Dublinesque (28 page)

Riba is poking fun at the funeral, but he wants to rise to the occasion and be as sincere and authentic as Walter. And out of the options he’s considering on various pieces of paper in his pocket, he plans to read, as a funeral prayer, the text of a letter from Flaubert that reveals how uncontrollably seduced the writer felt by the figure of St. Polycarp, martyr and bishop of Smyrna, to whom this expression is attributed: “My God! What century — or what world — have you made me born into?”

In order to better read this letter, first he tries to get as emotional as Walter. Right here, he thinks, is where Dignam’s coffin once was, which I imagined so many times when I was reading
Ulysses
. Here was this coffin in this chapel, and it doesn’t look like things have changed much since Joyce’s time. Everything looks exactly conserved in time, identical to the book. The bier, the entrance to the chancel, are all identical. The chancel is the same, there’s no doubt. There were four tall yellow candles at the corners, and the mourners knelt here and there, in these praying desks. Bloom stood behind, near the font, and when all had knelt, he carefully dropped his unfolded newspaper from his pocket and knelt his right knee upon it. Right here. This is where he fitted his black hat gently on his left knee, and holding its brim, bent over piously, more than a century ago now. But everything’s the same. Isn’t it moving?

Then he takes a step forward and walks to the middle of the altar and from there prepares to recite his dirge in the form of Flaubert’s letter to his lady friend Louise Colet. But at that moment a street vendor enters and approaches the group, with his little cart of biscuits and fruit. Somewhat thrown by his appearance, Nietzky intervenes with nervous energy, and without anyone having let him through or given him permission, starts to read, aloud and very fast, the section from
Ulysses
where a priest blesses Dignam’s soul. He reads somewhat hastily and awkwardly and adds many words of his own, ending like this: “All the year round that priest prayed the same thing over them all and shook water on top of them all. On Dignam now. And on top of an age that today dies with him. Never, ever, nothing. Never more, Gutenberg. Bon voyage, into the void.”

Pause. The wind.

And then in a sing-song, priestly voice:

“
In paradisum.
”

They all repeat the litany tersely, annoyed, perhaps because they feel something more than skeptical, and they have the impression that Nietzky couldn’t have been more false and mocking in his farewell sentiment for an era. “Some of us,” Walter says, “were not born for superficiality.” Once again, his involuntary humor. Stifled laughter. What can he have meant to say? Maybe it’s too simple. Nietzky was awful. And superficial, of course.

Riba finally gets ready now to recite his funeral prayer when a young couple comes in unexpectedly. Dubliners, probably. The man is tall and has a beard, the woman has long blonde hair carefully combed back. The woman crosses herself, the two speak in low tones, one might say they’re asking what sort of gathering is being held here in the chapel. Riba goes closer to hear what they’re saying and discovers that they’re French and are talking about the price of some furniture. Brief bewilderment. The sound of a cart transporting stones can be heard. Now everyone looks at Riba, undoubtedly so that he’ll bring to a close the ceremony he would have finished by now if not for the street vendor, the French couple, and Nietzky with his nervous energy. Ricardo too wants to join in with the prayer, and faced with such indecision, he gets there before Riba: “I don’t think any more words are necessary. Gutenberg interred, we’ve entered other ages. They will have to be buried too. We’ll have to burn phases as we go, perform more funerals. Until Judgement Day arrives. And then conduct a funeral for that day too. Then lose oneself in the immensity of the universe, listen to the endless movement of the stars. And organize obsequies for the stars. And after that I don’t know.”

The French couple is whispering louder now. Are they still talking about furniture? Riba decides to give the letter from Flaubert to Julia Piera, who takes the floor to read, with a few variations of her own, this sort of dirge of an essay: “All this makes me sick. Nowadays, literature looks like a great urinal factory. This is what people smell of, more than anything! I’m always tempted to exclaim, like St. Polycarp did, ‘Oh my God! What century — or what world — have you made me born into!’ and to flee, covering my ears, as this holy man did whenever he found himself faced with an unseemly proposition. Anyway. The time will come when the whole world will have turned into a businessman and an imbecile (by then, thank God, I will be dead). Our nephews and nieces will have a worse time. Future generations will be tremendously stupid and rude.”

Riba, as an ex-businessman, preferred Julia to read this letter. He wouldn’t have been able to stand his friends’ giggles when it came to talking about businessmen. The crunch of gravel is heard. An obese gray rat, Riba thinks. The distant cry of a seagull is also heard. The biscuit vendor seems to have gone for good. Riba waits for silence, and then taking two steps forward, more stately than plump Buck Mulligan at the start of
Ulysses
, he reads his personal requiem for the grand old whore of literature and recites “Dublinesque”:

Down stucco sidestreets,

Where light is pewter

And afternoon mist

Brings lights on in shops

Above race-guides and rosaries,

A funeral passes.

The hearse is ahead,

But after there follows

A troop of streetwalkers

In wide flowered hats,

Leg-of-mutton sleeves,

And ankle-length dresses.

There is an air of great friendliness,

As if they were honouring

One they were fond of;

Some caper a few steps,

Skirts held skilfully

(Someone claps time),

And of great sadness also.

As they wend away

A voice is heard singing

Of Kitty, or Katy,

As if the name meant once

All love, all beauty.

Minutes after the funeral oration for the honest old whore of literature, before leaving Glasnevin, they stand looking at a sign on the cemetery wall near the exit that prohibits cars from going over twenty miles an hour as they’re leaving. There’s laughter at the sign, maybe in an attempt to diffuse some of the tension that’s built up in the last few minutes. The French couple talk to the street vendor. Beyond them, the two cadaverous-looking tramps are still sitting on their bench. Far away, the screech of a seagull seems to imitate a crow. Or is it a crow?

“Let’s get out of here,” Javier says emphatically. Everyone seems to agree. They go back to Milly Bloom’s song, which they all sing happily now, as if they’d just escaped from an awful nightmare. Yes, that’s enough of this place.

They speed up and look as if they’ve just arrived from a trip to the country. The railings of
Ulysses
are slowly left behind. And that fragment:

“The gates glimmered in front: still open. Back to the world again. Enough of this place.”

At the very gates of the cemetery is the ancient pub, Kavanagh’s, also known as the Gravediggers. This pub isn’t named in Joyce’s chapter, but nevertheless it was here in 1904, next to the gates. It’s a squalid place, as far as they can see, which must have a hair-raising atmosphere late at night, something no one here doubts in the slightest, as already, right now in the evening light, at first glance and from outside, you can see that the very structure of the bar itself is reverberating and shuddering, as if about to explode.

Action
: After all the ups and downs of the day, everyone goes into the Gravediggers set on sinking down to the bottom somehow. They go in very thirstily.

The Rotunda always was a good excuse to take to drink.

The customers of the Gravediggers have literally turned the pub into pandemonium. At this time of day, the Gravediggers is the capital of Hell, the city of Satan and his acolytes, the city built by fallen angels. It’s at the opposite extreme from the Pantheon in Paris, for example. That sobriety, that elegance. Riba has started thinking of Paris again, of all things French. He interprets it as a passing nostalgia for the time of his admiration of Paris. That pantheon, those serene spaces where one can try to reunite all the gods.

The poet Milton made it possible for one to imagine the capital of Hell, Pandemonium, as a very small place. The demons had to make themselves tiny to get into it. Here, in this bar in Dublin, all the customers seem to have reduced their size to be able to be with the rest of the monsters in such a reduced space. The preferred noise of the agitated clientele is a string of staccato chatter, like a hyena’s laugh or the shrieks of a baboon, getting slower at the same time as it acquires a shriller pitch.

They’re all proper atheists, the barman says, amusingly and absurdly, in a Spanish he assures them he learned in Barcelona. No one really understands what he’s talking about. The racket gets more deafening every night, the barman explains without explaining anything. No one knows what the relationship between the noise and atheism can be exactly, but it doesn’t seem like the best moment to explain. The deafening party continues. Riba, who now really can hear the cawing Bev said she heard before, imagines that the customers and other gravediggers are like crows who flap down onto the pub’s roof every evening at dusk, and then penetrate the most unlikely places in the tiny, hellish bar and growl, threatening each other and singing obscene songs about Milly Bloom and other invented ladies of Dublin, all dead now. And meanwhile the bar reverberates and shudders and the atmosphere is alcoholic to the most delirious extremes.

The Gravediggers presents the most serious temptation to drink Riba has encountered since he came out of his health crisis. Who knows, maybe the secret name of the pub is the Coxwold. Riba is terrified at the mere possibility of falling off the wagon again and doesn’t lose sight of the threat the infernal place poses. Perhaps it’s here that the prophetic, moving, and terrifying vision of his dream might come true, this vision to be found inside the same dream that’s led him to Dublin and to this cavern of crows vibrating with the terrible air of the end of a party as in the cantina El Farolito from that novel by Lowry he’s always admired so much.

Everyone here looks as if they’ve come from the cemetery, he’s thinking, and at that moment his cell phone rings. A call from Barcelona. It’s Celia phoning to tell him that she’s had a call from Calle Aribau and that his parents are indignant because he still hasn’t wished them a happy sixty-first wedding anniversary. Oh no, Riba thinks. He’d completely forgotten. Maybe Dublin has liberated him too much from his parents’ gentle tyranny.

“Where are you now?” Celia wants to know.

“In the Gravediggers. A pub on the outskirts.”

Perhaps he shouldn’t have said this. Being in a pub, and also the name of this one, could get him into trouble.

“No, Celia, I haven’t had a drop to drink. Don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying. What makes you think I’m crying?”

There’s too much noise in the pub. He goes outside so he can talk. The racket subsumes the entire area around the pub and the high railings. He has a long conversation with Celia and makes another mistake, because when he describes the bar he tells her it looks like that place after death, a world called hell. “I don’t like your vision of the other world,” she says in a dangerously Buddhist tone. He immediately tries to change the subject, but Celia wants to know if he’s sure he hasn’t had a drink. And he has to take a few minutes to calm her down. When he finally manages to soothe her, he hangs up and stands lost in the noisy atmosphere around the door to the Gravediggers. He stands there thinking about the Coxwold premonition. He dreamt that scene of inconsolable weeping with Celia at the entrance to the bar with such intensity that, even though it’s only the memory of a dream, it’s still one of the most impressive memories of his life. He came here to Dublin to encounter the sea, but also to encounter this unlived memory, this moment which, just as happened in his New York dream, has hidden within it something some people call
the moment of true sensation
. Because that weeping seemed to contain, in its most absolute fullness, the core of his existence, the secret universe of all his great love for Celia and infinite joy at being alive and also the tragedy of having been, two years ago, on the point of losing it all.