Who can this irate, limping man be? Riba feels he’s known him all his life. He remembers the same thing happened with the young genius who for so many years he dreamed he’d find one day for his publishing house. He always believed he was out there and that in fact he’d known him all his life, and then it turned out there was no way of finding him, as he either didn’t exist or Riba didn’t know how to find him. Would having found the genius have justified his whole life? He doesn’t know, but nothing would have seemed more glorious than to have been able to announce to the world that it wasn’t true that all the greats of literature were dead already. It would have been fantastic, because then he would have been able to abandon his quaint practice of referring to the lack of young geniuses by forever quoting — once drunkenly and now with all the serenity and treachery in the world — the first line of a poem by Henry Vaughan, which he knew full well was really about something else:
“They are all gone.”
When he looks back at the one-eyed man, he finds he’s no longer out there limping around. Maybe the irate, ethereal man has stepped into a doorway, but in any case the fact is he’s no longer there. How strange, Riba thinks. He’s sure he saw him a moment ago, but it’s also true that some of the people he’s come across recently disappear too fast.
He goes back to the living room and feels there’s no conversation left here, just a wake-like atmosphere growing ever more profound, the leaden air of a waiting room. Then, he doesn’t know how, he remembers something Vilém Vok said in The Center: “To have a mother and not to know what to talk about with her!”
He has to leave, he thinks, he can’t spend any more time in this house. If he does he’ll end up totally mute and buried, and days later he’ll be walking around sharing cigarettes with the ghosts.
“They are all gone, Mama,” he mumbles, head bowed.
And his mother, who’s heard him perfectly well, laughs happily as she nods her head.
The day he said goodbye to his vocation as a publisher seems very far off now. The thing he remembers most perfectly is that, after years of familiar, spectral silence, literature came to him alone, completely alone. How can he say it, how can he describe it? It’s not easy. Even if he were a writer it wouldn’t be easy to explain. Because it was strange, literature came to him lightly, with a graceful step, in red high heels, a cocked Russian hat and a beige raincoat. Even so, he wasn’t interested until he consciously confused literature with Catherine Deneuve, whom he’d recently seen in a trench coat, under an umbrella, in a very rainy movie that took place in Cherbourg.
“I don’t think you know anything about Dublin,” says his mother, interrupting his thoughts.
He’d forgotten he was at his parents’ house. It feels like Wednesday of last week, when, head bowed, he said they are all gone, and his mother nodded in agreement. But this is another Wednesday.
It’s undoubtedly regrettable that, in the middle of a great muddle in his head, just as he was recalling how he thought that literature was Catherine Deneuve and afterward was never able to correct the misunderstanding, just as he was imagining her, alone and erotic, with her red shoes, naked underneath the trench coat, and with her cocked hat and her slight despair on a rainy day, his mother left him unable to complete this vision, which, once again, was getting him so excited. Because, in the end, when he met Celia, she too had looked to him like the spitting image of Deneuve in Cherbourg.
“It’s true, all I know is that it sometimes rains in Dublin,” he says, annoyed. “And then the city fills with trench coats.”
Has he been talking about raincoats? His mother reminds him that as a child he always loved them, was always waiting for it to rain so he could put one on. His mother wants to know if he really can’t remember this penchant of his. Well no, he doesn’t. But now that he thinks about it, it’s possible that this penchant for raincoats led to his fascination with Deneuve. No one knows about this great confusion of his between literature and Deneuve, not even Celia. It would be awful if someone found out, especially if the information fell into his enemies’ hands. They’d undoubtedly laugh at him. But what can he do if that’s how things are, and in reality it’s not so terrifying? Since time immemorial he’s associated Deneuve with literature itself. So what? Other people associate their lover with some rancid piece of chocolate cake they ate at the office. As long as it remains a secret, nothing will happen. Other people have more ridiculous secrets, and they certainly keep quiet about them. Although it’s also true that there are some people who don’t keep quiet, whose secrets aren’t ridiculous. Samuel Beckett, for example. One March night in Dublin, the Irish writer had a decisive vision, the sort of revelation that causes envy:
At the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, I saw the whole. The vision at last.
It was night time, and as he so often did, the young Beckett was wandering around on his own. He found himself at the end of a pier buffeted by a storm. And then it was as if everything found its place again: years of doubt, searching, questions, failures, suddenly made sense and the vision of what he had to carry out established itself like a piece of evidence. He saw that the darkness he’d always striven to reject was in reality his most precious ally, and he glimpsed the world he had to create in order to breathe. A kind of indestructible association with the light of consciousness took shape. An association of storm and night until the last breath.
As far as Riba remembered, this nocturne on the Dublin pier appeared later, a little altered, in Krapp’s Last Tape:
What will become of all this misery of ours? In the end, only an old whore walking around in an absurd raincoat, on a lonely dike in the rain.
In an essay — probably mistakenly, because he was often mistaken in his essays — Vilém Vok pointed out that this woman in the rain was the same one who appeared in Murphy and who was called Celia, the prostitute that the young writer-protagonist lived with, although she was much younger.
He’s always thought it quite a coincidence that this prostitute was called Celia, like his wife. Depending on how one looks at it, thanks to a simple rule of three, the old woman in the absurd raincoat from Krapp’s Last Tape could, due to her Deneuvesque trench coat, be literature and at the same time Celia from Murphy, very old by now, and also Celia, his wife, also very old.
All this leaves him quite confused, as if wandering around on a Dublin pier buffeted by a storm, wet with passion and from the waves. Until he remembers the raincoat, the mackintosh that appears in the sixth chapter of Ulysses. He remembers it’s a stranger attending the burial of Paddy Dignam who wears it. And it’s odd. Because nowadays, a Mac would just be a famous computer, but in those days it was a raincoat, a garment invented by Charles Macintosh, a name which somehow had a “k” added to it over the years when it came to refer to the coat.
He can’t help thinking that while he’s been a privileged witness to the leap from the Gutenberg to the digital age, he’s also observed the transition of the mackintosh coat to the Macintosh computer. Should he organize a requiem in Dublin for the age of this brand of raincoat? Immediately he congratulates himself on being able to cruelly satirize his projects, his efforts.
The stranger at Prospect Cemetery is someone we meet eleven times over the course of Joyce’s book, but who makes his first mysterious appearance in chapter six. Commentators on Ulysses have never been able to agree on his identity.