A restless island. A mass of land shipwrecked on the wrong course, flying in the face of good sense. Maybe a peninsula attached to Italy or Spain, which broke away from the continent, abandoned its natural habitat in the Mediterranean, managed to slip through the Strait of Gibraltar, and, perplexed and with nowhere else to turn, came to rest in the north seas, fated to be a target for the Vikings and the Normans.
It seems clear there were already a handful of Celts living there, probably Celtiberians. The fact is that the original inhabitants stayed on until the end, resisting centuries of invasions only to stage a deeply rooted rebellion against Anglo-Saxon subjugation at a later stage. And the truth is that several eternities later they shook off the yoke and drove otherness out without realising that it was already deep inside them.
During the struggle for their emancipation, the presence of the invaders made them look at what they were not and, when they only had themselves to look at, they began to ask themselves who they were. They dreamt about their freedom for so long that when it finally became visible in the mirror they were unable to recognise it. Independence sprung its identity on them and, naturally, it took them a while to work out who or what it was.
If this tale is untrue, then it should not be. The Irish people seem to be geographically misplaced, their co-ordinates idiosyncratically wide of the mark. Warm and festive, hospitable and open, given their location and appearance, the Irish are atypical: their behaviour, their attitude to life and death, their world view, their sense of time, almost everything makes them close cousins of the Latin soul.
History is their accomplice. A painful past and heroic melancholy renders them rather immune to haughtiness and self-repression, to pragmatism and discipline. For them, the world is neither a consequence of their own being, nor an expression of somebody else's. They have endured foreigners long enough to avert distrust, and their curiosity makes them great listeners. In fact, their culture is far more oral than visual, the focus being first on the spoken word, and then on the written. Oral and written cultures were once means of survival and today they are the font of the Irish character. The tremendous literary wealth of this country of a population of less than four million inhabitants, which has produced four Nobel Prizes for Literature - not counting their most emblematic writer - is no surprise.
Dublin is the fingerprint of Irishness. The town plans of this 1,000-year-old city have been drawn up with the calligraphy of the Irish world vision. Its streets, like its time, are neither linear nor circular: they are undulating, fragile, brief and never-ending. Squares and spirals are absent, as is the concept of parallel and perpendicular routes and arterial roads.
Like the unfolding of Irish history, Dublin streets change names; they double up, twist, and lengthen out again, in order to continue being themselves. It is impossible to get anywhere without turning corners over and over again, and this makes driving a constant challenge to one's sense of direction and patience.
Dublin just begs to be walked and doesn't hesitate to remind us of this: for the pedestrian, the stresses of the driver in the clutches of its sinuousness and traffic jams do not exist. Walking through Dublin is calming. Whereas turning the wheel is tiring on the arms, rounding a corner relaxes the legs, because wherever you go a stretch of water appears, a branch of a canal, or more often the Liffey. No society at peace with itself can do without bodies of water, and the Dubliners know this. Their river reminds them of it every day.
And yet there are still people who ask where the creativity of language in this well-watered land springs from. James Joyce was unambiguous on this point: it is impossible to live here without ingesting gallons of imagination.
Ireland is amable. Amable in Spanish means both friendly and loveable. For a Mexican, who for historical reasons understands both beauty and tragedy, it is all too easy to fall for this beautiful and tragic nation. I suppose that there must be an unpleasant Irish person somewhere, but I have not yet had the experience of meeting him. There are so many similarities between the Irish and the Mexican soul that, despite the climate, I cannot help but feel more and more at home.
And I can't help but think that one of these days this island will embark upon its return journey to the Mediterranean.
Published in Spanish in Reforma (Mexico City). Translated to English by Imogen Williams
