Free Giacomo Joyce by James Joyce Page B

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knife has probed in her entrails and withdrawn, leaving the raw jagged gash of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 !....

    As I come out of Ralli’s house I come upon her