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.