Physical state: Glacial. A massive headache. A feeling of “what for?”
Details: A suitcase and a carry-on bag in the hall — not on the landing, because the neighbors aren’t trustworthy here. They indicate that Celia, who’s asleep now, is very angry about yesterday and also about today; she’d wanted to give him one last chance this afternoon when she’d returned from her long Buddhist meeting, but he had been so comatose and stupid that she must have decided at that moment to leave tomorrow.
Action: Mental, unmitigating. Out of an obvious professional obsession — reading too many manuscripts, and to top it all, not a single masterpiece — he reads the events of his life more and more literarily. Riba is now in his rocking chair, and after having slept off his hangover all day long and having drunk two Bloody Marys a while ago to try to get over it, he’s attempting to reconstruct the terrifying events of the night before. He is doing so in a panic that he might remember too well what happened and die as soon as he does. His remorse at having started drinking again makes him wonder if it mightn’t be better to give the slip to the disagreeable and emotional memory of last night’s events and take refuge in a book that he has close at hand, an old copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s lectures on literature to his students at Cornell. He hopes that by reading these wise lectures, he’ll end up feeling sleepy again, which he doesn’t now because he’s slept all day. He doesn’t want to fall under the dangerous hypnosis of the computer, sit in front of it and risk Celia waking up and finding him in hikikomori mode again, which is the last thing, rightly or wrongly, she’ll be able to stand now.
After twenty-six months of abstinence, he’d completely forgotten how bad a hangover feels. How horrendous. Now the headache seems to be letting up a bit. But an uncontrollable buzzing and remorse are drilling into him. The buzzing — probably very closely related to his old writer’s malady — is disconcerting, because it brings back, absurdly and obsessively, the memory of the list of wedding gifts from when he married Celia, so many years ago now: that miserable and discouraging assortment of lamps, vases, and crockery. It’s all very strange. If he doesn’t do something, the rocking chair will take on the shape of his body.
More details: The rocking chair is unvarnished teak, guaranteed against cracks, rot, and nocturnal creaking. The sky he glimpses through the curtains is strangely orange, with violet tints. The rain starts to get heavier and now lashes the windowpanes. Since he arrived at this house, he’s been obsessed by the reproduction of “Stairway,” a small Edward Hopper painting the owner of the apartment has hung next to the window. It’s a painting in which the viewer looks down a staircase to a door open onto a dark, impenetrable mass of trees and mountains. He feels he has been denied what the geometry of the house offers. The open door is not a candid passage to the outside, but an invitation paradoxically extended to stay where he is.
“Go,” says the house.
“Where to?” says the landscape outside.
This feeling, once again, is unhinging him, disorienting him, making him very nervous. He decides to ask for some discreet help from Nabokov’s book, which is beside him. And then, for a moment or two, he stares at the hazy moon again and at everything he can see out there. The hangover, the abundant rain, “Stairway,” and that atrocious sky have him bound to a terrifying anguish. But also directly to a feeling that this is a game. For a moment, “anguish” and “game” intertwine perfectly, as they have so many times in his life. His feet are cold and that could be related as much to the hangover as to the game and the anguish and the stairway that seems to descend inside his own mind.
“Go,” says the house.
He covers his dramatic feet with a checked blanket, quite a ridiculous blanket, and pretends to write a sentence mentally, to write it in his head — he has that unusual and luxurious feeling of writing in his head — five times in a row:
It’s midnight and the rain lashes the windowpanes.
It’s midnight and the rain. .
Then, he starts other games.
The next one is even simpler. It consists of going through all the authors he’s published and studying why not even one of them ever presented his readers with a true, authentic masterpiece. Also to examine why none of them, in spite of occasionally showing signs of almost supernatural talent, was an anarchist and at the same time an architect.
Here he pauses and remembers that in one of the letters received from Gauger, who writes to him, every once in a while, from the Chateau Hotel in Tongariro, his secretary attributed the absence of genius in all the writers they published to the profound despondency prevalent in our times, to the absence of God, and definitively — he said — to the death of the author, “announced back in the day by Deleuze and Barthes.”
Marginal note: The ongoing correspondence from that hotel in Tongariro is particularly worrying for Riba, who can’t understand why his former secretary keeps writing to him, unless it’s simply to keep up appearances, and even more, hold at bay suspicions that he embezzled a substantial amount of money from the publishing company.
Other details: From this game of going through all the authors and studying why not even one ever submitted a true masterpiece is derived another even more perverse game, which consists of asking himself the painful question of whether the brilliant author for whom he’d searched so long and hard wasn’t actually himself, and if he hadn’t become a publisher in order to have to look exclusively for that great talent in others, and thus to be able to forget the dramatic case of his own personality; he’s actually hopeless at being brilliant as well as hopeless at writing. It’s very possible that he turned to editing in order to avoid this baggage and be able to dump his disappointment on others, not exclusively on himself.
He immediately feels he has to contradict himself and remembers that he also took up publishing because he’s always been an impassioned reader. He discovered literature by reading Marcel Schwob, Raymond Queneau, Stendhal, and Gustave Flaubert. He became a publisher after a long time; and then there’s the time he now considers black in which he betrayed his first literary loves, reading only novels with protagonists who earned more than a hundred thousand dollars a year.
A commentary: It’s well known that when a person sees a glint of gold in books, he’s taking a qualitative leap in his editorial vocation. And some of that could apply to Riba, except that, beforehand, he was a reader of good novels, and also a committed reader; he didn’t just go into the business to make a lot of money, that is, for what is vulgarly referred to in Spanish with the verb forrarse. Ah, forrarse! What a strange expression. Was there any equivalent in English? To make a mint? To line one’s pockets? In fact, he soon realized he was heading for ruin and still didn’t want to give it up, and the miracle was that he lasted in his profession for thirty years.
He always had good relationships with foreign publishers, whom he usually saw at the Frankfurt Book Fair and with whom he exchanged information and books. With editors in his own country, however, he never had a great rapport. They always seemed fatuous to him, less knowledgeable about literature than they pretended to be: bigger celebrities and more egocentric than their authors whom they branded as egomaniacs to delirious extremes. Curiously, his friends in Spain have usually been writers, and the vast majority younger than him.