Giacomo Joyce (2 page)

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

The lady goes
aspace
,
aspace
,
aspace
.....
Pure air on the
upland road. Trieste is waking
rawly
: raw sunlight
over its huddled
browntiled
roofs,
testudoform
; a multitude of prostrate bugs await a national
deliverance.
Bellumo
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, jeweled 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. They have owls’ eyes and owls’ wisdom. 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 by her sudden moving
knee; a white lace edging of an underskirt lifted unduly; a leg-stretched 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
pow
-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 steel-blue 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:
quiafrigus
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.
Haecdicit
Dominus: in tribulation
sua
mane
consurgent
ad me.
Venite
et
revertamur
ad
Dominum
....
She stands 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 violation, the daughter of Cenci, Beatrice, to her
death:

........ Tie

My girdle for me
and bind up this hair

In
any simple knot.

The housemaid tells me that they had to
take her away at once to the hospital,
poveretta
,
that she suffered so much, so much,
poveretta
,
that it is very grave...... I walk away from her empty house. I feel that I am
about to cry. Ah, no! It will not be like that, in a moment, without a word,
without a look. No, no! Surely hell’s luck will not fail me!

Operated.
The surgeon’s
knife has probed in her entrails and withdrawn, leaving the raw jagged gash of
its passage on her belly. I see her full dark suffering eyes, beautiful as the
eyes of an antelope. O cruel wound! Libidinous God!

Once more in her chair by the window,
happy words on her tongue, happy laughter. A bird twittering after storm, happy
that its little foolish life has fluttered out of reach of the clutching
fingers of an epileptic lord and giver of life, twittering happily, twittering
and chirping happily.

She says that, had
The Portrait of
the Artist
been frank only for frankness’ sake, she would have asked why I
had given it to her to read. O you would, would you?
A lady
of letters.

She stands black-robed at the telephone.
Little timid laughs, little cries, timid runs of speech suddenly broken....
Paleròcolla
mamma....
Come!
chook
, chook!
come
! The black
pullet is frightened: little runs suddenly broken, little timid cries: it is
crying for its mamma, the portly hen.

Loggione
.
The sodden
walls ooze a steamy damp. A symphony of smells fuses the mass of huddled human
forms: sour reek of armpits,
nozzled
oranges, melting
breast ointments,
mastick
water, the breath of
suppers of
sulphurous
garlic, foul phosphorescent
farts,
opoponax
,
the
frank
sweat of marriageable and married womankind, the soapy stink of men...... All
night I have watched her, all night I shall see her: braided and pinnacled hair
and olive oval face and calm soft eyes. A green fillet upon her hair and about
her body a green-broidered gown: the hue of the illusion of the vegetable glass
of nature and of lush grass, the hair of graves.

My words in her mind: cold polished
stones sinking through a quagmire.

Those quiet cold fingers have touched
the pages, foul and fair, on which my shame for glow
for
ever
.
Quiet and cold and pure fingers.
Have
they never erred?

Her body has no smell: an
odourless
flower.

On the stairs.
A cold frail
hand: shyness, silence: dark languor-flooded eyes: weariness.

Whirling wreaths
of grey
vapour
upon the heath.
Her face, how
grey and grave! Dank matted hair. Her lips press softly, her sighing breath
comes through.
Kissed.

My voice, dying in the echoes of its
words, dies like the wisdom-wearied voice of the Eternal calling on Abraham
through echoing hills. She leans back against the pillowed wall:
odalisque-featured in the luxurious obscurity. Her eyes have drunk my thoughts:
and into the moist warm yielding welcoming darkness of her womanhood, itself
dissolving, has streamed and poured and flooded a liquid and abundant seed......
Take her now who will
!....