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].