Even though he never stumbled upon a truly great genius, he had a deep respect for the vast majority of his authors, especially those who understood literature as a force directly linked to the subconscious. Riba has always believed that one loves most books that produce the sensation, when opened for the first time, that they’ve always been there: places never visited appear in them, things never seen or heard before, but the sense of having a personal memory of those places or things is so strong that somehow you end up thinking you’ve been there.
Today he takes it for granted that Dublin and the Irish Sea have been in his mental landscape forever, forming part of his past. If one day, now that he’s retired, he goes to live in New York, he’d like to begin a new life, he’d like to feel like a son or a grandson of an Irishman who emigrated to that city. He’d like to be called Brendan, for example, and for the memory of his work as a publisher to be easily forgotten in his native land, forgotten with the malice and treachery so typical of his tight-fisted and indolent compatriots.
Could he, if he so desired, go back to that night when he danced that foxtrot until dawn, go back to his wedding day, go back to being the brilliant and heartless publisher who, at the height of his success — it didn’t last long — made caustic declarations and pointed out the ideal way forward for literature? Or is he going to be left forever staring, like an idiot, at the electric light and wondering whether to have a third Bloody Mary and thus liberate himself from the rocking chair? Is he going to remain forever unable even to get up and walk normally through the house? The buzzing comes again. Obsessively, he goes back to the discouraging and truly obsessive trousseau, the wedding gift list: lamps, vases, old-fashioned crockery. An author’s trousseau, he thinks.
The rain is getting heavier and heavier and is now too persistent to be a summer shower. Since yesterday the downpour has been interrupting the usual fine weather at this time of year in Ireland. For weeks it hasn’t rained in Dublin. He’s into the second week of a twenty-day holiday with Celia in an apartment in the north of the city, the area on the other side of the Royal Canal, not very far from Glasnevin Cemetery, where he’s wanted to return for days now, perhaps to see if he might again glimpse that ghost who vanished before his very eyes on that afternoon of June 16 in front of The Gravediggers pub; that ghost, a relative of Dracula’s, with the great ability to turn himself into fog.
During their first days on the island, he and Celia stayed on Strand Street in the coastal town of Skerries, a pleasant place with a great variety of sea and coast and a long, curved harbor full of shops and pubs. But Celia felt too disconnected from her Buddhist contact in Dublin — she’d been having long meetings every afternoon since they arrived with a religious society or club — and they moved to the pretty town of Bray, near Dalkey, where they also felt uncomfortable; they finally ended up in this apartment in a building near the Royal Canal.
The thing keeping Riba entertained now is trying to avoid remembering in too much detail what happened yesterday. He fears remembering yesterday’s horrors. So he looks again at the book of Nabokov’s lectures as if this might be his only hope, finally deciding to fully enter the Nabokovian commentary on one of the chapters, chosen at random (the first chapter of Part Two), of Joyce’s ever-difficult Ulysses:
Part Two, Chapter I
Style: Joyce logical and lucid.
Time: Eight in the morning, synchronized with Stephen’s morning.
Place: 7 Eccles Street, where the Blooms live, in the northwest part of town.
Characters: Bloom, his wife; incidental characters, the pork-butcher Dlugacz, from Hungary like Bloom, and the maid servant of the Woods family next-door, 8 Eccles St. .
Action: Bloom in the basement kitchen prepares breakfast for his wife, talks charmingly to the cat. .
Riba ends up closing the book of lectures, because the theme of Ulysses now sounds antiquated to him, as if the funeral on June 16 in Dublin had been so effective as to draw to a close an entire era, and now he is living only at ground level, or at rocking-chair level, as if he were a Beckettian vagabond; as if he were now resigned to the inevitable, preferring to remain at the mercy of the memory of last night’s tragic alcoholic relapse.
Fortunately, this rain today is not the terrible London flood, it’s not the same apocalyptic storm as when he was there with his parents, fifteen days ago, that savage rain. He’ll never go back to that city. Deep down the trip was a concession to his elderly parents, an attempt to assuage his guilt for not having been in Barcelona for their sixty-first wedding anniversary. And also a way of saving himself, even if just once, the hateful task of having to tell them about his visit to a foreign city.
“So you’ve been to London.”
He just couldn’t be bothered, when he got back, to have to answer his mother’s question and tell them things about that city, so he decided to take both of them, his father and mother, to London.
It was complicated — he thinks now, almost motionless in his rocking chair — that trip to London, because his parents hadn’t moved from Calle Aribau for years. But if anything, the excursion confirmed that they have a free-flowing communication with the great beyond wherever they are. In London, gatherings occasionally formed around his parents: agglomerations they pretended not to notice, perhaps because since time immemorial they’d always known how to bear the weight of so many ancestors naturally.
Perhaps he’s become very Irish. The thing is he didn’t feel comfortable in London. He didn’t like many things, but he has to admit that he did love the double-decker buses and the three elegant and solitary green-and-white-striped deck chairs he photographed in Hyde Park. He was sorry his friend Dominique wasn’t there because he would have liked to see the Tate installation with her; but she’d had to leave quite suddenly for Brazil, where she lives most of the time. He didn’t like many things about London, even though other things amused him. The strangest was when he saw his parents in the middle of the very street that Hammershøi depicted in “The British Museum.” Riba hadn’t been able to find this street on his previous trip, but he suddenly discovered that it did exist and it was called Montague Street and was in such plain view that Celia had found it as soon as they approached the British Museum. She was carrying the photocopy of the painting that Riba had brought to London for that very reason: a very wrinkled photocopy Riba kept in his pants pocket. Right there, in Montague Street, was where the greatest ghostly turmoil gathered around his parents, who seemed to know everybody and to have been living in that neighborhood their whole lives.
Riba thought that, if he had been a poet or a novelist, he would have exploited the great narrative goldmine he had at his disposal in his parents’ animated ghostly gatherings: gatherings not restricted, as he’d always thought, to the closed space of the apartment on Calle Aribau, but taking place — as was now perfectly obvious — anywhere in the world, in broad daylight, in any bustling city street in any suburb of the universe, including London.
He didn’t like that city, but he walked around with interest, for a long time, through the surly and labyrinthine East End, the center of Spider’s gray life. And he was fascinated by the huge and somewhat ancient railway stations, especially Waterloo. He went into ecstasies for a few moments, in Bloomsbury, in front of the building of the enigmatic Swedenborg Society, and recalled the extraordinary revelation that occurred to the Swedish philosopher one day as he stood on the second-floor balcony of that house: if he wasn’t mistaken, the revelation was that, when a man dies, he doesn’t realize he’s died, since everything around him stays the same, for he is at home, his friends visit him, he walks the streets of his city; he doesn’t think he’s died, until he begins to notice that in the other world everything is as it is in this one, except it’s slightly more spacious.