Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas Page A

Auster in Ghana! Well, let’s go to La Central.”
    They leave the Belvedere. There’s a strong wind. Water’s flooding everything. They’re out in the open. They walk slowly. The rain grows more and more violent. The wind bends their umbrellas. They’ve heard a few apocalyptic voices speaking of a universal flood. Reality is becoming more and more like the installation Dominique is preparing in London.
    In the end it’ll turn out to be true that the end of the world isn’t far off. In fact it’s always been clear that the end couldn’t be too far off. While they wait for the end, human beings amuse themselves holding funerals, little imitations of
the great end
that is to come.
    As they’re about to go into La Central, Ricardo throws away his Pall Mall and doesn’t even bother to stamp it out, because the downpour instantly takes care of the butt. As they close their respective umbrellas, a gust of wind hits them with such force that they’re pushed forward and burst into the bookshop, falling comically on their butts on the doormat, just at the moment when a young man is leaving La Central wearing round tortoiseshell glasses, a blue Nehru jacket beneath an old raincoat, and with the collar of his white shirt quite torn.
    Riba thinks he knows him by sight, although he can’t manage to place him. Who is it? The man walks insolently past them, indifferent to their ridiculous fall. An unflappable guy. He acts with astonishing coldness, as if he hadn’t noticed that Ricardo and Riba have just fallen over. Or as if he thinks they are two comedians from a silent film. A strange guy. Although he’s come from inside the bookshop, his hair is plastered to his head from the rain.
    “We nearly killed ourselves,” comments Riba, still on the floor.
    Ricardo doesn’t even reply, perhaps dazed by what’s happened.
    It’s quite striking. The indifferent young man looks like the same one who was spying outside his parents’ house the other day, and also the same one he saw from a taxi at the intersection of Rambla de Prat and Avenida Príncipe de Asturias. He tells Ricardo that recently he’s seen the guy with the Nehru jacket everywhere, and for a minute fears his friend won’t even know who he’s talking about. Who knows, maybe he didn’t even notice the young man with the round glasses who walked passed them so indifferently. But this isn’t the case, he soon realizes he saw him perfectly well.
    “Well, you know,” Ricardo says. “Always someone turns up you never dreamt of.”

June

I f one day he were to find this much-searched-for author, this phantom, this genius, it would be difficult for such a person to improve on what’s already been said by so many others, about the rifts between the expectations of youth and the reality of one’s later years, what’s been said about the illusory nature of our choices, about how our search for success culminates in disappointment, about the present as fragile and the future as representing a need for control over old age and death. And what’s more, it will always be an annoyance, a malaise of the soul for every perceptive publisher, to have to go out in search of those phantoms, those damned authors. He’s thinking of all this now lying on a beach in front of blue water, surrounded by towels, red bathing caps, gentle waves lapping the warm yellow sand, near the center of the world. A strange beach in a corner of New York’s harbor.
    When he wakes up, still embarrassed as much as for having believed he really was on this beach, as for having unconsciously revived the sickness hidden inside every publisher, he dresses at top speed — he doesn’t want to waste time — and goes to his regular branch of the Bilbao Vizcaya bank, knowing there’ll be hardly any customers at this hour and he’ll be able to resolve a tiresome matter as quickly as possible. He’s seen by the smiling bank manager, whom he abruptly informs that he wishes to transfer half the money