Riba, much taken aback, understands that whatever happens he’s now faced with a second chance and starts to think carefully about his answer. In the end, he chooses not to make mistakes and opts for this Candor as well, a man he’s never heard of. What a coincidence, Riba says, he’s my favorite too. Bev looks at him in surprise and asks him to repeat that. Ragú is my favorite, Riba says, I like his stylistic restraint and the way he deals with silence. I thought you were more intelligent, Bev says. Ragú Candor is for silly girls like me and now you seem silly too.
She’s won the game. And what’s more, Riba was wrong again and the worst of it is that — the idea of getting along with Bev now ruled out forever — he feels he’s aged ten years. He’s incapable now of seducing young girls. He’s made a fool of himself, he’s finished. Without drink he lacks the humor that at least made him more daring and funny. His face darkens, and gradually acquires a slow, mournful look.
Up there, on the stage — as if it were a parallel story — the reading of the novel goes on and the funeral cortège continues slowly on its way at the height of a sunny morning: “Dunphy’s corner. Mourning coaches drawn up drowning their grief. A pause by the wayside. Tiptop position for a pub. Expect we’ll pull up here on the way back to drink his health. Pass round the consolation. Elixir of life.”
The Rotunda was always a good excuse to take to drink.
Time: A quarter to four.
Date: Bloomsday.
Place: Martello tower, in the village of Sandycove, a circular tower on the outskirts of the city of Dublin, the place where Ulysses begins: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead. . Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest.”
Characters: Riba, Nietzky, Javier, and Ricardo.
Action: They have climbed up the narrow spiral staircase to the round gunrest, and are now contemplating the Irish Sea from up there. The day is still calm and the sky is a surprisingly uniform white. The tide is high, and the surface of the sea, taut and burnished like rippling silk, looks higher than the land. Riba is hypnotized for a few moments. Strange sea of an intense blue, dangerous like love. He imagines that the sea, in reality, is only a pale gold gleam that extends out to the impossible horizon.
As time is getting on, because they’ve arranged to meet the Dew siblings and Amalia and Julia Piera at the gates of Glasnevin Cemetery, Nietzky decides to found the Order of Knights right here, high up in the tower. What’s more, he considers the setting a nobler one. They went to Finnegan’s pub yesterday and when they pass it again going to Dalkey to get the train home, they’ll have too little time to stop and found the Order there.
They’re alone on the gunrest, but Riba has the feeling that the wind is carrying broken words and that, what’s more, there’s a ghost hidden on the spiral staircase. Javier, who hates Ulysses, is pretending he’s Buck Mulligan and shaving his chin. Nietzky reads the rules he drew up yesterday: “The Order of Finnegans has as its sole purpose the veneration of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. The members of this society are obliged to honor the work and to honor Bloomsday every year, and when possible, go to the Martello tower in Sandycove and to feel there that they are part of a now ancient race that began like the sea, without name or horizon, and which today is in danger of dying out. . ”
In quite a hurry and after the symbolic inauguration of the Knights, it’s decided that every year one new member can be admitted, “only if and when three-quarters of the Knights of the Order agree to it.” And then, with no time left to lose, they go to catch the train. They walk for half an hour along the road to Dalkey and from there, without stopping at Finnegans, take the train back to Dublin singing a song about Milly, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Blooms who left Dublin to study photography and who only appears obliquely in Ulysses:
O, Milly Bloom, you are my darling.
You are my looking glass from night till morning.
I’d rather have you without a farthing
Than Katey Keogh with her ass and garden.
Time: After five o’clock.
Character: Riba.
Theme: Riba’s old age.
Action: Takes place entirely in Riba’s imagination, on the train returning to Dublin from Dalkey. With his friends singing “O, Milly Bloom” in the background, he imagines that this ghost haunting him and taking notes of everything happening on the train, and whose breathing he can practically hear, is a young novice in the world of letters; someone who’s spent weeks getting more and more involved in an adventure that’s driving him mad and which, moreover, he doesn’t know whether or not will end up leaving him buried under the books of his future oeuvre: an oeuvre that sooner or later will prevent him — a parallel story to that of Riba as a publisher, who these days sees his true personality obscured thanks to his catalog — from knowing who he is, or who he might have been.
He imagines that the young novice has chosen him as a character, a guinea pig for his experiments, as the character of a novel about the real life, without any exaggeration — of a poor old retired publisher who’s somewhat desperate. He imagines that young man observing him closely, studying him as if he were a guinea pig. For the novice it’s a question of finding out if devoting himself to good literature for forty years has been worth the trouble, and he tells the story of the daily life, without too many surprises, of the character he’s observing. At the same time as considering whether such literary passion is worth the effort; he tells how the retired publisher is still looking for the new, the revitalizing, the foreign. He comes as close to the character as he can — sometimes in the most physical sense — and narrates the problems the man has with his wife’s Buddhism, while commenting on his movements — having a funeral in Dublin, for example — to fill an empty space.
He imagines that in the novel, the novice has set out to subvert a certain kind of conventional approach, but isn’t trying to transform literature into something mysterious, rather attempting to make it possible for the literary publisher to be seen as a hero of our time, as an individual who bears witness to the disappearance of publishers of distinction and reflecting on the difficult situation of a society headed toward stupidity and the end of the world.
He imagines that suddenly this novice comes so close to him that Riba ends up sitting on top of him and blocking his view, suffocating him so the poor young man can only see a huge blurry blot, which is actually the written publisher’s dark-colored jacket.
Taking advantage of this opportune blot that momentarily paralyzes the novice’s narrative powers, Riba manages in every sense to put himself in the other man’s place, and to take over his way of seeing things. He then discovers, not without surprise, that he shares absolutely everything with him. To start with, an identical tendency to narrate, and interpret — with the distortions peculiar to a highly literary reader — those everyday events that touch his life.
Then the train goes into a tunnel and he is finally left with no imagination. Zero imagination. Total darkness. A bit of clarity comes when they emerge from the tunnel and he sees the light of dusk again. He thinks he’s missed everything already. And then suddenly, he feels a ghostly touch on his back. For a few moments he sits motionless in his seat, and little by little starts to understand that the novice is still there, lying in wait.