“Going from Manhattan to Brooklyn over the bridge,” said Nietzky, “is like entering another world. I really like this bridge. And I also like the great poem Hart Crane wrote about it before he committed suicide. Every time I cross over this bridge I feel happy. It’s a route that does me good.”
Marching over the bridge, it was impossible not to remember that, when he was young and dreamed of one day traveling to New York, he had wished a thousand times he could walk over this bridge, which he associated with Saul Bellow. When he was a new arrival to the city, Bellow felt like master of the world there. This story was told many years later by one of his friends, who actually witnessed this moment of great imaginary might and narrated it years later thus: “He looked over the city from the bridge with astonishing generosity and seemed to be measuring the hidden strength of all things in the universe, measuring the world’s power to resist him: he expected the world to come to him. He had pledged himself a great destiny.”
“You know, I feel really good walking across this bridge too,” he said to Nietzky.
And then, without mentioning Bellow, he said that for him, walking to Brooklyn meant seeking out again old hidden strengths, and evoking certain days of his youth when he still expected the world to come to meet him.
“Did you think the world would come to you?” asked young Nietzky. And he burst out laughing. Nietzky had lived in the city for years and nothing like this had ever occurred to him.
Later, walking down tranquil streets, they headed further into the historic neighborhood of Park Slope. And Brooklyn slowly revealed itself as a place with a very special atmosphere. As they walked, Nietzky explained to him that this mysterious neighborhood gets under one’s skin and stays there forever. Brooklyn, Nietzky said, is a bit like an inventory of the universe and one of its particular characteristics is that, whereas in many parts of the city ethnic differences are a potential source of conflict, here people live side by side in harmony and with a more human, older rhythm than in, say, Manhattan. It’s a great place, Nietzky concludes.
They walked farther and farther into Park Slope, where the red-brick house was, the three-story brownstone belonging to the Austers, very good friends of Nietzky’s.
In that house in Brooklyn — and this he couldn’t even have suspected — the happiness he’d looked for in vain on his first trip to that city awaited him. It came to him suddenly, at midnight, when he realized he was in the Austers’ house in that wonderful city. What more could he ask for? The Austers were the very incarnation of New York. And he was in their house, he was at the very center of the world.
It was a moment of happiness he remembers as very intense, similar to that of his recurring dream. Everything seemed so agreeable; he felt in the best mood at that moment. But something he never expected happened. Because of his jet lag, and despite his fantastically happy state, he couldn’t help yawning a few times, which he tried to hide with his hands, and this made it even worse. Body and soul were completely divided, each with their own language. And it was clear that the body, with its own codes, found itself radically disconnected from that moment of his spirit’s happiness. “When the spirit soars, the body kneels down,” said Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.
He’ll never forget the moment that night when he thought about telling Paul Auster that, according to something he’d read in a magazine a while ago, when we yawn it doesn’t mean we’re bored or sleepy, but rather the opposite, that we want to clear our heads and so manage to be even more awake than the wide-awake and happy people we are. He remembers this moment very clearly and also when he realized afterward it would be better not to say anything and not complicate things even further, and then, without being able to help it, he yawned again and had to cover his wretched mouth with his hands.
“Will you leave something as a deposit?” Auster asked him.
He didn’t understand the question at the time, or over the following days. Since they were speaking in French, he started to think he hadn’t understood because of the language. But Nietzky has confirmed on several occasions now that that’s what happened, that Auster did, in fact, ask him if he was going to leave something as a deposit.
Maybe Auster was asking if he was going to leave the memory of his yawns as a deposit, a supposed advance on the rent. The rent for that brownstone? Did Auster know that his guest that night wanted, more than anything in the world, to live in that house? Maybe Nietzky had told him?
Over the last few months, he’s turned over this strange question of Auster’s many times in his head, but it remains an unsolved mystery. Sometimes, he’s at a bus stop, or sitting at home in front of the TV, and he thinks about this and still hears the question, as if charged with an inexplicable energy.
“Will you leave something as a deposit?”
On YouTube he comes across a very young Bob Dylan singing “That’s Alright Mama” with Johnny Cash, and observes, with a mixture of surprise and curiosity, that the acclaimed Cash sings here with a resigned expression, as if he’d had no choice that day but to accept the sudden company of the unknown young genius, who’d jumped up onto the stage without anyone’s permission.
Riba observes that the presence of the young Dylan at his side doesn’t irritate Cash, but even so he seems to be wondering why he has to sing with this young genius who’s latched onto him. Perhaps young Dylan is trying to become Cash’s guardian angel? Maybe Dylan is an impromptu guardian of Cash’s creations?
He ends up thinking something similar occurred with him and Nietzky, who for months he confused with the genius he was always searching for among young writers. Later, when he realized Nietzky had great talent but wasn’t the special writer he would so like to have found, he resigned himself to seeing him just as he was, which was a pretty good writer anyway. He wasn’t the giant of literature he’d been looking for as a publisher, but he found traces of a lively, exciting creativity in him, which was more than enough.
Riba published When You Wound Brooklyn, Nietzky’s only novel, and has always thought it very good. A story about Irish characters in modern-day New York. A splendid piece in which his young friend had managed to give a new and unexpected turn of the screw, offering a world of heteronyms, a world of characters unable to be unified, compact, or perfectly outlined subjects. An amusing, strange book, in which the New York Irish seem like Lisboans who have just awoken from one of Pessoa’s highly anxious siestas. There were never stranger Irish people in a novel.
Because of all this and many other things, because of his ever-increasing admiration for Nietzky, a young man of indisputable talent, he doesn’t give it another thought and fires off an email, one he hopes will be as direct as a bolt of lightning, filled with energy like the tormented psyche of this promising Spanish New York writer. An email to Nietzky’s apartment on West 84th Street and Riverside Drive. In it he asks him to be the fourth member of the Bloomsday expedition. He ends up saying: “After all, you went there last year — and other times, I think — I know you flew from New York to go to the Bloomsday celebrations, and so it wouldn’t be at all strange for you to want to repeat the experience. Come on!”