Free Giacomo Joyce by James Joyce Page A

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 who 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 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,