Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? 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 [Ulysses, chapter six].
“What are you thinking about?” interrupts his mother.
Once again, in his parents’ house, that feeling of forgetting where he is. He’s annoyed they’ve interrupted his journey through the Dublin cemetery. Of course, there isn’t much difference between the atmosphere of the Prospect Cemetery and that of his parents’ house.
“Dublin has dead people everywhere,” he answers angrily.
And it’s the beginning of the end. Of today’s visit at least.
“What?” his mother almost sobs.
“I said that death and children”—he’s growing more and more enraged — “look very similar over there. The gravediggers touch their caps after burying them. And some people still say ‘mackintosh’ when they’re talking about raincoats. It’s another world, Mama, another world.”
He hails a taxi. There are always lots on Calle Aribau. All you have to do is raise your hand and one stops automatically. Today he’s out of luck, inside the taxi it stinks. But it’s too late to change and the car is already on its way to his house. It’s also too late to put right the falling out with his parents. Maybe he shouldn’t stick to this unwavering commitment every Wednesday. Today, once more, the overwhelming impression of a wake and that intimate familiarity with ghosts have made him a nervous wreck. After his inappropriate remark, his apologies did no good.
“What was that shout?”
“I didn’t shout, Mama.”
He ended up slamming the door on his way out, and then feeling full of anguish and remorse. Now he’s trying to get away from his sense of unease and concentrate on this sixth chapter he wants to revive in Dublin, and which starts just after eleven o’clock in the morning, when Bloom gets on the tram at the baths on Leinster Street and goes to the dead man Paddy Dignam’s house, number 9 Newbridge Avenue, southeast of the Liffey, from where the funeral procession will leave. Instead of heading directly westward, toward the center of Dublin, and then northwest toward Prospect Cemetery, the cortège goes in the direction of Irishtown, turning northeast and then west. Obeying an old custom, they parade Dignam’s body first through Irishtown, toward Tritonville Road, north of Serpentine Avenue, and only after crossing Irishtown do they turn west down Ringsend Road and Brunswick Street, then afterward crossing the River Liffey and carrying on northwest toward Prospect Cemetery.
As the taxi drives down Calle Brusi, he sees a man walking fast. He reminds him of the young man who stormed out of La Central bookshop the other day. Riba looks away for a moment and when he looks back again, the stranger isn’t there anymore, he’s disappeared. Where can he have gone? Who was he?
A man full of life, he thinks, and at the same time ethereal as a ghost. Who the hell can it be? Could it not be me? No, because I’m not young.
As of today, Celia is a Buddhist. He still hasn’t entered the house, but he’s already been informed of the news. Fine, he says, somewhat bewildered, resigned. And crosses the threshold. And he thinks: once upon a time, marquises went out at five o’clock in the afternoon, and now they become Buddhists.
He’d like to say to Celia that she’s not the only one who can change her personality from one day to the next, to tell her that he feels a little perturbed, as if he were an arrow in a cobwebbed cellar of steel-gray light. But he holds back. “Fine,” he repeats, “it’s fine. I congratulate you, Celia.” He notices the Buddhist decision has affected him more than he thought it would, although he was already convinced that Celia would end up converting to another religion, he saw it coming quite clearly. He lowers his head, goes straight to his study, feeling he needs to take refuge there.
It feels like everything in the house is turning oriental.
He’s a hikikomori, she’s a Buddhist.
“What’s the matter? Where are you off to?” Celia asks in her most affectionate voice.
He decides not to let himself feel duped and shuts himself up in his study. Once he’s there, he looks out of the window and starts meditating. Outside, the daylight is dying. He’s always admired Buddhism, he’s got nothing against it. But arriving home has annoyed him. It feels as if his experience has come out of a novel, and if there’s anything guaranteed to make him genuinely uncomfortable these days it’s things happening in his life that could turn out to be appropriate for a novelist to put in a novel. The way Celia has decided to tell him she’s become a Buddhist seems like the start of a classic conflict story: a wife who all at once has a different ideology than her husband, the first fights and serious disagreements after years of happiness.
If he’s gained anything from giving up the publishing house it’s no longer having to waste hours reading so much garbage: manuscripts with conventional plots, stories that need a conflict in order to be anything. Manuscripts telling the same old pernicious, traditional stories have disappeared from his view, and he doesn’t want to feel he’s inside one of them now. It’s a source of irritation to him that, having been so peaceful for two years — for twenty-six months to be precise — his life has taken this unexpected fictional turn. He loves the daily life he’s been leading recently, and more than most things, he loves his daily world, so tranquil and boring. If someone came to examine his day-to-day life they’d find it hard to see anything exciting about it, let alone to tell anyone else, because really it’s one of those lives in which scarcely anything happens. He leads an existence like a character in a book by Gracq, the writer he chose as the model for his theory in Lyon. That’s why it’s so irritating that this melodramatically inclined event has occurred now. He’s annoyed that everything has suddenly sped up, as if someone wanted him involved in a less slow novel.
He’s fascinated by the charm of everyday life. It’s true that at times he’s worried about having become so blocked, such a computer nerd, and it’s also true that at times he’s worried about leading a life lacking the excitement of before. But in general he repeats a daily mantra that the more insignificant the things happening to him are, the better. As a future member of the Order of Finnegans and a supposed expert on Joyce’s oeuvre, he knows the world functions through insignificances. After all, Joyce’s greatest achievement in Ulysses was to have understood that life is made up of trivial things. The glorious trick Joyce put into practice was to take the absolutely mundane and give it a Homeric foundation. It was a good idea, yes, although it’s never stopped seeming like a con to him. But that’s not enough for him to deprive his Dublin funeral of its symbolism. He doesn’t want to deprive it of the grandeur the occasion requires, even if a requiem for the end of an age in which Joyce reigned is nothing over there. What’s more, without grandeur, the parody would be incomprehensible. On the other hand, this grandiose, symbolic aspect would coexist — just as happens in Ulysses too — with the mundane procession of trivialities that comes with every journey. He can already start to imagine this coexistence: him in Dublin, bidding farewell with a somewhat heroic urge and funereal pomp to a historic period, and at the same time, in contact with the soporific vulgarity of the everyday, that is, buying T-shirts in some big department store, wolfing down a mediocre chicken curry in a restaurant on O’Connell Street and, well, keeping time with the gray rhythm of the prosaic.
Huge contrasts between greatness and the prosaic, between the heroic urge and chicken curry. He laughs. Maybe heroic urges nowadays are something completely vulgar and common. What is a heroic urge anyway? He thinks of it as if it were something very obvious when in fact he doesn’t really know what it is.