As long as he’s been tramping around and looking at this place, Riba was going to add, but held back.
“Tramped around France?” his father says.
Today more than ever a wake-like atmosphere can be sensed in this familiar living room. And although very early on in his adolescence he became aware of the strange stagnation of air and even the paralysis of everything alive that seemed to have taken possession of the room, never before has he had such a strong feeling of time being blocked, stopped, absolutely dead.
In this house, which seems more and more Irish to him, everything happens at a snail’s pace, and what’s more — perhaps so no entrenched custom can be altered in any way, nothing happens at all. It’s as if his parents were constantly holding a wake for their ancestors and precisely today, with maximum gravity, this ghostly family tradition falls heavily on the home. Indeed, he’d swear that more than ever, as so many times before, he’s seeing the ghosts of some of his ancestors. They are beings as blurry as they are out of place — they’re a little short-sighted — who act threateningly and resentfully toward the living. It’s important to acknowledge that at least they’re quite well mannered. And the proof is in the fact that, as if polite enough not to want to disturb things, some have discreetly left the wake, and are now standing over by the door, smoking and blowing the smoke out into the hallway. Riba wouldn’t be surprised if there were even a few of them playing soccer out on the patio right now. What good guys, he thinks suddenly. Today he’s taken to seeing them as if they were adorable ghosts. Indeed, they are. He’s been accustomed to them his whole life. They’re familiar to him in every sense. His childhood was swarming with these ghosts, laden with signs from the past.
“What are you looking at?” his mother says.
The spirits. This is what he should reply. Uncle Javier, Aunt Angelines, Grandpa Jacobo, little Rosa María, Uncle David. This is what he should say to her. But he doesn’t want trouble. He falls silent as a dead man, while thinking he’s hearing voices coming from the patio, maybe directly connected to that other patio, the one in New York. He amuses himself recalling in his mind wisps of the dead he’s seen before in other places. But he stays quiet, as if he himself were just another family apparition.
He tries to hear a conversation between the ghosts closest to him, the ones in the hallway — they seem easier to hear than the ones stirring up a fuss on the patio — and he thinks he hears something, but it’s so indistinct it’s not really anything at all, and then he remembers that famous description of the ghost to be found in Ulysses:
What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.
He remembers one day in this very place his maternal grandfather, Jacobo, saying with slightly forced emphasis: “Nothing important was ever achieved without enthusiasm!”
“Right then. And what have you managed to find out about Ireland?”
He doesn’t answer his mother straight away, he’s amusing himself too much looking around the living room. Suddenly, the voices start growing softer and considerably lower in tone, as if falling asleep, and finally, after a brief process of almost total disintegration, all that remains is the silence and the hazy smoke from some ghostly straggler’s cigarette. He thinks there couldn’t be a more opportune moment to tell his mother that Ireland is essentially a country of storytellers, full of ghosts of its own. He wants to give a weight to the word ghosts, winking at his mother, but it’s useless; for years now she’s pretended to ignore the subject of the family ghosts, probably because she’s spent so many years living in more than stable harmony with the specters and doesn’t want to argue about something as obvious as their gentle existence.
“Imagine,” he says to his mother, “that an Irish politician or bishop commits a terrible act. Fine. You’d want to know exactly how things had happened. Isn’t that right?”
“I think so.”
“Well for the Irish, this is secondary. What they care about is how the politician or the bishop is going to explain himself. If they’re able to justify themselves with grace, that is, with a gripping, human story, they’ll get out of their predicament without much trouble.”
Old age, illness, gray weather, centuries-old silence. Boredom, rain, net curtains cutting them off from the outside. The oh-so familiar ghosts of Calle Aribau. There’s no reason to try to play down his parents’ drama and his own; growing old is disastrous. The logical response would be for everyone who sees their life waning to shout out in fright, not resign themselves to a future of drooping jaws and hopeless dribbling, still less to this brutal tearing apart that is death, because to die is to be ripped up into a thousand pieces that are scattered dizzily forever, with no witnesses. This would be logical, but it’s also true that sometimes he feels pretty good listening to the soft, ghostly murmur of voices and spectral footsteps that lull him and which deep down, being so furiously familiar, even win him over.
“And what else do you know about Ireland?”
He’s about to tell his mother that the country is the closest thing there is to this living room. His father gently reproaches his wife for overwhelming their son with so many questions about Ireland. And before long they’re embroiled in an argument. “I won’t make you your coffee for two days,” she says. Senile shouts. The two of them have very different characters, different in every way. They’ve always loved each other, but for this very reason they hate each other. In reality they hate themselves. His parents remind him of something the poet Gil de Biedma once said to him in the Tuset bar in Barcelona. An intimate relationship between two people is an instrument of torture between them, whether they’re people of opposite sexes or the same. Each human being carries within himself a certain amount of self-hatred, and this hatred, this not being able to stand oneself, is something that has to be transferred to another person, and the person you can best transfer it to is the person you love.
When he thinks about it, the same thing happens with him and his wife. There are days when he feels like he’s lots of people at the same time, that his brain is peopled with more ghosts than his parents’ house. And he can’t stand any of these people, he thinks he knows them all. . He hates himself because he has to get older, because he’s aged a lot, because he has to die: this is precisely what he remembers very promptly every Wednesday when he visits his parents.
“What are you thinking about?” his mother interrupts him.
Old age, death. And not a single one of these normal net curtains can block the funereal view of a gloomy future, or the present. In the living room mirror, as he looks deep into his own eyes, he’s horrified to see, for a fraction of a second, Irish light inside his retinas, and in these, dozens of tiny different insects, moths of many varied species, all dead. It could be said that his eyes are like that mental cobweb seemingly reproduced by the terrifying workings of Spider’s brain. He is terrified, and looks away, but he remains petrified, frightened, on the verge of crying out.
He goes over to the window in search of a livelier landscape, and as he looks out at the world, sees a young man walking down the street quite quickly; just as he walks past, under the window, the man looks up at Riba with one irate eye and stares hard, softened only by his comical limp.