Mixed with fear, his yawns are imaginative curves taken by a slow, imaginary racing car that sometimes speeds up suddenly. On one of these curves, at the wheel of this strange car, he’s just discovered that his personality has things in common with that of Simon of the Desert, that anchorite who spent his life on top of a pillar in a Buñuel film. Simon stood in penance on top of the eight-meter-high pillar, while he has been doing the same, for a while now, with a more modern touch: sitting in front of a computer and with the feeling that the more time he spends in front of the screen, the more the computer, in a very Kafkaesque way, is imprinting itself on his body.
He suddenly realizes — no one is safe from the racing car’s whims — that a crippled dwarf and his goats are surrounding him. The devil appears to him dressed as a woman and tries to tempt him. Suddenly the feminine demon, as if in an imitation of what happened to Simon of the Desert, takes him on a trip — swifter than swift — to a cabaret in New York, and he’s glad to have arrived in that city so quickly, and what’s more, to have been unexpectedly liberated from the Gutenberg galaxy and the digital galaxy, both at once. It’s as if he’d approached the world beyond them, which can be nothing but the final cataclysm. After all, as John Cheever said: “We are never in our own times, we’re always somewhere else.”
In the cabaret, the voice of Frank Sinatra rings out at a thousand revolutions per minute, a song with lyrics that, depending on how you look at it, are terrible: “The best is yet to come.”
Everyone in the cabaret has insomnia. Outside, it’s pouring. Although New York is the most spectacular place he’s ever seen in his life, he’d rather be in Dublin. New York resembles a holiday more than anything and Dublin is more like a working day. He remembers those lines of Gil de Biedma’s that marked his youth: “After all, we don’t know / if things are not better this way, / limited on purpose. . Maybe, / maybe working days are right.”
“Go on, drink. It’s the end of the world.”
Black dancers attempt impossible dances.
New York’s very grand, but maybe, maybe it’s true that working days are right. And Dublin. Maybe Dublin is right too.
He’s always admired writers who each day begin a voyage into the unknown and yet who are sitting in a room the whole time. He goes back to thinking about rooms for recluses. He thinks of the philosopher Pascal, for starters, maybe because he was the first one Auster quoted in that chapter of The Invention of Solitude about rooms — square, rectangular, or circular — in which some took refuge. Pascal was the one who came up with that memorable idea that all our misfortunes stem from the fact that we are unable to stay quietly in our own room. What happened to Riba yesterday in McPherson’s is living proof of this, a clear demonstration that a rocking chair is preferable to the elements and the rain.
Auster mentioned many other rooms. The one in Amherst, for example, in which Emily Dickinson wrote her entire oeuvre. Van Gogh’s in Arles. Robinson Crusoe’s desert island. Vermeer’s rooms with natural light. .
Actually where Auster says Vermeer, he could just as well have said Hammershøi, that Danish painter of the obsessive portraits of deserted rooms. Or Xavier de Maistre, that man who traveled around his room. Or Virginia Woolf, with her demand for a room of her own. Or the hikikomoris in Japan who shut themselves up in their rooms in their parents’ houses for prolonged periods of time. Or Murphy, that character who didn’t move from the rocking chair in his room in London. . The sleeping pills seem to be taking effect again, and as he dozes, he feels he is getting into the skin of Malachy Moore when he knew how to slip away into the fog, and he is soon seeing all sorts of things in the deepest darkness. . But has Malachy Moore died? Google doesn’t know anything. It’s futile to search any further in Google. . He wants to believe it was a joke played on him by Verdier and Fournier, who took a shine to him last night. He can imagine the scene. Verdier saying: “Let’s go tell the whiskey king that his Malachy Moore was murdered at midnight. . ” He imagines things like that, until finally he falls asleep. He dreams that Google knows nothing.
He never thought he’d attend another funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery, and much less so soon. An altar boy, carrying a brass bucket of something no one can guess, is coming out of a door. The priest, in a white tunic, has come out behind him adjusting his stole with one hand and balancing a little book in the other against his toad’s belly. They both stop next to Malachy Moore’s coffin.
If I believed I was being pursued by an author, thinks Riba, it’s now entirely possible that he’s right there, four meters away from me, on that catafalque. And a moment later he wonders if he’d be able to admit to anyone that he is thinking such a thing. Would they take him for a lunatic? Surely it would be useless to explain that he’s not crazy, and that all that happens is that sometimes he senses or picks up too much, he detects realities no one else perceives. But it would probably be useless to explain all this, much less to say that his wife has left him and that’s why he’s so deranged. It’s the penultimate Tuesday in July and it’s only just stopped raining a couple of hours ago. It’s strange. So many days — months, even — with so much rain. Now even the disappearance of the clouds seems odd, such calm weather.
Yesterday, just as he feared, Celia left him. It didn’t matter that he was already awake when she woke up, because he failed to prevent her leaving. He tried everything and it was impossible to stop her.
“You can’t go, Celia.”
“I’m not staying.”
“Where will you go?”
“My people are waiting for me.”
“I’m sorry for being such an idiot. And anyway, who are your people?”
“You still reek of alcohol. But that’s not the only problem.”
“What is the problem?”
“You don’t love me.”
“I do love you, Celia.”
“No. You hate me. You don’t see the horrible things you do or how you look at me. And that’s not the only problem either. You’re a disgusting drunk. You never leave that rocking chair. You live in a pigsty. You always throw your dirty clothes on the floor and I have to pick them up after you. Who do you think I am?”
A long list of complaints followed in which, among other things, Celia accused him of endless stupid behavior and of encouraging cobwebs to grow in his brain and of not having accepted getting old and taking the loss of his publishing house and the power it used to give him so badly. And finally she again accused him of having fallen off the wagon just because he didn’t know what to do with his life anymore.
“You live without a god and your life lacks meaning. You’ve turned into a poor little man,” she sentenced finally.
At that moment, Riba couldn’t help but remember the previous day when, as soon as he gave Malachy Moore up for dead, something had given way swiftly in his room and he had settled into the worst of the worst. Now he was still in this place, the lowest of all. He was only saved by inhabiting the same paradox that united so many poor men like him: that sensation of being trapped in a place that only makes sense if it were actually possible to leave.
From Celia’s point of view, the whole conflict didn’t originate from her at all, nor was it caused indirectly by her change of religion, because she saw this change as completely normal, not at all problematic. The conflict had to come from somewhere else, surely from the meaningless life he was leading and also as the most direct consequence of this: his lamentable tendency recently toward extreme melancholy. Of course the life they’d lived before wasn’t exactly ideal either, despite the fact that, helped immeasurably by alcohol, he’d been more sociable. She, in any case, had long felt by then that literature had nothing to say to her; it didn’t change her vision of the world or make her see things in a different way. Instead, all that hot air depressed her profoundly without any author who was close to God or to anything. Andrew Breen, Houellebecq, Arto Paasilinna, Derek Hobbs, Martin Amis. She felt distant from all those names, which for her had simply increased a list — Riba’s catalog — a list now lost in time: former guests who once came to dine at her house; people who believed in nothing and who drank till dawn and who it was very difficult to get rid of.