“As a man thinketh, so is he,” he remembers his grandfather used to say. But was it his grandfather who said this? Did his grandfather, the least sullen man Riba has ever known, say so many things? He feels he’s worse than Spider, perhaps because he’s slept so little. And when he looks back over at that young, stern-faced, staring Morgan he sees that not only is the stranger no longer there, but that he’s vanished and not even the slightest trace of his presence remains. It’s as if he were never there.
He tries to remember that he has to go through the day completely enthused, but it’s hard to convince himself this will be possible. Where did that Morgan go? He found him deeply upsetting, but he hadn’t given him permission to disappear like that. He feels even more annoyed than when he was a child and his spirit abandoned him. And absurdly vindictive toward this Morgan who has left.
That young man — he thinks — so full of life, and at the same time insubstantial as a ghost. Recently, lots of people have been in the habit of disappearing a few seconds after having appeared.
And he remembers a little girl he used to play with in the summer holidays, in Tossa de Mar. Time flies like an arrow, the child used to say, and fruit flies fly too.
Back in his room, waiting for the revelers to wake up, he takes refuge in the book he’s brought with him and starts to read a biography of Beckett, by James Knowlson. He published it but didn’t read it at the time, and decided the trip to Dublin would provide an ideal opportunity to do so. The time has come to read this book he published five years ago and which, by the way, lost him so much money. He knows he could do other things. For instance, go to the executive lounge on the first floor and check his emails. But he wants to stick to his decision to undergo travel therapy and to distance himself from the internet and computers. He’s come to Dublin with this book on Beckett because he always thought one day an opportune moment to read it would arrive, but also because, shortly before leaving Barcelona, it struck him that Beckett was a great friend of Joyce’s — he’s heard it said he was his secretary too, but this isn’t true — and was born in Foxrock, County Dublin, on April 13, 1906, twenty-six months after the day on which Ulysses takes place. Precisely twenty-six months have passed since Riba suffered his physical collapse. Twenty-six months was also exactly how long his parents’ engagement lasted.
Now he reads the section where Knowlson comments on how the young Beckett fled Ireland and above all escaped from May, his mother, but didn’t have a much better time in London. He was depressed and jobless the whole time he was there. He applied without success for the post of assistant curator at the National Gallery. He suffered all sorts of physical discomforts in the form of cysts and eczema. He soon saw that he’d be forced to return to his Dublin home. The worst thing was that he went back, and his mother, convinced he was behaving strangely and had psychological problems, tortured him by making him return to London and paying for two years of intensive psychotherapy for him there, which led him to end up detesting forever the old capital of the empire and the empire itself. He was never a good Irishman, but he acted like it when it came to despising England. He traveled around Germany afterward, where he learned — Knowlson says — to be silent in another language, absorbed in front of Flemish paintings.
Even so, he did return to Dublin and to life with his mother. Uncomfortable in the house where he was born, in Cooldrinagh, in the village of Foxrock. Long walks at dusk to Three Rock and Two Rock, always returning home via Glencullen, generally accompanied by his mother’s two Kerry Blue terriers. Days of fog and lethargy, of indecision. Long hikes around the beautiful coast of the county: lighthouses, wind, harbors. Long strolls around one of the most beautiful areas on earth. And one single conviction during those days of much indecision: now he would hate London forever. And a question preyed on the no-longer-so-young Beckett: what if I went to France and fled from the beauty of the lighthouses and the last piers of the ports at the end of the world of my noble, beloved, sweet, revolting native land?
Two days later, Beckett says goodbye to Dublin once and for all and sets off for Paris, which soon becomes his life’s destiny. He experiences something there he forever calls a revelation and that he once summed up thus: “Molloy and the others came to me the day I realized my stupidity. Only then did I start to write what I felt.” When the biographer Knowlson asked him to be less cryptic about the matter, Beckett didn’t mind explaining it further:
I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than adding.
With this revelation of Beckett’s, the Gutenberg age and of literature in general had started to seem like a living organism that, having reached the peak of its vitality in Joyce, was now, with his direct and essential heir, Beckett, experiencing the irruption of a more extreme sense of the game than ever, but also the beginning of a steep decline in physical form, ageing, the descent to the opposite pier to that of Joyce’s splendor, a freefall toward the port’s murky waters and its poverty, where in recent times, and for many years now, an old whore walks in an absurd worn-out raincoat at the end of a jetty buffeted by the wind and the rain.
Reading makes him sleepy again, perhaps because he woke up too early. But he doesn’t attribute this sudden low to that, but rather to the fact that he’s started reading on the other bed, the one he didn’t sleep in last night. He remembers Amy Hempel, whose character says in one of her stories that she’d discovered a trick to get to sleep: “I sleep in my husband’s bed. That way, the empty bed I look at is my own.”
He looks at his empty bed and puts himself in the shoes of whoever might be observing him from the place he is now. The rumpled sheets on the adjacent bed would induce first boredom and then an instant loss of consciousness in this person. He imagines he gets right under the skin of the man and he ends up falling asleep, and a recurring nightmare of a cage gets to him too, except this time God is outside the cage. He’s a scruffy guy who’s always mechanically smoothing down his hair. He imagines that, under the gaze of the messy-haired man, he says to the absentee, the one who slept last night in the now empty bed:
“It was never a problem, but it’s starting to be one now, and it unsettles me. I try to communicate with myself, but it’s impossible to do so. There’s no greater distance than the space between two minds. As much as if you suspect I’m that first person who existed in you and vanished so early on, or if you think I’m the author of your days, or the spirit of your childhood, or simply the shadow cast by your publisher’s sorrow; the most distressing thing of all would be for you to think that I am happy. If only you knew.”
•
No one was further from suicide than Beckett. When he visited the grave of Heinrich von Kleist he felt a deep unease and scant admiration for this Romantic artist’s final suicidal gesture. Beckett, who loved the world of words and loved gambling, led a life where he wrote ever shorter, more minimal novels, works that were more and more stripped down and sparse. Always worstward. “Name, no, nothing is nameable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don’t know, I shouldn’t have begun.” A stubborn walk toward silence. “So leastward on. So long as dim still. Dim undimmed. Or dimmed to dimmer still. To dimmost dim. Leastmost in dimmost dim.”