Everyone is quiet. They’re probably thinking malicious thoughts.
Nietzky interrupts the silence to say that no one has noticed it, but the bar of Morgans hotel is called the John Cox Wilde pub, which sounds a lot like Coxwold. At first Riba chooses not to believe him, but when the others confirm that this is, in fact, the name of the bar, he says he’d actually be in favor of staying at a different hotel. He says it quite seriously, because he believes that, in general, dreams come true. Then he changes his mind, just as they get to Morgans and he finds he likes the foyer, decorated with large black and white tiles, and the statuesque receptionists as well. They’re extremely tall and look like fashion models, maybe they are. They’re also very friendly, although he can’t understand what they’re saying, or why they’re receptionists and not models.
In the large black and white foyer, several strangely tormented guests can be seen, their heads bowed, sad “Morgans” wearing dark glasses and impeccable business suits, thinking of impenetrable matters. Sophisticated background music. It doesn’t seem as though they’re on the road from the airport, or even near Dublin, you’d think they were in the very center of New York. It seems like Ireland’s economic situation has improved recently, thinks Riba, as he notices with some surprise that the foyer of this Dublin Morgans is almost identical to that of the hotel on Madison Avenue.
Javier de Galloy’s version of “Walk on the Wild Side” is playing. Whenever Riba hears this song — and especially when the singer pronounces the syllables of the words “New York City” — he thinks he’s listening to the background music for his English leap, for his great Sternean sentimental journey, his Odyssey in search of his original enthusiasm.
He’s not lacking in enthusiasm; although, at the sight of the closed John Cox Wilde, he is momentarily lost down depressing paths, evoking the brutal alcoholic life he led for many years so as to be able to get his independent publishing house off the ground and to have life experiences that would help him create a catalog disconnected from the academic formalism and the reactionary life of the people of his generation.
He needs to see alcohol as something monstrous, something to which he can never go back, because if he does so he’ll seriously risk his health. All in all, he needs to remember that he had to drink a lot to make the publishing house a success and that he paid a very high price, his health to be precise, for his alcoholic adventures. In any case, he doesn’t regret anything. It’s just that he no longer wants or is able to repeat that experience. After his great physical collapse, everything became calm and now he’d like to think that he’s come back to life, that he’s gradually forgotten this hardened period of alcoholic activity. As he left the hospital a new man, he started to listen in astonishment to what people were saying about his work as a publisher; at first he listened and pretended to believe that it was someone else who had done this work, his double, as if he’d just now inherited it as a surprise. And by pretending like this, he ended up believing, for a while, in his own farce.
Only when he was conscious once more that he had founded the publishing house and it had cost him his health did he start to feel old and washed up and depressed, and he began to sink into melancholy; this is a world where he doubts publishers with a passion for literature like his own will ever exist again. With every day that goes by it seems more and more to him that these kinds of passions have already begun receding into history and will soon fall into oblivion. The world he once knew is ending, and he knows full well that the best novels he published were practically only about this, worlds that would never exist again, apocalyptic situations that were mainly projections of the authors’ existential angst and that nowadays raise a smile, because the world has continued on its course despite meeting with an inexhaustible number of grand finales. Riba thinks, if the world doesn’t quickly fall into oblivion, it won’t be long before the tragedy of the decline of the print age (the decline of a great and brilliant period of human intelligence) will also raise a smile. Distancing oneself from fleeting dramas seems, at the very least, the most sensible option.
Morgans hotel looks different when one starts to explore the long corridors and discovers that the numbering of the floors and rooms is not the slightest bit logical. There is a phenomenal disorder inside the building. What’s more, the corridors are full of workers who seem to be adding the final touches to the hotel, as if the place weren’t finished yet. An aggressive hammering can be heard everywhere. And there is an exceptional amount of chaos, which has always been a famous source of creativity, and which recalls certain scenes from American films from the years of New York’s great economic optimism, when a certain kind of world was under construction and there was a simple, pure enthusiasm everywhere.
Riba wheels his suitcase to his room, and because of the strange numbering system he gets lost several times; he thinks that, among so many workers spread through all the corners of the great building, he wouldn’t be surprised if he suddenly came across Harpo Marx with a hammer, ready to bash in a nail then and there. This place, still in the middle of being built, is the ideal place to bump into Harpo, but he wouldn’t know how to explain why. It must be the general chaos that’s given him this idea.
In his room, next to the telephone, there’s a card inviting guests to the John Cox Wilde pub. It opens at six in the evening; in other words, somewhat to Riba’s relief, there are still a few hours to go. The room smells of perfume and it looks as if it’s been recently tidied, everything is in its place. There’s a slightly ridiculous token from the hotel, a lonely chocolate, on the bedside table. Do those businessmen like these little chocolatey gestures? The view from the window is a sad one, but he’s fascinated by the gray air, the smoke from the chimneys, the brownish color of the bricks of the houses opposite. He loves the view, because it is not at all Mediterranean, which allows him to feel properly abroad. This is what he’s wanted for weeks. He couldn’t feel any better. He’s got what he came for: to land on the other side. Finally he’s in an environment where strangeness and also — for him at least — mystery prevail. And he notices the joy surrounding everything new; he is almost looking at the world with enthusiasm again. In countries like this, a person can reinvent himself, mental horizons open up.
He has the impression that absolutely everything is new to him, even the steps he takes, the ground he walks on, the air he breathes. If everyone knew how to see the world like this, he thinks, if everyone understood that maybe everything around us can be new, we wouldn’t need to waste time thinking about death.
He thanks himself for being where he is, in this geography of strangeness. He notices that, above the bed, there is a framed photograph of Dublin from 1901. The picture is of a coach and horses, which makes him think of the funeral carriage Bloom got into on June 16, 1904, at eleven o’clock in the morning. He looks carefully, and seeing the atmosphere, he thinks he can sense in this unpaved street down which a black coach drives, it seems to him that in those days the city might have been frankly sinister. And this despite the fact that it was beginning to be a new city. But the atmosphere, given off by this photo is literally funereal. Back then, thinks Riba, maybe all of Dublin was an enormous funeral of funerals. All that was needed now was for some little old woman to look out of one of the windows of those sad houses on the unpaved road: a little old woman like the one who, in chapter six of Ulysses, peeps through her blinds and reminds Bloom of the interest old women take in corpses: “Never know who will touch you dead.”