Read Online Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Enrique Vila-Matas
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imaginative enough to be successful, but too much of a hard worker and teetotaller to fail completely. Bloom is far too foreign and cosmopolitan to be accepted by the provincial Irish, and too Irish not to worry about his country. Riba likes Bloom a lot.
•
“Downtown Train,” by Tom Waits, is playing. He can’t understand English, but it seems to him that the lyrics are about a train heading for the city center, a train carrying its passengers away from the remote neighborhood they grew up in and where they’ve been trapped for their whole lives. The train is going to the center. Of the city. It might be going to the center of the world. To New York. It’s the train to the center. He can’t even conceive that this song is not about a center.
Believing this is the subject of that Tom Waits song, he has never grown tired of listening to it. Waits’s voice has for him the poetry of a local train linking his childhood neighborhood to New York. Every time he listens to the song, he thinks of past trips, of everything he had to leave behind in order to devote himself to publishing. Now, the older he feels, he remembers his old zeal, his initial literary preoccupations, how for years he devoted himself endlessly to the dangerous business of publishing, so often ruinous. He relinquished youth for the honest labor of an imperfect catalog. And what’s happening now that everything has come to an end? He is left feeling very puzzled and with an empty wallet. Wondering why. A wild remorse at night. But no one can take away the fact that he toiled, and it took him far. And that is no small thing. In the end, as W. B. Yeats said, in luck or out, the toil has left its mark.
I’m all washed up, he thinks. But it would be worse if someone decided to light the lamps of my existence. It would be no good at all if something happened and everything livened up and the house turned into an exalted sideshow and I turned into the center of a vibrant novel. Nevertheless I can see it coming, something will happen soon, I’m sure of it. Suddenly, someone will burst into my monotonous life as an old man who walks barefoot around the house, without turning on any lights, and stands still sometimes, leaning against some piece of furniture in the dark while listening to the mice scurrying about. Something’s going to happen, I’m sure, my life will be turned upside down and my world will turn into a sparkling novel. If that happened, it would be awful. I don’t think I’d like to be separated from the unsurpassable charm of my current life. I would be happy only to go and live in New York, but leading a simple existence there too, always in contact with the sedate ordinariness of everyday life.
If he didn’t sit in front of the all-consuming computer screen, what else could he do? Well, he could carry on researching Dublin, or go back to scaring the neighbors by walking in the rain in short trousers, or else play dominoes with the retired men in the bar downstairs, or get drunk again like in the old days, supremely, savagely drunk; he could go to Brazil or Martinique, convert to Judaism, reap a wheat field, go and screw a casual girlfriend, jump into a swimming pool of freezing water. Although maybe the most sensible thing to do would be to put all his energy into preparing for a future trip to New York, the first stage of which will be in Dublin.
One day, while traveling through Mexico with José Emilio Pacheco, a book of whose he had just published — he would go on to publish another two — they arrived at the port of Veracruz in a friend’s convertible and went straight down to look at the sea. Those shapes I see by the sea, said Pacheco, shapes that immediately give rise to metaphorical associations, are they instruments of inspiration or of false literary quotes?
Riba asked him to repeat the sentence and the question. And when Pacheco did so, he saw he had understood them perfectly. Something similar always happened to him.
•
“Downtown Train,” by Tom Waits, is playing. He can’t understand English, but it seems to him that the lyrics are about a train heading for the city center, a train carrying its passengers away from the remote neighborhood they grew up in and where they’ve been trapped for their whole lives. The train is going to the center. Of the city. It might be going to the center of the world. To New York. It’s the train to the center. He can’t even conceive that this song is not about a center.
Believing this is the subject of that Tom Waits song, he has never grown tired of listening to it. Waits’s voice has for him the poetry of a local train linking his childhood neighborhood to New York. Every time he listens to the song, he thinks of past trips, of everything he had to leave behind in order to devote himself to publishing. Now, the older he feels, he remembers his old zeal, his initial literary preoccupations, how for years he devoted himself endlessly to the dangerous business of publishing, so often ruinous. He relinquished youth for the honest labor of an imperfect catalog. And what’s happening now that everything has come to an end? He is left feeling very puzzled and with an empty wallet. Wondering why. A wild remorse at night. But no one can take away the fact that he toiled, and it took him far. And that is no small thing. In the end, as W. B. Yeats said, in luck or out, the toil has left its mark.
I’m all washed up, he thinks. But it would be worse if someone decided to light the lamps of my existence. It would be no good at all if something happened and everything livened up and the house turned into an exalted sideshow and I turned into the center of a vibrant novel. Nevertheless I can see it coming, something will happen soon, I’m sure of it. Suddenly, someone will burst into my monotonous life as an old man who walks barefoot around the house, without turning on any lights, and stands still sometimes, leaning against some piece of furniture in the dark while listening to the mice scurrying about. Something’s going to happen, I’m sure, my life will be turned upside down and my world will turn into a sparkling novel. If that happened, it would be awful. I don’t think I’d like to be separated from the unsurpassable charm of my current life. I would be happy only to go and live in New York, but leading a simple existence there too, always in contact with the sedate ordinariness of everyday life.
If he didn’t sit in front of the all-consuming computer screen, what else could he do? Well, he could carry on researching Dublin, or go back to scaring the neighbors by walking in the rain in short trousers, or else play dominoes with the retired men in the bar downstairs, or get drunk again like in the old days, supremely, savagely drunk; he could go to Brazil or Martinique, convert to Judaism, reap a wheat field, go and screw a casual girlfriend, jump into a swimming pool of freezing water. Although maybe the most sensible thing to do would be to put all his energy into preparing for a future trip to New York, the first stage of which will be in Dublin.
One day, while traveling through Mexico with José Emilio Pacheco, a book of whose he had just published — he would go on to publish another two — they arrived at the port of Veracruz in a friend’s convertible and went straight down to look at the sea. Those shapes I see by the sea, said Pacheco, shapes that immediately give rise to metaphorical associations, are they instruments of inspiration or of false literary quotes?
Riba asked him to repeat the sentence and the question. And when Pacheco did so, he saw he had understood them perfectly. Something similar always happened to him.
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