Absence

Dublin and Trieste

WINTER 1909

JIM COMES HOME SCUTTERED FROM A CAFFÈ, LATE THE NIGHT before he leaves again for Ireland, though I’ve prepared a good farewell meal and Stannie’s brought a panettone. We eat without him. I’m miserable and sit at table giving out long yards about Jim.

“See how he treats us, one and all? He has no manners that man, not for us, at least. Oh, he has plenty of high words for any guttersnipe about the town, but none that come home with him.” I cross my arms over my chest. “He may stay in Dublin once he gets there, for all I care. Let him rot in Fontenoy Street with Pappie, let him die trying to build his cinematograph. What use is the blackguard to me?”

“You’re very hard on Jim, Nora,” Eva says. “Isn’t he just out having a drink like any fellow does?” I glare at her, not daring to open my beak for fear of what squawky madness might fly out.

“Jim drinks a bit more than the average fellow, Eva,” Stannie mumbles. “He’s not an easy man; Nora puts up with a lot.”

We eat on in silence, the children looking at us with big eyes.

Eva scrapes back her chair eventually. “I’ll get the children down for the night,” she says, scooping up Lucia like a baby and carrying her toward her bed. Eva makes goo-goo faces at Lucy and they both giggle and whisper, as if they share secrets.

Stannie is silent for a while then speaks up. “He’ll be away for a long while, Nora. Don’t be too hard on him. It’s only yourself you’ll injure.”

“Hmm,” I say, my gut knotted with annoyance.

“I’m off.” I nod and Stannie leaves. I sit on and wait.

When Jim falls in the door, I leap up and roar “Imbecille!” His face takes on a wounded look, but I feel more like smacking the cheeks off him than anything else. Running to Ireland to set up a cinematograph, indeed, when we need him here. “You’re nothing but a bloody imbecile, James Joyce,” I hiss and stalk away from him to my bed.

ON THE TRAIN STATION PLATFORM, WHERE WE PART, THE FOUR cold beats of imbecille ring in my ears: Im-be-cil-le! I don’t completely regret shouting the word at him, but he’ll be gone for two months or more, it’ll be our first Christmas apart, and my heart cracks a little to see him sad-eyed beside his trunk, off to Ireland and me left behind. We say good-bye brusquely.

“Mind yourself,” I say, with a peck to his cheek.

He grabs my hand. “Good-bye, my love. Be good.”

Jim stands in the train doorway to wave, but I have to lower my head so that he won’t see my tears. I turn my back and gallop down the platform, my eyes spilling.

I’m left in Trieste with a mopey Eva and two small children and a large pain in my backside. And now he punishes me. No letter has come from Dublin, just a postcard to say he arrived. No pages full of love, nothing to say whether Pappie is well, or if Jim and his backers have secured premises for the cinematograph, or anything at all. I want only a morsel, to know Jim is not angry with me. I cry over the little framed picture of him by my bed and regret my mad temper, though he drove me to it. Who is the imbecile now? I hold Jim’s photograph to my breast and sob like a woman in mourning. I worry that in Dublin the old haunts will become attractive to him again, those places around Tyrone Street, and the women there. Or that he’ll reacquaint with the well-to-do ladies who were his friends before he met me. His silence cuts me.

At last he writes, but reprimands me for calling him an imbecile. He says the Volta Cinematograph will open on Mary Street in Dublin and that with profits from his venture, he’ll buy me furs: a hat, a stole, a muff. His letter is strange and wayward. He writes,

I hate Ireland and Irish people. All I witness here are lecherous priests and false, cunning women. I thought tonight of that priest who fondled you in the presbytery in Galway and I wondered if you too are against me because, if you remember, we passed a priest in Trieste a fortnight ago and I said, “Aren’t you repulsed by the sight of him?” and you said, in a short, dry way, “No, I’m not.” These things silence and wound me. I am an envious, lonely, proud, discontented person. You should be nicer to me, more patient. Who is there but you? I weep as I write this, Nora. We have just this one life to love each other. Be kind to me, my darling. Bear with me though I am insensitive and awkward.

My odd, graceless Jim, he feels everything so deeply, most especially when we’re apart. He nurses small ills like pets and hurts himself with them. I swell with pity for him for it can’t be easy to be away. He tells me his sister Eileen wishes to join our Triestine tribe. Well, she’ll be company for Eva and she’ll earn a few useful pennies too. I’m happy to have her though it means I’ll be surrounded by Joyces; perhaps I’ll become one myself some fine day.

Jim sends me reindeer gloves to keep off the biting bora wind and a selection of others in soft leather. He promises, too, twelve yards of tweed to make a dress and coat.

“I’ll be the belle of Trieste,” I say to Eva when I open the parcel of gloves.

“But, Mamma, you have only two hands!” Lucia says.

I laugh. “See how kind your babbo is.” I give Eva a pair of white kid gloves and she thanks me. “See, clever Lucia, I mean to share.”

Eva and Lucia go about together like two little spinsters; it warms me to see them light in each other’s company for they both need that. Today they are bringing soup that I’ve made to Stannie, who has taken to his bed with a bad cold. Between us we mean to make him well again.

STANNIE FIDGETS WITH HIS PASTA, PUSHING IT FROM ONE SIDE OF the plate to the other. Eva glances at me to see if I’m going to ask him what’s the matter, or if he means to cough it out himself.

“Come on, Stannie, what ails you?” I ask.

He sets down his cutlery and faces me. “Herr Scholz came to see me.”

“Our Herr Scholz? The landlord? What did he want?”

“He didn’t like to come to you, with Jim away. He gave me this.” Stannie hands me a folded page and I open it and try to read the words, but my Italian is not up to the task. “Tell me, Stannie.”

“It’s a writ, Nora. You owe four months’ rent, and if you don’t pay at least two, Scholz means to evict you.”

I smack the table. “For the love of all that’s holy! Jim told me we were all right before he left. He promised me.” Georgie, Lucia, and Eva all cease eating and stare at me like strung puppets. I push back my chair and stand, thinking of the gloves and the tweed, the cost of them. “Oh God almighty, I’ll have James Joyce’s scalp for this. What am I to do now, Stannie?”

“I’ve already sent a telegram to Jim.” Stannie was never happy with the Volta scheme and it’s clear now he’s boiling. “The man is his father’s son, no doubt about it.”

Eva tuts. “All Jim’s furs and necklaces and fireworks and he doesn’t pay the rent.”

I glare at her. “Isn’t he putting a roof over your head?”

I see a look pass between Stannie and Eva and I want to knock their two crowns together. I’m furious with Jim, to be sure, but I won’t have a strapeen like Eva criticize him. I go to the box of paper and pull out a sheet. Jim will get the whole of my anger now, whether he likes it or not.

VIA VINCENZO SCUSSA 8, TRIESTE

15 November 1909

How could you do this to me, Jim, and to our children? I know you have expenses there, what with your father’s hospitalization and the care of the girls left to you, but what about us? Are we not your greatest care, your largest responsibility?

Lucia and Georgie sit here now but tomorrow they may sit on the street with la Nonna and with the lost boy outside the church, because you have not done your duty, which is to make sure they’re not cast out onto the streets like the beggar Bartimaeus in Jericho. Is that what you want for these children, to roam Trieste in rags, their hands out for coins?

You disgust me, James Joyce. You make false promises to those whom you claim to love the most. You’re not a man. How can you be when you fail to protect us? How can you be when you so clearly lie with prostitutes for that itch that ails you is got no other way? I’m leaving you, Jim. I’m going back to Galway to throw myself at the mercy of my mother and my uncles. I can’t stay another moment here when I don’t know from one day to the next if you’re faithful to me or if my children will be without a place to live.

Nora

His return letter to me is abject, wretched.

I don’t even dare to call you by your name. I feel like a cur who has been thrashed across the eyes. I am degraded before you.

He says I should leave him and let him sink back into the mud.

His words stir me and I feel foolish and ignorant—where would I go, truly? I don’t want to go to Galway, I never want to be without Jim. I look at the beautiful gloves he chose for me and cry knowing that he bought them with a big heart and that all I do is scold him and write angry words. I pick up my pen again and write nothing but kindness and forgiveness to him. By return he tells me he ate dinner in Finn’s Hotel and begged to see the room I once occupied there.

I think of you in that room, Gooseen, burning quietly with love, and I cry for you in your simple dress with your simple manners. I cry that you ended up with my ignoble love, I cry with pity for myself who is unworthy.

This strange land, this strange hotel, the shadow of a strange girl staring out over college park. A mysterious beauty hangs every place she has lived! I sob. In her is the beauty and mystery of life, of this world, the doomed race we come from, the pure spirituality of my boyhood. Her very soul and name and eyes that are blue, wildflowers in a rain-drenched hedge. Her soul trembles beside my own, I speak her name to the night, I weep because the beauty of the world passes like a dream behind her eyes.

His words have such grace; I swallow them down and let them settle inside me. I lie on our bed to read and reread and bask in them. An idea occurs to me: I can’t match Jim’s words for beauty, but I can rope him to me with certain words of my own. I take my pen and scratch out another private note, one that will keep Jim in my spell.

VIA VINCENZO SCUSSA 8, TRIESTE

20 November 1909

Jim, the fact is that I will have to punish you for your horrible ways and for your neglect of me when you return to me from Ireland. You think I will not reprimand you, no doubt. You think me too small and girlish, perhaps, to discipline a man. But when you get here I will order you to take off your clothes and, if you disobey me, I will sit on you and pin your arms down until you howl for forgiveness, and until your prick quivers and begs for my mercy, until I let it fuck me. Because I long for you to fuck me again, Jim. I wait here, your little fuckbird, open and wet.

Now, there is something for you to think about!

Your Nora

44 FONTENOY STREET, DUBLIN

2 December 1909

Nora, you rogue! I hardly dare to be familiar with you and you write me such a thing! I am agog when you write what you will do to me if I disobey you.

Don’t take offense at what I write, dear, you are firstly and forever my blue rain-drenched flower. My love for you allows me to honor the everlasting beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes, but also it means I want to force you onto your soft belly and fuck you from behind, a hog riding his sow, rejoicing in the stench and sweat that rises from your arse, glorying in your upturned dress and girlish drawers and in the fluster of your blushed cheeks and tangled-up hair. My love allows me to cry tears of pity and regard at some small word, to tremble with love for you at the sound of some note of music, or to lie top to tail with you and feel you fondle and tickle my balls, or sticking your fingers up the back of me and your hot mouth sucking off my cock while my head is lodged between your plump thighs, my hands clutching the cushions of your bum and my tongue licking hungrily at your red cunt. I have taught you almost to be overcome by my voice singing or whispering to your soul the passion and sorrow of life and at the same time have taught you to make lewd signs to me with your lips, to rouse me with filthy touches and sounds, and even to do in my presence that most shameful and dirty act of the body. You recall the evening you pulled up your clothes and let me lie on the floor looking up while you did it? Then, love, you could not even meet my eyes.

You are mine, Nora, mine! I love you. All I have written above is only momentary madness. The last drop of mine has hardly been spurted up your cunt before it ends and my love, the love of my poetry, the love of my eyes for your strange beguiling eyes, blows over my soul like a bora of spices. My cock is still hot and hard and quivering from the last brutal thrust inside you when a low, tender hymn sounds in sorrowful worship of you from the dark cloisters of my heart.

Nora, my darling, my blue-eyed blackguard girl, my Gooseen, be my harlot, be my mistress (my frigging mistress! my fucking whore!) you will always be my wildflower of the hedges, my beautiful rain-drenched flower.

Jim

He hopes the “coarse immodesty” of his letter doesn’t offend me. By God, it does not. It sends me, instead, into a frenzy of heat and I can barely stand to be with other people for I need to be alone on my bed to read his sinful words over and over and to ride my own fingers on the pleasure and badness of them. Oh Jim, oh my beautiful man, if I turn you to a beast as you say, you do the same to me.

. . . Nora, you lead the way. It was you who slipped your fingers into my trousers to tickle my prick; it was you who frigged me until I spurted warmly onto your fingers, all the time looking steadily at me with those saint’s eyes of yours. It was you who first told me to “fuck up,” riding my horn, you stuck my cock into your cunt, love, you did that . . .