They were good moments he spent there in front of the Swedenborg Society, but in general he didn’t like London; although that didn’t stop him doing things all over the city. Patiently, Celia and his parents accompanied him around Chelsea as he whimsically tracked down the two houses where Beckett had lived as a young man in the 1930s. One was situated at 48 Paultons Square, a beautiful spot just off the King’s Road. And the other at 34 Gertrude Street, where the writer rented a room from the Frost family and went out every day to the sessions of psychoanalysis his mother paid for from Dublin and which little by little created in him a mood favorable to hating that city, although not writers like Samuel Johnson, about whom he wanted to write a play. “You can’t imagine how much I hate London,” Beckett wrote to his friend Thomas McGreevy, a key person in his life because he was the one who put him in touch with James Joyce. For the young Beckett, that letter, in which he explained in detail how very much he hated London, was nothing more than the preamble to his decision, the next day, to pack his bag and return to Dublin, where the martyrdom of his difficult relationship with his mother awaited him.
There was a great photograph to commemorate 34 Gertrude Street. A big, suddenly youthful smile from Riba looking at the camera Celia was pointing at him. Glorious moment. He felt happy and almost proud of having been able to find the two lodgings of the young Beckett so easily.
“And without knowing a word of English!” he repeated happily, forgetting the none too minor detail that Celia, who spoke the language with ease, had figured it all out.
That photo of 34 Gertrude Street was one of the key mementos of the trip and also one of its few memorable events. Because, for the rest of the time, London put him in a very bad mood. Almost nothing he saw in that city seemed to amuse him. He discovered that he was still fascinated, and would be for a long time — much more than anywhere else — by New York and this wild sea of Ireland that he now had so close to home and on which the rain beat down tonight with relentless cruelty.
Now, as his hangover slowly, very slowly recedes, he reaffirms his old idea that anyone who has visited New York and this rough Irish Sea must look down on London with superiority and stupor. He ends up seeing it as Brendan Behan did that day when, comparing it with many other much better places, he described it as a wide flat pie of redbrick suburbs, with a currant in the middle for the West End.
He’s turned into one of those Irishmen who amuse themselves with their constant and ingenious cutting remarks about the English. He guesses that he’ll soon forget London, but never Dominique’s brilliant installation, which he visited with his parents and Celia in the Tate Modern. It was an experience at the edge of reason, because his parents were so literal and seeing, with natural astonishment, the end of the world, they were left impressed and mute for a long time.
It was raining especially hard and cruelly outside the installation, while inside loudspeakers reproduced the sound of the rain artificially. And when they were about to leave that place of refuge for “survivors of the catastrophe,” they rested for a while on the metal bunkbeds that accommodated, day and night, refugees from the flood of 2058, a year when undoubtedly all the people Riba loved, without exception, would be dead.
By that year, all his loved ones would be sleeping forever, they’d be sleeping in the infinite space of the unknown, that great space that could finally be represented by the rain lashing the windowpanes of the highest windows of the universe. No doubt, in 2058 all his loved ones would be like those high windows Phillip Larkin talked about: the sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
High fantasy is a place where it’s always raining, he took the opportunity to remember there in London, in the middle of that general atmosphere of great catastrophe and universal flood. All over the place, in Dominique’s installation, were human replicas of Spider, numerous displays of walking ghosts and other men sleeping. His mother ordered a lime flower tea in the bar overlooking the river on the Tate’s top floor, while his father looked permanently surprised.
“Do you realize what we’ve seen? We’re right at the end of the world!” he kept repeating, sounding cheerful and contrite at the same time, while contemplating the great view of London under the spectacular and destructive rain.
Then with a great sense of involuntary humor, his mother — once she’d recovered with whatever tea they’d served her instead of lime flower — said to her husband with a sudden worried grimace:
“Stop laughing, Sam, and take notice, once and for all, of what’s going on. For the past few weeks it’s been raining constantly. It can’t be true that it rains so much, in Barcelona, in London. I think it’s in the Great Beyond that it’s raining all the time.”
And then, as if she’d reached the most important or maybe most obvious conclusion of her life, added:
“I suspect we’re all dead.”
A few days ago he finished reading James Knowlson’s biography of Beckett. As soon as he got to the end he decided to reread Murphy, a book he’d delved into enthusiastically and with irrepressible astonishment when he was very young, as if he’d found the philosopher’s stone. The book made so great an impression on him that he has never since been able to look at a rocking chair without thinking of poor, old unhinged Murphy. What fascinated him most about the book was the central story in which nothing seemed to happen, but in reality lots of things were going on, because in fact that story was full of brutal micro-events; in the same way, although we don’t always notice, many things happen in our own apparently listless daily lives; lives that seem flat, but which suddenly appear to us loaded with tiny matters and also serious little discomforts.
Riba plays at rocking the chair in such a way that the moon rocks with it. It’s a gesture of profound hopelessness. As if seeking to ingratiate himself with the moon, since he’s not going to be forgiven by Celia now. The gesture is futile in any case, because the moon doesn’t bat an eyelid. Then he begins thinking about writers of first novels, so-called novices, and he meditates on how seldom ambitious young novelists choose the material closest to hand as subjects for their first books; it’s as though the most talented ones feel pushed to gain experience in the most arduous manner.
Only this would explain, Riba thinks, why the novice, that ghost he suspects is lying in wait for him, would notice someone like him, who isn’t close at hand. Just a desire to make life difficult for himself. Because, how can a poor novice narrate from outside what he barely knows?
Riba has read enough in his lifetime to know that when we try to comprehend the mental life of another man we soon realize just how incomprehensible, changeable, and hazy the beings we share the world with are. It’s as if solitude were an absolute and insurmountable condition of existence.
How arduous for a novice to talk about his tiny great events, or serious slight discomforts: all those matters that really only Riba himself would be able to explain and even qualify in great depth because, as is logical, only he truly knows them fully: the fact is only he knows them.