He has always liked this expression — quiet obsession — coined by Vok’s English translator. Riba also believes he has obsessions of a similar style. His quiet passion for New York, for instance. His tranquil obsession with a funeral in Dublin, with bidding farewell — he doesn’t yet know whether with a gunfire salute or with tears — to the age of print. His tranquil obsession with experiencing one more moment in the center of the world, traveling to the center of himself, and reaching significant degrees of enthusiasm, and not dying of shame after having lost almost everything.
He’s especially gripped by an obsession with The British Museum, the strangest, most obsessive Hammershøi painting he knows. A painting of an almost aggravated gray tone and in which a thick morning fog can be seen spreading down a totally deserted street in Bloomsbury. As in so many paintings by this artist, the canvas has no people in it. It belongs to a series of works by Hammershøi in which foggy, deserted streets in this area of London that must have hypnotized the painter appear with marked insistence.
He’s only set foot in London once, five years ago, when he was invited to a publishers’ conference. He never visited the book fair in this city because he was worried he would feel self-conscious about his non-existent English, so he always used to send Gauger there instead. On this first and only trip to London, he was put up in a little family-hotel in Bloomsbury, next to the British Museum, near the building of the enigmatic Swedenborg Society. The conference meetings took place in a Bloomsbury theater. And during his brief three-day stay he barely had time to look around anywhere other than his hotel and the museum. He got to know the streets of that district so exhaustively that he’s been under the impression ever since that he knows it really well, in depth. This has been his way of trying to take possession of the area. Maybe that is why, when he watched the film Spider, the rundown streets of the East End surprised him, because he didn’t want to accept something as basic as the fact that in London there were areas quite different from Bloomsbury.
On that journey five years ago he took great care not to say to anyone it was the first time he’d visited the city. He knew it would make a terrible impression that a publisher such as himself, with all his prestige, was such a yokel and hadn’t set foot in London, and moreover, had not set foot there purely out of embarrassment at having no idea how to speak English.
On that journey five years ago he carefully and meticulously studied the streets around the British Museum. He walked up and down them many times and ended up memorizing them and when he got home was able, almost immediately, to identify the street in any of Hammershøi’s London paintings he saw, and even knew, almost by heart, the street’s name. This was the case with all the paintings except The British Museum. The same thing happens to him today. It’s strange, but he still loses himself, gets confused, drowns in this painting. The more he sees the street that features in this painting, the less he knows which one must have served as a model for the painter, and the more he wonders if Hammershøi invented it himself. Nevertheless, the bit of the building that can be seen on the left of the canvas must be one side of the museum, and as such, he should recognize this street, which is probably no great mystery and is very possibly a street that exists and that is there — one more quiet obsession, for when he decides to return to London and see it.
In any case, he has a relationship with the painting The British Museum as strange as the one he’s always had with London. Because, in actual fact, if he hasn’t been to London more than once, it’s not just because of his lack of a command of English, but also because for years a strange fear has been growing inside him caused by the fact that on several occasions, having been on the verge of traveling to this city, something odd always prevented him at the last minute. The first time was in Calais, at the start of the seventies. His car was already on the ferry due to drop him on the other side of the Channel, when an unexpected argument with a female friend — a somewhat fatuous argument about Julie Christie’s miniskirts — had him backing out of the trip. In the eighties, the plane ticket already bought, a colossal storm blocked his path and ended up stopping him from crossing the English Channel.
He started thinking London was that place to which, for obscure reasons, we know we should never go, because death awaits us there. That’s why, five years ago, when the invitation to London he’d always feared arrived, he felt genuine panic. After quite a few doubts, he finally left his house in Barcelona, convinced, however, that before taking the plane, the most unforeseeable event would prevent him from setting foot on English soil. But nothing stood in his way, and he ended up landing at Heathrow, where, with extreme suspicion, he was able to verify that he remained perfectly alive.
Feeling threatened by strange, dark forces, he began walking very apprehensively through the airport. For a moment, he even thought he’d lost his sense of direction. An hour later, when he got to his hotel room, he sat on the bed for a long time, in silence, surprised nothing had happened to him yet and that he hadn’t even felt the slightest possibility of a visit from Death. After a short while, seeing that everything remained in a state of normality almost as vulgar as it was obscene, he turned on the television, found the news, and despite not understanding a word of English, very quickly deduced that Marlon Brando had just died.
He was filled with terror, because he understood that, due to an error by a distracted Death, so predisposed to getting muddled, Brando had died in his place. Afterward, he rejected the idea as inconsistent. But he spent quite a while holding a private funeral for poor Brando and at the same time keeping alert for any possible movements in the third-floor corridor outside his room, as he felt enormously afraid that Death might come down that narrow hallway with the aim of paying him a visit.
He was alert to all the building’s movements when he heard footsteps: someone was heading for his room. There was a knock at the door. He froze. Four more very sharp knocks. The shock didn’t fade until he opened the door and saw that it wasn’t the loathsome scythe-bearing figure at the door, but the publisher Roberto Calasso, who was also staying at the hotel, a guest at the conference, and he had simply come to suggest going for a stroll around the neighborhood.
When the two of them went out for that walk at dusk, they couldn’t have imagined they’d end up watching Joseph Mankiewicz’s film Julius Caesar, perhaps as a kind of unexpected and improvised homage to the film’s lead actor, the illustrious death of the day. They discovered, by one of those casual coincidences that sometimes occur in life, that the film starring Brando and James Mason was being shown at dusk in the Stevenson Room of the British Museum, a few yards from their hotel. And they decided they couldn’t ignore this wink from fate and went in to watch the admirable film that so many times and on so many different occasions they’d seen before.
He remembers that, last night, Celia was telling him, with a marked Buddhist emphasis to her words, that we’re all weaving and interweaving every moment of our lives. Not only, said Celia, do we weave our decisions, but also our acts, our dreams, our states of vigilance: we’re constantly weaving a tapestry. And in the middle of this tapestry, she concluded, it sometimes rains.
He’s started remembering these noteworthy phrases from yesterday, and this doesn’t stop him from imagining a tapestry where it can clearly be seen that it’s been pouring rain in Barcelona for months, without interruption, and it seems it will never stop raining. It always rains in high fantasy, said Dante. And it’s raining, especially now, in his imagination, and in Barcelona too. It’s pouring in this city, that’s for sure. And it’s been doing so, on and off, ever since he decided to go to Dublin. Rain always makes us remember, it brings other times to mind, and maybe this is why he now recalls that, five years ago in Bloomsbury, after having watched James Mason in Julius Caesar, he came across this actor again back in his hotel room that night, and there he was quite still on the television screen, in that scene from Kubrick’s Lolita, in which Humbert Humbert, before going up to his room to sleep with his nymphet, talks to a stranger, another guest at the hotel, a man called Quilty, who seems to know all about his life.