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?”