Time: Around two in the afternoon.
Day: Sunday June 15.
Place: The port of Howth, at the north end of Dublin Bay. Less than a mile from here is Ireland’s Eye, a rocky seabird sanctuary built on the ruins of a monastery.
Characters: The four travelers in the Chrysler.
Action: They park at the edge of the town, at the foot of the cliffs where Nietzky, who knows the place, has suggested they walk for a while. They stride along a path through the rocks, and once a certain amount of vertigo has been overcome — blue and gray lights in the fishing port, and high up, in the sky, scudding clouds over the Irish Sea — Riba can finally see Dublin. He still hasn’t seen the city, despite already having been on the island for some hours.
Even though it’s so far off, he finally sees something of Dublin, sees it from high on these cliffs that rise up from the sea. Flocks of birds float on the water. The fascinating sadness of the place seems accentuated by the sight of these fleets of somnolent birds, in the middle of the day, and it’s as if the void becomes intertwined with the deep sadness, which from time to time finds its voice in the shrieking of a gull. A magnificent landscape, boosted by his enthusiastic state of mind that comes from feeling he’s in a foreign land.
Timidly moved, Riba recalls a poem by Wallace Stevens, “The Irish Cliffs of Moher”:
They go to the cliffs of Moher rising out of the mist,
Above the real,
Rising out of present time and place, above
The wet, green grass.
This is not landscape, full of the somnambulations
Of poetry
And the sea. This is my father or, maybe,
It is as he was,
A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earth
And sea and air.
There’s Dublin, slightly hazy in the middle of the bay. A girl goes by with a portable radio playing “This Boy,” by The Beatles. And the song gives him a sudden feeling of nostalgia for the time when he too was close to the “race of fathers.” He’s not young anymore and doesn’t know if he can bear such beauty. He looks at the sea again. He takes a few steps toward the rocks and immediately feels that he ought to stand still, because if he keeps on walking he’ll probably end up staggering along, blinded by tears. It’s a secret emotion, hard to communicate. Because how can he tell the truth and let his friends know he’s fallen in love with the Irish Sea?
This is my country now, he thinks.
He’s so absorbed in all of this that Ricardo has to shake him awake, blowing the smoke from his Pall Mall into Riba’s face.
“What are we up to?” his friend asks.
Riba looks at Ricardo, his flowery, Polynesian-patterned shirt. He finds him ridiculous. He imagines him dressed this way in the Austers’ house.
Before, when he drank, Riba didn’t distinguish between strong and weak emotions, or between friends and enemies. But his recent lucidity has slowly given him back his capacity for boredom, and also for excitement. And the Irish Sea — over which he now imagines a great mass of gray clouds with silver edges floating — seems to him the most superb incarnation of beauty, the highest expression of that which disappeared from his life for so long and which now — it’s never too late — he has found all at once, as if he were in the middle of a great storm, feeling like a man who senses his life is going downhill, yet is faced with the unmistakable beauty of a gray sea edged with silver, and which he’ll never forget as long as his memory serves him.
He recalls some words of Leopardi’s that have been with him for years. The poet said that the view of the sky is perhaps less enjoyable than that of the land and the fields, because it’s less varied, and also far from us, not a part of us, belonging less to what is ours. . And nonetheless, if the view of the Irish Sea has moved Riba, it’s precisely because he doesn’t feel it’s his, it doesn’t belong to his world at all, it’s strange to him; it’s so different from his universe that it’s touched him inside leaving him deeply moved, a prisoner of a foreign sea.
Themes: All banal. Excessive hunger, for instance, which has taken hold of the group and made them desperately start looking for a place to have lunch.
Riba thinks about the theme of his own hunger — a special hunger, separate from the rest of the group’s — and remembers when he used to read manuscripts at the publishing house and noticed that in many of them, almost as if it were a set rule, certain trivial themes appeared on the surface of the story as if they also had the right to a certain rank. And he also remembers that, the further he got into these stories, the more noticeable it was that one important theme gradually shifted to another, preventing a stable center from existing for any length of time. And not just this, but on the surface of the stories only the shadows of certain elements remained, that is, precisely the least significant themes: the hysterical need to find a restaurant, for instance, which is the theme right at this moment, when he feels he’s almost having a nervous breakdown from hunger, and even more so because he’s so exhausted after having walked so far.
At a moment when the Irish Sea has come to be the center of Riba’s life, the circumstance has arisen — it can be modestly explained — that for the narration (supposing someone wanted to describe what is happening right now — now when actually, in these very moments, nothing is happening) the theme would be confused with the action, and the action and theme would turn into one single thing; this, moreover, could not be very easily summed up and wouldn’t be enough for any grand reflection, unless one would like to go on about humankind’s proverbial hunger since the beginning of time.
Action and theme: The need to find, as soon as possible, a restaurant.
As they look for a place to eat by the sea, Riba wonders whether his friends might not have conspired to prevent his setting foot on the streets of Dublin. For whatever reason, ever since he’s arrived, they’ve done nothing but skirt around the city. He can’t complain, because there’s no question that these walks are what have led to his encounter with the unforgettable, freezing, sad beauty of this coastline. But this doesn’t stop it from seeming strange to him that he still hasn’t set foot in Dublin.
“We’ll go to the city after this,” says Nietzky as if reading his thoughts.
Nietzky has started to scare him a little. It’s odd how our perceptions of others change so easily from one day to the next. Today it seems to him that Nietzky has a sinister side. He talks and acts differently from the person Riba imagined might be related to his angelo custode. At times he’s rude; it’s curious to observe how he never used to seem this way. But perhaps Nietzky doesn’t deserve to be seen in such a bad light. Maybe Riba’s disappointment comes from realizing something, which he obviously couldn’t see long before: Nietzky is nothing like a guardian angel, he’s simply a selfish young man, with certain demonic features. It would have all gone better if he hadn’t idolized him. Young Nietzky isn’t related to his duende, nor can he in any way be the complementary father Riba imagined he might find in him. Nietzky has absolutely nothing fatherly about him. To think he could have had two father figures was a grave error on Riba’s part. At the very least, the trip will have served to make him realize this, to understand that his friend from New York isn’t a protective father or an angel of any kind, is actually slightly conceited. For example, he’s conceited when he talks about what they’re going to do tomorrow, he’s unbearably arrogant, wearily imparting to them his vast knowledge of Bloom and Joyce, and treating them as if they are poor ignoramuses on the general topic of Bloomsday. And he’s pathetically conceited when he sings, in perfect English, the traditional Irish song “The Lass of Aughrim,” heard at the end of John Huston’s The Dead. He sings it very well, but soullessly, and ruins a very moving tune.
“Who decides when we go to Dublin?” asks Riba rebelliously.
“Well, whoever takes charge, and at the moment, as far as I can see, that’s not you,” says Nietzky, who suddenly starts speaking cruelly to Riba, as if he’s
read loud and clear his recent malevolent thoughts.
In the Globe restaurant in Howth where they have lunch, they’re served by an unbearable Spanish waiter from Zamora, wearing a spotless blue jacket. He speaks such perfect English that at first none of them realizes he’s not from Howth or that he’s not even Irish. When they find out, Riba decides to get revenge in his own way.
“What’s wrong with Zamora to make you leave it so quickly?” he asks, a variation of the curious question about Toro and Benavente he was asked the other day in the bank manager’s office in Barcelona.
The waiter denies having fled Zamora. His colloquial way of speaking is admirable, because everything he says sounds emphatically true. It’s clear his entire being is suffused with life, with authentic life, although the one problem he has — what stops Riba from envying him in the slightest — is that this very uninhibited language doesn’t stop him from being a waiter, but rather totally the opposite. Maybe he’s a waiter because since he was a child, he’s been fluent in this way of speaking so genuine and so Spanish, and now, any sort of change is impossible. In other words, he lives as a prisoner of his Spanishness, completely possessed by his Spanish-waiter’s language, by his terribly traditional and complex-free speech, which seems only normal, the only eternally authentic way of speaking for a hundred thousand miles.
They ask the waiter about last Thursday’s European elections and he tries to pass himself off as the world’s best informed person and in the end becomes literally unbearable. As he talks, he slowly loses all his credibility. Indeed, he lost it the very moment he started talking. He’s like the protagonist of a story in which a man in an elegant, meticulous blue jacket keeps his garment the whole time, but whose pockets gradually become more and more threadbare.
He talks and talks about Thursday’s elections, but they’re barely listening. Here in Dublin today, Sunday, the corpse of the ill-fated “yes” vote to the Lisbon Treaty is still warm; the Irish rejected this treaty last Thursday, and there are posters and other paraphernalia from last week’s intense and confused electoral battle still lying around.
“Ireland’s like that,” says Nietzky somewhat disdainfully.
What? Riba feels he ought to kill him. And the thing is, he’s already thinking like the biggest fanatic of all those in love with the Irish Sea.
“And what are you here for?” asks the Spanish waiter.
“A funeral,” says Riba.
They all, apart from Nietzky, think he’s being witty and laugh at his joke. The waiter leaves their table in confusion, and Riba notices he has a horrid pencil behind his ear.
The pencil of Latin literature, thinks Riba.
Time: Five in the afternoon, immediately after coming out of the Globe restaurant, Howth.
Action: They get back into the Chrysler and take a long detour, driving around the ring road and heading for the other end of the bay. After bypassing the entrance to Dublin again, they go to Finnegans pub, in the middle of Dalkey: a quiet town with narrow streets, where, mainly on Vico Road, the second chapter of Ulysses takes place, and where, as we know, thanks to the great Flann O’Brien, seemingly accidental encounters take place, and where the shops pretend to be closed, but are open.
Ricardo, his voluminous raincoat in hand — it’s obvious he didn’t need to bring it — thinks the town is very genteel. Javier says he’s been there many times and it’s the most enchanting place in the world. Young Nietzky doesn’t believe Javier or share Ricardo’s view.
“Believe me,” Javier says, “in a pub here in town, after he was dead, Joyce worked as a bartender. He confessed to the customers who recognized him that Ulysses was a pain in the ass and a joke in poor taste.”
Ricardo searches in vain for an open shop among those pretending to be shut, somewhere he can buy batteries for his camera.
They carry out an inspection of the pub with the Joycean name that’s been chosen — they agreed to this days ago by email — as the setting for the founding act of the Order of Finnegans. It was chosen by Nietzky, who claims to come to this pub every year.
Would it surprise or collapse you to know that the Mollycule Theory is at work in the parish of Dalkey? [Flann O’Brien, The Dalkey Archive].
Swap “Mollycule Theory” for “Order of Finnegans” and everything fits much better. The pub is packed, probably because they’re showing one of the European Championship games on the television, but also because in Ireland pubs are almost always full. Javier and Ricardo order beer, Nietzky a whiskey with ice.
A tender and ridiculous cup of tea with milk is the teetotaller Riba’s embarrassed order. Since the cruel jokes about his sad drink keep coming, he tries to dispel them by asking his friends if they knew there was a character in Borges’s story “Death and the Compass” called Black Finnegan who owned a pub called Liverpool House.
“So we’re also in a Borgesian pub,” says Javier.
“And the Order could be a bit Borgesian as well, it’s not going to be all Joyce,” suggests Ricardo.
“We could just include the Borges line as a motto on the Order’s coat of arms. I think that might be enough,”says Riba.
“Do we have a coat of arms?” asks Nietzky.
Riba proposes a legend that could be inserted into the coat of arms: “Black Finnegan by name, an old Irish criminal, who was crushed, annihilated almost, by respectability. .”
Atmosphere in Finnegans: Much clinking of pint glasses and rowdiness. A blonde woman who’s had a lot of work done and a man with a dense gray beard, his loose jaw trembling as he speaks. A foreign soccer team scores a goal, which provokes an almost endless cry of jubilation among the clientele. It turns out the Polish national team has loads of Irish supporters. Thick smoke, although in theory no one is smoking. It’s as if this smoke came from a deeply rooted past that hasn’t budged an inch from the pub. Meshuggah, as Joyce would say, off his chump. A long silence at the table of the future Knights of the Order.
“I haven’t come up with anything for the funeral for the Gutenberg age,” Nietzky suddenly bursts out.
Javier and Ricardo think he’s carrying on with the joke Riba made earlier. But as he then gives a lengthy explanation, they gradually discover his words are totally serious. It will involve holding a requiem tomorrow for one of the pinnacles of the golden age of printing, Ulysses, and for the age itself. A requiem, above all, for the end of an era. He hadn’t said anything about it up until now because he’d forgotten.
“You forgot?” asks Javier, incredulously.
Action: Riba says the requiem might seem like a silly idea, but it’s absolutely not. Because if one thinks about it calmly, it has a religious meaning, it’s a prayer for the end of an era. They, the members of the Order of Finnegans, will be the poets of this funeral prayer. It would be good to hold this funeral. After all, if they don’t do it, it won’t be long before others do.
Time: Thirty minutes later.
Action: They’ve been talking and arguing endlessly. Nietzky has drunk four whiskeys in a row. Javier, in the meantime, has become a fan of the Polish national team and maintains, in his characteristically categorical tone, that they’re the best team in the world. Ricardo’s got an exaggeratedly indignant scowl permanently stuck on his face. What’s he grumbling about? The requiem, mainly.
“But what’s so bad about organizing a funeral for the Gutenberg era, a requiem that’s a grand metaphor for the end of the print age, and also for the almost forgotten closure of my publishing house?” says Riba with such subdued sarcasm no one even notices.
“You haven’t made us come to Dublin so you can turn yourself into a metaphor, have you?” says Ricardo.
“And what’s so bad about our Riba wanting to be an allegory, a witness to the times, a notary to a change of eras?” Nietzky intervenes, drunk as a skunk.
“But have we come here so that our dear friend can become a witness to the times? That’s the last thing I expected,” says Ricardo.
“Well, that and so I ca
n feel alive,” protests Riba with surprisingly genuine bitterness, “and have a trip to tell my parents about when I go and see them on Wednesdays, and feel I’m opening up to other people and not being such a hikikomori. Have pity on me. That’s all I ask.”
They look at him as if they’ve just heard an alien speak.
“Pity?” asks Javier, almost laughing.
“All I want is for the funeral to be a work of art,” says Riba.
“A work of art? Ah, this is new!” Nietzky intervenes.
“And also for you all to understand that retiring is tough, that I’ve got too much time on my hands and sometimes I think I’ve got nothing left to do, and that’s why I’d like you all to be more sympathetic and understand that I’m trying to organize things to escape the boredom.”
His voice sounds so broken that they’re all frozen for a moment.
“Don’t you see?” Riba carries on, “There’s nothing left for me to do, except. .”
He looks down. Everyone stares at him, as if asking him to make an effort, as if begging him, please, to complete the sentence and say something that will save them from feeling so embarrassed and awkward. They want this episode to be over soon.
He lowers his head even more, it’s as if he wants it to sink into the ground.
“Except. .”
“Except what, Riba? Except what? For God’s sake, explain. What’s left for you to do?”
He’d like to say, but he won’t: to find his spirit, the first person that existed in him and vanished so early on.
But no, he won’t say it.
For the sake of his health, he’s been going to bed early for over two years. And as he himself says, if he ever breaks this routine and goes to a dinner party — the last time was that evening at the Austers’ house — everything gets very complicated. For this reason, at ten o’clock, having eaten nothing but a squalid little sandwich, his friends drop him off at the entrance to Morgans hotel. He’s going to bed without having seen Dublin. It’s no big deal, but he thinks he could have been there by now; his friends could have been kind enough to go into the city at some point. But anyway, he’ll wait till tomorrow. They’ll see Dublin tonight, because they’ve arranged to meet Walter to give him his car back, and then they’re going to check out some bars and maybe some clubs. They tell Riba they expect to see him fresh-faced in the morning, at breakfast time. If he can’t sleep — they remark jokingly — Irish TV is always very enjoyable. And don’t drink the minibar dry, Ricardo advises him with unnecessary cruelty.
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