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— as well he knows — she is confident that Buddhism can lend her a hand and help her to take a spiritual step forward.
    They smile nervously, trying to minimize the tension of this odd moment. Maybe he loves her so madly because she is someone he will never know everything about. It has always fascinated him, for example, that Celia is one of those women who never turn off taps properly. Dripping taps have been a constant in his marriage, in the same way — if such a comparison is possible — as his problems with alcohol.
    He thinks he has always combined superbly well this relative ignorance about Celia with his total ignorance about himself. As he remarked once in an article for
La Vanguardia
: “I don’t know myself. The list of books I have published seems to have obscured forever the person behind the books. My biography is my catalog. But the man who was there before I decided to become a publisher is missing. I, in short, am missing.”
    “What are you thinking about?” asks Celia.
    Being interrupted annoys him and he reacts strangely and tells her he was thinking about the dining-room table and the hall chairs, which are perfectly real, and about the fruit basket that belonged to his grandmother, but that, however, he is also thinking that any madman could step through the door at any point and remark that things aren’t so clear.
    He is immediately filled with dismay, as he realizes he has muddled things up unnecessarily. Now his wife is indignant.
    “What chairs?” says Celia. “What hall? And what madman? You must be hiding something from me. I’ll ask you again. What are you thinking about? You haven’t started drinking again, have you?”
    “I’m thinking about my catalog,” says Riba, lowering his head.
    Since he stopped drinking, he barely has any domestic quarrels with Celia. This has been a great step forward in their relationship. Before, they used to have really awful fights, and he never once tried to rule out the thought that he, with his damned drinking, was always the guilty party. When the arguments were really bad, Celia used to pack a few things in her suitcase, which she then took out of the apartment to the landing. Afterward, if she got tired, she went to bed, but left the suitcase out there. In this way the neighbors always knew when they’d had a fight: the suitcase reflected what had gone on the night before. Shortly before he had his collapse, Celia really did leave him and spent two nights away from home. If he hadn’t had health problems and been forced to stop drinking, it’s more than likely he would have ended up losing his wife.
    Suddenly he tells her that he’s thinking of going to Dublin on the sixteenth of June.
    He tells her about his parents’ wedding anniversary and also about Joyce’s
Ulysses
, and finally about his dream, his premonition, especially about being drunk outside a pub called the Coxwold, the two of them weeping copiously and inconsolably, sitting on the ground at the end of an Irish side street.
    He has tried to tell her too much too quickly. What’s more, he has the feeling that Celia is only one step away from telling him that, although the absence of alcohol in his life and his daily fourteen hours of isolation in front of the computer have calmed him down and are without doubt a blessing, they are making him increasingly autistic. Or, to be precise, more
hikikomori
.
    “Dublin?” she asks, surprised. “And what are you going to do there? Start drinking again?”
    “But Celia —” he makes a gesture as if arming himself with patience, “ — the Coxwold is just a pub in a dream.”
    “And if I’ve understood correctly, it’s also the place of a premonition, dear.”
    Riba has been interested for days in everything surrounding the subject of the
hikikomori
, young Japanese people who suffer from autism in front of the computer, and who, in order to avoid outside pressures, react by withdrawing completely from society. In fact, the