Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas Read Free Book Online Page A

couldn’t even justify by explaining that, as a publisher fallen on hard times, he had an understandable touch of madness to him. For a while, as if indifferent to the rain, he could be seen advancing, phantom-like, like one of those guys who showed up in so many of the most celebrated novels he used to publish: those desperate men with a romantic air, always alone, sleepwalking in the rain, walking always along lost highways.
    He has always admired writers who each day begin a journey toward the unknown, and who nevertheless spend all their time sitting in a room. The doors to their rooms are closed, they never move, and yet the confinement provides them with absolute freedom to be who they want to be, to go wherever their thoughts take them. Sometimes he links this image of solitary writers in their writing rooms with one that has been his lifelong obsession: the need to catch a genius, a young man highly superior to the others and who travels in his room better than anyone. He would’ve liked to have discovered and published him, but he didn’t find him, and it seems less and less likely he will do so now. He has never doubted the existence of this young genius. It’s just that, Riba thinks, he remains in the shadows: in solitude, in doubt, in question; that’s why I can’t find him.
    Celia is sitting right beside him, and when she sees with a certain degree of alarm how completely he has sunk into self-absorption, she decides to intervene, to bring him back — as far as possible — into the real world.
    “Let’s return, if you don’t mind,” she says, “to this requiem in Dublin. A requiem in honor of whom did you say?”
    He is going to repeat that it is a requiem for the age of print, a funeral for one of the pinnacles of the Gutenberg galaxy, when suddenly from
Ulysses,
the funeral Bloom attends in Dublin on June 16, 1904, springs to mind, and he recalls the sixth episode in the book, when at eleven in the morning Bloom joins a group on its way to the cemetery to bid farewell to the dead man, Paddy Dignam, crossing the city to Prospect Cemetery in a carriage with Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, and John Power. Bloom is still an outsider. Bloom, for his part, joins the group quite reluctantly, because he is aware they don’t trust him, because they know of his freemasonry and Jewishness. After all Dignam was a patriotic Catholic who boasted of his own past and that of Ireland. And moreover, he was such a good man he let alcohol kill him.
    — Liquor, what?
    — Many a good man’s fault, Mr Dedalus said with a sigh.
     
    He remembers when they stop in front of the mortuary chapel. It is a sad chapel, a meditation on death, the saddest he has seen in his life. This is the gray burial of a working-class alcoholic. All the details of the cortège are described and one expects that at any moment happiness will appear in the form of a rose, an unending rose, as Borges would have said. But this happiness is a long time coming, in fact it never arrives. The process of burying the dead man is long and complex. And the grave is deep and endless, as the rose. Nothing is truer than that he has never read anything so sad as that perfectly gray chapter of Joyce’s book. In the end, tin wreaths are left hung on knobs, garlands of bronzefoil. Roses would have been better, the narrator remarks, flowers are more poetical.
    “A requiem for whom?” repeats Celia.
    He wants to avoid at all costs her seeing him as still alienated, or as a now permanently unhinged
hikikomori
, but his reply doesn’t let her see him any other way.
    “For Paddy Dignam,” he says.
    “For Paddy who?”
    “Dignam, Paddy Dignam, the one with the red nose.”
    It would have been better if he’d said nothing at all.
    Before going to bed, they watch TV for a while. They catch the end of an American film, in which there is a rainy burial. Lots of umbrellas. With great satisfaction, he recognizes Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx, where he went on