On his way to the elevator, he passes a young man wearing a black suit who seems to recognize him. For a minute, the guy hesitates and seems about to stop and talk to him. Riba also hesitates. But he doesn’t know him at all and it would be ludicrous to stop and talk to this stranger. In the end, the man coughs, looks away and quickens his pace.
In the elevator, the piped music is so depressing that for a minute he has the impression that the music itself, no matter how modern, is only bringing back memories of ruins: he tries to remember details of loved ones, houses, faces, but all that appears are ruins and more ruins. His life is in decline, he has to acknowledge it, but so is the world, and this gives him some consolation. He must try to make a connection, somehow, with enthusiasm. And in any case not cease in his exploration of the foreign. Dublin is a great first port of call in his struggle against the familiar, against the interbreeding of Catalan concepts and landscapes too often repeated and now too cramped for him. His native land, fatal land. He feels he’s truly fleeing from it at last. He should make up his mind once and for all and start this long journey toward enthusiasm, even if it were just to honor his grandfather Jacobo, such a supporter of euphoria. .
A ghostly brush against his shoulder. A coldness on the nape of his neck. But there’s no one else in the elevator. He looks at himself in the mirror and shrugs his shoulders, as if he’s trying to have fun all by himself now. What’s this icy draught? The elevator doors open; he steps out into the long, empty corridor, slowly walks down it. In the time it would take for the briefest flash of light in the world, he walks past his Uncle David, his mother’s brother, dead for more than twenty years. He’s not about to panic, but it’s the first time he’s seen the ghost of a relative outside his usual surroundings. In any case, the apparition was so fleeting that if he really saw it then he might have to start admitting that an instant like this is sort of a glimpse or connection point between the past and the present. Hadn’t he heard of interconnected points in space and time whose topology we might never understand, but between which the so-called living and the so-called dead can travel and thus encounter each other?
Time: Half past one in the morning.
Day: Bloomsday.
Style: Somnambulistic.
Place: Dublin, Morgans hotel. Room 527.
Action: Riba wakes abruptly from a deep sleep, as someone tries to enter his room using their swipe card. Still half asleep, he remembers the red suitcase someone left in the room this morning. He gets up fearing the intruder’s swipe card will end up working. When he can’t get in, the person on the other side nervously knocks three times on the door. Some unintelligible words are heard. The voice of a young man. It’s a little scary. The old panic of someone coming into your house or your hotel room in the middle of the night.
“Who’s there?” asks Riba, half sleepy, half scared.
“New York,” the voice of the young man replies.
Did he really say New York? Riba didn’t hear very well, but that’s what he thought he heard. New York. He goes back to bed, disconcerted and with a certain amount of comic awareness, as if retreating inside the room could protect him from something. He tries to think he’s dreamed it all. But he’s awake, and though he’s still quite sleepy and clumsy thanks to the one and a half Orfidal he took a while ago, he’s aware that all this couldn’t be more real. The thing he’s feared so much would happen to him one day is taking place. Someone is trying to get into his room in the middle of the night.
Two more knocks on the door.
“The suitcase is in reception,” he says to whoever is out there. And he almost shouts out of fear when he says this, as if he was scared that the person trying to get into his room wanted only to kill him.
A long silence follows. Riba is motionless, barely breathing.
Some footsteps in the corridor, and then on the stairs. The man goes away.
Day breaks very early in Dublin, something he hadn’t expected at all. At seven minutes past five, the very first light of day can be seen in the room, and he half opens his eyes. On the television, which he left on, he sees the mute image of a bridlepath lined with bare bushes. There’s no one on the path, until suddenly a funeral procession appears, led by a very majestic horse. Riba realizes he’s watching a Dracula film. Another shock for today, he thinks drowsily. All at once he remembers the disturbing events of last night. After the intruder appeared, he fell back asleep quite easily, and luckily, the man didn’t reappear. It must have been the owner of the red suitcase. And it’s more than likely that he didn’t say he was called New York, but some other thing that sounded like it and that Riba didn’t hear properly. No one’s called New York.
Perhaps he should have opened the door and made sure. He checks the time again. It’s only ten after five in the morning, a dreadful time to begin any kind of activity. To start with, it’s too early to go down for breakfast. Will his friends have returned yet from their night on the town? It would be awful to go out into the corridor and find them all there, drunk, barely able to recognize him. Or the other way around, to find them overly happy to see him, and what’s more, to run into the enigmatic Walter and for him to embrace Riba enthusiastically. It’s too early for that sort of thing. He’ll even have to wait to call his parents in Barcelona and wishing them a happy anniversary. Because today — he’s just remembered — is their sixty-first wedding anniversary.
Even so, he tries to liven up and recalls a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote: “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.” Today must be, he thinks. After all, he’s been waiting for it for weeks. Then, he remembers his grandfather Jacobo: “Nothing important was ever achieved without enthusiasm!” What a great phrase, he thinks once again. It’s clear he’s trying to liven up any way he can. He wants to feel euphoric on this Bloomsday. But he’ll have to wait. He’s used to that. He’d like to feel that enthusiasm his grandfather always tried to instill in him, but at this time in the morning — this morning of the best day of the year — it’s all turning out to be a little bit difficult. It seems as if even thinking is turning out to be complicated. He’s so sleepy he only manages to think he’s not managing to think much yet. Unexpectedly, he remembers: a day when, as he was coming out of the cinema he asked a young usherette — who vaguely reminded him of Catherine Deneuve — what she thought the film was about. And as she replied, telling him it was a story of undying love, he felt himself briefly falling in love with her. He has always liked women who look like Catherine Deneuve, and would go so far as to say that his whole life has been deeply marked by this.
It’s clear his mind is already starting to wake up. The proof is that he’s now gripped by a certain amount of enthusiasm. But he realizes that his euphoria must coexist with the awkward memory of the incident last night, which now he sees almost as a dream, or the start of a good story, although he won’t tell his friends about it later as if it were a story, or as if he were a writer. It’s possible the stranger was someone who thought he was still staying in room 527. Maybe it was a young man who stayed in this room with his lover. Perhaps that morning he had left the room very early and the woman, fed up with him and not knowing when he’d be back, decided to break things off, paid for the room and left his suitcase up there, so that, when he returned, the fool would realize he’d been abandoned to his fate.