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.