He changed his language to impoverish his expression. And in the end his texts appeared more and more purged. The lucid delirium of poverty. Going through life forever hindered, precarious, inert, deformed, unsettled, numb, terrified, unwlecomed, naked, sickly, shaky, defenceless, exiled, inconsolable, playful. Beckett, skinny and smoking in his room in Tiers-Temps, a nursing home in Paris. His pockets full of cake for the pigeons. Retired, like any other elderly person with no family, to an old people’s home. Thinking of the Irish Sea. Waiting for the final darkness. “Much better, in the end, if sorrow disappears and silence returns. In the end, it’s how you’ve always been. Alone.”
So far from New York.
“I’d like to be born,” he hears someone say in the next room.
He interrupts his reading of the biography. It might be true that he’d heard this if it weren’t for the fact there’s no one in the adjacent room. Not a single sound has been heard there since he arrived. He hasn’t heard anyone go into the room. And anyway, the sentence was uttered in Spanish. It’s his imagination. It’s not exactly serious. He’ll continue to talk to it, to his imagination. He invents any name and says it before challenging it to come in.
“If you’re out there, knock three times.”
Enter ghost. Perhaps who’s come in is this first person he’s obsessed with, this first good man who became hidden thanks to his catalog.
It’s well known that ghosts come from our memories, they almost never arrive from distant lands, or outside us. They are our tenants.
“What about the red suitcase?”
“I never travel,” the ghost says. “I’m forever trying to be born. And to learn English, which it’s about time I did.”
Time: Eleven o’clock in the morning.
Date: Bloomsday.
Place: Meeting House Square, a square that developed from the place where a century ago a large part of the Quaker community of Dublin was concentrated.
Characters: Riba, Nietzky, Ricardo, Javier, Amalia Iglesias, Julia Piera, Walter, and Bev Dew.
Style: Theatrical and festive.
Action: The traditional public reading of Ulysses on the stage of the theater built in one corner of the square. A seated audience occupies all the chairs in Meeting House Square. More of the audience is on the terrace outside a café. Occasional passersby and people stand and talk, some of them very animatedly. A well-expressed pleasure at the costumes of the readers.
Riba finds himself with Julia Piera, a Spanish poet who’s lived in Dublin for two years and is also a friend of Javier and Ricardo and who immediately offers to add them to the list of people who will take their turn to read a section from the book on the little stage. They’re already at the end of chapter five, so the most likely thing is that, thanks to a curious coincidence, they’ll get to read bits from chapter six. Nietzky and Ricardo put their names on the list and are given readings at around half past twelve.
With anxious curiosity, Riba observes all the people dressed up as Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, Stephen Dedalus. He’s attaining small degrees of unsuspected happiness. Everything, absolutely everything, seems new to him, and life does too. He thinks the feeling must be similar to that of having traveled to another world. There’s an air of wonderful unreality. Of being somewhere else.
He records everything in a commonplace book he’s bought in a bookshop of the nearby photography gallery and that he’s decided to inaugurate with a list of the things that catch his eye this morning.
A word-for-word account of what he has written down up to now:
A man dressed as the “inner landscape of a skull.”
A wonderful fat girl who thinks she’s Molly Bloom.
The Israeli writer David Grossman, who’s put himself down on the list to read a fragment of Ulysses.
Bev Dew, the young daughter of the South African ambassador, in a wide-brimmed flowery hat and an ankle-length dress. Very beautiful. Fragrant face. Apple-faced. Accompanied by her laconic and strange brother Walter, a friend of Nietzky’s from school and shadowy owner of the Chrysler.
The poet Amalia Iglesias, who waves to Javier, who was her neighbor years ago in Madrid.
A Portuguese man dressed up as David Hockney!
“Full devotion to funerals!” Nietzky says. He’s probably been drinking again.
An anonymous, bony figure. To employ a Beckettian description: haughty forehead nose ears white holes mouth white threadlike finished invisible stitching.
Julia Piera again. Sensuality, beauty, vivaciousness.
A few more than obvious ghosts, even one wearing a white sheet. Me, comically reflected in a shop window again.
A sort of Finnish ogre with a straw hat and silver-handled cane.
A man in a raincoat bearing a quite astonishing resemblance to Beckett as a young man.
A Jesuit called Cobble, friend of Nietzky’s, who suddenly stops dead and starts talking in a suspiciously low voice to Amalia Iglesias.
The reading is running conspicuously late, as if from their Irish vantage point they wanted to poke fun at British punctuality. They’re so behind that Nietzky doesn’t take the floor until 1:10 p.m. He reads in a ridiculous, very correct and lilting English. His friend Walter’s sister, however, seems almost moved listening to him. Riba feels unexpectedly jealous, and then this reaction worries him. Extreme beauty, youth. He likes Bev, he can’t deny his arousal, his sudden sexual desire. Above all he likes her voice. In the middle of this sort of euphoria he’s experiencing, in the middle of unexpected levels of happiness, he thinks that maybe Bev reminds him of one of those girls with beautiful, glittering voices from the novels of Scott Fitzgerald: that timbre in which the jingle of coins can be heard, the beautiful cascade of gold in every fairy tale. Yes, he likes Bev, among other things because in some way her glamour brings her closer to New York. Or maybe he just likes her, and that’s it.
Meanwhile, up on the stage, the reading of Joyce’s novel continues. Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, and John Power are already sitting in the hearse and chapter six is trotting along at the same pace as the horses toward Prospect Cemetery.
— What way is he taking us? Mr Power asked through both windows.
— Irishtown, Martin Cunningham said. Ringsend. Brunswick street.
Mr Dedalus nodded, looking out.
— That’s a fine old custom, he said. I am glad to see it has not died out.
All watched awhile through their windows caps and hats lifted by passers. Respect. The carriage swerved from the tramtrack to the smoother road past Watery Lane.
“It’s really a requiem for my profession and above all for me, as I’m all washed up,” Riba says to Javier as he glances anxiously at Bev, as if wanting to point out to his friend that he’s saying all this because she reminds him that he’s old now, after all he’s nearly sixty and seducing her would not be the easy task it might have once been for him.
They’re standing on one side of the square, by the first row of seats of the ever-increasing audience.
“You don’t have to convince me of anything anymore,” Javier says. “And even less when we’re on the sixth chapter already and I’m feeling imbued with your idea for the requiem. I’ve even thought about writing a story about someone who holds funerals all over the world, funerals in the form of works of art. What do you think? It’s someone trying to learn to say goodbye to everything. Saying goodbye to Joyce and the age of print is not enough for him, and he starts to turn into a collector of funerals.”