Giacomo Joyce by James Joyce

Giacomo Joyce
    James
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: Checoltura ! 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.Crossing the piazza . Grey eve lowering on wide sagegreen pasturelands,
shedding silently dusk and dew. She follows her mother with ungainly grace, the
mare leading her filly foal. Grey twilight molds 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 knobs 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!

    Mio padre: she does the simplest acts
with distinction. Undederivatur ? Mia figlia ha una grandissima ammira-zione 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,
helpless-ness of age, confidence, frankness, urbanity, sincerity, warning,
pathos, compassion: a perfect blend. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!
                This
heart is sore and sad. Crossed in love?
                Long
lewdly leering lips: dark-blooded mollusks

    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