Complete Works of James Joyce (359 page)

The City of the Tribe
s

ITALIAN ECHOES IN AN IRISH PORT.

1912

Galway, August.

The lazy Dubliner, who travels little and knows his own country only by hearsay, believes that the inhabitants of Galway are descendants of Spanish stock, and that you can’t go four steps in the dark streets of the City of the Tribes without meeting the true Spanish type, with olive complexion and raven hair. The Dubliner is both right and wrong. Today in Galway the black eyes are scarce enough, and the raven hair, too, since a Titian red predominates for the most part. The old Spanish houses are falling to ruins, and clumps of weeds grow in the protruding bay windows. Outside the city walls rise the suburbs — new, gay, and heedless of the past, but you have only to close your eyes to this bothersome modernity for a moment to see in the twilight of history the ‘Spanish city’. It lies scattered among innumerable little islands, cut by rivulets, cataracts, conduits, and canals, at the lower end of a vast gulf of the Atlantic Ocean in which the entire British navy could anchor. At the mouth of the gulf, the three Aran islands, lying on the grey waters like a sleeping whale, form a natural breakwater and take the force of the Atlantic waves. The little lighthouse of the southern island casts a weak ray of light toward the west, the last greeting of the old world to the new, and calls stubbornly but in vain to the foreign merchant, who, for many years, has not come near these parts.

* * * *

And yet, in the Middle Ages these waters were cut by thousands of foreign ships. The signs at the corners of the narrow streets record the city’s connection with Latin Europe — Madeira Street, Merchant Street, Spaniards Walk, Madeira Island, Lombard Street, Velasquezde Palmeira Boulevard. Oliver Cromwell’s correspondence shows that the port of Galway was the second most important harbour in the United Kingdom, and the prime market in the entire Kingdom for the Spanish and Italian trade. In the first decade of the fourteenth century, a Florentine merchant, Andrea Gerardo, was tax collector of the government, and on the list of officials of the seventeenth century we find the name of Giovanni Fante. The city itself has as guardian Saint Nicholas of Bari, patron of sailors and babies, and the so-called ‘seal of the college’ bears his likeness. The papal envoy, Cardinal Rinuccini, came to Galway during the trial of the martyr king, and placed the city under the papal flag. The clergy and religious orders refused to recognize his authority, so the fiery Cardinal broke the bell in the Church of the Carmelites, and posted two priests of his own following at the church door to prevent the entrance of the faithful. The parish house of Saint Nicholas still preserves a record of another Italian prelate of the Middle Ages — an autograph letter of the notorious Borgia. In the same place there is a curious document, left by an Italian traveller of the sixteenth century, in which the writer says that, although he had travelled throughout the world, he had never seen in a single glance what he saw in Galway — a priest elevating the Host, a pack chasing a deer, a ship entering the harbour under full sail, and a salmon being killed with a spear.

Almost all the wine imported into the United Kingdom from Spain, Portugal, the Canary Islands, and Italy passed through this port, the annual import amounting to 1500 ‘tuns’, that is to say, almost two million litres. This trade was so important that the government of Holland proposed to buy a large tract of land near the city and pay for it by covering the ground with pieces of silver. Afraid of the foreign competition, the Galway merchants had their envoy reply that they would accept if the silver pieces would be placed end-up on the ground. The answer of the Dutch to this most kind counter-offer has not yet arrived.

* * * *

For many centuries, the entire municipal and church administration was in the hands of the descendants of the fourteen tribes, whose names are recorded in four limping verses. The strangest and most interesting historical document in the city archives is the map of the city made for the Duke of Lorraine in the seventeenth century, when His Highness wished to be assured of the city’s greatness on the occasion of a loan requested of him by his English confrère, the happy monarch. The map, full of symbolic expressions and engravings, was the work of Henry Joyce, Dean of the Canons of the city. All the margins of the parchment are heavy with the heraldic arms of the tribes, and the map itself is little more than a topographic symphony on the theme of the number of the tribes. Thus, the map maker enumerates and depicts fourteen bastions, fourteen towers on the wall, fourteen principal streets, fourteen narrow streets, and then, sliding down into a minor mode, six gardens, six altars for the procession of Corpus Domini, six markets, and six other wonders. Among these last, in fact, the last of the last, the worthy Dean enumerates ‘the old pigeon house located in the southern part of the city’.

* * * *

Of all the tribes, the most famous was that of the Lynches. During the century and a half that runs from the founding of the city to the devastating invasions of the Cromwellian soldiery, a member of this family filled the post of chief magistrate a good eighty-three times. The most tragic event in the city’s history was the expiation of a crime committed in 1493 by the young Walter Lynch, the only son of the chief magistrate James Lynch Fitz- Stephen. The magistrate, a rich wine merchant, took a voyage that year to Spain, where he was the guest of a Spanish friend of his, a certain Gomez. This man’s son, listening every night to the tales of the traveller, was very much attracted to far-away Ireland, and asked his father’s permission to accompany their guest when he returned to his native land. The father hesitated. Times were dangerous, and travellers were accustomed to make out their wills before setting out for shores known or unknown. But the magistrate Lynch guaranteed the safety of the youth, and they left together.

When they arrived in Galway, the young Spaniard became the friend of the magistrate’s son, Walter, a wayward young man of impetuous nature, who was paying court to Agnes Blake, the daughter of another nobleman of the city. Very soon, love arose between Agnes and the foreigner, and one night when Gomez was leaving the Blake house, Walter Lynch, who was waiting in ambush, stuck a knife in his back, and then, in a blind rage, dragged the body along the street and threw it into a ditch.

The crime was discovered and young Walter was arrested and tried. His father, chief magistrate of the city, was the judge. Deaf to the call of blood, and mindful only of the honour of the city and of his own pledged word, he condemned the assassin to death. In vain his friends tried to dissuade him. The people, full of pity for the unhappy youth, besieged the judge’s home, the dark and gloomy castle that still shadows the main street. But the magistrate was inexorable, even when the hangman refused to execute the sentence. Father and son spent the night before the execution together in the prison cell, praying until dawn. When the hour of execution arrived, father and son appeared at a window of the house. They kissed and bade each other farewell, then the father himself hanged his son from the window beam before the eyes of the horrified crowd.

The old Spanish houses are falling to ruin. The castles of the tribes are demolished. Clumps of weeds grow in the windows and the open courtyards. Over the gateways, the noble coats of arms, cut in the darkened rock, are fading — the wolf of the Campidoglio with the two twins, the two-headed eagle of the Hapsburgs, the black bull of the Darcys, descendants of Charlemagne. In the city of Galway, writes an old chronicler, reign the passions of pride and lust.

* * * *

The evening is quiet and grey. From the distance, beyond the waterfall, comes a murmur. It sounds like the hum of bees around a hive. It comes closer. Six young men appear, playing bagpipes, at the head of a band of people. They pass, proud and warlike, with heads uncovered, playing a vague and strange music. In the uncertain light you can hardly distinguish the green plaids hanging from the right shoulder and the saffron-coloured kilts. They enter the street of the Convent of Offerings, and, as the vague music spreads in the twilight, at the windows of the convent appear, one by one, the white veils of the nuns.

James Joyce

The Mirage of the Fisherman of Ara
n

ENGLAND’S SAFETY VALVE IN CASE OF WAR.

1912

Galway,
2
September

The little ship carrying a small load of travellers moves away from the quay under the watchful eyes of the Scottish agent absorbed in a private fantasy of calculation. It leaves the little port of Galway and enters open water, leaving behind on its right the village of Claddagh, a cluster of huts outside the walls of the city. A cluster of huts, and yet a kingdom. Up until a few years ago the village elected its own king, had its own mode of dress, passed its own laws, and lived to itself. The wedding rings of the inhabitants are still decorated with the king’s crest: two joined hands supporting a crowned heart.

We set out for Aranmor, the holy island that sleeps like a great shark on the grey waters of the Atlantic Ocean, which the islanders call the Old Sea. Beneath the waters of this bay and along its coast lie the wrecks of a squadron of the unfortunate Spanish Armada. After their defeat in the English Channel, the ships set sail for the North, where the storms and the waves scattered them. The citizens of Galway, remembering the long friendship between Spain and Ireland, hid the fugitives from the vengeance of the English garrison and gave the shipwrecked a decent burial, wrapping their bodies in white linen cloth.

The waters have repented. Every year on the day before the Feast of the Assumption, when the herring fishing begins, the waters of the bay are blessed. A flotilla of fishing boats departs from Claddagh preceded by a flagship, on whose deck stands a Dominican friar. When they reach an appropriate place the flotilla stops, the fishermen kneel down and uncover themselves, and the friar, muttering prayers of exorcism, shakes his aspergill on the sea, and divides the dark air in the form of a cross.

A border of white sand on the right indicates the place where the new transatlantic port is, perhaps, destined to rise. My companion spreads out a large map on which the projected lines curve, ramify, and cross each other from Galway to the great Canadian ports. The voyage from Europe to America will take less than three days, according to the figures. From Galway, the last port in Europe, to Saint John, Newfoundland, a steamship will take two days and sixteen hours, and from Galway to Halifax, the first port in Canada, three days and ten hours. The text of the booklet attached to the map bristles with figures, estimates of cost, and oceanographic pictures. The writer makes a warm appeal to the British admiralty, to the railway societies, to the Chambers of Commerce, to the Irish population. The new port would be a safety valve for England in case of war. From Canada, the granary and warehouse of the United Kingdom, great cargos of grain would enter the Irish port, thus avoiding the dangers of navigation in Saint George’s Channel and the enemy fleets. In time of peace, the new line would be the shortest way between one continent and the other. A large part of the goods and passengers which are now landed at Liverpool would in the future land at Galway, proceeding directly to London, -via Dublin and Holyhead. The old decadent city would rise again. From the new world, wealth and vital energy would run through this new artery of an Ireland drained of blood. Again, after about ten centuries, the mirage which blinded the poor fisherman of Aran, follower and emulator of St. Brendan, appears in the distance, vague and tremulous on the mirror of the ocean.

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honoured by posterity because he was the last to discover America. A thousand years before the Genoese navigator was derided at Salamanca, Saint Brendan weighed anchor for the unknown world from the bare shore which our ship is approaching; and, after crossing the ocean, landed on the coast of Florida. The island at that time was wooded and fertile. At the edge of the woods he found the hermitage of Irish monks which had been established in the fourth century after Christ by Enda, a saint of royal blood. From this hermitage came Finnian, later Bishop of Lucca. Here lived and dreamed the visionary Saint Fursa, described in the hagiographie calendar of Ireland as the precursor of Dante Alighieri. A medieval copy of the Visions of Fursa depicts the voyage of the saint from hell to heaven, from the gloomy valley of the four fires among the bands of devils up through the universe to the divine light reflected from innumerable angels wings. This vision would have served as a model for the poet of the
Divine Comedy
, who, like Columbus, is honoured by posterity because he was the last to visit and describe the three regions of the soul.

* * * *

On the shore of the bay fragile little boats of stretched canvas are drawn up to dry. Four islanders come nimbly down to the sea over rocks covered with purple and rust-coloured seaweed, like that seen in the shops of herb-sellers in Galway. The fisherman of Aran has sure feet. He wears a rough sandal of untanned cowhide, without heels, open at the arch, and tied with rawhide laces. He dresses in wool as thick as felt and wears a big black hat with a wide brim.

We stop in one of the steep little streets, uncertain. An islander, who speaks an English all his own, says good morning, adding that it has been a horrible summer, praise be to God. The phrase, which at first seems one of the usual Irish blunders, rather comes from the innermost depths of human resignation. The man who said it bears a princely name, that of the O’Flaherties, a name which the young Oscar Wilde proudly had printed on the title page of his first book. But time and the wind have razed to the ground the bygone civilization to which he belongs — the sacred druids of his island, the territory ruled by his ancestors, the language, and perhaps even the name, of that hermit of Aran who was called the dove of the church. Around the stunted shrubs which grow on the hills of the island his imagination has woven legends and tales which reveal the depths of his psyche. And under his apparent simplicity he retains a slight trace of scep-.

ticism, and of humour. He looks away when he has spoken and lets the eager enthusiast jot down in his notebook the astounding fact that yonder hawthorn tree was the little tree from which Joseph of Arimathea cut his walking stick.

An old lady comes toward us and invites us to enter her house. She places on the table an enormous tea pot, a small loaf of bread, and some salted butter. The islander, who is her son, sits near the fireplace and answers the questions of my companion in an embarrassed and humble manner. He doesn’t know how old he is, but he says that he will soon be old. He doesn’t know why he hasn’t taken a wife, perhaps because there are no women for him. My companion goes on to ask why there are no women for him, and the islander, removing his hat from his head, sinks his face in the soft wool, confused and smiling. Aran, it is said, is the strangest place in the world. A poor place, but no matter how poor it is, when my companion tries to pay, the old lady rejects the money almost angrily and asks us if we are trying to dishonour her house.

A fine and steady drizzle falls from the grey clouds. The rainy mist comes in from the West, while the little ship calls desperately for the laggards. The island disappears little by little, wrapped in a smoky veil. Three Danish sailors sitting stationary on the ridge of the slope also disappear. They were out in the ocean for the summer fishing and made a stop at Aran. Silent and melancholy, they seem to be thinking of the Danish hordes who burned the city of Galway in the eighth century, of the Irish lands which are included in the dowries of the girls of Denmark, according to legend, and which they dream of reconquering. On the islands and on the sea falls the rain. It rains as it can rain only in Ireland. Under the forecastle, where a girl is noisily making love to one of the crew, holding him on her knees, we again open the map. In the twilight the names of the ports cannot be distinguished, but the line that leaves Galway and ramifies and spreads out recalls the motto placed near the crest of his native city by a mystic and perhaps even prophetic head of a monastery:

Quasi lilium germinans germinabit,

et quasi terebinthus extendans ramos suos.

James Joyce