“No,” Javier says, “I fell in love watching her peeling sweet potatoes in her parents’ kitchen, and I remember she was missing a tooth. . ”
“A tooth?”
Riba decides to take it all tragically seriously, despite the fact that Javier might just be joking. It’s not long before he realizes he’s made the right choice. His friend isn’t joking at all.
“Yes, you heard right,” Javier says, his voice quivering. “She wasn’t even peeling potatoes, but sweet potatoes, mind you, and the poor girl was missing a tooth.”
“Love’s like that,” Javier adds, faraway and philosophical. “The first sight of the beloved, although it might seem trivial, is capable of leading us to the strongest of passions, and even at times to suicide. Nothing’s as irrational as passion, believe you me.”
Since Riba has the impression of having inappropriately unearthed a dark drama, he takes the first opportunity in the conversation to say goodbye, thinking it’s always better to talk to Javier on odd-numbered days, when it’s he, on his own initiative, who calls.
“Have you ever eaten sweet potato?” Javier asks when they’ve practically already finished their farewells, and were both about to hang up.
Riba doesn’t like the thought of not replying. But the fact is he doesn’t answer. He hangs up. He pretends the line has been cut off. My god, he thinks, imagine, talking to me about sweet potatoes. Poor Javier. A love affair is always an interesting topic, but mixed with food it’s indigestible.
He already knows that, at the center of the world, Ricardo had a door harshly slammed in his face by Tom Waits. And that good old Javier, meanwhile, saw a girl peeling something. As for young Nietzky, in his case it might all be different, and the question of the center of things may not be important, given that, after all — almost without realizing it Riba slips into a torrential inner world at the mere mention of New York — he already lives in this center, lives there without any trouble, lives right in the very center of the world. But who knows what’s happening in his mind when young Nietzky’s left alone in the center of the center of the center of his world, and thinks. What might go through his head, for example, when the light’s purity bathes the windows of the skyscrapers, which are like blue, transparent skies pointing toward a superior sky over there in Central Park? What does he really know about Nietzky? And about the superior sky of Central Park in New York?
He tries to forget all this, because it’s complicated and because it’s Wednesday and now he’s at his parents’ house and hasn’t properly heard what his mother’s just said.
“I asked you if everything’s all right,” she repeats. “You look distracted.”
How fast time goes by, he thinks. It’s Wednesday again. Love, illness, old age, gray weather, boredom, rain. All the Irish writers’ themes seem to be highly topical in his parents’ living room. And outside, the drizzle adds to this impression.
Illness, old age, boredom, unbearable grayness. Nothing that’s not common knowledge on the face of the earth. The stark contrast between the wake-like atmosphere in his parents’ house and Nietzky’s torrential inner world seems enormous.
Thinking of his talented young friend, twenty-seven years his junior, reminds him that, right now, Nietzky must be on his way to number 27 ½ Edison Street in Providence. Although Nietzky is in North America and he’s in Europe, at this moment they’re both in almost identical parallel situations, situations that are both preludes to the same trip to Ireland.
And he thinks that, when he first met Nietzky, no one could have predicted that one day they’d end up being friends. He can’t get the idea out of his head that their meeting fifteen years ago in Paris bore a certain resemblance — mainly in regard to Nietzky’s age difference and unpleasant farewell phrase — to the meeting that took place in Dublin between W. B. Yeats and James Joyce.
At that first meeting, after having reproached him for even the most impeccable side of his publishing policy, his future friend Nietzky said to him: “We might have been contemporaries, and perhaps even the best two members of our generation, I as a writer and you as a publisher. But that’s not how it turned out. You’re pretty old now, and it really shows.”
He didn’t bear a grudge, just as, the many differences aside, Yeats didn’t hold a grudge against the very young Joyce when they met in the smoking room of a restaurant on O’Connell Street in Dublin, and the future author of Ulysses, who’d just turned twenty, read the thirty-seven-year-old poet a collection of his own brief and eccentric prose descriptions and meditations, beautiful though immature. He had thrown over metrical form, young Joyce told him, that he might get a form so fluent it would respond to the motions of the spirit.
Yeats praised this endeavor, but the young Joyce said arrogantly: “I really don’t care whether you like what I am doing or not. Indeed I don’t know why I’m reading to you.” And then, putting his book down on the table, he proceeded to set out his objections to everything Yeats had done. Why had he concerned himself with politics, and above all, why had he concentrated on ideas and condescended to make generalizations? These things, he said, were all the sign of the cooling of the iron, of the fading out of inspiration. Yeats was puzzled, but then was confident again. He thought: “He’s from the Royal University, and thinks that everything’s been settled by Thomas Aquinas — no need to trouble about it. I have met so many like him. He would probably review my book in the newspaper if I sent it there.”
But his cheer disappeared when a minute later the young Joyce spoke badly of Wilde, who was a friend of Yeats’s.” Presently — although this was later refuted by Joyce who classified it as “café gossip,” claiming that, in any case, his parting words were never as disdainful as might be inferred from the anecdote — he got up to go, and as he was going out, said: “I am twenty. How old are you?” Yeats replied saying he was a year younger than he actually was. Joyce said with a sigh: “I thought as much. I have met you too late. You are too old. . ”
He talks to his parents, while imagining the parallel action that might be unfolding in Providence, near New York: Nietzky walking into the Finnegans Society at that very moment and greeting the Joyceans who welcome him as a new and unexpectedly Spanish member of their society, asking him if it’s true that he’s read Finnegans Wake in its entirety and also if it’s true that he’s a fan of this work. He can imagine Nietzky smiling and wildly launching into a recital of the whole book from memory: “Riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay. .” And he can also imagine the other members, overcome with horror, having to interrupt him.
“So what the hell happened in Lyon? We still don’t know anything about what happened there,” asks his mother suddenly.
“Oh, no! Please, Mama! Since very early this morning, until just before coming over here to see you two, I’ve been sitting at my computer reading all kinds of things about Dublin and studying the core” — brief pause, he swallows — “of all things Irish. And now. .”
He stops in his tracks, suddenly. He’s embarrassed to have said the core, because he thinks that the essence would have been a more suitable, more accurate term. But it doesn’t matter. Surely his parents can forgive him this sort of mistake. It’s all right. Or is it?
“The core? You’re so strange, son,” says his mother, who at times really does seem to be able to read his mind.
“The essence of all things Irish,” he grumpily corrects himself. “Right now, Mama, right now when I know I’m brimming with facts about Dublin and I wanted to tell you some things about this city, now that I even know what sort of trees I’ll find on the highway from the airport to my hotel in Dublin, you go and ask me about Lyon. What do you want me to tell you about Lyon? I said farewell to France there for a long time. I think that was all that happened. I said goodbye to France. I’ve studied it, tramped around it, looked at it for long enough.”