He worries that the noise he’s making in the kitchen will wake up Celia, but he hears some chairs being dragged across the floor upstairs — where they always finish dinner very late. He realizes the neighbors will wake her before he does. He decides not to have a coffee and then begins a mute and autistic protest against the noisy upstairs neighbors and pisses in the sink with a marvellous sensation of eternity.
Someone buzzes the intercom.
Late as it is, the sharp, shrill sound surprises him. He goes out into the hall and timidly picks up the intercom phone, asking who it is. Long pause. And all of a sudden, someone says:
“Malachy Moore est mort.”
He stands petrified. Moore and mort sound similar, although they belong to two different languages. He ponders this trivial detail to keep from being completely overwhelmed by fear.
Now he remembers. It’s terrible and weighs on his soul. He spent a long time yesterday in McPherson’s talking about Malachy Moore.
“Who’s there?” he asks over the intercom.
No one answers.
He looks down from the balcony, and just like last night, there’s nobody in the street. Yesterday’s great muddle began in exactly the same way. Someone rang the bell at the same time. He looked out and there was nobody there. History repeats itself.
Whoever has just said that Malachy Moore is dead might be the same person who yesterday, in Spanish and with a Catalan accent, called and explained that they were conducting an evening survey and wanted to ask him just one single question, and without giving him time to respond, said:
“We just want to know if you know why Marcel Duchamp came back from the sea.”
But no, it doesn’t seem to be the same person as yesterday. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that the two calls came twenty-four hours apart. This person tonight has spoken in French without the slightest trace of a Catalan accent, and it could just as easily be Verdier as Fournier, one of the brand-new friends he made last night in the bar. As for last night’s call on the intercom, it had to have been perpetrated by an expert in The Exception of My Parents, his friend Ricardo’s autobiographical novel. Because that question about Duchamp appears hidden within the pages of that book.
Whoever called yesterday can’t be the same person as today, a moment ago. The man on the intercom last night was someone who read The Exception of My Parents and could only be that Catalan friend of Walter’s they’d met two days earlier and to whom they’d given their address. Yesterday’s caller couldn’t have been anyone else, unless it were — something unlikely, surely — Walter himself with a Catalan accent. The strange thing was that whoever buzzed last night didn’t come back later — if only to laugh at his cleverness — to reveal himself. Riba still doesn’t know why this friend of Walter’s, who went to the trouble of making that midnight joke, then vanished from the scene. And he understands even less why whoever just rang also now vanished. They do resemble each other in that respect.
He goes back to the intercom and demands again that whoever’s down there identify himself.
Silence. Just like last night at midnight. Nothing but quiet, quiet under the infernal leaden light of the front hall that harbors two sad chairs and a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, along with that suitcase and carry-on bag with which Celia threatens to leave tomorrow.
At midnight yesterday, when he didn’t see anybody, he thought Walter’s friend must have taken refuge in McPherson’s. Absolutely everything arose from that misunderstanding. McPherson’s is a pub run by a man from Marseille and a number of his regulars are French. He and Celia had sat out on the patio of this establishment a couple of times, always in the daytime. Yesterday he ended up there, believing that he’d find Walter’s friend and would be able to ask him why he’d played that late-night joke.
Although he doesn’t want to remember too precisely — he’s afraid it’ll upset him — he’s gradually getting back his memory of what happened, and all at once he remembers how, at this very time, after the question about Duchamp and after having seen there was nobody down in the street, he was seized by a huge sense of anxiety and decided to go and see how Celia was doing and thus feel in some way supported by her company. He’d left her sleeping and didn’t know if the intercom would have woken her, or whether her face would still be wreathed in the beatific expression she’d been wearing recently. He needed her to help him get over his bewilderment caused by the call about the sea and Marcel Duchamp. So he went into the bedroom and got quite a surprise. He remembers quite clearly now, it was a distressing moment. The incredibly harsh expression on Celia’s sleeping face shocked him, so rigid and paralyzed and more like a lifeless soul than anything else. He was left literally terrified. She was sleeping, or she was dead. She looked dead, or maybe she was petrified. Although everything indicated that she badly needed to be reborn, he preferred to think that Celia was near a divine spirit, some god of hers. After all, he thought, religion is useless, but sleep is very religious, it will always be more religious than any religion, perhaps because when one is sleeping one is closer to God. .
He had stayed there in the bedroom for a while, still hearing the echo of the question about Marcel Duchamp and wondering if the time hadn’t arrived to overcome his fear and to head down — it was an old, private metaphor of his — the metaphysical avenue of the dead. It has always seemed, thought Riba, that, on that general avenue, one single deceased person isn’t anything or anybody. Everything’s relative and so it’s easier to see that there’s more than one crooked cross, more than one headstone surrounded by barren thorns in this world so big and so wide, where the rain falls ever slowly upon the universe of the dead. .
Oh! He realized that, aside from a certain desire to be absurdly poetic, he wasn’t controlling what was going through his mind very well, and stopped. The world big and wide, the universe of the dead. . As if a logical consequence of how complicated everything was, and also another more than likely consequence of last month’s funeral in Dublin and his world ending in London and the enigmatic words coming through the intercom, Riba ended up thinking of the scene in John Huston’s The Dead where the husband watches his wife on the stairway of a Dublin house, still, stiff but unexpectedly lovely and rejuvenated — lovely and youthful on account of the story she’d just remembered — paralyzed at the top of the stairs by the voice singing that sad Irish ballad, “The Lass of Aughrim,” which always reminded her — giving her a sudden beauty — of a young man who died in the cold and rain of love for her.
And he couldn’t help it. Last night, Riba associated that scene in The Dead with that young man from Cork who, two years before he’d met her, fell in love with Celia and then, after a number of diabolical misunderstandings, left Spain and returned to his own country, where soon afterward he killed himself by jumping off the furthest pier in the port of his home town.
Cork. Four letters to a fatal name. He always associated that city with a vase in their home in Barcelona. The vase always struck him as a nuisance, but he’d never gone so far as getting rid of it due to Celia’s strong opposition. Sometimes, when he was depressed, he found that he got much more depressed if he looked at old photographs, the cutlery, the paintings inherited from Celia’s grandmother. And that vase. By God, that vase.
Riba had never been able to tolerate the sinister story of that suicidal young man. When occasionally it occurred to him to remind Celia of that poor boy from Cork, she always reacted by breaking into a smile, as if the memory made her feel young again and profoundly happy.