Dublinesque (27 page)

Than Katey Keogh with her ass and garden.

Time
: After five o’clock.

Character
: Riba.

Theme
: Riba’s old age.

Action
: Takes place entirely in Riba’s imagination, on the train returning to Dublin from Dalkey. With his friends singing “O, Milly Bloom” in the background, he imagines that this ghost haunting him and taking notes of everything happening on the train, and whose breathing he can practically hear, is a young novice in the world of letters; someone who’s spent weeks getting more and more involved in an adventure that’s driving him mad and which, moreover, he doesn’t know whether or not will end up leaving him buried under the books of his future oeuvre: an oeuvre that sooner or later will prevent him — a parallel story to that of Riba as a publisher, who these days sees his true personality obscured thanks to his catalog — from knowing who he is, or who he might have been.

He imagines that the young novice has chosen him as a character, a guinea pig for his experiments, as the character of a novel about the real life, without any exaggeration — of a poor old retired publisher who’s somewhat desperate. He imagines that young man observing him closely, studying him as if he were a guinea pig. For the novice it’s a question of finding out if devoting himself to good literature for forty years has been worth the trouble, and he tells the story of the daily life, without too many surprises, of the character he’s observing. At the same time as considering whether such literary passion is worth the effort; he tells how the retired publisher is still looking for the new, the revitalizing, the
foreign
. He comes as close to the character as he can — sometimes in the most physical sense — and narrates the problems the man has with his wife’s Buddhism, while commenting on his movements — having a funeral in Dublin, for example — to fill an empty space.

He imagines that in the novel, the novice has set out to subvert a certain kind of conventional approach, but isn’t trying to transform literature into something mysterious, rather attempting to make it possible for the literary publisher to be seen as a hero of our time, as an individual who bears witness to the disappearance of publishers of distinction and reflecting on the difficult situation of a society headed toward stupidity and the end of the world.

He imagines that suddenly this novice comes so close to him that Riba ends up sitting on top of him and blocking his view, suffocating him so the poor young man can only see a huge blurry blot, which is actually the
written
publisher’s dark-colored jacket.

Taking advantage of this opportune blot that momentarily paralyzes the novice’s narrative powers, Riba manages in every sense to put himself in the other man’s place, and to take over his way of seeing things. He then discovers, not without surprise, that he shares absolutely everything with him. To start with, an identical tendency to narrate, and interpret — with the distortions peculiar to a highly literary reader — those everyday events that touch his life.

Then the train goes into a tunnel and he is finally left with no imagination. Zero imagination. Total darkness. A bit of clarity comes when they emerge from the tunnel and he sees the light of dusk again. He thinks he’s missed everything already. And then suddenly, he feels a ghostly touch on his back. For a few moments he sits motionless in his seat, and little by little starts to understand that the novice is still there, lying in wait.

Time
: Fifteen minutes later.

Style
: As theatrical as in the Meeting House Square and maybe more gloomy than festive, although things could change at any moment.

Place
: The Catholic cemetery of Glasnevin. A million people are buried here. Founded by Daniel O’Connell, it is eerie at this time in the evening. There are many patriotic monuments, decorated with national symbols or personalized with sports paraphernalia and old toys. Curious towers on the walls, which were used to look out for grave robbers who worked for surgeons at the end of the nineteenth century.

Characters
: Riba, Javier, Nietzky, Ricardo, Amalia Iglesias, Julia Piera, Bev, and Walter Dew.

Action
: Outside the gates to the place, Riba becomes emotional when he sees the iron railings. They’re the same ones Joyce names in chapter six. Are they really railings or a line from
Ulysses
? Faced with this dilemma, Riba is lost for a long time, and after a powerful mental journey, his gaze ends up returning to the cemetery gates. “The high railings of Prospect rippled past their gaze. Dark poplars, rare white forms. Forms more frequent, white shapes thronged amid the trees, white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sustaining vain gestures on the air.”

“The same poplars,” Amalia whispers. They cross the threshold of the main gates and the eight of them walk through the terrifying cemetery, which looks like it’s come straight out of the Dracula film Riba saw this morning. All that’s missing is some artificial fog and for Paddy Dignam’s corpse to rise up from the grave. Riba continues to remember: “Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.”

Ravages of death, ravages of the Rotunda.

An unexpected, inspired tirade from Ricardo when they’re already a few yards inside the cemetery. He says he’s had a sudden revelation and understood everything all at once. He now sees how pertinent the funeral for the Gutenberg age is, for we mustn’t lose sight of how much Joyce loved wordplay.

“And I don’t know if you’ve realized that Bloomsday,” he says, “sounds like Doomsday. And the long day
Ulysses
takes place on is nothing less than that.”

In the end, Ricardo says, Joyce’s book is a sort of universal synthesis, a summary of time; a book designed to make a few anecdotal gestures signal an epic, an odyssey in the most literal sense of the word. That’s why whoever had the idea for a requiem had the greatest idea of all.

They walk slowly down the main path in Glasnevin and come to a beautiful lilac tree, which Ricardo photographs after explaining to them all, with unnecessary solemnity, that he’s almost certain it appears in
Ulysses
toward the end of the cemetery scene. Nietzky thinks the tree is the same color as the lilacs at the Rotunda, which he takes to represent Death, and talks — without the others really understanding him — about the beauty of the Rotunda’s lilacs, as if there had to be a logical and purely commonsensical relationship between the lilacs and Dublin’s maternity hospital. Riba comes to the conclusion that young Nietzky is talking for the sake of talking and has had a lot to drink again, besides.

Oblivious to his status as a fallen angel, Nietzky reflects aloud on the disparity between the length of men’s lives and that of lilacs and other trees. Julia Piera yawns, and then her gaze wanders to a mother and daughter in mourning, standing by a grave, the girl’s face streaked with dirt and tears. The mother with a long face, pale and bloodless. Mother and daughter, a hideous pair as if plucked from a drama from another century, as if they’d stepped out of a period film about life in the Rotunda.

And Ricardo, totally oblivious to this, makes questionable macabre jokes. Minutes later, in the middle of an argument in overly raised voices about the gloomy beauty of the place and the by now hackneyed lilac tree, Bev asks for everyone’s attention so they can observe how the cawing of the crows blends with their argumentative visitors’ shouts.

There are crows, but no one’s heard them cawing. A brief silence. A pause. The wind. “You will see my ghost after death.” Ricardo finds this phrase, lifted from
Ulysses
, carved onto a gravestone beside one of the smaller paths, in the Murray family crypt. Another photo opportunity, obviously. “How wonderful the Murrays are,” someone says. More group portraits. Now everyone squeezes around the tomb of the Joycean family. A cemetery worker wields Ricardo’s camera as if he were a great photographic artist and gives them all orders to pose with more style. When the session is over, someone realizes they’ve been walking around for quite some time now and still haven’t gone into the chapel at the end of the cemetery, the place where the brief and sad funeral for Dignam the drunk was held. This seems like the ideal place for the funereal words for the Gutenberg age, and actually for everything, for the world in general.

Javier asks how they’re going to make sure the requiem is a work of art. They all look thoughtful. Then the laconic Walter speaks up. He offers to recite the prayer. It will be a short piece, he says, very artistic, thanks precisely to its brevity and depth. Everyone looks at Walter, they all stare incredulously at him and carry on walking along the path that leads to the chapel. A laconic man’s words can always have an artistic side, Riba thinks. “It’s a prayer for writers,” Walter says, with an unnecessarily doleful air. And he tells them it was composed by Samuel Johnson, on the day he signed a contract to write the first complete dictionary of the English language.

Then repeats what he’s just said, in English, despite it not being at all necessary. Walter has a great involuntary sense of humor. At the same time, it’s surprising that even before intoning the funeral prayer, he’s said so much already, even a few unnecessary words. What a waste, Riba thinks. Another long pause. Everyone’s gaze drifts to a bench, the last one on the left shortly before going into the chapel. Two men who look like tramps have just sat down there, two guys who are remarkably pale. “Two stiffs who’ve come out to get some fresh air,” Ricardo says, as if his flowery Polynesian shirt made him feel more alive than anyone else. Laughter.

A gentle evening breeze moves the lilac tree. Actually, Johnson was praying for himself, Walter clarifies. And he says it so naturally it’s as if Johnson were simply one of them. No one in the group has heard of this prayer before. In any case they all think it’s a good idea to use a prayer of Johnson’s to intone a funeral hymn. After all, Walter says, Dr. Johnson is the only person in the world to have dedicated a genuinely brilliant essay to the theme of epitaphs. He himself specialized in them for a while, writing them in verse and giving them to the best tombs in London. So Dr. Johnson seems like the ideal person for this epitaph for the Gutenberg age, Walter says.

Everyone is delighted that Dr. Johnson’s writers’ prayer is the one that will be used as an epitaph for the print age. Everyone that is except Riba, who at the last minute discovers that, as hard as he tries, he can’t identify at all with writers, against whom he actually bears a certain grudge, because when it comes down to it, they’re the involuntary cause of this sorrow that at times reappears in the middle of his recurring nightmare about the cage and God. Deep down, Riba fears that this writers’ prayer is pursuing him and making him regret what he stopped doing, his brain forever pierced by his publisher’s sorrow, by that intimate hydra gnawing away at him.

The wind moves the lilac tree again.

And what’s more, Riba thinks, they’re taking this ceremony too seriously. They don’t realize that the apocalyptic is now, but it was already there back in the mists of time and will still be there when we have gone. A very informal man or feeling is what’s apocalyptic, and doesn’t deserve so much respect. The important thing is not that the print age is foundering. The serious thing is that I am foundering.

“For himself,” Walter is still saying, “Johnson was praying for himself.”

Then Nietzky says that there are prayers for sailors, for kings, for distinguished men, but that he didn’t know there could be a prayer for writers.

“And what about publishers?” Javier asks.

Riba remembers a dream in which he saw Shakespeare studying
Hamlet
to play the part of the ghost.

“Johnson was praying for himself,” Walter insists.

They go into the little chapel, and Riba recalls the obese gray rat that in Joyce’s book toddles about by a crypt close to Paddy Dignam’s. He remembers his friend Antonia Derén, whose anthology on the various appearances of rats in the most illustrious contemporary novels he published a few years ago.

“One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the bones clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat gone bad,” Bloom thinks at the funeral.

Walter waits for a great silence to fall and then, when he sees the suitable conditions for his prayer have arrived, he utters it in a solemn, quivering voice: “O God, who hast hitherto supported me, enable me to proceed in this labor, and in the whole task of my present state; that when I shall render up at the last day an account of the talent committed to me, I may receive pardon by the grace of God. Amen.”

No one, except Riba, can understand what is going on when Walter then suddenly starts weeping inconsolably. In theory, he’s not a writer and so this problem linked to literary talent shouldn’t affect him. The thing is, even if he were, it wouldn’t really be very logical for him to start weeping like this. After all, no writer has ever shed a single tear about this. But Riba knows that’s precisely where the clue to solving this enigma lies. Writers don’t cry for themselves or for other writers. Only someone like Walter who sees everything from the outside and who has a special intelligence and sensitivity, understands how much one should cry whenever one sees a writer.