When they arrived in Zurich there was no vacancy in the Berlitz School, the Miss Gilford of Lincolnshire having deceived Joyce. They managed to stay one night in a guest house which bore the auspicious name of “hope.” It was there the “adventure” was consummated and James, still half-embroiled in the family matrix, told Stanislaus in a letter that she was no longer a virgin, she had been “touched.” The pun can hardly have been lost on either of them. The bloodstains on the sheet, he was later in a moment of insane jealousy, to question. And later still Molly Bloom was to say drolly that any woman could simulate her virginity with a drop of red ink or blackberry juice. And so it was on to Trieste where there was no vacancy either, his skills as borrower sorely tried. He found two pupils to whom he gave English lessons. As usual there were some incidents. He managed to get himself arrested when he intervened in a fight between three drunken British sailors and was almost deported back to Ireland. In the midst of such precariousness he wrote the twelfth chapter of Stephen Hero and began a story called “Christmas Eve.”
The head of the Berlitz School took pity on them and within a few days found a teaching post for Joyce in the naval town of Pola one hundred and fifty miles away. An official who met them at the boat said he did not know whether to contemplate murder or suicide, upon sighting a ragged couple dragging a torn suitcase with bits of clothing sticking out, “the bride” in a man’s long overcoat and a straw hat pulled down over her head. Joyce was in his element—here was a milieu of several languages, a hotpotch of tongues, Italian, Serbian, German, all of which would be threaded into his future work. For Nora it was quite a different story. She felt lost, far from home and with no one to turn to, only her wayward liege. “James Joyce, Bachelor of Arts” proved to be an idiosyncratic teacher. His employers thought him gifted but also conceited and absurd, a man of contradictions, fragile and hysterical, refined and ascetic yet one who gravitated toward the mud. Soon they saw his great partiality for drink.
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