Although he stops looking at the photograph, he continues to recall the start of chapter six: “Martin Cunningham, first, poked his silkhatted head into the creaking carriage and, entering deftly, seated himself. Mr Power stepped in after him, curving his height with care.”
Full of contradictory feelings toward the novelty of everything, Riba decides to go back down to the foyer, to keep from creating anymore mental spider’s webs for himself, and to forget that the character of Spider can sometimes be overly tyrannical and possessive with him. He decides that the most sensible thing to do now is throw himself into discovering Dublin with his friends, with his own personal Martin Cunningham and Mr. Power.
He’s already getting ready to leave the room when he sees, next to the curtains, a red suitcase. He stares at it in amazement. What’s a suitcase doing there? He can’t believe it. He remembers when Celia used to get angry and leave her suitcase out on the landing. He doesn’t find it funny when things happen to him that might seem appropriate for a novelist to put in his novel. He doesn’t want to be written by anyone. Could it be that they wanted to surprise him and it’s Celia’s luggage? No, surely not. If she said she was staying in Barcelona that was because she was going to stay. Anyway, he’s never seen this suitcase at home. He picks it up as if it stank, not wanting to think about it, takes it out into the hallway. It’s not his, how awful.
He goes down to reception, planning to tell them he’s found a suitcase in his room and has left it in the fourth-floor corridor — actually the fifth, if one goes by the strange numbering — but when he gets down there he remembers he doesn’t speak a word of English, and ends up walking right past, saying absolutely nothing. In the brief walk from the foyer to the Chrysler, he puts the incident out of his mind. Any other time, it would have been the first thing he’d have told his friends. I found a red suitcase in my room, he would have said immediately. And he would have told them the story, as if he had a gift for storytelling.
Time: Around two in the afternoon.
Day: Sunday June 15.
Place: The port of Howth, at the north end of Dublin Bay. Less than a mile from here is Ireland’s Eye, a rocky seabird sanctuary built on the ruins of a monastery.
Characters: The four travelers in the Chrysler.
Action: They park at the edge of the town, at the foot of the cliffs where Nietzky, who knows the place, has suggested they walk for a while. They stride along a path through the rocks, and once a certain amount of vertigo has been overcome — blue and gray lights in the fishing port, and high up, in the sky, scudding clouds over the Irish Sea — Riba can finally see Dublin. He still hasn’t seen the city, despite already having been on the island for some hours.
Even though it’s so far off, he finally sees something of Dublin, sees it from high on these cliffs that rise up from the sea. Flocks of birds float on the water. The fascinating sadness of the place seems accentuated by the sight of these fleets of somnolent birds, in the middle of the day, and it’s as if the void becomes intertwined with the deep sadness, which from time to time finds its voice in the shrieking of a gull. A magnificent landscape, boosted by his enthusiastic state of mind that comes from feeling he’s in a foreign land.
Timidly moved, Riba recalls a poem by Wallace Stevens, “The Irish Cliffs of Moher”:
They go to the cliffs of Moher rising out of the mist,
Above the real,
Rising out of present time and place, above
The wet, green grass.
This is not landscape, full of the somnambulations
Of poetry
And the sea. This is my father or, maybe,
It is as he was,
A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earth
And sea and air.
There’s Dublin, slightly hazy in the middle of the bay. A girl goes by with a portable radio playing “This Boy,” by The Beatles. And the song gives him a sudden feeling of nostalgia for the time when he too was close to the “race of fathers.” He’s not young anymore and doesn’t know if he can bear such beauty. He looks at the sea again. He takes a few steps toward the rocks and immediately feels that he ought to stand still, because if he keeps on walking he’ll probably end up staggering along, blinded by tears. It’s a secret emotion, hard to communicate. Because how can he tell the truth and let his friends know he’s fallen in love with the Irish Sea?
This is my country now, he thinks.
He’s so absorbed in all of this that Ricardo has to shake him awake, blowing the smoke from his Pall Mall into Riba’s face.
“What are we up to?” his friend asks.
Riba looks at Ricardo, his flowery, Polynesian-patterned shirt. He finds him ridiculous. He imagines him dressed this way in the Austers’ house.
Before, when he drank, Riba didn’t distinguish between strong and weak emotions, or between friends and enemies. But his recent lucidity has slowly given him back his capacity for boredom, and also for excitement. And the Irish Sea — over which he now imagines a great mass of gray clouds with silver edges floating — seems to him the most superb incarnation of beauty, the highest expression of that which disappeared from his life for so long and which now — it’s never too late — he has found all at once, as if he were in the middle of a great storm, feeling like a man who senses his life is going downhill, yet is faced with the unmistakable beauty of a gray sea edged with silver, and which he’ll never forget as long as his memory serves him.
He recalls some words of Leopardi’s that have been with him for years. The poet said that the view of the sky is perhaps less enjoyable than that of the land and the fields, because it’s less varied, and also far from us, not a part of us, belonging less to what is ours. . And nonetheless, if the view of the Irish Sea has moved Riba, it’s precisely because he doesn’t feel it’s his, it doesn’t belong to his world at all, it’s strange to him; it’s so different from his universe that it’s touched him inside leaving him deeply moved, a prisoner of a foreign sea.
Themes: All banal. Excessive hunger, for instance, which has taken hold of the group and made them desperately start looking for a place to have lunch.
Riba thinks about the theme of his own hunger — a special hunger, separate from the rest of the group’s — and remembers when he used to read manuscripts at the publishing house and noticed that in many of them, almost as if it were a set rule, certain trivial themes appeared on the surface of the story as if they also had the right to a certain rank. And he also remembers that, the further he got into these stories, the more noticeable it was that one important theme gradually shifted to another, preventing a stable center from existing for any length of time. And not just this, but on the surface of the stories only the shadows of certain elements remained, that is, precisely the least significant themes: the hysterical need to find a restaurant, for instance, which is the theme right at this moment, when he feels he’s almost having a nervous breakdown from hunger, and even more so because he’s so exhausted after having walked so far.