He’s sure that sooner or later Nietzky will come up with some ideas for the funeral rites, will suggest, for example, where to hold them. St. Patrick’s, the cathedral, is a seemingly appropriate place for the ceremony, but there may be others. He’s also sure Nietzky will end up telling him which words to use to give a dignified send-off to the Gutenberg era. In any case, it would be good and opportune to link the funeral with Ulysses’ chapter six. It’s the only thing that seems self-evident to Riba, especially when he sees — although he keeps this to himself — how Javier, Ricardo, and young Nietzky have already started to seem like living replicas of the three characters — Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, and John Power — who accompany Bloom in the funeral procession crossing the city to Glasnevin Cemetery on the morning of June 16, 1904.
It doesn’t escape Riba that it’s characteristic of the imagination always to consider itself to be at the end of an era. For as long as he can remember he’s heard it said that we are in a period of maximum crisis, a catastrophic transition toward a new culture. But the apocalyptic has always been there, in every era. We find it, for instance, in the Bible, in the Aeneid. It exists in every civilization. Riba understands that in our time the apocalyptic can only be dealt with parodically. If they manage to hold this funeral in Dublin, it can’t be anything other than a great parody of the weeping of a few sensitive souls for the end of an era. The apocalyptic demands a lack of excessive seriousness. After all, ever since he was a boy he’s been sick and tired of hearing that our historical and cultural situation is uncharacteristically terrible and in a certain way privileged, a cardinal point in time. But is this really true? It seems doubtful that our “terrible” situation is so different from that of our ancestors, as many of them felt the same as we do, and as Vok puts it, if our criteria seem satisfactory to us it would have been the same for them. Any crisis, after all, is just a projection of our existential anxiety. Perhaps our only privilege is to be alive and know we’re all going to die together or separately. In the end, thinks Riba, the apocalyptic has a splendid fictional veneer, but it shouldn’t be taken too seriously, because actually, if I look at it properly, what it offers me is the joyful, emphatic, and happy paradox of a funeral in Dublin, that is, it offers me what I’ve been most in need of recently: something to do in the future.
Nietzky doesn’t always reply to emails straight away. He soon sees that Nietzky’s speedy reply to his previous email was an exception to the rule. The minutes go by and he starts to see that Nietzky isn’t prepared to reply so swiftly now.
Two whole days of certain amounts of anxiety.
During those days, moments of intense impatience and bewilderment. Like a good hikikomori, Riba believes the emails he sends will always be answered immediately. And it rarely happens. With Nietzky he’s been left feeling more disconcerted than he should be, knowing as he does that his young New York friend has never been a man of instantaneous email replies.
He spends two days waiting for the reply. And finally even Celia seems to be waiting for Nietzky to deign to reply, perhaps because she wishes with all her heart that her hikikomori husband would take some sort of exercise for once — even if it’s only getting onto a plane — and get as much air as possible in Dublin.
From time to time, over these two days of waiting, Celia expresses an interest in knowing if his friend from New York, young Nietzsche — she calls him this by mistake, without malice — has shown any signs of life.
“No, not one, it’s as if the earth has swallowed him up. But he’s already promised to come to Dublin, and that’s enough,” Riba replies, hiding from Celia his fear that Nietzky might not like, for instance, the idea of having to come up with ideas about how and where to hold the requiem.
When finally, after two long anxious days, Nietzky’s reply arrives, night has fallen in Barcelona, and Celia is asleep. So Riba can’t tell her the good news straight away. Nietzky writes from a hotel in Providence, not too far from New York, and tells him that, just as he said in his previous email, he’s really enthusiastic about repeating the trip to Dublin he took last year. Regarding the English leap, he says he thinks he knows what it refers to. And he remarks, with neurotic energy, that out of the Protestant and the Catholic religions, he prefers the latter: “Both are false. The first is cold and colorless. The second is forever associated with art; it’s a beautiful lie, that at least is something.” Then comes a disconcerting sentence: “You were Jewish, weren’t you?” And immediately afterward, for no real reason whatsoever, he starts talking about New York, and begins a long and unexpected string of personal complaints. He writes of the appalling changes the city is constantly subjected to and says his “own requiem for the days when, wherever you lived, you could always find a few blocks from home a grocery store, a barbershop, a newsstand, a dry cleaner’s, a florist, a liquor store, a shoe store. .”
Then there is a P.S. in which he mentions a meeting he’s set up with a society of Finnegans Wake fans, the strange and, according to Nietzky, not at all unsuccessful last book by James Joyce: “On Wednesday I’m going to a gathering the members of the Finnegans Society of Providence have held on the fourth Wednesday of every month for sixty-one years. They have a website. I rang them up and the guy who answered seemed very surprised by my Hispanic accent. He asked me if I had any experience with the text. I said I did. He said it wasn’t necessary. He gave me the address of the place they meet, which isn’t on their website: number twenty-seven and a half (that’s what he said), Edison Street. When I told him my Polish surname, he started doubting I was Spanish again.”
And not a word about the funeral?
Unsettled by this piece of information about the sixty-one years of the Finnegans Society, it takes Riba a while to realize there’s a P.S. to Nietzky’s P.S., which he doesn’t notice until he stops thinking about the curious coincidences between his parents’ marriage and that of the Providence Finnegansean society: they have the same number of years, sixty-one.
In the P.S. to the P.S., he reads: “There’ll be time for everything in Dublin, even I think to find a good place for our heartfelt eulogy for the glorious, annihilated age of Gutenberg.”
Perfect, thinks Riba. I hope that when Nietzky says the “heartfelt eulogy,” he’s doing so mockingly, as if sensing the most ideal way to handle the funeral is to do it parodically. I await his concrete ideas for the requiem, the ones I need. I couldn’t have a better collaborator for Dublin. And now that he’s confirmed his complicity he’s brightened up my day.
But it’s a strange way that Riba feels this happiness. He celebrates by starting to worry that his “there’ll be time for everything” might refer to going to lots of pubs in Dublin. If this suspicion is true, he’s in real danger. He could end up succumbing to the temptation of alcohol and drinking in a pub called the Coxwold, and then crying dejectedly, hopelessly drunk and full of remorse, sitting on the pavement down an alleyway, maybe consoled by Celia, or by her phantom, since Celia won’t be going to Dublin, but her phantom might very well do so. .