The noise inside the Gravediggers is so loud that now he’s talking to Walter using only signs. No one can understand him, not even Walter, an expert in sign language. But Riba on the other hand knows very well what he’s saying. He’s telling Walter that all life is a demolition job, but the blows that carry out the dramatic part of this task — the sudden hard blows that come, or seem to come, from outside — the ones that a person remembers and that make him blame things, and those that, in moments of weakness, a person tells his friends about, don’t reveal their effects immediately. The blows come from inside, those blows that furtively encroached upon your interior self from the moment you decided to become a publisher and look for writers, and especially for a genius. These blows are related to a dull, muted pain a person doesn’t really notice until it’s too late to do anything, until you realize once and for all that in a certain sense you’ll never again be who you were and that the blows were well-aimed.
•
He doesn’t touch a drop, but perhaps because he’s returned, after twenty-six months, to a completely alcohol-infused environment, he remembers that his greatest error, linked to his love of drink, was his inexcusable need to show others the most abject side of his being, and the fact that he always he used to make an effort to speak the truth about what he was thinking, whether or not this hurt whoever might be listening. Taking for granted that his charming side was always visible, he took pains to reveal his abject side. And he did this driven by a need, on the one hand, to escape all social protocols (which made him feel ill) and on the other, because of a desire to align himself with the purest and most original surrealist movement, that which held that any idea that passed through one’s head should be immediately put out there and doing so constituted a moral obligation, because this way the most intimate side of everyone’s personality was put on display. Naturally this, shall we say, aggressive compulsion brought him numerous problems, lost him contracts and friendships and destroyed his public image. Now, since he stopped drinking and went over to the other side and reveals only, in a positively overwhelming way, the most attractive side of his being, he has the feeling he’s lost the suicidal but brilliant “open country” of his previous experiences. He’s remained in a state of stifling serenity and politeness and cleanliness that sickens him. It’s as if now he were merely an elegant impostor who pilfered the genuine, moving images from the minds of others. Of course he couldn’t feel less inclined to have a few drinks and return uselessly to being abject. He’d much rather feel that, for some time now, sobriety has been helping him to recover his tragic conscience, as well as to look for his center, his algebra and his key, as Borges would say, and his mirror.
An hour later, imagination and memory transport Riba to the end of the sixties and the edge of a forest on the Costa Brava battered by gale-force winds. He finds himself on this confused forest edge, the sky grown dark and a wind rising, blowing dust over the surface of the scorched earth, creating, at first swirls, and then freak cobwebs that gradually formed a persistent and obsessive geometric poem in his mind. He remembers that back then he was still very young and hadn’t yet published even one book or knew what he was going to do with his life. He would have been very surprised to learn that, forty years later, he’d want to be in that situation once more, that is, to be again in front of the forest battered by gale-force winds without yet having done anything with his life.
The hurricane in this memory having blown over, Riba goes back to the Dublin night, which now, compared to this memory, seems a mild one. He’s in the doorway to the pub, he came out to get some fresh air.
This is my country now, he thinks again.
As he opens the door to the place, he hears “Walk on the Wild Side,” the song that always evokes New York for him. His friends are coming out of the pub and it looks as if they’re bringing the party into the street. Suddenly they all realize the temperature has dropped and they need to find taxis and go back into the town center. A fog obscures the railings of the cemetery, where visitors are still leaving.
Riba’s gaze darts among those present and stops at a group not from the pub but from the graveyard. Near these people, as if he’d come from nowhere, is a tall, lanky, solitary man. He’s not with anyone. Where the hell did he come from? It’s the same guy he saw this morning in Meeting House Square. He looks like a young Samuel Beckett. Round tortoiseshell glasses. A lean, bony face. Eagle-eyed, the eyes of a bird that flies high, that sees everything, even at night. He’s wearing a scruffy beige raincoat and is looking at Riba intensely, as if he can sense his spirit soaring, and also as if he doesn’t want to transmit a certain dark unhappiness emanating from his birdlike face.
He doesn’t look happy, but Riba prefers to think that the young man has just felt for the first time the emotion that any mortal with literary pretensions experiences when he discovers that the practice of his art makes him sense the fluttering of brilliance. Could it be that this young man’s art consists of the intimate humility of learning to observe in order to then try to narrate and decipher? If this is true, there would be no more mystery. But Riba doubts this is the case and so, fearfully, he asks Ricardo if he has any idea who the lanky-looking fellow in the mackintosh might be. Amalia hails a taxi. Walter scans the foggy horizon in search of a second vehicle. Bev and Nietzky argue politely about who’s going to get into the car Amalia has stopped. Finally Nietzky loses the battle and stands watching the first taxi leave with the resignation of a man watching a gravedigger help attach the ropes to a coffin to lower it into the grave. Walter, who is the one who seems to have best understood Nietzky’s deathly expression, carries on looking for a second taxi.
Riba’s gaze follows the stranger in the raincoat and after a short while he sees him walk slowly into the fog and soon afterwardvanish, disappear into it. He doesn’t see him again. What could have become of the guy swallowed up by the mist? Dracula disappeared like this too. What’s more, Dracula had the ability to turn himself into fog. Is Riba the only one who saw him? He asks Ricardo again if he noticed the young man in a raincoat who was also there this morning in Meeting House Square. “What selfinvolved enigma did Bloom risen, going, gathering multicoloured multiform multitudinous garments, voluntarily apprehending, not comprehend?” Such ease, incidentally, to disappear, like Dracula in the mist. In this same graveyard, in another time, Bloom saw his creator.
If I have an author, it’s possible he has a face like that, he thinks.
“Well, what do you know,” Ricardo says. “Always someone turns up you never dreamt of.”
July
The moon shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
It’s raining. It’s midnight. He feels that the more time he spends in this rocking chair, the more it will take on the shape of his body. An enormous hangover. He has a terrible fear that his kidneys will explode and he’ll die here, right now. Cold sweat. He fears that first thing tomorrow morning Celia will leave him. Fear of fear. Even colder sweat. Twelve o’clock on the dot on the clock of anguish.
Time: Midnight.
Place: A fifth-floor apartment in a building in north Dublin.
Atmosphere: Dissatisfaction. He hates himself for yesterday’s mistake, but also for having been so clumsy and not having been able to find a writer truly able to dream in spite of the world; to structure the world in a different way. A great writer: at once anarchist and architect. It wouldn’t have mattered if he were dead. A real genius, just one would have been enough. Someone able to undermine and reconstruct the banal landscape of reality. Someone, dead or alive. . An even colder sweat.