, he says, and stresses this. A funeral not just for the extinct world of literary publishing, but also for the world of genuine writers and talented readers, for everything that’s needed nowadays.

He’s sure that sooner or later Nietzky will come up with some ideas for the funeral rites, will suggest, for example, where to hold them. St. Patrick’s, the cathedral, is a seemingly appropriate place for the ceremony, but there may be others. He’s also sure Nietzky will end up telling him which words to use to give a dignified send-off to the Gutenberg era. In any case, it would be good and opportune to link the funeral with Ulysses’ chapter six. It’s the only thing that seems self-evident to Riba, especially when he sees — although he keeps this to himself — how Javier, Ricardo, and young Nietzky have already started to seem like living replicas of the three characters — Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, and John Power — who accompany Bloom in the funeral procession crossing the city to Glasnevin Cemetery on the morning of June 16, 1904.

It doesn’t escape Riba that it’s characteristic of the imagination always to consider itself to be at the end of an era. For as long as he can remember he’s heard it said that we are in a period of maximum crisis, a catastrophic transition toward a new culture. But the apocalyptic has always been there, in every era. We find it, for instance, in the Bible, in the Aeneid. It exists in every civilization. Riba understands that in our time the apocalyptic can only be dealt with parodically. If they manage to hold this funeral in Dublin, it can’t be anything other than a great parody of the weeping of a few sensitive souls for the end of an era. The apocalyptic demands a lack of excessive seriousness. After all, ever since he was a boy he’s been sick and tired of hearing that our historical and cultural situation is uncharacteristically terrible and in a certain way privileged, a cardinal point in time. But is this really true? It seems doubtful that our “terrible” situation is so different from that of our ancestors, as many of them felt the same as we do, and as Vok puts it, if our criteria seem satisfactory to us it would have been the same for them. Any crisis, after all, is just a projection of our existential anxiety. Perhaps our only privilege is to be alive and know we’re all going to die together or separately. In the end, thinks Riba, the apocalyptic has a splendid fictional veneer, but it shouldn’t be taken too seriously, because actually, if I look at it properly, what it offers me is the joyful, emphatic, and happy paradox of a funeral in Dublin, that is, it offers me what I’ve been most in need of recently: something to do in the future.

Nietzky doesn’t always reply to emails straight away. He soon sees that Nietzky’s speedy reply to his previous email was an exception to the rule. The minutes go by and he starts to see that Nietzky isn’t prepared to reply so swiftly now.

Two whole days of certain amounts of anxiety.

During those days, moments of intense impatience and bewilderment. Like a good hikikomori, Riba believes the emails he sends will always be answered immediately. And it rarely happens. With Nietzky he’s been left feeling more disconcerted than he should be, knowing as he does that his young New York friend has never been a man of instantaneous email replies.

He spends two days waiting for the reply. And finally even Celia seems to be waiting for Nietzky to deign to reply, perhaps because she wishes with all her heart that her hikikomori husband would take some sort of exercise for once — even if it’s only getting onto a plane — and get as much air as possible in Dublin.

From time to time, over these two days of waiting, Celia expresses an interest in knowing if his friend from New York, young Nietzsche — she calls him this by mistake, without malice — has shown any signs of life.

“No, not one, it’s as if the earth has swallowed him up. But he’s already promised to come to Dublin, and that’s enough,” Riba replies, hiding from Celia his fear that Nietzky might not like, for instance, the idea of having to come up with ideas about how and where to hold the requiem.

When finally, after two long anxious days, Nietzky’s reply arrives, night has fallen in Barcelona, and Celia is asleep. So Riba can’t tell her the good news straight away. Nietzky writes from a hotel in Providence, not too far from New York, and tells him that, just as he said in his previous email, he’s really enthusiastic about repeating the trip to Dublin he took last year. Regarding the English leap, he says he thinks he knows what it refers to. And he remarks, with neurotic energy, that out of the Protestant and the Catholic religions, he prefers the latter: “Both are false. The first is cold and colorless. The second is forever associated with art; it’s a beautiful lie, that at least is something.” Then comes a disconcerting sentence: “You were Jewish, weren’t you?” And immediately afterward, for no real reason whatsoever, he starts talking about New York, and begins a long and unexpected string of personal complaints. He writes of the appalling changes the city is constantly subjected to and says his “own requiem for the days when, wherever you lived, you could always find a few blocks from home a grocery store, a barbershop, a newsstand, a dry cleaner’s, a florist, a liquor store, a shoe store. .”

Then there is a P.S. in which he mentions a meeting he’s set up with a society of Finnegans Wake fans, the strange and, according to Nietzky, not at all unsuccessful last book by James Joyce: “On Wednesday I’m going to a gathering the members of the Finnegans Society of Providence have held on the fourth Wednesday of every month for sixty-one years. They have a website. I rang them up and the guy who answered seemed very surprised by my Hispanic accent. He asked me if I had any experience with the text. I said I did. He said it wasn’t necessary. He gave me the address of the place they meet, which isn’t on their website: number twenty-seven and a half (that’s what he said), Edison Street. When I told him my Polish surname, he started doubting I was Spanish again.”

And not a word about the funeral?

Unsettled by this piece of information about the sixty-one years of the Finnegans Society, it takes Riba a while to realize there’s a P.S. to Nietzky’s P.S., which he doesn’t notice until he stops thinking about the curious coincidences between his parents’ marriage and that of the Providence Finnegansean society: they have the same number of years, sixty-one.

In the P.S. to the P.S., he reads: “There’ll be time for everything in Dublin, even I think to find a good place for our heartfelt eulogy for the glorious, annihilated age of Gutenberg.”

Perfect, thinks Riba. I hope that when Nietzky says the “heartfelt eulogy,” he’s doing so mockingly, as if sensing the most ideal way to handle the funeral is to do it parodically. I await his concrete ideas for the requiem, the ones I need. I couldn’t have a better collaborator for Dublin. And now that he’s confirmed his complicity he’s brightened up my day.

But it’s a strange way that Riba feels this happiness. He celebrates by starting to worry that his “there’ll be time for everything” might refer to going to lots of pubs in Dublin. If this suspicion is true, he’s in real danger. He could end up succumbing to the temptation of alcohol and drinking in a pub called the Coxwold, and then crying dejectedly, hopelessly drunk and full of remorse, sitting on the pavement down an alleyway, maybe consoled by Celia, or by her phantom, since Celia won’t be going to Dublin, but her phantom might very well do so. .

Enough, he thinks. These are ridiculous fears. And he stops being paranoid. Although his strange way of celebrating Nietzky’s reply doesn’t stop. Because now he starts to celebrate Nietzky’s complicit wink by imagining that it takes the color and weight away from life and strips away almost everything until it seems like a delicate shadow, lit by a distorted light, an imaginary anemic lunar shining. This shadow is Riba himself. And it remains logical that this is what he is. After all, doesn’t he now just seem like a poor old man, a simple assistant to Nietzky in this whole story?

On the trip to Dublin, Nietzky sees himself acting solely as his friend’s protector over there. Riba has secretly handed command of the trip over to him. It matters little that Nietzky’s actually an inexperienced young man. A few weeks ago, in spite of Nietzky’s age, Riba secretly named him “his second father.” And the thing is that he has a very similar relationship with Nietzky to that which he’s had his whole life with any “paternal figure”: when he’s with him, just as with his father, he’s nearly always surprisingly meek, and despite being almost sixty, open to all kinds of instructions and orders.

In fact, he feels a quiet and huge fundamental admiration for his father as well as for Nietzky, and an infinite sense of calm in knowing he’s at their service, knowing he’s controlled and guided by their ideas. He doesn’t know any other father as conscientious as his own. Nietzky, meanwhile, has no idea what it means to act as the head of a family; maybe this is why he seems ideal as a second father. They complement each other: the paternal shortcomings of one are compensated by the excesses of the other.

In any case, it’s clear that we’re dealing with quite an embarrassment of fathers. Maybe caused, as he comes to think more and more insistently, by the fact that he doesn’t know himself. He doesn’t know himself at all. Because of his brilliant catalog, he doesn’t know who he is, and instinct tells him it’s unlikely he ever will. And it’s likely that it’s due to this self-neglect that the need for protection from certain heights arises, for protection from those summits supposedly inhabited by a warm — and in this case two-headed — father, good-natured at times and at others a talented, constant creator of neurotic excitement in New York.

Maybe he has a vague yearning for a concealed architect of his days, and so is forever on the hunt for him, in the family home or the bright streets of New York. He always walks around as if he were about to run into an almighty omnipotent father, that abstract figure he sometimes imagines as a stranger — maybe just a young man with a ridiculous Nehru jacket — someone who’d be directing everything under a weary light.

At night, he remembers a phrase of Mark Strand’s he might add to the Word document where he notes down everything that catches his interest during the day, a document that’s growing almost on its own, as if the phrases, slowly crossing paths with each other, are falling like snowflakes, “as flakes of snow / on Alpine summit, when the wind is hush’d,” as Dante said in the Inferno.

Mark Strand’s phrase goes like this: “The search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living.” Does he really seek lightness? He realizes that everything this evening seems to be directed toward a loss of gravity and heading toward the very moment he has decided to get some air and take the nimble English leap once and for all; he understands that he has actually become someone waiting for this leap, which began as just a pleasant image, a rhetorical figure.

He walks down the hall; he’s going to consult a book by Italo Calvino, which also mentions lightness. And there he discovers the episode of the poet Cavalcanti’s leap. Cavalcanti. In this case, an Italian leap. He’s quite struck by the relative coincidence, and is literally rooted to the spot in the study. And when he finally manages to move, he takes the book and sits down in his favorite armchair. Celia is asleep, probably happy, if one goes by the last words she said to him: “You must always love me like you do today.”

He’d forgotten this leap the nimble Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti performs in an episode of the Decameron by Boccaccio, and in this casual discovery thinks he’s found one more reason, in his furious obsession and need to be more foreign every day, to take the English leap. To Calvino, nothing better illustrates his idea that there must be a necessary lightness that can be inserted into life and literature than the story in the Decameron by Boccaccio, in which the poet Cavalcanti appears, an austere philosopher who walks around in meditation among the marble tombs of a Florentine church.

Boccaccio tells us that the jeunesse dorée of the city — youths who ride around in a group and who have it in for Cavalcanti because he will never go out on a bender with them — they surround him and try to mock him. “Guido, thou wilt be none of our company,” they say, “but lo now, when thou hast proved that God does not exist, what wilt thou have achieved?” Cavalcanti, seeing he is surrounded by them, presently answers: “Gentlemen, you may say to me what you please in your own house.” And resting his hand on one of the great tombs and being very nimble, he vaults over it, and landing on the other side, he evades them, and goes on his way.

He’s surprised by this visual image of Cavalcanti freeing himself in one leap “si come colui che leggerissimo era.” He’s surprised by the image, and what’s more, the Boccaccio extract immediately makes him want to land on the other side. It occurs to him that, if he had to choose an auspicious image for the new rhythms his life is moving to, he would choose that one: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times — noisy, aggressive, revving, roaring — belongs to the realm of death — like a cemetery for rusty old cars.

And shortly afterward he remembers a few words from a book which, just as with Calvino’s collection of essays, was decisive during his first few years as a reader. This book was Short Letter, Long Farewell by Peter Handke. He read it in the seventies, and thinks he remembers finding in it his generation’s tone of voice, or at least the one he was looking for when he started publishing, because right from the start he believed it wasn’t exclusively writers who had the privilege of choosing a voice, but that the publisher also more than deserved the right to acquire a certain tone and to allow this tone, this style, always to come across in all the books on his list.

And now Riba remembers too that what surprised him most about Handke’s book was that, at the end of the novel, the two young protagonists — the narrator and his girlfriend Judith — speak with the filmmaker John Ford, a character who’s a real person. So characters such as Ford could appear in fiction, even if they weren’t exactly themselves and didn’t say exactly what they might have said in real life? It was the first time he realized doing something like that was possible. And he thought it very shocking, almost as much as the fact that in the novel Ford always speaks in the first person plural:

We Americans always say “we” even when we’re talking about our private affairs. We see everything we do as part of a common effort. . We don’t take our egos as seriously as you Europeans.

Whether solemnly or not, the narrator of Short Letter, Long Farewell always used his “I,” probably because he had studied in Europe. The kind of “I” Handke used was one Riba could immediately imagine influencing him. Since then, in his private life, he has always used a first person singular, although his has been an unnatural “I,” probably because he lost his childhood spirit, that first person inside him that disappeared so early on. And maybe it’s also due to this lamentable absence — because of which he now uses this artificial “I” — that he seems always to be perfectly ready to make the leap over to the other side, that is, fully prepared to become a multiple “I,” in the style of John Ford in the novel, who speaks in the first person plural.

And the fact is, when Riba thinks, he is simply commenting on the world, something he always does away from home mentally and in search of his center. And on these occasions it’s not strange that he suddenly feels he’s John Ford, and also Spider, Vilém Vok, Borges, and John Vincent Moon, and in short, all the men that all the men in this world have been. Essentially, his plural “I” — adopted because of the circumstances, that is, because he has never been able to find the original spirit again — is not that far from Buddhism. Essentially, his plural “I” was always ideal for the job he did. Isn’t a literary publisher a ventriloquist who cultivates the most varied different voices through his catalog?

“Do you dream a lot?” Judith asked.

“We hardly dream at all any more,” said John Ford. “And when we do have a dream, we forget it. We talk about everything, so there’s nothing left to dream about.”

When he was a publisher he never spoke in interviews about the plurality of his first person singular. It would have been good if, for example, he’d said something like this at some point: “You won’t understand, but really I’m like an Irishman who lives in New York. I combine the American ‘we’ with a furiously European ‘I.’”

Would it really have been worthwhile to say something like that? He’s always weighed down by doubt, never sure of anything. But it’s true that with the topic of the plural “I” he could have excelled perfectly. Actually, there were so many things he didn’t say in interviews when he was in publishing. He let himself down, for instance, by trying to be diplomatic and not always saying what he thought of certain dreadful authors he didn’t publish. He probably let himself down, wasted his life, by his ridiculous desire to be too sensitive. He was let down by this and also, obviously, by having the spirit of a son instead of the customary protective fatherly temperament that seems so typical in publishers, although it’s also true that there are quite a few who pretend to have it when they actually lack the most basic paternal instinct.

He remembers that it has been no time at all since he spent an entire morning going around to branches of two different banks and making changes to his investment funds, and yet he sometimes has the impression that an eternity has gone by since that morning. And he observes that even the time when he used to publish all the great literature he could is starting to drift into the distance.

How old he looks, how old he feels since he retired. And how dull it is not to drink. The world, in itself, is often tedious and lacks true emotion. Without alcohol, one is lost. Although he’d do well not to forget that it’s a wise person who monotonizes existence because then each small incident, if one knows how to read it in a literary way, has a wondrous quality. Never to forget this possibility of consciously monotonizing his life is the only or best solution he has left. Drinking might seriously damage his health. What’s more, he never found anything in alcohol, at the bottom of all those glasses, and nowadays can’t very well explain to himself what it was he was looking for there. Because he didn’t actually manage to avoid boredom, a feeling that always came back relentlessly. Although in interviews he had at times pretended he led an exciting publisher’s life; he used to make things up like crazy back then. Now he wonders what for. What good did it do him to make out that he had an extraordinary occupation and that he enjoyed it so much? Of course it was always better to be a publisher than to do nothing, like now. . Nothing? He’s planning a trip to Dublin, an homage, a funeral for a disappearing era. Is that nothing? How boring everything is, except thinking, thinking one is doing something. Or thinking what he’s thinking now: that it would be good to monotonize his life and try, wherever possible, to look for those hidden wonders in his daily life that, deep down, if he wants to, he’s perfectly capable of finding. Because isn’t he capable of seeing much more than what’s there in everything he experiences? At least all those years are worth something, all those years of understanding reading not just as a practice inseparable from his occupation as a publisher, but also as a way of being in the world: an instrument for interpreting, sequence after sequence, his day-to-day life.

He carries on getting ready for Dublin, and as his mind drifts, he ends up thinking about Irish writers. Nothing’s truer than the fact that he admires them more every day. He only ever published a couple of them, but it wasn’t because he wasn’t keen to publish more. For a long time, without success, he went after the rights for John Banville and Flann O’Brien. He thinks Irish writers are the most intelligent in terms of monotonizing and finding wonder in everyday tedium. In the last few days he’s read and re-read a few Irish authors — Elizabeth Bowen, Joseph O’Neill, Matthew Sweeney, Colum McCann — and his amazement at their capacity for writing astonishingly well has not diminished.

It’s as if the Irish had the gift of literature. He remembers that four years ago he saw one of them at a book fair in Guanajuato, Mexico, and discovered, among other things, that they didn’t have the Latin habit of talking about themselves. At a press conference, Claire Keegan replied almost angrily to a journalist who wanted to know what topics she wrote about in her novels: “I’m Irish. I write about dysfunctional families, miserable, loveless lives, illness, old age, winter, the gray weather, boredom, and rain.”

And at her side, Colum McCann concluded his colleague’s contribution, speaking in an exquisite plural, à la John Ford: “We don’t usually talk publicly about ourselves, we prefer to read.”

He sits thinking about how much he’d like to speak in the plural like this all the time, like John Ford, like the Irish writers. To say to Celia, for instance:

“We don’t think it’s a bad idea that you’re thinking of becoming a Buddhist. But we also think it might become a point of dispute and rupture.”

•

He knows Ricardo once felt like he was at the gates to the center of the world, but that he was ejected from this place by a radical slam of the door by Tom Waits. He doesn’t know, meanwhile, what Javier’s center might be. He phones him.

“Sorry,” he says, “but even though it’s not an odd-numbered day I wanted to talk to you, I want you to tell me if you remember any especially great moments in your life, some moment when you felt at the center of the world.”

An imposing silence at the other end of the phone. Maybe his sarcastic remark about the odd-numbered day has annoyed his friend. There is a silence that seems as if it might go on forever. Until at last, after a terrible, long sigh, Javier says:

“My first love, Riba, my first love. When I saw her for the first time, it was love at first sight. The center of the universe.”

Riba asks him what she was doing, his first love, when he saw her that first time. Was she perhaps walking like Dante’s Beatrice down a Florentine street?

“No,” Javier says, “I fell in love watching her peeling sweet potatoes in her parents’ kitchen, and I remember she was missing a tooth. . ”

“A tooth?”

Riba decides to take it all tragically seriously, despite the fact that Javier might just be joking. It’s not long before he realizes he’s made the right choice. His friend isn’t joking at all.

“Yes, you heard right,” Javier says, his voice quivering. “She wasn’t even peeling potatoes, but sweet potatoes, mind you, and the poor girl was missing a tooth.”

“Love’s like that,” Javier adds, faraway and philosophical. “The first sight of the beloved, although it might seem trivial, is capable of leading us to the strongest of passions, and even at times to suicide. Nothing’s as irrational as passion, believe you me.”

Since Riba has the impression of having inappropriately unearthed a dark drama, he takes the first opportunity in the conversation to say goodbye, thinking it’s always better to talk to Javier on odd-numbered days, when it’s he, on his own initiative, who calls.

“Have you ever eaten sweet potato?” Javier asks when they’ve practically already finished their farewells, and were both about to hang up.

Riba doesn’t like the thought of not replying. But the fact is he doesn’t answer. He hangs up. He pretends the line has been cut off. My god, he thinks, imagine, talking to me about sweet potatoes. Poor Javier. A love affair is always an interesting topic, but mixed with food it’s indigestible.

He already knows that, at the center of the world, Ricardo had a door harshly slammed in his face by Tom Waits. And that good old Javier, meanwhile, saw a girl peeling something. As for young Nietzky, in his case it might all be different, and the question of the center of things may not be important, given that, after all — almost without realizing it Riba slips into a torrential inner world at the mere mention of New York — he already lives in this center, lives there without any trouble, lives right in the very center of the world. But who knows what’s happening in his mind when young Nietzky’s left alone in the center of the center of the center of his world, and thinks. What might go through his head, for example, when the light’s purity bathes the windows of the skyscrapers, which are like blue, transparent skies pointing toward a superior sky over there in Central Park? What does he really know about Nietzky? And about the superior sky of Central Park in New York?

He tries to forget all this, because it’s complicated and because it’s Wednesday and now he’s at his parents’ house and hasn’t properly heard what his mother’s just said.

“I asked you if everything’s all right,” she repeats. “You look distracted.”

How fast time goes by, he thinks. It’s Wednesday again. Love, illness, old age, gray weather, boredom, rain. All the Irish writers’ themes seem to be highly topical in his parents’ living room. And outside, the drizzle adds to this impression.

Illness, old age, boredom, unbearable grayness. Nothing that’s not common knowledge on the face of the earth. The stark contrast between the wake-like atmosphere in his parents’ house and Nietzky’s torrential inner world seems enormous.

Thinking of his talented young friend, twenty-seven years his junior, reminds him that, right now, Nietzky must be on his way to number 27 ½ Edison Street in Providence. Although Nietzky is in North America and he’s in Europe, at this moment they’re both in almost identical parallel situations, situations that are both preludes to the same trip to Ireland.

And he thinks that, when he first met Nietzky, no one could have predicted that one day they’d end up being friends. He can’t get the idea out of his head that their meeting fifteen years ago in Paris bore a certain resemblance — mainly in regard to Nietzky’s age difference and unpleasant farewell phrase — to the meeting that took place in Dublin between W. B. Yeats and James Joyce.

At that first meeting, after having reproached him for even the most impeccable side of his publishing policy, his future friend Nietzky said to him: “We might have been contemporaries, and perhaps even the best two members of our generation, I as a writer and you as a publisher. But that’s not how it turned out. You’re pretty old now, and it really shows.”

He didn’t bear a grudge, just as, the many differences aside, Yeats didn’t hold a grudge against the very young Joyce when they met in the smoking room of a restaurant on O’Connell Street in Dublin, and the future author of Ulysses, who’d just turned twenty, read the thirty-seven-year-old poet a collection of his own brief and eccentric prose descriptions and meditations, beautiful though immature. He had thrown over metrical form, young Joyce told him, that he might get a form so fluent it would respond to the motions of the spirit.

Yeats praised this endeavor, but the young Joyce said arrogantly: “I really don’t care whether you like what I am doing or not. Indeed I don’t know why I’m reading to you.” And then, putting his book down on the table, he proceeded to set out his objections to everything Yeats had done. Why had he concerned himself with politics, and above all, why had he concentrated on ideas and condescended to make generalizations? These things, he said, were all the sign of the cooling of the iron, of the fading out of inspiration. Yeats was puzzled, but then was confident again. He thought: “He’s from the Royal University, and thinks that everything’s been settled by Thomas Aquinas — no need to trouble about it. I have met so many like him. He would probably review my book in the newspaper if I sent it there.”

But his cheer disappeared when a minute later the young Joyce spoke badly of Wilde, who was a friend of Yeats’s.” Presently — although this was later refuted by Joyce who classified it as “café gossip,” claiming that, in any case, his parting words were never as disdainful as might be inferred from the anecdote — he got up to go, and as he was going out, said: “I am twenty. How old are you?” Yeats replied saying he was a year younger than he actually was. Joyce said with a sigh: “I thought as much. I have met you too late. You are too old. . ”

He talks to his parents, while imagining the parallel action that might be unfolding in Providence, near New York: Nietzky walking into the Finnegans Society at that very moment and greeting the Joyceans who welcome him as a new and unexpectedly Spanish member of their society, asking him if it’s true that he’s read Finnegans Wake in its entirety and also if it’s true that he’s a fan of this work. He can imagine Nietzky smiling and wildly launching into a recital of the whole book from memory: “Riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay. .” And he can also imagine the other members, overcome with horror, having to interrupt him.

“So what the hell happened in Lyon? We still don’t know anything about what happened there,” asks his mother suddenly.

“Oh, no! Please, Mama! Since very early this morning, until just before coming over here to see you two, I’ve been sitting at my computer reading all kinds of things about Dublin and studying the core” — brief pause, he swallows — “of all things Irish. And now. .”

He stops in his tracks, suddenly. He’s embarrassed to have said the core, because he thinks that the essence would have been a more suitable, more accurate term. But it doesn’t matter. Surely his parents can forgive him this sort of mistake. It’s all right. Or is it?

“The core? You’re so strange, son,” says his mother, who at times really does seem to be able to read his mind.

“The essence of all things Irish,” he grumpily corrects himself. “Right now, Mama, right now when I know I’m brimming with facts about Dublin and I wanted to tell you some things about this city, now that I even know what sort of trees I’ll find on the highway from the airport to my hotel in Dublin, you go and ask me about Lyon. What do you want me to tell you about Lyon? I said farewell to France there for a long time. I think that was all that happened. I said goodbye to France. I’ve studied it, tramped around it, looked at it for long enough.”

As long as he’s been tramping around and looking at this place, Riba was going to add, but held back.

“Tramped around France?” his father says.

Today more than ever a wake-like atmosphere can be sensed in this familiar living room. And although very early on in his adolescence he became aware of the strange stagnation of air and even the paralysis of everything alive that seemed to have taken possession of the room, never before has he had such a strong feeling of time being blocked, stopped, absolutely dead.

In this house, which seems more and more Irish to him, everything happens at a snail’s pace, and what’s more — perhaps so no entrenched custom can be altered in any way, nothing happens at all. It’s as if his parents were constantly holding a wake for their ancestors and precisely today, with maximum gravity, this ghostly family tradition falls heavily on the home. Indeed, he’d swear that more than ever, as so many times before, he’s seeing the ghosts of some of his ancestors. They are beings as blurry as they are out of place — they’re a little short-sighted — who act threateningly and resentfully toward the living. It’s important to acknowledge that at least they’re quite well mannered. And the proof is in the fact that, as if polite enough not to want to disturb things, some have discreetly left the wake, and are now standing over by the door, smoking and blowing the smoke out into the hallway. Riba wouldn’t be surprised if there were even a few of them playing soccer out on the patio right now. What good guys, he thinks suddenly. Today he’s taken to seeing them as if they were adorable ghosts. Indeed, they are. He’s been accustomed to them his whole life. They’re familiar to him in every sense. His childhood was swarming with these ghosts, laden with signs from the past.

“What are you looking at?” his mother says.

The spirits. This is what he should reply. Uncle Javier, Aunt Angelines, Grandpa Jacobo, little Rosa María, Uncle David. This is what he should say to her. But he doesn’t want trouble. He falls silent as a dead man, while thinking he’s hearing voices coming from the patio, maybe directly connected to that other patio, the one in New York. He amuses himself recalling in his mind wisps of the dead he’s seen before in other places. But he stays quiet, as if he himself were just another family apparition.

He tries to hear a conversation between the ghosts closest to him, the ones in the hallway — they seem easier to hear than the ones stirring up a fuss on the patio — and he thinks he hears something, but it’s so indistinct it’s not really anything at all, and then he remembers that famous description of the ghost to be found in Ulysses:

What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.

He remembers one day in this very place his maternal grandfather, Jacobo, saying with slightly forced emphasis: “Nothing important was ever achieved without enthusiasm!”

“Right then. And what have you managed to find out about Ireland?”

He doesn’t answer his mother straight away, he’s amusing himself too much looking around the living room. Suddenly, the voices start growing softer and considerably lower in tone, as if falling asleep, and finally, after a brief process of almost total disintegration, all that remains is the silence and the hazy smoke from some ghostly straggler’s cigarette. He thinks there couldn’t be a more opportune moment to tell his mother that Ireland is essentially a country of storytellers, full of ghosts of its own. He wants to give a weight to the word ghosts, winking at his mother, but it’s useless; for years now she’s pretended to ignore the subject of the family ghosts, probably because she’s spent so many years living in more than stable harmony with the specters and doesn’t want to argue about something as obvious as their gentle existence.

“Imagine,” he says to his mother, “that an Irish politician or bishop commits a terrible act. Fine. You’d want to know exactly how things had happened. Isn’t that right?”

“I think so.”

“Well for the Irish, this is secondary. What they care about is how the politician or the bishop is going to explain himself. If they’re able to justify themselves with grace, that is, with a gripping, human story, they’ll get out of their predicament without much trouble.”

Old age, illness, gray weather, centuries-old silence. Boredom, rain, net curtains cutting them off from the outside. The oh-so familiar ghosts of Calle Aribau. There’s no reason to try to play down his parents’ drama and his own; growing old is disastrous. The logical response would be for everyone who sees their life waning to shout out in fright, not resign themselves to a future of drooping jaws and hopeless dribbling, still less to this brutal tearing apart that is death, because to die is to be ripped up into a thousand pieces that are scattered dizzily forever, with no witnesses. This would be logical, but it’s also true that sometimes he feels pretty good listening to the soft, ghostly murmur of voices and spectral footsteps that lull him and which deep down, being so furiously familiar, even win him over.

“And what else do you know about Ireland?”

He’s about to tell his mother that the country is the closest thing there is to this living room. His father gently reproaches his wife for overwhelming their son with so many questions about Ireland. And before long they’re embroiled in an argument. “I won’t make you your coffee for two days,” she says. Senile shouts. The two of them have very different characters, different in every way. They’ve always loved each other, but for this very reason they hate each other. In reality they hate themselves. His parents remind him of something the poet Gil de Biedma once said to him in the Tuset bar in Barcelona. An intimate relationship between two people is an instrument of torture between them, whether they’re people of opposite sexes or the same. Each human being carries within himself a certain amount of self-hatred, and this hatred, this not being able to stand oneself, is something that has to be transferred to another person, and the person you can best transfer it to is the person you love.

When he thinks about it, the same thing happens with him and his wife. There are days when he feels like he’s lots of people at the same time, that his brain is peopled with more ghosts than his parents’ house. And he can’t stand any of these people, he thinks he knows them all. . He hates himself because he has to get older, because he’s aged a lot, because he has to die: this is precisely what he remembers very promptly every Wednesday when he visits his parents.

“What are you thinking about?” his mother interrupts him.

Old age, death. And not a single one of these normal net curtains can block the funereal view of a gloomy future, or the present. In the living room mirror, as he looks deep into his own eyes, he’s horrified to see, for a fraction of a second, Irish light inside his retinas, and in these, dozens of tiny different insects, moths of many varied species, all dead. It could be said that his eyes are like that mental cobweb seemingly reproduced by the terrifying workings of Spider’s brain. He is terrified, and looks away, but he remains petrified, frightened, on the verge of crying out.

He goes over to the window in search of a livelier landscape, and as he looks out at the world, sees a young man walking down the street quite quickly; just as he walks past, under the window, the man looks up at Riba with one irate eye and stares hard, softened only by his comical limp.

Who can this irate, limping man be? Riba feels he’s known him all his life. He remembers the same thing happened with the young genius who for so many years he dreamed he’d find one day for his publishing house. He always believed he was out there and that in fact he’d known him all his life, and then it turned out there was no way of finding him, as he either didn’t exist or Riba didn’t know how to find him. Would having found the genius have justified his whole life? He doesn’t know, but nothing would have seemed more glorious than to have been able to announce to the world that it wasn’t true that all the greats of literature were dead already. It would have been fantastic, because then he would have been able to abandon his quaint practice of referring to the lack of young geniuses by forever quoting — once drunkenly and now with all the serenity and treachery in the world — the first line of a poem by Henry Vaughan, which he knew full well was really about something else:

“They are all gone.”

When he looks back at the one-eyed man, he finds he’s no longer out there limping around. Maybe the irate, ethereal man has stepped into a doorway, but in any case the fact is he’s no longer there. How strange, Riba thinks. He’s sure he saw him a moment ago, but it’s also true that some of the people he’s come across recently disappear too fast.

He goes back to the living room and feels there’s no conversation left here, just a wake-like atmosphere growing ever more profound, the leaden air of a waiting room. Then, he doesn’t know how, he remembers something Vilém Vok said in The Center: “To have a mother and not to know what to talk about with her!”

He has to leave, he thinks, he can’t spend any more time in this house. If he does he’ll end up totally mute and buried, and days later he’ll be walking around sharing cigarettes with the ghosts.

“They are all gone, Mama,” he mumbles, head bowed.

And his mother, who’s heard him perfectly well, laughs happily as she nods her head.

The day he said goodbye to his vocation as a publisher seems very far off now. The thing he remembers most perfectly is that, after years of familiar, spectral silence, literature came to him alone, completely alone. How can he say it, how can he describe it? It’s not easy. Even if he were a writer it wouldn’t be easy to explain. Because it was strange, literature came to him lightly, with a graceful step, in red high heels, a cocked Russian hat and a beige raincoat. Even so, he wasn’t interested until he consciously confused literature with Catherine Deneuve, whom he’d recently seen in a trench coat, under an umbrella, in a very rainy movie that took place in Cherbourg.

“I don’t think you know anything about Dublin,” says his mother, interrupting his thoughts.

He’d forgotten he was at his parents’ house. It feels like Wednesday of last week, when, head bowed, he said they are all gone, and his mother nodded in agreement. But this is another Wednesday.

It’s undoubtedly regrettable that, in the middle of a great muddle in his head, just as he was recalling how he thought that literature was Catherine Deneuve and afterward was never able to correct the misunderstanding, just as he was imagining her, alone and erotic, with her red shoes, naked underneath the trench coat, and with her cocked hat and her slight despair on a rainy day, his mother left him unable to complete this vision, which, once again, was getting him so excited. Because, in the end, when he met Celia, she too had looked to him like the spitting image of Deneuve in Cherbourg.

“It’s true, all I know is that it sometimes rains in Dublin,” he says, annoyed. “And then the city fills with trench coats.”

Has he been talking about raincoats? His mother reminds him that as a child he always loved them, was always waiting for it to rain so he could put one on. His mother wants to know if he really can’t remember this penchant of his. Well no, he doesn’t. But now that he thinks about it, it’s possible that this penchant for raincoats led to his fascination with Deneuve. No one knows about this great confusion of his between literature and Deneuve, not even Celia. It would be awful if someone found out, especially if the information fell into his enemies’ hands. They’d undoubtedly laugh at him. But what can he do if that’s how things are, and in reality it’s not so terrifying? Since time immemorial he’s associated Deneuve with literature itself. So what? Other people associate their lover with some rancid piece of chocolate cake they ate at the office. As long as it remains a secret, nothing will happen. Other people have more ridiculous secrets, and they certainly keep quiet about them. Although it’s also true that there are some people who don’t keep quiet, whose secrets aren’t ridiculous. Samuel Beckett, for example. One March night in Dublin, the Irish writer had a decisive vision, the sort of revelation that causes envy:

At the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, I saw the whole. The vision at last.

It was night time, and as he so often did, the young Beckett was wandering around on his own. He found himself at the end of a pier buffeted by a storm. And then it was as if everything found its place again: years of doubt, searching, questions, failures, suddenly made sense and the vision of what he had to carry out established itself like a piece of evidence. He saw that the darkness he’d always striven to reject was in reality his most precious ally, and he glimpsed the world he had to create in order to breathe. A kind of indestructible association with the light of consciousness took shape. An association of storm and night until the last breath.

As far as Riba remembered, this nocturne on the Dublin pier appeared later, a little altered, in Krapp’s Last Tape:

What will become of all this misery of ours? In the end, only an old whore walking around in an absurd raincoat, on a lonely dike in the rain.

In an essay — probably mistakenly, because he was often mistaken in his essays — Vilém Vok pointed out that this woman in the rain was the same one who appeared in Murphy and who was called Celia, the prostitute that the young writer-protagonist lived with, although she was much younger.

He’s always thought it quite a coincidence that this prostitute was called Celia, like his wife. Depending on how one looks at it, thanks to a simple rule of three, the old woman in the absurd raincoat from Krapp’s Last Tape could, due to her Deneuvesque trench coat, be literature and at the same time Celia from Murphy, very old by now, and also Celia, his wife, also very old.

All this leaves him quite confused, as if wandering around on a Dublin pier buffeted by a storm, wet with passion and from the waves. Until he remembers the raincoat, the mackintosh that appears in the sixth chapter of Ulysses. He remembers it’s a stranger attending the burial of Paddy Dignam who wears it. And it’s odd. Because nowadays, a Mac would just be a famous computer, but in those days it was a raincoat, a garment invented by Charles Macintosh, a name which somehow had a “k” added to it over the years when it came to refer to the coat.

He can’t help thinking that while he’s been a privileged witness to the leap from the Gutenberg to the digital age, he’s also observed the transition of the mackintosh coat to the Macintosh computer. Should he organize a requiem in Dublin for the age of this brand of raincoat? Immediately he congratulates himself on being able to cruelly satirize his projects, his efforts.

The stranger at Prospect Cemetery is someone we meet eleven times over the course of Joyce’s book, but who makes his first mysterious appearance in chapter six. Commentators on Ulysses have never been able to agree on his identity.

Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I’d like to know? Now, I’d give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of [Ulysses, chapter six].

“What are you thinking about?” interrupts his mother.

Once again, in his parents’ house, that feeling of forgetting where he is. He’s annoyed they’ve interrupted his journey through the Dublin cemetery. Of course, there isn’t much difference between the atmosphere of the Prospect Cemetery and that of his parents’ house.

“Dublin has dead people everywhere,” he answers angrily.

And it’s the beginning of the end. Of today’s visit at least.

“What?” his mother almost sobs.

“I said that death and children”—he’s growing more and more enraged — “look very similar over there. The gravediggers touch their caps after burying them. And some people still say ‘mackintosh’ when they’re talking about raincoats. It’s another world, Mama, another world.”

He hails a taxi. There are always lots on Calle Aribau. All you have to do is raise your hand and one stops automatically. Today he’s out of luck, inside the taxi it stinks. But it’s too late to change and the car is already on its way to his house. It’s also too late to put right the falling out with his parents. Maybe he shouldn’t stick to this unwavering commitment every Wednesday. Today, once more, the overwhelming impression of a wake and that intimate familiarity with ghosts have made him a nervous wreck. After his inappropriate remark, his apologies did no good.

“What was that shout?”

“I didn’t shout, Mama.”

He ended up slamming the door on his way out, and then feeling full of anguish and remorse. Now he’s trying to get away from his sense of unease and concentrate on this sixth chapter he wants to revive in Dublin, and which starts just after eleven o’clock in the morning, when Bloom gets on the tram at the baths on Leinster Street and goes to the dead man Paddy Dignam’s house, number 9 Newbridge Avenue, southeast of the Liffey, from where the funeral procession will leave. Instead of heading directly westward, toward the center of Dublin, and then northwest toward Prospect Cemetery, the cortège goes in the direction of Irishtown, turning northeast and then west. Obeying an old custom, they parade Dignam’s body first through Irishtown, toward Tritonville Road, north of Serpentine Avenue, and only after crossing Irishtown do they turn west down Ringsend Road and Brunswick Street, then afterward crossing the River Liffey and carrying on northwest toward Prospect Cemetery.

As the taxi drives down Calle Brusi, he sees a man walking fast. He reminds him of the young man who stormed out of La Central bookshop the other day. Riba looks away for a moment and when he looks back again, the stranger isn’t there anymore, he’s disappeared. Where can he have gone? Who was he?

A man full of life, he thinks, and at the same time ethereal as a ghost. Who the hell can it be? Could it not be me? No, because I’m not young.

As of today, Celia is a Buddhist. He still hasn’t entered the house, but he’s already been informed of the news. Fine, he says, somewhat bewildered, resigned. And crosses the threshold. And he thinks: once upon a time, marquises went out at five o’clock in the afternoon, and now they become Buddhists.

He’d like to say to Celia that she’s not the only one who can change her personality from one day to the next, to tell her that he feels a little perturbed, as if he were an arrow in a cobwebbed cellar of steel-gray light. But he holds back. “Fine,” he repeats, “it’s fine. I congratulate you, Celia.” He notices the Buddhist decision has affected him more than he thought it would, although he was already convinced that Celia would end up converting to another religion, he saw it coming quite clearly. He lowers his head, goes straight to his study, feeling he needs to take refuge there.

It feels like everything in the house is turning oriental.

He’s a hikikomori, she’s a Buddhist.

“What’s the matter? Where are you off to?” Celia asks in her most affectionate voice.

He decides not to let himself feel duped and shuts himself up in his study. Once he’s there, he looks out of the window and starts meditating. Outside, the daylight is dying. He’s always admired Buddhism, he’s got nothing against it. But arriving home has annoyed him. It feels as if his experience has come out of a novel, and if there’s anything guaranteed to make him genuinely uncomfortable these days it’s things happening in his life that could turn out to be appropriate for a novelist to put in a novel. The way Celia has decided to tell him she’s become a Buddhist seems like the start of a classic conflict story: a wife who all at once has a different ideology than her husband, the first fights and serious disagreements after years of happiness.

If he’s gained anything from giving up the publishing house it’s no longer having to waste hours reading so much garbage: manuscripts with conventional plots, stories that need a conflict in order to be anything. Manuscripts telling the same old pernicious, traditional stories have disappeared from his view, and he doesn’t want to feel he’s inside one of them now. It’s a source of irritation to him that, having been so peaceful for two years — for twenty-six months to be precise — his life has taken this unexpected fictional turn. He loves the daily life he’s been leading recently, and more than most things, he loves his daily world, so tranquil and boring. If someone came to examine his day-to-day life they’d find it hard to see anything exciting about it, let alone to tell anyone else, because really it’s one of those lives in which scarcely anything happens. He leads an existence like a character in a book by Gracq, the writer he chose as the model for his theory in Lyon. That’s why it’s so irritating that this melodramatically inclined event has occurred now. He’s annoyed that everything has suddenly sped up, as if someone wanted him involved in a less slow novel.

He’s fascinated by the charm of everyday life. It’s true that at times he’s worried about having become so blocked, such a computer nerd, and it’s also true that at times he’s worried about leading a life lacking the excitement of before. But in general he repeats a daily mantra that the more insignificant the things happening to him are, the better. As a future member of the Order of Finnegans and a supposed expert on Joyce’s oeuvre, he knows the world functions through insignificances. After all, Joyce’s greatest achievement in Ulysses was to have understood that life is made up of trivial things. The glorious trick Joyce put into practice was to take the absolutely mundane and give it a Homeric foundation. It was a good idea, yes, although it’s never stopped seeming like a con to him. But that’s not enough for him to deprive his Dublin funeral of its symbolism. He doesn’t want to deprive it of the grandeur the occasion requires, even if a requiem for the end of an age in which Joyce reigned is nothing over there. What’s more, without grandeur, the parody would be incomprehensible. On the other hand, this grandiose, symbolic aspect would coexist — just as happens in Ulysses too — with the mundane procession of trivialities that comes with every journey. He can already start to imagine this coexistence: him in Dublin, bidding farewell with a somewhat heroic urge and funereal pomp to a historic period, and at the same time, in contact with the soporific vulgarity of the everyday, that is, buying T-shirts in some big department store, wolfing down a mediocre chicken curry in a restaurant on O’Connell Street and, well, keeping time with the gray rhythm of the prosaic.

Huge contrasts between greatness and the prosaic, between the heroic urge and chicken curry. He laughs. Maybe heroic urges nowadays are something completely vulgar and common. What is a heroic urge anyway? He thinks of it as if it were something very obvious when in fact he doesn’t really know what it is.

“Did you know that in Buddhist monasteries one of the exercises is to meet each moment of your life by living it to the full?” asks Celia.

She’s come into the study, and it doesn’t look like on her first day as a Buddhist she’s going to let him be much of a hikikomori. Riba is surprised because Celia never comes into his room without knocking.

“In Buddhist monasteries they help you to think,” says Celia completely naturally, as if she hasn’t infringed one of their house rules by coming into his study.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Really? I’ll explain. In Buddhist monasteries they help you say to yourself, for instance: now it’s noon, now I’m walking across the patio, now I’m going to meet the abbot, and at the same time you have to think that noon, the patio, and the abbot are unreal, they’re as unreal as oneself and one’s own thoughts. Because Buddhism denies the I.”

“That’s something I am not unaware of.”

He observes that the conflict he wanted to avoid is about to happen, and thinks again that in no way does he want to live in a novel. But the fact is, what he feared is happening: it won’t be easy living with someone who’s changed a lot in the last few weeks and who now has a markedly religious world view very different from his own.

Celia thinks she can guess what he’s thinking, and calms him down. She says he mustn’t worry, because Buddhism is gentle, it’s good, and what’s more, Buddhism is just a philosophy, a way of life, essentially just a technique for personal improvement.

One of Buddhism’s meditation themes, Celia explains, is the idea that there is no subject, but rather a series of mental states. Another theme is that our past life is illusory. He should calm down, Celia tells him. Riba doesn’t know what to reply, and says he’s prepared to calm down but he’s not inside a novel.

“I don’t understand,” Celia says.

“Nor I you.”

“But let’s see if you at least understand this. If, for example, you were a Buddhist monk, you’d think at this moment that you’ve started to live now. Are you listening?”

“I’ve started to live now?”

“You’d think that all of your life before now, that alcoholic period of yours and the very one you hate so much and feel so proud of having escaped, was a dream. This is what you’d think, do you follow? You’d think this and also that all of universal history is a dream. Are you listening?”

He is, sort of. The irruption of Buddhism into his life has overwhelmed him. The truth is he preferred her when she used to talk to her mother on the phone every evening, or to her siblings, or her work colleagues about the problems at the museum. Buddhism has come to complicate everything.

“You’d gradually liberate yourself by doing mental exercises,” Celia continues. “And once you understood for real that the I doesn’t exist, you wouldn’t think that the I can be happy, or that your task is to make it happy, you wouldn’t think any of that.”

He thinks that all that remains for her to say is: And don’t get so excited about your trip to Dublin, or your search for enthusiasm and lost genius, or about New York, which represents your hope of abandoning your mediocre life, or about the idea that you’re not that old, or about the English leap.

But being a Buddhist, he wonders, would she be able to say something so incredibly cruel? He prefers to think not. Buddhism isn’t merciless. Buddhism is gentle, Buddhism is good. Isn’t it?

His eyes round as saucers, he’s sitting in front of the computer. He doesn’t know how many hours he’s been here. Relentless insomnia. He gets the impression he’s being observed. Maybe by someone not visible. By someone who has faded into impalpability, whether through death or through a change of manners.

It’s well known that every man shows a different face when he feels he’s being spied on, and now Riba, sensing he might be watched, changes even his gestures. He should go to bed, maybe that’s all it is. Tiredness. It’s almost five o’clock in the morning. He should get some rest, but he’s not convinced it’s the right thing to do. He turns back to the computer.

He discovers via Google that on February 2, 1922, the day his father was born, other things happened in the world. One of them is astonishingly related to a very important event for Dublin. On this day Sylvia Beach, the publisher of Ulysses, was walking restlessly along the platform of the Gare de Lyon in Paris for a long time. Shrouded in the chilly morning air, she awaited the arrival of the train from Dijon. The express arrived at seven o’clock on the dot. And Sylvia Beach ran toward the ticket inspector who was holding a packet and looking for the person to give those first two copies of Ulysses to, sent by the printer Maurice Darantière, who had worked his fingers to the very bone on every correction of every paragraph of every galley that had been crossed out, rewritten, and manhandled to ridiculous extremes. There were the first and the second copies of the first edition, with their Greek blue cover and the title and author’s name in white lettering. It was James Joyce’s birthday, and Sylvia Beach’s present to him would be unforgettable. Perhaps this was one of the great secret moments of the age of print, of the Gutenberg galaxy.

That same day, at the same time that Joyce received his first copy of Ulysses, at a strange age — he’d been in the world a mere four hours — Riba’s father let out a huge resounding grunt, which went right through the walls of the house where he was born.

He writes a really long email to Nietzky to say that every day he feels more predestined to go to Dublin, but in the end he doesn’t send it. He goes back to Google and after looking at a few random pages ends up with the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershøi on the screen, which leave him even more wide awake than he was before. He always finds this Danish artist immensely hypnotic, a man who for his entire career limited himself to a few motifs: portraits of his relatives and close friends, paintings of the inside of his home, monumental buildings in Copenhagen and London, and Sjælland landscapes. He likes these canvases where the same motifs appear again and again. And although their creator projects great peace and calm in all of them, Hammershøi might be reproached for being obsessive. But he thinks that in art this is often precisely what matters, unbridled obsession, the fastidiousness behind the work.

In Hammershøi’s works the painter is always present, with his persistent images circling around his insistent empty spaces, and nothing apparently happens though nevertheless, a lot does — what happens — unlike a subject in a painting by someone like Edward Hopper for example — would never catch on as material for an orthodox novelist. There is no action in his paintings. And without exception, they are all impregnated with a very solid atmosphere: behind the extreme calm and motionlessness, one senses something indefinable and maybe threatening lying in wait.

His palette is very limited and is dominated by a range of gray tones. He’s the painter of what happens when it looks like nothing’s happening. All this turns his interiors into places of hypnotic stillness and melancholic introspection. Happily, in these paintings there is no place for fictions, for novels. One can relax comfortably in them, however much an obsessive mind sweeps over all the canvases.

But what’s more, Riba likes this painter precisely because, in the midst of the lethargic stillness of his empty spaces, everything in him is obstinate, insistent. Hammershøi lives in a permanent state of quiet obsession — to use the title of one of Vok’s books, given in English. The peaceful man’s universe seems to revolve around his restrained fascination.

He has always liked this expression — quiet obsession — coined by Vok’s English translator. Riba also believes he has obsessions of a similar style. His quiet passion for New York, for instance. His tranquil obsession with a funeral in Dublin, with bidding farewell — he doesn’t yet know whether with a gunfire salute or with tears — to the age of print. His tranquil obsession with experiencing one more moment in the center of the world, traveling to the center of himself, and reaching significant degrees of enthusiasm, and not dying of shame after having lost almost everything.

He’s especially gripped by an obsession with The British Museum, the strangest, most obsessive Hammershøi painting he knows. A painting of an almost aggravated gray tone and in which a thick morning fog can be seen spreading down a totally deserted street in Bloomsbury. As in so many paintings by this artist, the canvas has no people in it. It belongs to a series of works by Hammershøi in which foggy, deserted streets in this area of London that must have hypnotized the painter appear with marked insistence.

He’s only set foot in London once, five years ago, when he was invited to a publishers’ conference. He never visited the book fair in this city because he was worried he would feel self-conscious about his non-existent English, so he always used to send Gauger there instead. On this first and only trip to London, he was put up in a little family-hotel in Bloomsbury, next to the British Museum, near the building of the enigmatic Swedenborg Society. The conference meetings took place in a Bloomsbury theater. And during his brief three-day stay he barely had time to look around anywhere other than his hotel and the museum. He got to know the streets of that district so exhaustively that he’s been under the impression ever since that he knows it really well, in depth. This has been his way of trying to take possession of the area. Maybe that is why, when he watched the film Spider, the rundown streets of the East End surprised him, because he didn’t want to accept something as basic as the fact that in London there were areas quite different from Bloomsbury.

On that journey five years ago he took great care not to say to anyone it was the first time he’d visited the city. He knew it would make a terrible impression that a publisher such as himself, with all his prestige, was such a yokel and hadn’t set foot in London, and moreover, had not set foot there purely out of embarrassment at having no idea how to speak English.

On that journey five years ago he carefully and meticulously studied the streets around the British Museum. He walked up and down them many times and ended up memorizing them and when he got home was able, almost immediately, to identify the street in any of Hammershøi’s London paintings he saw, and even knew, almost by heart, the street’s name. This was the case with all the paintings except The British Museum. The same thing happens to him today. It’s strange, but he still loses himself, gets confused, drowns in this painting. The more he sees the street that features in this painting, the less he knows which one must have served as a model for the painter, and the more he wonders if Hammershøi invented it himself. Nevertheless, the bit of the building that can be seen on the left of the canvas must be one side of the museum, and as such, he should recognize this street, which is probably no great mystery and is very possibly a street that exists and that is there — one more quiet obsession, for when he decides to return to London and see it.

In any case, he has a relationship with the painting The British Museum as strange as the one he’s always had with London. Because, in actual fact, if he hasn’t been to London more than once, it’s not just because of his lack of a command of English, but also because for years a strange fear has been growing inside him caused by the fact that on several occasions, having been on the verge of traveling to this city, something odd always prevented him at the last minute. The first time was in Calais, at the start of the seventies. His car was already on the ferry due to drop him on the other side of the Channel, when an unexpected argument with a female friend — a somewhat fatuous argument about Julie Christie’s miniskirts — had him backing out of the trip. In the eighties, the plane ticket already bought, a colossal storm blocked his path and ended up stopping him from crossing the English Channel.

He started thinking London was that place to which, for obscure reasons, we know we should never go, because death awaits us there. That’s why, five years ago, when the invitation to London he’d always feared arrived, he felt genuine panic. After quite a few doubts, he finally left his house in Barcelona, convinced, however, that before taking the plane, the most unforeseeable event would prevent him from setting foot on English soil. But nothing stood in his way, and he ended up landing at Heathrow, where, with extreme suspicion, he was able to verify that he remained perfectly alive.

Feeling threatened by strange, dark forces, he began walking very apprehensively through the airport. For a moment, he even thought he’d lost his sense of direction. An hour later, when he got to his hotel room, he sat on the bed for a long time, in silence, surprised nothing had happened to him yet and that he hadn’t even felt the slightest possibility of a visit from Death. After a short while, seeing that everything remained in a state of normality almost as vulgar as it was obscene, he turned on the television, found the news, and despite not understanding a word of English, very quickly deduced that Marlon Brando had just died.

He was filled with terror, because he understood that, due to an error by a distracted Death, so predisposed to getting muddled, Brando had died in his place. Afterward, he rejected the idea as inconsistent. But he spent quite a while holding a private funeral for poor Brando and at the same time keeping alert for any possible movements in the third-floor corridor outside his room, as he felt enormously afraid that Death might come down that narrow hallway with the aim of paying him a visit.

He was alert to all the building’s movements when he heard footsteps: someone was heading for his room. There was a knock at the door. He froze. Four more very sharp knocks. The shock didn’t fade until he opened the door and saw that it wasn’t the loathsome scythe-bearing figure at the door, but the publisher Roberto Calasso, who was also staying at the hotel, a guest at the conference, and he had simply come to suggest going for a stroll around the neighborhood.

When the two of them went out for that walk at dusk, they couldn’t have imagined they’d end up watching Joseph Mankiewicz’s film Julius Caesar, perhaps as a kind of unexpected and improvised homage to the film’s lead actor, the illustrious death of the day. They discovered, by one of those casual coincidences that sometimes occur in life, that the film starring Brando and James Mason was being shown at dusk in the Stevenson Room of the British Museum, a few yards from their hotel. And they decided they couldn’t ignore this wink from fate and went in to watch the admirable film that so many times and on so many different occasions they’d seen before.

He remembers that, last night, Celia was telling him, with a marked Buddhist emphasis to her words, that we’re all weaving and interweaving every moment of our lives. Not only, said Celia, do we weave our decisions, but also our acts, our dreams, our states of vigilance: we’re constantly weaving a tapestry. And in the middle of this tapestry, she concluded, it sometimes rains.

He’s started remembering these noteworthy phrases from yesterday, and this doesn’t stop him from imagining a tapestry where it can clearly be seen that it’s been pouring rain in Barcelona for months, without interruption, and it seems it will never stop raining. It always rains in high fantasy, said Dante. And it’s raining, especially now, in his imagination, and in Barcelona too. It’s pouring in this city, that’s for sure. And it’s been doing so, on and off, ever since he decided to go to Dublin. Rain always makes us remember, it brings other times to mind, and maybe this is why he now recalls that, five years ago in Bloomsbury, after having watched James Mason in Julius Caesar, he came across this actor again back in his hotel room that night, and there he was quite still on the television screen, in that scene from Kubrick’s Lolita, in which Humbert Humbert, before going up to his room to sleep with his nymphet, talks to a stranger, another guest at the hotel, a man called Quilty, who seems to know all about his life.

Who is this Quilty? Was he wearing a Nehru jacket in the film? He doesn’t know if it’s because he’s had severe insomnia and hasn’t slept for many hours or because he’s still got The British Museum on his computer screen, but he’s acting more and more disturbed. Carried along by the rhymes the rain is gradually spinning in the unknown street of the painting, thinking about the rainy installation his friend Dominique is preparing at the Tate, he’s mentally writing phrases and wondering in one of them what London will be like when he and all the people he loves are dead. There will be days — he can be sure of this now — when all his dead will have become pure vapor and will speak from their wild, remote solitude; they’ll speak just as the rain in Africa does, and won’t remember anything anymore. Everything will have been forgotten. Even the rain beneath which all the dead once fell in love will have faded away. And lost too, the memory of the moon beneath which they once walked along an also forgotten road like lost souls.

And although, once more, things are getting occasionally complicated, he thinks he knows that, as long as everything still depends only on him, as long as he’s still in control of the action and can make sure things are pure and exclusively mental, he won’t be fazed. This is why he gets lost with a certain amount of calm down the foggy, presumably unknown street, next to the British Museum, and gets trapped at a strange bend, what at first sight had seemed like a street corner. It’s not a street corner, it’s a blot, and in it there’s a shadow that seems to want to escape from the screen.

Alarmed at this threatening shadow, he clicks the mouse and in two moves gets to the page with his emails, where he finds one containing the poem “Dublinesque,” by Philip Larkin, which young Nietzky has just sent him from New York. It’s a poem that talks of an old Dublin prostitute, who in her last hour is accompanied only by a few co-workers along the city streets. Nietzky says he’s sent Riba this poem because there’s a funeral in it and it takes place in Dublin: a deliberate wink at the funeral ceremony they’re preparing for June 16. A poem that begins:

Down stucco sidestreets,

Where light is pewter

And afternoon mist

Brings lights on in shops

Above race-guides and rosaries,

A funeral passes.

He stops reading to turn on the radio and think about other, less funereal things, and he hears “Partir Quand Même” sung by Françoise Hardy. It’s been years since he’s heard this song that he’s always liked. It looks like it’s stopped raining. It must be past seven already. He memorizes the first line of Larkin’s poem, Down stucco sidestreets, so he can pretend he’s starting to know English, so he can say it at the slightest opportunity. His insomnia now seems to be irrepressible. Celia sees this for herself. She’s there all of a sudden, standing in the doorway, looking threateningly at him, although at the same time with what might be an air of despair. I didn’t know, thinks Riba, that Buddhists could experience anxiety too. But he’s wrong, it’s not despair, it’s just that Celia has to go to work and isn’t helped by seeing her husband so outrageously wide-awake. Riba puts his head down and hides in “Dublinesque.” He reads the rest of the poem, hoping that this might protect him from the telling-off that could come from Celia at any moment. And as he reads, he wonders what would happen now if that blot were to reappear on the screen, that threatening shadow.

Celia is about to leave and he — so she can see he’s not hypnotized — switches off the computer, avoiding several problems at once. Celia still hasn’t left and is trying on a new shirt in front of the mirror. He realizes that, as soon as he turned off the computer and lost the possibility of seeing the shadow, he started to feel hugely, strangely, most unexpectedly sad. Absurdly sad, because he doesn’t think it’s the absence of the shadow that’s caused his spirits to sink, but still he can’t find a better explanation. He decides to evade this odd sadness with one that’s more clear; he starts thinking about the sad — but not so sad, because it’s associated with a trip with good prospects — funeral ceremony awaiting him in Dublin, this ceremony about which all he knows is that it will have to uphold some sort of connection with the sixth chapter of Ulysses.

Now that he thinks about it, his life over the last two days seems to have points of contact with this chapter. He decides to re-read it, to check if what he senses is true. And shortly afterward he’s closely examining the pages of Paddy Dignam’s burial and in particular the moment when a lanky guy appears at the last moment in the cemetery. He’s a man who seems to have come from nowhere at the very minute the coffin drops into the hole in Prospect Cemetery. Bloom is thinking about Dignam, the dead man they’ve just lowered into the hole, and as his gaze flits among the living, it pauses for a moment on the stranger. Who is he? Who can this man in a mackintosh be?

“Now who is he I’d like to know? Now, I’d give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of,” thinks Bloom, and lets his thoughts drift to other matters. At the end of the ceremony, Joe Hynes, a reporter who’s taking the names of everyone attending the burial for the funeral report, asks Bloom if he knows “that fellow in the. .” and just at that moment, as he’s asking the question, he realizes the individual he’s referring to has vanished, and the sentence goes unfinished. The missing word is raincoat (macintosh). Bloom completes the phrase a moment later: “Macintosh. Yes, I saw him. Where is he now?” Hynes misunderstands and thinks the man’s surname is Macintosh, and notes it down for his report of the burial.

Rereading this passage reminds Riba that in Ulysses there are ten more allusions to the enigmatic man in the raincoat. One of the last appearances of this mysterious character occurs when, after midnight, Bloom orders a coffee for Stephen in the cabman’s shelter and picks up a copy of the evening Telegraph and reads the short report on the burial of Paddy Dignam written by Joe Hynes. In it the journalist gives the names of thirteen mourners, and the last of them is. . Macintosh.

Macintosh. This could also be the name of the dark shadow he saw before on his screen. And as he thinks this, perhaps involuntarily, the link between his computer and Paddy Dignam’s funeral is strengthened.

He’s not exactly the first person in the world to wonder this.

“Who was M’Intosh?” he remembers from the second chapter of the third part of Ulysses, a chapter formed of questions and answers.

One of these questions, intriguing and thorny, has always appealed to him: “What selfinvolved enigma did Bloom risen, going, gathering multicoloured multiform multitudinous garments, voluntarily apprehending, not comprehend?”

He goes over all the debates about who this M’Intosh was. The widest range of interpretations exists. There are those who think that he is Mr. James Duffy, the indecisive companion of Mrs. Sinico in “A Painful Case” from Dubliners, who commits suicide overwhelmed by lovelessness and solitude. Duffy, tormented by the consequences of his indecision, wanders around the tomb of the woman he could have loved. And there are those who think he is Charles Stewart Parnell, who’s risen from the grave to continue his fight for Ireland. And there are also those who think it might be God, disguised as Jesus Christ, on his way to Emmaus.

Nietzky has always been especially fond of Nabokov’s theory. After reading the opinions of so many researchers, Nabokov deduced that the key to the enigma of the stranger was to be found in the fourth chapter of the second part of Ulysses, in the library scene. In this scene, Stephen Dedalus is talking about Shakespeare and maintains that he included himself in his plays. Very tensely, Stephen says that Shakespeare “has hidden his own name, a fair name, William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas.”

This, according to Nabokov, is what Joyce managed to do in Ulysses: to set his face in a dark corner of his canvas. The man in the macintosh who crosses the book’s dream is none other than the author himself. Bloom actually sees his creator!

He wonders whether he should make an effort to stay awake, or give in to sleep — he doesn’t think that is such a good idea because his insomnia is giving him a special sort of lucidity, although Celia’s already gotten seriously annoyed with him because of it. They had a morning argument, so she hasn’t gone back to the old days, that is, to the times when she used to get so annoyed she’d end up putting a few things in a suitcase and leaving it on the landing. She hasn’t acted like that this time, but it’s clear that if things get worse, she might do so later, when she gets home from work at lunch time. It’s terrible. Everything’s always hanging from a thread with Celia.

He leaves the computer and goes over to the window, looks out at the street. He hears Celia slamming the door loudly as she goes to work. She’s gone at last. It’s ridiculous, but it seems as if the thing that’s really irritated her, that’s made her explode with rage, is when a moment ago, he flippantly quoted W. C. Fields at her: “The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep.” This little phrase drove her crazy. “Excuses are worthless,” she said.

He went too far with the Fields quote, he thinks now, uselessly repentant. When will he learn to control his words better? When will he realize that there are certain inappropriate remarks that might seem witty in many settings outside the conjugal one? Celia was probably more than justified in slamming the door. For a while, from the big window, he stands and watches what happens when nothing is happening. When he turns his eyes away from the general view of Barcelona and looks down to focus on what’s going on nearby, he realizes that a man in a gray Burberry coat is walking down his street, a man who reminds him — who has an air — of the stranger in the raincoat with his hair plastered to his head that Riba and Ricardo saw in La Central bookshop. At first this seems strange and then less so. The fact is he ends up feeling a mysterious emotional affinity with him. Couldn’t he have come to tell him to persist in his search for “the unfathomable dimension,” the dimension that, in the middle of a storm, his father asked about in a low voice the other day? He feels dizzy. And he remembers the Swedish thinker Swedenborg who, one day, finding himself by the window of his London house, noticed a man walking down the street for whom he felt instant empathy. To his surprise, this man came over to his door and knocked at it. And when he opened it, Swedenborg felt from the first moment absolute trust in this individual, who introduced himself as the son of God. They took tea together, and over the course of the encounter, the man told Swedenborg that he saw in him the most suitable person to explain the right path to the world. Borges always said that lots of mystics could pass as madmen, but that the case of Swedenborg was special, as much for his enormous intellectual capacity and great scientific prestige, as for the radical change in his life and work brought about by the visions that came from the hand of this unexpected visitor, who connected him directly to celestial life.

He watches the footsteps of the man in the gray Burberry and for a moment fears, and at the same time wishes, that this individual will come over to the front door of his building and press the intercom. It might be that the man wants to congratulate him for planning a requiem for the Gutenberg age, but also that he wants, as well as this, to tell him there’s no reason to look at things in such a short-term way and that he should intone a funeral song for the digital age too — which one day will disappear — and not be afraid, moreover, of time-traveling and intoning another requiem for everything that will come after the apocalypse of the internet, including not just the end of the world but the end of the world that follows that one. After all, life is an enjoyable and serious journey round the most diverse funerals.

Will the second end of the world include the brilliant blue dress with silver needlework, the white gloves and the little cocked hat his mother used to wear every Saturday night in the fifties when she went out with her husband to dance at the Flamingo? Back then no one in the family asked about the unfathomable dimension.

He looks out of the window again and sees that the man in the gray Burberry isn’t on his street anymore. What if it was Swedenborg? No, it wasn’t him. Just as it wasn’t that guy he one day thought might be directing everything under a weary light. It was someone who’s walked right by, although it’s strange, because at first that hadn’t seemed to be his intention.

His insomnia leads him to sit and read in his armchair. Like in the old days, when the computer didn’t limit his time so drastically. The music on the radio is still French, as if the English leap is up against curious domestic resistance from his favorite station.

He’s rescued from the shelf a book by W. B. Yeats, one of his favorite poets. It wasn’t planned, but reading this book might also contribute perfectly to the preparations for his trip to Dublin. Time goes by very quickly, and his insomnia adds even more to a sensation of time flying, but the fact is there are now only five days left until his trip. Everything has gone by really quickly and it seems like only yesterday when, in order to avoid his mother finding out he had absolutely no plans for the future, it occurred to him to say he had to go to Dublin.

He dives into the Yeats, into a poem where it clearly says that everything is falling apart, and that turns out to be ideal for the bloodshot eyes of a profoundly sleepless reader. Letting the verses carry him along, he imagines that the bright light of day is blinding him and that he’s turned into a skilled pilot who flies quickly over the geography of infinite life. A pilot who very soon leaves behind all the stages of humanity — the Iron age, the Silver age, the Gutenberg age, the digital age, the definitive, mortal age — and arrives just in time to witness the universal flood and the grand end, the funeral of the world, although in reality it would be more accurate to say that the world itself had been gradually burning through the ages and traveling toward its grand finale and funeral, previously announced in these lines of Yeats’s that carried Riba so far along this morning: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.. .”

There his flight ends. He comes back to reality, which is not so different from where his imagination has transported him. He shuts the book of the great Yeats and looks out of the window and follows the course of a cloud extremely curiously and then his head nods and he feels he might soon fall asleep, and then, to stop this from happening, he reopens the book he’d closed and finds in what he reads traces of the cloud he’s just been looking at, he finds it in a fragment of Vilém Vok’s prologue to Yeats’s book: “The winds that shake the coast and the woods where the sidhe talk, emissaries of the fairies, allude to a lost, but recoverable splendor.” And later: “It said that the world was once all perfect and kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth.” And he suddenly realizes what the real content of his father’s words were when he asked, the other day, if someone could explain the mystery to him.

If he hadn’t read those lines of Yeats’s, he surely wouldn’t have thought this just now. But he did read them and he can’t help but think that he’s just understood what exactly might have been behind those words of his father’s. Maybe the winds battering the Catalan coast at that moment disturbed his father’s unconscious, until he was driven to ask, indirectly, about a lost splendor. And the thing is that maybe his father wasn’t really asking about the mystery of life in general, or about the mystery of the storm, but rather about everything close to his emotional world, everything that, with time, he’d come to see was buried, like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of the dampest earth.

This could have been the true and fundamental cause of his father’s worries about the storm. And if this was the cause then Riba can’t deny that it was insomnia that helped him realize it, that his insomnia was hiding a visionary power he was previously unaware of, and by leading him to understand the true meaning of those words of his father’s, it was able to widen his outlook.

He goes to the kitchen, and lapsing once more into the mundane, makes himself a sandwich with ham and two layers of cheese in it. He wonders if it might not be the case that, when he thinks of New York, really what he’s interested in — a worthy successor to his father — is a perfect, kindly world, which as a child he lost very early on, and which he hopes to find again in this city one day. Is it symbolically concentrated in New York — his whole search for that great part of his life buried like a mass of roses under tons of earth? It’s possible. He takes a bite from the sandwich, then another one. He hates himself for having base needs, but the cheese is superb. He recalls a quote of Woody Allen’s about reality and steak. He’s feeling wider and wider awake. Wasn’t this what he was after? If so, then he’s achieving it, and he’s seeing more than ever. It’s as if he were approaching the experience of Swedenborg, the man who spoke totally naturally to angels. At times it seems to him that insomnia is capable of having the same effect on him as alcohol once did. Alcohol, which he needs so much sometimes. Who’s there? He smiles. He detects a presence again, although this time it might be merely wild intuition, provoked by his sleep-deprived state. The presence ends up seeming so obvious and large that he grows sad wondering what would become of him if reality suddenly showed him evidence of a great absence.

He starts reading The Dalkey Archive by Flann O’Brien, which is simply another way of conscientiously preparing for the trip to Dublin. What’s more, Finnegans pub, where Nietzky is planning to found the Order of Knights, is in Dalkey, a small town some twelve miles south of Dublin, on the coast.

Flann O’Brien says: “It is an unlikely town, huddled, quiet, pretending to be asleep. Its streets are narrow, not quite self-evident as streets and with meetings which seem accidental.”

Dalkey, a town of accidental meetings. And also of strange appearances. In The Dalkey Archive, St. Augustine appears alive and kicking, talking to an Irish friend. And James Joyce also appears, working as a bartender in a tourist pub outside Dublin and refusing to be associated with Ulysses, which he considers “a dirty book, that collection of smut.”

A violent wave of exhaustion now jolts his head forward. And again he has the sensation of being watched. Has Celia come back without him hearing her? He calls her, but no one answers. Total silence.

“James?”

Well, he doesn’t really know why he’s asking for James, but he hopes it’s not actually Joyce who’s now walking around out there.

He’s afraid of falling asleep, and if that’s true he suspects it’s because he’ll be assailed by that recurring nightmare where a sightless god with the look of a weary primate wants to shake his hand and so is forced to raise his elbow as high as he can. Riba looks at him from above, but it can’t be said he’s in a better position, as the two of them are locked in this cage in which they’re condemned for all eternity to be eaten away by an intimate Hydra, by a fearsome pain: the author’s ache.

Just after eleven o’clock in the morning, he starts to feel overcome by sleepiness. He wavers between going meekly to sleep falling victim to what his friend Hugo Claus called the sorrow of the publisher, or resisting a bit longer. He’s annoyed that sleep threatens just when, only a few moments ago, he felt most lucid.

In exactly five days, at this very hour, his plane will be landing in Dublin. Javier, Ricardo, and Nietzky will already have been there for a day when he arrives. Javier and Ricardo still don’t know that, apart from taking part in Bloomsday and the founding ceremony of the Order of the Knights of Finnegans, they’re going to participate in a funeral for the Gutenberg age. They have a tight schedule. Maybe Nietzky will explain it to them over the course of that first day the three of them spend together. Perhaps when he, Riba, gets to Dublin, Nietzky will already have thought of a way to celebrate this funeral and found the ideal place to hold it.

For quite a while, he resists the ravages of tiredness and fatigue by thinking about the imminent Irish trip. He’s worried, above all else, that even though he stopped being a hikikomori a few hours ago, now he seems more like one than ever. While he’s stopped being one in spirit, he knows that when Celia comes home, if she finds him asleep, the first thing she’ll think is that he’s turned, tragically and once and for all — unjustly, but it’s what she’ll think — into one of those Japanese people who spend their time in front of the computer all night and sleep all day.

It seems quite clear that if people say that as well as being respectable one must have the appearance of respectability, then it’s not enough to stop being a hikikomori, he also has to stop acting like one. But what can he do to avoid it? Sooner or later, he’ll give in. He’s had enough. He’ll sleep, he’s got no alternative. He leaves the idea of continuing experimenting with reason and madness for another time. But immediately he sees that he can’t interrupt them. He makes a huge effort and gets to his feet, he’s decided he won’t let sleep win, much less let Celia think he’s still a stubborn computer nerd.

He gets dressed, picks up his umbrella, hesitates for a few seconds, but finally goes out to the landing, takes the elevator, and goes down into the street. He’s spent days lazily avoiding buying some medication he needs. Now he has time to take care of some errands. He goes to the same pharmacy as usual and buys the pills he’s nearly run out of and which he’s been taking on prescription ever since his physical collapse two years ago. Pills to control high blood pressure: Atenolol, Astudal, Carduran, Tertensif. Then, in the bakery he buys a Roquefort pizza — which he’ll eat cold on the way home — and some croutons for the soup Celia made yesterday.

He can be seen all over the neighborhood, in the rain, with a bag from the pharmacy and eating a pizza. His oversized sunglasses hide physical deterioration caused by his insomnia. Comical and touching, from time to time, he glances furtively at the croutons. Today, despite his evident outlandishness, he looks more normal than on other occasions, at least he’s on his way from the bakery and the pharmacy, and might seem — indeed he is — just like one more local. The last time he was in this area there were a lot of people who saw him walking around in the rain in his old raincoat, his shirt with its torn collar turned up, those hideous short trousers, his hair completely plastered to his head. It was a strange picture he made, a poor, formerly prestigious publisher, dressed to be taken straight to a psychiatrist. A dreadful picture of an unhinged eccentric. Because of his behavior that day, lots of people in the neighborhood now look at him dubiously, and this despite the fact they’ve seen him more than once on TV talking sensibly about the books he published and which brought him such great fame.

He walks slowly, with his Roquefort pizza and his croutons and his umbrella held up straight and the pills he’s just bought from the pharmacy. I’m normal, look at me, his appearance seems to be saying. Of course the sunglasses give him away, and the raincoat is the same one he wore the other night, and his slightly meandering walk also gives him away, as do his anxious bites of the pizza. Actually, everything puts him in his neighbors’ sights. In the glass window of the florist, he studies himself and gives a start as he sees a strange passerby, with short trousers on under his raincoat. But he’s not wearing short trousers. Why did he think he was? Who is this fucking old man; who’s this comic character reflected in the glass?

He starts to laugh at himself and to walk like a tramp from a silent film. He plays at being his shadow, that comic character he saw in the shop window. He walks in a deliberately erratic way and then, outside the deli, imagines he’s not a common tramp — he has a house, a stable home where, it’s true, he does trample around. While he carries on walking in a funny way, he imagines it’s night time already and that he’s in his house, the rain lashing against the windowpanes, where there’s a reflection of his shadow, the shadow of another shadow. Because in this imagined house he is an ex-publisher waiting to meet the man he was before he created — with the books he published and the catalog life he’s led — a false personality for himself.

He imagines that in his house he’s not tired — this last tallies with his own reality — and his old lamp is illuminating him as he starts preparing a report on his situation in life, a report he imagines he must finish before dawn breaks. So as not to feel bored out on the street — he’s never bored except when he walks around places as familiar as the ones in his neighborhood — he slowly elaborates mentally, painfully, sentence by sentence, as he advances in a decidedly pathetic way, with his silent cinema actor’s air, spitting a tide of garbage from his mind:

“Soon I will turn sixty. For two years now I’ve been haunted by the reality of death, at the same time as I devote myself to observing how bad things are in the world. As a friend says, it’s all over, or coming to an end. There is nothing else left but a great illiterate throng deliberately created by the powers that be, a kind of amorphous crowd that’s sunk us all into a general state of mediocrity. There must be a huge misunderstanding. And a tragic jumble of gothic stories and despicable publishers, guilty of a monumental mess. A funeral is already being prepared in Dublin for the literary publishing I gave my life to. And now all I can do is to devote myself to trying to breathe, to opening as many spaces as possible in the days I have left, to trying to search for an art of my own being, an art that maybe one day I can perfect by making an inventory of my main errors as a publisher. I have the impression — one last project, merely imaginary — that it would be great if other publishers wanted to do the same, and for there to be a book containing the confessions of publishers who described what it was they believe went awry in their publishing policy; independent publishers who told how extraordinary the books were that they dreamed of bringing to light one day; publishers who described their greatest hopes and how it was that these did not materialize (it would be good for a publisher such as the great Sensini to speak on this, someone who only published stories of brave characters who are adrift, who ended up standing trial in the United States); literary publishers who described the poverty of literature, now a whole symphony of crows lost in the funereal center of the corrupt jungle of their industry. In short, publishers who would agree to publish the great map of their disappointments and who would confess the truth and say once and for all, to top it all, that not one of them ever discovered a true genius along the way. A map like this would allow us to move deeper into the quicksand of truth. Riba thinks, I’d like one day to have the audacity to go deeper into these sands and to make an inventory of everything I tried to achieve in my catalog and never did. I’d like one day to have the honesty to reveal the great shadows hiding behind the lights of my work that was so absurdly praised. . ”

He decides to speed up on his way home because he’s exhausted, and what’s more, realizes his insomniac’s lucidity might start to wane at any moment, as even the outline of his laughable but ultimately pathetic silent cinema figure is dissolving and dangerously transforming itself in the shop windows. The only thing that matters to him now is that, when Celia gets home from work, she finds him with lunch made, nicely laid out on the tablecloth, and the TV on so they don’t have to talk as they eat. For now, he’ll have another coffee. She has to find him awake, as if there were nothing wrong. He must seek a prompt reconciliation. Become a Buddhist, if necessary. He has no faith in people with faith — even if it’s a Buddhist faith — but he’ll pretend to have it; his relationship with Celia is more important than anything else. Although it is also true he greatly distrusts people with faith. When he thinks of these matters, he always recalls something he heard Juan Carlos Onetti say toward the end of the seventies at the French Institute in Barcelona. Onetti, who seemed enormously, joyously drunk, was saying that Catholics, Freudians, Marxists, and patriots should all be lumped together. Anyone — he said — with faith, it didn’t matter in what; anyone who spouted opinions, who believed they knew or acted according to repeated, learned, or inherited thoughts.

Those words lingered for a long time in his mind. He recalls Onetti said, that day, that a faithful man was more dangerous than a hungry beast and that faith should be placed in what is most insignificant and subjective. In the woman you happen to be in love with at the moment, for example. Or a dog, a soccer team, a number on a roulette wheel, a lifelong vocation. This is what he believes Onetti said on that evening now so long ago in Barcelona.

Since the woman, in his case, is Celia and as such not exactly a woman of the moment, and since, not so long ago, he gave up publishing, which was always his lifelong vocation, and besides he has no dog or soccer team, it seems more than obvious that all he’s got left is a number. A roulette number, if he’s got anything left at all, and this number might well be on the wheel of life itself, that is, his destiny.

For a moment and without panicking, he stands in a daze looking at the croutons, as if they were his only true future.

As he walks past the patisserie, standing in the doorway smoking, is the transsexual who works there, the only person in the world who still makes passes at him, at least in such a brazen way. The tragedy of growing old, thinks Riba, leads to these things: nowadays this kindly transsexual is the only woman who still notices him. A man knows he’s grown old when age spots appear on his hands and he realizes he’s become invisible to women. Celia sometimes talks to this shop assistant, when she goes to buy dessert on Sundays. The patisserie is so bad that she hardly has any work to do and is usually stationed in the doorway, smoking. Since Riba knows she does tarot readings, whenever he sees her he imagines asking her to tell his fortune. He imagines her inside the patisserie, dressed as a gypsy after having made a huge effort to read his future, as if she were Marlene Dietrich in Touch of Evil. A very serious laugh. Tell me my future once and for all, please, says Riba. There’s barely any light at all in the back of the patisserie. You have no future, she replies. And laughs conclusively.

Back home, the rain lashes against the windows. It’s as if he’s arrived at his imagined house from earlier, except this is his real house, luckily. Thinking about the character Bloom, he wonders what sort of face he’d have had. Joyce doesn’t provide too many clues in this respect. He’s the typical modern man, that much is clear. Modern, of course, if one compares him to Homer’s Ulysses. (Inner laughter.) Supposedly, Joyce devised him to seem like any provincial European citizen. A man without qualities. Bloom is outstripped by the two other main characters in the book: Stephen Dedalus and Molly Bloom. Stephen, who represents the intellect, the creative imagination, surpasses him, illuminating him from above. And Molly, who represents the body, the earth, supports him. But in the long run Bloom is neither worse nor better than either of them, as Stephen has an excess of intellectual pride, and Molly finds herself at the mercy of the flesh; Bloom, on the other hand, although lacking their robustness, has the power of humility. And what’s more, Bloom was certainly — this is certainly true today — more charming than his author.

He looks over his bookshelves and stops here and there; he picks up a volume, flips through it nervously, puts it back. He stands hypnotized looking at the rain. He goes into the kitchen to make lunch. The sound of the rain reminds him of that day in his youth when he walked around without an umbrella, and even so, wasted time staring at the faces of passersby, on the hunt for the unique essence of each one, and ended up very wet. His ridiculous youth could be summed up in this one episode, but he prefers to forget it forever, he’s not prepared to be depressed by the rain and his memories.

He stops paying attention to the heavy downpour, and for a moment, it seems as if that strange feeling has come back, as if someone had started walking silently at his side, someone different, obviously, although at times seeming almost familiar. It’s a silent walker who has perhaps always been there. He goes back to the window. He sees the silvery gleam of the rain. He thinks he should tell someone, but Celia is clearly not the best person. When she gets in, she’ll probably still be annoyed with him. With no one to tell, he decides to note it down in the Word document where he collects phrases. He turns on his computer, opens the document and writes down his impression from a moment ago:

The silvery gleam of the rain.

He can’t resist adding something else and writes, in smaller type:

The author’s ache, my intimate Hydra.

Celia gets home and finds him awake, and what’s more, euphoric, listening to Liam Clancy singing “Green Fields of France.” And she also sees that, as incredible as it seems, he has very helpfully set the table and put lunch out on the checked tablecloth they were given as a wedding present that February day over thirty years ago. He’s made a huge effort, he’s stayed awake, although his mental acuity is on a steep decline. Luckily, Celia has come in peace. And even better, with mind-blowing remedies for insomnia and stress.

“Relaxation gadgets!” she cries with a smile.

Buddhism seems to be agreeing with her. She’s come back with a product someone at the office sold her, a sort of digital machine using audiovisual stimulations, with a pair of multicolored glasses, a mask, and headphones. She tells him that, by way of its twenty-two programs, the machine uses light, color, and sound models to calm the user’s brain and create sensations conducive to relaxation.

“Now all we need to do is figure out the frequencies of your brainwaves,” Celia says somewhat mischievously.

The what waves? He smiles. He can’t help thinking of Spider and his mental cobwebs. She insists on asking what his frequencies are. The salespeople have promised the product will make you mentally sharp, relaxed, and less stressed, leading to a pleasant sleep.

Now Celia asks him to try the digital relaxation machine.

“It’s not good for you to get no sleep. This music! Liam Clancy! What is it with you and Liam Clancy?”

“I find it moving, I think it’s a patriotic song and it’s moving, I’m turning Irish.”

“I don’t think it’s really that patriotic. Come on. You can’t go to Dublin on Sunday without having slept,” she says in a tender, maternal tone, but one that is also deliberately banal, carnal, provocative.

She shows him her cleavage. She asks him an apparently trivial or, at least, incongruous question.

“Why don’t you take the odd Wednesday off from going to your parents’ house? Do you feel you owe them something?”

“It’s filial duty, a perfectly natural sentiment in the human species.”

She ruffles his hair.

“Don’t get annoyed,” she says.

She moves closer still and caresses him.

They make love, Celia’s ass on a red cushion, legs wide open. A tangle of bedsheets. Liam Clancy, still singing. And with a great racket, the digital machine smashing violently onto the floor.

Barcelona, noon on Friday the thirteenth, two days before the plane leaves for Dublin.

From a place where he can’t be seen, he carefully observes, with a jolt of astonishment how two pseudo-friends, or rather acquaintances from his generation, prepare to walk very solemnly down La Rambla. Their ceremonial gestures leave little room for doubt: they are about to begin a ritual they’ve been performing for years. Indeed, he saw them forty years ago, getting ready to do the very same thing. They are preparing themselves for a conversation about the world and the vicissitudes of their lives as they walk elegantly down La Rambla.

A jolt of astonishment, but also a certain amount of envy. All their gestures and this air of preparing for an old ritual sends him back to the idea that they have all the time ahead of them to talk about the world. And they’ve probably attracted his attention more than usual because their slow, solemn ritual contrasts with the people rushing about all around them. It seems there’s no one else who has the time to think or simply talk about the world, but rather people must walk quickly with barely enough time, people hurrying, but without thought.

He knows them. They went to university at the same time as him and they’re from the same social class. He knows they’re not particularly intelligent. But the solemnity of their gestures, their good manners — the final flourish in that type of natural Catalan aesthetics. That they’ve managed to conserve this openness, this sense of time, leaves him thunderstruck. It even looks as if they’re going to start thinking. And now he realizes: they are the true representatives of his generation. If he didn’t feel like an educated person, if he felt like an intellectual from Barcelona who didn’t want to betray his social class, he’d recognize himself immediately in these two acquaintances, who have all the time in the world ahead of them.

It’s a shame, but they seem different. He is envious of the ritual his two compatriots have conserved, but also he feels compassion, a deep, endless compassion. And he regrets it greatly: a generation he envies, but also pities; he doesn’t want this to be his generation.

He sees them up there at the start of La Rambla, just as he saw them forty years ago, exactly the same as then, getting ready to converse, think, initiating the ritual of the walk. Even back then, seeing them there, so educated and so majestic, preparing for the descent, the time they had was enviable.

Time does not pass for them. They were going to conquer the world and now all they do is comment on it, if that’s what they do, confined as they are to their limited ability to think. Yet, it also seems true that time does not pass for them and they’re not yet at the gateway to their future of drooping jaws and hopeless dribbling. That will be the end of a generation that might have been his. But it’s not, and yet it is, only in a very remote way. Why should “belonging to his generation” be more important than being compassionate or not compassionate, for example? If someone told him he’s compassionate he’d know more about his identity than if he were told he’s from Barcelona or that he belongs to his generation.

Goodbye to this city, this country, goodbye to all that.

Two old professionals over there at the start of the stately, commercial avenue. They don’t seem aware that all life is a process of demolition and that the hardest blows await them. He thinks about all this from a spot where he can’t be seen by them. Without them knowing it, he’s a traitor, he represents one more blow of the many that will hit them. Here he is now, saying goodbye in his own way to Barcelona, in his shadowy corner, crouching down as he waits for absolute darkness. It will be much better if, at the end of everything, sorrow disappears and silence returns. He’ll carry on as he always has done. Alone, without a generation, and without even a modicum of pity.

Time: Just past eleven in the morning.

Day: June 15, 2008, Sunday.

Style: Linear. Everything can be understood, displaying an air similar to that of the sixth chapter of Ulysses, in which we find a lucid and logical Joyce, who introduces the occasional thought from Bloom that the reader can easily follow.

Place: Dublin Airport.

Characters: Javier, Ricardo, Nietzky, and Riba.

Action: Javier, Ricardo, and Nietzky, who have already spent a day in Dublin, meet Riba at the airport. The idea is to hold the funeral ceremony for the Gutenberg galaxy at dusk tomorrow before visiting the Martello tower. Where? Riba delegated this decision to Nietzky days ago now, and he, with good judgement, thinks that the Catholic cemetery of Glasnevin — formerly Prospect Cemetery, where Paddy Dignam is buried in Ulysses — might be a suitable place. But Ricardo and Javier still know nothing of the funeral. And because they don’t know, they don’t know it’s been included in the informal itinerary Riba and Nietzky have been putting together.

Meanwhile, Riba’s friends, the three writers, are already, unbeknownst to them, living replicas of the three characters — Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, and John Power — who accompany Bloom in the funeral procession in the sixth chapter of Ulysses. To Riba’s secret satisfaction.

Themes: The usual ones. The now unalterable past, the fleeting present, the nonexistent future.

First, the past. This suffering relates to what Riba might have done and what he didn’t do and left buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth, and his need to not look back, to attend to his heroic urges and take the English leap, to direct his gaze forward, toward the insatiable quality of his present.

Then, the present, fleeting, but in some way graspable in the shape of a great need to feel alive in a now that is giving him the gift of feeling joyously free at last, without being criminally hindered by publishing fiction, a task that in the long run became a torment, with the sinister competition of books filled with gothic stories and Holy Grails, holy shrouds, and all the paraphernalia of illiterate modern publishers.

And finally, the question of the future, of course. Dark. You have no future, as the transsexual from the patisserie downstairs would say. The famous future is the main theme, which turns out to be not exactly a unique one: Riba and his destiny. Riba and the destiny of the Gutenberg galaxy. Riba and the heroic urge. Riba and his suspicion a few hours ago that he was being watched by someone who maybe wants to do some sort of experiment on him. Riba and the decline of literary publishing. Riba and the grand old whore of literature, already now out in the rain on the last pier. Riba and the angel of originality. Riba and the croutons. Riba and whatever you like. As you like it, as Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, his friend Boswell, and so many others said.

“Where shall we celebrate?” asks Riba, as soon as he arrives at the terminal and meets up with his friends.

He’s referring to the funeral for the Gutenberg world, for the world he knew and idolized and which has worn him out. But he’s caused a misunderstanding. As Javier and Ricardo still haven’t been informed of the requiem, they think Riba is talking about celebrating the fact that the four of them have just met up in Dublin and is suggesting they go for a few drinks, that is, they assume he’s decided to start drinking again. It’s odd, but they’re excessively thrilled by the idea of their former publisher supposedly having fallen off the wagon. And so they laugh happily.

“In Glasnevin Cemetery itself,” Nietzky interrupts tersely.

“Is there a bar in the cemetery?” Javier asks, surprised.

State of the sky: It’s not raining like in Barcelona. But a cloud is starting to cover the sun and plunges the land around the airport into a darker shade of green. Riba’s memories melt into the dark, refreshing waters of the shadows.

They get into the Chrysler that Walter, a friend of Nietzky’s from Dublin, has lent them. Ricardo drives, since he’s an expert in driving on the left and the only one of them, moreover, who is dressed as an Irishman, although an Irishman who is, if anything, straight out of the John Ford film Donovan’s Reef, that is, in a flowery shirt with Polynesian designs, hidden, however, under a very long, old-fashioned raincoat that recalls those used by Sergio Leone in his spaghetti westerns. In comparison, Javier is dressed in a very sober, almost British way. Depending how one looks at it, they make an unwittingly comic pair.

They head for Morgans hotel, the quartet’s headquarters. A strange place, as Javier explains to Riba, a place full of solitary executives, individuals in suits and ties whom they’ve decided to call “Morgans.” It’s a place on the road leading from the airport to the city of Dublin and that belongs to the same chain as the sophisticated Morgans hotel in New York, on Madison Avenue. The bar of the Morgan Museum, next to Morgans hotel in New York, was precisely where Nietzky and Riba set out from a few months ago to visit the Austers’ house.

“Oh, have you two been to the Austers’ house?” asks Javier mockingly, as he’s heard Riba tell this story a thousand times.

Ricardo found this Dublin highway hotel on the internet and booked the rooms because of its proximity to the airport, never imagining it would be so hip, especially since it looked like a motel on the website. They all protest, because Ricardo seems to have had no qualms about putting them up in a motel like that.

Riba tells them his wife had been on the verge of coming with him, but luckily she couldn’t make it. While Celia’s intentions were good, her presence on the trip would have made the unfortunate scene he’d witnessed in his dreams far too likely to come true, a terrible sequence resulting from cold, hard alcoholism on the way out of the Coxwold pub. Perhaps a pub with this name doesn’t exist in Dublin, but he believes that, if his wife had come with him, the terrifying, prophetic vision from his dream might have come true: Celia, appalled when she discovers the undesirable fact that he’s fallen off the wagon, embracing him emotionally, the two of them crying in the end, sitting on the curb of a Dublin side street.

Everyone is quiet. They’re probably thinking malicious thoughts.

Nietzky interrupts the silence to say that no one has noticed it, but the bar of Morgans hotel is called the John Cox Wilde pub, which sounds a lot like Coxwold. At first Riba chooses not to believe him, but when the others confirm that this is, in fact, the name of the bar, he says he’d actually be in favor of staying at a different hotel. He says it quite seriously, because he believes that, in general, dreams come true. Then he changes his mind, just as they get to Morgans and he finds he likes the foyer, decorated with large black and white tiles, and the statuesque receptionists as well. They’re extremely tall and look like fashion models, maybe they are. They’re also very friendly, although he can’t understand what they’re saying, or why they’re receptionists and not models.

In the large black and white foyer, several strangely tormented guests can be seen, their heads bowed, sad “Morgans” wearing dark glasses and impeccable business suits, thinking of impenetrable matters. Sophisticated background music. It doesn’t seem as though they’re on the road from the airport, or even near Dublin, you’d think they were in the very center of New York. It seems like Ireland’s economic situation has improved recently, thinks Riba, as he notices with some surprise that the foyer of this Dublin Morgans is almost identical to that of the hotel on Madison Avenue.

Javier de Galloy’s version of “Walk on the Wild Side” is playing. Whenever Riba hears this song — and especially when the singer pronounces the syllables of the words “New York City” — he thinks he’s listening to the background music for his English leap, for his great Sternean sentimental journey, his Odyssey in search of his original enthusiasm.

He’s not lacking in enthusiasm; although, at the sight of the closed John Cox Wilde, he is momentarily lost down depressing paths, evoking the brutal alcoholic life he led for many years so as to be able to get his independent publishing house off the ground and to have life experiences that would help him create a catalog disconnected from the academic formalism and the reactionary life of the people of his generation.

He needs to see alcohol as something monstrous, something to which he can never go back, because if he does so he’ll seriously risk his health. All in all, he needs to remember that he had to drink a lot to make the publishing house a success and that he paid a very high price, his health to be precise, for his alcoholic adventures. In any case, he doesn’t regret anything. It’s just that he no longer wants or is able to repeat that experience. After his great physical collapse, everything became calm and now he’d like to think that he’s come back to life, that he’s gradually forgotten this hardened period of alcoholic activity. As he left the hospital a new man, he started to listen in astonishment to what people were saying about his work as a publisher; at first he listened and pretended to believe that it was someone else who had done this work, his double, as if he’d just now inherited it as a surprise. And by pretending like this, he ended up believing, for a while, in his own farce.

Only when he was conscious once more that he had founded the publishing house and it had cost him his health did he start to feel old and washed up and depressed, and he began to sink into melancholy; this is a world where he doubts publishers with a passion for literature like his own will ever exist again. With every day that goes by it seems more and more to him that these kinds of passions have already begun receding into history and will soon fall into oblivion. The world he once knew is ending, and he knows full well that the best novels he published were practically only about this, worlds that would never exist again, apocalyptic situations that were mainly projections of the authors’ existential angst and that nowadays raise a smile, because the world has continued on its course despite meeting with an inexhaustible number of grand finales. Riba thinks, if the world doesn’t quickly fall into oblivion, it won’t be long before the tragedy of the decline of the print age (the decline of a great and brilliant period of human intelligence) will also raise a smile. Distancing oneself from fleeting dramas seems, at the very least, the most sensible option.

Morgans hotel looks different when one starts to explore the long corridors and discovers that the numbering of the floors and rooms is not the slightest bit logical. There is a phenomenal disorder inside the building. What’s more, the corridors are full of workers who seem to be adding the final touches to the hotel, as if the place weren’t finished yet. An aggressive hammering can be heard everywhere. And there is an exceptional amount of chaos, which has always been a famous source of creativity, and which recalls certain scenes from American films from the years of New York’s great economic optimism, when a certain kind of world was under construction and there was a simple, pure enthusiasm everywhere.

Riba wheels his suitcase to his room, and because of the strange numbering system he gets lost several times; he thinks that, among so many workers spread through all the corners of the great building, he wouldn’t be surprised if he suddenly came across Harpo Marx with a hammer, ready to bash in a nail then and there. This place, still in the middle of being built, is the ideal place to bump into Harpo, but he wouldn’t know how to explain why. It must be the general chaos that’s given him this idea.

In his room, next to the telephone, there’s a card inviting guests to the John Cox Wilde pub. It opens at six in the evening; in other words, somewhat to Riba’s relief, there are still a few hours to go. The room smells of perfume and it looks as if it’s been recently tidied, everything is in its place. There’s a slightly ridiculous token from the hotel, a lonely chocolate, on the bedside table. Do those businessmen like these little chocolatey gestures? The view from the window is a sad one, but he’s fascinated by the gray air, the smoke from the chimneys, the brownish color of the bricks of the houses opposite. He loves the view, because it is not at all Mediterranean, which allows him to feel properly abroad. This is what he’s wanted for weeks. He couldn’t feel any better. He’s got what he came for: to land on the other side. Finally he’s in an environment where strangeness and also — for him at least — mystery prevail. And he notices the joy surrounding everything new; he is almost looking at the world with enthusiasm again. In countries like this, a person can reinvent himself, mental horizons open up.

He has the impression that absolutely everything is new to him, even the steps he takes, the ground he walks on, the air he breathes. If everyone knew how to see the world like this, he thinks, if everyone understood that maybe everything around us can be new, we wouldn’t need to waste time thinking about death.

He thanks himself for being where he is, in this geography of strangeness. He notices that, above the bed, there is a framed photograph of Dublin from 1901. The picture is of a coach and horses, which makes him think of the funeral carriage Bloom got into on June 16, 1904, at eleven o’clock in the morning. He looks carefully, and seeing the atmosphere, he thinks he can sense in this unpaved street down which a black coach drives, it seems to him that in those days the city might have been frankly sinister. And this despite the fact that it was beginning to be a new city. But the atmosphere, given off by this photo is literally funereal. Back then, thinks Riba, maybe all of Dublin was an enormous funeral of funerals. All that was needed now was for some little old woman to look out of one of the windows of those sad houses on the unpaved road: a little old woman like the one who, in chapter six of Ulysses, peeps through her blinds and reminds Bloom of the interest old women take in corpses: “Never know who will touch you dead.”

Although he stops looking at the photograph, he continues to recall the start of chapter six: “Martin Cunningham, first, poked his silkhatted head into the creaking carriage and, entering deftly, seated himself. Mr Power stepped in after him, curving his height with care.”

Full of contradictory feelings toward the novelty of everything, Riba decides to go back down to the foyer, to keep from creating anymore mental spider’s webs for himself, and to forget that the character of Spider can sometimes be overly tyrannical and possessive with him. He decides that the most sensible thing to do now is throw himself into discovering Dublin with his friends, with his own personal Martin Cunningham and Mr. Power.

He’s already getting ready to leave the room when he sees, next to the curtains, a red suitcase. He stares at it in amazement. What’s a suitcase doing there? He can’t believe it. He remembers when Celia used to get angry and leave her suitcase out on the landing. He doesn’t find it funny when things happen to him that might seem appropriate for a novelist to put in his novel. He doesn’t want to be written by anyone. Could it be that they wanted to surprise him and it’s Celia’s luggage? No, surely not. If she said she was staying in Barcelona that was because she was going to stay. Anyway, he’s never seen this suitcase at home. He picks it up as if it stank, not wanting to think about it, takes it out into the hallway. It’s not his, how awful.

He goes down to reception, planning to tell them he’s found a suitcase in his room and has left it in the fourth-floor corridor — actually the fifth, if one goes by the strange numbering — but when he gets down there he remembers he doesn’t speak a word of English, and ends up walking right past, saying absolutely nothing. In the brief walk from the foyer to the Chrysler, he puts the incident out of his mind. Any other time, it would have been the first thing he’d have told his friends. I found a red suitcase in my room, he would have said immediately. And he would have told them the story, as if he had a gift for storytelling.

Time: Around two in the afternoon.

Day: Sunday June 15.

Place: The port of Howth, at the north end of Dublin Bay. Less than a mile from here is Ireland’s Eye, a rocky seabird sanctuary built on the ruins of a monastery.

Characters: The four travelers in the Chrysler.

Action: They park at the edge of the town, at the foot of the cliffs where Nietzky, who knows the place, has suggested they walk for a while. They stride along a path through the rocks, and once a certain amount of vertigo has been overcome — blue and gray lights in the fishing port, and high up, in the sky, scudding clouds over the Irish Sea — Riba can finally see Dublin. He still hasn’t seen the city, despite already having been on the island for some hours.

Even though it’s so far off, he finally sees something of Dublin, sees it from high on these cliffs that rise up from the sea. Flocks of birds float on the water. The fascinating sadness of the place seems accentuated by the sight of these fleets of somnolent birds, in the middle of the day, and it’s as if the void becomes intertwined with the deep sadness, which from time to time finds its voice in the shrieking of a gull. A magnificent landscape, boosted by his enthusiastic state of mind that comes from feeling he’s in a foreign land.

Timidly moved, Riba recalls a poem by Wallace Stevens, “The Irish Cliffs of Moher”:

They go to the cliffs of Moher rising out of the mist,

Above the real,

Rising out of present time and place, above

The wet, green grass.

This is not landscape, full of the somnambulations

Of poetry

And the sea. This is my father or, maybe,

It is as he was,

A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earth

And sea and air.

There’s Dublin, slightly hazy in the middle of the bay. A girl goes by with a portable radio playing “This Boy,” by The Beatles. And the song gives him a sudden feeling of nostalgia for the time when he too was close to the “race of fathers.” He’s not young anymore and doesn’t know if he can bear such beauty. He looks at the sea again. He takes a few steps toward the rocks and immediately feels that he ought to stand still, because if he keeps on walking he’ll probably end up staggering along, blinded by tears. It’s a secret emotion, hard to communicate. Because how can he tell the truth and let his friends know he’s fallen in love with the Irish Sea?

This is my country now, he thinks.

He’s so absorbed in all of this that Ricardo has to shake him awake, blowing the smoke from his Pall Mall into Riba’s face.

“What are we up to?” his friend asks.

Riba looks at Ricardo, his flowery, Polynesian-patterned shirt. He finds him ridiculous. He imagines him dressed this way in the Austers’ house.

Before, when he drank, Riba didn’t distinguish between strong and weak emotions, or between friends and enemies. But his recent lucidity has slowly given him back his capacity for boredom, and also for excitement. And the Irish Sea — over which he now imagines a great mass of gray clouds with silver edges floating — seems to him the most superb incarnation of beauty, the highest expression of that which disappeared from his life for so long and which now — it’s never too late — he has found all at once, as if he were in the middle of a great storm, feeling like a man who senses his life is going downhill, yet is faced with the unmistakable beauty of a gray sea edged with silver, and which he’ll never forget as long as his memory serves him.

He recalls some words of Leopardi’s that have been with him for years. The poet said that the view of the sky is perhaps less enjoyable than that of the land and the fields, because it’s less varied, and also far from us, not a part of us, belonging less to what is ours. . And nonetheless, if the view of the Irish Sea has moved Riba, it’s precisely because he doesn’t feel it’s his, it doesn’t belong to his world at all, it’s strange to him; it’s so different from his universe that it’s touched him inside leaving him deeply moved, a prisoner of a foreign sea.

Themes: All banal. Excessive hunger, for instance, which has taken hold of the group and made them desperately start looking for a place to have lunch.

Riba thinks about the theme of his own hunger — a special hunger, separate from the rest of the group’s — and remembers when he used to read manuscripts at the publishing house and noticed that in many of them, almost as if it were a set rule, certain trivial themes appeared on the surface of the story as if they also had the right to a certain rank. And he also remembers that, the further he got into these stories, the more noticeable it was that one important theme gradually shifted to another, preventing a stable center from existing for any length of time. And not just this, but on the surface of the stories only the shadows of certain elements remained, that is, precisely the least significant themes: the hysterical need to find a restaurant, for instance, which is the theme right at this moment, when he feels he’s almost having a nervous breakdown from hunger, and even more so because he’s so exhausted after having walked so far.

At a moment when the Irish Sea has come to be the center of Riba’s life, the circumstance has arisen — it can be modestly explained — that for the narration (supposing someone wanted to describe what is happening right now — now when actually, in these very moments, nothing is happening) the theme would be confused with the action, and the action and theme would turn into one single thing; this, moreover, could not be very easily summed up and wouldn’t be enough for any grand reflection, unless one would like to go on about humankind’s proverbial hunger since the beginning of time.

Action and theme: The need to find, as soon as possible, a restaurant.

As they look for a place to eat by the sea, Riba wonders whether his friends might not have conspired to prevent his setting foot on the streets of Dublin. For whatever reason, ever since he’s arrived, they’ve done nothing but skirt around the city. He can’t complain, because there’s no question that these walks are what have led to his encounter with the unforgettable, freezing, sad beauty of this coastline. But this doesn’t stop it from seeming strange to him that he still hasn’t set foot in Dublin.

“We’ll go to the city after this,” says Nietzky as if reading his thoughts.

Nietzky has started to scare him a little. It’s odd how our perceptions of others change so easily from one day to the next. Today it seems to him that Nietzky has a sinister side. He talks and acts differently from the person Riba imagined might be related to his angelo custode. At times he’s rude; it’s curious to observe how he never used to seem this way. But perhaps Nietzky doesn’t deserve to be seen in such a bad light. Maybe Riba’s disappointment comes from realizing something, which he obviously couldn’t see long before: Nietzky is nothing like a guardian angel, he’s simply a selfish young man, with certain demonic features. It would have all gone better if he hadn’t idolized him. Young Nietzky isn’t related to his duende, nor can he in any way be the complementary father Riba imagined he might find in him. Nietzky has absolutely nothing fatherly about him. To think he could have had two father figures was a grave error on Riba’s part. At the very least, the trip will have served to make him realize this, to understand that his friend from New York isn’t a protective father or an angel of any kind, is actually slightly conceited. For example, he’s conceited when he talks about what they’re going to do tomorrow, he’s unbearably arrogant, wearily imparting to them his vast knowledge of Bloom and Joyce, and treating them as if they are poor ignoramuses on the general topic of Bloomsday. And he’s pathetically conceited when he sings, in perfect English, the traditional Irish song “The Lass of Aughrim,” heard at the end of John Huston’s The Dead. He sings it very well, but soullessly, and ruins a very moving tune.

“Who decides when we go to Dublin?” asks Riba rebelliously.

“Well, whoever takes charge, and at the moment, as far as I can see, that’s not you,” says Nietzky, who suddenly starts speaking cruelly to Riba, as if he’s read loud and clear his recent malevolent thoughts.

In the Globe restaurant in Howth where they have lunch, they’re served by an unbearable Spanish waiter from Zamora, wearing a spotless blue jacket. He speaks such perfect English that at first none of them realizes he’s not from Howth or that he’s not even Irish. When they find out, Riba decides to get revenge in his own way.

“What’s wrong with Zamora to make you leave it so quickly?” he asks, a variation of the curious question about Toro and Benavente he was asked the other day in the bank manager’s office in Barcelona.

The waiter denies having fled Zamora. His colloquial way of speaking is admirable, because everything he says sounds emphatically true. It’s clear his entire being is suffused with life, with authentic life, although the one problem he has — what stops Riba from envying him in the slightest — is that this very uninhibited language doesn’t stop him from being a waiter, but rather totally the opposite. Maybe he’s a waiter because since he was a child, he’s been fluent in this way of speaking so genuine and so Spanish, and now, any sort of change is impossible. In other words, he lives as a prisoner of his Spanishness, completely possessed by his Spanish-waiter’s language, by his terribly traditional and complex-free speech, which seems only normal, the only eternally authentic way of speaking for a hundred thousand miles.

They ask the waiter about last Thursday’s European elections and he tries to pass himself off as the world’s best informed person and in the end becomes literally unbearable. As he talks, he slowly loses all his credibility. Indeed, he lost it the very moment he started talking. He’s like the protagonist of a story in which a man in an elegant, meticulous blue jacket keeps his garment the whole time, but whose pockets gradually become more and more threadbare.

He talks and talks about Thursday’s elections, but they’re barely listening. Here in Dublin today, Sunday, the corpse of the ill-fated “yes” vote to the Lisbon Treaty is still warm; the Irish rejected this treaty last Thursday, and there are posters and other paraphernalia from last week’s intense and confused electoral battle still lying around.

“Ireland’s like that,” says Nietzky somewhat disdainfully.

What? Riba feels he ought to kill him. And the thing is, he’s already thinking like the biggest fanatic of all those in love with the Irish Sea.

“And what are you here for?” asks the Spanish waiter.

“A funeral,” says Riba.

They all, apart from Nietzky, think he’s being witty and laugh at his joke. The waiter leaves their table in confusion, and Riba notices he has a horrid pencil behind his ear.

The pencil of Latin literature, thinks Riba.

Time: Five in the afternoon, immediately after coming out of the Globe restaurant, Howth.

Action: They get back into the Chrysler and take a long detour, driving around the ring road and heading for the other end of the bay. After bypassing the entrance to Dublin again, they go to Finnegans pub, in the middle of Dalkey: a quiet town with narrow streets, where, mainly on Vico Road, the second chapter of Ulysses takes place, and where, as we know, thanks to the great Flann O’Brien, seemingly accidental encounters take place, and where the shops pretend to be closed, but are open.

Ricardo, his voluminous raincoat in hand — it’s obvious he didn’t need to bring it — thinks the town is very genteel. Javier says he’s been there many times and it’s the most enchanting place in the world. Young Nietzky doesn’t believe Javier or share Ricardo’s view.

“Believe me,” Javier says, “in a pub here in town, after he was dead, Joyce worked as a bartender. He confessed to the customers who recognized him that Ulysses was a pain in the ass and a joke in poor taste.”

Ricardo searches in vain for an open shop among those pretending to be shut, somewhere he can buy batteries for his camera.

They carry out an inspection of the pub with the Joycean name that’s been chosen — they agreed to this days ago by email — as the setting for the founding act of the Order of Finnegans. It was chosen by Nietzky, who claims to come to this pub every year.

Would it surprise or collapse you to know that the Mollycule Theory is at work in the parish of Dalkey? [Flann O’Brien, The Dalkey Archive].

Swap “Mollycule Theory” for “Order of Finnegans” and everything fits much better. The pub is packed, probably because they’re showing one of the European Championship games on the television, but also because in Ireland pubs are almost always full. Javier and Ricardo order beer, Nietzky a whiskey with ice.

A tender and ridiculous cup of tea with milk is the teetotaller Riba’s embarrassed order. Since the cruel jokes about his sad drink keep coming, he tries to dispel them by asking his friends if they knew there was a character in Borges’s story “Death and the Compass” called Black Finnegan who owned a pub called Liverpool House.

“So we’re also in a Borgesian pub,” says Javier.

“And the Order could be a bit Borgesian as well, it’s not going to be all Joyce,” suggests Ricardo.

“We could just include the Borges line as a motto on the Order’s coat of arms. I think that might be enough,”says Riba.

“Do we have a coat of arms?” asks Nietzky.

Riba proposes a legend that could be inserted into the coat of arms: “Black Finnegan by name, an old Irish criminal, who was crushed, annihilated almost, by respectability. .”

Atmosphere in Finnegans: Much clinking of pint glasses and rowdiness. A blonde woman who’s had a lot of work done and a man with a dense gray beard, his loose jaw trembling as he speaks. A foreign soccer team scores a goal, which provokes an almost endless cry of jubilation among the clientele. It turns out the Polish national team has loads of Irish supporters. Thick smoke, although in theory no one is smoking. It’s as if this smoke came from a deeply rooted past that hasn’t budged an inch from the pub. Meshuggah, as Joyce would say, off his chump. A long silence at the table of the future Knights of the Order.

“I haven’t come up with anything for the funeral for the Gutenberg age,” Nietzky suddenly bursts out.

Javier and Ricardo think he’s carrying on with the joke Riba made earlier. But as he then gives a lengthy explanation, they gradually discover his words are totally serious. It will involve holding a requiem tomorrow for one of the pinnacles of the golden age of printing, Ulysses, and for the age itself. A requiem, above all, for the end of an era. He hadn’t said anything about it up until now because he’d forgotten.

“You forgot?” asks Javier, incredulously.

Action: Riba says the requiem might seem like a silly idea, but it’s absolutely not. Because if one thinks about it calmly, it has a religious meaning, it’s a prayer for the end of an era. They, the members of the Order of Finnegans, will be the poets of this funeral prayer. It would be good to hold this funeral. After all, if they don’t do it, it won’t be long before others do.

Time: Thirty minutes later.

Action: They’ve been talking and arguing endlessly. Nietzky has drunk four whiskeys in a row. Javier, in the meantime, has become a fan of the Polish national team and maintains, in his characteristically categorical tone, that they’re the best team in the world. Ricardo’s got an exaggeratedly indignant scowl permanently stuck on his face. What’s he grumbling about? The requiem, mainly.

“But what’s so bad about organizing a funeral for the Gutenberg era, a requiem that’s a grand metaphor for the end of the print age, and also for the almost forgotten closure of my publishing house?” says Riba with such subdued sarcasm no one even notices.

“You haven’t made us come to Dublin so you can turn yourself into a metaphor, have you?” says Ricardo.

“And what’s so bad about our Riba wanting to be an allegory, a witness to the times, a notary to a change of eras?” Nietzky intervenes, drunk as a skunk.

“But have we come here so that our dear friend can become a witness to the times? That’s the last thing I expected,” says Ricardo.

“Well, that and so I can feel alive,” protests Riba with surprisingly genuine bitterness, “and have a trip to tell my parents about when I go and see them on Wednesdays, and feel I’m opening up to other people and not being such a hikikomori. Have pity on me. That’s all I ask.”

They look at him as if they’ve just heard an alien speak.

“Pity?” asks Javier, almost laughing.

“All I want is for the funeral to be a work of art,” says Riba.

“A work of art? Ah, this is new!” Nietzky intervenes.

“And also for you all to understand that retiring is tough, that I’ve got too much time on my hands and sometimes I think I’ve got nothing left to do, and that’s why I’d like you all to be more sympathetic and understand that I’m trying to organize things to escape the boredom.”

His voice sounds so broken that they’re all frozen for a moment.

“Don’t you see?” Riba carries on, “There’s nothing left for me to do, except. .”

He looks down. Everyone stares at him, as if asking him to make an effort, as if begging him, please, to complete the sentence and say something that will save them from feeling so embarrassed and awkward. They want this episode to be over soon.

He lowers his head even more, it’s as if he wants it to sink into the ground.

“Except. .”

“Except what, Riba? Except what? For God’s sake, explain. What’s left for you to do?”

He’d like to say, but he won’t: to find his spirit, the first person that existed in him and vanished so early on.

But no, he won’t say it.

For the sake of his health, he’s been going to bed early for over two years. And as he himself says, if he ever breaks this routine and goes to a dinner party — the last time was that evening at the Austers’ house — everything gets very complicated. For this reason, at ten o’clock, having eaten nothing but a squalid little sandwich, his friends drop him off at the entrance to Morgans hotel. He’s going to bed without having seen Dublin. It’s no big deal, but he thinks he could have been there by now; his friends could have been kind enough to go into the city at some point. But anyway, he’ll wait till tomorrow. They’ll see Dublin tonight, because they’ve arranged to meet Walter to give him his car back, and then they’re going to check out some bars and maybe some clubs. They tell Riba they expect to see him fresh-faced in the morning, at breakfast time. If he can’t sleep — they remark jokingly — Irish TV is always very enjoyable. And don’t drink the minibar dry, Ricardo advises him with unnecessary cruelty.

A last-minute question. Riba wants to know who Walter is. It seems somehow to be an unsolved mystery. They have a car and Walter is the one who loaned it to them. But why do they have this car and who is Walter?

Sometimes his friends don’t act like friends but like writers or former authors, and then they’re like everyone else: bastards. No one is prepared to give him an explanation about this Walter. It’s as if ever since an hour ago, when they learned he wasn’t going out with them, his friends, his ex-authors, stopped counting him among the living.

His head bowed, he goes into the hotel, a little annoyed with them. As he walks past the John Cox Wilde, which is now buzzing, he acts as if he hasn’t even seen the pub. He’s faced with a risk, because fate has surely planned to get him drunk there tonight. And so he doesn’t even look at it. But finally he gives in and glances over at the place, his curiosity gets the better of him. He goes in and resists, as much as he can, the constant waves of a nagging desire to have a drink, despite thinking that just one wouldn’t do any harm and might help him sleep better tonight. But he resists, because he knows it wouldn’t be just one drink and his will would easily cave in. This is why it’s better not even to start, not to try one drop. No alcohol at all.

He acts almost like a hero of “the anti-alcohol resistance.” He clenches his fists and thinks that he’ll turn around and go up to his room. It amuses him to think that if someone saw him in here, they’d think he’d started drinking again. In the end, he leaves the bar.

On his way to the elevator, he passes a young man wearing a black suit who seems to recognize him. For a minute, the guy hesitates and seems about to stop and talk to him. Riba also hesitates. But he doesn’t know him at all and it would be ludicrous to stop and talk to this stranger. In the end, the man coughs, looks away and quickens his pace.

In the elevator, the piped music is so depressing that for a minute he has the impression that the music itself, no matter how modern, is only bringing back memories of ruins: he tries to remember details of loved ones, houses, faces, but all that appears are ruins and more ruins. His life is in decline, he has to acknowledge it, but so is the world, and this gives him some consolation. He must try to make a connection, somehow, with enthusiasm. And in any case not cease in his exploration of the foreign. Dublin is a great first port of call in his struggle against the familiar, against the interbreeding of Catalan concepts and landscapes too often repeated and now too cramped for him. His native land, fatal land. He feels he’s truly fleeing from it at last. He should make up his mind once and for all and start this long journey toward enthusiasm, even if it were just to honor his grandfather Jacobo, such a supporter of euphoria. .

A ghostly brush against his shoulder. A coldness on the nape of his neck. But there’s no one else in the elevator. He looks at himself in the mirror and shrugs his shoulders, as if he’s trying to have fun all by himself now. What’s this icy draught? The elevator doors open; he steps out into the long, empty corridor, slowly walks down it. In the time it would take for the briefest flash of light in the world, he walks past his Uncle David, his mother’s brother, dead for more than twenty years. He’s not about to panic, but it’s the first time he’s seen the ghost of a relative outside his usual surroundings. In any case, the apparition was so fleeting that if he really saw it then he might have to start admitting that an instant like this is sort of a glimpse or connection point between the past and the present. Hadn’t he heard of interconnected points in space and time whose topology we might never understand, but between which the so-called living and the so-called dead can travel and thus encounter each other?

Time: Half past one in the morning.

Day: Bloomsday.

Style: Somnambulistic.

Place: Dublin, Morgans hotel. Room 527.

Action: Riba wakes abruptly from a deep sleep, as someone tries to enter his room using their swipe card. Still half asleep, he remembers the red suitcase someone left in the room this morning. He gets up fearing the intruder’s swipe card will end up working. When he can’t get in, the person on the other side nervously knocks three times on the door. Some unintelligible words are heard. The voice of a young man. It’s a little scary. The old panic of someone coming into your house or your hotel room in the middle of the night.

“Who’s there?” asks Riba, half sleepy, half scared.

“New York,” the voice of the young man replies.

Did he really say New York? Riba didn’t hear very well, but that’s what he thought he heard. New York. He goes back to bed, disconcerted and with a certain amount of comic awareness, as if retreating inside the room could protect him from something. He tries to think he’s dreamed it all. But he’s awake, and though he’s still quite sleepy and clumsy thanks to the one and a half Orfidal he took a while ago, he’s aware that all this couldn’t be more real. The thing he’s feared so much would happen to him one day is taking place. Someone is trying to get into his room in the middle of the night.

Two more knocks on the door.

“The suitcase is in reception,” he says to whoever is out there. And he almost shouts out of fear when he says this, as if he was scared that the person trying to get into his room wanted only to kill him.

A long silence follows. Riba is motionless, barely breathing.

Some footsteps in the corridor, and then on the stairs. The man goes away.

Day breaks very early in Dublin, something he hadn’t expected at all. At seven minutes past five, the very first light of day can be seen in the room, and he half opens his eyes. On the television, which he left on, he sees the mute image of a bridlepath lined with bare bushes. There’s no one on the path, until suddenly a funeral procession appears, led by a very majestic horse. Riba realizes he’s watching a Dracula film. Another shock for today, he thinks drowsily. All at once he remembers the disturbing events of last night. After the intruder appeared, he fell back asleep quite easily, and luckily, the man didn’t reappear. It must have been the owner of the red suitcase. And it’s more than likely that he didn’t say he was called New York, but some other thing that sounded like it and that Riba didn’t hear properly. No one’s called New York.

Perhaps he should have opened the door and made sure. He checks the time again. It’s only ten after five in the morning, a dreadful time to begin any kind of activity. To start with, it’s too early to go down for breakfast. Will his friends have returned yet from their night on the town? It would be awful to go out into the corridor and find them all there, drunk, barely able to recognize him. Or the other way around, to find them overly happy to see him, and what’s more, to run into the enigmatic Walter and for him to embrace Riba enthusiastically. It’s too early for that sort of thing. He’ll even have to wait to call his parents in Barcelona and wishing them a happy anniversary. Because today — he’s just remembered — is their sixty-first wedding anniversary.

Even so, he tries to liven up and recalls a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote: “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.” Today must be, he thinks. After all, he’s been waiting for it for weeks. Then, he remembers his grandfather Jacobo: “Nothing important was ever achieved without enthusiasm!” What a great phrase, he thinks once again. It’s clear he’s trying to liven up any way he can. He wants to feel euphoric on this Bloomsday. But he’ll have to wait. He’s used to that. He’d like to feel that enthusiasm his grandfather always tried to instill in him, but at this time in the morning — this morning of the best day of the year — it’s all turning out to be a little bit difficult. It seems as if even thinking is turning out to be complicated. He’s so sleepy he only manages to think he’s not managing to think much yet. Unexpectedly, he remembers: a day when, as he was coming out of the cinema he asked a young usherette — who vaguely reminded him of Catherine Deneuve — what she thought the film was about. And as she replied, telling him it was a story of undying love, he felt himself briefly falling in love with her. He has always liked women who look like Catherine Deneuve, and would go so far as to say that his whole life has been deeply marked by this.

It’s clear his mind is already starting to wake up. The proof is that he’s now gripped by a certain amount of enthusiasm. But he realizes that his euphoria must coexist with the awkward memory of the incident last night, which now he sees almost as a dream, or the start of a good story, although he won’t tell his friends about it later as if it were a story, or as if he were a writer. It’s possible the stranger was someone who thought he was still staying in room 527. Maybe it was a young man who stayed in this room with his lover. Perhaps that morning he had left the room very early and the woman, fed up with him and not knowing when he’d be back, decided to break things off, paid for the room and left his suitcase up there, so that, when he returned, the fool would realize he’d been abandoned to his fate.

What would have happened if Riba had opened the door a few hours ago? This guy was hoping to find his lover there. Maybe the stranger would have got the biggest shock himself. And what’s clear is that, if Riba had opened the door to him, a story would have been set in motion. A writer would no doubt have found the beginning of a good story there, thinks Riba. . His head nods gently. It seems he’s woken up too early and is going to fall back asleep. But he immediately recovers from this false return to slumber.

Shortly afterward, precisely when he’s most awake, he falls into a stupor of words and questions with very little meaning. He thinks, for example, about the color of Ireland and asks himself if one day this predominant color, green, will go away. What does this question mean? Isn’t it an idiotic question? He looks over at the TV and watches how, after scanning the horizon to look for the sun, Dracula hurls a curse at the sky. From the movement of his lips Riba thinks he’s understood what he said, but it doesn’t seem very likely. He thinks the vampire said:

“Restless as a child’s bottom.”

How strange, he thinks. Would the young man who came to look for his red suitcase and said he was called New York have spoken like that? His mind becomes somewhat confused again. And how strange it all is, he thinks. He pulls the sheets over his head, as if he were starting to feel scared again. If he could choose his future, he’d go on sleeping forever. If anyone knocked at the door now, he’d think it was the genius he’s been looking for all his life.

He remembers a day when, with excessive care, Celia read the label on a bottle of mineral water at home, turning it around slowly, without stopping. And now he does something similar in his room. He picks up a bottle of crystal-clear Irish spring water and repeats those gestures of Celia’s.

Loneliness. Celia over there in Barcelona. His friends, probably sleeping off their hangover. His parents on the day of their sixty-first wedding anniversary, but it’s so early in the day he can’t even call them.

Alone, dreadfully alone. Although, all things considered, with each moment that passes, the feeling of loneliness grows less. Because this strange background murmur doesn’t cease, the sensation of noticing the almost palpable presence of someone at his side, stalking him. Damn it, he thinks, I’m going to end up getting used to this company. He tries to incorporate some humor into the moment, but doesn’t really know how. He thinks that, if it’s anyone, this ghost can only be the creator of his days, or the spirit — the lost genius — of his childhood. Or someone who’s using him as a guinea pig for his experiments. Or Uncle David himself, although he doesn’t think so. Or the masterly author he always looked for and never found. Or no one. In any of these cases, it must be someone who, as Joyce would say, has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through a change of manners. Whoever it is, admitting the unmissable disparity — this someone or no one — must be like that famous reality, toward which one can get closer and closer, but never close enough; because reality knows how to slip away behind an infinite series, of footsteps, levels of perception, false soundings. And in the long run, reality turns out to be inextinguishable, unreachable. One can find out more and more about it, but not everything. Even so, it’s advisable to try to find out a little more, because in certain investigations surprises do occasionally occur.

Breakfast is served in a room adjacent to the lobby, an ultra-modern black and white space, a tiresome, painfully hip locale. He’s never seen such a dark, lowly-lit place for having breakfast: it looks like Dublin at night, but very late at night and before it was built, when this place too was one of the darkest on earth. Because, for starters, you can’t see a thing. And when he eventually gets used to the darkness, he starts to make out a series of brusque businessmen, each eating breakfast alone, their expressions stern and unsmiling, their briefcases on the floor. All he can see around him are sullen businessmen dressed in stiff suits. Those are “the Morgans,” he thinks. They don’t interact with each other, although one would hope that a certain enthusiasm for the things of this world would be visible on their faces. The Morgans seem to live in a migrainey, morbid, unsociable sort of enthusiasm. In order to be on a par with them, Riba asks for coffee in the same reserved, standoffish tone they use. A few of them throw him glances of complete indifference and seem to frown.

He amuses himself by imagining that one of the Morgans is eating cooked kidneys for breakfast, as Bloom does at the start of Ulysses. It comforts him to think that, when breakfast is over, it’ll be a more appropriate time to call his parents. One of the Morgans is staring at him so hard it makes him uncomfortable. It makes him think of a similarly sullen man he met in the Roverini on Madison Avenue, on his second trip to New York. Like that one, this man seems strangely familiar; it’s as if he knew him from a long time ago and knew everything about him, and yet as if at the same time the man, who looks quite Italian, were really a genuine and total stranger; more than that, it’s as if he were the person he knew least of all the millions of strangers in the world.

Maybe he’s spying on him. Or it could be that Walter man. Or a friend Nietzky recruited last night, who’ll come up to him any minute to introduce himself and say something like how he was the first to buy all the books Riba published at his publishing house. So you are the famous first person, Riba would say then if this guy came over to say something like that. But the supposed Italian doesn’t come over, he sits motionless, simply staring at him, until he gets bored and chooses instead to bury himself in his copy of the Irish Times, which they hand out on your way into the dining room. Riba wonders what would happen now if he went over to the man and told him that he sometimes thinks he recognizes the lost spirit of his childhood in strangers. The other man would either think he was a madman or was trying to chat him up. He’d never understand the spiritual nuances, this manoeuvre where he was only trying to connect as closely as possible to that little boy on a long-ago Barcelona patio, wanting to reconcile himself with his childhood spirit, with the first person he knew so fleetingly and who separated from him so early on. But the surly Morgans aren’t in the mood for any kind of subtleties.

Another one, the one sitting at an adjacent table very involved in some papers covered in figures and mathematical equations, looks at Riba now with absurd suspicion, as if he thought he wanted to copy his notes. This is all Riba needs, for someone to think he’s nostalgic for the world of business or needs to copy other people’s formulas for success.

He looks at the supposed Italian and confirms that the man’s stare of a few seconds ago has given up the ghost. This allows Riba to observe him better. He really reminds Riba of the young Morgan he saw a few months ago in New York’s Roverini. But he soon sees it’s not the same guy, not at all. This one, if possible, looks even more sullen.

What a shame he can’t tell his parents he’s thinking of them so fondly now on the day of their wedding anniversary, and that he’s doing so sitting opposite one Irish grump, and next to another, who’s almost childlike in his fear that someone’s going to copy his work. But Riba knows that, when he talks to his parents, he’ll only wish them a happy anniversary and will say nothing to them about these Morgans. He’s got enough problems with them since his visit last Wednesday ended so badly.

In order not to sink into self-reproach he concentrates again on the world of the sullen strangers. He thinks of all the ones he’s ever met in his life. The first that comes to mind is a burial insurance salesman, a friend of his grandfather’s who used to visit them every summer to renew their endless policies. He was extraordinarily sullen, as if he believed he had to be like that in order to be closely linked to his profession. And the worst thing: you could never tell what he was thinking.

“As a man thinketh, so is he,” he remembers his grandfather used to say. But was it his grandfather who said this? Did his grandfather, the least sullen man Riba has ever known, say so many things? He feels he’s worse than Spider, perhaps because he’s slept so little. And when he looks back over at that young, stern-faced, staring Morgan he sees that not only is the stranger no longer there, but that he’s vanished and not even the slightest trace of his presence remains. It’s as if he were never there.

He tries to remember that he has to go through the day completely enthused, but it’s hard to convince himself this will be possible. Where did that Morgan go? He found him deeply upsetting, but he hadn’t given him permission to disappear like that. He feels even more annoyed than when he was a child and his spirit abandoned him. And absurdly vindictive toward this Morgan who has left.

That young man — he thinks — so full of life, and at the same time insubstantial as a ghost. Recently, lots of people have been in the habit of disappearing a few seconds after having appeared.

And he remembers a little girl he used to play with in the summer holidays, in Tossa de Mar. Time flies like an arrow, the child used to say, and fruit flies fly too.

Back in his room, waiting for the revelers to wake up, he takes refuge in the book he’s brought with him and starts to read a biography of Beckett, by James Knowlson. He published it but didn’t read it at the time, and decided the trip to Dublin would provide an ideal opportunity to do so. The time has come to read this book he published five years ago and which, by the way, lost him so much money. He knows he could do other things. For instance, go to the executive lounge on the first floor and check his emails. But he wants to stick to his decision to undergo travel therapy and to distance himself from the internet and computers. He’s come to Dublin with this book on Beckett because he always thought one day an opportune moment to read it would arrive, but also because, shortly before leaving Barcelona, it struck him that Beckett was a great friend of Joyce’s — he’s heard it said he was his secretary too, but this isn’t true — and was born in Foxrock, County Dublin, on April 13, 1906, twenty-six months after the day on which Ulysses takes place. Precisely twenty-six months have passed since Riba suffered his physical collapse. Twenty-six months was also exactly how long his parents’ engagement lasted.

Now he reads the section where Knowlson comments on how the young Beckett fled Ireland and above all escaped from May, his mother, but didn’t have a much better time in London. He was depressed and jobless the whole time he was there. He applied without success for the post of assistant curator at the National Gallery. He suffered all sorts of physical discomforts in the form of cysts and eczema. He soon saw that he’d be forced to return to his Dublin home. The worst thing was that he went back, and his mother, convinced he was behaving strangely and had psychological problems, tortured him by making him return to London and paying for two years of intensive psychotherapy for him there, which led him to end up detesting forever the old capital of the empire and the empire itself. He was never a good Irishman, but he acted like it when it came to despising England. He traveled around Germany afterward, where he learned — Knowlson says — to be silent in another language, absorbed in front of Flemish paintings.

Even so, he did return to Dublin and to life with his mother. Uncomfortable in the house where he was born, in Cooldrinagh, in the village of Foxrock. Long walks at dusk to Three Rock and Two Rock, always returning home via Glencullen, generally accompanied by his mother’s two Kerry Blue terriers. Days of fog and lethargy, of indecision. Long hikes around the beautiful coast of the county: lighthouses, wind, harbors. Long strolls around one of the most beautiful areas on earth. And one single conviction during those days of much indecision: now he would hate London forever. And a question preyed on the no-longer-so-young Beckett: what if I went to France and fled from the beauty of the lighthouses and the last piers of the ports at the end of the world of my noble, beloved, sweet, revolting native land?

Two days later, Beckett says goodbye to Dublin once and for all and sets off for Paris, which soon becomes his life’s destiny. He experiences something there he forever calls a revelation and that he once summed up thus: “Molloy and the others came to me the day I realized my stupidity. Only then did I start to write what I felt.” When the biographer Knowlson asked him to be less cryptic about the matter, Beckett didn’t mind explaining it further:

I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than adding.

With this revelation of Beckett’s, the Gutenberg age and of literature in general had started to seem like a living organism that, having reached the peak of its vitality in Joyce, was now, with his direct and essential heir, Beckett, experiencing the irruption of a more extreme sense of the game than ever, but also the beginning of a steep decline in physical form, ageing, the descent to the opposite pier to that of Joyce’s splendor, a freefall toward the port’s murky waters and its poverty, where in recent times, and for many years now, an old whore walks in an absurd worn-out raincoat at the end of a jetty buffeted by the wind and the rain.

Reading makes him sleepy again, perhaps because he woke up too early. But he doesn’t attribute this sudden low to that, but rather to the fact that he’s started reading on the other bed, the one he didn’t sleep in last night. He remembers Amy Hempel, whose character says in one of her stories that she’d discovered a trick to get to sleep: “I sleep in my husband’s bed. That way, the empty bed I look at is my own.”

He looks at his empty bed and puts himself in the shoes of whoever might be observing him from the place he is now. The rumpled sheets on the adjacent bed would induce first boredom and then an instant loss of consciousness in this person. He imagines he gets right under the skin of the man and he ends up falling asleep, and a recurring nightmare of a cage gets to him too, except this time God is outside the cage. He’s a scruffy guy who’s always mechanically smoothing down his hair. He imagines that, under the gaze of the messy-haired man, he says to the absentee, the one who slept last night in the now empty bed:

“It was never a problem, but it’s starting to be one now, and it unsettles me. I try to communicate with myself, but it’s impossible to do so. There’s no greater distance than the space between two minds. As much as if you suspect I’m that first person who existed in you and vanished so early on, or if you think I’m the author of your days, or the spirit of your childhood, or simply the shadow cast by your publisher’s sorrow; the most distressing thing of all would be for you to think that I am happy. If only you knew.”

•

No one was further from suicide than Beckett. When he visited the grave of Heinrich von Kleist he felt a deep unease and scant admiration for this Romantic artist’s final suicidal gesture. Beckett, who loved the world of words and loved gambling, led a life where he wrote ever shorter, more minimal novels, works that were more and more stripped down and sparse. Always worstward. “Name, no, nothing is nameable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don’t know, I shouldn’t have begun.” A stubborn walk toward silence. “So leastward on. So long as dim still. Dim undimmed. Or dimmed to dimmer still. To dimmost dim. Leastmost in dimmost dim.”

He changed his language to impoverish his expression. And in the end his texts appeared more and more purged. The lucid delirium of poverty. Going through life forever hindered, precarious, inert, deformed, unsettled, numb, terrified, unwlecomed, naked, sickly, shaky, defenceless, exiled, inconsolable, playful. Beckett, skinny and smoking in his room in Tiers-Temps, a nursing home in Paris. His pockets full of cake for the pigeons. Retired, like any other elderly person with no family, to an old people’s home. Thinking of the Irish Sea. Waiting for the final darkness. “Much better, in the end, if sorrow disappears and silence returns. In the end, it’s how you’ve always been. Alone.”

So far from New York.

“I’d like to be born,” he hears someone say in the next room.

He interrupts his reading of the biography. It might be true that he’d heard this if it weren’t for the fact there’s no one in the adjacent room. Not a single sound has been heard there since he arrived. He hasn’t heard anyone go into the room. And anyway, the sentence was uttered in Spanish. It’s his imagination. It’s not exactly serious. He’ll continue to talk to it, to his imagination. He invents any name and says it before challenging it to come in.

“If you’re out there, knock three times.”

Enter ghost. Perhaps who’s come in is this first person he’s obsessed with, this first good man who became hidden thanks to his catalog.

It’s well known that ghosts come from our memories, they almost never arrive from distant lands, or outside us. They are our tenants.

“What about the red suitcase?”

“I never travel,” the ghost says. “I’m forever trying to be born. And to learn English, which it’s about time I did.”

Time: Eleven o’clock in the morning.

Date: Bloomsday.

Place: Meeting House Square, a square that developed from the place where a century ago a large part of the Quaker community of Dublin was concentrated.

Characters: Riba, Nietzky, Ricardo, Javier, Amalia Iglesias, Julia Piera, Walter, and Bev Dew.

Style: Theatrical and festive.

Action: The traditional public reading of Ulysses on the stage of the theater built in one corner of the square. A seated audience occupies all the chairs in Meeting House Square. More of the audience is on the terrace outside a café. Occasional passersby and people stand and talk, some of them very animatedly. A well-expressed pleasure at the costumes of the readers.

Riba finds himself with Julia Piera, a Spanish poet who’s lived in Dublin for two years and is also a friend of Javier and Ricardo and who immediately offers to add them to the list of people who will take their turn to read a section from the book on the little stage. They’re already at the end of chapter five, so the most likely thing is that, thanks to a curious coincidence, they’ll get to read bits from chapter six. Nietzky and Ricardo put their names on the list and are given readings at around half past twelve.

With anxious curiosity, Riba observes all the people dressed up as Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, Stephen Dedalus. He’s attaining small degrees of unsuspected happiness. Everything, absolutely everything, seems new to him, and life does too. He thinks the feeling must be similar to that of having traveled to another world. There’s an air of wonderful unreality. Of being somewhere else.

He records everything in a commonplace book he’s bought in a bookshop of the nearby photography gallery and that he’s decided to inaugurate with a list of the things that catch his eye this morning.

A word-for-word account of what he has written down up to now:

A man dressed as the “inner landscape of a skull.”

A wonderful fat girl who thinks she’s Molly Bloom.

The Israeli writer David Grossman, who’s put himself down on the list to read a fragment of Ulysses.

Bev Dew, the young daughter of the South African ambassador, in a wide-brimmed flowery hat and an ankle-length dress. Very beautiful. Fragrant face. Apple-faced. Accompanied by her laconic and strange brother Walter, a friend of Nietzky’s from school and shadowy owner of the Chrysler.

The poet Amalia Iglesias, who waves to Javier, who was her neighbor years ago in Madrid.

A Portuguese man dressed up as David Hockney!

“Full devotion to funerals!” Nietzky says. He’s probably been drinking again.

An anonymous, bony figure. To employ a Beckettian description: haughty forehead nose ears white holes mouth white threadlike finished invisible stitching.

Julia Piera again. Sensuality, beauty, vivaciousness.

A few more than obvious ghosts, even one wearing a white sheet. Me, comically reflected in a shop window again.

A sort of Finnish ogre with a straw hat and silver-handled cane.

A man in a raincoat bearing a quite astonishing resemblance to Beckett as a young man.

A Jesuit called Cobble, friend of Nietzky’s, who suddenly stops dead and starts talking in a suspiciously low voice to Amalia Iglesias.

The reading is running conspicuously late, as if from their Irish vantage point they wanted to poke fun at British punctuality. They’re so behind that Nietzky doesn’t take the floor until 1:10 p.m. He reads in a ridiculous, very correct and lilting English. His friend Walter’s sister, however, seems almost moved listening to him. Riba feels unexpectedly jealous, and then this reaction worries him. Extreme beauty, youth. He likes Bev, he can’t deny his arousal, his sudden sexual desire. Above all he likes her voice. In the middle of this sort of euphoria he’s experiencing, in the middle of unexpected levels of happiness, he thinks that maybe Bev reminds him of one of those girls with beautiful, glittering voices from the novels of Scott Fitzgerald: that timbre in which the jingle of coins can be heard, the beautiful cascade of gold in every fairy tale. Yes, he likes Bev, among other things because in some way her glamour brings her closer to New York. Or maybe he just likes her, and that’s it.

Meanwhile, up on the stage, the reading of Joyce’s novel continues. Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, and John Power are already sitting in the hearse and chapter six is trotting along at the same pace as the horses toward Prospect Cemetery.

— What way is he taking us? Mr Power asked through both windows.

— Irishtown, Martin Cunningham said. Ringsend. Brunswick street.

Mr Dedalus nodded, looking out.

— That’s a fine old custom, he said. I am glad to see it has not died out.

All watched awhile through their windows caps and hats lifted by passers. Respect. The carriage swerved from the tramtrack to the smoother road past Watery Lane.

“It’s really a requiem for my profession and above all for me, as I’m all washed up,” Riba says to Javier as he glances anxiously at Bev, as if wanting to point out to his friend that he’s saying all this because she reminds him that he’s old now, after all he’s nearly sixty and seducing her would not be the easy task it might have once been for him.

They’re standing on one side of the square, by the first row of seats of the ever-increasing audience.

“You don’t have to convince me of anything anymore,” Javier says. “And even less when we’re on the sixth chapter already and I’m feeling imbued with your idea for the requiem. I’ve even thought about writing a story about someone who holds funerals all over the world, funerals in the form of works of art. What do you think? It’s someone trying to learn to say goodbye to everything. Saying goodbye to Joyce and the age of print is not enough for him, and he starts to turn into a collector of funerals.”

Reba responds, “He could have this slogan printed on his hat: ‘Full devotion to funerals!’ It’s what Nietzky said just now.”

Javier can’t hear these last few words properly because an unnecessarily loud voice booms out from the stage.

“How awful! I don’t think the visit to the terrible Hades needs so much shouting,” Javier comments.

The sun comes out and obviously no one was expecting it, although everyone has immediately noticed it with great cheer. Riba goes back to his commonplace book and writes that, due to the sun’s recent appearance, people at the tables outside the café are now sitting open-mouthed, “as if they were already home and it was evening and they were watching television.”

The sun’s come out, but up there the reading continues on an ever gloomier stage: “A raindrop spat on his hat. He drew back and saw an instant of shower spray dots over the gray flags.”

Bev and Walter Dew come over, slightly enigmatically, across these same gray flagstones. It looks as if the South African ambassador’s son is about to say something, but in the end he lives up to his incurable curtness — Nietzky has already warned them that his friend is president of the elitist Dublin Laconic Society, and doesn’t tend to open his mouth much.

Bev smiles and asks, in her near-perfect Spanish, how they’re going to manage today without the Chrysler to get around on this wonderful Bloomsday. Not even she and her brother have the car today, because their father’s using it. There can be no doubt that hidden in the laconic man’s sister’s voice there’s real charm. It’s a sensual voice, with light, life, heat, he even hears sweat. A radiant, sparkling voice, although this sparkling contrasts at times with the girl’s opaque intelligence.

“Trains and taxis,” Javier replies, “it’s not a problem. We came here in a taxi today. Otherwise we’ll walk, it’s fine.”

Riba doesn’t even move, he’s rooted to the spot looking at Bev, hoping that maybe she’ll say something else.

“Isn’t that right?” Javier asks him. “Well, look at this, our beloved editor has joined the laconic circle.”

“Oh, yes,” Riba reacts. “There are taxis everywhere. All you’ve got to do is raise your arm when you’re out on the road, in front of the hotel, for example, and one soon stops.”

When he’s finished saying this, he feels, he’s almost certain, that he’s said too much. And he remembers there was a time when he felt genuine panic at turning into a chatterbox.

Some distance away from Riba stands Ricardo, slightly cautious, a Pall Mall in hand as ever, talking to Nietzky.

“Listen up. To me the worst thing is that Riba’s been imagining me all this time as some sort of Romantic artist type. It’s madness. I can’t understand why he’s incapable of seeing me as a normal person, a family man, an office worker, a busy husband who goes to the supermarket on the weekends and takes the garbage out every night. I mean, I’m nothing more, nothing less than that.”

“I didn’t know you were so normal,” says Nietzky.

On the stage, the relentless reading of the novel continues:

White horses with white frontlet plumes came round the Rotunda corner, galloping. A tiny coffin flashed by. In a hurry to bury. A mourning coach. Unmarried. Black for the married. Piebald for bachelors. Dun for a nun.

— Sad, Martin Cunningham said. A child.

State of the sky: Very bright, getting more and more sunny.

Action: In his corner, Riba thinks about the child he was. A strange moment. He imagines the coffin he would have had if he’d died young. And he also imagines the shadow of his spirit — the guardian angel lost at such a young age — accompanying the coffin in silence. Then the voice of his childhood playmate. Time flies like an arrow and fruit flies fly too.

Not far off, Ricardo and Nietzky continue their now lengthy conversation.

“What can the Rotunda corner be?” Ricardo asks.

“The Rotunda corner? The corner of Death. At least that’s what it seems like, doesn’t it?”

“But also like Gothic Rotunda, that font invented in I don’t know which century. But it’s true, it would be normal for the Rotunda to be Death. About being normal. Didn’t you know I was?”

Short silence.

“What? Normal? Well, no.” Another brief silence. “I associate you with art and as far as I know, art is never normal. It’s labyrinthine, fantastically deceitful and complex, my friend. Look at Walter, for instance.”

“Is Walter an artist?”

“In his own way he is. He’s not normal, even when he’s taking out the garbage.”

In another corner of the square, Bev has just noticed Riba’s notebook.

“What are you writing in there?” she asks.

Riba reckons that maybe, if she’s addressed him so familiarly, it’s because she doesn’t see him as that old or decrepit. He cheers up suddenly, actually he cheers up a lot, enormously so. It was worth taking the Irish leap for something like this alone. The girl’s question has given him an opportunity to shine, and given that he’s already taken the much desired English leap, he understands that now he can even reconcile himself with his French past — he’s already quite keen to do so — and become an echo of the Parisian Perec, his eternal idol, and a superb expert in questioning the everyday, the commonplace.

“Oh, nothing,” he replies. “I’m taking notes on what seems not to be important, what isn’t spectacular, what happens every day, what comes back every day. The trivial, the everyday, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, background noise, the usual, what happens when nothing is happening. .”

“What did you say? Don’t you think Bloomsday is spectacular? But that’s awful, baby, that’s awful you don’t think it’s spectacular!”

Did she say “baby’? It’s not the most important thing, but her tone of voice didn’t sound nearly as wonderful as before, this is true. And although everything can be improved on, the bad first impression he’s doubtless managed to have of the girl is beyond repair. He thought ingenuously that the South African ambassador’s daughter’s intelligence was equal to her beauty and all he’s achieved is to come across like a fool, as someone incapable of valuing the spectacular qualities of Bloomsday. Good heavens, this is hopeless now. And it won’t do any good to think this “baby” of hers was vulgar and unnecessary as well, nor will it do any good to think the girl looks like or is a total idiot. Even if she is or looks that way, he was the one not to rise to the occasion and everything is beyond hope now. And so is his age, and what’s worse: his blatant decrepitude. It’s better to take a few steps and move away, to help the famous fruit fly to fly.

When, after walking in a slow zigzag across the square, Amalia gets to where Nietzky and Ricardo are, they finally discover, thanks to her, that the Rotunda isn’t Death, or a typeface, nor can it be associated in any way — everything would fit too neatly if it could — with the death of the age of print. No. It’s simply the old maternity hospital of Dublin, the first one in Europe.

Birth and Death. And Amalia’s laughter.

At the same time, Bev has returned to her attack on Riba. She looks at him, laughs. What can she want now? Will she go on about how spectacular the day is? She’s very beautiful. Despite his recent letdown, he’d give anything to hear her voice again. He’s bewitched, he admits it, but she makes him feel like he’s in the States. Will she call him “baby” again?

“My favorite writer is Ragú Candor,” Bev says in her attractive voice, just as sensual as before although now she has a French accent. “And yours?”

Riba, much taken aback, understands that whatever happens he’s now faced with a second chance and starts to think carefully about his answer. In the end, he chooses not to make mistakes and opts for this Candor as well, a man he’s never heard of. What a coincidence, Riba says, he’s my favorite too. Bev looks at him in surprise and asks him to repeat that. Ragú is my favorite, Riba says, I like his stylistic restraint and the way he deals with silence. I thought you were more intelligent, Bev says. Ragú Candor is for silly girls like me and now you seem silly too.

She’s won the game. And what’s more, Riba was wrong again and the worst of it is that — the idea of getting along with Bev now ruled out forever — he feels he’s aged ten years. He’s incapable now of seducing young girls. He’s made a fool of himself, he’s finished. Without drink he lacks the humor that at least made him more daring and funny. His face darkens, and gradually acquires a slow, mournful look.

Up there, on the stage — as if it were a parallel story — the reading of the novel goes on and the funeral cortège continues slowly on its way at the height of a sunny morning: “Dunphy’s corner. Mourning coaches drawn up drowning their grief. A pause by the wayside. Tiptop position for a pub. Expect we’ll pull up here on the way back to drink his health. Pass round the consolation. Elixir of life.”

The Rotunda was always a good excuse to take to drink.

Time: A quarter to four.

Date: Bloomsday.

Place: Martello tower, in the village of Sandycove, a circular tower on the outskirts of the city of Dublin, the place where Ulysses begins: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead. . Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest.”

Characters: Riba, Nietzky, Javier, and Ricardo.

Action: They have climbed up the narrow spiral staircase to the round gunrest, and are now contemplating the Irish Sea from up there. The day is still calm and the sky is a surprisingly uniform white. The tide is high, and the surface of the sea, taut and burnished like rippling silk, looks higher than the land. Riba is hypnotized for a few moments. Strange sea of an intense blue, dangerous like love. He imagines that the sea, in reality, is only a pale gold gleam that extends out to the impossible horizon.

As time is getting on, because they’ve arranged to meet the Dew siblings and Amalia and Julia Piera at the gates of Glasnevin Cemetery, Nietzky decides to found the Order of Knights right here, high up in the tower. What’s more, he considers the setting a nobler one. They went to Finnegan’s pub yesterday and when they pass it again going to Dalkey to get the train home, they’ll have too little time to stop and found the Order there.

They’re alone on the gunrest, but Riba has the feeling that the wind is carrying broken words and that, what’s more, there’s a ghost hidden on the spiral staircase. Javier, who hates Ulysses, is pretending he’s Buck Mulligan and shaving his chin. Nietzky reads the rules he drew up yesterday: “The Order of Finnegans has as its sole purpose the veneration of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. The members of this society are obliged to honor the work and to honor Bloomsday every year, and when possible, go to the Martello tower in Sandycove and to feel there that they are part of a now ancient race that began like the sea, without name or horizon, and which today is in danger of dying out. . ”

In quite a hurry and after the symbolic inauguration of the Knights, it’s decided that every year one new member can be admitted, “only if and when three-quarters of the Knights of the Order agree to it.” And then, with no time left to lose, they go to catch the train. They walk for half an hour along the road to Dalkey and from there, without stopping at Finnegans, take the train back to Dublin singing a song about Milly, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Blooms who left Dublin to study photography and who only appears obliquely in Ulysses:

O, Milly Bloom, you are my darling.

You are my looking glass from night till morning.

I’d rather have you without a farthing

Than Katey Keogh with her ass and garden.

Time: After five o’clock.

Character: Riba.

Theme: Riba’s old age.

Action: Takes place entirely in Riba’s imagination, on the train returning to Dublin from Dalkey. With his friends singing “O, Milly Bloom” in the background, he imagines that this ghost haunting him and taking notes of everything happening on the train, and whose breathing he can practically hear, is a young novice in the world of letters; someone who’s spent weeks getting more and more involved in an adventure that’s driving him mad and which, moreover, he doesn’t know whether or not will end up leaving him buried under the books of his future oeuvre: an oeuvre that sooner or later will prevent him — a parallel story to that of Riba as a publisher, who these days sees his true personality obscured thanks to his catalog — from knowing who he is, or who he might have been.

He imagines that the young novice has chosen him as a character, a guinea pig for his experiments, as the character of a novel about the real life, without any exaggeration — of a poor old retired publisher who’s somewhat desperate. He imagines that young man observing him closely, studying him as if he were a guinea pig. For the novice it’s a question of finding out if devoting himself to good literature for forty years has been worth the trouble, and he tells the story of the daily life, without too many surprises, of the character he’s observing. At the same time as considering whether such literary passion is worth the effort; he tells how the retired publisher is still looking for the new, the revitalizing, the foreign. He comes as close to the character as he can — sometimes in the most physical sense — and narrates the problems the man has with his wife’s Buddhism, while commenting on his movements — having a funeral in Dublin, for example — to fill an empty space.

He imagines that in the novel, the novice has set out to subvert a certain kind of conventional approach, but isn’t trying to transform literature into something mysterious, rather attempting to make it possible for the literary publisher to be seen as a hero of our time, as an individual who bears witness to the disappearance of publishers of distinction and reflecting on the difficult situation of a society headed toward stupidity and the end of the world.

He imagines that suddenly this novice comes so close to him that Riba ends up sitting on top of him and blocking his view, suffocating him so the poor young man can only see a huge blurry blot, which is actually the written publisher’s dark-colored jacket.

Taking advantage of this opportune blot that momentarily paralyzes the novice’s narrative powers, Riba manages in every sense to put himself in the other man’s place, and to take over his way of seeing things. He then discovers, not without surprise, that he shares absolutely everything with him. To start with, an identical tendency to narrate, and interpret — with the distortions peculiar to a highly literary reader — those everyday events that touch his life.

Then the train goes into a tunnel and he is finally left with no imagination. Zero imagination. Total darkness. A bit of clarity comes when they emerge from the tunnel and he sees the light of dusk again. He thinks he’s missed everything already. And then suddenly, he feels a ghostly touch on his back. For a few moments he sits motionless in his seat, and little by little starts to understand that the novice is still there, lying in wait.

Time: Fifteen minutes later.

Style: As theatrical as in the Meeting House Square and maybe more gloomy than festive, although things could change at any moment.

Place: The Catholic cemetery of Glasnevin. A million people are buried here. Founded by Daniel O’Connell, it is eerie at this time in the evening. There are many patriotic monuments, decorated with national symbols or personalized with sports paraphernalia and old toys. Curious towers on the walls, which were used to look out for grave robbers who worked for surgeons at the end of the nineteenth century.

Characters: Riba, Javier, Nietzky, Ricardo, Amalia Iglesias, Julia Piera, Bev, and Walter Dew.

Action: Outside the gates to the place, Riba becomes emotional when he sees the iron railings. They’re the same ones Joyce names in chapter six. Are they really railings or a line from Ulysses? Faced with this dilemma, Riba is lost for a long time, and after a powerful mental journey, his gaze ends up returning to the cemetery gates. “The high railings of Prospect rippled past their gaze. Dark poplars, rare white forms. Forms more frequent, white shapes thronged amid the trees, white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sustaining vain gestures on the air.”

“The same poplars,” Amalia whispers. They cross the threshold of the main gates and the eight of them walk through the terrifying cemetery, which looks like it’s come straight out of the Dracula film Riba saw this morning. All that’s missing is some artificial fog and for Paddy Dignam’s corpse to rise up from the grave. Riba continues to remember: “Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.”

Ravages of death, ravages of the Rotunda.

An unexpected, inspired tirade from Ricardo when they’re already a few yards inside the cemetery. He says he’s had a sudden revelation and understood everything all at once. He now sees how pertinent the funeral for the Gutenberg age is, for we mustn’t lose sight of how much Joyce loved wordplay.

“And I don’t know if you’ve realized that Bloomsday,” he says, “sounds like Doomsday. And the long day Ulysses takes place on is nothing less than that.”

In the end, Ricardo says, Joyce’s book is a sort of universal synthesis, a summary of time; a book designed to make a few anecdotal gestures signal an epic, an odyssey in the most literal sense of the word. That’s why whoever had the idea for a requiem had the greatest idea of all.

They walk slowly down the main path in Glasnevin and come to a beautiful lilac tree, which Ricardo photographs after explaining to them all, with unnecessary solemnity, that he’s almost certain it appears in Ulysses toward the end of the cemetery scene. Nietzky thinks the tree is the same color as the lilacs at the Rotunda, which he takes to represent Death, and talks — without the others really understanding him — about the beauty of the Rotunda’s lilacs, as if there had to be a logical and purely commonsensical relationship between the lilacs and Dublin’s maternity hospital. Riba comes to the conclusion that young Nietzky is talking for the sake of talking and has had a lot to drink again, besides.

Oblivious to his status as a fallen angel, Nietzky reflects aloud on the disparity between the length of men’s lives and that of lilacs and other trees. Julia Piera yawns, and then her gaze wanders to a mother and daughter in mourning, standing by a grave, the girl’s face streaked with dirt and tears. The mother with a long face, pale and bloodless. Mother and daughter, a hideous pair as if plucked from a drama from another century, as if they’d stepped out of a period film about life in the Rotunda.

And Ricardo, totally oblivious to this, makes questionable macabre jokes. Minutes later, in the middle of an argument in overly raised voices about the gloomy beauty of the place and the by now hackneyed lilac tree, Bev asks for everyone’s attention so they can observe how the cawing of the crows blends with their argumentative visitors’ shouts.

There are crows, but no one’s heard them cawing. A brief silence. A pause. The wind. “You will see my ghost after death.” Ricardo finds this phrase, lifted from Ulysses, carved onto a gravestone beside one of the smaller paths, in the Murray family crypt. Another photo opportunity, obviously. “How wonderful the Murrays are,” someone says. More group portraits. Now everyone squeezes around the tomb of the Joycean family. A cemetery worker wields Ricardo’s camera as if he were a great photographic artist and gives them all orders to pose with more style. When the session is over, someone realizes they’ve been walking around for quite some time now and still haven’t gone into the chapel at the end of the cemetery, the place where the brief and sad funeral for Dignam the drunk was held. This seems like the ideal place for the funereal words for the Gutenberg age, and actually for everything, for the world in general.

Javier asks how they’re going to make sure the requiem is a work of art. They all look thoughtful. Then the laconic Walter speaks up. He offers to recite the prayer. It will be a short piece, he says, very artistic, thanks precisely to its brevity and depth. Everyone looks at Walter, they all stare incredulously at him and carry on walking along the path that leads to the chapel. A laconic man’s words can always have an artistic side, Riba thinks. “It’s a prayer for writers,” Walter says, with an unnecessarily doleful air. And he tells them it was composed by Samuel Johnson, on the day he signed a contract to write the first complete dictionary of the English language.

Then repeats what he’s just said, in English, despite it not being at all necessary. Walter has a great involuntary sense of humor. At the same time, it’s surprising that even before intoning the funeral prayer, he’s said so much already, even a few unnecessary words. What a waste, Riba thinks. Another long pause. Everyone’s gaze drifts to a bench, the last one on the left shortly before going into the chapel. Two men who look like tramps have just sat down there, two guys who are remarkably pale. “Two stiffs who’ve come out to get some fresh air,” Ricardo says, as if his flowery Polynesian shirt made him feel more alive than anyone else. Laughter.

A gentle evening breeze moves the lilac tree. Actually, Johnson was praying for himself, Walter clarifies. And he says it so naturally it’s as if Johnson were simply one of them. No one in the group has heard of this prayer before. In any case they all think it’s a good idea to use a prayer of Johnson’s to intone a funeral hymn. After all, Walter says, Dr. Johnson is the only person in the world to have dedicated a genuinely brilliant essay to the theme of epitaphs. He himself specialized in them for a while, writing them in verse and giving them to the best tombs in London. So Dr. Johnson seems like the ideal person for this epitaph for the Gutenberg age, Walter says.

Everyone is delighted that Dr. Johnson’s writers’ prayer is the one that will be used as an epitaph for the print age. Everyone that is except Riba, who at the last minute discovers that, as hard as he tries, he can’t identify at all with writers, against whom he actually bears a certain grudge, because when it comes down to it, they’re the involuntary cause of this sorrow that at times reappears in the middle of his recurring nightmare about the cage and God. Deep down, Riba fears that this writers’ prayer is pursuing him and making him regret what he stopped doing, his brain forever pierced by his publisher’s sorrow, by that intimate hydra gnawing away at him.

The wind moves the lilac tree again.

And what’s more, Riba thinks, they’re taking this ceremony too seriously. They don’t realize that the apocalyptic is now, but it was already there back in the mists of time and will still be there when we have gone. A very informal man or feeling is what’s apocalyptic, and doesn’t deserve so much respect. The important thing is not that the print age is foundering. The serious thing is that I am foundering.

“For himself,” Walter is still saying, “Johnson was praying for himself.”

Then Nietzky says that there are prayers for sailors, for kings, for distinguished men, but that he didn’t know there could be a prayer for writers.

“And what about publishers?” Javier asks.

Riba remembers a dream in which he saw Shakespeare studying Hamlet to play the part of the ghost.

“Johnson was praying for himself,” Walter insists.

They go into the little chapel, and Riba recalls the obese gray rat that in Joyce’s book toddles about by a crypt close to Paddy Dignam’s. He remembers his friend Antonia Derén, whose anthology on the various appearances of rats in the most illustrious contemporary novels he published a few years ago.

“One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the bones clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat gone bad,” Bloom thinks at the funeral.

Walter waits for a great silence to fall and then, when he sees the suitable conditions for his prayer have arrived, he utters it in a solemn, quivering voice: “O God, who hast hitherto supported me, enable me to proceed in this labor, and in the whole task of my present state; that when I shall render up at the last day an account of the talent committed to me, I may receive pardon by the grace of God. Amen.”

No one, except Riba, can understand what is going on when Walter then suddenly starts weeping inconsolably. In theory, he’s not a writer and so this problem linked to literary talent shouldn’t affect him. The thing is, even if he were, it wouldn’t really be very logical for him to start weeping like this. After all, no writer has ever shed a single tear about this. But Riba knows that’s precisely where the clue to solving this enigma lies. Writers don’t cry for themselves or for other writers. Only someone like Walter who sees everything from the outside and who has a special intelligence and sensitivity, understands how much one should cry whenever one sees a writer.

Riba is poking fun at the funeral, but he wants to rise to the occasion and be as sincere and authentic as Walter. And out of the options he’s considering on various pieces of paper in his pocket, he plans to read, as a funeral prayer, the text of a letter from Flaubert that reveals how uncontrollably seduced the writer felt by the figure of St. Polycarp, martyr and bishop of Smyrna, to whom this expression is attributed: “My God! What century — or what world — have you made me born into?”

In order to better read this letter, first he tries to get as emotional as Walter. Right here, he thinks, is where Dignam’s coffin once was, which I imagined so many times when I was reading Ulysses. Here was this coffin in this chapel, and it doesn’t look like things have changed much since Joyce’s time. Everything looks exactly conserved in time, identical to the book. The bier, the entrance to the chancel, are all identical. The chancel is the same, there’s no doubt. There were four tall yellow candles at the corners, and the mourners knelt here and there, in these praying desks. Bloom stood behind, near the font, and when all had knelt, he carefully dropped his unfolded newspaper from his pocket and knelt his right knee upon it. Right here. This is where he fitted his black hat gently on his left knee, and holding its brim, bent over piously, more than a century ago now. But everything’s the same. Isn’t it moving?

Then he takes a step forward and walks to the middle of the altar and from there prepares to recite his dirge in the form of Flaubert’s letter to his lady friend Louise Colet. But at that moment a street vendor enters and approaches the group, with his little cart of biscuits and fruit. Somewhat thrown by his appearance, Nietzky intervenes with nervous energy, and without anyone having let him through or given him permission, starts to read, aloud and very fast, the section from Ulysses where a priest blesses Dignam’s soul. He reads somewhat hastily and awkwardly and adds many words of his own, ending like this: “All the year round that priest prayed the same thing over them all and shook water on top of them all. On Dignam now. And on top of an age that today dies with him. Never, ever, nothing. Never more, Gutenberg. Bon voyage, into the void.”

Pause. The wind.

And then in a sing-song, priestly voice:

“In paradisum.”

They all repeat the litany tersely, annoyed, perhaps because they feel something more than skeptical, and they have the impression that Nietzky couldn’t have been more false and mocking in his farewell sentiment for an era. “Some of us,” Walter says, “were not born for superficiality.” Once again, his involuntary humor. Stifled laughter. What can he have meant to say? Maybe it’s too simple. Nietzky was awful. And superficial, of course.

Riba finally gets ready now to recite his funeral prayer when a young couple comes in unexpectedly. Dubliners, probably. The man is tall and has a beard, the woman has long blonde hair carefully combed back. The woman crosses herself, the two speak in low tones, one might say they’re asking what sort of gathering is being held here in the chapel. Riba goes closer to hear what they’re saying and discovers that they’re French and are talking about the price of some furniture. Brief bewilderment. The sound of a cart transporting stones can be heard. Now everyone looks at Riba, undoubtedly so that he’ll bring to a close the ceremony he would have finished by now if not for the street vendor, the French couple, and Nietzky with his nervous energy. Ricardo too wants to join in with the prayer, and faced with such indecision, he gets there before Riba: “I don’t think any more words are necessary. Gutenberg interred, we’ve entered other ages. They will have to be buried too. We’ll have to burn phases as we go, perform more funerals. Until Judgement Day arrives. And then conduct a funeral for that day too. Then lose oneself in the immensity of the universe, listen to the endless movement of the stars. And organize obsequies for the stars. And after that I don’t know.”

The French couple is whispering louder now. Are they still talking about furniture? Riba decides to give the letter from Flaubert to Julia Piera, who takes the floor to read, with a few variations of her own, this sort of dirge of an essay: “All this makes me sick. Nowadays, literature looks like a great urinal factory. This is what people smell of, more than anything! I’m always tempted to exclaim, like St. Polycarp did, ‘Oh my God! What century — or what world — have you made me born into!’ and to flee, covering my ears, as this holy man did whenever he found himself faced with an unseemly proposition. Anyway. The time will come when the whole world will have turned into a businessman and an imbecile (by then, thank God, I will be dead). Our nephews and nieces will have a worse time. Future generations will be tremendously stupid and rude.”

Riba, as an ex-businessman, preferred Julia to read this letter. He wouldn’t have been able to stand his friends’ giggles when it came to talking about businessmen. The crunch of gravel is heard. An obese gray rat, Riba thinks. The distant cry of a seagull is also heard. The biscuit vendor seems to have gone for good. Riba waits for silence, and then taking two steps forward, more stately than plump Buck Mulligan at the start of Ulysses, he reads his personal requiem for the grand old whore of literature and recites “Dublinesque”:

Down stucco sidestreets,

Where light is pewter

And afternoon mist

Brings lights on in shops

Above race-guides and rosaries,

A funeral passes.

The hearse is ahead,

But after there follows

A troop of streetwalkers

In wide flowered hats,

Leg-of-mutton sleeves,

And ankle-length dresses.

There is an air of great friendliness,

As if they were honouring

One they were fond of;

Some caper a few steps,

Skirts held skilfully

(Someone claps time),

And of great sadness also.

As they wend away

A voice is heard singing

Of Kitty, or Katy,

As if the name meant once

All love, all beauty.

Minutes after the funeral oration for the honest old whore of literature, before leaving Glasnevin, they stand looking at a sign on the cemetery wall near the exit that prohibits cars from going over twenty miles an hour as they’re leaving. There’s laughter at the sign, maybe in an attempt to diffuse some of the tension that’s built up in the last few minutes. The French couple talk to the street vendor. Beyond them, the two cadaverous-looking tramps are still sitting on their bench. Far away, the screech of a seagull seems to imitate a crow. Or is it a crow?

“Let’s get out of here,” Javier says emphatically. Everyone seems to agree. They go back to Milly Bloom’s song, which they all sing happily now, as if they’d just escaped from an awful nightmare. Yes, that’s enough of this place.

They speed up and look as if they’ve just arrived from a trip to the country. The railings of Ulysses are slowly left behind. And that fragment:

“The gates glimmered in front: still open. Back to the world again. Enough of this place.”

At the very gates of the cemetery is the ancient pub, Kavanagh’s, also known as the Gravediggers. This pub isn’t named in Joyce’s chapter, but nevertheless it was here in 1904, next to the gates. It’s a squalid place, as far as they can see, which must have a hair-raising atmosphere late at night, something no one here doubts in the slightest, as already, right now in the evening light, at first glance and from outside, you can see that the very structure of the bar itself is reverberating and shuddering, as if about to explode.

Action: After all the ups and downs of the day, everyone goes into the Gravediggers set on sinking down to the bottom somehow. They go in very thirstily.

The Rotunda always was a good excuse to take to drink.

The customers of the Gravediggers have literally turned the pub into pandemonium. At this time of day, the Gravediggers is the capital of Hell, the city of Satan and his acolytes, the city built by fallen angels. It’s at the opposite extreme from the Pantheon in Paris, for example. That sobriety, that elegance. Riba has started thinking of Paris again, of all things French. He interprets it as a passing nostalgia for the time of his admiration of Paris. That pantheon, those serene spaces where one can try to reunite all the gods.

The poet Milton made it possible for one to imagine the capital of Hell, Pandemonium, as a very small place. The demons had to make themselves tiny to get into it. Here, in this bar in Dublin, all the customers seem to have reduced their size to be able to be with the rest of the monsters in such a reduced space. The preferred noise of the agitated clientele is a string of staccato chatter, like a hyena’s laugh or the shrieks of a baboon, getting slower at the same time as it acquires a shriller pitch.

They’re all proper atheists, the barman says, amusingly and absurdly, in a Spanish he assures them he learned in Barcelona. No one really understands what he’s talking about. The racket gets more deafening every night, the barman explains without explaining anything. No one knows what the relationship between the noise and atheism can be exactly, but it doesn’t seem like the best moment to explain. The deafening party continues. Riba, who now really can hear the cawing Bev said she heard before, imagines that the customers and other gravediggers are like crows who flap down onto the pub’s roof every evening at dusk, and then penetrate the most unlikely places in the tiny, hellish bar and growl, threatening each other and singing obscene songs about Milly Bloom and other invented ladies of Dublin, all dead now. And meanwhile the bar reverberates and shudders and the atmosphere is alcoholic to the most delirious extremes.

The Gravediggers presents the most serious temptation to drink Riba has encountered since he came out of his health crisis. Who knows, maybe the secret name of the pub is the Coxwold. Riba is terrified at the mere possibility of falling off the wagon again and doesn’t lose sight of the threat the infernal place poses. Perhaps it’s here that the prophetic, moving, and terrifying vision of his dream might come true, this vision to be found inside the same dream that’s led him to Dublin and to this cavern of crows vibrating with the terrible air of the end of a party as in the cantina El Farolito from that novel by Lowry he’s always admired so much.

Everyone here looks as if they’ve come from the cemetery, he’s thinking, and at that moment his cell phone rings. A call from Barcelona. It’s Celia phoning to tell him that she’s had a call from Calle Aribau and that his parents are indignant because he still hasn’t wished them a happy sixty-first wedding anniversary. Oh no, Riba thinks. He’d completely forgotten. Maybe Dublin has liberated him too much from his parents’ gentle tyranny.

“Where are you now?” Celia wants to know.

“In the Gravediggers. A pub on the outskirts.”

Perhaps he shouldn’t have said this. Being in a pub, and also the name of this one, could get him into trouble.

“No, Celia, I haven’t had a drop to drink. Don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying. What makes you think I’m crying?”

There’s too much noise in the pub. He goes outside so he can talk. The racket subsumes the entire area around the pub and the high railings. He has a long conversation with Celia and makes another mistake, because when he describes the bar he tells her it looks like that place after death, a world called hell. “I don’t like your vision of the other world,” she says in a dangerously Buddhist tone. He immediately tries to change the subject, but Celia wants to know if he’s sure he hasn’t had a drink. And he has to take a few minutes to calm her down. When he finally manages to soothe her, he hangs up and stands lost in the noisy atmosphere around the door to the Gravediggers. He stands there thinking about the Coxwold premonition. He dreamt that scene of inconsolable weeping with Celia at the entrance to the bar with such intensity that, even though it’s only the memory of a dream, it’s still one of the most impressive memories of his life. He came here to Dublin to encounter the sea, but also to encounter this unlived memory, this moment which, just as happened in his New York dream, has hidden within it something some people call the moment of true sensation. Because that weeping seemed to contain, in its most absolute fullness, the core of his existence, the secret universe of all his great love for Celia and infinite joy at being alive and also the tragedy of having been, two years ago, on the point of losing it all.

Perhaps Celia should be here now, and a couple of good drinks should have left the two of them crying emotionally, collapsed in an embrace on the floor, at the entrance to this hellish pub: fallen, but together forever in their love and in their essential weeping, and with Buddha’s permission, going through an intense experience of great epiphany, a moment right in the center of the world.

The noise inside the Gravediggers is so loud that now he’s talking to Walter using only signs. No one can understand him, not even Walter, an expert in sign language. But Riba on the other hand knows very well what he’s saying. He’s telling Walter that all life is a demolition job, but the blows that carry out the dramatic part of this task — the sudden hard blows that come, or seem to come, from outside — the ones that a person remembers and that make him blame things, and those that, in moments of weakness, a person tells his friends about, don’t reveal their effects immediately. The blows come from inside, those blows that furtively encroached upon your interior self from the moment you decided to become a publisher and look for writers, and especially for a genius. These blows are related to a dull, muted pain a person doesn’t really notice until it’s too late to do anything, until you realize once and for all that in a certain sense you’ll never again be who you were and that the blows were well-aimed.

•

He doesn’t touch a drop, but perhaps because he’s returned, after twenty-six months, to a completely alcohol-infused environment, he remembers that his greatest error, linked to his love of drink, was his inexcusable need to show others the most abject side of his being, and the fact that he always he used to make an effort to speak the truth about what he was thinking, whether or not this hurt whoever might be listening. Taking for granted that his charming side was always visible, he took pains to reveal his abject side. And he did this driven by a need, on the one hand, to escape all social protocols (which made him feel ill) and on the other, because of a desire to align himself with the purest and most original surrealist movement, that which held that any idea that passed through one’s head should be immediately put out there and doing so constituted a moral obligation, because this way the most intimate side of everyone’s personality was put on display. Naturally this, shall we say, aggressive compulsion brought him numerous problems, lost him contracts and friendships and destroyed his public image. Now, since he stopped drinking and went over to the other side and reveals only, in a positively overwhelming way, the most attractive side of his being, he has the feeling he’s lost the suicidal but brilliant “open country” of his previous experiences. He’s remained in a state of stifling serenity and politeness and cleanliness that sickens him. It’s as if now he were merely an elegant impostor who pilfered the genuine, moving images from the minds of others. Of course he couldn’t feel less inclined to have a few drinks and return uselessly to being abject. He’d much rather feel that, for some time now, sobriety has been helping him to recover his tragic conscience, as well as to look for his center, his algebra and his key, as Borges would say, and his mirror.

An hour later, imagination and memory transport Riba to the end of the sixties and the edge of a forest on the Costa Brava battered by gale-force winds. He finds himself on this confused forest edge, the sky grown dark and a wind rising, blowing dust over the surface of the scorched earth, creating, at first swirls, and then freak cobwebs that gradually formed a persistent and obsessive geometric poem in his mind. He remembers that back then he was still very young and hadn’t yet published even one book or knew what he was going to do with his life. He would have been very surprised to learn that, forty years later, he’d want to be in that situation once more, that is, to be again in front of the forest battered by gale-force winds without yet having done anything with his life.

The hurricane in this memory having blown over, Riba goes back to the Dublin night, which now, compared to this memory, seems a mild one. He’s in the doorway to the pub, he came out to get some fresh air.

This is my country now, he thinks again.

As he opens the door to the place, he hears “Walk on the Wild Side,” the song that always evokes New York for him. His friends are coming out of the pub and it looks as if they’re bringing the party into the street. Suddenly they all realize the temperature has dropped and they need to find taxis and go back into the town center. A fog obscures the railings of the cemetery, where visitors are still leaving.

Riba’s gaze darts among those present and stops at a group not from the pub but from the graveyard. Near these people, as if he’d come from nowhere, is a tall, lanky, solitary man. He’s not with anyone. Where the hell did he come from? It’s the same guy he saw this morning in Meeting House Square. He looks like a young Samuel Beckett. Round tortoiseshell glasses. A lean, bony face. Eagle-eyed, the eyes of a bird that flies high, that sees everything, even at night. He’s wearing a scruffy beige raincoat and is looking at Riba intensely, as if he can sense his spirit soaring, and also as if he doesn’t want to transmit a certain dark unhappiness emanating from his birdlike face.

He doesn’t look happy, but Riba prefers to think that the young man has just felt for the first time the emotion that any mortal with literary pretensions experiences when he discovers that the practice of his art makes him sense the fluttering of brilliance. Could it be that this young man’s art consists of the intimate humility of learning to observe in order to then try to narrate and decipher? If this is true, there would be no more mystery. But Riba doubts this is the case and so, fearfully, he asks Ricardo if he has any idea who the lanky-looking fellow in the mackintosh might be. Amalia hails a taxi. Walter scans the foggy horizon in search of a second vehicle. Bev and Nietzky argue politely about who’s going to get into the car Amalia has stopped. Finally Nietzky loses the battle and stands watching the first taxi leave with the resignation of a man watching a gravedigger help attach the ropes to a coffin to lower it into the grave. Walter, who is the one who seems to have best understood Nietzky’s deathly expression, carries on looking for a second taxi.

Riba’s gaze follows the stranger in the raincoat and after a short while he sees him walk slowly into the fog and soon afterwardvanish, disappear into it. He doesn’t see him again. What could have become of the guy swallowed up by the mist? Dracula disappeared like this too. What’s more, Dracula had the ability to turn himself into fog. Is Riba the only one who saw him? He asks Ricardo again if he noticed the young man in a raincoat who was also there this morning in Meeting House Square. “What selfinvolved enigma did Bloom risen, going, gathering multicoloured multiform multitudinous garments, voluntarily apprehending, not comprehend?” Such ease, incidentally, to disappear, like Dracula in the mist. In this same graveyard, in another time, Bloom saw his creator.

If I have an author, it’s possible he has a face like that, he thinks.

“Well, what do you know,” Ricardo says. “Always someone turns up you never dreamt of.”