That tempest in Augusto’s soul was finished, like in a dead calm, with the decision to commit suicide. He wanted to put an end to himself, the source of his own miseries. But before carrying this out, like a castaway who clings to a weak board, it occurred to him that he could consult with me, with the author of this entire tale. Around that time, Augusto had read one of my essays in which, although superficially, I discussed suicide; it seemed to have made such an impression upon him, as well as other things that he had read about me, that he did not want to leave this world without having met me and talked to me for a while. He embarked, therefore, on a trip hither, to Salamanca, where I have lived for more than twenty years, in order to see me. When they announced his visit to me, I smiled quizzically and I ordered him to come into my office-library. He entered like a ghost, looked at an oil portrait of me that presides over the books of my library, and on my signal he sat down, opposite me.

Artist’s note: This piece was completed using pen and ink. I did a rough story board first to get the positions of the panels right, then I sketched out the main piece in pencil and inked over it in pen. All the text was cut and pasted at the end. I found once I got to art college I stopped drawing, so this zine became a perfect way for me to start again. I’m very influenced by the DIY ethics of the underground music scene, as well as existentialist writers like Paul Auster and Robert M Pirsig.

The River House, known to most as the old Motor Tax Office, has been empty for almost three years now. There are grand plans to replace it with something bigger and bolder, but those plans are on hold. The economy has provided a reprieve. The building awaits the wrecking ball with an ugly splendor and is being reclaimed by the drunks and junkies of the north inner city. It is my feeling that it should be listed, protected, treated like a Georgian bathhouse. River House is a tacky declaration of modernity. The least it deserves is a slow and public death.

Exit, the music festival in Serbia that began as a rebellion against the isolationism of the Milošević regime, is based in a Roman fortress in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second largest city, which still isn’t large enough to sustain an airport. Belgrade is just an hour’s bus journey away, but to fly there is prohibitively expensive, so most western Europeans get a plane to Hungary or Croatia and train it the rest of the way. Except for me. My journey was murkier, involved the city of Graz, a lost sixteen hours, then an abandoned train station in a provincial town in the dark, where I was unsure what country I was in. I finally boarded a train with some fellow festival-goers. I got talking to a Slovenian from Ljubljana. “In the nightclubs now, there are the homosexuals. They come to me and say ‘You are nice. I like your bottom.’ But I am tolerant. I do not beat them. The girls do not like it if you beat.”

Once upon a time – it was during the holidays and wasn’t actually that long ago at all – I found myself staying at a pension near Lucerne and looking out at the grey lake. The weather was dull and I thought: ho-hum, I thought, they can’t be having much fun down at the races today. It may not have been horse racing at all, it may well have been showjumping. I don’t know much about these things; anyone who has seen me riding understands. It’s pacifism. The horse’s head, that’s up the front somewhere …that’s all I know. And so I will never get to pen one of those exquisite society novels, the sort where the poor little servant is meant to forget and lo, does forget, where it is he belongs. Class struggle? You just leave a man a rented tailcoat hanging on his back stairs and watch him forget all about class struggle. But anyway. Lucerne. There I sat, watching the little dining-room gradually fill up with guests coming down for their tea. There was Frau Otto from Magdeburg, a woman who looked like Protestant morality itself. Morality had a daughter … it was difficult enough to imagine that the mother went through the motions required for having a daughter; it was impossible to imagine same daughter going through any kind of motions at all, not that you would have wanted to. Then there was a business type called Zuegli who hailed from some part of Switzerland which, if the pronunciation was anything to go by, was apparently located somewhere in the larynx; there was a pious lady from Geneva who was so refined that she socialized scarcely even with herself; there was an old Austrian aristocrat who bore some resemblance to the Emperor Franz Joseph and treated the staff accordingly … and then in came Frau Steiner.

1 Perhaps it began with the trip to Kinsale in January of this year. I had been promising my friend Ulick I would visit him for several months. He was doing a course in permaculture at Kinsale College of Further Education. Permaculture is about practical sustainability, the idea of living a self-sufficient life. Every time I hear this word, self-sufficiency, I am drawn to the image of a dacha in the Russian taiga with the soil as black as crude oil and the crackling of a freshly shovelled wood-chip fire; images drawn from Tarkovsky’s films or perhaps, not so strangely, the paintings of Finnish mythology by Akseli Gallen-Kallela. A Finnish man once asked me about Irish nationalism and art; why, in the nineteenth century, architecture never played the same role here as in other emerging European nations. I suppose my answer was something about colonialism or religion, but I do not remember. I did not decide to go to Kinsale until just before my journey. It was a week before university was to start. The weather was cold and grey but it was not raining. I got the train to Cork and slept. On arriving at Ceannt Station, I struggled onto the platform and from there to the bus depot. I was weighed down with my top-heavy rucksack. It was mostly full of new books I had received over Christmas. It would be an hour before the bus to Kinsale was to leave and so, even with my cumbersome luggage, I went to Eason’s in search of poetry, my obsession at the time. I had spent the previous two months reading and writing poetry, rooting it out, looking for “nourishment” as I called it. In one working week in December, I had written four poems I was happy with – a record! Never before had I written with such vigour and, on this creative high, all the things I saw, heard and tasted, were printed in my memory as ideograms, waiting to be placed into poems. My uncle Barney described great poems as being like sweets you could suck on forever. On Christmas Eve, we sat in O’Flaherty’s pub in Buncrana discussing poetry. The photo of the night, posted on the internet several weeks later, shows him and me sitting close together. My hair is greasy and plantlike: clumps of hair whisp in every direction. My right hand is holding a half-empty pint glass while I gesticulate with my left. Barney’s hands are on his lap, out of sight, and his dark-reddish hair is silvering over the ears. “I can’t write poetry, Michael,” he said. “But I can appreciate it.” His Donegal accent has an American twang. He has lived in San Francisco since 1979. His favourite poet is Thomas Hardy, but he told me to read Gary Snyder.

31 December, 1959 On the other hand, the qualities of a Roman senator don’t seem tied to a certain historical time, the same way Schelling showed that Romanticism is not a literary school belonging to a phase in the evolution of taste, but one of the permanent propensities of the human soul. The Jew of over eighty-two years old, the little retiree from Bucharest, proved, out of the blue, and in the simplest of ways, capable of authentic senatorial feelings. After I told him how things happened, he spoke: - Why did you come home, you fool? You gave them the impression that you’re hesitating, that there’s room for the possibility that you’re going to betray your friends. In business, when you ask for time to think, it means that you’ve accepted already. Under no circumstances are you to agree to be a witness for the prosecution. Come on, go right now. I remember how he used to come home in the evenings in Pantelimon, how martial he looked on the step of the coach; when during the Troubles in 1919 he went through the factory workshops in uniform and with his sword drawn, but I’m inclined to believe that he is acting, for both our sakes, at least a little. I steal glances at him, I’m afraid to find that he’s posturing. I explain to him that I won’t find anybody there now, and that to go and sit with a suitcase at the Securitate’s gates until Monday is futile, this heroism being very close to buffoonery… And I feel worn out, and there’s still dinner to come. And I also explain to him what prison means in reality, that he’s old, he’ll be left alone with a very small pension; he should not expect charity from anyone; nor to receive any visits; and I’m also afraid; after all, I’m only asked to declare the truth; and we’ll never see each other again; I’ve already caused him trouble all his life, at least now at the end I should try to sweeten his days a little; and – to be honest – the prospect of prison, of suffering, and to top it all off, the thought of his misfortune horrify me.