Whether solemnly or not, the narrator of Short Letter, Long Farewell always used his “I,” probably because he had studied in Europe. The kind of “I” Handke used was one Riba could immediately imagine influencing him. Since then, in his private life, he has always used a first person singular, although his has been an unnatural “I,” probably because he lost his childhood spirit, that first person inside him that disappeared so early on. And maybe it’s also due to this lamentable absence — because of which he now uses this artificial “I” — that he seems always to be perfectly ready to make the leap over to the other side, that is, fully prepared to become a multiple “I,” in the style of John Ford in the novel, who speaks in the first person plural.
And the fact is, when Riba thinks, he is simply commenting on the world, something he always does away from home mentally and in search of his center. And on these occasions it’s not strange that he suddenly feels he’s John Ford, and also Spider, Vilém Vok, Borges, and John Vincent Moon, and in short, all the men that all the men in this world have been. Essentially, his plural “I” — adopted because of the circumstances, that is, because he has never been able to find the original spirit again — is not that far from Buddhism. Essentially, his plural “I” was always ideal for the job he did. Isn’t a literary publisher a ventriloquist who cultivates the most varied different voices through his catalog?
“Do you dream a lot?” Judith asked.
“We hardly dream at all any more,” said John Ford. “And when we do have a dream, we forget it. We talk about everything, so there’s nothing left to dream about.”
When he was a publisher he never spoke in interviews about the plurality of his first person singular. It would have been good if, for example, he’d said something like this at some point: “You won’t understand, but really I’m like an Irishman who lives in New York. I combine the American ‘we’ with a furiously European ‘I.’”
Would it really have been worthwhile to say something like that? He’s always weighed down by doubt, never sure of anything. But it’s true that with the topic of the plural “I” he could have excelled perfectly. Actually, there were so many things he didn’t say in interviews when he was in publishing. He let himself down, for instance, by trying to be diplomatic and not always saying what he thought of certain dreadful authors he didn’t publish. He probably let himself down, wasted his life, by his ridiculous desire to be too sensitive. He was let down by this and also, obviously, by having the spirit of a son instead of the customary protective fatherly temperament that seems so typical in publishers, although it’s also true that there are quite a few who pretend to have it when they actually lack the most basic paternal instinct.
He remembers that it has been no time at all since he spent an entire morning going around to branches of two different banks and making changes to his investment funds, and yet he sometimes has the impression that an eternity has gone by since that morning. And he observes that even the time when he used to publish all the great literature he could is starting to drift into the distance.
How old he looks, how old he feels since he retired. And how dull it is not to drink. The world, in itself, is often tedious and lacks true emotion. Without alcohol, one is lost. Although he’d do well not to forget that it’s a wise person who monotonizes existence because then each small incident, if one knows how to read it in a literary way, has a wondrous quality. Never to forget this possibility of consciously monotonizing his life is the only or best solution he has left. Drinking might seriously damage his health. What’s more, he never found anything in alcohol, at the bottom of all those glasses, and nowadays can’t very well explain to himself what it was he was looking for there. Because he didn’t actually manage to avoid boredom, a feeling that always came back relentlessly. Although in interviews he had at times pretended he led an exciting publisher’s life; he used to make things up like crazy back then. Now he wonders what for. What good did it do him to make out that he had an extraordinary occupation and that he enjoyed it so much? Of course it was always better to be a publisher than to do nothing, like now. . Nothing? He’s planning a trip to Dublin, an homage, a funeral for a disappearing era. Is that nothing? How boring everything is, except thinking, thinking one is doing something. Or thinking what he’s thinking now: that it would be good to monotonize his life and try, wherever possible, to look for those hidden wonders in his daily life that, deep down, if he wants to, he’s perfectly capable of finding. Because isn’t he capable of seeing much more than what’s there in everything he experiences? At least all those years are worth something, all those years of understanding reading not just as a practice inseparable from his occupation as a publisher, but also as a way of being in the world: an instrument for interpreting, sequence after sequence, his day-to-day life.
He carries on getting ready for Dublin, and as his mind drifts, he ends up thinking about Irish writers. Nothing’s truer than the fact that he admires them more every day. He only ever published a couple of them, but it wasn’t because he wasn’t keen to publish more. For a long time, without success, he went after the rights for John Banville and Flann O’Brien. He thinks Irish writers are the most intelligent in terms of monotonizing and finding wonder in everyday tedium. In the last few days he’s read and re-read a few Irish authors — Elizabeth Bowen, Joseph O’Neill, Matthew Sweeney, Colum McCann — and his amazement at their capacity for writing astonishingly well has not diminished.
It’s as if the Irish had the gift of literature. He remembers that four years ago he saw one of them at a book fair in Guanajuato, Mexico, and discovered, among other things, that they didn’t have the Latin habit of talking about themselves. At a press conference, Claire Keegan replied almost angrily to a journalist who wanted to know what topics she wrote about in her novels: “I’m Irish. I write about dysfunctional families, miserable, loveless lives, illness, old age, winter, the gray weather, boredom, and rain.”
And at her side, Colum McCann concluded his colleague’s contribution, speaking in an exquisite plural, à la John Ford: “We don’t usually talk publicly about ourselves, we prefer to read.”
He sits thinking about how much he’d like to speak in the plural like this all the time, like John Ford, like the Irish writers. To say to Celia, for instance:
“We don’t think it’s a bad idea that you’re thinking of becoming a Buddhist. But we also think it might become a point of dispute and rupture.”
•
He knows Ricardo once felt like he was at the gates to the center of the world, but that he was ejected from this place by a radical slam of the door by Tom Waits. He doesn’t know, meanwhile, what Javier’s center might be. He phones him.
“Sorry,” he says, “but even though it’s not an odd-numbered day I wanted to talk to you, I want you to tell me if you remember any especially great moments in your life, some moment when you felt at the center of the world.”
An imposing silence at the other end of the phone. Maybe his sarcastic remark about the odd-numbered day has annoyed his friend. There is a silence that seems as if it might go on forever. Until at last, after a terrible, long sigh, Javier says:
“My first love, Riba, my first love. When I saw her for the first time, it was love at first sight. The center of the universe.”
Riba asks him what she was doing, his first love, when he saw her that first time. Was she perhaps walking like Dante’s Beatrice down a Florentine street?