This “come on!” has a special power, because suddenly, as if he too were given the fleeting ownership of a certain neurotic energy, he feels as if he’s penetrating the essence of the wind that’s blowing outside with the rainwater spreading throughout Barcelona: he believes for a few moments — a sensation without a doubt totally unknown to him — that he’s inside the wind’s thoughts, until he understands that the wind’s mind could never be his or anyone else’s, and then he contents himself — a sad fate — with a deeply ridiculous thought: the world always feels more spacious in the spring.
For years now he’s led his life through his catalog. And in fact he now finds it very hard to know who he really is. And above all, what’s even harder: to know who he really might have been. Who was the man who was there before he began publishing? Where is this person who gradually became hidden behind the brilliant catalog and the systematic identification with the most interesting voices contained within it? Now some words of Maurice Blanchot spring to mind, words he’s known well for a long time: “Would writing be to become, in the book, legible for everyone, and indecipherable for oneself?”
In his work as a publisher, he recalls the day he read these words of Blanchot’s as a turning point, and from that moment on, began to observe how, with each book published, his authors gradually became more and more dramatically indecipherable to themselves at the same time as they shadily became very visible and legible to the rest of the world, starting with him, their publisher, who saw in the drama of his authors one more consequence of the occupational hazards of his job, in this case, the hazards of publishing.
“Oh,” he said very cynically one day during a meeting with four of his best Spanish writers, “your problem has been getting published. You’ve been very foolish to do so. I don’t understand how you didn’t sense that publishing was going to make you all indecipherable to yourselves, and what’s more, would place you on the path of a writer’s fate, which in the best of cases always contains the strange seeds of a sinister adventure.”
Riba was hiding his own drama behind these cynical words. Leading a publisher’s life kept him from finding out who the person gradually hidden behind the brilliant catalog might have been.
Nietzky might be the perfect companion for the trip to Ireland, and could even be the brains of the expedition, as he always has original ideas, and despite his youth, is a real expert on the work of James Joyce. In Spain the Irish writer’s importance tends to be downplayed, and what’s more, it’s become grotesquely commonplace to brag about not having read Ulysses, and also to say it’s an incomprehensible and boring book. But Nietzky has been out of the country for ten years, and can’t exactly be considered a Spanish Joyce specialist anymore. Really, Nietzky can now only be seen as a young writer and citizen of New York, a man well versed in local Irish topics as filtered through the color of Lisbon tiles.
He thinks about Nietzky and ends up thinking of Celia. He wouldn’t like her to find him, once again, engrossed in front of the computer when she gets back from work at a quarter to three. He doesn’t switch it off, but stops looking at it and sits there trying to decide what to do, looking at the ceiling. Then he checks his watch and realizes that it doesn’t matter, as Celia will soon be home. He goes to look out the window and then to stare at a stain on the roof, in which he suddenly thinks he can see a map of his native country. He remembers, he remembers quite well the culture of his compatriots that became dangerously oppressive and familiar to him. He remembers his desperate leap to France, his by now so outdated French leap. Paris allowed him to flee from Franco’s eternal uncultured summer, and later on to meet writers such as Gracq, Philippe Sollers, and Julia Kristeva, or Romain Gary, one of the friendships he feels most proud of. It doesn’t escape his notice now that many of those who find Ulysses unbearable haven’t even bothered to get past the first page of a book they assume is leaden, complicated, foreign, lacking the “authentic and proverbial Spanish wit.” But he assumes that this first page of Joyce’s book, just the first page, is enough on its own to dazzle. It’s an apparently trivial page, which nevertheless presents a complete and extraordinary world. He knows it by heart in the now legendary version by that first translator of the book into Spanish, that translator as brilliant as he was strange, the great adventurer J. Salas Subirat, an Argentine autodidact who worked as an insurance broker and wrote a strange manual, Life Insurance, which Riba published as a curiosity, at the start of the ’90s.
He leaves the window and goes to the kitchen and as he walks down the hall he thinks about the opening of Ulysses, so apparently flat, although really this beginning gives off a harmony rarely forgotten. It takes place up on the gun platform of the Martello tower, built in Sandycove in 1804 by the British army to defend against a possible Napoleonic invasion:
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
— Introibo ad altare Dei.
Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:
— Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful Jesuit.
Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest.
He’s sure that, when the moment comes, he’ll enjoy being up on the circular gun platform, where this legendary scene from Ulysses takes place. Moreover, very near to there, in Finnegan’s pub in the village of Dalkey, is where his young friend proposes that the first meeting take place of the Order of Knights — to be named the Order of Finnegans after this very pub, and not after Joyce’s book of the same name — which his friend wants to found on June 16 itself.
The news that this will take place has just arrived in an instantaneous electronic reply from Nietzky. Simply because it comes from Nietzky, the creation of this kind of Finnegansean club strikes him as a good idea. Couldn’t he, in his melancholy, stand to be in a few clubs and some meetings? In any case, anything Nietzky comes up with or writes usually seems pertinent. What’s more, the email has arrived at just the right time, and has made him very happy because it’s arrived in the middle of a series of messages from other people in which — with no change in the trend that’s established itself in the messages he’s received lately — no one invites him to anything, not one conference or publishers’ meeting, nothing at all; they just pester him with trivial matters or ask him for favors. In a way, they’re forgetting about him without forgetting him.
He’s been prudent with Ricardo and Javier, but with Nietzky he’s going to act in a very different way. He will dare to tell Nietzky that in Dublin he wants to hold a requiem for the Gutenberg galaxy, for this galaxy, now a pale fire, of which Joyce’s novel was one of the great stellar moments. And it’s not just that he plans to tell Nietzky this; he’s telling him right now in the email he’s writing.
Without any sort of preamble or overly complicated explanation, he tells Nietzky he wants to take the English leap — he hopes he gets what he means, and that in the long run, with his particular talent, he might even broaden the expression’s meaning — and he explains, moreover, that he’s thought of holding a requiem for the end of the Gutenberg era, offering a requiem about which all he knows, for now, is that it should have something to do with the sixth chapter of Ulysses. A funeral in Dublin, he says, and stresses this. A funeral not just for the extinct world of literary publishing, but also for the world of genuine writers and talented readers, for everything that’s needed nowadays.