from the computer until she gets home at a quarter to three. Today he makes an exception and devotes part of his time to standing there in front of the window from which, nevertheless, he can see nothing. Perhaps he hasn’t picked the best moment. What is certain is that today there is nothing to see, except the rubbed-out city and the mist. He stays there for a while, listening to the almost religious, monotonous murmur of the rain. He somewhat loses track of time.
He hardly ever sets foot on the streets of Barcelona. Recently, he merely contemplates the city from up here, but today, with the rain and the mist, he can’t even do this. To think that he used to have a busy social life. Now he has become down in the mouth, melancholy, shy — more than he ever thought — shut up between these four walls. A good drink would liberate him from feeling so misanthropic and timid. But it’s not worth his while because it would endanger his health. He wonders if there is a pub called the Coxwold in Dublin. Deep down he has a burning desire to break his own internal rules and have a good slug of whiskey. But he won’t do it, he knows better. He is convinced that Celia would be capable of leaving him if she saw he was drinking again. She wouldn’t stand for a return to the days of the great alcoholic nightmare.
He won’t have even one drink, he’ll endure stoically. Nevertheless, there’s not a day when he’s not seized by an indefinable nostalgia for bygone evenings, when he used to go out to dinner with his authors. Unforgettable dinners with Hrabal, Amis, Michon . . . Writers are such great drinkers.
He leaves the window and goes back to the computer and googles the words
Coxwold pub Dublin
. It’s a way like any other to make him believe he is quenching his great thirst. He searches and soon sees there’s no pub with this name there, and again feels like going into one for real. Again, he is holding back. He goes to the kitchen and drinks two glasses of water one after the other. There, by the fridge, suddenly leaning on it, he remembers how he sometimes imagines — only imagines — that, instead of spending all his time shut up in the house, a computer addict, he is a man open to the world and to the city at his feet. It is then he imagines he is not a retired, reclusive publisher and a perfect computer nerd, but a man of the world, one of those guys from 1950s Hollywood movies his father wanted so much to resemble, and did. A sort of Clark Gable or Gary Cooper. That kind of very sociable man who used to be called an “extrovert” and who was friends with hotel porters, waitresses, bank clerks, fruit sellers, taxi drivers, truck drivers, and hairdressers. One of those admirable, uninhibited, really open guys who are constantly reminding us that life is essentially wonderful and should be approached with pure enthusiasm, as there’s no better remedy against terrible anguish, such a European disorder.
From the fifties, that time linked to the period of his childhood, he still retains — directly inherited from his father, although much deformed and hidden by his shyness and also by his leftist tendencies and his quite rigorous intellectual veneer — a powerful fascination with the “American way of life.” What’s more, he never forgets that if there is one place where he might one day find happiness , this place is New York. In fact, on the two occasions he’s been there, he came very close to it. This conviction is not at all unconnected to a recurring dream that pursued him for a while. In the dream, everything was as it had been when he used to play soccer eternally alone as a child, out on the family patio of the apartment on Aribau, imagining he was both the visiting and the home team at the same time. The patio was identical to the one at his parents’ apartment, and the general atmosphere of desolation, characteristic of the post-war years, was also similar to the one back then. Everything was the
He hardly ever sets foot on the streets of Barcelona. Recently, he merely contemplates the city from up here, but today, with the rain and the mist, he can’t even do this. To think that he used to have a busy social life. Now he has become down in the mouth, melancholy, shy — more than he ever thought — shut up between these four walls. A good drink would liberate him from feeling so misanthropic and timid. But it’s not worth his while because it would endanger his health. He wonders if there is a pub called the Coxwold in Dublin. Deep down he has a burning desire to break his own internal rules and have a good slug of whiskey. But he won’t do it, he knows better. He is convinced that Celia would be capable of leaving him if she saw he was drinking again. She wouldn’t stand for a return to the days of the great alcoholic nightmare.
He won’t have even one drink, he’ll endure stoically. Nevertheless, there’s not a day when he’s not seized by an indefinable nostalgia for bygone evenings, when he used to go out to dinner with his authors. Unforgettable dinners with Hrabal, Amis, Michon . . . Writers are such great drinkers.
He leaves the window and goes back to the computer and googles the words
Coxwold pub Dublin
. It’s a way like any other to make him believe he is quenching his great thirst. He searches and soon sees there’s no pub with this name there, and again feels like going into one for real. Again, he is holding back. He goes to the kitchen and drinks two glasses of water one after the other. There, by the fridge, suddenly leaning on it, he remembers how he sometimes imagines — only imagines — that, instead of spending all his time shut up in the house, a computer addict, he is a man open to the world and to the city at his feet. It is then he imagines he is not a retired, reclusive publisher and a perfect computer nerd, but a man of the world, one of those guys from 1950s Hollywood movies his father wanted so much to resemble, and did. A sort of Clark Gable or Gary Cooper. That kind of very sociable man who used to be called an “extrovert” and who was friends with hotel porters, waitresses, bank clerks, fruit sellers, taxi drivers, truck drivers, and hairdressers. One of those admirable, uninhibited, really open guys who are constantly reminding us that life is essentially wonderful and should be approached with pure enthusiasm, as there’s no better remedy against terrible anguish, such a European disorder.
From the fifties, that time linked to the period of his childhood, he still retains — directly inherited from his father, although much deformed and hidden by his shyness and also by his leftist tendencies and his quite rigorous intellectual veneer — a powerful fascination with the “American way of life.” What’s more, he never forgets that if there is one place where he might one day find happiness , this place is New York. In fact, on the two occasions he’s been there, he came very close to it. This conviction is not at all unconnected to a recurring dream that pursued him for a while. In the dream, everything was as it had been when he used to play soccer eternally alone as a child, out on the family patio of the apartment on Aribau, imagining he was both the visiting and the home team at the same time. The patio was identical to the one at his parents’ apartment, and the general atmosphere of desolation, characteristic of the post-war years, was also similar to the one back then. Everything was the
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