“For himself,” Walter is still saying, “Johnson was praying for himself.”
Then Nietzky says that there are prayers for sailors, for kings, for distinguished men, but that he didn’t know there could be a prayer for writers.
“And what about publishers?” Javier asks.
Riba remembers a dream in which he saw Shakespeare studying Hamlet to play the part of the ghost.
“Johnson was praying for himself,” Walter insists.
They go into the little chapel, and Riba recalls the obese gray rat that in Joyce’s book toddles about by a crypt close to Paddy Dignam’s. He remembers his friend Antonia Derén, whose anthology on the various appearances of rats in the most illustrious contemporary novels he published a few years ago.
“One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the bones clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat gone bad,” Bloom thinks at the funeral.
Walter waits for a great silence to fall and then, when he sees the suitable conditions for his prayer have arrived, he utters it in a solemn, quivering voice: “O God, who hast hitherto supported me, enable me to proceed in this labor, and in the whole task of my present state; that when I shall render up at the last day an account of the talent committed to me, I may receive pardon by the grace of God. Amen.”
No one, except Riba, can understand what is going on when Walter then suddenly starts weeping inconsolably. In theory, he’s not a writer and so this problem linked to literary talent shouldn’t affect him. The thing is, even if he were, it wouldn’t really be very logical for him to start weeping like this. After all, no writer has ever shed a single tear about this. But Riba knows that’s precisely where the clue to solving this enigma lies. Writers don’t cry for themselves or for other writers. Only someone like Walter who sees everything from the outside and who has a special intelligence and sensitivity, understands how much one should cry whenever one sees a writer.
Riba is poking fun at the funeral, but he wants to rise to the occasion and be as sincere and authentic as Walter. And out of the options he’s considering on various pieces of paper in his pocket, he plans to read, as a funeral prayer, the text of a letter from Flaubert that reveals how uncontrollably seduced the writer felt by the figure of St. Polycarp, martyr and bishop of Smyrna, to whom this expression is attributed: “My God! What century — or what world — have you made me born into?”
In order to better read this letter, first he tries to get as emotional as Walter. Right here, he thinks, is where Dignam’s coffin once was, which I imagined so many times when I was reading Ulysses. Here was this coffin in this chapel, and it doesn’t look like things have changed much since Joyce’s time. Everything looks exactly conserved in time, identical to the book. The bier, the entrance to the chancel, are all identical. The chancel is the same, there’s no doubt. There were four tall yellow candles at the corners, and the mourners knelt here and there, in these praying desks. Bloom stood behind, near the font, and when all had knelt, he carefully dropped his unfolded newspaper from his pocket and knelt his right knee upon it. Right here. This is where he fitted his black hat gently on his left knee, and holding its brim, bent over piously, more than a century ago now. But everything’s the same. Isn’t it moving?
Then he takes a step forward and walks to the middle of the altar and from there prepares to recite his dirge in the form of Flaubert’s letter to his lady friend Louise Colet. But at that moment a street vendor enters and approaches the group, with his little cart of biscuits and fruit. Somewhat thrown by his appearance, Nietzky intervenes with nervous energy, and without anyone having let him through or given him permission, starts to read, aloud and very fast, the section from Ulysses where a priest blesses Dignam’s soul. He reads somewhat hastily and awkwardly and adds many words of his own, ending like this: “All the year round that priest prayed the same thing over them all and shook water on top of them all. On Dignam now. And on top of an age that today dies with him. Never, ever, nothing. Never more, Gutenberg. Bon voyage, into the void.”
Pause. The wind.
And then in a sing-song, priestly voice:
“In paradisum.”
They all repeat the litany tersely, annoyed, perhaps because they feel something more than skeptical, and they have the impression that Nietzky couldn’t have been more false and mocking in his farewell sentiment for an era. “Some of us,” Walter says, “were not born for superficiality.” Once again, his involuntary humor. Stifled laughter. What can he have meant to say? Maybe it’s too simple. Nietzky was awful. And superficial, of course.
Riba finally gets ready now to recite his funeral prayer when a young couple comes in unexpectedly. Dubliners, probably. The man is tall and has a beard, the woman has long blonde hair carefully combed back. The woman crosses herself, the two speak in low tones, one might say they’re asking what sort of gathering is being held here in the chapel. Riba goes closer to hear what they’re saying and discovers that they’re French and are talking about the price of some furniture. Brief bewilderment. The sound of a cart transporting stones can be heard. Now everyone looks at Riba, undoubtedly so that he’ll bring to a close the ceremony he would have finished by now if not for the street vendor, the French couple, and Nietzky with his nervous energy. Ricardo too wants to join in with the prayer, and faced with such indecision, he gets there before Riba: “I don’t think any more words are necessary. Gutenberg interred, we’ve entered other ages. They will have to be buried too. We’ll have to burn phases as we go, perform more funerals. Until Judgement Day arrives. And then conduct a funeral for that day too. Then lose oneself in the immensity of the universe, listen to the endless movement of the stars. And organize obsequies for the stars. And after that I don’t know.”
The French couple is whispering louder now. Are they still talking about furniture? Riba decides to give the letter from Flaubert to Julia Piera, who takes the floor to read, with a few variations of her own, this sort of dirge of an essay: “All this makes me sick. Nowadays, literature looks like a great urinal factory. This is what people smell of, more than anything! I’m always tempted to exclaim, like St. Polycarp did, ‘Oh my God! What century — or what world — have you made me born into!’ and to flee, covering my ears, as this holy man did whenever he found himself faced with an unseemly proposition. Anyway. The time will come when the whole world will have turned into a businessman and an imbecile (by then, thank God, I will be dead). Our nephews and nieces will have a worse time. Future generations will be tremendously stupid and rude.”
Riba, as an ex-businessman, preferred Julia to read this letter. He wouldn’t have been able to stand his friends’ giggles when it came to talking about businessmen. The crunch of gravel is heard. An obese gray rat, Riba thinks. The distant cry of a seagull is also heard. The biscuit vendor seems to have gone for good. Riba waits for silence, and then taking two steps forward, more stately than plump Buck Mulligan at the start of Ulysses, he reads his personal requiem for the grand old whore of literature and recites “Dublinesque”:
Down stucco sidestreets,
Where light is pewter
And afternoon mist