Dublinesque (18 page)

He was alert to all the building’s movements when he heard footsteps: someone was heading for his room. There was a knock at the door. He froze. Four more very sharp knocks. The shock didn’t fade until he opened the door and saw that it wasn’t the loathsome scythe-bearing figure at the door, but the publisher Roberto Calasso, who was also staying at the hotel, a guest at the conference, and he had simply come to suggest going for a stroll around the neighborhood.

When the two of them went out for that walk at dusk, they couldn’t have imagined they’d end up watching Joseph Mankiewicz’s film
Julius Caesar
, perhaps as a kind of unexpected and improvised homage to the film’s lead actor, the illustrious death of the day. They discovered, by one of those casual coincidences that sometimes occur in life, that the film starring Brando and James Mason was being shown at dusk in the Stevenson Room of the British Museum, a few yards from their hotel. And they decided they couldn’t ignore this wink from fate and went in to watch the admirable film that so many times and on so many different occasions they’d seen before.

He remembers that, last night, Celia was telling him, with a marked Buddhist emphasis to her words, that we’re all weaving and interweaving every moment of our lives. Not only, said Celia, do we weave our decisions, but also our acts, our dreams, our states of vigilance: we’re constantly weaving a tapestry. And in the middle of this tapestry, she concluded, it sometimes rains.

He’s started remembering these noteworthy phrases from yesterday, and this doesn’t stop him from imagining a tapestry where it can clearly be seen that it’s been pouring rain in Barcelona for months, without interruption, and it seems it will never stop raining. It always rains in high fantasy, said Dante. And it’s raining, especially now, in his imagination, and in Barcelona too. It’s pouring in this city, that’s for sure. And it’s been doing so, on and off, ever since he decided to go to Dublin. Rain always makes us remember, it brings other times to mind, and maybe this is why he now recalls that, five years ago in Bloomsbury, after having watched James Mason in
Julius Caesar
, he came across this actor again back in his hotel room that night, and there he was quite still on the television screen, in that scene from Kubrick’s
Lolita
, in which Humbert Humbert, before going up to his room to sleep with his nymphet, talks to a stranger, another guest at the hotel, a man called Quilty, who seems to know all about his life.

Who is this Quilty? Was he wearing a Nehru jacket in the film? He doesn’t know if it’s because he’s had severe insomnia and hasn’t slept for many hours or because he’s still got
The British Museum
on his computer screen, but he’s acting more and more disturbed. Carried along by the rhymes the rain is gradually spinning in the unknown street of the painting, thinking about the rainy installation his friend Dominique is preparing at the Tate, he’s mentally writing phrases and wondering in one of them what London will be like when he and all the people he loves are dead. There will be days — he can be sure of this now — when all his dead will have become pure vapor and will speak from their wild, remote solitude; they’ll speak just as the rain in Africa does, and won’t remember anything anymore. Everything will have been forgotten. Even the rain beneath which all the dead once fell in love will have faded away. And lost too, the memory of the moon beneath which they once walked along an also forgotten road like lost souls.

And although, once more, things are getting occasionally complicated, he thinks he knows that, as long as everything still depends only on him, as long as he’s still in control of the action and can make sure things are pure and exclusively mental, he won’t be fazed. This is why he gets lost with a certain amount of calm down the foggy, presumably unknown street, next to the British Museum, and gets trapped at a strange bend, what at first sight had seemed like a street corner. It’s not a street corner, it’s a blot, and in it there’s a shadow that seems to want to escape from the screen.

Alarmed at this threatening shadow, he clicks the mouse and in two moves gets to the page with his emails, where he finds one containing the poem “Dublinesque,” by Philip Larkin, which young Nietzky has just sent him from New York. It’s a poem that talks of an old Dublin prostitute, who in her last hour is accompanied only by a few co-workers along the city streets. Nietzky says he’s sent Riba this poem because there’s a funeral in it and it takes place in Dublin: a deliberate wink at the funeral ceremony they’re preparing for June 16. A poem that begins:

Down stucco sidestreets,

Where light is pewter

And afternoon mist

Brings lights on in shops

Above race-guides and rosaries,

A funeral passes.

He stops reading to turn on the radio and think about other, less funereal things, and he hears “Partir Quand Même” sung by Françoise Hardy. It’s been years since he’s heard this song that he’s always liked. It looks like it’s stopped raining. It must be past seven already. He memorizes the first line of Larkin’s poem,
Down stucco sidestreets,
so he can pretend he’s starting to know English, so he can say it at the slightest opportunity. His insomnia now seems to be irrepressible. Celia sees this for herself. She’s there all of a sudden, standing in the doorway, looking threateningly at him, although at the same time with what might be an air of despair. I didn’t know, thinks Riba, that Buddhists could experience anxiety too. But he’s wrong, it’s not despair, it’s just that Celia has to go to work and isn’t helped by seeing her husband so outrageously wide-awake. Riba puts his head down and hides in “Dublinesque.” He reads the rest of the poem, hoping that this might protect him from the telling-off that could come from Celia at any moment. And as he reads, he wonders what would happen now if that blot were to reappear on the screen, that threatening shadow.

Celia is about to leave and he — so she can see he’s not hypnotized — switches off the computer, avoiding several problems at once. Celia still hasn’t left and is trying on a new shirt in front of the mirror. He realizes that, as soon as he turned off the computer and lost the possibility of seeing the shadow, he started to feel hugely, strangely, most unexpectedly sad.
Absurdly
sad, because he doesn’t think it’s the absence of the shadow that’s caused his spirits to sink, but still he can’t find a better explanation. He decides to evade this odd sadness with one that’s more clear; he starts thinking about the sad — but not so sad, because it’s associated with a trip with good prospects — funeral ceremony awaiting him in Dublin, this ceremony about which all he knows is that it will have to uphold some sort of connection with the sixth chapter of
Ulysses
.

Now that he thinks about it, his life over the last two days seems to have points of contact with this chapter. He decides to re-read it, to check if what he senses is true. And shortly afterward he’s closely examining the pages of Paddy Dignam’s burial and in particular the moment when a lanky guy appears at the last moment in the cemetery. He’s a man who seems to have come from nowhere at the very minute the coffin drops into the hole in Prospect Cemetery. Bloom is thinking about Dignam, the dead man they’ve just lowered into the hole, and as his gaze flits among the living, it pauses for a moment on the stranger. Who is he? Who can this man in a mackintosh be?

“Now who is he I’d like to know? Now, I’d give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of,” thinks Bloom, and lets his thoughts drift to other matters. At the end of the ceremony, Joe Hynes, a reporter who’s taking the names of everyone attending the burial for the funeral report, asks Bloom if he knows “that fellow in the . . .” and just at that moment, as he’s asking the question, he realizes the individual he’s referring to has vanished, and the sentence goes unfinished. The missing word is raincoat (macintosh). Bloom completes the phrase a moment later: “Macintosh. Yes, I saw him. Where is he now?” Hynes misunderstands and thinks the man’s surname is Macintosh, and notes it down for his report of the burial.

Rereading this passage reminds Riba that in
Ulysses
there are ten more allusions to the enigmatic man in the raincoat. One of the last appearances of this mysterious character occurs when, after midnight, Bloom orders a coffee for Stephen in the cabman’s shelter and picks up a copy of the evening
Telegraph
and reads the short report on the burial of Paddy Dignam written by Joe Hynes. In it the journalist gives the names of thirteen mourners, and the last of them is . . . Macintosh.

Macintosh. This could also be the name of the dark shadow he saw before on his screen. And as he thinks this, perhaps involuntarily, the link between his computer and Paddy Dignam’s funeral is strengthened.

He’s not exactly the first person in the world to wonder this.

“Who was M’Intosh?” he remembers from the second chapter of the third part of
Ulysses
, a chapter formed of questions and answers.

One of these questions, intriguing and thorny, has always appealed to him: “What selfinvolved enigma did Bloom risen, going, gathering multicoloured multiform multitudinous garments, voluntarily apprehending, not comprehend?”

He goes over all the debates about who this M’Intosh was. The widest range of interpretations exists. There are those who think that he is Mr. James Duffy, the indecisive companion of Mrs. Sinico in “A Painful Case” from
Dubliners
, who commits suicide overwhelmed by lovelessness and solitude. Duffy, tormented by the consequences of his indecision, wanders around the tomb of the woman he could have loved. And there are those who think he is Charles Stewart Parnell, who’s risen from the grave to continue his fight for Ireland. And there are also those who think it might be God, disguised as Jesus Christ, on his way to Emmaus.

Nietzky has always been especially fond of Nabokov’s theory. After reading the opinions of so many researchers, Nabokov deduced that the key to the enigma of the stranger was to be found in the fourth chapter of the second part of
Ulysses
, in the library scene. In this scene, Stephen Dedalus is talking about Shakespeare and maintains that he included himself in his plays. Very tensely, Stephen says that Shakespeare “has hidden his own name, a fair name, William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas.”

This, according to Nabokov, is what Joyce managed to do in
Ulysses
: to set his face in a dark corner of his canvas. The man in the macintosh who crosses the book’s dream is none other than the author himself. Bloom actually sees his creator!

He wonders whether he should make an effort to stay awake, or give in to sleep — he doesn’t think that is such a good idea because his insomnia is giving him a special sort of lucidity, although Celia’s already gotten seriously annoyed with him because of it. They had a morning argument, so she hasn’t gone back to the old days, that is, to the times when she used to get so annoyed she’d end up putting a few things in a suitcase and leaving it on the landing. She hasn’t acted like that this time, but it’s clear that if things get worse, she might do so later, when she gets home from work at lunch time. It’s terrible. Everything’s always hanging from a thread with Celia.

He leaves the computer and goes over to the window, looks out at the street. He hears Celia slamming the door loudly as she goes to work. She’s gone at last. It’s ridiculous, but it seems as if the thing that’s really irritated her, that’s made her explode with rage, is when a moment ago, he flippantly quoted W. C. Fields at her: “The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep.” This little phrase drove her crazy. “Excuses are worthless,” she said.

He went too far with the Fields quote, he thinks now, uselessly repentant. When will he learn to control his words better? When will he realize that there are certain inappropriate remarks that might seem witty in many settings outside the conjugal one? Celia was probably more than justified in slamming the door. For a while, from the big window, he stands and watches what happens when nothing is happening. When he turns his eyes away from the general view of Barcelona and looks down to focus on what’s going on nearby, he realizes that a man in a gray Burberry coat is walking down his street, a man who reminds him — who has an air — of the stranger in the raincoat with his hair plastered to his head that Riba and Ricardo saw in La Central bookshop. At first this seems strange and then less so. The fact is he ends up feeling a mysterious emotional affinity with him. Couldn’t he have come to tell him to persist in his search for “the unfathomable dimension,” the dimension that, in the middle of a storm, his father asked about in a low voice the other day? He feels dizzy. And he remembers the Swedish thinker Swedenborg who, one day, finding himself by the window of his London house, noticed a man walking down the street for whom he felt instant empathy. To his surprise, this man came over to his door and knocked at it. And when he opened it, Swedenborg felt from the first moment absolute trust in this individual, who introduced himself as the son of God. They took tea together, and over the course of the encounter, the man told Swedenborg that he saw in him the most suitable person to explain the right path to the world. Borges always said that lots of mystics could pass as madmen, but that the case of Swedenborg was special, as much for his enormous intellectual capacity and great scientific prestige, as for the radical change in his life and work brought about by the visions that came from the hand of this unexpected visitor, who connected him directly to celestial life.