Enrique Vila-Matas: Dublinesque

Of Kitty, or Katy,

As if the name meant once

All love, all beauty.

He doesn’t understand anything they say. Due to his complete fragility, even in the way he stands, the first of the two young men to speak reminds him of Vilém Vok when he reflected aloud on his chimeric attempt to mature toward childhood. The second seems more sure of himself, but ends up bursting into tears and provoking a general outbreak of grief among those present. There is the emotional collapse of the parents. Someone faints, probably a relative. A small, great Irish drama. The death of Malachy Moore ends up seeming like a much more serious event than the end of the Gutenberg era and the end of the world. The loss of the author. The great Western problem. Or not. Or simply the loss of a young man with round glasses and a mackintosh. A great misfortune in any case, for the inner life and also for all those who still desire to use the word subjectively, to strain and stretch it toward thousands of connections of light still to be established in the great darkness of the world.

Action : The sorrow of the publisher.

On his way out of the funeral, seeing that the parents and two sisters are receiving the condolences of relatives and friends, he joins the line. When his turn comes, he shakes one of the sister’s hands, then the other’s, nods to the father and then turns to the mother and says in formal Spanish and with a conviction in his words that surprises himself:

“He was a hero. I never met him, but I wanted him to get better. I was following his condition for days, hoping for his recovery.”

Then he makes way for the person behind him. It’s as if he were saying that Malachy Moore had spent the last days of his life in a military hospital, mortally wounded from combating against the forces of evil. Or as if he had somehow wanted to tell them the author had been murdered by all of them together in one more stupid incident of our times. He thinks he hears the melody of “Green Fields of France” in the distance and is silently moved. The English leap, he thinks, has taken me further than I expected, because my feelings have changed. This seems like my land now. The draughty streets, end-on to hills. The faint archaic smell of the Irish docklands. The sea, awaiting me.

In some place, at the edge of one of his thoughts, he discovers a darkness that chills him to the bone. When he’s getting ready to leave, he suddenly sees the young Beckett, standing right behind his two distressed sisters. They exchange glances and the surprise seems to register on both sides. The young man is wearing the same mackintosh as the other night, although more threadbare. The young man has the look of a fatigued philosopher and the unmistakable air of living a hindered, precarious, inert, uncertain, numb, terrified, unwelcoming, inconsolable life.

Maybe Dublin is right. And perhaps it is also true that there are interconnected points in space and time, focal points among which we so-called living and so-called dead can travel, and in this way, meet.

When he looks back in the direction of the young man, he’s disappeared, and this time it’s not the fog that has swallowed him up. The thing is he’s no longer there.

Impossible not to go back to thinking there is a wrinkled piece of fabric that sometimes allows the living to see the dead and the dead to see the living, the survivors. Impossible too not to see Riba now walking along, overrun by ghosts, suffocated by his catalog, and weighed down by signs of the past. In New York the day is surely mild and sunny, fragrant and sharp like an apple. Here everything is darker.

He walks ahead weighed down by signs from the past, but he has taken the reappearance of the author as an incredibly optimistic sign. He feels like he’s experiencing another moment at the center of the world. And he thinks of “The Importance of Elsewhere,” that Larkin poem. And letting himself be swept up in the celebration of the moment, by the excitement of finally being elsewhere , he speaks like John Ford, in the first person plural.

“We are us, we are here,” he says softly.

He doesn’t know he is speaking unwittingly to his destiny marked by solitude. Because the fog has begun to take up a position around him, and the truth is it’s been a while now since the last shadow on earth was interested in stalking him.

But he’s still enthusiastic about the reappearance of the author.

“Well, what do you know. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of.”