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Ichabudonosor begat O'Donnell Magnus and O'Donnell Magnus begat Christbaum
and Christbaum begat Ben Maimun and Ben Maimun begat Dusty Rhodes and Dusty
Rhodes begat Benamor and Benamor begat Jones-Smith and Jones-Smith begat
Savorgnanovich and Savorgnanovich begat Jasperstone and Jasperstone begat
Vingtetunieme and Vingtetunieme begat Szombathely and Szombathely begat
Virag and Virag begat Bloom et vocabitur nomen eius Emmanuel.
A DEADHAND (Writes on the wall.) Bloom is a cod. A CRAB (In bush
ranger's kit.) What did you do in the cattlecreep behind Kilbarrack?
A FEMALE INFANT (Shakes a rattle.) And under Ballybough bridge?
A HOLLYBUSH And in the devil's glen?
BLOOM (Blushes furiously all over from front to nates, three tears
falling from his left eye.) Spare my past.
THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS (In bodycoats, kneebreeches, with Donnybrook
fair shillelaghs.) Sjambok him!
(Bloom with asses' ears seats himself in the pillory with crossed arms,
his feet protruding. He whistles Don Giovanni, a cenar teco. Artane orphans,
joining hands, caper round him. Girls of the Prison Gate Mission, joining
hands, caper round in the opposite direction.)
THE ARTANE ORPHANS
You big, you bog, you dirty dog!
You think the ladies love you!
THE PRISON GATE GIRLS
If you see kay
Tell him he may
See you in tea
Tell him from me.
HORNBLOWER (In ephod and huntingcap, announces.) And he shall carry the
sins of the people to Azazel, the spirit which is in the wilderness, and to
Lilith, the nighthag. And they shall stone him and defile him, yea, all from
Agendath Netaim and from Mizraim, the land of Ham.
(All the people cast soft pantomime stones at Bloom. Many bonafide
travellers and ownerless dogs come near him and defile him. Mastiansky and
Citron approach in gaberdines, wearing long earlocks. They wag their beards
at Bloom.)
MASTIANSKY AND CITRON Belial! Laemlein of Istria! the false Messiah!
Abulafia!
(George S. Mesias, Bloom's tailor, appears, a tailor's goose under his
arm, presenting a bill.)
MESIAS To alteration one pair trousers eleven shillings.
BLOOM (Rubs his hands cheerfully.) Just like old times. Poor Bloom!
(Reuben J. Dodd, black bearded Iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing on his
shoulders the drowned corpse of his son, approaches the pillory.)
REUBEN J. (Whispers hoarsely.) The squeak is out. A split is gone for
the flatties. Nip the first rattler.
THE FIRE BRIGADE Pflaap!
BROTHER BUZZ (Invests Bloom in a yellow habit with embroidery of
painted flames and high pointed hat. He places a bag of gunpowder round his
neck and hands him over to the civil power, saying.) Forgive him his
trespasses.
(Lieutenant Myers of the Dublin Fire Brigade by general request sets
fire to Bloom. Lamentations.)
THE CITIZEN Thank heaven!
BLOOM (In a seamless garment marked I. H. S. stands upright amid
phoenix flames.) Weep not for me, O daughters of Erin.
(He exhibits to Dublin reporters traces of burning. The daughters of
Erin, in black garments with lace prayerbooks and long lighted candles in
their hands, kneel down and pray.)
THE DAUGHTERS OF ERIN Kidney of Bloom, pray for us. Flower of the Bath,
pray for us. Mentor of Menton, pray for us. Canvasser for the Freeman, pray
for us. Charitable Mason, pray for us. Wandering Soap, pray for us. Sweets
of Sin, pray for us. Music without Words, pray for us. Reprover of the
Citizen, pray for us. Friend of all Frillies, pray for us. Midwife Most
Merciful, pray for us. Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence,
pray for us.
(A choir of six hundred voices, conducted by Mr Vincent O'Brien, sings
the Alleluia chorus, accompanied on the organ by Joseph Glynn. Bloom becomes
mute, shrunken, carbonised.)
ZOE Talk away till you're black in the face.
BLOOM (In caubeen with clay pipe stuck in the band, dusty brogues, an
emigrant's red handkerchief bundle in his hand, leading a black bogoak pig
by a sugaun, with a smile in his eye.) Let me be going now, woman of the
house, for by all the goats in Connemara I'm after having the father and
mother of a bating. (With a tear in his eye.) All insanity. Patriotism,
sorrow for the dead, music, future of the race. To be or not to be. Life's
dream is o'er. End it peacefully. They can live on. (He gazes far away
mournfully.) I am ruined. A few pastilles of aconite. The blinds drawn. A
letter. Then lie back to rest. (He breathes softly.) No more. I have lived.
Fare. Farewell.
ZOE (Stiffly, her finger in her neckfillet.) Honest? Till the next
time. (She sneers.) Suppose you got up the wrong side of the bed or came too
quick with your best girl. O, I can read your thoughts.
BLOOM (Bitterly.) Man and woman, love, what is it? A cork and bottle.
ZOE (In sudden sulks.) I hate a rotter that's insincere. Give a
bleeding whore a chance.
BLOOM (Repentantly.) I am very disagreeable. You are a necessary evil.
Where are you from? London?
ZOE (Glibly.) Hog's Norton where the pigs play the organs. I'm
Yorkshire born. (She holds his hand which is feeling for her nipple.) I say,
Tommy Tittlemouse. Stop that and begin worse. Have you cash for a short
time? Ten shillings?
BLOOM (Smiles, nods slowly.) More, houri, more.
ZOE And more's mother? (She pats him offhandedly with velvet paws.) Are
you coming into the musicroom to see our new pianola? Come and I'll peel
off.
BLOOM (Feeling his occiput dubiously with the unparalleled
embarrassment of a harassed pedlar gauging the symmetry of her peeled
pears.) Somebody would be dreadfully jealous if she knew. The greeneyed
monster. (Earnestly.) You know how difficult it is. I needn't tell you.
ZOE (Flattered.) What the eye can't see the heart can't grieve for.
(She pats him.) Come.
BLOOM Laughing witch! The hand that rocks the cradle.
ZOE Babby!
BLOOM (In babylinen and pelisse, bigheaded, with a caul of dark hair,
fixes big eyes on her fluid slip and counts its bronze buckles with a chubby
finger, his moist tongue tolling and lisping.) One two tlee: tlee tlwo
tlone.
THE BUCKLES Love me. Love me not. Love me.
ZOE Silent means consent. (With little parted talons she captures his
hand, her forefinger giving to his palm the pass touch of secret monitor,
luring him to doom.) Hot hands cold gizzard.
(He hesitates amid scents, music, temptations. She leads him towards
the steps, drawing him by the odour of her armpits, the vice of her painted
eyes, the rustle of her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the lion reek of
all the male brutes that have possessed her.)
THE MALE BRUTES (Exhaling sulphur of rut and dung and ramping in their
loosebox, faintly roaring, their drugged heads swaying to and fro.) Good!
(Zoe and Bloom reach the doorway where two sister whores are seated.
They examine him curiously from under their pencilled brows and smile to his
hasty bow. He trips awkwardly.)
ZOE (Her lucky hand instantly saving him.) Hoopsa! Don't fall upstairs.
BLOOM The just man falls seven times. (He stands aside at the
threshold.) After you is good manners.
ZOE Ladies first, gentlemen after.
(She crosses the threshold. He hesitates. She turns and, holding out
her hands, draws him over. He hops. On the an tiered rack of the hall hang a
man's hat and waterproof Bloom uncovers himself but, seeing them, frowns,
then smiles, preoccupied. A door on the return landing is thrown open. A man
in purple shirt and grey trousers, brownsocked, passes with an apes gait,
his bald head and goatee beard upheld, hugging a full waterjugjar his
twotailed black braces dangling at heels. Averting his face quickly Bloom
bends to examine on the halltable the spaniel eyes of a running fox: then,
his lifted head sniffing, follows Zoe into the musicroom. A shade of mauve
tissuepaper dims the light of the chandelier. Round and round a moth flies,
colliding, escaping. The floor is covered with an oilcloth mosaic of jade
and azure and cinnabar rhomboids. Footmarks are stamped over it in all
senses, heel to heel, heel to hollow, toe to toe, feet locked, a morris of
shuffling feet without body phantoms, all in a scrimmage higgledypiggledy.
The walls are tapes-tried with a paper of yewfronds and clear glades. In the
grate is spread a screen of peacock feathers. Lynch squats crosslegged on
the hearth rug of matted hair, his cap back to the front. With a wand he
beats time slowly. Kitty Ricketts, a bony pallid whore in navy costume,
doeskin gloves rolled back from a coral wristlet, a chain purse in her hand,
sits perched on the edge of the table swinging her leg and glancing at
herself in the gilt mirror over the mantelpiece. A tag of her corset lace
hangs slightly below her jacket. Lynch indicates mockingly the couple at the
piano.)
KITTY (Coughs behind her hand.) She's a bit imbecilic. (She signs with
a waggling forefinger.) Blemblem. (Lynch lifts up her skirt and white
petticoat with the wand. She settles them down quickly.) Respect yourself.
(She hiccups, then bends quickly her sailor hat under which her hair glows,
red with henna.) O, excuse!
ZOE More limelight, Charley. (She goes to the chandelier and turns the
gas full cock.)
KITTY (Peers at the gasjet.) What ails it tonight?
LYNCH (Deeply.) Enter a ghost and hobgoblins.
ZOE Clap on the back for Zoe.
(The wand in Lynch's hand flashes: a brass poker. Stephen stands at the
pianola on which sprawl his hat and ashplant. With two fingers he repeats
once more the series of empty fifths. Florry Talbot, a blond feeble goosefat
whore in a tatterdemalion gown of mildewed strawberry, lolls spreadeagle in
the sofa corner, her limp forearm pendent over the bolster, listening. A
heavy stye droops over her sleepy eyelid.)
KITTY (Hiccups again with a kick of her horsed foot.) O, excuse!
ZOE (Promptly.) Your boy's thinking of you. Tie a knot on your shift.
(Kitty Ricketts bends her head. Her boa uncoils, slides, glides over
her shoulder, back, arm, chair to the ground. Lynch lifts the curled
caterpillar on his wand. She snakes her neck, nestling. Stephen glances
behind at the squatted figure with its cap back to the front.)
STEPHEN As a matter of fact it is of no importance whether Benedetto
Marcello found it or made it. The rite is the poet's rest. It may be an old
hymn to Demeter or also illustrate Cla enarrant gloriam Domini . It is
susceptible of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and mixolydian
and of texts so divergent as priests haihooping round David's that is
Circe's or what am I saying Ceres' altar and David's tip from the stable to
his chief bassoonist about his almightiness. Mais, nom de nom, that is
another pair of trousers. Jetez la gourme. Faut que jeunesse se passe. (He
stops, points at Lynch's cap, smiles, laughs.) Which side is your knowledge
bump?
THE CAP (With saturnine spleen.) Bah! It is because it is. Woman's
reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form of
life. Bah!
STEPHEN You remember fairly accurately all my errors, boasts, mistakes.
How long shall I continue to close my eyes to disloyalty? Whetstone!
THE CAP Bah!
STEPHEN Here's another for you. (He frowns.) The reason is because the
fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible interval
which .
THE CAP Which? Finish. You can't.
STEPHEN (With on effort.) Interval which. Is the greatest possible
ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave. Which.
THE CAP Which? (Outside the gramophone begins to blare The Holy City.)
STEPHEN (Abruptly.) What went forth to the ends of the world to
traverse not itself. God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller,
having itself traversed in reality itself, becomes that self. Wait a moment.
Wait a second. Damn that fellow's noise in the street. Self which it itself
was ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco!
LYNCH (With a mocking whinny of laughter grins at Bloom and Zoe
Higgins.) What a learned speech, eh?
ZOE (Briskly.) God help your head, he knows more than you have
forgotten.
(With obese stupidity Florry Talbot regards Stephen.)
FLORRY They say the last day is coming this summer.
KITTY No!
ZOE (Explodes in laughter.) Great unjust God!
FLORRY (Offended.) Well, it was in the papers about Anti christ. O, my
foot's tickling.
(Ragged barefoot newsboys, jogging a wagtail kite, patterpast,
yelling.)
THE NEWSBOYS Stop press edition. Result of the rockinghorse races. Sea
serpent in the royal canal. Safe arrival of Antichrist.
(Stephen turns and sees Bloom.)
STEPHEN A time, times and half a time.
(Reuben J. Antichrist, wanderingjew, a clutching hand open on his
spine, stumps forward. Across his loins is slung a pilgrims wallet from
which protrude promissory notes and dishonoured bills. Aloft over his
shoulder he bears a long boatpole from the hook of which the sodden huddled
mass of his only son, saved from Liffey waters, hangs from the slack of its
breeches. A hobgoblin in the image of Punch Costello, hipshot, crookbacked,
hydrocephalic, prognathic with receding forehead and Ally Sloper nose,
tumbles in somersaults through the gathering darkness.)
ALL What?
THE HOBGOBLIN (His jaws chattering, capers to and fro, goggling his
eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping, with outstretched clutching arms, then all
at once thrusts his lipless face through the fork of his thighs.) Il vient!
C'est moi! L'homme qui rit! L'homme primigene! (He whirls round and round
with dervish howls.) Sieurs et dames, faites vos jeux! (He crouches
juggling. Tiny roulette planets fly from his hands.) Les jeux son! faits!
(The planets rush together, uttering crepitant cracks.) Rien n'va plus. (The
planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and away. He springs off into
vacuum.)
FLORRY (Sinking into torpor, crosses herself secretly.) The end of the
world!
(A female tepid effluvium leaks out from her. Nebulous obscurity
occupies space. Through the drifting fog without the gramophone blares over
coughs and feetshuffling.)
THE GRAMOPHONE Jerusalem! Open your gates and sing Hosanna...
(A rocket rushes up the sky and bursts. A white star falls from it,
proclaiming the consummation of all things and second coming of Elijah.
Along an infinite invisible tight-rope taut from zenith to nadir the End of
the World, a two headed octopus in gillies kilts, busby and tartan filibegs,
whirls through the murk, head over heels, in the fob of the Three Lugs of
Man.)
THE END OF THE WORLD (With a Scotch accent.) Wha'll dance the keel row,
the keel row, the keel row?
(Over the passing drift and choking breathcoughs, Elijah's voice, harsh
as a corncrakes, jars on high. Perspiring in a loose lawn surplice with
funnel sleeves he is seen, vergefaced above a rostrum about which the banner
of old glory is draped. He thumps the parapet.)
ELIJAH No yapping, if you please, in this booth. Jake Crane, Creole
Sue, Dave Campbell, Abe Kirschner, do your coughing with your mouths shut.
Say, I am operating all this trunk line. Boys, do it now. God's time is
12.25. Tell mother you'll be there. Rush your order and you play a slick
ace. Join on right here! Book through to eternity junction, the nonstop run.
Just one word more. Are you a god or a doggone clod? If the second advent
came to Coney Island are we ready? Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe
Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ, it's up to you to sense
that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the cosmos? No. Be on the side of
the angels. Be a prism. You have that something within, the higher self. You
can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll. Are you all in this
vibration? I say you are. You once nobble that, congregation, and a buck
joyride to heaven becomes a back number. You got me? It's a lifebrightener,
sure. The hottest stuff ever was. It's the whole pie with jam in. It's just
the cutest snappiest line out. It is immense, supersumptuous. It restores.
It vibrates. I know and I am some vibrator. Joking apart and getting down to
bedrock, A. J. Christ Dowie and the harmonial philosophy, have you got that?
O.K. Seventyseven west sixtyninth street. Got me? That's it. You call me up
by sunphone any old time. Bumboosers, save your stamps. (He shouts.) Now
then our glory song. All join heartily in the singing. Encore! (He sings.)
Jeru...
THE GRAMOPHONE (Drowning his voice.) Whorusalaminyour highhohhhh.
(The disc rasps gratingly against the needle.)
THE THREE' WHORES (Covering their ears, squawk.) Ahhkkk!
ELIJAH (In rolledup shirtsleeves, black in the face, shouts at the top
of his voice, his arms uplifted.) Big Brother up there, Mr President, you
hear what I done just been saying to you. Certainly, I sort of believe
strong in you, Mr President. I certainly am thinking now Miss Higgins and
Miss Ricketts got religion way inside them. Certainly seems to me I don't
never see no wusser scared female than the way you been, Miss Florry, just
now as I done seed you. Mr President, you come long and help me save our
sisters dear. (He winks at his audience.) Our Mr President, he twig the
whole lot and he ain't saying nothing.
KITTY-KATE I forgot myself. In a weak moment I erred and did what I did
on Constitution hill. I was confirmed by the bishop. My mother's sister
married a Montmorency. It was a working plumber was my ruination when I was
pure.
ZOE-FANNY I let him larrup it into me for the fun of it.
FLORRY-TERESA It was in consequence of a portwine beverage on top of
Hennessy's three stars I was guilty with Whelan when he slipped into the
bed.
STEPHEN In the beginning was the word, in the end the world without
end. Blessed be the eight beatitudes.
(The beatitudes, Dixon, Madden, Crotthers, Costello, Lenehan, Bannon,
Mulligan and Lynch in white surgical students' gowns, four abreast,
goosestepping, tramp fast past in noisy marching.)
THE BEATITUDES (Incoherently.) Beer beef battledog buybull businum
barnum buggerum bishop.
LYSTER (In quakergrey kneebreeches and broadbrimmed hat, says
discreetly.) He is our friend. I need not mention names. Seek thou the
light.
(He corantos by. Best enters in hairdresser attire, shinily laundered,
his locks in curlpapers. He leads John Eglinton who wears a mandarin's
kimono of Nankeen yellow, lizard-lettered, and a high pagoda hat.)
BEST (Smiling, lifts the hat and displays a shaven poll from the crown
of which bristles a pigtail toupee tied with an orange topknot.) I was just
beautifying him, don't you know. A thing of beauty, don't you know. Yeats
says, or I mean, Keats says. (Produces a greencapped dark lantern and
flashes it towards a corner; with carping accent.) Esthetics and cosmetics
are for the boudoir. I am out for truth. Plain truth for a plain man.
Tanderagee wants the facts and means to get them.
(In the cone of the search light behind the coalscuttle, ollave,
holyeyed, the bearded figure of Mananaan MacLir broods, chin on knees. He
rises slowly. A cold seawind blows from his druid mantle. About his head
writhe eels and elvers. He is encrusted with weeds and shells. His right
hand holds a bicycle pump. His left hand grasps a huge crayfish by its two
talons.)
MANANAAN MACLIR (With a voice of waves.) Aum! Hek! Wal! Ak! Lub! Mor!
Ma! White yoghin of the Gods. Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos. (With
a voice of whistling seawind.) Punarjanam patsypunjaub! I won't have my leg
pulled. It has been said by one: beware the left, the cult of Shakti. (With
a cry of stormbirds.) Shakti, Shiva! Dark hidden Father! (He smites with his
bicycle pump the crayfish in his left hand. On its co-operative dial glow
the twelve signs of the zodiac. He wails with the vehemence of the ocean.)
Aum! Baum! Pyjaum! I am the light of the homestead, I am the dreamery
creamery butter.
(A skeleton judas hand strangles the light. The green light wanes to
mauve. The gasjet wails whistling.)
THE GASJET Pooah! Pfuiiiiii!
(Zoe runs to the chandelier and, crooking her leg, adjusts the mantle.)
ZOE Who has a fag as I'm here?
LYNCH (Tossing a cigarette on to the table.) Here.
ZOE (Her head perched aside in mock pride.) Is that the way to hand the
pot to a lady? (She stretches up to light the cigarette over the flame,
twirling it slowly, showing the brown tufts of her armpits. Lynch with his
poker lifts boldly a side of her slip. Bare from her garters up her flesh
appears under the sapphire a nixie's green. She puffs calmly at her
cigarette.) Can you see the beauty spot of my behind?
LYNCH I'm not looking.
ZOE (Makes sheep's eyes.) No? You wouldn't do a less thing. Would you
suck a lemon?
(Squinting in mock shame she glances with sidelong meaning at Bloom,
then twists round towards him, pulling her slip free of the poker. Blue
fluid again flows over her flesh. Bloom stands, smiling desirously, twirling
his thumbs. Kitty Ricketts licks her middle finger with her spittle and
gazing in the mirror, smooths both eyebrows. Lipoti Virag, basilicogrammate,
chutes rapidly down through the chimneyflue and struts two steps to the left
on gawky pink stilts. He is sausaged into several overcoats and wears a
brown macintosh under which he holds a roll of parchment. In his left eye
flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell. On
his head is perched an Egyptian pshent. Two quills project over his ears.)
VIRAG (Heels together bows.) My name is Virag Lipoti, of Szombathely.
(He coughs thoughtfully, drily.) Promiscuous nakedness is much in evidence
hereabouts, eh? Inadvertently her backview revealed the fact that she is not
wearing those rather intimate garments of which you are a particular
devotee. The injection mark on the thigh I hope you perceived? Good.
BLOOM Granpapachi. But...
VIRAG Number two on the other hand, she of the cherry rouge and
coiffeuse white, whose hair owes not a little to our tribal elixir of
gopherwood, is in walking costume and tightly staysed by her sit, I should
opine. Backbone in front, so to say. Correct me but I always understood that
the act so performed by skittish humans with glimpses of lingerie appealed
to you in virtue of its exhibitionististicicity. In a word. Hippogriff. Am I
right?
BLOOM She is rather lean.
VIRAG (Not unpleasantly.) Absolutely! Well observed and those pannier
pockets of the skirt and slightly pegtop effect are devised to suggest
bunchiness of hip. A new purchase at some monster sale for which a gull has
been mulcted. Meretricious finery to deceive the eye. Observe the attention
to details of dustspecks. Never put on you tomorrow what you can wear today.
Parallax! (With a nervous twitch of his head.) Did you hear my brain go
snap? Pollysyllabax!
BLOOM (An elbow resting in a hand, a forefinger against his cheek.) She
seems sad.
VIRAG (Cynically, his weasel teeth bared yellow, draws down his left
eye with a finger and barks hoarsely.) Hoax! Beware of the flapper and bogus
mournful. Lily of the alley. All possess bachelor's button discovered by
Rualdus Colombus. Tumble her. Columble her. Chameleon. (More genially.) Well
then, permit me to draw your attention to item number three. There is plenty
of her visible to the naked eye. Observe the mass of oxygenated vegetable
matter on her skull. What ho, she bumps! The ugly duckling of the party,
longcasted and deep in keel.
BLOOM (Regretfully.) When you come out without your gun.
VIRAG We can do you all brands, mild, medium and strong. Pay your
money, take your choice. How happy could you be with either...
BLOOM With?...
VIRAG (His tongue upcurling.) Lyum! Look. Her beam is broad. She is
coated with quite a considerable layer of fat. Obviously mammal in weight of
bosom you remark that she has in front well to the fore two protuberances of
very respectable dimensions, inclined to fall in the noonday soupplate,
while on her rere lower down are two additional protuberances, suggestive of
potent rectum and tumescent for palpation which leave nothing to be desired
save compactness. Such fleshy parts are the product of careful nurture. When
coopfattened their livers reach an elephantine size. Pellets of new bread
with fennygreek and gumbenjamin swamped down by potions of green tea endow
them during their brief existence with natural pincushions of quite colossal
blubber. That suits your book, eh? Fleshhotpots of Egypt to hanker after.
Wallow in it. Lycopodium. (His throat twitches.) Slapbang! There he goes
again.
BLOOM The stye I dislike.
VIRAG (Arches his eyebrows.) Contact with a goldring, they say.
Argumentum ad feminam, as we said in old Rome and ancient Greece in the
consulship of Diplodocus and Ichthyo saurus. For the rest Eve's sovereign
remedy. Not for sale. Hire only. Huguenot. (He twitches.) It is a funny
sound.
(He coughs encouragingly.) But possibly it is only a wart. I presume
you shall have remembered what I will have taught you on that head?
Wheatenmeal with honey and nutmeg.
BLOOM (Reflecting.) Wheatenmeal with lycopodium and syllabax. This
searching ordeal. It has been an unusually fatiguing day, a chapter of
accidents. Wait. I mean, wartsblood spreads warts, you said .
VIRAG (Severely, his nose hardhumped, his side eye winking.) Stop
twirling your thumbs and have a good old thunk. See, you have forgotten.
Exercise your mnemotechnic. La causa х santa. Tara. Tara. (Aside.) He will
surely remember.
BLOOM Rosemary also did I understand you to say or will power over
parasitic tissues. Then nay no I have an inkling. The touch of a deadhand
cures. Mnemo?
VIRAG (Excitedly.) I say so. I say so. E'en so. Technic. (He taps his
parchmentroll energetically.) This book tells you how to act with all
descriptive particulars. Consult index for agitated fear of aconite,
melancholy of muriatic, priapic pulsatilla. Virag is going to talk about
amputation. Our old friend caustic. They must be starved. Snip off with
horsehair under the denned neck. But, to change the venue to the Bulgar and
the Basque, have you made up your mind whether you like or dislike women in
male habiliments? (With a dry snigger.) You intended to devote an entire
year to the study of the religious problem and the summer months of 1882 to
square the circle and win that million. Pomegranate! From the sublime to the
ridiculous is but a step. Pyjamas, let us say? Or stockingette gusseted
knickers, closed? Or, put we the case, those complicated combinations,
camiknickers? (He crows derisively.) Keekeereekee!
(Bloom surveys uncertainly the three whores, then gazes at the veiled
mauve light, hearing the everflying moth.)
BLOOM I wanted then to have now concluded. Nightdress was never. Hence
this. But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is will
then tomorrow as now was be past yester.
VIRAG (Prompts into his ear in a pig's whisper.) Insects of the day
spend their brief existence in reiterated coition, lured by the smell of the
inferiorly pulchritudinous female possessing extendified pudendal verve in
dorsal region. Pretty Poll! (His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally.) They
had a proverb in the Carpathians in or about the year five thousand five
hundred and fifty of our era. One tablespoonful of honey will attract friend
Bruin more than half a dozen barrels of first choice malt vinegar. Bear's
buzz bothers bees. But of this apart. At another time we may resume. We were
very pleased, we others. (He coughs and, bending his brow, rubs his nose
thoughtfully with a scooping hand.) You shall find that these night insects
follow the light. An illusion for remember their complex unadjustable eye.
For all these knotty points see the seventeenth book of my Fundamentals of
Sexology or the Love Passion which Doctor L. B. says is the book sensation
of the year. Some, to example, there are again whose movements are
automatic. Perceive. That is his appropriate sun. Nightbird nightsun
nighttown. Chase me, Charley! Buzz!
BLOOM Bee or bluebottle too other day butting shadow on wall dazed self
then me wandered dazed down shirt good job I...
VIRAG (His face impassive, laughs in a rich feminine key.) Splendid!
Spanish fly in his fly or mustard plaster on his dibble. (He gobbles
gluttonously with turkey wattles.) Bubbly jock! Bubbly jock! Where are we?
Open Sesame! Cometh forth! (He unrolls his parchment rapidly and reads, his
glowworm's nose running backwards over the letters which he claws.) Stay,
good friend. I bring thee thy answer Redbank oysters will shortly be upon
us. I'm the best o'cook. Those succulent bivalves may help us and the
truffles of Perigord, tubers dislodged through mister omnivorous porker,
were unsurpassed in cases of nervous debility or viragitis. Though they
stink yet they sting. (He wags head with cackling raillery.) Jocular. With
my eyeglass in my ocular.
BLOOM (Absently.) Ocularly woman's bivalve case is worse. Always open
sesame. The cloven sex. Why they fear vermin, creeping things. Yet Eve and
the serpent contradict. Not a historical fact. Obvious analogy to my idea.
Serpents too are gluttons for woman's milk. Wind their way through miles of
omnivorous forest to sucksucculent her breast dry. Like those bubblyjocular
Roman matrons one reads of in Elephantuliasis.
VIRAG (His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes stonily forlornly
closed, psalms in outlandish monotone.) That the cows with their those
distended udders that they have been the known...
BLOOM I am going to scream. I beg your pardon. Ah? So. (He repeats.)
Spontaneously to seek out the saurian's lair in order to entrust their teats
to his avid suction. Ant milks aphis. (Profoundly.) Instinct rules the
world. In life. In death.
VIRAG (Head askew, arches his back and hunched wing- shoulders, peers
at the moth out of blear bulged eyes, points a homing claw and cries.) Who's
Ger Ger? Who's dear Gerald? O, I much fear he shall be most badly burned.
Will some pleashe pershon not now impediment so catastrophics mit agitation
of firstclass tablenumpkin? (He mews.) Luss puss puss puss! (He sighs, draws
back and stares sideways down with dropping underjaw.) Well, well. He doth
rest anon.
I'm a tiny tiny thing
Ever flying in the spring
Round and round a ringaring.
Long ago I was a king,
Now I do this kind of thing
On the wing, on the wing!
Bing!
(He rushes against the mauve shade flapping noisily.) Pretty pretty
pretty pretty pretty pretty petticoats.
(From left upper entrance with two sliding steps Henry Flower comes
forward to left front centre. He wears a dark mantle and drooping plumed
sombrero. He carries a silverstringed inlaid dulcimer and a longstemmed
bamboo Jacobs pipe, its clay bowl fashioned as a female head. He wears dark
velvet hose and silverbuckled pumps. He has the romantic Saviour's face with
flowing locks, thin beard and moustache. His spindlelegs and sparrow feet
are those of the tenor Mario, prince of Candia. He settles down his goffered
ruffs and moistens his lips with a passage of his amorous tongue.)
HENRY (In a low dulcet voice, touching the strings of his guitar.)
There is a flower that bloometh.
(Virag truculent, his jowl set, stares at the lamp. Grave Bloom regards
Zoe's neck. Henry gallant turns with pendent dewlap to the piano.)
STEPHEN (To himself.) Play with your eyes shut. Imitate pa. Filling my
belly with husks of swine. Too much of this. I will arise and go to my.
Expect this is the. Steve, thou art in a parlous way. Must visit old Deasy
or telegraph. Our interview of this morning has left on me a deep
impression. Though our ages. Will write fully tomorrow. I'm partially drunk,
by the way. (He touches the keys again.) Minor chord comes now. Yes. Not
much however.
(Almidano Artifoni holds out a batonroll of music with vigorous
moustachework.)
ARTIFONI Ci rifletta. Lei rovina tutto.
FLORRY Sing us something. Love's old sweet song.
STEPHEN No voice. I am a most finished artist. Lynch, did I show you
the letter about the lute?
FLORRY (Smirking.) The bird that can sing and won't sing.
(The Siamese twins, Philip Drunk and Philip Sober two Oxford dons with
lawnmowers, appear in the window embrasure. Both are masked with Matthew
Arnold's face.)
PHILIP SOBER Take a fool's advice. All is not well. Work it out with
the buttend of a pencil, like a good young idiot. Three pounds twelve you
got, two notes, one sovereign, two crowns, if youth but knew. Mooney's en
ville, Mooney's sur mer, the Moira, Larchet's, Holles street hospital,
Burke's. Eh? I am watching you.
PHILIP DRUNK (Impatiently.) Ah, bosh, man. Go to hell! I paid my way.
If I could only find out about octaves. Reduplication of personality. Who
was it told me his name?
(His lawnmower begins to purr.) Aha, yes. Zoe mou sas agapo. Have a
notion I was here before. When was it not Atkinson his card I have
somewhere? Mac somebody. Unmack I have it. He told me about, hold on,
Swinburne, was it, no?
FLORRY And the song?
STEPHEN Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.
FLORRY Are you out of Maynooth? You're like someone I knew once.
STEPHEN Out of it now. (To himself.) Clever.
PHILIP DRUNK AND PHILIP SOBER (Their lawnmowers purring with a rigadoon
of grasshalms.) Clever ever. Out of it. Out of it. By the by have you the
book, the thing, the ashplant? Yes, there it, yes. Cleverever outofitnow.
Keep in condition. Do like us.
ZOE There was a priest down here two nights ago to do his bit of
business with his coat buttoned up. You needn't try to hide, I says to him.
I know you've a Roman collar.
VIRAG Perfectly logical from his standpoint. Fall of man. (Harshly, his
pupils waxing.) To hell with the pope! Nothing new under the sun. I am the
Virag who disclosed the sex secrets of monks and maidens. Why I left the
Church of Rome. Read the Priest, the Woman and the Confessional. Penrose.
Flipperty Jippert. (He wriggles.) Woman, undoing with sweet pudor her belt
of rushrope, offers her allmoist yoni to man's lingam. Short time after man
presents woman with pieces of jungle meat. Woman shows joy and covers
herself with featherskins. Man loves her yoni fiercely with big lingam, the
stiff one. (He cries.) Coactus volui. Then giddy woman will run about.
Strong man grasps woman's wrist. Woman squeals, bites, spucks. Man, now
fierce angry, strikes woman's fat yadgana. (He chases his tail.) Piffpaff!
Popo! (He stops, sneezes.) Pchp! (He worries his butt.) Prrrrrht!
LYNCH I hope you gave the good father a penance. Nine glorias for
shooting a bishop.
ZOE (Spouts walrus smoke through her nostrils.) He couldn't get a
connection. Only, you know, sensation. A dry rush.
BLOOM Poor man!
ZOE (Lightly.) Only for what happened him.
BLOOM How?
VIRAG (A diabolic rictus of black luminosity contracting his visage,
cranes his scraggy neck forward. He lifts a mooncalf nozzle and howls.)
Verfluchte Goim! He had a father, forty fathers. He never existed. Pig God!
He had two left feet. He was Judas Iacchias, a Libyan eunuch, the pope's
bastard. (He leans out on tortured forepaws, elbows bent rigid, his eye
agonising in his flat skullneck and yelps over the mute world.) A son of a
whore. Apocalypse.
KITTY And Mary Shortall that was in the lock with the pox she got from
Jimmy Pidgeon in the blue caps had a child off him that couldn't swallow and
was smothered with the convulsions in the mattress and we all subscribed for
the funeral.
PHILIP DRUNK (Gravely.) Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position,
Philippe?
PHILIP SOBER (Gaily.) C'иtait le sacrи pigeon, Philippe.
(Kitty unpins her hat and sets it down calmly, patting her henna hair.
And a prettier, a daintier head of winsome curls was never seen on a whores
shoulders. Lynch puts on her hat. She whips it off.)
LYNCH (Laughs.) And to such delights has Metchnikoff inoculated
anthropoid apes.
FLORRY (Nods.) Locomotor ataxy.
ZOE (Gaily.) O, my dictionary.
LYNCH Three wise virgins.
VIRAG (Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his bony epileptic
lips.) She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orange flower. Panther, the Roman
centurion, polluted her with his genitories. (He sticks out a flickering
phosphorescent scorpion tongue, his hand on his fork.) Messiah! He burst her
tympanum. (With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in the cynical
spasm.) Hik! Hek! Hak! Hok! Huk! Kok! Kuk!
(Ben Jumbo Dollard, rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled,
hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fatpapped, stands
forth, his loins and genitals tightened into a pair of black bathing
bagslops.)
BEN POLLARD (Nakkering castanet bones in his huge padded paws, yodels
jovially in base barreltone.) When love absorbs my ardent soul.
(The virgins, Nurse Callan and Nurse Quigley, burst through the
ringkeepers and the ropes and mob him with open arms.)
THE VIRGINS (Gushingly.) Big Ben! Ben MacChree!
A VOICE Hold that fellow with the bad breeches.
BEN DOLLARD (Smites his thigh in abundant laughter.) Hold him now.
HENRY (Caressing on his breast a severed female head, murmurs.) Thine
heart, mine love. (He plucks his lutestrings.) When first I saw.
VIRAG (Sloughing his skins, his multitudinous plumage moulting.) Rats!
(He yawns; showing a coalblack throat and closes his jaws by an upward push
of his parchment roll.) After having said which I took my departure.
Farewell. Fare thee well. Dreck!
(Henry Flower combs his moustache and beard rapidly with a pocketcomb
and gives a cows lick to his hair. Steered by his rapier, he glides to the
door his wild had slung behind him. Virag reaches the door in two ungainly
stilthops, his tail cocked, and deftly claps sideways on the wall a
pusyellow flybill, butting it with his head.)
THE FLYBILL K. 11. post no bills. Strictly confidential. Dr Hy Franks.
HENRY All is lost now.
(Virag unscrews his head in a trice and holds it under his arm.)
VIRAG'S HEAD Quack!
(Exeunt severally.)
STEPHEN (Over his shoulder to Zoe.) You would have preferred the
fighting parson who founded the protestant error. But beware Antisthenes,
the dog sage, and the last end of Anus Heresiarchus. The agony in the
closet.
LYNCH All one and the same God to her.
STEPHEN (Devoutly.) And Sovereign Lord of all things.
FLORRY (To Stephen.) I'm sure you are a spoiled priest. Or a monk.
LYNCH He is. A Cardinal's son.
STEPHEN Cardinal sin. Monks of the screw.
(His Eminence, Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Primate of all Ireland,
appears in the doorway, dressed in red soutane, sandals and socks. Seven
dwarf simian acolytes, also in red, cardinal sins, uphold his train, peeping
under it. He wears a battered silk hat sideways on his head. His thumbs are
stuck in his armpits and his palms outspread. Round his neck hangs a rosary
of corks ending on his breast in a corkscrew cross. Releasing his thumbs, he
invokes grace from on high with lace wave gestures and proclaims with
bloated pomp.)
THE CARDINAL
Conservio lies captured.
He lies in the lowest dungeon
With manacles and chains around his limbs
Weighing upwards of three tons.
(He looks at all for a moment, his right eye closed tight, his left
cheek puffed out. Then, unable to repress his merriment, he rocks to and
fro, ads akimbo, and sings with broad rollicking humour.) O, the poor little
fellow Hi-hi-hi-hi-his legs they were yellow He was plump, fat and heavy and
brisk as a snake But some bloody savage To graize his white cabbage He
murdered Nell Flaherty's duckloving drake.
(A multitude of midges swarms over his robe. He scratches himself with
crossed arms at his ribs, grimacing, and exclaims.) I'm suffering the agony
of the damned. By the hoky fiddle, thanks be to Jesus those funny little
chaps are not unanimous. If they were they'd walk me off the face of the
bloody globe.
(His head aslant, he blesses curtly with fore and middle fingers,
imparts the Easter kiss and doubleshuffles off comically, swaying his hat
from side to side, shrinking quickly to the size of his train bearers. The
dwarf acolytes, giggling, peeping, nudging, ogling, Easterkissing, zigzag
behind him. His voice is heard mellow from afar, merciful, male, melodious.)
Shall carry my heart to thee, Shall carry my heart to thee, And the breath
of the balmy night Shall carry my heart to thee.
(The trick doorhandle turns.)
THE DOORHANDLE Theeee.
ZOE The devil is in that door.
(A male form passes down the creaking staircase and is heard taking the
waterproof and hat from the rack. Bloom starts forward involuntarily and,
half closing the door as he passes, takes the chocolate from his pocket and
offers it nervously to Zoe.)
ZOE (Sniffs his hair briskly.) Hum. Thank your mother for the rabbits.
I'm very fond of what I like.
BLOOM (Hearing a male voice in talk with the whores on the doorstep,
pricks his ears.) If it were he? After? Or because not? Or the double event?
ZOE (Tears open the silverfoil.) Fingers was made before forks. (She
breaks off and nibbles a piece, gives a piece to Kitty Ricketts and then
turns kittenishly to Lynch.) No objection to French lozenges? (He nods. She
taunts him.) Have it now or wait till you get it? (He opens his mouth, his
head cocked. She whirls the prize in left circle. His head follows. She
whirls it back in right circle. He eyes her.) Catch.
(She tosses a piece. With an adroit snap he catches it and bites it
through with a crack.)
KITTY (Chewing.) The engineer I was with at the bazaar does have lovely
ones. Full of the best liqueurs. And the viceroy was there with his lady.
The gas we had on the Toft's hobbyhorses. I'm giddy still.
BLOOM (In Svengali's fur overcoat, with folded arms and Napoleonic
forelock, frowns in ventriloquial exorcism with piercing eagle glance
towards the door. Then, rigid, with left foot advanced, he makes a swift
pass with impelling fingers and gives the sign of past master, drawing his
right arm downwards from his left shoulder.) Go, go, go, I conjure you,
whoever you are.
(A male cough and tread are heard passing through the mist outside.
Blooms features relax. He places a hand in his waistcoat, posing calmly. Zoe
offers him chocolate.)
BLOOM (Solemnly.) Thanks.
ZOE Do as you're bid. Here.
(A firm heelclacking is heard on the stairs.)
BLOOM (Takes the chocolate.) Aphrodisiac? But I thought it. Vanilla
calms or? Mnemo. Confused light confuses memory. Red influences lupus.
Colours affect women's characters, any they have. This black makes me sad.
Eat and be merry for tomorrow. (He eats.) Influence taste too, mauve. But it
is so long since I. Seems new. Aphro. That priest. Must come. Better late
and Christbaum begat Ben Maimun and Ben Maimun begat Dusty Rhodes and Dusty
Rhodes begat Benamor and Benamor begat Jones-Smith and Jones-Smith begat
Savorgnanovich and Savorgnanovich begat Jasperstone and Jasperstone begat
Vingtetunieme and Vingtetunieme begat Szombathely and Szombathely begat
Virag and Virag begat Bloom et vocabitur nomen eius Emmanuel.
A DEADHAND (Writes on the wall.) Bloom is a cod. A CRAB (In bush
ranger's kit.) What did you do in the cattlecreep behind Kilbarrack?
A FEMALE INFANT (Shakes a rattle.) And under Ballybough bridge?
A HOLLYBUSH And in the devil's glen?
BLOOM (Blushes furiously all over from front to nates, three tears
falling from his left eye.) Spare my past.
THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS (In bodycoats, kneebreeches, with Donnybrook
fair shillelaghs.) Sjambok him!
(Bloom with asses' ears seats himself in the pillory with crossed arms,
his feet protruding. He whistles Don Giovanni, a cenar teco. Artane orphans,
joining hands, caper round him. Girls of the Prison Gate Mission, joining
hands, caper round in the opposite direction.)
THE ARTANE ORPHANS
You big, you bog, you dirty dog!
You think the ladies love you!
THE PRISON GATE GIRLS
If you see kay
Tell him he may
See you in tea
Tell him from me.
HORNBLOWER (In ephod and huntingcap, announces.) And he shall carry the
sins of the people to Azazel, the spirit which is in the wilderness, and to
Lilith, the nighthag. And they shall stone him and defile him, yea, all from
Agendath Netaim and from Mizraim, the land of Ham.
(All the people cast soft pantomime stones at Bloom. Many bonafide
travellers and ownerless dogs come near him and defile him. Mastiansky and
Citron approach in gaberdines, wearing long earlocks. They wag their beards
at Bloom.)
MASTIANSKY AND CITRON Belial! Laemlein of Istria! the false Messiah!
Abulafia!
(George S. Mesias, Bloom's tailor, appears, a tailor's goose under his
arm, presenting a bill.)
MESIAS To alteration one pair trousers eleven shillings.
BLOOM (Rubs his hands cheerfully.) Just like old times. Poor Bloom!
(Reuben J. Dodd, black bearded Iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing on his
shoulders the drowned corpse of his son, approaches the pillory.)
REUBEN J. (Whispers hoarsely.) The squeak is out. A split is gone for
the flatties. Nip the first rattler.
THE FIRE BRIGADE Pflaap!
BROTHER BUZZ (Invests Bloom in a yellow habit with embroidery of
painted flames and high pointed hat. He places a bag of gunpowder round his
neck and hands him over to the civil power, saying.) Forgive him his
trespasses.
(Lieutenant Myers of the Dublin Fire Brigade by general request sets
fire to Bloom. Lamentations.)
THE CITIZEN Thank heaven!
BLOOM (In a seamless garment marked I. H. S. stands upright amid
phoenix flames.) Weep not for me, O daughters of Erin.
(He exhibits to Dublin reporters traces of burning. The daughters of
Erin, in black garments with lace prayerbooks and long lighted candles in
their hands, kneel down and pray.)
THE DAUGHTERS OF ERIN Kidney of Bloom, pray for us. Flower of the Bath,
pray for us. Mentor of Menton, pray for us. Canvasser for the Freeman, pray
for us. Charitable Mason, pray for us. Wandering Soap, pray for us. Sweets
of Sin, pray for us. Music without Words, pray for us. Reprover of the
Citizen, pray for us. Friend of all Frillies, pray for us. Midwife Most
Merciful, pray for us. Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence,
pray for us.
(A choir of six hundred voices, conducted by Mr Vincent O'Brien, sings
the Alleluia chorus, accompanied on the organ by Joseph Glynn. Bloom becomes
mute, shrunken, carbonised.)
ZOE Talk away till you're black in the face.
BLOOM (In caubeen with clay pipe stuck in the band, dusty brogues, an
emigrant's red handkerchief bundle in his hand, leading a black bogoak pig
by a sugaun, with a smile in his eye.) Let me be going now, woman of the
house, for by all the goats in Connemara I'm after having the father and
mother of a bating. (With a tear in his eye.) All insanity. Patriotism,
sorrow for the dead, music, future of the race. To be or not to be. Life's
dream is o'er. End it peacefully. They can live on. (He gazes far away
mournfully.) I am ruined. A few pastilles of aconite. The blinds drawn. A
letter. Then lie back to rest. (He breathes softly.) No more. I have lived.
Fare. Farewell.
ZOE (Stiffly, her finger in her neckfillet.) Honest? Till the next
time. (She sneers.) Suppose you got up the wrong side of the bed or came too
quick with your best girl. O, I can read your thoughts.
BLOOM (Bitterly.) Man and woman, love, what is it? A cork and bottle.
ZOE (In sudden sulks.) I hate a rotter that's insincere. Give a
bleeding whore a chance.
BLOOM (Repentantly.) I am very disagreeable. You are a necessary evil.
Where are you from? London?
ZOE (Glibly.) Hog's Norton where the pigs play the organs. I'm
Yorkshire born. (She holds his hand which is feeling for her nipple.) I say,
Tommy Tittlemouse. Stop that and begin worse. Have you cash for a short
time? Ten shillings?
BLOOM (Smiles, nods slowly.) More, houri, more.
ZOE And more's mother? (She pats him offhandedly with velvet paws.) Are
you coming into the musicroom to see our new pianola? Come and I'll peel
off.
BLOOM (Feeling his occiput dubiously with the unparalleled
embarrassment of a harassed pedlar gauging the symmetry of her peeled
pears.) Somebody would be dreadfully jealous if she knew. The greeneyed
monster. (Earnestly.) You know how difficult it is. I needn't tell you.
ZOE (Flattered.) What the eye can't see the heart can't grieve for.
(She pats him.) Come.
BLOOM Laughing witch! The hand that rocks the cradle.
ZOE Babby!
BLOOM (In babylinen and pelisse, bigheaded, with a caul of dark hair,
fixes big eyes on her fluid slip and counts its bronze buckles with a chubby
finger, his moist tongue tolling and lisping.) One two tlee: tlee tlwo
tlone.
THE BUCKLES Love me. Love me not. Love me.
ZOE Silent means consent. (With little parted talons she captures his
hand, her forefinger giving to his palm the pass touch of secret monitor,
luring him to doom.) Hot hands cold gizzard.
(He hesitates amid scents, music, temptations. She leads him towards
the steps, drawing him by the odour of her armpits, the vice of her painted
eyes, the rustle of her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the lion reek of
all the male brutes that have possessed her.)
THE MALE BRUTES (Exhaling sulphur of rut and dung and ramping in their
loosebox, faintly roaring, their drugged heads swaying to and fro.) Good!
(Zoe and Bloom reach the doorway where two sister whores are seated.
They examine him curiously from under their pencilled brows and smile to his
hasty bow. He trips awkwardly.)
ZOE (Her lucky hand instantly saving him.) Hoopsa! Don't fall upstairs.
BLOOM The just man falls seven times. (He stands aside at the
threshold.) After you is good manners.
ZOE Ladies first, gentlemen after.
(She crosses the threshold. He hesitates. She turns and, holding out
her hands, draws him over. He hops. On the an tiered rack of the hall hang a
man's hat and waterproof Bloom uncovers himself but, seeing them, frowns,
then smiles, preoccupied. A door on the return landing is thrown open. A man
in purple shirt and grey trousers, brownsocked, passes with an apes gait,
his bald head and goatee beard upheld, hugging a full waterjugjar his
twotailed black braces dangling at heels. Averting his face quickly Bloom
bends to examine on the halltable the spaniel eyes of a running fox: then,
his lifted head sniffing, follows Zoe into the musicroom. A shade of mauve
tissuepaper dims the light of the chandelier. Round and round a moth flies,
colliding, escaping. The floor is covered with an oilcloth mosaic of jade
and azure and cinnabar rhomboids. Footmarks are stamped over it in all
senses, heel to heel, heel to hollow, toe to toe, feet locked, a morris of
shuffling feet without body phantoms, all in a scrimmage higgledypiggledy.
The walls are tapes-tried with a paper of yewfronds and clear glades. In the
grate is spread a screen of peacock feathers. Lynch squats crosslegged on
the hearth rug of matted hair, his cap back to the front. With a wand he
beats time slowly. Kitty Ricketts, a bony pallid whore in navy costume,
doeskin gloves rolled back from a coral wristlet, a chain purse in her hand,
sits perched on the edge of the table swinging her leg and glancing at
herself in the gilt mirror over the mantelpiece. A tag of her corset lace
hangs slightly below her jacket. Lynch indicates mockingly the couple at the
piano.)
KITTY (Coughs behind her hand.) She's a bit imbecilic. (She signs with
a waggling forefinger.) Blemblem. (Lynch lifts up her skirt and white
petticoat with the wand. She settles them down quickly.) Respect yourself.
(She hiccups, then bends quickly her sailor hat under which her hair glows,
red with henna.) O, excuse!
ZOE More limelight, Charley. (She goes to the chandelier and turns the
gas full cock.)
KITTY (Peers at the gasjet.) What ails it tonight?
LYNCH (Deeply.) Enter a ghost and hobgoblins.
ZOE Clap on the back for Zoe.
(The wand in Lynch's hand flashes: a brass poker. Stephen stands at the
pianola on which sprawl his hat and ashplant. With two fingers he repeats
once more the series of empty fifths. Florry Talbot, a blond feeble goosefat
whore in a tatterdemalion gown of mildewed strawberry, lolls spreadeagle in
the sofa corner, her limp forearm pendent over the bolster, listening. A
heavy stye droops over her sleepy eyelid.)
KITTY (Hiccups again with a kick of her horsed foot.) O, excuse!
ZOE (Promptly.) Your boy's thinking of you. Tie a knot on your shift.
(Kitty Ricketts bends her head. Her boa uncoils, slides, glides over
her shoulder, back, arm, chair to the ground. Lynch lifts the curled
caterpillar on his wand. She snakes her neck, nestling. Stephen glances
behind at the squatted figure with its cap back to the front.)
STEPHEN As a matter of fact it is of no importance whether Benedetto
Marcello found it or made it. The rite is the poet's rest. It may be an old
hymn to Demeter or also illustrate C
susceptible of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and mixolydian
and of texts so divergent as priests haihooping round David's that is
Circe's or what am I saying Ceres' altar and David's tip from the stable to
his chief bassoonist about his almightiness. Mais, nom de nom, that is
another pair of trousers. Jetez la gourme. Faut que jeunesse se passe. (He
stops, points at Lynch's cap, smiles, laughs.) Which side is your knowledge
bump?
THE CAP (With saturnine spleen.) Bah! It is because it is. Woman's
reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form of
life. Bah!
STEPHEN You remember fairly accurately all my errors, boasts, mistakes.
How long shall I continue to close my eyes to disloyalty? Whetstone!
THE CAP Bah!
STEPHEN Here's another for you. (He frowns.) The reason is because the
fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible interval
which .
THE CAP Which? Finish. You can't.
STEPHEN (With on effort.) Interval which. Is the greatest possible
ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave. Which.
THE CAP Which? (Outside the gramophone begins to blare The Holy City.)
STEPHEN (Abruptly.) What went forth to the ends of the world to
traverse not itself. God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller,
having itself traversed in reality itself, becomes that self. Wait a moment.
Wait a second. Damn that fellow's noise in the street. Self which it itself
was ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco!
LYNCH (With a mocking whinny of laughter grins at Bloom and Zoe
Higgins.) What a learned speech, eh?
ZOE (Briskly.) God help your head, he knows more than you have
forgotten.
(With obese stupidity Florry Talbot regards Stephen.)
FLORRY They say the last day is coming this summer.
KITTY No!
ZOE (Explodes in laughter.) Great unjust God!
FLORRY (Offended.) Well, it was in the papers about Anti christ. O, my
foot's tickling.
(Ragged barefoot newsboys, jogging a wagtail kite, patterpast,
yelling.)
THE NEWSBOYS Stop press edition. Result of the rockinghorse races. Sea
serpent in the royal canal. Safe arrival of Antichrist.
(Stephen turns and sees Bloom.)
STEPHEN A time, times and half a time.
(Reuben J. Antichrist, wanderingjew, a clutching hand open on his
spine, stumps forward. Across his loins is slung a pilgrims wallet from
which protrude promissory notes and dishonoured bills. Aloft over his
shoulder he bears a long boatpole from the hook of which the sodden huddled
mass of his only son, saved from Liffey waters, hangs from the slack of its
breeches. A hobgoblin in the image of Punch Costello, hipshot, crookbacked,
hydrocephalic, prognathic with receding forehead and Ally Sloper nose,
tumbles in somersaults through the gathering darkness.)
ALL What?
THE HOBGOBLIN (His jaws chattering, capers to and fro, goggling his
eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping, with outstretched clutching arms, then all
at once thrusts his lipless face through the fork of his thighs.) Il vient!
C'est moi! L'homme qui rit! L'homme primigene! (He whirls round and round
with dervish howls.) Sieurs et dames, faites vos jeux! (He crouches
juggling. Tiny roulette planets fly from his hands.) Les jeux son! faits!
(The planets rush together, uttering crepitant cracks.) Rien n'va plus. (The
planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and away. He springs off into
vacuum.)
FLORRY (Sinking into torpor, crosses herself secretly.) The end of the
world!
(A female tepid effluvium leaks out from her. Nebulous obscurity
occupies space. Through the drifting fog without the gramophone blares over
coughs and feetshuffling.)
THE GRAMOPHONE Jerusalem! Open your gates and sing Hosanna...
(A rocket rushes up the sky and bursts. A white star falls from it,
proclaiming the consummation of all things and second coming of Elijah.
Along an infinite invisible tight-rope taut from zenith to nadir the End of
the World, a two headed octopus in gillies kilts, busby and tartan filibegs,
whirls through the murk, head over heels, in the fob of the Three Lugs of
Man.)
THE END OF THE WORLD (With a Scotch accent.) Wha'll dance the keel row,
the keel row, the keel row?
(Over the passing drift and choking breathcoughs, Elijah's voice, harsh
as a corncrakes, jars on high. Perspiring in a loose lawn surplice with
funnel sleeves he is seen, vergefaced above a rostrum about which the banner
of old glory is draped. He thumps the parapet.)
ELIJAH No yapping, if you please, in this booth. Jake Crane, Creole
Sue, Dave Campbell, Abe Kirschner, do your coughing with your mouths shut.
Say, I am operating all this trunk line. Boys, do it now. God's time is
12.25. Tell mother you'll be there. Rush your order and you play a slick
ace. Join on right here! Book through to eternity junction, the nonstop run.
Just one word more. Are you a god or a doggone clod? If the second advent
came to Coney Island are we ready? Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe
Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ, it's up to you to sense
that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the cosmos? No. Be on the side of
the angels. Be a prism. You have that something within, the higher self. You
can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll. Are you all in this
vibration? I say you are. You once nobble that, congregation, and a buck
joyride to heaven becomes a back number. You got me? It's a lifebrightener,
sure. The hottest stuff ever was. It's the whole pie with jam in. It's just
the cutest snappiest line out. It is immense, supersumptuous. It restores.
It vibrates. I know and I am some vibrator. Joking apart and getting down to
bedrock, A. J. Christ Dowie and the harmonial philosophy, have you got that?
O.K. Seventyseven west sixtyninth street. Got me? That's it. You call me up
by sunphone any old time. Bumboosers, save your stamps. (He shouts.) Now
then our glory song. All join heartily in the singing. Encore! (He sings.)
Jeru...
THE GRAMOPHONE (Drowning his voice.) Whorusalaminyour highhohhhh.
(The disc rasps gratingly against the needle.)
THE THREE' WHORES (Covering their ears, squawk.) Ahhkkk!
ELIJAH (In rolledup shirtsleeves, black in the face, shouts at the top
of his voice, his arms uplifted.) Big Brother up there, Mr President, you
hear what I done just been saying to you. Certainly, I sort of believe
strong in you, Mr President. I certainly am thinking now Miss Higgins and
Miss Ricketts got religion way inside them. Certainly seems to me I don't
never see no wusser scared female than the way you been, Miss Florry, just
now as I done seed you. Mr President, you come long and help me save our
sisters dear. (He winks at his audience.) Our Mr President, he twig the
whole lot and he ain't saying nothing.
KITTY-KATE I forgot myself. In a weak moment I erred and did what I did
on Constitution hill. I was confirmed by the bishop. My mother's sister
married a Montmorency. It was a working plumber was my ruination when I was
pure.
ZOE-FANNY I let him larrup it into me for the fun of it.
FLORRY-TERESA It was in consequence of a portwine beverage on top of
Hennessy's three stars I was guilty with Whelan when he slipped into the
bed.
STEPHEN In the beginning was the word, in the end the world without
end. Blessed be the eight beatitudes.
(The beatitudes, Dixon, Madden, Crotthers, Costello, Lenehan, Bannon,
Mulligan and Lynch in white surgical students' gowns, four abreast,
goosestepping, tramp fast past in noisy marching.)
THE BEATITUDES (Incoherently.) Beer beef battledog buybull businum
barnum buggerum bishop.
LYSTER (In quakergrey kneebreeches and broadbrimmed hat, says
discreetly.) He is our friend. I need not mention names. Seek thou the
light.
(He corantos by. Best enters in hairdresser attire, shinily laundered,
his locks in curlpapers. He leads John Eglinton who wears a mandarin's
kimono of Nankeen yellow, lizard-lettered, and a high pagoda hat.)
BEST (Smiling, lifts the hat and displays a shaven poll from the crown
of which bristles a pigtail toupee tied with an orange topknot.) I was just
beautifying him, don't you know. A thing of beauty, don't you know. Yeats
says, or I mean, Keats says. (Produces a greencapped dark lantern and
flashes it towards a corner; with carping accent.) Esthetics and cosmetics
are for the boudoir. I am out for truth. Plain truth for a plain man.
Tanderagee wants the facts and means to get them.
(In the cone of the search light behind the coalscuttle, ollave,
holyeyed, the bearded figure of Mananaan MacLir broods, chin on knees. He
rises slowly. A cold seawind blows from his druid mantle. About his head
writhe eels and elvers. He is encrusted with weeds and shells. His right
hand holds a bicycle pump. His left hand grasps a huge crayfish by its two
talons.)
MANANAAN MACLIR (With a voice of waves.) Aum! Hek! Wal! Ak! Lub! Mor!
Ma! White yoghin of the Gods. Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos. (With
a voice of whistling seawind.) Punarjanam patsypunjaub! I won't have my leg
pulled. It has been said by one: beware the left, the cult of Shakti. (With
a cry of stormbirds.) Shakti, Shiva! Dark hidden Father! (He smites with his
bicycle pump the crayfish in his left hand. On its co-operative dial glow
the twelve signs of the zodiac. He wails with the vehemence of the ocean.)
Aum! Baum! Pyjaum! I am the light of the homestead, I am the dreamery
creamery butter.
(A skeleton judas hand strangles the light. The green light wanes to
mauve. The gasjet wails whistling.)
THE GASJET Pooah! Pfuiiiiii!
(Zoe runs to the chandelier and, crooking her leg, adjusts the mantle.)
ZOE Who has a fag as I'm here?
LYNCH (Tossing a cigarette on to the table.) Here.
ZOE (Her head perched aside in mock pride.) Is that the way to hand the
pot to a lady? (She stretches up to light the cigarette over the flame,
twirling it slowly, showing the brown tufts of her armpits. Lynch with his
poker lifts boldly a side of her slip. Bare from her garters up her flesh
appears under the sapphire a nixie's green. She puffs calmly at her
cigarette.) Can you see the beauty spot of my behind?
LYNCH I'm not looking.
ZOE (Makes sheep's eyes.) No? You wouldn't do a less thing. Would you
suck a lemon?
(Squinting in mock shame she glances with sidelong meaning at Bloom,
then twists round towards him, pulling her slip free of the poker. Blue
fluid again flows over her flesh. Bloom stands, smiling desirously, twirling
his thumbs. Kitty Ricketts licks her middle finger with her spittle and
gazing in the mirror, smooths both eyebrows. Lipoti Virag, basilicogrammate,
chutes rapidly down through the chimneyflue and struts two steps to the left
on gawky pink stilts. He is sausaged into several overcoats and wears a
brown macintosh under which he holds a roll of parchment. In his left eye
flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell. On
his head is perched an Egyptian pshent. Two quills project over his ears.)
VIRAG (Heels together bows.) My name is Virag Lipoti, of Szombathely.
(He coughs thoughtfully, drily.) Promiscuous nakedness is much in evidence
hereabouts, eh? Inadvertently her backview revealed the fact that she is not
wearing those rather intimate garments of which you are a particular
devotee. The injection mark on the thigh I hope you perceived? Good.
BLOOM Granpapachi. But...
VIRAG Number two on the other hand, she of the cherry rouge and
coiffeuse white, whose hair owes not a little to our tribal elixir of
gopherwood, is in walking costume and tightly staysed by her sit, I should
opine. Backbone in front, so to say. Correct me but I always understood that
the act so performed by skittish humans with glimpses of lingerie appealed
to you in virtue of its exhibitionististicicity. In a word. Hippogriff. Am I
right?
BLOOM She is rather lean.
VIRAG (Not unpleasantly.) Absolutely! Well observed and those pannier
pockets of the skirt and slightly pegtop effect are devised to suggest
bunchiness of hip. A new purchase at some monster sale for which a gull has
been mulcted. Meretricious finery to deceive the eye. Observe the attention
to details of dustspecks. Never put on you tomorrow what you can wear today.
Parallax! (With a nervous twitch of his head.) Did you hear my brain go
snap? Pollysyllabax!
BLOOM (An elbow resting in a hand, a forefinger against his cheek.) She
seems sad.
VIRAG (Cynically, his weasel teeth bared yellow, draws down his left
eye with a finger and barks hoarsely.) Hoax! Beware of the flapper and bogus
mournful. Lily of the alley. All possess bachelor's button discovered by
Rualdus Colombus. Tumble her. Columble her. Chameleon. (More genially.) Well
then, permit me to draw your attention to item number three. There is plenty
of her visible to the naked eye. Observe the mass of oxygenated vegetable
matter on her skull. What ho, she bumps! The ugly duckling of the party,
longcasted and deep in keel.
BLOOM (Regretfully.) When you come out without your gun.
VIRAG We can do you all brands, mild, medium and strong. Pay your
money, take your choice. How happy could you be with either...
BLOOM With?...
VIRAG (His tongue upcurling.) Lyum! Look. Her beam is broad. She is
coated with quite a considerable layer of fat. Obviously mammal in weight of
bosom you remark that she has in front well to the fore two protuberances of
very respectable dimensions, inclined to fall in the noonday soupplate,
while on her rere lower down are two additional protuberances, suggestive of
potent rectum and tumescent for palpation which leave nothing to be desired
save compactness. Such fleshy parts are the product of careful nurture. When
coopfattened their livers reach an elephantine size. Pellets of new bread
with fennygreek and gumbenjamin swamped down by potions of green tea endow
them during their brief existence with natural pincushions of quite colossal
blubber. That suits your book, eh? Fleshhotpots of Egypt to hanker after.
Wallow in it. Lycopodium. (His throat twitches.) Slapbang! There he goes
again.
BLOOM The stye I dislike.
VIRAG (Arches his eyebrows.) Contact with a goldring, they say.
Argumentum ad feminam, as we said in old Rome and ancient Greece in the
consulship of Diplodocus and Ichthyo saurus. For the rest Eve's sovereign
remedy. Not for sale. Hire only. Huguenot. (He twitches.) It is a funny
sound.
(He coughs encouragingly.) But possibly it is only a wart. I presume
you shall have remembered what I will have taught you on that head?
Wheatenmeal with honey and nutmeg.
BLOOM (Reflecting.) Wheatenmeal with lycopodium and syllabax. This
searching ordeal. It has been an unusually fatiguing day, a chapter of
accidents. Wait. I mean, wartsblood spreads warts, you said .
VIRAG (Severely, his nose hardhumped, his side eye winking.) Stop
twirling your thumbs and have a good old thunk. See, you have forgotten.
Exercise your mnemotechnic. La causa х santa. Tara. Tara. (Aside.) He will
surely remember.
BLOOM Rosemary also did I understand you to say or will power over
parasitic tissues. Then nay no I have an inkling. The touch of a deadhand
cures. Mnemo?
VIRAG (Excitedly.) I say so. I say so. E'en so. Technic. (He taps his
parchmentroll energetically.) This book tells you how to act with all
descriptive particulars. Consult index for agitated fear of aconite,
melancholy of muriatic, priapic pulsatilla. Virag is going to talk about
amputation. Our old friend caustic. They must be starved. Snip off with
horsehair under the denned neck. But, to change the venue to the Bulgar and
the Basque, have you made up your mind whether you like or dislike women in
male habiliments? (With a dry snigger.) You intended to devote an entire
year to the study of the religious problem and the summer months of 1882 to
square the circle and win that million. Pomegranate! From the sublime to the
ridiculous is but a step. Pyjamas, let us say? Or stockingette gusseted
knickers, closed? Or, put we the case, those complicated combinations,
camiknickers? (He crows derisively.) Keekeereekee!
(Bloom surveys uncertainly the three whores, then gazes at the veiled
mauve light, hearing the everflying moth.)
BLOOM I wanted then to have now concluded. Nightdress was never. Hence
this. But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is will
then tomorrow as now was be past yester.
VIRAG (Prompts into his ear in a pig's whisper.) Insects of the day
spend their brief existence in reiterated coition, lured by the smell of the
inferiorly pulchritudinous female possessing extendified pudendal verve in
dorsal region. Pretty Poll! (His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally.) They
had a proverb in the Carpathians in or about the year five thousand five
hundred and fifty of our era. One tablespoonful of honey will attract friend
Bruin more than half a dozen barrels of first choice malt vinegar. Bear's
buzz bothers bees. But of this apart. At another time we may resume. We were
very pleased, we others. (He coughs and, bending his brow, rubs his nose
thoughtfully with a scooping hand.) You shall find that these night insects
follow the light. An illusion for remember their complex unadjustable eye.
For all these knotty points see the seventeenth book of my Fundamentals of
Sexology or the Love Passion which Doctor L. B. says is the book sensation
of the year. Some, to example, there are again whose movements are
automatic. Perceive. That is his appropriate sun. Nightbird nightsun
nighttown. Chase me, Charley! Buzz!
BLOOM Bee or bluebottle too other day butting shadow on wall dazed self
then me wandered dazed down shirt good job I...
VIRAG (His face impassive, laughs in a rich feminine key.) Splendid!
Spanish fly in his fly or mustard plaster on his dibble. (He gobbles
gluttonously with turkey wattles.) Bubbly jock! Bubbly jock! Where are we?
Open Sesame! Cometh forth! (He unrolls his parchment rapidly and reads, his
glowworm's nose running backwards over the letters which he claws.) Stay,
good friend. I bring thee thy answer Redbank oysters will shortly be upon
us. I'm the best o'cook. Those succulent bivalves may help us and the
truffles of Perigord, tubers dislodged through mister omnivorous porker,
were unsurpassed in cases of nervous debility or viragitis. Though they
stink yet they sting. (He wags head with cackling raillery.) Jocular. With
my eyeglass in my ocular.
BLOOM (Absently.) Ocularly woman's bivalve case is worse. Always open
sesame. The cloven sex. Why they fear vermin, creeping things. Yet Eve and
the serpent contradict. Not a historical fact. Obvious analogy to my idea.
Serpents too are gluttons for woman's milk. Wind their way through miles of
omnivorous forest to sucksucculent her breast dry. Like those bubblyjocular
Roman matrons one reads of in Elephantuliasis.
VIRAG (His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes stonily forlornly
closed, psalms in outlandish monotone.) That the cows with their those
distended udders that they have been the known...
BLOOM I am going to scream. I beg your pardon. Ah? So. (He repeats.)
Spontaneously to seek out the saurian's lair in order to entrust their teats
to his avid suction. Ant milks aphis. (Profoundly.) Instinct rules the
world. In life. In death.
VIRAG (Head askew, arches his back and hunched wing- shoulders, peers
at the moth out of blear bulged eyes, points a homing claw and cries.) Who's
Ger Ger? Who's dear Gerald? O, I much fear he shall be most badly burned.
Will some pleashe pershon not now impediment so catastrophics mit agitation
of firstclass tablenumpkin? (He mews.) Luss puss puss puss! (He sighs, draws
back and stares sideways down with dropping underjaw.) Well, well. He doth
rest anon.
I'm a tiny tiny thing
Ever flying in the spring
Round and round a ringaring.
Long ago I was a king,
Now I do this kind of thing
On the wing, on the wing!
Bing!
(He rushes against the mauve shade flapping noisily.) Pretty pretty
pretty pretty pretty pretty petticoats.
(From left upper entrance with two sliding steps Henry Flower comes
forward to left front centre. He wears a dark mantle and drooping plumed
sombrero. He carries a silverstringed inlaid dulcimer and a longstemmed
bamboo Jacobs pipe, its clay bowl fashioned as a female head. He wears dark
velvet hose and silverbuckled pumps. He has the romantic Saviour's face with
flowing locks, thin beard and moustache. His spindlelegs and sparrow feet
are those of the tenor Mario, prince of Candia. He settles down his goffered
ruffs and moistens his lips with a passage of his amorous tongue.)
HENRY (In a low dulcet voice, touching the strings of his guitar.)
There is a flower that bloometh.
(Virag truculent, his jowl set, stares at the lamp. Grave Bloom regards
Zoe's neck. Henry gallant turns with pendent dewlap to the piano.)
STEPHEN (To himself.) Play with your eyes shut. Imitate pa. Filling my
belly with husks of swine. Too much of this. I will arise and go to my.
Expect this is the. Steve, thou art in a parlous way. Must visit old Deasy
or telegraph. Our interview of this morning has left on me a deep
impression. Though our ages. Will write fully tomorrow. I'm partially drunk,
by the way. (He touches the keys again.) Minor chord comes now. Yes. Not
much however.
(Almidano Artifoni holds out a batonroll of music with vigorous
moustachework.)
ARTIFONI Ci rifletta. Lei rovina tutto.
FLORRY Sing us something. Love's old sweet song.
STEPHEN No voice. I am a most finished artist. Lynch, did I show you
the letter about the lute?
FLORRY (Smirking.) The bird that can sing and won't sing.
(The Siamese twins, Philip Drunk and Philip Sober two Oxford dons with
lawnmowers, appear in the window embrasure. Both are masked with Matthew
Arnold's face.)
PHILIP SOBER Take a fool's advice. All is not well. Work it out with
the buttend of a pencil, like a good young idiot. Three pounds twelve you
got, two notes, one sovereign, two crowns, if youth but knew. Mooney's en
ville, Mooney's sur mer, the Moira, Larchet's, Holles street hospital,
Burke's. Eh? I am watching you.
PHILIP DRUNK (Impatiently.) Ah, bosh, man. Go to hell! I paid my way.
If I could only find out about octaves. Reduplication of personality. Who
was it told me his name?
(His lawnmower begins to purr.) Aha, yes. Zoe mou sas agapo. Have a
notion I was here before. When was it not Atkinson his card I have
somewhere? Mac somebody. Unmack I have it. He told me about, hold on,
Swinburne, was it, no?
FLORRY And the song?
STEPHEN Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.
FLORRY Are you out of Maynooth? You're like someone I knew once.
STEPHEN Out of it now. (To himself.) Clever.
PHILIP DRUNK AND PHILIP SOBER (Their lawnmowers purring with a rigadoon
of grasshalms.) Clever ever. Out of it. Out of it. By the by have you the
book, the thing, the ashplant? Yes, there it, yes. Cleverever outofitnow.
Keep in condition. Do like us.
ZOE There was a priest down here two nights ago to do his bit of
business with his coat buttoned up. You needn't try to hide, I says to him.
I know you've a Roman collar.
VIRAG Perfectly logical from his standpoint. Fall of man. (Harshly, his
pupils waxing.) To hell with the pope! Nothing new under the sun. I am the
Virag who disclosed the sex secrets of monks and maidens. Why I left the
Church of Rome. Read the Priest, the Woman and the Confessional. Penrose.
Flipperty Jippert. (He wriggles.) Woman, undoing with sweet pudor her belt
of rushrope, offers her allmoist yoni to man's lingam. Short time after man
presents woman with pieces of jungle meat. Woman shows joy and covers
herself with featherskins. Man loves her yoni fiercely with big lingam, the
stiff one. (He cries.) Coactus volui. Then giddy woman will run about.
Strong man grasps woman's wrist. Woman squeals, bites, spucks. Man, now
fierce angry, strikes woman's fat yadgana. (He chases his tail.) Piffpaff!
Popo! (He stops, sneezes.) Pchp! (He worries his butt.) Prrrrrht!
LYNCH I hope you gave the good father a penance. Nine glorias for
shooting a bishop.
ZOE (Spouts walrus smoke through her nostrils.) He couldn't get a
connection. Only, you know, sensation. A dry rush.
BLOOM Poor man!
ZOE (Lightly.) Only for what happened him.
BLOOM How?
VIRAG (A diabolic rictus of black luminosity contracting his visage,
cranes his scraggy neck forward. He lifts a mooncalf nozzle and howls.)
Verfluchte Goim! He had a father, forty fathers. He never existed. Pig God!
He had two left feet. He was Judas Iacchias, a Libyan eunuch, the pope's
bastard. (He leans out on tortured forepaws, elbows bent rigid, his eye
agonising in his flat skullneck and yelps over the mute world.) A son of a
whore. Apocalypse.
KITTY And Mary Shortall that was in the lock with the pox she got from
Jimmy Pidgeon in the blue caps had a child off him that couldn't swallow and
was smothered with the convulsions in the mattress and we all subscribed for
the funeral.
PHILIP DRUNK (Gravely.) Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position,
Philippe?
PHILIP SOBER (Gaily.) C'иtait le sacrи pigeon, Philippe.
(Kitty unpins her hat and sets it down calmly, patting her henna hair.
And a prettier, a daintier head of winsome curls was never seen on a whores
shoulders. Lynch puts on her hat. She whips it off.)
LYNCH (Laughs.) And to such delights has Metchnikoff inoculated
anthropoid apes.
FLORRY (Nods.) Locomotor ataxy.
ZOE (Gaily.) O, my dictionary.
LYNCH Three wise virgins.
VIRAG (Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his bony epileptic
lips.) She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orange flower. Panther, the Roman
centurion, polluted her with his genitories. (He sticks out a flickering
phosphorescent scorpion tongue, his hand on his fork.) Messiah! He burst her
tympanum. (With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in the cynical
spasm.) Hik! Hek! Hak! Hok! Huk! Kok! Kuk!
(Ben Jumbo Dollard, rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled,
hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fatpapped, stands
forth, his loins and genitals tightened into a pair of black bathing
bagslops.)
BEN POLLARD (Nakkering castanet bones in his huge padded paws, yodels
jovially in base barreltone.) When love absorbs my ardent soul.
(The virgins, Nurse Callan and Nurse Quigley, burst through the
ringkeepers and the ropes and mob him with open arms.)
THE VIRGINS (Gushingly.) Big Ben! Ben MacChree!
A VOICE Hold that fellow with the bad breeches.
BEN DOLLARD (Smites his thigh in abundant laughter.) Hold him now.
HENRY (Caressing on his breast a severed female head, murmurs.) Thine
heart, mine love. (He plucks his lutestrings.) When first I saw.
VIRAG (Sloughing his skins, his multitudinous plumage moulting.) Rats!
(He yawns; showing a coalblack throat and closes his jaws by an upward push
of his parchment roll.) After having said which I took my departure.
Farewell. Fare thee well. Dreck!
(Henry Flower combs his moustache and beard rapidly with a pocketcomb
and gives a cows lick to his hair. Steered by his rapier, he glides to the
door his wild had slung behind him. Virag reaches the door in two ungainly
stilthops, his tail cocked, and deftly claps sideways on the wall a
pusyellow flybill, butting it with his head.)
THE FLYBILL K. 11. post no bills. Strictly confidential. Dr Hy Franks.
HENRY All is lost now.
(Virag unscrews his head in a trice and holds it under his arm.)
VIRAG'S HEAD Quack!
(Exeunt severally.)
STEPHEN (Over his shoulder to Zoe.) You would have preferred the
fighting parson who founded the protestant error. But beware Antisthenes,
the dog sage, and the last end of Anus Heresiarchus. The agony in the
closet.
LYNCH All one and the same God to her.
STEPHEN (Devoutly.) And Sovereign Lord of all things.
FLORRY (To Stephen.) I'm sure you are a spoiled priest. Or a monk.
LYNCH He is. A Cardinal's son.
STEPHEN Cardinal sin. Monks of the screw.
(His Eminence, Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Primate of all Ireland,
appears in the doorway, dressed in red soutane, sandals and socks. Seven
dwarf simian acolytes, also in red, cardinal sins, uphold his train, peeping
under it. He wears a battered silk hat sideways on his head. His thumbs are
stuck in his armpits and his palms outspread. Round his neck hangs a rosary
of corks ending on his breast in a corkscrew cross. Releasing his thumbs, he
invokes grace from on high with lace wave gestures and proclaims with
bloated pomp.)
THE CARDINAL
Conservio lies captured.
He lies in the lowest dungeon
With manacles and chains around his limbs
Weighing upwards of three tons.
(He looks at all for a moment, his right eye closed tight, his left
cheek puffed out. Then, unable to repress his merriment, he rocks to and
fro, ads akimbo, and sings with broad rollicking humour.) O, the poor little
fellow Hi-hi-hi-hi-his legs they were yellow He was plump, fat and heavy and
brisk as a snake But some bloody savage To graize his white cabbage He
murdered Nell Flaherty's duckloving drake.
(A multitude of midges swarms over his robe. He scratches himself with
crossed arms at his ribs, grimacing, and exclaims.) I'm suffering the agony
of the damned. By the hoky fiddle, thanks be to Jesus those funny little
chaps are not unanimous. If they were they'd walk me off the face of the
bloody globe.
(His head aslant, he blesses curtly with fore and middle fingers,
imparts the Easter kiss and doubleshuffles off comically, swaying his hat
from side to side, shrinking quickly to the size of his train bearers. The
dwarf acolytes, giggling, peeping, nudging, ogling, Easterkissing, zigzag
behind him. His voice is heard mellow from afar, merciful, male, melodious.)
Shall carry my heart to thee, Shall carry my heart to thee, And the breath
of the balmy night Shall carry my heart to thee.
(The trick doorhandle turns.)
THE DOORHANDLE Theeee.
ZOE The devil is in that door.
(A male form passes down the creaking staircase and is heard taking the
waterproof and hat from the rack. Bloom starts forward involuntarily and,
half closing the door as he passes, takes the chocolate from his pocket and
offers it nervously to Zoe.)
ZOE (Sniffs his hair briskly.) Hum. Thank your mother for the rabbits.
I'm very fond of what I like.
BLOOM (Hearing a male voice in talk with the whores on the doorstep,
pricks his ears.) If it were he? After? Or because not? Or the double event?
ZOE (Tears open the silverfoil.) Fingers was made before forks. (She
breaks off and nibbles a piece, gives a piece to Kitty Ricketts and then
turns kittenishly to Lynch.) No objection to French lozenges? (He nods. She
taunts him.) Have it now or wait till you get it? (He opens his mouth, his
head cocked. She whirls the prize in left circle. His head follows. She
whirls it back in right circle. He eyes her.) Catch.
(She tosses a piece. With an adroit snap he catches it and bites it
through with a crack.)
KITTY (Chewing.) The engineer I was with at the bazaar does have lovely
ones. Full of the best liqueurs. And the viceroy was there with his lady.
The gas we had on the Toft's hobbyhorses. I'm giddy still.
BLOOM (In Svengali's fur overcoat, with folded arms and Napoleonic
forelock, frowns in ventriloquial exorcism with piercing eagle glance
towards the door. Then, rigid, with left foot advanced, he makes a swift
pass with impelling fingers and gives the sign of past master, drawing his
right arm downwards from his left shoulder.) Go, go, go, I conjure you,
whoever you are.
(A male cough and tread are heard passing through the mist outside.
Blooms features relax. He places a hand in his waistcoat, posing calmly. Zoe
offers him chocolate.)
BLOOM (Solemnly.) Thanks.
ZOE Do as you're bid. Here.
(A firm heelclacking is heard on the stairs.)
BLOOM (Takes the chocolate.) Aphrodisiac? But I thought it. Vanilla
calms or? Mnemo. Confused light confuses memory. Red influences lupus.
Colours affect women's characters, any they have. This black makes me sad.
Eat and be merry for tomorrow. (He eats.) Influence taste too, mauve. But it
is so long since I. Seems new. Aphro. That priest. Must come. Better late