Dublinesque

July

The moon shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

It’s raining. It’s midnight. He feels that the more time he spends in this rocking chair, the more it will take on the shape of his body. An enormous hangover. He has a terrible fear that his kidneys will explode and he’ll die here, right now. Cold sweat. He fears that first thing tomorrow morning Celia will leave him. Fear of fear. Even colder sweat. Twelve o’clock on the dot on the clock of anguish.

Time: Midnight.

Place: A fifth-floor apartment in a building in north Dublin.

Atmosphere: Dissatisfaction. He hates himself for yesterday’s mistake, but also for having been so clumsy and not having been able to find a writer truly able to dream in spite of the world; to structure the world in a different way. A great writer: at once anarchist and architect. It wouldn’t have mattered if he were dead. A real genius, just one would have been enough. Someone able to undermine and reconstruct the banal landscape of reality. Someone, dead or alive. . An even colder sweat.

Physical state: Glacial. A massive headache. A feeling of “what for?”

Details: A suitcase and a carry-on bag in the hall — not on the landing, because the neighbors aren’t trustworthy here. They indicate that Celia, who’s asleep now, is very angry about yesterday and also about today; she’d wanted to give him one last chance this afternoon when she’d returned from her long Buddhist meeting, but he had been so comatose and stupid that she must have decided at that moment to leave tomorrow.

Action: Mental, unmitigating. Out of an obvious professional obsession — reading too many manuscripts, and to top it all, not a single masterpiece — he reads the events of his life more and more literarily. Riba is now in his rocking chair, and after having slept off his hangover all day long and having drunk two Bloody Marys a while ago to try to get over it, he’s attempting to reconstruct the terrifying events of the night before. He is doing so in a panic that he might remember too well what happened and die as soon as he does. His remorse at having started drinking again makes him wonder if it mightn’t be better to give the slip to the disagreeable and emotional memory of last night’s events and take refuge in a book that he has close at hand, an old copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s lectures on literature to his students at Cornell. He hopes that by reading these wise lectures, he’ll end up feeling sleepy again, which he doesn’t now because he’s slept all day. He doesn’t want to fall under the dangerous hypnosis of the computer, sit in front of it and risk Celia waking up and finding him in hikikomori mode again, which is the last thing, rightly or wrongly, she’ll be able to stand now.

After twenty-six months of abstinence, he’d completely forgotten how bad a hangover feels. How horrendous. Now the headache seems to be letting up a bit. But an uncontrollable buzzing and remorse are drilling into him. The buzzing — probably very closely related to his old writer’s malady — is disconcerting, because it brings back, absurdly and obsessively, the memory of the list of wedding gifts from when he married Celia, so many years ago now: that miserable and discouraging assortment of lamps, vases, and crockery. It’s all very strange. If he doesn’t do something, the rocking chair will take on the shape of his body.

More details: The rocking chair is unvarnished teak, guaranteed against cracks, rot, and nocturnal creaking. The sky he glimpses through the curtains is strangely orange, with violet tints. The rain starts to get heavier and now lashes the windowpanes. Since he arrived at this house, he’s been obsessed by the reproduction of “Stairway,” a small Edward Hopper painting the owner of the apartment has hung next to the window. It’s a painting in which the viewer looks down a staircase to a door open onto a dark, impenetrable mass of trees and mountains. He feels he has been denied what the geometry of the house offers. The open door is not a candid passage to the outside, but an invitation paradoxically extended to stay where he is.

“Go,” says the house.

“Where to?” says the landscape outside.

This feeling, once again, is unhinging him, disorienting him, making him very nervous. He decides to ask for some discreet help from Nabokov’s book, which is beside him. And then, for a moment or two, he stares at the hazy moon again and at everything he can see out there. The hangover, the abundant rain, “Stairway,” and that atrocious sky have him bound to a terrifying anguish. But also directly to a feeling that this is a game. For a moment, “anguish” and “game” intertwine perfectly, as they have so many times in his life. His feet are cold and that could be related as much to the hangover as to the game and the anguish and the stairway that seems to descend inside his own mind.

“Go,” says the house.

He covers his dramatic feet with a checked blanket, quite a ridiculous blanket, and pretends to write a sentence mentally, to write it in his head — he has that unusual and luxurious feeling of writing in his head — five times in a row:

It’s midnight and the rain lashes the windowpanes.

It’s midnight and the rain. .

Then, he starts other games.

The next one is even simpler. It consists of going through all the authors he’s published and studying why not even one of them ever presented his readers with a true, authentic masterpiece. Also to examine why none of them, in spite of occasionally showing signs of almost supernatural talent, was an anarchist and at the same time an architect.

Here he pauses and remembers that in one of the letters received from Gauger, who writes to him, every once in a while, from the Chateau Hotel in Tongariro, his secretary attributed the absence of genius in all the writers they published to the profound despondency prevalent in our times, to the absence of God, and definitively — he said — to the death of the author, “announced back in the day by Deleuze and Barthes.”

Marginal note: The ongoing correspondence from that hotel in Tongariro is particularly worrying for Riba, who can’t understand why his former secretary keeps writing to him, unless it’s simply to keep up appearances, and even more, hold at bay suspicions that he embezzled a substantial amount of money from the publishing company.

Other details: From this game of going through all the authors and studying why not even one ever submitted a true masterpiece is derived another even more perverse game, which consists of asking himself the painful question of whether the brilliant author for whom he’d searched so long and hard wasn’t actually himself, and if he hadn’t become a publisher in order to have to look exclusively for that great talent in others, and thus to be able to forget the dramatic case of his own personality; he’s actually hopeless at being brilliant as well as hopeless at writing. It’s very possible that he turned to editing in order to avoid this baggage and be able to dump his disappointment on others, not exclusively on himself.

He immediately feels he has to contradict himself and remembers that he also took up publishing because he’s always been an impassioned reader. He discovered literature by reading Marcel Schwob, Raymond Queneau, Stendhal, and Gustave Flaubert. He became a publisher after a long time; and then there’s the time he now considers black in which he betrayed his first literary loves, reading only novels with protagonists who earned more than a hundred thousand dollars a year.

A commentary: It’s well known that when a person sees a glint of gold in books, he’s taking a qualitative leap in his editorial vocation. And some of that could apply to Riba, except that, beforehand, he was a reader of good novels, and also a committed reader; he didn’t just go into the business to make a lot of money, that is, for what is vulgarly referred to in Spanish with the verb forrarse. Ah, forrarse! What a strange expression. Was there any equivalent in English? To make a mint? To line one’s pockets? In fact, he soon realized he was heading for ruin and still didn’t want to give it up, and the miracle was that he lasted in his profession for thirty years.

He always had good relationships with foreign publishers, whom he usually saw at the Frankfurt Book Fair and with whom he exchanged information and books. With editors in his own country, however, he never had a great rapport. They always seemed fatuous to him, less knowledgeable about literature than they pretended to be: bigger celebrities and more egocentric than their authors whom they branded as egomaniacs to delirious extremes. Curiously, his friends in Spain have usually been writers, and the vast majority younger than him.

Even though he never stumbled upon a truly great genius, he had a deep respect for the vast majority of his authors, especially those who understood literature as a force directly linked to the subconscious. Riba has always believed that one loves most books that produce the sensation, when opened for the first time, that they’ve always been there: places never visited appear in them, things never seen or heard before, but the sense of having a personal memory of those places or things is so strong that somehow you end up thinking you’ve been there.

Today he takes it for granted that Dublin and the Irish Sea have been in his mental landscape forever, forming part of his past. If one day, now that he’s retired, he goes to live in New York, he’d like to begin a new life, he’d like to feel like a son or a grandson of an Irishman who emigrated to that city. He’d like to be called Brendan, for example, and for the memory of his work as a publisher to be easily forgotten in his native land, forgotten with the malice and treachery so typical of his tight-fisted and indolent compatriots.

Could he, if he so desired, go back to that night when he danced that foxtrot until dawn, go back to his wedding day, go back to being the brilliant and heartless publisher who, at the height of his success — it didn’t last long — made caustic declarations and pointed out the ideal way forward for literature? Or is he going to be left forever staring, like an idiot, at the electric light and wondering whether to have a third Bloody Mary and thus liberate himself from the rocking chair? Is he going to remain forever unable even to get up and walk normally through the house? The buzzing comes again. Obsessively, he goes back to the discouraging and truly obsessive trousseau, the wedding gift list: lamps, vases, old-fashioned crockery. An author’s trousseau, he thinks.

The rain is getting heavier and heavier and is now too persistent to be a summer shower. Since yesterday the downpour has been interrupting the usual fine weather at this time of year in Ireland. For weeks it hasn’t rained in Dublin. He’s into the second week of a twenty-day holiday with Celia in an apartment in the north of the city, the area on the other side of the Royal Canal, not very far from Glasnevin Cemetery, where he’s wanted to return for days now, perhaps to see if he might again glimpse that ghost who vanished before his very eyes on that afternoon of June 16 in front of The Gravediggers pub; that ghost, a relative of Dracula’s, with the great ability to turn himself into fog.

During their first days on the island, he and Celia stayed on Strand Street in the coastal town of Skerries, a pleasant place with a great variety of sea and coast and a long, curved harbor full of shops and pubs. But Celia felt too disconnected from her Buddhist contact in Dublin — she’d been having long meetings every afternoon since they arrived with a religious society or club — and they moved to the pretty town of Bray, near Dalkey, where they also felt uncomfortable; they finally ended up in this apartment in a building near the Royal Canal.

The thing keeping Riba entertained now is trying to avoid remembering in too much detail what happened yesterday. He fears remembering yesterday’s horrors. So he looks again at the book of Nabokov’s lectures as if this might be his only hope, finally deciding to fully enter the Nabokovian commentary on one of the chapters, chosen at random (the first chapter of Part Two), of Joyce’s ever-difficult Ulysses:

Part Two, Chapter I

Style: Joyce logical and lucid.

Time: Eight in the morning, synchronized with Stephen’s morning.

Place: 7 Eccles Street, where the Blooms live, in the northwest part of town.

Characters: Bloom, his wife; incidental characters, the pork-butcher Dlugacz, from Hungary like Bloom, and the maid servant of the Woods family next-door, 8 Eccles St. .

Action: Bloom in the basement kitchen prepares breakfast for his wife, talks charmingly to the cat. .

Riba ends up closing the book of lectures, because the theme of Ulysses now sounds antiquated to him, as if the funeral on June 16 in Dublin had been so effective as to draw to a close an entire era, and now he is living only at ground level, or at rocking-chair level, as if he were a Beckettian vagabond; as if he were now resigned to the inevitable, preferring to remain at the mercy of the memory of last night’s tragic alcoholic relapse.

Fortunately, this rain today is not the terrible London flood, it’s not the same apocalyptic storm as when he was there with his parents, fifteen days ago, that savage rain. He’ll never go back to that city. Deep down the trip was a concession to his elderly parents, an attempt to assuage his guilt for not having been in Barcelona for their sixty-first wedding anniversary. And also a way of saving himself, even if just once, the hateful task of having to tell them about his visit to a foreign city.

“So you’ve been to London.”

He just couldn’t be bothered, when he got back, to have to answer his mother’s question and tell them things about that city, so he decided to take both of them, his father and mother, to London.

It was complicated — he thinks now, almost motionless in his rocking chair — that trip to London, because his parents hadn’t moved from Calle Aribau for years. But if anything, the excursion confirmed that they have a free-flowing communication with the great beyond wherever they are. In London, gatherings occasionally formed around his parents: agglomerations they pretended not to notice, perhaps because since time immemorial they’d always known how to bear the weight of so many ancestors naturally.

Perhaps he’s become very Irish. The thing is he didn’t feel comfortable in London. He didn’t like many things, but he has to admit that he did love the double-decker buses and the three elegant and solitary green-and-white-striped deck chairs he photographed in Hyde Park. He was sorry his friend Dominique wasn’t there because he would have liked to see the Tate installation with her; but she’d had to leave quite suddenly for Brazil, where she lives most of the time. He didn’t like many things about London, even though other things amused him. The strangest was when he saw his parents in the middle of the very street that Hammershøi depicted in “The British Museum.” Riba hadn’t been able to find this street on his previous trip, but he suddenly discovered that it did exist and it was called Montague Street and was in such plain view that Celia had found it as soon as they approached the British Museum. She was carrying the photocopy of the painting that Riba had brought to London for that very reason: a very wrinkled photocopy Riba kept in his pants pocket. Right there, in Montague Street, was where the greatest ghostly turmoil gathered around his parents, who seemed to know everybody and to have been living in that neighborhood their whole lives.

Riba thought that, if he had been a poet or a novelist, he would have exploited the great narrative goldmine he had at his disposal in his parents’ animated ghostly gatherings: gatherings not restricted, as he’d always thought, to the closed space of the apartment on Calle Aribau, but taking place — as was now perfectly obvious — anywhere in the world, in broad daylight, in any bustling city street in any suburb of the universe, including London.

He didn’t like that city, but he walked around with interest, for a long time, through the surly and labyrinthine East End, the center of Spider’s gray life. And he was fascinated by the huge and somewhat ancient railway stations, especially Waterloo. He went into ecstasies for a few moments, in Bloomsbury, in front of the building of the enigmatic Swedenborg Society, and recalled the extraordinary revelation that occurred to the Swedish philosopher one day as he stood on the second-floor balcony of that house: if he wasn’t mistaken, the revelation was that, when a man dies, he doesn’t realize he’s died, since everything around him stays the same, for he is at home, his friends visit him, he walks the streets of his city; he doesn’t think he’s died, until he begins to notice that in the other world everything is as it is in this one, except it’s slightly more spacious.

They were good moments he spent there in front of the Swedenborg Society, but in general he didn’t like London; although that didn’t stop him doing things all over the city. Patiently, Celia and his parents accompanied him around Chelsea as he whimsically tracked down the two houses where Beckett had lived as a young man in the 1930s. One was situated at 48 Paultons Square, a beautiful spot just off the King’s Road. And the other at 34 Gertrude Street, where the writer rented a room from the Frost family and went out every day to the sessions of psychoanalysis his mother paid for from Dublin and which little by little created in him a mood favorable to hating that city, although not writers like Samuel Johnson, about whom he wanted to write a play. “You can’t imagine how much I hate London,” Beckett wrote to his friend Thomas McGreevy, a key person in his life because he was the one who put him in touch with James Joyce. For the young Beckett, that letter, in which he explained in detail how very much he hated London, was nothing more than the preamble to his decision, the next day, to pack his bag and return to Dublin, where the martyrdom of his difficult relationship with his mother awaited him.

There was a great photograph to commemorate 34 Gertrude Street. A big, suddenly youthful smile from Riba looking at the camera Celia was pointing at him. Glorious moment. He felt happy and almost proud of having been able to find the two lodgings of the young Beckett so easily.

“And without knowing a word of English!” he repeated happily, forgetting the none too minor detail that Celia, who spoke the language with ease, had figured it all out.

That photo of 34 Gertrude Street was one of the key mementos of the trip and also one of its few memorable events. Because, for the rest of the time, London put him in a very bad mood. Almost nothing he saw in that city seemed to amuse him. He discovered that he was still fascinated, and would be for a long time — much more than anywhere else — by New York and this wild sea of Ireland that he now had so close to home and on which the rain beat down tonight with relentless cruelty.

Now, as his hangover slowly, very slowly recedes, he reaffirms his old idea that anyone who has visited New York and this rough Irish Sea must look down on London with superiority and stupor. He ends up seeing it as Brendan Behan did that day when, comparing it with many other much better places, he described it as a wide flat pie of redbrick suburbs, with a currant in the middle for the West End.

He’s turned into one of those Irishmen who amuse themselves with their constant and ingenious cutting remarks about the English. He guesses that he’ll soon forget London, but never Dominique’s brilliant installation, which he visited with his parents and Celia in the Tate Modern. It was an experience at the edge of reason, because his parents were so literal and seeing, with natural astonishment, the end of the world, they were left impressed and mute for a long time.

It was raining especially hard and cruelly outside the installation, while inside loudspeakers reproduced the sound of the rain artificially. And when they were about to leave that place of refuge for “survivors of the catastrophe,” they rested for a while on the metal bunkbeds that accommodated, day and night, refugees from the flood of 2058, a year when undoubtedly all the people Riba loved, without exception, would be dead.

By that year, all his loved ones would be sleeping forever, they’d be sleeping in the infinite space of the unknown, that great space that could finally be represented by the rain lashing the windowpanes of the highest windows of the universe. No doubt, in 2058 all his loved ones would be like those high windows Phillip Larkin talked about: the sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

High fantasy is a place where it’s always raining, he took the opportunity to remember there in London, in the middle of that general atmosphere of great catastrophe and universal flood. All over the place, in Dominique’s installation, were human replicas of Spider, numerous displays of walking ghosts and other men sleeping. His mother ordered a lime flower tea in the bar overlooking the river on the Tate’s top floor, while his father looked permanently surprised.

“Do you realize what we’ve seen? We’re right at the end of the world!” he kept repeating, sounding cheerful and contrite at the same time, while contemplating the great view of London under the spectacular and destructive rain.

Then with a great sense of involuntary humor, his mother — once she’d recovered with whatever tea they’d served her instead of lime flower — said to her husband with a sudden worried grimace:

“Stop laughing, Sam, and take notice, once and for all, of what’s going on. For the past few weeks it’s been raining constantly. It can’t be true that it rains so much, in Barcelona, in London. I think it’s in the Great Beyond that it’s raining all the time.”

And then, as if she’d reached the most important or maybe most obvious conclusion of her life, added:

“I suspect we’re all dead.”

A few days ago he finished reading James Knowlson’s biography of Beckett. As soon as he got to the end he decided to reread Murphy, a book he’d delved into enthusiastically and with irrepressible astonishment when he was very young, as if he’d found the philosopher’s stone. The book made so great an impression on him that he has never since been able to look at a rocking chair without thinking of poor, old unhinged Murphy. What fascinated him most about the book was the central story in which nothing seemed to happen, but in reality lots of things were going on, because in fact that story was full of brutal micro-events; in the same way, although we don’t always notice, many things happen in our own apparently listless daily lives; lives that seem flat, but which suddenly appear to us loaded with tiny matters and also serious little discomforts.

Riba plays at rocking the chair in such a way that the moon rocks with it. It’s a gesture of profound hopelessness. As if seeking to ingratiate himself with the moon, since he’s not going to be forgiven by Celia now. The gesture is futile in any case, because the moon doesn’t bat an eyelid. Then he begins thinking about writers of first novels, so-called novices, and he meditates on how seldom ambitious young novelists choose the material closest to hand as subjects for their first books; it’s as though the most talented ones feel pushed to gain experience in the most arduous manner.

Only this would explain, Riba thinks, why the novice, that ghost he suspects is lying in wait for him, would notice someone like him, who isn’t close at hand. Just a desire to make life difficult for himself. Because, how can a poor novice narrate from outside what he barely knows?

Riba has read enough in his lifetime to know that when we try to comprehend the mental life of another man we soon realize just how incomprehensible, changeable, and hazy the beings we share the world with are. It’s as if solitude were an absolute and insurmountable condition of existence.

How arduous for a novice to talk about his tiny great events, or serious slight discomforts: all those matters that really only Riba himself would be able to explain and even qualify in great depth because, as is logical, only he truly knows them fully: the fact is only he knows them.

Only he — no one else — knows that on the one hand, it’s true, there are those serious slight discomforts, with their monotonous sound, similar to rain, occupying the bitterest side of his days. And on the other, the tiny great events: his private promenade, for example, along the length of the bridge linking the almost excessive world of Joyce with Beckett’s more laconic one, and which, in the end, is the main trajectory — as brilliant as it is depressing — of the great literature of recent decades: the one that goes from the richness of one Irishman to the deliberate poverty of the other; from Gutenberg to Google; from the existence of the sacred (Joyce) to the somber era of the disappearance of God (Beckett).

Depending on how you look at it, Riba thinks, his own daily life over the past few weeks is starting to reflect that story of splendor and decadence and sudden collapse and descent to the pier, opposite that of the splendor of a now unsurpassable literary period. It’s as if his biography of the past few weeks were running parallel to the story of literature: one that saw the great years of the existence of God, and then his murder and death. It’s as if literature had discovered, with Beckett, that after the divine Joyce’s vantage point the only path left was a criminal one, that is, the death of the sacred, being left to live at ground level or in a rocking chair.

It’s as if — just like in that Coldplay song — after having ruled the world and experienced great heights, all literature could do was sweep the streets it used to own.

How difficult and how complicated it is for the poor novice, he thinks. He doesn’t envy young authors at all, having to take on this whole muddle. It’s midnight and the rain continues to lash the windowpanes, and the moon carries on in its own way. His hangover is fading, but not that much. The worst thing is there are still blank spots in his memory of last night. And Celia, who might be able to help him, is sleeping, and has probably decided to leave him tomorrow.

There’s only one thing that he’s completely sure happened yesterday: part of the premonition of the Dublin dream came true when he, tragically, started drinking again; Celia ended up embracing him in the early hours of the morning, on the way out of McPherson’s, the pub on the corner. They both fell and rolled on the ground, in the rain, moved and terrified at the same time at the misfortune that had unexpectedly befallen them. But what especially surprised him is that he recognized that same powerful emotion he’d felt in the hospital when he had that prophetic dream.

As soon as he remembers the final scene of yesterday’s tragedy, he tries to get the rocking chair to remain stiller than anything around it, even for a moment. It’s as if he wanted to stop time and go back to try to make amends and even attempt to prevent last night from happening. As he tries to stop everything, a deep silence gradually settles, and it even seems the light has grown dimmer and is now more like a color closely resembling lead. It’s strange, because up to now he could hear the neighbors. The world is still for a fraction of a second. The shining glint of some scenes from the pub last night. Fright. Dismay. The more he remembers, the more the feeling of anguish grows and also the discovery of something impossible: he can’t go back without falling prey to attrition, the idea of which has always horrified him. What does all this mean? This impossibility, this silence, this attrition, this pain, this stillness — which, in any case, have yet to come entirely into being — do they mean something? Outside, the night sky is still strangely orange. Riba could not feel any lower. How rich Joyce’s prose was. Only the rocking chair lets him be higher than the floor. He suddenly remembers Beckett’s Endgame: “Mean something? You and I, mean something! Ah that’s a good one!”

So maybe what happened with Dr. Bruc in Barcelona before traveling to Dublin for the second time might not mean anything either? After informing him of the results of his tests, the doctor suggested he volunteer for a clinical trial investigating “paricalcitol’s role in preventing cardiovascular fatalities” in patients with chronic renal failure like him.

“You might say,” Riba interrupted her, “that you’re actually asking me if I’d like to be your guinea pig.”

She smiled, and instead of answering directly, she explained that paricalcitol was a metabolically active form of Vitamin D used in the prevention and treatment of secondary hyperparathyroidism, which was associated with chronic renal failure. It would mean collaborating in a study — led by a laboratory in Massachusetts — of the types of changes in gene expression when certain patients were treated with paricalcitol.

Riba insisted on asking again why she thought of him as a guinea pig and explained, as if confiding a secret to a friend, that for weeks he’d been feeling watched, though he didn’t know by whom. It was, he told her, as if he’d actually become somebody’s guinea pig, and that’s why her medical proposal had suddenly set all his alarm bells ringing even louder. He couldn’t explain it, but it seemed as if, overnight, people had started thinking of all sorts of experiments to do on him.

“You don’t think people see you as a mouse?” the doctor said.

“A mouse?”

The doctor realized how sensitive he was, but still placed an information sheet in front of him and the contract — Advised Consent for Associated Pharmacological-Genetic Research (DNA & RNA) — so he could study it at home or on his trip to Dublin, in case he decided when he came back that he did want to volunteer to help with the advancement of science.

Now at midnight, in this house in Dublin, he looks again at the papers his doctor friend gave him in Barcelona. He re-reads them so carefully and anxiously that the “Information Sheet” ends up sending him into a tremendous metaphysical panic, perhaps because he connects it with that undeniable fact, which he sometimes forgets, but which is the heart of everything: his kidneys are failing, and although at the moment the situation is stable, cardiovascular problems could appear in days to come. In short: death is visible on the horizon, that horizon that begins and ends in his rocking chair.

But perhaps, Riba tells himself now, the biggest problem of all isn’t so much being at death’s door, or being dead without knowing it — as his mother sensed in London when she saw the rain wasn’t going to stop — but the disturbing sensation of not having really been born yet.

“To be born, that’s my idea now,” Beckett’s character Malone confessed. And further on: “I am being given, if I may venture the expression, birth into death.”

The idea, now that he thinks of it, was also in Artaud: that sensation of a body possessed that struggles to rescue itself with difficulty.

But what if it was yesterday, just as he was on his way out of McPherson’s, that he was born into death? In the prophetic dream he had in the hospital when he was seriously ill, the feeling of being born into death was clear and seemed to be right at its heart when he and Celia — who in turn seemed to be at the center of the world — embraced beneath the rain, on their way out of a mysterious pub.

And yesterday, in real life, he again felt something similar. Within the disgrace, there was an enigmatic emotion in that embrace scene. An emotion that arose from birth into death or from feeling alive for the first time in his life. Because it was a great moment despite its brutality and tragedy. One moment, at last, at the center of the world. As if the cities of Dublin and New York were united by a single current, and this was none other than the very current of life, circulating through an imaginary passage; there were various stations or stops on this “journey” that had all been decorated with replicas of the same statue that were even an homage to a gesture, to a sort of secret leap, to an almost clandestine but existing movement, perfectly real and true; and that was the English leap.

He worries that the noise he’s making in the kitchen will wake up Celia, but he hears some chairs being dragged across the floor upstairs — where they always finish dinner very late. He realizes the neighbors will wake her before he does. He decides not to have a coffee and then begins a mute and autistic protest against the noisy upstairs neighbors and pisses in the sink with a marvellous sensation of eternity.

Someone buzzes the intercom.

Late as it is, the sharp, shrill sound surprises him. He goes out into the hall and timidly picks up the intercom phone, asking who it is. Long pause. And all of a sudden, someone says:

“Malachy Moore est mort.”

He stands petrified. Moore and mort sound similar, although they belong to two different languages. He ponders this trivial detail to keep from being completely overwhelmed by fear.

Now he remembers. It’s terrible and weighs on his soul. He spent a long time yesterday in McPherson’s talking about Malachy Moore.

“Who’s there?” he asks over the intercom.

No one answers.

He looks down from the balcony, and just like last night, there’s nobody in the street. Yesterday’s great muddle began in exactly the same way. Someone rang the bell at the same time. He looked out and there was nobody there. History repeats itself.

Whoever has just said that Malachy Moore is dead might be the same person who yesterday, in Spanish and with a Catalan accent, called and explained that they were conducting an evening survey and wanted to ask him just one single question, and without giving him time to respond, said:

“We just want to know if you know why Marcel Duchamp came back from the sea.”

But no, it doesn’t seem to be the same person as yesterday. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that the two calls came twenty-four hours apart. This person tonight has spoken in French without the slightest trace of a Catalan accent, and it could just as easily be Verdier as Fournier, one of the brand-new friends he made last night in the bar. As for last night’s call on the intercom, it had to have been perpetrated by an expert in The Exception of My Parents, his friend Ricardo’s autobiographical novel. Because that question about Duchamp appears hidden within the pages of that book.

Whoever called yesterday can’t be the same person as today, a moment ago. The man on the intercom last night was someone who read The Exception of My Parents and could only be that Catalan friend of Walter’s they’d met two days earlier and to whom they’d given their address. Yesterday’s caller couldn’t have been anyone else, unless it were — something unlikely, surely — Walter himself with a Catalan accent. The strange thing was that whoever buzzed last night didn’t come back later — if only to laugh at his cleverness — to reveal himself. Riba still doesn’t know why this friend of Walter’s, who went to the trouble of making that midnight joke, then vanished from the scene. And he understands even less why whoever just rang also now vanished. They do resemble each other in that respect.

He goes back to the intercom and demands again that whoever’s down there identify himself.

Silence. Just like last night at midnight. Nothing but quiet, quiet under the infernal leaden light of the front hall that harbors two sad chairs and a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, along with that suitcase and carry-on bag with which Celia threatens to leave tomorrow.

At midnight yesterday, when he didn’t see anybody, he thought Walter’s friend must have taken refuge in McPherson’s. Absolutely everything arose from that misunderstanding. McPherson’s is a pub run by a man from Marseille and a number of his regulars are French. He and Celia had sat out on the patio of this establishment a couple of times, always in the daytime. Yesterday he ended up there, believing that he’d find Walter’s friend and would be able to ask him why he’d played that late-night joke.

Although he doesn’t want to remember too precisely — he’s afraid it’ll upset him — he’s gradually getting back his memory of what happened, and all at once he remembers how, at this very time, after the question about Duchamp and after having seen there was nobody down in the street, he was seized by a huge sense of anxiety and decided to go and see how Celia was doing and thus feel in some way supported by her company. He’d left her sleeping and didn’t know if the intercom would have woken her, or whether her face would still be wreathed in the beatific expression she’d been wearing recently. He needed her to help him get over his bewilderment caused by the call about the sea and Marcel Duchamp. So he went into the bedroom and got quite a surprise. He remembers quite clearly now, it was a distressing moment. The incredibly harsh expression on Celia’s sleeping face shocked him, so rigid and paralyzed and more like a lifeless soul than anything else. He was left literally terrified. She was sleeping, or she was dead. She looked dead, or maybe she was petrified. Although everything indicated that she badly needed to be reborn, he preferred to think that Celia was near a divine spirit, some god of hers. After all, he thought, religion is useless, but sleep is very religious, it will always be more religious than any religion, perhaps because when one is sleeping one is closer to God. .

He had stayed there in the bedroom for a while, still hearing the echo of the question about Marcel Duchamp and wondering if the time hadn’t arrived to overcome his fear and to head down — it was an old, private metaphor of his — the metaphysical avenue of the dead. It has always seemed, thought Riba, that, on that general avenue, one single deceased person isn’t anything or anybody. Everything’s relative and so it’s easier to see that there’s more than one crooked cross, more than one headstone surrounded by barren thorns in this world so big and so wide, where the rain falls ever slowly upon the universe of the dead. .

Oh! He realized that, aside from a certain desire to be absurdly poetic, he wasn’t controlling what was going through his mind very well, and stopped. The world big and wide, the universe of the dead. . As if a logical consequence of how complicated everything was, and also another more than likely consequence of last month’s funeral in Dublin and his world ending in London and the enigmatic words coming through the intercom, Riba ended up thinking of the scene in John Huston’s The Dead where the husband watches his wife on the stairway of a Dublin house, still, stiff but unexpectedly lovely and rejuvenated — lovely and youthful on account of the story she’d just remembered — paralyzed at the top of the stairs by the voice singing that sad Irish ballad, “The Lass of Aughrim,” which always reminded her — giving her a sudden beauty — of a young man who died in the cold and rain of love for her.

And he couldn’t help it. Last night, Riba associated that scene in The Dead with that young man from Cork who, two years before he’d met her, fell in love with Celia and then, after a number of diabolical misunderstandings, left Spain and returned to his own country, where soon afterward he killed himself by jumping off the furthest pier in the port of his home town.

Cork. Four letters to a fatal name. He always associated that city with a vase in their home in Barcelona. The vase always struck him as a nuisance, but he’d never gone so far as getting rid of it due to Celia’s strong opposition. Sometimes, when he was depressed, he found that he got much more depressed if he looked at old photographs, the cutlery, the paintings inherited from Celia’s grandmother. And that vase. By God, that vase.

Riba had never been able to tolerate the sinister story of that suicidal young man. When occasionally it occurred to him to remind Celia of that poor boy from Cork, she always reacted by breaking into a smile, as if the memory made her feel young again and profoundly happy.

Yesterday, watching her sleep so rigidly but so beautifully, and unsure whether she was alive or petrified, he couldn’t resist a depraved temptation, a vengeful urge, and imagined her in those days of her youth, closer to a prostitute on the jetty at the end of the world than to the serene Buddhist she was today. He imagined her that way and then said mentally to his sleeping wife, with that strange softness of imagined but unspoken words:

Celia, my love, you cannot suspect how slowly the snow is falling through the universe and upon all the living and the dead and upon that young imbecile from Cork.

That’s what he said mentally, though she remained immersed in her indecipherable dreams, faintly illuminated by the light from the hall: her hair all messy, her mouth half open, breathing deeply. The rain lashed wildly against the windows. In the bathroom, one of the taps hadn’t been turned off properly and was dripping, and Riba went to turn it off. The light grew a little dimmer and then began to tremble, as if the world were ending. Although the door to the apartment was closed, it seemed like all that remained was to wait for Duchamp to come back from the sea, come back to get rid of that blasted vase.

It would be best to get used to the idea that Malachy Moore has died. He’d rather think that than speculate on the idea that the Frenchmen he’d met yesterday, Verdier and Fournier, might have played a trick on him to get him to come to the pub again tonight. He doesn’t really know why, but he thinks the voice that told him Malachy Moore was dead had meant it.

But as soon as he’s given him up for dead, he notices that something, in a vague and indistinct tone of protest, has gently begun to deflate in the atmosphere. It’s as if the space through which his shadow normally wanders were emptying itself, and as if with this absence, the previously chilly nape of his neck and his back had begun to heat up. In some part of this room, something is giving way at quite a pace. At such a pace that it already seems to be entirely gone. Someone has left. Maybe that’s why now, for the first time in a long time, it seems there is no longer somebody there lying in wait. Not a single shadow, no trace of the specter of his author, or of the novice who uses him as a guinea pig, no God, no spirit of New York, no sign of the genius he always sought. He feels panic in the midst of this sudden stillness, so extraordinarily flat. And he remembers the flat instant that followed the moment Nietzsche announced that God had died, and then the whole world started living at ground level, miserably.

He could swear he’s entered an ambiguous realm of the deceased, a region that dazzles him in such a way that he can’t look straight at it, as with the sun, which no one can look at for very long. Although at heart, like the sun, this region is no more than a benign force, a source of life. One can be born into it, because one can be born into death. He will try. After all, yesterday that rebirth was possible. He will try to get his faded retired publisher’s life back on track and improve it. But something has completely given way in the room. Someone has left. Or been erased. Someone, perhaps indispensable, is no longer here. Someone is laughing on his own somewhere else. And the rain lashes more and more wildly against the windowpanes and also through the empty and deep-blue air, and what is nowhere and is never-ending.

Since he has a tendency to interpret the events of his world each day with distortions typical of the reader he has been for so long, he now remembers the days of his youth when it was common to argue about the death of the author and he read everything relating to this thorny issue, which worried him more from one day to the next. Because if there was one thing he wanted to be in life it was a publisher and he was already taking the first steps to becoming one. And it seemed like very bad luck that just as he was preparing to find authors and publish them, the figure of the author should be questioned so strongly that people were even saying that, if it hadn’t already, it was going to disappear. They could have waited a little longer, young Riba lamented every day back then. Some friends tried to encourage him, telling him not to worry, because it was only a dubious trend of the French and American deconstructionists.

“Is it true the author has died?” he asked Juan Marsé, who he occasionally bumped into in his neighborhood. That morning Marsé was accompanied by a tall, dark-haired girl with an unforgettable apple-shaped face, and the poet Jaime Gil de Biedma.

Marsé threw young Riba a frightful look, which he still hasn’t forgotten.

“How funny, that’s like asking if it’s true we have to die,” he heard the girl say.

He remembers that he really fancied that woman — facially so similar to Bev Dew, now that he thinks of it — and he also remembers that he even fell suddenly in love with her, the very same as what happened not long ago with Bev. He was especially enamored of her face. Her fresh, fragrant apple face. And also because hanging over her furrowed brow, an impalpable shadow on her face, was an expression that struck him as a direct invitation to love.

“The author is the ghost of the editor,” said Gil de Biedma, half smiling.

And Marsé and the tall girl with the apple face laughed a lot, probably at a private joke he couldn’t share.

Certain scenes from last night come back to him in violent flashes. He remembers when, having already had quite a bit to drink, he was talking to those two Frenchmen at the bar in McPherson’s and at a certain point, after they’d talked of the beauty of the Irish Sea and about the Spanish victory in the European Championship and asked Riba something about the decor of Irish houses, the conversation slid, though he can’t remember why, toward Samuel Beckett.

“I know someone who’s lined his house with Beckett,” said

Verdier.

A house lined with Beckett. He’d never heard of such a thing. In its day — in the days when the publishing house received so many manuscripts — it would have been a good title for one of those novels certain weak and indecisive authors used to submit with titles even feebler and more faltering than they were.

The two Frenchmen, Verdier and Fournier, knew so much about Beckett’s appalling squandered years in Dublin that, between one shot of gin and another, at some point he started calling them Mercier and Camier, the names of two Beckett characters.

Verdier, a great Guinness drinker, was explaining precisely why the key to Beckett’s personality lay in his Dublin years. Sitting in his rocking chair, Riba could not now recall many of the things Verdier told him, but he did remember perfectly hearing about the extremely dangerous game the writer used to play from an early age, when he’d climb to the top of one of the pine trees surrounding the house where he was born and jump down, grabbing a branch just before he crashed to the ground.

Riba remembers perfectly Verdier telling him this, probably because it impressed him more than the other things and perhaps also because it reminded him of what he tended to do with the rocking chair when he rocked it as far back as possible and then dropped back so he could feel himself almost falling, closely linked to the calamitous pretension of the world that he now associated with the death of the author and of everything.

Fournier was also very talkative, and at a certain moment, emphasized again and again that Beckett has always been an example of a writer who risks everything, has no roots, and shouldn’t have any: no family, no brothers or sisters. He comes from the void, said Fournier. Several times he said that he came from the void. The ravages

of alcohol. Riba suddenly remembers the exact moment when he asked Verdier and Fournier if they’d ever seen an individual in Dublin who resembled the young Beckett.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Another gin,” said Riba.

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

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

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

“Souvent, j’ai supposé que tout. .”

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

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

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

“Lined?” said Riba, surprised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tomorrow we could go to Cork.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

He took a while to respond.

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

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

And so the spell of the moment was gradually broken.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Although he’s stuck in his rocking chair, he keeps hearing the gradual and almost irresistible call of his computer and after a while, knowing that Google sometimes works just like a police file, he gives in to temptation and goes and sits in front of the screen, like a perfect hikikomori, trying to discover in the entries on Malachy Moore, the young man in the mackintosh he saw in Glasnevin who made him think he might be looking at his author.

He looks at the entries, but only finds information on baseball or soccer players of that name, none of whom could ever be the genius in the raincoat he thought he saw a few weeks ago. He clicks on Images to see if by chance anyone pops up resembling a young Beckett, but there’s nothing of the sort, although there is a photo of three gentlemen, the caption of which has nothing at all to do with anyone called Malachy Moore: Sean McBride, Minister of External Affairs Irish Republic, Bernard Deeny, and Malachy McGrady at the 1950 Aeridheacht.

In order to carry on doing something before his two sleeping pills kick in, he checks the word Malachy, without the Moore, and there he finds information about an honorable Irishman, St. Malachy, a character completely unknown to him, but whom he has the impression he’s heard spoken of a thousand times. He reads about this St. Malachy of Armagh of Ireland, who was born Maelmhaedhoc O’Morgair in the year 1094 and was a Catholic archbishop, who is remembered ten centuries later for the two prophecies supposedly revealed to him at the end of a pilgrimage to Rome.

St. Malachy’s prophecies take Riba to Benedictus, the mysterious current Pope. And looking up the latest news on him, he discovers that Benedictus alias Ratzinger is a pope who spends most of his time in his room, reading and writing and preparing encyclicals. He travels much less than his energetic predecessor. As they used to say John Paul’s apartment looked like a Polish tabernacle, because there were always people coming in and out, they say the papal apartment of Benedictus/Ratzinger resembles a vault, that it’s reminiscent of the room in which the poet Hölderlin shut himself up for forty years. Why that room specifically? He tries to find out, unsuccessfully, to whom it would have occurred to link Ratzinger with the sublime Hölderlin. And he ends up thinking of Hölderlin’s room in Tübingen, that room lent to him by the carpenter Zimmer and in which the poet lived for forty years. He thinks of The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster, where it’s said that Hölderlin’s madness was faked and that the poet retired from the world in response to the ridiculous political attitude that racked Germany after the French Revolution. According to this, Hölderlin’s most deranged texts had been written in a secret, revolutionary code, and furthermore, with the private joy of a confined man.

“Confining oneself to a room. .” he remembers Paul Auster wrote.

He thinks how someone who could observe him from outside would see him. Someone like Malachy Moore, for example, who has now died. No one was ever able to prove that the dead can’t see us. . A great clap of thunder. . Again, he feels entirely awake. A shame, now that he was starting to enter into a restorative dream, a dream that would take place entirely on Hopper’s stairway.

Mixed with fear, his yawns are imaginative curves taken by a slow, imaginary racing car that sometimes speeds up suddenly. On one of these curves, at the wheel of this strange car, he’s just discovered that his personality has things in common with that of Simon of the Desert, that anchorite who spent his life on top of a pillar in a Buñuel film. Simon stood in penance on top of the eight-meter-high pillar, while he has been doing the same, for a while now, with a more modern touch: sitting in front of a computer and with the feeling that the more time he spends in front of the screen, the more the computer, in a very Kafkaesque way, is imprinting itself on his body.

He suddenly realizes — no one is safe from the racing car’s whims — that a crippled dwarf and his goats are surrounding him. The devil appears to him dressed as a woman and tries to tempt him. Suddenly the feminine demon, as if in an imitation of what happened to Simon of the Desert, takes him on a trip — swifter than swift — to a cabaret in New York, and he’s glad to have arrived in that city so quickly, and what’s more, to have been unexpectedly liberated from the Gutenberg galaxy and the digital galaxy, both at once. It’s as if he’d approached the world beyond them, which can be nothing but the final cataclysm. After all, as John Cheever said: “We are never in our own times, we’re always somewhere else.”

In the cabaret, the voice of Frank Sinatra rings out at a thousand revolutions per minute, a song with lyrics that, depending on how you look at it, are terrible: “The best is yet to come.”

Everyone in the cabaret has insomnia. Outside, it’s pouring. Although New York is the most spectacular place he’s ever seen in his life, he’d rather be in Dublin. New York resembles a holiday more than anything and Dublin is more like a working day. He remembers those lines of Gil de Biedma’s that marked his youth: “After all, we don’t know / if things are not better this way, / limited on purpose. . Maybe, / maybe working days are right.”

“Go on, drink. It’s the end of the world.”

Black dancers attempt impossible dances.

New York’s very grand, but maybe, maybe it’s true that working days are right. And Dublin. Maybe Dublin is right too.

He’s always admired writers who each day begin a voyage into the unknown and yet who are sitting in a room the whole time. He goes back to thinking about rooms for recluses. He thinks of the philosopher Pascal, for starters, maybe because he was the first one Auster quoted in that chapter of The Invention of Solitude about rooms — square, rectangular, or circular — in which some took refuge. Pascal was the one who came up with that memorable idea that all our misfortunes stem from the fact that we are unable to stay quietly in our own room. What happened to Riba yesterday in McPherson’s is living proof of this, a clear demonstration that a rocking chair is preferable to the elements and the rain.

Auster mentioned many other rooms. The one in Amherst, for example, in which Emily Dickinson wrote her entire oeuvre. Van Gogh’s in Arles. Robinson Crusoe’s desert island. Vermeer’s rooms with natural light. .

Actually where Auster says Vermeer, he could just as well have said Hammershøi, that Danish painter of the obsessive portraits of deserted rooms. Or Xavier de Maistre, that man who traveled around his room. Or Virginia Woolf, with her demand for a room of her own. Or the hikikomoris in Japan who shut themselves up in their rooms in their parents’ houses for prolonged periods of time. Or Murphy, that character who didn’t move from the rocking chair in his room in London. . The sleeping pills seem to be taking effect again, and as he dozes, he feels he is getting into the skin of Malachy Moore when he knew how to slip away into the fog, and he is soon seeing all sorts of things in the deepest darkness. . But has Malachy Moore died? Google doesn’t know anything. It’s futile to search any further in Google. . He wants to believe it was a joke played on him by Verdier and Fournier, who took a shine to him last night. He can imagine the scene. Verdier saying: “Let’s go tell the whiskey king that his Malachy Moore was murdered at midnight. . ” He imagines things like that, until finally he falls asleep. He dreams that Google knows nothing.

He never thought he’d attend another funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery, and much less so soon. An altar boy, carrying a brass bucket of something no one can guess, is coming out of a door. The priest, in a white tunic, has come out behind him adjusting his stole with one hand and balancing a little book in the other against his toad’s belly. They both stop next to Malachy Moore’s coffin.

If I believed I was being pursued by an author, thinks Riba, it’s now entirely possible that he’s right there, four meters away from me, on that catafalque. And a moment later he wonders if he’d be able to admit to anyone that he is thinking such a thing. Would they take him for a lunatic? Surely it would be useless to explain that he’s not crazy, and that all that happens is that sometimes he senses or picks up too much, he detects realities no one else perceives. But it would probably be useless to explain all this, much less to say that his wife has left him and that’s why he’s so deranged. It’s the penultimate Tuesday in July and it’s only just stopped raining a couple of hours ago. It’s strange. So many days — months, even — with so much rain. Now even the disappearance of the clouds seems odd, such calm weather.

Yesterday, just as he feared, Celia left him. It didn’t matter that he was already awake when she woke up, because he failed to prevent her leaving. He tried everything and it was impossible to stop her.

“You can’t go, Celia.”

“I’m not staying.”

“Where will you go?”

“My people are waiting for me.”

“I’m sorry for being such an idiot. And anyway, who are your people?”

“You still reek of alcohol. But that’s not the only problem.”

“What is the problem?”

“You don’t love me.”

“I do love you, Celia.”

“No. You hate me. You don’t see the horrible things you do or how you look at me. And that’s not the only problem either. You’re a disgusting drunk. You never leave that rocking chair. You live in a pigsty. You always throw your dirty clothes on the floor and I have to pick them up after you. Who do you think I am?”

A long list of complaints followed in which, among other things, Celia accused him of endless stupid behavior and of encouraging cobwebs to grow in his brain and of not having accepted getting old and taking the loss of his publishing house and the power it used to give him so badly. And finally she again accused him of having fallen off the wagon just because he didn’t know what to do with his life anymore.

“You live without a god and your life lacks meaning. You’ve turned into a poor little man,” she sentenced finally.

At that moment, Riba couldn’t help but remember the previous day when, as soon as he gave Malachy Moore up for dead, something had given way swiftly in his room and he had settled into the worst of the worst. Now he was still in this place, the lowest of all. He was only saved by inhabiting the same paradox that united so many poor men like him: that sensation of being trapped in a place that only makes sense if it were actually possible to leave.

From Celia’s point of view, the whole conflict didn’t originate from her at all, nor was it caused indirectly by her change of religion, because she saw this change as completely normal, not at all problematic. The conflict had to come from somewhere else, surely from the meaningless life he was leading and also as the most direct consequence of this: his lamentable tendency recently toward extreme melancholy. Of course the life they’d lived before wasn’t exactly ideal either, despite the fact that, helped immeasurably by alcohol, he’d been more sociable. She, in any case, had long felt by then that literature had nothing to say to her; it didn’t change her vision of the world or make her see things in a different way. Instead, all that hot air depressed her profoundly without any author who was close to God or to anything. Andrew Breen, Houellebecq, Arto Paasilinna, Derek Hobbs, Martin Amis. She felt distant from all those names, which for her had simply increased a list — Riba’s catalog — a list now lost in time: former guests who once came to dine at her house; people who believed in nothing and who drank till dawn and who it was very difficult to get rid of.

A taxi was waiting downstairs for Celia, and almost from the moment she reached the landing and put her suitcase and bag in the elevator, Riba began to think how he could get her back. He spent all day calling her cell phone, but there was never any answer. And his anguish at her absence was increasing, and by a long way, exceeding any other anguish he’d had for any other absence. Yesterday, when Celia left with a loud Buddhist slam of the door — even now the slam still strikes Riba as Buddhist — he stood in the house trembling with fear, fearing everything, including the unwanted emotions that might get to him through the enigmatic intercom. And he regretted never having once taken note of the address of the place in Dublin where she attended her Buddhist meetings. Without Celia, he was filled with such an absolute fear of the world that he spent longer than ever sitting motionless in the rocking chair, staring at the reproduction of the small Hopper painting.

“Leave,” the house said to him.

And he stayed in the rocking chair, half terrified, half obligingly, and even pretending that the painting of the stairway really had trapped him.

But as evening fell, as if he’d suddenly remembered that when it gets dark we all need someone, he got his strength back and began to move around the house, almost frenetically, until this unexpected restlessness ended up taking him all the way outside, where he trusted a stroke of luck would lead him to Celia, perhaps still walking round and round Dublin dragging her suitcase, in search of some society for the protection of Buddhists.

But it was he who started walking in circles, confused and lost in the city, bewildered, desperate. A nagging idea kept coming back to him of converting to Judaism — his mother’s former religion, after all — so Celia would see he’d taken a spiritual turn in his life. But most likely it was all futile. Celia had probably actually left the island by now.

He walked sadly along gay Grafton Street, stopping in front of all the shops with their awnings out. He took grievous delight in the muslin prints and silks, the young people from all over the world, the jingling of harnesses, the still echoing hoofthuds from bygone days lowringing in the baking causeway. He passed, dallying in front of the display windows of Brown Thomas, the venerable shop with its cascades of ribbons and flimsy China silks. He saw the grand house where Oscar Wilde spent his childhood, and then walked to the house where Bram Stoker, the creator of Dracula, lived for so many years. For a while, he could be seen walking along, ghostlike, as if he were one of those fellows that turned up so often in some of the most celebrated novels he published: those poor desperate romantics, always alone and without any direction or God, sleepwalking down lost highways.

On O’Connell Bridge he remembered that no one ever crosses it without seeing a white horse. He crossed it and didn’t see anything. There was a white pigeon perched on O’Connell’s head. But obviously a pigeon was not what he was looking for. “I feel ridiculous like this, without a white horse,” he thought. And he retraced his steps. On Grafton Street, with patriotic fervor, he heard a street band playing “Green Fields of France,” the ballad about the soldier Willie McBride. His Irish patriotism suddenly blended with an abrupt nostalgia for France, and the combination was stimulating. After that he spent a long time in the bar of the Shelbourne Hotel, and thought of phoning Walter from there, or Julia Piera, his Dublin contacts, but he didn’t have the nerve. After all, he wasn’t that close to them, and besides, he didn’t think they could help him on the subject of Celia’s departure. He could also call the two Irish writers he’d published years ago and who’d drunk his entire wine cellar dry, Andrew Breen and Derek Hobbs, but he remembered in time that he wouldn’t be able to communicate with them. That day at his house, it had been Gauger who’d looked after the two restless Irishmen.

At 27 St. Stephen’s Green, a few yards from the street where Dracula’s creator had lived, he gave in to alcohol again. In the great bar of the Shelbourne Hotel, he unexpectedly dracularized himself with four shots of whiskey. Through the window overlooking the street he followed, bloodymindedly, the progress of a miserable godforsaken cat, with no owner. . no author, no novice, no wife. For a while, the alley cat was him. He was a cat deep in spiritual and physical discomfort. He had a little straw hat tied on his head, making it quite clear he’d had an owner until very recently. As he walked he shook his paws, which were very wet. Riba followed his progress feeling like he wanted to bite his neck. Bite himself? Once again, alcohol had left its mark on him. He decided to leave, to go back to hiding out in his rocking chair because he couldn’t risk running into Celia in one of these two places and her seeing him in that state again.

He phoned his parents in Barcelona.

“So you’ve been to Dublin,” his mother said.

“I’m still there, Mama!”

“And what are your plans now?”

That damned question about his plans again. The question had already taken him very far once before, to where he is now. Dublin.

“I’m going to Cork because there’s a revelation waiting for me there,” he told her. “I’m hoping to talk to Celia’s former lover.”

“Isn’t he dead?”

“You know perfectly well, Mama, that a little detail like that means absolutely nothing.”

After these words, he had to hang up immediately, before everything got even more complicated.

He was about to ask for the bill in the increasingly lively bar of the Shelbourne when, flipping distractedly through the pages of the Irish Times that someone had just left on the next table, he came across the tiny and sinister death notice for Malachy Moore. He froze. So it was true, he thought, almost disheartened. The funeral was the next day, at noon, in Glasnevin. He was so shocked, it was as if he’d known the dead man his whole life. And as had happened weeks earlier in Barcelona, what again struck him as a great setback was that, the whole story of his life having been so tranquil for the last two years, this fictional side that he hadn’t counted on and had no desire for should have grown so alarmingly. For if there was anything he’d particularly valued lately, it was the agreeably steady pace of his normal life, that daily world so calm and boring into which he thought he’d settled perfectly forever: his moderate life of long waits in Lyon or his long wait to go to Dublin, and then a long wait in Barcelona to return to Dublin, without it ever crossing his mind that there he’d end up at the funeral of a great stranger.

He’s still astonished by the fact that it’s not raining today. He arrives late at the cemetery, when they’ve already closed the coffin and it’s impossible to see the dead man’s face. In any case, the most likely thing is that today they’re burying the person who a month ago, in the same place, he confused with his author.

In the front row are the parents and two girls who must be the sisters of the deceased. The two young women bear hardly any resemblance to Beckett, perhaps none at all. As for the parents, they seem more likely to be related to Joyce than to Beckett. However, most of the people there are young, which leads him to think that this person who died was in the prime of life. He has no reason to think differently; the funeral is very likely for that fellow glimpsed a month ago beside the gates of this cemetery: that glassy young man so prone to disappearing that finally he really did vanish.

He never thought he’d attend another funeral in Glasnevin, and much less that it would be for the young man in the round glasses, presumably his author. When the time comes for the speeches, he doesn’t understand anything they say, but he can see that the first and second of the young people to speak in Gaelic are overcome by emotion. And to think that he’d thought of his author as a lone wolf, and when he says his author he’s also saying that genius author he’d looked for so hard for his whole life and never found — maybe he has found him, but in this case he’s been found after he was already dead. And to think that he’d imagined his author as a man with no friends, forever approaching a pier at the end of the world.

He doesn’t understand any of the funeral speeches, but he thinks this is the real, the final funeral of the great whore of literature, the same one who caused this unparalleled pain, the publisher’s sorrow that he’s never been able to escape since. And he remembers that:

As they wend away

A voice is heard singing

Of Kitty, or Katy,

As if the name meant once

All love, all beauty.

He doesn’t understand anything they say. Due to his complete fragility, even in the way he stands, the first of the two young men to speak reminds him of Vilém Vok when he reflected aloud on his chimeric attempt to mature toward childhood. The second seems more sure of himself, but ends up bursting into tears and provoking a general outbreak of grief among those present. There is the emotional collapse of the parents. Someone faints, probably a relative. A small, great Irish drama. The death of Malachy Moore ends up seeming like a much more serious event than the end of the Gutenberg era and the end of the world. The loss of the author. The great Western problem. Or not. Or simply the loss of a young man with round glasses and a mackintosh. A great misfortune in any case, for the inner life and also for all those who still desire to use the word subjectively, to strain and stretch it toward thousands of connections of light still to be established in the great darkness of the world.

Action: The sorrow of the publisher.

On his way out of the funeral, seeing that the parents and two sisters are receiving the condolences of relatives and friends, he joins the line. When his turn comes, he shakes one of the sister’s hands, then the other’s, nods to the father and then turns to the mother and says in formal Spanish and with a conviction in his words that surprises himself:

“He was a hero. I never met him, but I wanted him to get better. I was following his condition for days, hoping for his recovery.”

Then he makes way for the person behind him. It’s as if he were saying that Malachy Moore had spent the last days of his life in a military hospital, mortally wounded from combating against the forces of evil. Or as if he had somehow wanted to tell them the author had been murdered by all of them together in one more stupid incident of our times. He thinks he hears the melody of “Green Fields of France” in the distance and is silently moved. The English leap, he thinks, has taken me further than I expected, because my feelings have changed. This seems like my land now. The draughty streets, end-on to hills. The faint archaic smell of the Irish docklands. The sea, awaiting me.

In some place, at the edge of one of his thoughts, he discovers a darkness that chills him to the bone. When he’s getting ready to leave, he suddenly sees the young Beckett, standing right behind his two distressed sisters. They exchange glances and the surprise seems to register on both sides. The young man is wearing the same mackintosh as the other night, although more threadbare. The young man has the look of a fatigued philosopher and the unmistakable air of living a hindered, precarious, inert, uncertain, numb, terrified, unwelcoming, inconsolable life.

Maybe Dublin is right. And perhaps it is also true that there are interconnected points in space and time, focal points among which we so-called living and so-called dead can travel, and in this way, meet.

When he looks back in the direction of the young man, he’s disappeared, and this time it’s not the fog that has swallowed him up. The thing is he’s no longer there.

Impossible not to go back to thinking there is a wrinkled piece of fabric that sometimes allows the living to see the dead and the dead to see the living, the survivors. Impossible too not to see Riba now walking along, overrun by ghosts, suffocated by his catalog, and weighed down by signs of the past. In New York the day is surely mild and sunny, fragrant and sharp like an apple. Here everything is darker.

He walks ahead weighed down by signs from the past, but he has taken the reappearance of the author as an incredibly optimistic sign. He feels like he’s experiencing another moment at the center of the world. And he thinks of “The Importance of Elsewhere,” that Larkin poem. And letting himself be swept up in the celebration of the moment, by the excitement of finally being elsewhere, he speaks like John Ford, in the first person plural.

“We are us, we are here,” he says softly.

He doesn’t know he is speaking unwittingly to his destiny marked by solitude. Because the fog has begun to take up a position around him, and the truth is it’s been a while now since the last shadow on earth was interested in stalking him.

But he’s still enthusiastic about the reappearance of the author.

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