Dublinesque Read Online Free PDF Page B

find out if I can still concentrate and notice things in the outside world?” he finally asks her.
    Celia seems used to him talking to her like this and his answers coming at her from unexpected directions, not necessarily connected to his questions.
    “What you have to do is to love me. The rest doesn’t matter,” she says, emphatically.
    Riba makes a mental note of the phrase, jotting everything down this way. He wants to type it up later in a Word document he keeps open on his computer where he collects phrases.
    What you have to do is to love me. The rest doesn’t matter. This is new, he thinks. Or maybe what’s happened is that she used to put it a different way. It may well be a Buddhist saying, who knows.
    Soon it seems to him that Spider is listening in and spying on his conversation, even his thoughts. Might he himself be Spider? He can’t deny he feels drawn to the character. What’s more, deep down, he would like to be Spider, because he completely identifies with him in some aspects. For him, he’s not just a poor madman, but also the bearer of a subversive kind of wisdom, the sort of wisdom Riba has found very interesting since closing down the publishing house. Maybe it’s an exaggeration to think he’s Spider. But hasn’t he been accused many times of reading his life as if it were the manuscript of an unknown author? How many times has he had to listen to people tell him he reads his life anomalously, as if it were a literary text?
    He sees Spider look at the camera, then close his suitcase, and walk for a while through cold and deserted streets. He sees him act as if he’d come into his living room. He moves around in it as if it were a rundown neighborhood in London. Spider has come from a mental hospital and is headed for a place that is theoretically less harsh, just a little less harsh, to a hospice or a halfway house, coincidentally situated in the same neighborhood of London where he spent his early years; this will be the direct cause of his starting fatally to reconstruct his childhood.
    When Riba sees that Spider is reconstructing his childhood with deceptive faithfulness to the facts, he wonders if it might not also be the case that his own tangled mental life never strays far from his childhood neighborhood. Because he himself is now thinking of his early years too, and the blessed innocence he had back then. He sees a straw hat in the sun, a pair of tan shoes, a pair of turned-up trousers. He sees his Latin teacher, who was an Englishman. And then he doesn’t see him. Oh, as everyone knows, there are people who, just as they appear, disappear very shortly afterward. The Latin teacher was a consumptive man who had a spittoon next to his blackboard. These are snippets from his childhood in El Eixample, the neighborhood near the center of Barcelona. In those days, he often felt stupid, Riba remembers. He does now, too, but for different reasons: now he feels stupid because it seems he only possesses
moral
intelligence; that is, an intelligence that isn’t scientific, or political, or financial, or practical, or philosophical. . . . He could have a more rounded intelligence. He always believed he was intelligent and now he sees he’s not.
    “Mad people are very strange,” says Celia. “But they’re interesting, aren’t they?”
    It seems once again as if his wife is trying to see how he reacts to the figure of Spider, perhaps to measure his own degree of dementia and stupidity. Perhaps she’s even reading his mind. Or who knows, perhaps she just wants to know if he identifies in a highly emotional way with this very isolated, engrossed individual, lost in an inhospitable world. The film is a walk around the East End, taken by a disturbed man. We see life just as this madman registers and captures it. We see life just as it is filtered through the wretched mind of this young man with his strange suitcase and his notebook with microscopic handwriting. It is a life that the poor