Only he — no one else — knows that on the one hand, it’s true, there are those serious slight discomforts, with their monotonous sound, similar to rain, occupying the bitterest side of his days. And on the other, the tiny great events: his private promenade, for example, along the length of the bridge linking the almost excessive world of Joyce with Beckett’s more laconic one, and which, in the end, is the main trajectory — as brilliant as it is depressing — of the great literature of recent decades: the one that goes from the richness of one Irishman to the deliberate poverty of the other; from Gutenberg to Google; from the existence of the sacred (Joyce) to the somber era of the disappearance of God (Beckett).
Depending on how you look at it, Riba thinks, his own daily life over the past few weeks is starting to reflect that story of splendor and decadence and sudden collapse and descent to the pier, opposite that of the splendor of a now unsurpassable literary period. It’s as if his biography of the past few weeks were running parallel to the story of literature: one that saw the great years of the existence of God, and then his murder and death. It’s as if literature had discovered, with Beckett, that after the divine Joyce’s vantage point the only path left was a criminal one, that is, the death of the sacred, being left to live at ground level or in a rocking chair.
It’s as if — just like in that Coldplay song — after having ruled the world and experienced great heights, all literature could do was sweep the streets it used to own.
How difficult and how complicated it is for the poor novice, he thinks. He doesn’t envy young authors at all, having to take on this whole muddle. It’s midnight and the rain continues to lash the windowpanes, and the moon carries on in its own way. His hangover is fading, but not that much. The worst thing is there are still blank spots in his memory of last night. And Celia, who might be able to help him, is sleeping, and has probably decided to leave him tomorrow.
There’s only one thing that he’s completely sure happened yesterday: part of the premonition of the Dublin dream came true when he, tragically, started drinking again; Celia ended up embracing him in the early hours of the morning, on the way out of McPherson’s, the pub on the corner. They both fell and rolled on the ground, in the rain, moved and terrified at the same time at the misfortune that had unexpectedly befallen them. But what especially surprised him is that he recognized that same powerful emotion he’d felt in the hospital when he had that prophetic dream.
As soon as he remembers the final scene of yesterday’s tragedy, he tries to get the rocking chair to remain stiller than anything around it, even for a moment. It’s as if he wanted to stop time and go back to try to make amends and even attempt to prevent last night from happening. As he tries to stop everything, a deep silence gradually settles, and it even seems the light has grown dimmer and is now more like a color closely resembling lead. It’s strange, because up to now he could hear the neighbors. The world is still for a fraction of a second. The shining glint of some scenes from the pub last night. Fright. Dismay. The more he remembers, the more the feeling of anguish grows and also the discovery of something impossible: he can’t go back without falling prey to attrition, the idea of which has always horrified him. What does all this mean? This impossibility, this silence, this attrition, this pain, this stillness — which, in any case, have yet to come entirely into being — do they mean something? Outside, the night sky is still strangely orange. Riba could not feel any lower. How rich Joyce’s prose was. Only the rocking chair lets him be higher than the floor. He suddenly remembers Beckett’s Endgame: “Mean something? You and I, mean something! Ah that’s a good one!”
So maybe what happened with Dr. Bruc in Barcelona before traveling to Dublin for the second time might not mean anything either? After informing him of the results of his tests, the doctor suggested he volunteer for a clinical trial investigating “paricalcitol’s role in preventing cardiovascular fatalities” in patients with chronic renal failure like him.
“You might say,” Riba interrupted her, “that you’re actually asking me if I’d like to be your guinea pig.”
She smiled, and instead of answering directly, she explained that paricalcitol was a metabolically active form of Vitamin D used in the prevention and treatment of secondary hyperparathyroidism, which was associated with chronic renal failure. It would mean collaborating in a study — led by a laboratory in Massachusetts — of the types of changes in gene expression when certain patients were treated with paricalcitol.
Riba insisted on asking again why she thought of him as a guinea pig and explained, as if confiding a secret to a friend, that for weeks he’d been feeling watched, though he didn’t know by whom. It was, he told her, as if he’d actually become somebody’s guinea pig, and that’s why her medical proposal had suddenly set all his alarm bells ringing even louder. He couldn’t explain it, but it seemed as if, overnight, people had started thinking of all sorts of experiments to do on him.
“You don’t think people see you as a mouse?” the doctor said.
“A mouse?”
The doctor realized how sensitive he was, but still placed an information sheet in front of him and the contract — Advised Consent for Associated Pharmacological-Genetic Research (DNA & RNA) — so he could study it at home or on his trip to Dublin, in case he decided when he came back that he did want to volunteer to help with the advancement of science.
Now at midnight, in this house in Dublin, he looks again at the papers his doctor friend gave him in Barcelona. He re-reads them so carefully and anxiously that the “Information Sheet” ends up sending him into a tremendous metaphysical panic, perhaps because he connects it with that undeniable fact, which he sometimes forgets, but which is the heart of everything: his kidneys are failing, and although at the moment the situation is stable, cardiovascular problems could appear in days to come. In short: death is visible on the horizon, that horizon that begins and ends in his rocking chair.
But perhaps, Riba tells himself now, the biggest problem of all isn’t so much being at death’s door, or being dead without knowing it — as his mother sensed in London when she saw the rain wasn’t going to stop — but the disturbing sensation of not having really been born yet.
“To be born, that’s my idea now,” Beckett’s character Malone confessed. And further on: “I am being given, if I may venture the expression, birth into death.”
The idea, now that he thinks of it, was also in Artaud: that sensation of a body possessed that struggles to rescue itself with difficulty.
But what if it was yesterday, just as he was on his way out of McPherson’s, that he was born into death? In the prophetic dream he had in the hospital when he was seriously ill, the feeling of being born into death was clear and seemed to be right at its heart when he and Celia — who in turn seemed to be at the center of the world — embraced beneath the rain, on their way out of a mysterious pub.
And yesterday, in real life, he again felt something similar. Within the disgrace, there was an enigmatic emotion in that embrace scene. An emotion that arose from birth into death or from feeling alive for the first time in his life. Because it was a great moment despite its brutality and tragedy. One moment, at last, at the center of the world. As if the cities of Dublin and New York were united by a single current, and this was none other than the very current of life, circulating through an imaginary passage; there were various stations or stops on this “journey” that had all been decorated with replicas of the same statue that were even an homage to a gesture, to a sort of secret leap, to an almost clandestine but existing movement, perfectly real and true; and that was the English leap.