Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas Read Free Book Online

Dominique, with her dynamic relationship to quotations, wants in part to situate herself in Godard’s wake, while at the same time locating the visitor in a London of 2058, where it has been raining cruelly, without let-up, for years.
    The idea — Dominique tells him in her email — is that one sees how a great flood has transformed London, where the incessant rainfall over the last few years has had strange effects; there have been mutations in the urban sculptures, which, invaded by damp, have not just eroded, but have also grown monumentally, as if they were tropical plants or thirsty giants. In order to stop this
tropicalization
or organic growth, they are stored in the Turbine Hall, surrounded by hundreds of metal bunks that, day and night, cradle
men who sleep
, and other vagabonds and refugees from the flood.
    Dominique plans to project a strange film, more experimental than futuristic, onto a giant screen, which will bring together scenes from
Alphaville
(Godard),
Toute la mémoire du monde
(Resnais),
Fahrenheit 451
(Truffaut),
The Jetty
(Chris Marker), and
Red Desert
(Antonioni): quite an end-of-the-world aesthetic, very much in keeping with the apocalyptic feeling Riba himself has had for some time now.
    On each bunk there will be at least one book, a volume that, with modern corrective treatments, will have survived the excessive dampness caused by the rains. There will be English editions of books by authors almost all published in Spanish by Riba: books by Philip K. Dick, Robert Walser, Stanislaw Lem, James Joyce, Fleur Jaeggy, Jean Echenoz, Philip Larkin, Georges Perec, Marguerite Duras, W. G. Sebald . . .
    And playing an undefined sort of music between the metallic bunks, there will be musicians who will be like an echo of the orchestra that went down with the
Titanic
but playing acoustic string instruments along with electric guitars. Maybe what they play will be the distorted jazz of the future, perhaps a hybrid style that, one day, will be called
electric Marienbad
.
    The coexistence of the music with the rain, the books, the sculptures, the literary quotations, and the metal bunks in the exhibit — where Riba imagines, he doesn’t know why, replicas of Spider appearing, phantoms walking everywhere — might produce a strange result, as if — Dominique ends up telling him — the spectral hour had arrived and we were all walking lost among the ruins of a great disaster, in an unmistakable apocalyptic state.
    He sits absorbed in front of the computer when suddenly he remembers that terrible day last week when, simultaneously sweet and ridiculous, he went for a walk at dusk, in a light rainstorm, wearing his old raincoat, his shirt with its torn collar turned up, his hideous short trousers, his hair completely plastered to his head. Car headlights were blinding him, but he carried on walking through the streets of the neighborhood, focusing on his thoughts. He was aware how strange his appearance was in the rain — mainly due to the short trousers — but also that there was no longer any solution, that it was too late now to try to put things right. He had spent hours hypnotized in front of the computer, and in a fit of lucidity, had decided to dash out into the street to get some air no matter what. He went out just as he was, in exactly the same clothes he wore around the house. Seven whole hours he had spent shut up in his study. It was actually not so much time, considering that his daily ration of confinement was usually much more extreme. But that day he had felt especially sensitive to being confined. Worried about himself and his excessive isolation, he had launched himself into the street carrying his old raincoat, but he had made the mistake of forgetting his umbrella, and then it was too late to go home, to go back upstairs to get it, and while he was at it change his trousers, so short and ridiculous under the raincoat. He must have presented a forlorn image to the neighbors, one he