Dublinesque

May

He belongs to an increasingly rare breed of sophisticated, literary publishers. And every day, since the beginning of this century, he has watched in despair the spectacle of the noble branch of his trade — publishers who still read and who have always been drawn to literature — gradually, surreptitiously dying out. He had financial trouble two years ago, but managed to shut the publishing house down without having to declare bankruptcy, toward which it had been heading with terrifying obstinacy, despite its prestige. In over thirty years as an independent he has seen it all, successes but also huge failures. He attributes the loss of direction in the end to his resistance to publishing the gothic vampire tales and other nonsense now in fashion, and so forgets part of the truth: he was never renowned for good financial management, and what’s more, his exaggerated fanaticism for literature was probably harmful.

Samuel Riba — known to everyone as Riba — has published many of the great writers of his time. In some cases only one book, but enough so they appear in his catalog. Sometimes, although aware that in the honorable sector of his trade there are still some valiant Quixotes, he likes to see himself as the last publisher. He has a somewhat romantic image of himself, and spends his life feeling that it’s the end of an era, the end of the world, doubtless influenced by the sudden cessation of his activities. He has a remarkable tendency to read his life as a literary text, interpreting it with the distortions befitting the compulsive reader he’s been for so many years. Aside from this, he is hoping to sell his assets to a foreign publishing house, but talks have been stalled for some time. He lives in an anxious state of powerful, end-of-everything psychosis. Nothing, and no one, has yet convinced him that getting old has its good points. Does it?

He is visiting his elderly parents, and at this moment, looking them up and down with open curiosity. He has come to tell them how his recent trip to Lyon went. Apart from every Wednesday — a regular engagement — it’s a long-standing custom of his to go and see them whenever he gets back from a trip. In the last two years, he hasn’t received even a tenth of the offers to travel that he used to, but he’s hidden this detail from his parents, as well as the fact that he has closed down the publishing house, since he considers them to be too old for such upsets, and anyway, he’s not sure they would really take it in.

He cheers up every time he gets invited somewhere, because, among other things, it allows him to keep up the fiction of his busyness for his parents. Despite the fact that he will soon turn sixty he is, as can be seen, highly dependent on them, perhaps because he has no children, and they, in turn, have only him: an only child. He’s even traveled to places that barely interest him, just to be able to tell his parents about the trip afterward and keep them believing — they don’t read newspapers or watch television — that he is still publishing and his presence is still sought in many places, and therefore, that things are still going very well for him. But it’s not remotely like this. When he was a publisher he used to have a very busy social life, but now he has far less of one, if it counts as a social life at all. On top of the loss of so many false friendships, there is also the problem of the anxiety that has overcome him since he gave up drinking two years ago. It is an anxiety that comes as much from his awareness that, without alcohol, he would have been less daring in what he published, as from his certainty that his social life was forced, not at all natural and perhaps came only from an unhealthy fear of disorder and solitude.

Nothing has gone well for him since he began courting solitude. Despite trying to keep it from falling into the abyss, his marriage is in fact teetering on the edge, although not always, because his relationship passes through the most varied states and goes from euphoria and love to hatred and disaster. Every day he feels more unstable in every way, and he’s become grumpy and dislikes most of what he sees. Something to do with getting old, probably. But the fact is that he is starting to feel uncomfortable in the world, and turning sixty makes him feel as if he has a noose around his neck.

His elderly parents always listen to the tales of his travels with great curiosity and attention. At times, they even look like two exact replicas of Kubla Khan listening to Marco Polo’s stories. The visits that follow one of his trips take on a special quality; they seem to belong to a higher category than the more monotonous, habitual Wednesday visits. Today’s also has that quality of being extraordinary. However, something strange is happening because, despite having been in the house for a while, he still hasn’t managed to broach the subject of Lyon. And the thing is he cannot tell his parents anything about his time in that city, because he was so cut off from the world there and his journey so savagely cerebral that he is unable to dredge up a single, minimally human anecdote. Besides, what actually happened to him in Lyon was unpleasant. It was a cold, unfriendly trip, like those hypnotic journeys that lately he so often undertakes in front of his computer.

“So you’ve been to Lyon,” his mother says again, by now even slightly concerned.

His father has slowly begun to light his pipe and looks at him in surprise, as if also wondering why he doesn’t tell them anything about Lyon. But what can he tell them? He’s not going to start talking about the general theory of the novel he managed to concoct all by himself, there in the hotel. They wouldn’t be at all interested in how he elaborated this theory, and moreover, he doesn’t think they really know what a “literary theory” might be. And supposing they did know, he’s sure they would find the subject profoundly boring. They might even come to the same conclusion as Celia: that he has been too isolated recently, too disconnected from the real world and seduced by his computer or, in its absence — as in Lyon — by his own mental journeys.

In Lyon he spent his time avoiding all contact with Villa Fondebrider, the organization that had invited him to give a lecture on the grave state of literary publishing in Europe. In revenge, perhaps, for the disdain shown him by the organizers in not sending anyone to meet him either at the airport or the hotel, Riba had shut himself up in his hotel room and managed to realize one of the dreams he’d had when he was in publishing and didn’t have time for anything: to write a general theory of the novel.

He’d published lots of important authors, but only in Julien Gracq’s novel The Opposing Shore did he perceive any spirit of the future. In his room in Lyon, over the course of endless hours spent locked away, he devoted himself to a theory of the novel that, based on the lessons apparent to him the moment he opened The Opposing Shore, established five elements he considered essential for the novel of the future. These essential elements were: intertextuality; connection with serious poetry; awareness of a moral landscape in ruins; a slight favoring of style over plot; a view of writing that moves forward like time.

It was a daring theory, given that it put forward Gracq’s book, usually considered antiquated, as the most advanced of all novels. He filled a great many pages expanding on his proposal for the novel of the future. But when he had finished this tough job, he remembered the “sacred instinct of having no theories” spoken of by Pessoa, another of his favorite writers and whose book The Education of the Stoic he had once had the honor of publishing. He remembered this instinct and thought of how foolish novelists sometimes were, and remembered several Spanish writers he had published whose novels were the ingenuous product of extensive, sophisticated theories. What a huge waste of time, Riba thought, to come up with a theory in order to write a novel. He now had genuine grounds to say this, as he had just written one himself.

Let’s see, thought Riba. If one has the theory, why write the novel? And at the same time as he asked himself this, and doubtless in order to avoid the strong sense of having wasted his time, of wasting it even as he asked the question, he understood that the hours spent in his hotel room writing his theory of the novel had basically allowed him to get rid of it. Wasn’t this contemptible? No, of course not. His theory would still be what it was, lucid and daring, but he was going to destroy it by throwing it into the wastebasket in his room.

He held a secret, private funeral for his theory and for all the theories that had ever existed, and then left the city of Lyon without once having contacted the people who had invited him to speak about the grave — or maybe not so grave, thought Riba throughout the journey — state of literary publishing in Europe. He slipped quietly out of the hotel and took a train back to Barcelona, twenty-four hours after arriving in Lyon. He didn’t even leave a note for the people at Villa Fondebrider justifying his invisibility in Lyon, or his subsequent strange flight. He understood that the whole journey had served only to set out his theory and then hold a private funeral for it. He left totally convinced that his entire theory of what the novel should be was nothing more than a document drawn up with the single aim of liberating himself from its contents. Or, rather, a document with the exclusive aim of confirming that the best thing to do is to travel and to lose theories, lose them all.

“So you’ve been to Lyon,” his mother says, returning to the attack.

It has been a May of changeable weather, amazingly rainy for Barcelona. Today is cold, gray, and sad. For a few minutes, he imagines he’s in New York, in a building where you can hear the traffic driving toward the Holland Tunnel: rivers of cars heading home after work. It’s pure imagination. He has never heard the sound of the Holland Tunnel. He soon returns to reality, to Barcelona and the depressing ash-gray light. Celia, his wife, expects him home around six. Everything is happening with a certain degree of normality, apart from his parents’ growing concern as they realize their son is telling them nothing about Lyon.

But what can he tell them about what happened there? What can he say? That, as they well know, he hasn’t had a drink for two years, since his long-suffering kidneys put him in the hospital, and that this has confined him to a permanent state of sobriety, which means that sometimes he dedicates himself to activities as outlandish as elaborating literary theories and never leaving his hotel room, not even to meet the people who invited him? That in Lyon he didn’t speak to anyone and that, in short, since he stopped publishing, this is what he does every day in the long hours he spends sitting in front of his computer in Barcelona? That what he finds most regrettable and what saddens him most is that he left publishing without having discovered an unknown writer who turned out to be a genius? That he is still traumatized by the misfortune inherent in his former trade, that most bitter misfortune of having to look for authors, those tiresomely essential beings, since without them the whole business would be impossible? That in the past few weeks he has had pains in his right knee, almost certainly caused by uric acid or arthritis, supposing these are two different things? That he was once talkative thanks to alcohol and now he has become melancholy, which was probably always his true natural state? What can he tell his parents? That everything comes to an end?

His visit is going by with a degree of monotony and his parents even resort to recalling, due in part to the tedium dominating this encounter, the now distant day in 1959 when General Eisenhower deigned to visit Spain and ended the international isolation of Franco’s dictatorship. His father spent that day bursting with enthusiasm, not because of the diplomatic battle won by the wretched Galician general, but rather because the United States, the vanquishers of Nazism, had at last approached a moribund Spain. It is one of the first significant memories of Riba’s life. He remembers, above all, the moment his mother asked his father why he was so “excessively enthusiastic” about the American president’s visit.

“What does enthusiastic mean?” Riba had asked his parents.

He will always remember exactly how he framed this question, because — timid as he was at that age — it was the first one he asked. The second question he remembers asking, although he’s not so sure how he framed it. He knows, in any case, that it had to do with his name — Samuel — and with what some teachers and children at school had said to him. His father explained that he was only Jewish on his mother’s side and since she had converted to Catholicism a few months after he was born, he should relax — that’s what he said, relax — and just consider himself the son of Catholics.

Today his father, as on previous occasions when they’ve spoken of Eisenhower’s visit, denies he was so excited, and says it’s a misunderstanding of his mother’s, who thought that he got far too worked up about the American president’s visit. He also denies that for a while his favorite film was Charles Walters’s High Society with Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, and Frank Sinatra. They watched it at least three times, at the end of the fifties, and Riba remembers this film always used to put his father in an excellent mood. He was crazy about everything that came from the United States; the films and the glamour fascinated him; he was drawn to the lives led by human beings who were like them but in a place that seemed as remote as it was inaccessible. And it’s very likely Riba inherited from him, from his father, his fascination with the New World, the distant charm of those places that, back then, seemed so unattainable, maybe because the people who lived there seemed like the happiest people on earth.

They talk about Eisenhower’s visit and High Society and the D-Day landings, but his father continues stubbornly to deny he felt such enthusiasm. Just when it seems as if, to avoid getting stuck on the subject, his parents will soon return to the Lyon question, night falls on Barcelona with unusual speed; it grows dark very quickly, and a violent downpour arrives with a big flash of lightning. It falls just at the moment he is getting ready to leave the house.

The dreadful crash of a solitary clap of thunder. The rain falls on Barcelona with a rage and force never before seen. Suddenly he has the feeling of being trapped and at the same time of being perfectly capable of walking through walls. Somewhere, at the edge of one of his thoughts, he discovers a darkness that chills him to the bone. He isn’t too surprised, he’s used to this happening to him in his parents’ apartment. The most likely explanation is that, a few moments ago, one of the numerous damp ghosts — peaceful ghosts of some ancestor or other who inhabit this dark mezzanine — has slipped inside him.

He wants to forget about the domestic specter chilling him to the bone, so he goes over to the window and there he sees a young man who, with no umbrella in the rain, standing right in the middle of Calle Aribau, seems to be spying on the house. He is perhaps a superior ghost. But in any case, the young man is without a doubt a phantom from outside, not one of the family. Riba exchanges a few glances with him. The young man has an Indian-looking face, and wears an electric-blue Nehru jacket with gold buttons down the front. What can he be doing out there and why is he dressed like that? When the strange young man sees that the traffic lights have changed and the cars are starting to move along the street again, he crosses to the other side. Is it really a Nehru jacket he’s wearing? It could just be some kind of fashionable jacket, but it’s not at all clear. Only someone like Riba, who has always been such an attentive reader of newspapers and is now of a respectable age, would remember people such as Srî Pandit Jawâharlâl Nehru, a politician from another age, the Indian leader who was spoken of so much forty years ago, and now not at all.

Suddenly his father turns around in his armchair, and in a gloomy tone of voice, as if consumed by a feverish melancholy, says he’d like someone to explain something to him. And he repeats it twice, very anxiously. Riba’s never seen him in such a dismal mood: he’d like someone to explain something to him.

“What, Dad?”

Riba thinks he’s referring to the great peals of thunder, and patiently starts to explain the origin and cause of certain types of storms. But he soon realizes what he’s saying sounds ridiculous, and moreover, his father is looking at him as if he’s stupid. He pauses tragically and the pause becomes eternal, he can’t carry on talking. Perhaps now he might resolve to tell them something about Lyon. As things stand, it might even be an opportune moment to distract them by describing the literary theory he put together there. He could say he wrote the theory on a cigarette paper and then smoked it. Yes, he should tell them things like that. Or instead, to stir things up even more, ask them that question he hasn’t asked for years now: “Why did Mom convert to Catholicism? I need an explanation.”

He knows it’s useless, that they’ll never answer this.

He could also tell them about Julien Gracq and about the day he visited him and went out with the writer onto the balcony of his house in Sion, and Gracq contemplated bolts of lightning, and with particular attention, what he called the unleashing of erroneous energy.

His father interrupts the long pause to tell him, with a smug smile, that he is perfectly aware of the existence of altocumulus clouds and so forth, but he isn’t asking his son to tell him about things he learned in his long-ago school days.

A new silence follows, this time even longer. Time passes extraordinarily slowly. Mixed with the rain and “the unleashing of erroneous energy” is the ticking of the clock on the wall that, when it was in a different room of this apartment, witnessed his birth, almost sixty years ago. Suddenly all three of them stop moving and stay almost motionless, stiff, exaggeratedly stern — not at all exuberant, very Catalan, expecting who knows what, but definitely waiting. They have just begun the tensest wait of their lives, as if listening for the thunderclap that must arrive. Then suddenly the three of them are totally motionless, more expectant than ever. His parents are shockingly old, this is patently obvious. It’s not surprising they haven’t found out that he no longer has the publishing house and that he sees far fewer people than he used to.

“I was talking about the mystery,” says his father.

Another long pause.

“Of the unfathomable dimension.”

An hour later, the rain has stopped. Riba is preparing to escape the trap of the parental home when his mother asks him, almost innocently:

“And what plans do you have now?”

He says nothing, not having expected that question. He has no plans for the immediate future, not even a wretched invitation to some publishers’ conference; no book launch to at least show his face at; no new literary theory to write in a hotel room in Lyon; nothing, absolutely nothing at all.

“I can see you don’t have any plans,” his mother says.

His self-esteem wounded, he lets Dublin come to his rescue. He remembers the strange, striking dream he’d had in the hospital when he fell seriously ill two years ago: a long walk through the streets of the Irish capital, a city he has never been to, but which, in the dream, he knew perfectly well, as if he’d lived there in another life. Nothing astonished him as much as the extraordinary precision of the dream’s many details. Were they details from the real Dublin, or did they simply seem real due to the dream’s unparalleled intensity? When he woke up, he still knew nothing about Dublin, but he felt totally, strangely certain he had been walking through the streets of this city for a long time, and found it impossible to forget the only difficult part in the dream, the one where reality became strange and upsetting: the moment his wife discovered he had started to drink again, there, in a pub in Dublin. It was a difficult moment, more intense than any other in that dream. Caught by surprise by Celia on his way out of a pub called the Coxwold, in the midst of his latest unwelcome drinking binge, he embraced her sadly, and the two of them ended up crying, sitting on the curb of a Dublin side street. Tears were shed in the most disconsolate situation he had ever experienced in a dream.

“Oh my God, why have you started drinking again?” asked Celia.

A difficult moment, but a strange one too, maybe related to his having recovered from physical collapse and being reborn. A difficult, strange moment, as if there was some kind of message in their pathetic weeping. A singular moment due to how especially intense the dream became — an intensity he had only known before when, on repeated occasions, he dreamt he was happy because he was in New York — and because suddenly, almost brutally, he felt he was linked to Celia beyond this life, an incommunicable feeling it was impossible to demonstrate, but as powerful and personal as it was genuine. A moment like a stab of pain, as if for the first time in his life he felt alive. A very subtle moment, because it seemed to contain — like a puff of air, the dream coming from someone else’s mind — a hidden message that placed him just one step away from a great revelation.

“We could go to Cork tomorrow,” Celia was saying.

And that’s where it all ended. As if the revelation were waiting for him in the port city of Cork, in the south of Ireland.

What revelation?

His mother clears her throat impatiently when she sees him so pensive. And now Riba is worried that she is reading his mind — he has always suspected that, being his mother, she can read it perfectly — and she has discovered that her poor son is destined to fall off the wagon again.

“I’m planning a trip to Dublin,” Riba says, this time getting straight to the point.

Up until this precise moment it has rarely, if ever, crossed his mind to go to Dublin. Not speaking English well has always put him off. For business, he always felt it was enough to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair. He used to send his secretary Gauger to the London Book Fair. Gauger was always a huge asset whenever the English language proved essential. But perhaps now the time has come for everything to change. Didn’t it change two years ago for Gauger, who took his life savings and a sum of money Riba suspects he stole from him, and left to go and live in a great big hotel in the Tongariro region of New Zealand, where his stepsister was waiting for him? And anyway, didn’t Celia’s young lover, the one she had before she met Riba, come from Cork?

With charming innocence, his mother asks what he is going to do in Dublin. And he answers with the first thing that comes into his head: that he is going on the sixteenth of June, to give a lecture. Only once he has answered does he realize that this is precisely the day of his parents’ sixty-first wedding anniversary. And what is more, he also realizes that “61” and “16” are like heads and tails of the same number. The sixteenth of June, meanwhile, is the day on which Joyce’s Ulysses takes place, the Dublinesque novel par excellence and one of the pinnacles of the age of print, of the Gutenberg galaxy, the twilight of which he is having to live through.

“What’s the lecture about?” asks his father.

Brief hesitation.

“It’s about James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, and the Gutenberg constellation giving way to the digital age,” he replies.

It was the first thing that occurred to him. Afterward he pauses, and then, as if dictated by an inner voice, he adds:

“They actually want me to speak about the end of the age of print.”

Long silence.

“Are the presses closing down?” his mother asks.

His parents, who — as far as he knows — have not the slightest idea who Joyce is and even less what kind of novel lies behind the title Ulysses and who, moreover, have been caught off guard by the topic of the end of the age of print, look at him as if it’s just been confirmed that, even though it’s beneficial for his health, he’s been very odd lately, owing to his permanent sobriety since giving up alcohol so radically two years ago. He senses this is what his parents are thinking and fears greatly that they are not entirely in the wrong, since his constant sobriety is affecting him, why pretend otherwise? He is too connected to his thoughts and sometimes disconnects fatally for a few seconds and gives answers he should have thought through more, such as the one he has just given them about Ulysses and the Gutenberg galaxy.

He ought to have given them a different answer. But as Céline said, “Once you’re in, you’re in it up to your neck.” Now that he’s announced he is going to Dublin, he’s going to push on into the tangled affair, up to his neck, as far as is necessary. He will go to Dublin. No doubt about it. This will also allow him to verify whether or not the many extraordinarily precise details in his strange dream were real. If, for instance, he sees that in Dublin there is a pub called the Coxwold with a big red and black door, this will mean nothing less than that he really did cry with Celia, in an emotional scene, sitting on the ground, in Dublin, perhaps before he was ever there.

He will go to Dublin, capital of Ireland, a country he doesn’t know much about, only that, if he remembers correctly — he tells himself he’ll look it up later on Google — it has been an independent state since 1922, the very year — another coincidence — his parents were born. He knows very little about Ireland, although he knows a good deal about its literature. W. B. Yeats, for example, is one of his favorite poets. 1922 is, moreover, the year in which Ulysses was published. He could go and hold a funeral for the Gutenberg galaxy in Dublin Cathedral, which is called St. Patrick’s, if he remembers rightly; there, on that holy site, Antonin Artaud finally went completely mad when he saw no difference between the saint’s cane and the one he was using himself.

His parents are still looking at him as if thinking that his permanent sobriety has led him perilously down the pathways of autism; they seem to be reproaching him for daring to talk about someone called Joyce when he knows perfectly well they have no idea who this gentleman is.

His father turns around in his chair and appears to be about to protest, but finally says only that he would like someone to explain something.

Again? Now it seems like he’s parodying himself. Could it be a touch of humor on his part?

“What, Dad? The storm’s over. What else do we have to explain to you? The unfathomable dimension?”

Unperturbed, his father continues what he’s started, and now he wants to know why exactly they’ve chosen his son to speak in Dublin about the decline of the Gutenberg constellation. And he also wants to know why his son still hasn’t said anything at all about his trip to Lyon. Perhaps he didn’t really go there and wants to hide this from his parents. They are used to him telling them about his trips, and his behavior today is alarmingly anomalous.

“I don’t know, it could be you’ve got a lover and you didn’t go to Lyon with her, but up Tibidabo,” he says. “You’re really doing some things badly lately, and as your father I feel obliged to point this out.”

Riba is about to tell him that he went to Lyon simply to hold a funeral for all the literary theories still in the world, including the one he himself managed to devise in a hotel room there. He’d like to be able to say something like this to his father, because he doesn’t appreciate those last paternal words one bit. But he holds back, he controls himself. He stands up, and begins the ceremony of saying goodbye. After all, it’s not raining anymore. And in any case he knows that when his parents start telling him off, it’s usually just a trick to keep him in the house a little longer. He can’t stay there a minute longer. He realizes that sometimes he lets his father control his life too much. Not having had children and being, moreover, an only child has led to this ongoing state of strange childish submission, but there’s a limit to everything. Years ago, he used to fight a lot with his father. Later on, they made peace. But he thinks that, at times like these, he can sense a certain nostalgia for that period of big arguments, great clashes. As if his father enjoyed hand-to-hand combat more than the current haven of peace and mutual comprehension. What’s more, it’s possible that arguing makes his elderly father feel better, and he unconsciously seeks out confrontation.

Although it’s a recent feeling, in some ways he adores his father: his intelligence, his secret goodness, his unexploited writing talent. He would have liked to have published a novel of his. He adores this man, always so strict, so entrenched in his role as a nineteenth-century father, that he has created in his son the need to be a subordinate, to be such an obedient person that he often even finds himself thanking his father for trying to direct his steps.

“Do you really not want to tell us anything about Lyon? It’s very strange, son, very strange,” says his mother.

They seem determined to keep him there with trifling matters for as long as possible, as if they wanted to delay him from going home, maybe because deep down they have always believed that, even though he is married and a highly respected publisher of almost sixty years of age, when he’s here he is still in short trousers.

Marco Polo is leaving, he thinks of saying. But he keeps quiet, he knows this would make it worse. His father looks at him angrily. His mother reproaches him for having spoiled such a firmly established custom as that of telling them about his latest trip. They walk him to the door, but they don’t make it easy for him to get to the exit, practically blocking him with their bodies. “You’re grown up now,” says his father, “and I can’t understand why you’d want to go to Dublin just to see this friend of yours from the Ulysses family.”

The Ulysses family! This must be another touch of last-minute paternal humor or sarcasm. He calls the elevator which, as always, takes its time arriving, despite only having to come up one floor. His parents have never accepted that, given the short distance to the lobby, he might walk down the stairs, and he, meanwhile, never wished to be the callous son who breaks with the sacred tradition of always leaving in the same clunky old elevator, once so luxurious.

While they wait, he asks his father with childish sarcasm if he doesn’t like the fact his son has a friend. And he reminds him that as a child he didn’t let him have friends, and was always jealous of them. He is exaggerating, but in a way he is right to do so. Isn’t his father exaggerating too? Doesn’t his father, in his heart of hearts, want to forbid him to go to Dublin? So he rebels against him, against his father’s secret wish to stop him going to Ireland. But really he is acting as a small child would do, unable to seriously hurt his father, let alone kill him, as he thinks he remembers Freud recommended earnestly.

No matter how great his tendency or vocation for patience might be, and no matter how much heroic fiber he might be made of, the wait for the elevator seems to go on forever. Finally the hulking old thing comes, he says goodbye again to his parents, steps into the elevator, presses a button, and goes down. Such a huge relief; he breathes deeply. The descent to the lobby is, as ever, very slow; the elevator is very old. As he descends, he feels like he is leaving behind the whole saga of the patio of this mezzanine apartment on Calle Aribau, where as a child he played soccer, always eternally alone. Later on, this patio became the center of his happiest dream, his dream linked to New York.

Out on Calle Aribau, as he gets into a taxi, he realizes it’s about to start raining again. He had thought that after the great storm the rain would ease up. Maybe he could say this to the taxi driver? He hopes he’s not like the somewhat Shakespearean Portuguese taxi driver he met in Lyon, the most theatrical taxi driver in the world.

“It’s going to rain some more,” Riba says.

For a moment, he worries that the taxi driver is going to answer like the character from Macbeth and give the famous reply:

“Let it come down.”

But he doesn’t always — if ever — come across taxi drivers in Barcelona who speak like characters from Shakespeare.

“You said it,” replies the man.

In the taxi he finally finds time to glance through the day’s newspaper, and comes across some comments by Claudio Magris about The Infinite Journey, his latest book. He’s interested in whatever Magris writes. Almost too long ago to remember, he published his book Clarisse’s Ring, and has been good friends with the writer ever since.

The taxi glides along the apparently lifeless streets of Barcelona under a dirty light after the storm. He always worries absurdly that taxi drivers — it’s probably a very childish feeling — will see him barricaded behind his newspaper and get a false impression that, despite having already talked about the weather, he is not in the least bit interested in them and in what they might tell him about their lives of drudgery. He doesn’t know whether to bury himself in his newspaper and read Magris’s comments or talk to the driver and ask him something slightly odd: for example, if he’s been through the forest yet today, or if he’s played backgammon, or watched much television.

This fear that taxi drivers will think him so very indifferent means he sometimes turns the pages of his newspaper very furtively, but this isn’t the case today, since he’s just decided that nothing and no one will be able to distract him from Claudio Magris, whose article is about — a very striking double coincidence — Ulysses and Joyce and about precisely what he is doing now: going home.

He feels he should read this reappearance of Ulysses as a not at all insignificant coded message. As if secret forces — one of them Magris himself with his comments — are nudging him ever closer toward Dublin. He looks up and gazes out of the window; the taxi has just left Calle Aribau and is turning onto Vía Augusta. When they reach the intersection of Avenida Príncipe de Asturias and Rambla de Prat, he sees a young man on a street corner wearing an electric-blue Nehru jacket. He looks a lot like the man he saw earlier, standing in the rain in front of his parents’ house. Two Nehru jackets in such a short space of time is surely a coincidence.

He sees the young man only fleetingly because, almost immediately, as if fearing he’d been discovered, the man turns the corner and vanishes with astonishing speed.

How strange, thinks Riba, he’s disappeared almost too quickly. Although it’s not so strange really, he’s used to such things by now. He knows that sometimes people one didn’t expect at all can appear.

He goes back to reading the newspaper, he wants to concentrate on the interview with Magris, but ends up calling Celia on his cell phone to tell her he’s on his way home. The short conversation calms him down. When he hangs up, he thinks he could have told her that he’s seen two Nehru jackets in a short space of time. But no, maybe it was better just to have said he was coming home.

He goes back to the newspaper and reads that Claudio Magris believes Ulysses’s circular journey as he returns triumphantly home — Joyce’s traditional, classic, Oedipal, conservative journey — was replaced halfway through the twentieth century by a rectilinear journey: a sort of pilgrimage, a journey always moving forward, toward an impossible point in infinity, like a straight line advancing hesitantly into nothingness.

He could see himself now as a rectilinear traveler, but doesn’t want to create too many problems for himself, and decides that his journey through life is traditional, classic, Oedipal, conservative. He’s going home in a taxi, isn’t he? Doesn’t he go to his parents’ house whenever he comes back from a trip, and on top of that, visit them without fail every Wednesday? Isn’t he planning a trip to Dublin and the very center of Ulysses to then come home good-naturedly days later to Barcelona and to his parents and tell them about the trip? It’s hard to deny his life is following the pattern of a strictly orthodox circular journey.

“After Calle Verdi, you said?” asks the taxi driver.

“Yes, I’ll tell you where.”

When he finally gets home, he says hello to his wife and gives her a kiss. He smiles happily, like a simpleton. They have known or loved each other for thirty years, and except for very critical moments — such as during the final escalation of his drinking two years ago that ended in physical collapse — they haven’t grown too tired of living together. He tells her straight away that his father suffered an attack of melancholy and asked his son to explain the mystery of “the dimension.”

What dimension? she asks. He knew she might ask this. Well, the unfathomable dimension no less, he replies. They look at each other, and an air of mystery appears between them as well. The mystery his father was talking about? He can’t help but let his attention wander to other questions. Isn’t there essentially an unfathomable dimension between him and her?

“Without asking who you were, / I fell in love. / And whoever you might be, / I will always love you,” go the ridiculous, naïve lyrics to the song by Les Surfs that was playing when they met, and fell in love. Back then Celia looked more like Catherine Deneuve than anyone he had ever seen. Even the raincoats she wore that made her look sluttish recalled the ones Deneuve wore in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

And what do we know about ourselves, he wonders. Less and less every day, because on top of everything, Celia has been studying for some time now the possibility of becoming a Buddhist; she’s been contemplating for a few months what she calls the sweet eventuality. By now she’s almost convinced that she has within her the potential for reaching Nirvana, and believes she is close to seeing, with clarity and conviction, the true nature of existence and of life. It hasn’t escaped his notice that these first signs of Buddhism could end up being a big problem, in the same way that the escalation in his drinking was, two years ago, leading Celia seriously to consider leaving him. The fact is, he’d be in danger of being left on his own if one day he had the crazy idea of abusing alcohol again.

Now the two of them are motionless, as if both preoccupied with the same four questions, and this has paralyzed them: life, alcohol, Buddhism, and above all, their ignorance of each other.

They have been gripped by an unexpected coldness, as if they have suddenly realized that deep down they are strangers to each other, and to themselves, although — as well he knows — she is confident that Buddhism can lend her a hand and help her to take a spiritual step forward.

They smile nervously, trying to minimize the tension of this odd moment. Maybe he loves her so madly because she is someone he will never know everything about. It has always fascinated him, for example, that Celia is one of those women who never turn off taps properly. Dripping taps have been a constant in his marriage, in the same way — if such a comparison is possible — as his problems with alcohol.

He thinks he has always combined superbly well this relative ignorance about Celia with his total ignorance about himself. As he remarked once in an article for La Vanguardia: “I don’t know myself. The list of books I have published seems to have obscured forever the person behind the books. My biography is my catalog. But the man who was there before I decided to become a publisher is missing. I, in short, am missing.”

“What are you thinking about?” asks Celia.

Being interrupted annoys him and he reacts strangely and tells her he was thinking about the dining-room table and the hall chairs, which are perfectly real, and about the fruit basket that belonged to his grandmother, but that, however, he is also thinking that any madman could step through the door at any point and remark that things aren’t so clear.

He is immediately filled with dismay, as he realizes he has muddled things up unnecessarily. Now his wife is indignant.

“What chairs?” says Celia. “What hall? And what madman? You must be hiding something from me. I’ll ask you again. What are you thinking about? You haven’t started drinking again, have you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He notes that he has got himself tied into knots.

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

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

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

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

“Is that me?” he asks.

Celia doesn’t even answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is natural for publishers to suffer from this strange buzzing. Some hear it more than others, but not one escapes from it completely. There are extreme cases, although Riba was never one of those. They are the publishers with the most acute writer’s malady, who would prefer to publish books written by nobody, since that way they would avoid the buzzing and keep the glory of what they had published for themselves alone.

In the same way that death shelters the malady of death inside itself, that is, its own malady, there are publishers whose most intimate tormentor, the writer’s malady, gnaws away at them, a background noise, whose sound recalls the crunching of dry leaves.

One day in Antwerp, Riba spoke of this crunching sound to Hugo Claus. He spoke of how he was doomed to live with the writer’s malady, and mentioned that his head was forever pierced with sorrow, due to that persistent, intimate monster and its goddamned buzzing, reminding him constantly that apparently nothing in life could exist without it, without the malady, without that background noise, without that savage, relentless crunching; always reminding him that the malady, the murmur of dry leaves, was a vital cog in the diabolical mechanism of his mental clockwork.

Hugo Claus, so famous for The Sorrow of Belgium, silently sympathized with him and then remarked simply:

“The sorrow of the publisher.”

The anguish that gives every sign of being dementia is gradually causing him to feel lost, drifting strangely through that dangerous childlike area on the edges of his mind, where he knows he might lose himself forever at any moment. But at the last second he manages to escape the danger by thinking of something else, remembering, for instance, that he has a moral intelligence, even though at times he feels this is not much, though sometimes he feels it’s quite a lot. And he escapes from the danger at last by remembering too that next month he’ll go to Dublin. And by recalling a line of Monica Vitti’s in Red Desert, a line that, he now realizes, is almost as dangerous as the most feverish and most obsessively particular wanderings around London’s East End might be for anyone:

“My hair is hurting me.”

He could say the same thing too. Spider would certainly say it. Spider, who walks through life so lost, doesn’t know Riba could imitate him and reconstruct his personality by adapting other people’s memories — he could turn into John Vincent Moon, one of Borges’s heroes, for example, or into an accumulation of literary quotations; he could become a mental enclave where several personalities could find shelter and coexist, and thus, perhaps without even any real effort, manage to shape a strictly individual voice, an ambiguous support for a nomadic, heteronymous profile. .

There’s no doubt Riba has a certain facility for going off on mental tangents and making life more complicated than necessary. He is like a follower of the Italian writer, three of whose books he published, Carlo Emilio Gadda, who was a neurotic as admirable as he was phenomenal: Gadda threw himself into the page he was writing, with all his obsessions. And everything he did was incomplete. In a short article about risotto alla milanese, he made things so complicated that he ended up describing the grains of rice, one by one — including the moment when each one was still enveloped in its little husk, the pericarp — and naturally, he was unable to ever finish the text.

Riba has a tendency to read life like a literary text and sometimes to see the world like a tangled mess or a ball of wool. So that when Celia interrupts the film and his reflections on Gadda and the risotto, and his digression about John Vincent Moon, so she can say, in the most prosaic tone possible, that afterward she will heat up the leftover potatoes au gratin in the oven, he remembers a Jules Renard quote, a perfect snippet: “A young woman from London left this note the other day: ‘I’m going to kill myself, father’s dinner is in the oven.’”

Celia seems to him to be acting as if she’s already a Buddhist, and also as if she’s convinced that everything he thinks leads him to get dangerously lost on the edges of his East End.

So as not to get so lost, Riba turns slightly and looks to the left, at the kitchen. The potatoes au gratin are, in effect, already in the oven. But it doesn’t escape his notice that this is merely a relative truth, as at any time a madwoman, or Spider himself, could come through the door and dispute this piece of evidence and all others, every single one, including the simple truth of the potatoes au gratin.

When they have finished watching Spider, he hurls himself at the computer like a desperate man. The hours of computer abstinence have brought him to the brink of a nervous breakdown. And a serious hairache. On the other hand, not sitting in front of the computer has meant that the pain in his right knee has abated slightly, pain he attributes to an excess of uric acid, although in reality it might simply be arthritis, the onset of old age, why kid himself?

He sits down in front of the computer screen wearing the same expression Spider does that clearly demonstrates his failure to communicate with a world he doesn’t understand. First, he searches for the latest news about himself on Google. Within the last few days, there is none. He then spends some time looking at a huge range of websites and finally comes across an article that seems oddly related to his decision to hold a funeral in Dublin. The writer of the article claims we will arrive sooner than expected at the digitalization of all written knowledge and the disappearance of literary authors, in the interests of producing a single universal book, an almost infinite flow of words, which will be reached, naturally, the writer says, by means of the internet.

The disappearance of literary authors is a topic that touches him deeply. This reality that the web announces for the future, becoming clearer every day, never fails to move him. “But perhaps,” says the writer, “instead of surprise, the predicted end of the printed book might now provoke rejection in the traditional reader. What to say about the writer who sees in this vertigo a sort of attack on the purpose and the nature of his work? However, it would appear that the course has been set and the die cast for paper and ink. No argument will divert its terrible fate, nor is there any clairvoyant or prophet who can predict its survival. The funeral march has begun, and it is futile for those of us who remain loyal to the printed page to protest and rage in the midst of our despair.”

He is struck by the writer saying the funeral march has begun. Then, he decides to open his email and finds the email he expected from a friend, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, who finally tells him in detail about the installation she is preparing for the end of July in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern. They have been good friends since he published a very comprehensive book on Dominique’s work five years ago. He feels that amidst the general decline of his life, his friendship with the French artist is one of the few things that hasn’t turned into a disaster.

He has always been fascinated by the way Dominique’s installations connect literature and cities, films and hotels, architecture and abysses, mental geographies and authors’ quotations. She is a great lover of the art of quotation and very specifically of Godard’s technique from his early period, when he inserted quotations, the words of others — real or invented — into the action of his films.

Recently, Dominique has been filled with passion for other people’s phrases and is trying to create an apocalyptic culture of the literary quotation, a culture of the end of the line, and as a matter of fact, of the end of the world. In her installation for the Turbine Hall, Dominique, with her dynamic relationship to quotations, wants in part to situate herself in Godard’s wake, while at the same time locating the visitor in a London of 2058, where it has been raining cruelly, without let-up, for years.

The idea — Dominique tells him in her email — is that one sees how a great flood has transformed London, where the incessant rainfall over the last few years has had strange effects; there have been mutations in the urban sculptures, which, invaded by damp, have not just eroded, but have also grown monumentally, as if they were tropical plants or thirsty giants. In order to stop this tropicalization or organic growth, they are stored in the Turbine Hall, surrounded by hundreds of metal bunks that, day and night, cradle men who sleep, and other vagabonds and refugees from the flood.

Dominique plans to project a strange film, more experimental than futuristic, onto a giant screen, which will bring together scenes from Alphaville (Godard), Toute la mémoire du monde (Resnais), Fahrenheit 451 (Truffaut), The Jetty (Chris Marker), and Red Desert (Antonioni): quite an end-of-the-world aesthetic, very much in keeping with the apocalyptic feeling Riba himself has had for some time now.

On each bunk there will be at least one book, a volume that, with modern corrective treatments, will have survived the excessive dampness caused by the rains. There will be English editions of books by authors almost all published in Spanish by Riba: books by Philip K. Dick, Robert Walser, Stanislaw Lem, James Joyce, Fleur Jaeggy, Jean Echenoz, Philip Larkin, Georges Perec, Marguerite Duras, W. G. Sebald. .

And playing an undefined sort of music between the metallic bunks, there will be musicians who will be like an echo of the orchestra that went down with the Titanic but playing acoustic string instruments along with electric guitars. Maybe what they play will be the distorted jazz of the future, perhaps a hybrid style that, one day, will be called electric Marienbad.

The coexistence of the music with the rain, the books, the sculptures, the literary quotations, and the metal bunks in the exhibit — where Riba imagines, he doesn’t know why, replicas of Spider appearing, phantoms walking everywhere — might produce a strange result, as if — Dominique ends up telling him — the spectral hour had arrived and we were all walking lost among the ruins of a great disaster, in an unmistakable apocalyptic state.

He sits absorbed in front of the computer when suddenly he remembers that terrible day last week when, simultaneously sweet and ridiculous, he went for a walk at dusk, in a light rainstorm, wearing his old raincoat, his shirt with its torn collar turned up, his hideous short trousers, his hair completely plastered to his head. Car headlights were blinding him, but he carried on walking through the streets of the neighborhood, focusing on his thoughts. He was aware how strange his appearance was in the rain — mainly due to the short trousers — but also that there was no longer any solution, that it was too late now to try to put things right. He had spent hours hypnotized in front of the computer, and in a fit of lucidity, had decided to dash out into the street to get some air no matter what. He went out just as he was, in exactly the same clothes he wore around the house. Seven whole hours he had spent shut up in his study. It was actually not so much time, considering that his daily ration of confinement was usually much more extreme. But that day he had felt especially sensitive to being confined. Worried about himself and his excessive isolation, he had launched himself into the street carrying his old raincoat, but he had made the mistake of forgetting his umbrella, and then it was too late to go home, to go back upstairs to get it, and while he was at it change his trousers, so short and ridiculous under the raincoat. He must have presented a forlorn image to the neighbors, one he couldn’t even justify by explaining that, as a publisher fallen on hard times, he had an understandable touch of madness to him. For a while, as if indifferent to the rain, he could be seen advancing, phantom-like, like one of those guys who showed up in so many of the most celebrated novels he used to publish: those desperate men with a romantic air, always alone, sleepwalking in the rain, walking always along lost highways.

He has always admired writers who each day begin a journey toward the unknown, and who nevertheless spend all their time sitting in a room. The doors to their rooms are closed, they never move, and yet the confinement provides them with absolute freedom to be who they want to be, to go wherever their thoughts take them. Sometimes he links this image of solitary writers in their writing rooms with one that has been his lifelong obsession: the need to catch a genius, a young man highly superior to the others and who travels in his room better than anyone. He would’ve liked to have discovered and published him, but he didn’t find him, and it seems less and less likely he will do so now. He has never doubted the existence of this young genius. It’s just that, Riba thinks, he remains in the shadows: in solitude, in doubt, in question; that’s why I can’t find him.

Celia is sitting right beside him, and when she sees with a certain degree of alarm how completely he has sunk into self-absorption, she decides to intervene, to bring him back — as far as possible — into the real world.

“Let’s return, if you don’t mind,” she says, “to this requiem in Dublin. A requiem in honor of whom did you say?”

He is going to repeat that it is a requiem for the age of print, a funeral for one of the pinnacles of the Gutenberg galaxy, when suddenly from Ulysses, the funeral Bloom attends in Dublin on June 16, 1904, springs to mind, and he recalls the sixth episode in the book, when at eleven in the morning Bloom joins a group on its way to the cemetery to bid farewell to the dead man, Paddy Dignam, crossing the city to Prospect Cemetery in a carriage with Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, and John Power. Bloom is still an outsider. Bloom, for his part, joins the group quite reluctantly, because he is aware they don’t trust him, because they know of his freemasonry and Jewishness. After all Dignam was a patriotic Catholic who boasted of his own past and that of Ireland. And moreover, he was such a good man he let alcohol kill him.

— Liquor, what?

— Many a good man’s fault, Mr Dedalus said with a sigh.

He remembers when they stop in front of the mortuary chapel. It is a sad chapel, a meditation on death, the saddest he has seen in his life. This is the gray burial of a working-class alcoholic. All the details of the cortège are described and one expects that at any moment happiness will appear in the form of a rose, an unending rose, as Borges would have said. But this happiness is a long time coming, in fact it never arrives. The process of burying the dead man is long and complex. And the grave is deep and endless, as the rose. Nothing is truer than that he has never read anything so sad as that perfectly gray chapter of Joyce’s book. In the end, tin wreaths are left hung on knobs, garlands of bronzefoil. Roses would have been better, the narrator remarks, flowers are more poetical.

“A requiem for whom?” repeats Celia.

He wants to avoid at all costs her seeing him as still alienated, or as a now permanently unhinged hikikomori, but his reply doesn’t let her see him any other way.

“For Paddy Dignam,” he says.

“For Paddy who?”

“Dignam, Paddy Dignam, the one with the red nose.”

It would have been better if he’d said nothing at all.

Before going to bed, they watch TV for a while. They catch the end of an American film, in which there is a rainy burial. Lots of umbrellas. With great satisfaction, he recognizes Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx, where he went on his second and most recent trip to New York. He went to this cemetery to see Herman Melville’s grave. He recognizes it by the style of the tombstones and because the place etched itself deeply on his memory, and also because visible in the background is the elevated train station he disembarked from to visit the place. Although he sees Celia is very absorbed in the burial scene, he intervenes to say he has been to that cemetery, that he recognizes it by the train station in the background and that it is very familiar to him. Celia doesn’t know what to say.

“Are you impressed that you’re seeing somewhere I’ve been, or is the funeral scene making more of an impression?” he asks her in a somewhat provocative tone of voice.

Celia chooses to remain absorbed in the film.

He doesn’t know why he wants to go to Dublin. He doesn’t think it’s just because he’s fascinated by the idea of waiting around until June 16 to travel to a place where no one has invited him. He doesn’t believe it’s only because he thinks he should go there and then tell his parents about it, to make it up to them for not having said anything about Lyon. And nor does he believe he wants to go to Dublin simply because, if the premonition is true, it might be that he will find himself at the gateway to a great revelation about the secret of the world, a revelation that will be waiting for him in Cork. Nor does he think it’s simply because, if he goes to Dublin he will somehow get a little closer to his beloved New York, although this is another reason he wants to go there. He doesn’t even believe he wants to go to Dublin because he wishes to say a requiem for the culture of the Gutenberg age and at the same time say a requiem for himself, literary publisher very much in decline.

Maybe he wants to go to Dublin for all these reasons and also for others that escape him and will go on escaping him forever.

Why do I want to go to Dublin?

He asks himself silently twice in a row. It’s possible there is an answer to this question, but also possible that he may never find out exactly what it is.

And it is even possible that the very fact of not knowing the reasons he is going to Dublin in their entirety forms part of the meaning of the journey, in the same way that still not knowing the exact number of words of his requiem may help him to deliver a good eulogy in Dublin.

He will go to Dublin.

The following morning, an hour after waking up and with her time already minutely planned out, Celia is getting ready to go to her office at the museum where she works. Her face radiates peace, serenity, tranquility. It might be that these are a consequence of her imminent conversion to Buddhism.

Celia always goes about things enthusiastically, with enviable drive. She appears helpless and at the same time possesses a frightening strength — both extremes are necessary. Occasionally, he is reminded of what his grandfather Jacobo used to say: “Nothing important was ever achieved without enthusiasm!” Celia is enthusiasm itself and always has an air of giving importance to what she does, whatever it might be, and at the same time of denying all this importance with a simple smile. She says she learned all this from the Oklahoma Theater, that theater whose stage, according to her, was directly connected to the void.

Oklahoma and Celia seem to be inseparable. Buddha will be the third side to the triangle. Celia often says there is no better place for enthusiasm than the United States. And that life there — she once went to Chicago — is pure theater to her, permanently connected to the void. But she wouldn’t mind going to live in New York if he would only stop obsessing about it and finally decide to move to that place he so yearns for, to the supposed center of the world.

Celia is going to work, but first she drops a hint by means of a terrifying piece of information. Sensing that it won’t be long before her dear autistic husband goes and sits in front of the computer, she tells him that people who regularly use Google gradually lose the ability to read literary works with any kind of depth, which serves to demonstrate how digital knowledge can be linked to the recent stupidity in the world.

Riba accepts the dig, but prefers not to take it personally. When she leaves, he has his first cappuccino of the morning. Really, coffee was devised as a way of concentrating better on the internet, he thinks. Over the last two years, in the absence of alcohol, coffee has been his only stimulant. Today he drinks it faster than ever, at top speed: standing up in the kitchen, gloriously anxious. Then, in an almost desperate attempt not to let a single effect of the caffeine escape, he turns his back on Celia’s words and seats himself at the computer.

For a moment, he considers not spending as many hours as usual in front of the screen, not exactly because of what Celia said, although this has a strong influence, but rather because he has been telling himself for some time now he should set himself life challenges far removed from his recent obsessive tendency to sit motionless at the computer. But he immediately changes his mind. Being almost sixty years old he doesn’t really have any ideas for life challenges. So eventually he decides to delve once more into the internet, where he is unable ever to avoid giving free rein to a certain narcissism by typing into Google first his name, and then that of the publishing house. He knows that, aside from being egocentric, all of this is clearly obsessive. But even so, he doesn’t want to give up this daily habit. The flesh is weak.

This obsessive activity in fact serves to soothe his nostalgia for the time when he used to go to his office and, with his secretary Gauger, inspect every mention in the press about the books they published. He knows that, as a substitute for what he used to do in his office, his current mania is verging on the grotesque, but he feels it is necessary for his mental health. He looks at lots of blogs to find out what they are saying about the books he published. And if he comes across someone who has written something even slightly unpleasant, he writes an anonymous post calling the author ignorant or an idiot.

Today he spends a long time doing this activity and ends up insulting a guy from Barcelona who says on his blog that he took a Paul Auster book on holiday to Tokyo and feels disappointed. What a bastard this blogger is! Riba only published The Invention of Solitude by Auster, and although the book the tourist is putting down is The Brooklyn Follies, he feels just as affronted by this mistreatment of Auster, whom he considers a friend. When he finishes insulting the blogger, he feels more refreshed than ever. Recently he has been so very sensitive and had such low morale that he thinks if he had overlooked this unjust comment on Auster’s book he would have become even more depressed than he was before.

•

He interrupts the hypnotic state the computer has lulled him into for yet another day and stands up. He goes over to the big window for a few moments and from there looks out at the great view over the city of Barcelona, not as fantastic today as it usually is, due to the alarmingly persistent rain. In fact, the whole city has disappeared from his window, disappeared behind a heavy curtain of water. May rain, although a little excessive for this time of year. It is as if up there, in the clouds, someone has begun to collaborate on Dominique’s future installation in the Tate Modern in London.

He senses that this short journey over to the window, this modest, fleeting liberation from the digital world, will turn out to be beneficial. Right away, standing here, even though he’s facing the disappeared view of Barcelona, his hikikomori guilt has diminished. And he starts to see that Celia’s words as she left today are having quite an effect on him. In general, he barely takes a break from the computer until she gets home at a quarter to three. Today he makes an exception and devotes part of his time to standing there in front of the window from which, nevertheless, he can see nothing. Perhaps he hasn’t picked the best moment. What is certain is that today there is nothing to see, except the rubbed-out city and the mist. He stays there for a while, listening to the almost religious, monotonous murmur of the rain. He somewhat loses track of time.

He hardly ever sets foot on the streets of Barcelona. Recently, he merely contemplates the city from up here, but today, with the rain and the mist, he can’t even do this. To think that he used to have a busy social life. Now he has become down in the mouth, melancholy, shy — more than he ever thought — shut up between these four walls. A good drink would liberate him from feeling so misanthropic and timid. But it’s not worth his while because it would endanger his health. He wonders if there is a pub called the Coxwold in Dublin. Deep down he has a burning desire to break his own internal rules and have a good slug of whiskey. But he won’t do it, he knows better. He is convinced that Celia would be capable of leaving him if she saw he was drinking again. She wouldn’t stand for a return to the days of the great alcoholic nightmare.

He won’t have even one drink, he’ll endure stoically. Nevertheless, there’s not a day when he’s not seized by an indefinable nostalgia for bygone evenings, when he used to go out to dinner with his authors. Unforgettable dinners with Hrabal, Amis, Michon. . Writers are such great drinkers.

He leaves the window and goes back to the computer and googles the words Coxwold pub Dublin. It’s a way like any other to make him believe he is quenching his great thirst. He searches and soon sees there’s no pub with this name there, and again feels like going into one for real. Again, he is holding back. He goes to the kitchen and drinks two glasses of water one after the other. There, by the fridge, suddenly leaning on it, he remembers how he sometimes imagines — only imagines — that, instead of spending all his time shut up in the house, a computer addict, he is a man open to the world and to the city at his feet. It is then he imagines he is not a retired, reclusive publisher and a perfect computer nerd, but a man of the world, one of those guys from 1950s Hollywood movies his father wanted so much to resemble, and did. A sort of Clark Gable or Gary Cooper. That kind of very sociable man who used to be called an “extrovert” and who was friends with hotel porters, waitresses, bank clerks, fruit sellers, taxi drivers, truck drivers, and hairdressers. One of those admirable, uninhibited, really open guys who are constantly reminding us that life is essentially wonderful and should be approached with pure enthusiasm, as there’s no better remedy against terrible anguish, such a European disorder.

From the fifties, that time linked to the period of his childhood, he still retains — directly inherited from his father, although much deformed and hidden by his shyness and also by his leftist tendencies and his quite rigorous intellectual veneer — a powerful fascination with the “American way of life.” What’s more, he never forgets that if there is one place where he might one day find happiness, this place is New York. In fact, on the two occasions he’s been there, he came very close to it. This conviction is not at all unconnected to a recurring dream that pursued him for a while. In the dream, everything was as it had been when he used to play soccer eternally alone as a child, out on the family patio of the apartment on Aribau, imagining he was both the visiting and the home team at the same time. The patio was identical to the one at his parents’ apartment, and the general atmosphere of desolation, characteristic of the post-war years, was also similar to the one back then. Everything was the same in the dream, apart from the fact that the gray apartment buildings overlooking the patio were replaced by skyscrapers from New York. This New York setting gave him a feeling of being at the center of the world, and transmitted a special emotion to him — the same one he’d later recognize when he dreamt of being at the center of the world on his way out of a pub in Dublin — and the warm sense of experiencing a moment of intense happiness.

The dream always ended up being a strange one about happiness in New York, a dream about a perfect moment at the center of the world, a moment he sometimes related to these lines by Idea Vilariño:

It was a moment

A moment

At the center of the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where?” asked Mr Bartell D’Arcy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

. .

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

If he didn’t sit in front of the all-consuming computer screen, what else could he do? Well, he could carry on researching Dublin, or go back to scaring the neighbors by walking in the rain in short trousers, or else play dominoes with the retired men in the bar downstairs, or get drunk again like in the old days, supremely, savagely drunk; he could go to Brazil or Martinique, convert to Judaism, reap a wheat field, go and screw a casual girlfriend, jump into a swimming pool of freezing water. Although maybe the most sensible thing to do would be to put all his energy into preparing for a future trip to New York, the first stage of which will be in Dublin.

One day, while traveling through Mexico with José Emilio Pacheco, a book of whose he had just published — he would go on to publish another two — they arrived at the port of Veracruz in a friend’s convertible and went straight down to look at the sea. Those shapes I see by the sea, said Pacheco, shapes that immediately give rise to metaphorical associations, are they instruments of inspiration or of false literary quotes?

Riba asked him to repeat the sentence and the question. And when Pacheco did so, he saw he had understood them perfectly. Something similar always happened to him. He made associations between ideas, and always had a remarkable tendency to read his own life like a book. Publishing, and consequently having to read so many manuscripts, contributed still more to this tendency of his to imagine that metaphorical associations and an often highly enigmatic code lay concealed behind any scene in his daily life.

He considers himself as much a reader as he is a publisher. It was basically his health that forced him to retire from publishing, but it seems to him it was also partly the golden calf of the gothic novel, which created the stupid myth of the passive reader. He dreams of the day when the spell of the best-seller will be broken, making way for the reappearance of the talented reader, and for the terms of the moral contract between author and audience to be reconsidered. He dreams of the day when literary publishers can breathe again, those who live for an active reader, for a reader open enough to buy a book and allow a conscience radically different from his own to appear in his mind. He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn’t deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies. As Vilém Vok says, it’s not so simple to feel the world as Kafka felt it, a world in which movement is denied and it becomes impossible even to go from one village to the next. The same skills needed for writing are needed for reading. Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it. .

The phone rings.

What was he saying to himself? He was thinking about the arrival of a new time that might bring with it this revision of the demanding pact between writers and readers and that the return of the talented reader might be possible. But it could be that this dream is already unrealizable. Better to be realistic and think about the Irish funeral.

He will go to Dublin. Partly to do something. To feel a little busier in his retirement.

On odd-numbered days, and always at this time, Javier calls on the phone, a faithful friend and thoroughly methodical man. Riba still hasn’t picked up and he already knows perfectly well it can only be Javier. He turns down the volume on the radio, where Brassens’s “Les Copains d’Abord” is playing, coincidental background music he thinks most appropriate to his friend’s phone call. He picks up.

“I’m going to Dublin in June, did you know?”

Due to the fact that in the last two years he has stopped drinking and avoids going out at night, he has recently seen little of Javier, a very nocturnal man. Nevertheless, their relationship is still active, although now it’s nurtured only by telephone conversations every other day at noon and the occasional lunch date. Maybe over time the absence of nights out together will gradually erode the friendship, but he doesn’t think so, because he is one of those who thinks that friendships are strengthened by people seeing one another very infrequently. He’s not sure that friends exist, exactly. Javier himself usually says that there are no friends, only moments of friendship.

Javier calls on odd days. And he always does so around midday, thinking, perhaps, that for moments of friendship this time of day might offer more guarantees than others. He’s very methodical. But after all, so is Riba. Does he not, for example, systematically visit his parents every Wednesday afternoon? Does he not sit punctually in front of his computer every day?

Now Javier is asking him how the talks about selling his business are going, and Riba is explaining that he feels disheartened and that in the end he might not sell his assets, might leave things as they are, in the hope of better times. There are precedents, he says, for other glorious ruins in the Barcelona publishing industry. The case of Carlos Barral, for example. Javier interrupts him to dispute the idea that Barral was ruined. Riba has no desire to waste his energy arguing, Riba doesn’t even bother to pursue the topic. Then they talk about Spider and he tells Javier he’s come to identify entirely with the main character of this strange film. And Javier, who suddenly remembers he’s seen it too, says he doesn’t understand what Riba saw in the film, as he remembers it as being terribly depressing, and very dull. By now Riba is used to Javier taking the opposite view to him on everything. Their friendship or, rather, their moments of friendship are based on them differing almost completely on questions of art. Riba published Javier’s first five novels, before Javier ran off to more commercial publishers. And although he has always disagreed with some aspects of his literary aesthetic, Riba has always had absolute respect for the power of his friend’s realist style.

When the topic of Spider wanes, they talk about the incessant, even disturbing rain of the past few days. Then, Riba tells him — he told him before — how he spent an entire day in Lyon without speaking to anyone and set out a general theory of the novel. And Javier ends up getting very nervous. Writers don’t put up at all well with publishers taking literary baby steps, and Javier ends up interrupting Riba to say indignantly that he already told him, the other day, that he was glad he’d managed to write something in Lyon, but there’s nothing more French than a general theory for novels.

“I didn’t know theories were just a French thing,” says Riba, surprised.

“They are, I’m telling you. What’s more, it’d do you good to stop being a café thinker. A French café thinker, I mean. You should forget about Paris. That’s my impartial piece of advice for today.”

Javier is from Asturias, from a town near Oviedo, although he’s lived in Barcelona for over thirty years. He’s fifteen years younger than Riba and has a remarkable tendency to give advice and above all to be unequivocal. He’s very inclined to use a categorical tone. But today Riba can’t understand what he’s getting at and asks what he’s got against the cafés of Paris.

Riba starts to remembering that his vocation as a publisher began during a trip to Paris after May ’68. As he was stealing left-wing essays with unusual happiness from the François Maspero bookshop — where the booksellers looked kindly upon people looting the place — he decided to devote himself to a profession as noble as that of publishing avant-garde novels and rebellious books that later enthusiasts would steal from the Maspero and other left-wing bookshops. Some years afterward, he changed his mind and gave the revolutionary dream up for dead and decided to be reasonable and charge for the books he published.

On the other end of the line, his friend Javier is silent, but he can tell he’s still indignant. He’d be even more so if he knew his friend had mentally associated his diatribe against French cafés with his Asturian background.

Riba, to calm him down, changes the subject and talks about his growing interest in Dublin. Javier interrupts him and asks if he’s not timidly gravitating toward an English landscape. Or Irish, if he prefers. If he is, there’s no doubt he’s taking the first step toward the great betrayal.

The music now playing on the radio is Les Rita Mitsouko, “Le Petit Train.” The first step toward the great betrayal of everything French, shouts Javier enthusiastically. And Riba has no choice but to hold the telephone away from his ear. Javier is too excited. A betrayal of everything French? Is it possible to betray Rimbaud and Gracq?

It’s great you’ve gone over to England, Javier says just a few minutes later. And as he congratulates him for having taken the leap, he manages to surprise Riba.

What leap?

Javier says nearly everything in a highly unequivocal tone, totally convinced it can be no other way. It’s as if he’s talking about someone who’s swapped soccer teams. But Riba hasn’t taken any leap, nor has he gone over to England. Everything indicates that Javier would be pleased if he left French culture behind, maybe because he’s never had much contact with it and feels inferior in this respect. Maybe because he never stole anything in the Maspero bookshop, or because his father — this is not something easy to forget about Javier — was the anonymous author of the libelous article “Against the French” published in 1980 by a Valencian press: an amusing collection of swipes at the smugness of much of French culture and which began thus: “Their vanity was always their greatest talent.”

“It’d be good for you to lose some weight,” Javier says suddenly, “take the English leap. Get out of the Frenchified muddle you’ve been in for so long. Be lighter, more fun. Become English. Or Irish. Take the leap, my friend.”

Javier is methodical and sometimes categorical. But above all he’s stubborn, incredibly stubborn. He seems like he’s from Aragon in that way. Of course, you could probably say there are the same proportion of stubborn people in Aragon as anywhere else. Today, it seems, Javier is directing all his obstinacy against Riba’s French influence in his formative years. And he seems to be advising him to leave his Frenchification behind if he wants to get back his sense of humor and lose weight.

Riba timidly reminds him that, in the end, Paris is the capital of the Republic of Letters. And it still is, says Javier, but that’s exactly the problem, that culture has too much weight and can’t bear the slightest comparison to English liveliness. What’s more, the French don’t know how to communicate as well as the British nowadays. You just have to look at the phone booths in London and Paris. It’s not just that the English ones are much prettier, but they offer a comfortable and better designed space in which to actually talk, unlike the French ones, which are strange and designed for the outrageously pedantic aesthetics of silence.

Javier’s argument doesn’t convince him at all, among other things because there are hardly any phone booths left in Europe. But he doesn’t want to argue. He makes up his mind now to be agile and take a leap, a light English leap, to land on the other side, to start thinking about something else, to turn around, to move. And he ends up thinking to himself of some words of Julian Barnes’s, which seem very opportune at this moment: words where Barnes comments that the British have always been obsessed with France, as it represents for them the beginning of difference, the start of the exotic: “It’s curious: the English are obsessed with France while the French are merely intrigued by England.”

He remembers these words of Julian Barnes’s in Cross Channel and thinks that for him, on the other hand, it is precisely everything English that is the start of difference, the beginning of the exotic. New York intrigues him and when he thinks of this city he always remembers the words of his friend, the young writer Nietzky, who for years now has had a place there: “I live in the perfect city for dissolving your identity and reinventing yourself. Mobility’s hard in Spain: people pigeonhole you for life in the box where they think you belong.”

Deep down he’d like nothing more than to escape his pigeonhole of the prestigious retired publisher he’s been put in — quite firmly, it seems — by his colleagues and friends in Spain. Perhaps the time has come to take a step forward, to cross the bridge — in this case a metaphorical English Channel — that will lead him to other voices, other environments. Maybe it’d be a good idea to remove French culture from his life for a time: he’s so close to it now it almost disgusts him, and so it doesn’t even seem foreign anymore, but seems as familiar to him as Spanish culture, the very first culture he fled from.

Riba is starting to think that Englishness is where difference begins, where the exotic starts. It’s obvious that at the moment, only what is alien to his familiar world, only what is foreign, can draw him in a different direction. He knows he needs to venture into topographies where strangeness reigns and also the mystery and joy that surround the new: he needs to look at the world with enthusiasm again, as if seeing it for the first time. In short, to take the English leap, or something that looks like the leap that a moment ago, in such an eccentric, British fashion, Javier suggested to him.

A way to be even less Latin occurs to him: to stand in front of the mirror, to lose his instinct for melodrama and exaggeration and become a cold, dispassionate gentleman who doesn’t wave his arms around when he gives an opinion. And soon he hears the call of the difficult countries, the places and climates where no one — not even he — ever dreamed they would explore with such interest: places he imagined as inaccessible his whole life or, rather, took it for granted that, if only because of the language barrier, they would never be within his reach. He will look, once again, for the impossible. Nothing will be as good for him as to gravitate once more toward the foreign, because only then will he be able to get closer to the center of the world he’s looking for. A sentimental center, sought by the traveler from the Laurence Sterne book. He needs to be a sentimental traveler, to go to English-speaking countries, where he might regain the strangeness of things, where he might recover that whole special way of feeling he never found in the comfort of the intimately familiar: to see a wider range of possibilities opening up, of cultures, of strange signs to decipher. He needs to go to a place where he can regain the intense feeling of euphoria, to hear once more the voice of his grandfather Jacobo when he used to say nothing important was ever achieved without enthusiasm. He needs to take the English leap, although actually, he needs to leap in the opposite direction as that taken by Sterne’s sentimental traveler, who, being an Irish-born Englishman, left England precisely to take a leap that was French.

He knows that if he goes to Dublin, he’ll feel, just as he once felt in France, like an outsider again. The wonderful sensation of being from a different place. In Dublin he’ll be an outsider as Bloom was, and be able to travel once more through a place in which he won’t have the sensation of that disgusting closeness. Larkin wrote a poem called “The Importance of Elsewhere” that spoke of Ireland and that for a long time Riba liked a lot. He remembers it very well. In it the English poet spoke about how he wasn’t allowed to feel like an outsider in England, his own country. And he said that, when he was alone in Ireland, since it wasn’t his land, at least there he saw it was possible to be an outsider: “The salt rebuff of speech, / Insisting so on difference, made me welcome: / Once that was recognized, we were in touch.” Larkin spoke of the draughty streets, end-on to hills. And of the faint archaic smell of the Irish docklands. And of the herring-hawker’s cry in the distance, making him feel separate but not overshadowed. “Living in England has no such excuse: / These are my customs and establishments / It would be much more serious to refuse. / Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.”

Riba feels a nostalgia for the Protestants. He loves their work ethic. He’s commented on this more than once to Javier himself, who, conversely, is fascinated by cold, hard Catholicism. Now that he thinks of it, Javier would be a good person to accompany him on this trip to Catholic Ireland.

Another odd-numbered day comes around and Javier calls at the same time as always. Why not ask him if he fancies coming to Dublin? There’s still time. He hesitates, but finally does. He tells him the day he’s picked to go to Dublin is June 16, and asks him to look at his diary and see if he can join him on his trip. He’s asking him, he stresses that, he asks him. Javier is silent, disconcerted. His reply takes a while. Finally he promises he’ll think about it, but he doesn’t understand why Riba asks him like this, as if he’s begging him. He’ll come if he can, but it’s strange that he’s begging him. Before when they used to go out in the evening together, he never asked for anything; instead he used to insult him for being published by houses other than Riba’s and for even more trivial things.

“It’s so we could be there for Bloomsday,” interrupts Riba in a little voice, designed to elicit sympathy that he has no one who wants to go with him. For a moment, he worries that the word “Bloomsday” might have ruined everything and Javier will start sounding off about James Joyce and his novel Ulysses, which he has never held in particularly high regard, because he was against Joyce’s intellectualism and in favor of a more orthodox kind of writing, along the lines of Dickens or Conrad.

But today it seems Javier has nothing against Joyce, he just wants to know if Riba won’t want to go out at night in Dublin either. No I won’t, Riba says, but I have thought about suggesting the trip to Ricardo too, and as you well know he’s a night owl. A long silence. Down the line Javier seems pensive. Finally, he asks if it’s just about going for Bloomsday.

Here’s danger. The question resounds in Riba’s ears for a fraction of a second. It would be complete suicide to tell Javier about the funeral for the Gutenberg galaxy; he wouldn’t understand right away and perhaps, not understanding, he’d go back on his decision to travel. Javier asks again.

“Is it just about going for Bloomsday?”

“It’s about, first and foremost, going over to the English wavelength,” he replies.

He worries he’s got it completely wrong saying this, but soon discovers just the opposite, as the phrase has had a surprising effect. He hears Javier cough, enthusiastically. He remembers the other day, when they spoke of taking a leap, a nimble English leap, landing on the other side.

On the other end of the line it sounds like a party is going on. He can’t remember the last time so few words did so much. Shortly afterward Javier says that clearly he has been able to reflect on how good it would be for him to distance himself from the culture that has dominated his life up to now. Even, he adds, if it’s just to go in search of other voices and other environments. And he talks, in a strange fury, about taking away the weight of language until it looks like moonlight. And he also talks about the English language, which he says he’s completely sure that in prose as much as in poetry is more malleable and ethereal than French. And as an example he recites a poem by Emily Dickinson, who is certainly aerial and nimble: “A sepal, petal, and a thorn / Upon a common summer’s morn — / A flask of Dew — A Bee or two — / A Breeze — a caper in the trees — / And I’m a Rose!”

A long pause.

I’m only against the French, says Javier as he breaks the silence. At least this morning, he explains. Do you want me to say it again? No, says Riba, that’s not necessary. Fine, says Javier, let’s not talk anymore about it, I want to take the English leap with you, I’ll come to Dublin and may poor old France be well and truly buried.

Minutes later, they’re talking about the endless rain that’s starting to become an alarming fact for everyone, when they change, almost without noticing, to talking about Vilém Vok, a writer they both admire so much, each for different reasons. To Riba, Vok is, first and foremost, the author of the fictional essay The Center, to the point where he sometimes relates paragraphs from the book to his desire to undertake a third trip to New York very soon, as this city has always held for him the exact magic of the myths some people need to live by. And in turn The Center has been like a Bible reinforcing this magic, helping him through the times when he needed the idea of New York, not just to live by but to survive. What would become of him without New York? Javier knows the book well and says he thinks he understands why it exerts such a direct influence over his old friend and editor, but also says he himself has always preferred snippets from Vok’s other narrative essay, Some Returned From Long Crossings (The Quiet Obsession is the altered, though beautiful and elegant title of the English translation).

As always, they end up talking about soccer. It’s a tacit rule between them, but when they start talking about soccer, this just means that the conversation has entered its final stage. They discuss the upcoming European Championship. Javier states categorically that France won’t get very far this year. And Riba is about to ask him if he doesn’t think he’s really got something against the French today, but decides not to complicate things any further. Bye, Javier says suddenly, talk to you soon. And when his friend hangs up, he understands that the Irish trip is no longer an unknown, but rather has started to take shape on the horizon. He goes to the kitchen to drink another coffee and think about it all calmly. A trip with Javier and perhaps with Ricardo — he promised Javier he’d call Ricardo tomorrow — could be just the thing. Ultimately it will help, for example, Celia to stop seeing him as so autistic and closed off, so chained to his computer and indolence. This is one of his main objectives, thinks Riba. That Celia sees he is active, sees he still wants to meet up with people, communicate outside of the web, not live off the memory of the great books he has published, not be content to see himself every day old and stagnant in the mirror.

On the radio, as if the outside world evolves along with his life, “Just Like the Rain,” sung by Richard Hawley, is playing. He observes with amused surprise how he’s gone from a French song, almost without noticing, to music in English. Outside, as if the radio knew the state of the weather or vice versa, it’s still raining, just like the rain. He registers the fact that by now he can almost whisper the titles of songs in English, and suddenly feels as if his name is Spider and he’s lost weight and is already in a bunk in the great Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in his friend Dominique’s installation. As he gradually approaches, in a way, his sentimental and Sternean center, in search of some sort of equilibrium, the rain in Barcelona becomes still heavier.

He goes over to the largest window in the house. Barcelona is below, at his feet, invisible again. The rain’s persistence over the last few days is strange. He considers what he’d say to someone who asked him what the English leap was. Maybe he’d reply the way St. Augustine did when asked what time was to him: “If no one asks me, I know: If I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not.” But he thinks that, pressed to respond in some other way, he would end up saying that the English leap is landing on the other side, a pastime it’s up to him to invent on his next trip.

In the Eixample district of Barcelona, like anywhere else, there are many casual encounters. It’s a well-known fact: life is governed by coincidences. Although at first glance it might seem so, the encounter Riba just had with Ricardo on Calle Mallorca is not at all casual.

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

No, not a casual encounter, although Ricardo might think it is. They’ve just practically collided head on and actually bumped into each other, their two umbrellas nearly flying out of their hands. Riba calculated it all so it would happen like this, and now pretends to Ricardo that he was simply heading to La Central, the bookshop a couple of steps from here, on the same street. The truth is different: he’s spent over an hour across the street waiting for his friend to come out of his house so he could feign a fortuitous encounter. What he is about to propose could never be achieved over the phone. He knows it will turn out well only if there’s a conversation in some café, or in the bookshop itself; a conversation that paves the way so that, when the opportune moment arrives, the proposal of Ricardo coming to Dublin appears quite spontaneous. After all, he’s the most ardent Anglophile of all his friends, a tireless reviewer of books from English-speaking countries. Surely it might interest him to attend his first Bloomsday. Ricardo, moreover, is a world authority on writers such as Andrew Breen and Derek Hobbs, modest Irish writers whom Riba, following Ricardo’s advice, had translated and published in Spanish when they were — they still are — completely unknown.

Apart from being a reviewer and discoverer of English-speaking talents, Ricardo is also an interesting novelist: ultra postmodern at times, more conventional at others. He likes to have, at least, two literary faces: the avant-garde and the conservative. His best work is The Exception of My Parents, an original autobiographical book that Riba published in its day.

They share literary tastes, from Roberto Bolaño (who both of them were friendly with for a time) to Vilém Vok. For this and for a thousand other reasons, Ricardo might be a very suitable person for the trip, even an ideal participant in the funeral for Gutenberg and his galaxy, although Riba doesn’t plan on mentioning anything about this requiem for the moment, because he thinks that, just as with Javier, speaking about all that would be total suicide. Whether one likes it or not, a funeral can always cause bad vibes and scare people. And anyway, Ricardo might think it’s an event organized by publishers nostalgic for the world of the printing press, or something along those lines.

Better, he thinks, not to mention the funeral, at least for now.

“Is your mother well?” asks Ricardo.

Has he confused him with someone else? It’s then that he remembers a month ago he used his mother as an excuse not to attend an evening out Ricardo organized for two English translators of his work.

“My mother is perfectly well,” he replies, somewhat uncomfortably.

He doesn’t ask Ricardo about his own mother, because he already knows she isn’t very well — not in any sense — he’s heard him say so in a thousand different ways, including in The Exception of My Parents, a book where he tirelessly comments on and analyzes his disaster of a mother. Ricardo is from Bogotá, and has lived with his wife and their three children in Barcelona for eleven years. He feels like a stateless writer, and if it’d been up to him to choose a nationality, he’d undoubtedly have opted for an American one. Just as his admired Cortázar as a child traveled slowly with his finger across the maps of atlases, savoring the heady taste of the incomprehensible, as a child Ricardo traveled rapidly through the poems within his grasp in his grandparents’ house in Barranquilla and was eventually drawn to one, which led him to feel an immense desire to grow up and be able to leave Colombia forever, actually to be able to leave behind everything that might cross his path, to be constantly leaving everything behind, to be free and on the move, without ever slowing down.

Even today Ricardo remembers that poem by William Carlos Williams which says that most artists stop, or adopt a style, and in doing so they establish a convention, and that’s the end of them; while, for one who moves, everything always contains an idea, because the one who moves, runs without stopping, the one who moves simply keeps stirring things up. . Leaping in the English way, Riba adds now.

Ricardo is the man in motion par excellence. He can even give the impression he is always on the move, without ever pausing at all. His eldest son, Samuel — named in honor of his father’s old publisher — is seven years old, and was born in Barcelona, close to this house, by La Central bookshop. His three sons will be the main obstacle in convincing Ricardo to join them on the Bloomsday trip, but he’s got nothing to lose by trying; he’ll make the attempt, but not right now, rather when he sees that the most appropriate moment has arrived.

They head for the Bar Belvedere, a place that once upon a time — when he wasn’t a hikikomori and left the house more often — he frequented quite regularly.

“You’ve been really reclusive recently, don’t you think?” Ricardo says in a tone of voice that is exquisitely friendly, yet also caustic.

Ricardo’s question is too impudent, and Riba falls silent. He likes the shiny orange umbrella, damp with rain, which his friend is carrying today. It’s the first time he’s seen an umbrella this color. He says this to Ricardo, and then laughs. He stops in front of the window of a men’s clothing shop and looks at some suits and shirts he’s sure he’d never wear, especially with the rain that’s falling now. Ricardo laughs affectionately, making fun of his friend’s umbrella, and Riba, in turn, asks him if he happens to be insinuating that his own umbrella doesn’t measure up to the orange one.

“No, no,” Ricardo excuses himself, “I didn’t mean that, but maybe you haven’t seen an umbrella for months. You never go out, do you? What does Celia have to say about that?”

No answer. They walk in silence down Calle Mallorca, until Ricardo asks him if he’s read Larry O’Sullivan’s poems yet. Riba doesn’t even know who this O’Sullivan might be, he’s usually only interested in writers he’s at least heard of; he always has this feeling that any others are made up.

“I didn’t know O’Sullivan wrote poetry,” he says to Ricardo.

“But O’Sullivan’s always written poetry! You’re turning into a badly informed ex-publisher.”

As they step onto the terrace of the Belvedere, Ricardo points out a young tree, whose round, firm trunk thrusts itself, almost bodily, into the air with an undulating movement halfway up, sending out young branches in all directions.

“It could be in one of O’Sullivan’s poems,” says Ricardo, lighting one of his customary Pall Malls.

They are now leaning against the bar in the Belvedere, and Ricardo is still talking about the tree O’Sullivan might have written a poem about. Before long he’s just talking about the Boston poet.

“For O’Sullivan, Boston is a city of great extremes,” says Ricardo, without anyone having asked for his opinion on the matter. “A city of heat and cold, passion and indifference, wealth and poverty, masses and individuals —” he smokes agitatedly and talks as if he were writing a review of this poet or had just written it and is now reciting it from memory, “ — a city to live shut in with double locks on every door or to feel excited by its energy. . I see you don’t know O’Sullivan at all. Later, in La Central, I’ll show you something by him. He’s very American, you’ll see.”

Outside, the rain seems to be getting heavier, but it’s just an illusion.

Ricardo, too, is very American, however Colombian he may be by birth. Now he’s assuring Riba, with admirable conviction, that this O’Sullivan is a master of putting the trivial close to the lyrical, and so that Riba might understand him better, he recites a few lines about walking through downtown Boston: “I go get a shoeshine / and walk up the muggy street beginning to sun / and have a hamburger and a malted and buy / an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days.”

He’d like to ask Ricardo what a New World Writing is, but he holds back and merely tries to find out what Ricardo thinks the poets in Ghana might have been doing on that day when O’Sullivan was so inspired. Ricardo looks at him with sudden compassion, almost as if he were looking at a new species of extraterrestrial. But Ricardo is even more Martian-like. At least, his blessed Colombian parents always were, and Ricardo inherited more than a few things from them. Ricardo’s taste for being two-faced probably originated in those parents, his constant leaning toward side A of things, but then his tendency to see its coexistence with side B. All their lives his parents were stubborn progressives, who instilled in him a sort of love-hate feeling toward left-wing revolutionary iconography. Even though they were fiercely gauchistes, his parents were friends — in flagrant, scandalous contradiction — with people as rich as Andrew Sempleton, the investor and philanthropist, known as the good-humored millionaire.

“Loads of money and a big laugh. Very American,” Ricardo always says when he evokes this outstanding man, who was his magnanimous and affectionate godfather. Riba has always suspected Ricardo will end up writing a novel about Sempleton. Despite managing large sums of money, his rich godfather never fell prey to avarice and was generous with many people, including Ricardo’s parents, above all, when they went to jail in Bogotá for political reasons. With parents like that, Ricardo was destined to have a double face and personality, and that’s what happened: a heavy pipe smoker (domestically, only at home) and (in public places) smoker of Pall Mall cigarettes; a solemn and frivolous writer, depending on the day; a home-loving man and at the same time dangerously nocturnal; a Hyde who was a most wildly modern Colombian, yet a quietly American Jekyll. It would be magnificent if he could persuade him to come to Dublin. Why hasn’t he tried yet?

While he waits for the ideal moment to propose the trip, he recalls some of Ricardo’s stories. From his adolescence, the most memorable is the one about Tom Waits and in a hotel room in New York. The daughter of a friend of some friends of his parents had an appointment to interview Waits in his hotel. Ricardo managed to convince her to let him come along. He just wanted to see — he was dying of curiosity to find out — what Waits did when he was alone in a hotel room. They knocked at the door. Waits opened it with a grumpy look on his face. He had black sunglasses on and was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of very faded jeans.

“Sorry,” Waits said, “but there’s no room for anyone else.”

Ricardo experienced his own particular and somewhat unfortunate great moment there. He experienced it in the center of Waits’s world, a place he was ejected from by a slamming door. There was no interview. His friend cried and blamed him for Waits having acted that way.

The fact is, the most avant-garde poetics in Ricardo’s work, as he himself has always acknowledged, is nourished from the same sources as Waits’s: the lyrics of Irish ballads, the blues of the cotton fields, the rhythms of New Orleans, the lyrics of German cabaret from the 1930s, rock and roll, and country music. It’s a poetics that always fails, although with dignity, in its attempt to imitate, to put down on paper no more than the barroom register of Waits’s voice.

This phrase of the singer’s, spoken in the doorway to his hotel room, really stuck in Ricardo’s head. The phrase stuck in his memory, but so did the Hawaiian shirt and the dark glasses. And more than once he used this phrase to get rid of someone.

It’s what Ricardo uses now in his attempt to leave the Belvedere to go to La Central to buy some books. He says he’s sorry, but there’s no room for anyone else.

“Eh?”

Ricardo always needs movement. He’s monstrously frenetic. Something must be done quickly to detain him. Riba still hasn’t proposed going to Dublin. Why not, for God’s sake? When does he plan on doing it? Not now, because Ricardo is physically trying to project himself toward the street to flee from the Belvedere, where there really is no room for anyone else.

Half an hour later, Ricardo finally gets the proposal. And he claims to have only one question before he accepts the invitation to travel with Javier and Riba to Dublin. He wants to know if it’s just to be there for Bloomsday, or if there’s some dark motive he sould be warned about beforehand.

He still thinks it would be suicide to give Ricardo any kind of clue about his intentions to hold a requiem for the Gutenberg galaxy. Ricardo might think, and he wouldn’t be far off either, that Riba wanted to hold the funeral for himself: a funeral ceremony for his current unemployed state of half-failed publisher, embarrassing idler and computer nerd.

“Look, Ricardo. There is another motive, in fact. I want to take the English leap.”

After agreeing to travel with them, Ricardo is quiet for a long time at first and then starts telling him — almost in passing and without giving it the slightest importance — that he was in New York not long ago, where he interviewed Paul Auster in his house for the magazine Gentleman. He says it as if it’s nothing. At first, Riba can’t even believe it.

“You were in Auster’s house? And how was it? When did you go to New York?”

His eyes have become like saucers and he’s genuinely stunned just by the idea that Ricardo has also managed to visit this three-story brownstone in Park Slope that he once went to and that has since become so legendary in his mind. Straight away he asks Ricardo, doesn’t he think the house was really nice and weren’t Paul and Siri very likeable, pleasant people? He says it with almost childlike wonder and in the belief he has shared a similar experience.

Ricardo practically shrugs. He has not the slightest opinion on the neighborhood, or the Austers’ hospitality, or the house or even the red bricks of the façade. In fact, he has nothing to tell about his visit to the old neighborhood of Park Slope. He hadn’t given his foray into Auster’s house a second thought. For him, it was just another interview. He had more fun the other day, he says, interviewing John Banville in London.

Could it be that having grown up in New York has left Ricardo immune to have any sense of fascination for this city? Quite likely. For him, walking around there is natural, inconsequential.

How different two people can be, even though they’re friends. The city of New York, the Austers, the English wavelength, for Ricardo all this is the most normal thing in the world, it holds no secrets and no special attraction for him. It’s something he’s had ever since he was a child.

Quite easily, Ricardo changes the subject, and above all the character, and tells Riba that in Boston, the day after his visit to Auster, he interviewed O’Sullivan. And then he starts talking about Brendan Behan, who he says was one of the most tremendous Irishmen who passed through New York back in the day.

He doesn’t want to point out to Ricardo it’s useless to tell him things about Behan, as he already knows everything about the man. He lets him talk about the Irishman, until, in a brief lapse of concentration, he brings up the topic of Auster again.

“Do you think Paul Auster’s considered a good novelist in Ghana?” he asks Ricardo provocatively.

“Oh, how should I know?” He looks at him strangely. “You’re behaving really oddly today. You never go out, do you? It’s not that you don’t go out much, you just don’t go out, you’re not used to talking to people. It’s good you’re going to get some fresh air in Dublin. Believe me, you’re a bit unhinged. You should start up the publishing house again. You can’t just do nothing. Auster in Ghana! Well, let’s go to La Central.”

They leave the Belvedere. There’s a strong wind. Water’s flooding everything. They’re out in the open. They walk slowly. The rain grows more and more violent. The wind bends their umbrellas. They’ve heard a few apocalyptic voices speaking of a universal flood. Reality is becoming more and more like the installation Dominique is preparing in London.

In the end it’ll turn out to be true that the end of the world isn’t far off. In fact it’s always been clear that the end couldn’t be too far off. While they wait for the end, human beings amuse themselves holding funerals, little imitations of the great end that is to come.

As they’re about to go into La Central, Ricardo throws away his Pall Mall and doesn’t even bother to stamp it out, because the downpour instantly takes care of the butt. As they close their respective umbrellas, a gust of wind hits them with such force that they’re pushed forward and burst into the bookshop, falling comically on their butts on the doormat, just at the moment when a young man is leaving La Central wearing round tortoiseshell glasses, a blue Nehru jacket beneath an old raincoat, and with the collar of his white shirt quite torn.

Riba thinks he knows him by sight, although he can’t manage to place him. Who is it? The man walks insolently past them, indifferent to their ridiculous fall. An unflappable guy. He acts with astonishing coldness, as if he hadn’t noticed that Ricardo and Riba have just fallen over. Or as if he thinks they are two comedians from a silent film. A strange guy. Although he’s come from inside the bookshop, his hair is plastered to his head from the rain.

“We nearly killed ourselves,” comments Riba, still on the floor.

Ricardo doesn’t even reply, perhaps dazed by what’s happened.

It’s quite striking. The indifferent young man looks like the same one who was spying outside his parents’ house the other day, and also the same one he saw from a taxi at the intersection of Rambla de Prat and Avenida Príncipe de Asturias. He tells Ricardo that recently he’s seen the guy with the Nehru jacket everywhere, and for a minute fears his friend won’t even know who he’s talking about. Who knows, maybe he didn’t even notice the young man with the round glasses who walked passed them so indifferently. But this isn’t the case, he soon realizes he saw him perfectly well.

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