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).