Complete Works of James Joyce (301 page)

The first edition

GIACOMO JOYCE

Who? A pale face surrounded by heavy odorous furs. Her movements are shy and nervous. She uses quizzing-glasses.

Yes
: a brief syllable. A brief laugh. A brief beat of the eyelids.

Cobweb handwriting, traced long and fine with quiet disdain and resignation: a young person of quality.

I launch forth on an easy wave of tepid speech: Swedenborg, the pseudo-Areopagite, Miguel de Molinos, Joachim Abbas. The wave is spent. Her classmate, retwisting her twisted body, purrs in boneless Viennese Italian:
Che coltura!
The long eyelids beat and lift: a burning needleprick stings and quivers in the velvet iris.

High heels clack hollow on the resonant stone stairs. Wintry air in the castle, gibbeted coats of mail, rude iron sconces over the windings of the winding turret stairs. Tapping clacking heels, a high and hollow noise. There is one below would speak with your ladyship.

She never blows her nose. A form of speech: the lesser for the greater.

Rounded and ripened: rounded by the lathe of intermarriage and ripened in the forcing-house of the seclusion of her race.

A ricefield near Vercelli under creamy summer haze. the wings of her drooping hat shadow her false smile. Shadows streak her falsely smiling face, smitten by the hot creamy light, grey wheyhued shadows under the jawbones, streaks of eggyolk yellow on the moistened brow, rancid yellow humour lurking within the softened pulp of the eyes.

A flower given by her to my daughter. Frail gift, frail giver, frail blue-veined child.

Padua far beyond the sea. The silent middle age, night, darkness of history sleep in the
Piazza delle Erbe
under the moon. The city sleeps. Under the arches in the dark streets near the river the whores’ eyes spy out for fornicators.
Cinque servizi per cinque franchi
. A dark wave of sense, again and again and again.

Mine eyes fail in darkness, mine eyes fail,

Mine eyes fail in darkness, love.

Again. No more. Dark love, dark longing. No more. Darkness.

Twilight. Crossin the
piazza
. grey eve lowering on wide sagegreen pasturelands, sheddin silently dusk and dew. She follows her mother with ungainly grace, the mare leading her filly foal. Grey twilight moulds softly the slim and shapely haunches, the meek supple tendonous neck, the fine-boned skull. Eve, peace, the dusk of wonder....... Hillo! Ostler! Hilloho!

Papa and the girls sliding downhill, astride of a toboggan: the Grand Turk and his harem. Tightly capped and jacketted, boots laced in deft crisscross over the flesh-warmed tongue, the short skirt taut from the round nobs of the knees. A white flash: a flake, a snowflake:

And when she next doth ride abroad

May I be there to see!

I rush out of the tobacco-shop and call her name. She turns and halts to hear my jumbled words of lessons, hours, lessons, hours: and slowly her pale cheeks are flushed with a kindling opal light. Nay, nay, be not afraid!

Mia padre
: she does the simplest acts with distinction.
Unde derivatur? Mia figlia ha una grandissima ammirazione per il suo maestro inglese
.
The old man’s face, handsome, flushed, with strongly Jewish features and long white whiskers, turns towards me as we walk down the hill together. O! Perfectly said: courtesy, benevolence, curiosity, trust, suspicion, naturalness, helplessness of age, confidence, frankness, urbanity, sincerity, warning, pathos, compassion: a perfect blend. Iganatius Loyola, make haste to help me!

This heart is sore and sad. Crossed in love?

Long lewdly leering lips: dark-blooded molluscs

Moving mists on the hill as I look upward from night and mud. Hanging mists over the damp trees. A light in the upper room. She is dressing to go to the play. There are ghosts in the mirror..... Candles! Candles!

A gentle creature
. At midnight, after music, all the way up the via San Michele, these words were spoken softly. Easy now, Jamesy! Did you never walk the streets of Dublin at night sobbing another name?

Corpses of Jews lie about me rotting in the mould of their holy field. Here is the tomb of her people, black stone, silence without hope..... Pimply Meissel brought me here. He is beyond those trees standing with covered head at the grave of his suicide wife, wondering how the woman hwo slept in his bed has come to this end..... The tomb of her people and hers: black stone, silence without hope: and all is ready. Do not die!

She raises her arms in an effort to hook at the nape of her neck a gown of black veiling. She cannot: no, she cannot. She moves backwards towards me mutely. I raise my arms to help her: her arms fall. I hold the websoft edges of her gown and drawing them out to hook them I see through the opening of the black veil her lithe body sheathed in an orange shift. It slips its ribbons of moorings at her shoulders and falls slowly: a lithe smooth naked body shimmering with silvery scales. It slips slowly over the slender buttocks of smooth polished silver and over their furrow, a tarnished silver shadow.... Fingers, cold and calm and moving.... A touch, a touch.

Small witless helpless and thin breath. But bend and hear: a voice. A sparrow under the wheels of Juggernaut, shaking shaker of the earth. Please, mister God, big mister God! Goodbye, big world!.......
Aber das ist eine Schweinerei!

Great bows on her slim bronze shoes: spurs of a pampered fowl.

The lady goes apace, apace, apace.....
Pure air on the upland road. Trieste is waking rawly: raw sunlight over its huddled browntiled roofs, testudoform; a multitude of prostrate bugs awwait a national deliverance. Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife’s lover’s wife: the busy housewife is astir, sloe-eyed, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand..... Pure air and silence on the upland road and hoofs. A girl on horseback. Hedda! Hedda Gabler!

The sellers offer on their altars the first fruits: green-flecked lemons, jewelled cherries, shameful peaches with torn leaves. The carriage passes through the lane of canvas stalls, its wheel-spokes spinning in the glare. Make way! Her father and his son sit in the carriage. Owlish wisdom stares from their eyes brooding upon the lore of their
Summa contra Gentiles
.

She thinks the Italian gentlemen were right to haul Ettore Albini, the critic of the
Secolo
, from the stalls because he did not stand up when the band played the Royal March. She heard that at supper. Ay. They love their country when they are quite sure which country it is.

She listens: virgin most prudent.

A skirt caught back by her sudden moving knee; a white lace edging of an underskirt lifted unduly; a legstretched web of stocking.
Si pol?

I play lightly, softly singing, John Dowland’s languid song.
Loth to depart
: I too am loth to go. That age is here and now. Here, opening from the darkness of desire, are eyes that dim the breaking East, their shimmer the shimmer of the scum that mantles the cesspool of the court of slobbering James. Here are wines all ambered, dying fallings of sweet airs, the proud pavan, kind gentlewomen wooing from their balconies, with sucking mouths, the pox-fouled wenches and young wives that, gaily yielding to their ravishers , clip and clip again.

In the raw veiled spring morning faint odours float of morning Paris: aniseed, damp sawdust, hot dough of bread: and as I cross the Pont Saint Michel the steelblue waking waters chill my heart. They creep and lap about the island whereon men have lived since the stone age..... Tawny gloom in the vast gargoyled church. It is cold as on that morning:
quia frigus erat
. Upon the steps of the far high altar, naked as the body of the Lord, the ministers lie prostrate in weak prayer. The voice of an unseen reader rises, intoning the lesson from Hosea.
Haec dicit Dominus: in tribulatione sua mane consurgent ad me.
Venite et revertamur ad Dominum....
She stand beside me, pale and chill, clothed with the shadows of the sindark nave, her thin elbow at my arm. Her flesh recalls the thrill of that raw mist-veiled morning, hurrying torches, cruel eyes. Her soul is sorrowful, trembles and would weep. Weep not for me, O daughter of Jerusalem!

I expound Shakespeare to docile Trieste: Hamlet, quoth I, who is most courteous to gentle and simple is rude only to Polonius. Perhaps, an embittered idealist, he can see in the parents of his beloved only grotesque attempts on the part of nature to produce her image........... Marked you that?

She walks before me along the corridor and as she walks a dark coil of her hair slowly uncoils and falls. Slowly uncoiling, falling hair. She does not know and walks before me simple and proud. So did she walk by Dante in simple pride and so, stainless of blood and voilation, the daughter of Cenci, Beatrice to her death: