At a moment when the Irish Sea has come to be the center of Riba’s life, the circumstance has arisen — it can be modestly explained — that for the narration (supposing someone wanted to describe what is happening right now — now when actually, in these very moments, nothing is happening) the theme would be confused with the action, and the action and theme would turn into one single thing; this, moreover, could not be very easily summed up and wouldn’t be enough for any grand reflection, unless one would like to go on about humankind’s proverbial hunger since the beginning of time.
Action and theme: The need to find, as soon as possible, a restaurant.
As they look for a place to eat by the sea, Riba wonders whether his friends might not have conspired to prevent his setting foot on the streets of Dublin. For whatever reason, ever since he’s arrived, they’ve done nothing but skirt around the city. He can’t complain, because there’s no question that these walks are what have led to his encounter with the unforgettable, freezing, sad beauty of this coastline. But this doesn’t stop it from seeming strange to him that he still hasn’t set foot in Dublin.
“We’ll go to the city after this,” says Nietzky as if reading his thoughts.
Nietzky has started to scare him a little. It’s odd how our perceptions of others change so easily from one day to the next. Today it seems to him that Nietzky has a sinister side. He talks and acts differently from the person Riba imagined might be related to his angelo custode. At times he’s rude; it’s curious to observe how he never used to seem this way. But perhaps Nietzky doesn’t deserve to be seen in such a bad light. Maybe Riba’s disappointment comes from realizing something, which he obviously couldn’t see long before: Nietzky is nothing like a guardian angel, he’s simply a selfish young man, with certain demonic features. It would have all gone better if he hadn’t idolized him. Young Nietzky isn’t related to his duende, nor can he in any way be the complementary father Riba imagined he might find in him. Nietzky has absolutely nothing fatherly about him. To think he could have had two father figures was a grave error on Riba’s part. At the very least, the trip will have served to make him realize this, to understand that his friend from New York isn’t a protective father or an angel of any kind, is actually slightly conceited. For example, he’s conceited when he talks about what they’re going to do tomorrow, he’s unbearably arrogant, wearily imparting to them his vast knowledge of Bloom and Joyce, and treating them as if they are poor ignoramuses on the general topic of Bloomsday. And he’s pathetically conceited when he sings, in perfect English, the traditional Irish song “The Lass of Aughrim,” heard at the end of John Huston’s The Dead. He sings it very well, but soullessly, and ruins a very moving tune.
“Who decides when we go to Dublin?” asks Riba rebelliously.
“Well, whoever takes charge, and at the moment, as far as I can see, that’s not you,” says Nietzky, who suddenly starts speaking cruelly to Riba, as if he’s read loud and clear his recent malevolent thoughts.
In the Globe restaurant in Howth where they have lunch, they’re served by an unbearable Spanish waiter from Zamora, wearing a spotless blue jacket. He speaks such perfect English that at first none of them realizes he’s not from Howth or that he’s not even Irish. When they find out, Riba decides to get revenge in his own way.
“What’s wrong with Zamora to make you leave it so quickly?” he asks, a variation of the curious question about Toro and Benavente he was asked the other day in the bank manager’s office in Barcelona.
The waiter denies having fled Zamora. His colloquial way of speaking is admirable, because everything he says sounds emphatically true. It’s clear his entire being is suffused with life, with authentic life, although the one problem he has — what stops Riba from envying him in the slightest — is that this very uninhibited language doesn’t stop him from being a waiter, but rather totally the opposite. Maybe he’s a waiter because since he was a child, he’s been fluent in this way of speaking so genuine and so Spanish, and now, any sort of change is impossible. In other words, he lives as a prisoner of his Spanishness, completely possessed by his Spanish-waiter’s language, by his terribly traditional and complex-free speech, which seems only normal, the only eternally authentic way of speaking for a hundred thousand miles.
They ask the waiter about last Thursday’s European elections and he tries to pass himself off as the world’s best informed person and in the end becomes literally unbearable. As he talks, he slowly loses all his credibility. Indeed, he lost it the very moment he started talking. He’s like the protagonist of a story in which a man in an elegant, meticulous blue jacket keeps his garment the whole time, but whose pockets gradually become more and more threadbare.
He talks and talks about Thursday’s elections, but they’re barely listening. Here in Dublin today, Sunday, the corpse of the ill-fated “yes” vote to the Lisbon Treaty is still warm; the Irish rejected this treaty last Thursday, and there are posters and other paraphernalia from last week’s intense and confused electoral battle still lying around.
“Ireland’s like that,” says Nietzky somewhat disdainfully.
What? Riba feels he ought to kill him. And the thing is, he’s already thinking like the biggest fanatic of all those in love with the Irish Sea.
“And what are you here for?” asks the Spanish waiter.
“A funeral,” says Riba.
They all, apart from Nietzky, think he’s being witty and laugh at his joke. The waiter leaves their table in confusion, and Riba notices he has a horrid pencil behind his ear.
The pencil of Latin literature, thinks Riba.
Time: Five in the afternoon, immediately after coming out of the Globe restaurant, Howth.
Action: They get back into the Chrysler and take a long detour, driving around the ring road and heading for the other end of the bay. After bypassing the entrance to Dublin again, they go to Finnegans pub, in the middle of Dalkey: a quiet town with narrow streets, where, mainly on Vico Road, the second chapter of Ulysses takes place, and where, as we know, thanks to the great Flann O’Brien, seemingly accidental encounters take place, and where the shops pretend to be closed, but are open.
Ricardo, his voluminous raincoat in hand — it’s obvious he didn’t need to bring it — thinks the town is very genteel. Javier says he’s been there many times and it’s the most enchanting place in the world. Young Nietzky doesn’t believe Javier or share Ricardo’s view.
“Believe me,” Javier says, “in a pub here in town, after he was dead, Joyce worked as a bartender. He confessed to the customers who recognized him that Ulysses was a pain in the ass and a joke in poor taste.”
Ricardo searches in vain for an open shop among those pretending to be shut, somewhere he can buy batteries for his camera.
They carry out an inspection of the pub with the Joycean name that’s been chosen — they agreed to this days ago by email — as the setting for the founding act of the Order of Finnegans. It was chosen by Nietzky, who claims to come to this pub every year.
Would it surprise or collapse you to know that the Mollycule Theory is at work in the parish of Dalkey? [Flann O’Brien, The Dalkey Archive].