In the hospital I don’t dream at all. Or I think I don’t. Or maybe I dream I don’t.

It is September 2018. I am being treated – successfully, as it turns out – for testicular cancer.

Since the hospital is built on the site of the house – 7 Eccles Street – where Leopold and Molly Bloom lived in James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, then I should be thinking about the Blooms, but I don’t really. So far, I haven’t put a thought into them.

Instead, the hospital has a way of filling up the day with its routines. At night, I lie for a while waiting and, with the help of a pill, I fitfully sleep.

The morning is enlivened by an early visit from the oncologist, and then there is the taking of blood, the checking of blood pressure, then breakfast, then the man with a trolley bearing the day’s newspapers, as though they too are part of the treatment.

Soon, other nurses will come and prepare the chemotherapy and I will lie here all day as it makes its way freely, perhaps even happily, through my veins.  By now, I have no hair, little appetite, no energy, I can’t read much or write anything, but I can think, if letting your mind wander aimlessly is thinking. And I can remember.

Mostly, however, I just lie here, letting the day go by. The treatment, or this round of it, will be over by the end of November.

Maybe that is when the real problems will begin, or maybe not. They’ll be able to tell when the scans are done when the chemo finishes.

This is a private hospital owned by an order of nuns. In the lobby, there is a photograph of an old nun, but nowadays no nuns roam the corridors. They manage things from afar, the one or two that are left. Ireland has swiftly become secular.

Later, I will write a poem called ‘The Last Nun’ that begins:

Her prowling

Is prayer.

She is telling the beads

And instructing

The young nurses

What to do.

She hears night groans

From the wards

And snoring

From private rooms.

Her habit is the latest,

Or the last, design

For nuns, discreet,

Non-rustling,

Like the order itself.

In the hospital I have my own room, which is good most of the time, but it means I miss knowing who else is here. In the next room, however, there is a man who must be a heavy-metal musician. On Sunday, he got permission for his friends to visit, or maybe members of his band. I saw a few of them walking down the corridor, all bellies and beards. And then some of them began to play electric guitars in his room, heavy metal music breaking the silence of an oncology ward in a hospital near the centre of Dublin.

Outside, there is a plaque to James Joyce. There should maybe also be a plaque to the nun who had the decision to have the Blooms’ house knocked down in 1967.

Mostly, I don’t think about this, but there is often a lovely half hour at about one in the morning when the steroids have worn off and the Xanax and the sleeping pill create a glow of comfort (but no sleep, as yet) as I lie in the dark. And then the sentence comes into my head, the glorious opening of Episode 4 of ‘Ulysses’: ‘Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.’

In my waking time, I still don’t feel the ghost of Bloom. The steroids keep me mostly in the real world. I don’t have fantasies. But I have come to love the idea that on a floor below this one in the deep imagined past – 1904 to be precise – Leopold Bloom sat down and had breakfast. This is one of the few scenes of domestic life in a novel that privileges the street, the pub, the casual encounter.

It is strange how easily the smallest, sweetest thought under the pressures of all these drugs, this confinement, all this worry, can darken. Once I think of Bloom having his breakfast, with his wife still in bed, I think of him going out from this house into Dorset Street, one of those streets in Dublin that has a busy, ramshackle, run-down look that I have come to appreciate more than the orderly Georgian city, or the leafy Victorian and Edwardian avenues in Dublin.

Bloom can go out into the street, but I cannot. This is a simple, humble, banal thought, but it contains enough energy to depress me for a few seconds. I start to think then about what happens when Bloom does go out, how he, because of his rich and darting way of thinking and observing the world, can suffer from mood swings too.

I don’t move to this thought deliberately; the change comes naturally, unforced, as a way maybe of avoiding even darker musings.

The paragraph when Leopold Bloom walks out into Dorset Street on the morning of 16 June 1904 is uplifting, enlightening. First, the pleasure of sunlight, ‘happy warmth’, and then the thought comes into Bloom’s head that he might ‘set off at dawn. Travel round in front of the sun, steal a day’s march on him. Keep it up for ever never grow old technically.’

I have turned on the bedside light now, and opened the copy of ‘Ulysses’ that I have carried with me to the hospital. I have found the page where Bloom imagines moving ahead of his own fate. For a moment, this delights me, and then it occurs to me that the pain in my right testicle began as I was in Southern California, in ‘happy warmth’. I did not move ahead of the sun. Instead, I had to come back here. To Ireland. To hospital.

Bloom, by now, has imagined a step on his journey: ‘Turbaned faces going by. Dark caves of carpet shops.’ I direct my thoughts to a shop in a cavernous street in Fez in Morocco where I bought a carpet, asking the owner to show me the oldest thing he had, which he did, and then asking him if he could show me the most beautiful rug or carpet he had. (The man thought for a while and called in someone who could translate and said: What is beautiful for me might not be so for you.)

Or the Hotel Continental in Tangiers where I wrote some of my second novel, or the Blue Mosque in Istanbul where I went every day when I stayed in the city and sat as though I were at prayer.

I turn back to ‘Ulysses’:

The shadows of the mosques among the pillars: priest with a scroll rolled up. A shiver of the trees, signal, the evening wind.

I determine that I must go on a spree when…and then I am unsure when actually is. When I am finished this treatment, I will be too weak to go anywhere. Already I am having trouble walking. It is hard to go up a staircase.

There is a chance that the when might be when I am told that more treatment is needed or when I am advised to enjoy the time left while it lasts. Where would I go then? Would I stay home, lying on the sofa, staring straight ahead? Or would I go where there are ‘turbaned faces going by’ and ‘dark caves of carpet shops’? Would I move ahead of the sun, ‘never grow a day older technically.’

Bloom’s destination on Dorset Street is a butcher’s shop. In the real world the only butcher on Upper Dorset Street in 1904 was Michael Brunton’s, but Joyce wanted something more exotic and also a name that had some personal resonance for him as he wrote this scene in the city of Trieste. He chose the name ‘Dlugacz’ since he knew a Jewish intellectual and Zionist in Trieste called Moses Dlugacz. He gave his name to a butcher’s shop that sold pork in Upper Dorset Street.

Bloom walks back along Dorset Street; his mood changes as ‘A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Fat.’ It is the very same cloud that appears three episodes earlier as Stephen and Buck Mulligan debate lofty subjects on the roof of the tower in Sandycove: ‘A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in deeper green.’

It makes me think of the other rooms on this corridor. One patient turning in the night, and soon another patient turning too, or maybe them both at the same time. The same morning light, the same clouds seen from each window. All of us woken by the same screech of the same seagull. The same nurse coming to take our blood pressure. But that last would have to be at different times unless they were different nurses.

Some things are indeed different from each other, including words. Here in this hospital bed in the middle of the night, I whisper the word ‘day’. Bloom will have an epic day. My day will not be epic. Time for me will move slowly, and then will seem to have moved fast, or just gathered itself up and gone off.

Bloom, on the other hand, will walk into the city. He will go to a funeral. He will observe the world with wit, with sharpness, with intelligence. He will think about sex, about his wife’s disloyalty; he will be intrigued by the modern world; he will go into the National Library; he will be found later at the Ormond Hotel. Towards the end of the day, he will visit the brothel area of Dublin where he will undergo many transformations.

At the end of the book, he will come back to this building where he and Stephen, who has returned with him, will hear ‘the sound of the peal of the hour of the night by the chime of the bells in the church of Saint George.’

The church is just across the road. But there are no bells now. I don’t hear any bells.

I cannot will into being a dream or plan its contours. Dreams go their own way, with their own logic. They seem to have different priorities than I do, or different impulses. But if I can will a dream, I will follow Bloom as soon as he leaves his own house this morning. I will let him melt into the figure of Joyce who is walking home from his day teaching English in Trieste. I will make it winter.

As Joyce opens the door of a chemist shop, planning to buy some special soap, the people inside all shout at him to close the door quickly because of La Bora, the katabatic wind that famously blows through Trieste.

‘La Bora! La Bora!’ a woman shouted at me when I opened the door of a chemist’s shop in Trieste in what must have been 1986.

The dream moves again to Joyce. He remembers to get tickets for ‘Martha’ by Flotow which is being performed in the opera house. He loves how each individual ticket is rolled up and fitted into a round hole at the box office until it is bought. Thus, in one glance he can see what seats are free.

(But maybe that wasn’t Joyce. In fact, I think it was something I noticed in Trieste in 1986. Others, of course, must have noticed it too.)

Bloom, by this time, is wondering who he would be, what he would think, had his father not come to Ireland from Hungary. Would he have a different mind in the different language? What would love be like in Hungarian? Would he, even once, dream of Dublin, his shadow life in Eccles Street, if he had never come here? No, he concludes, that dream could not happen. He would have no intimation of what his life might have been.

In pubs, the Dublin nationalists watch him carefully. It is easy to make mocking reference to his Jewishness. He has let the rumour linger that he is the one who told Arthur Griffith about the movement for Hungarian independence, how the Hungarians, like the Irish and the people of Trieste, needed to find strategies to escape from an empire. As a result, Griffith came up with the idea of Sinn Fein, and wrote a book in the very year that ‘Ulysses’ is set called ‘The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland.’

Was it really true that Bloom had directed Griffith to the example of Hungary? How will the truth ever be known? How will the fiction ever be known? The idea had to come from somewhere. So let’s agree it came from Bloom. Leopold Bloom, Irish liberator! The man who carried the idea from Hungary that fired them all up in Ireland!

Up Bloom! I hereby unveil a statue to Bloom. Up Boom!

For a second, I am in the very bedroom in the Queen’s Hotel in Ennis where Bloom’s father committed suicide. There is someone else in the other bed, but I cannot think who it is. And then I realize who it is, but I don’t want to think about that.

In a bed in the other room in this hospital, there is a man with bad eyesight calling out words that no one is sure about. Telemachus Nestor Proteus Calypso Lotus-Eaters Hades Aeolus Lestrygonians Scylla and Charybdis Wandering Rocks Sirens Cyclops Nausicaa Oxen of the Sun Circe Eumaeus Ithaca Penelope. The night nurse comes to calm him and then he begins to sing to her in a beautiful tenor voice.

The oncologist turns on the light. He asks me a long question. I want him to repeat it and he does: Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?

Duumvirate? I ask.

Stephen and Bloom, he replies.

I know how to answer, as one nurse takes my pulse and another checks my blood pressure.

Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, women, prostitution, diet.

The doctor asks the nurses to leave.

Is there something else, he asks. Did they speak of other matters?

Yes, they did. The Roman catholic church, ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, Jesuit education, careers, the study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of the presabbath, Stephen’s collapse.

I am breathless now. Trying to wake up.

The doctor is asking another question.

Did you have a good night? Peaceful?

Like the other nights, I reply. Nothing unusual.

What’s that big book on the bedside table. It looks like ‘Ulysses’. Did you know that Leopold Bloom lived in this house? I mean, before it was a hospital.

At this time of the morning, I reply, he is stooping to gather two letters that have been delivered. They are on the floor of the hallway just below us now.

Who are they addressed to?

That is when my dream stopped, I say. I will have to consult the book. It is daytime. Too late to know.

Colm Tóibín (September 2024)