(The portly figure of John O'Connell, caretaker stands forth, holding a bunch of keys tied with crape. Beside him stands Father Coffey, chaplain, toad bellied, wrynecked, in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding sleepily a staff of twisted poppies.)FATHER COFFEY (Yawns, then chants with a hoarse croak.) Namine. Jacobs Vobiscuits. Amen.
(Foghorns stormily through his megaphone.) Dignam, Patrick T., deceased.
PADDY DIGNAM (With pricked up ears, winces.) Overtones.
(He wriggles forward, places an ear to the ground.) My masters' voice!
JOHN O'CONNELL Burial docket letter number U. P. Eightyfive thousand. Field seventeen. House of Keys. Plot, one hundred and one.
(Paddy Dignam listens with visible effort, thinking, his tailstiffpointed, his ears cocked.)PADDY DIGNAM Pray for the repose of his soul.
(He worms down through a coal hole, his brown habit trailing its tether over rattling pebbles. After him toddles an obese grandfather rat on fungus turtle paws under a grey carapace. Dignam's voice, muffled, is heard baying under ground: Dignam's dead and gone below. Tom Rochford, robinredbreasted, in cap and breeches, jumps from his two-columned machine.)TOM ROCHFORD (A hand to his breastbone, bows.) Reuben J. A florin I find him. (He fixes the manhole with a resolute stare.) My turn now on. Follow me up to Carlow.
(He executes a daredevil salmon leap in the air and is engulfed in the coalhole. Two discs on the columns wobble eyes of nought. All recedes. Bloom plodges forward again. He stands before a lighted house, listening. The kisses, winging from their bowers, fly about him, twittering, warbling, cooing.)THE KISSES (Warbling.) Leo! (Twittering.) Icky licky micky sticky for Leo! (Cooing.) Coo coocoo! Yummyumm Wom worn! (Warbling.) Big comebig! Pirouette! Leopopold! (Twittering.) Leeolee! (Warbling.) O Leo!
(They rustle, flutter upon his garments, alight, bright giddyflecks, silvery sequins.)BLOOM A man's touch. Sad music. Church music. Perhaps here.
(Zoe Higgins, a young whore in a sapphire slip, closed with three bronze buckles, a slim black velvet fillet round her throat, nods, trips down the steps and accosts him.)ZOE Are you looking for someone? He's inside with his friend.
BLOOM Is this Mrs Mack's?
ZOE No, eightyone. Mrs Cohen's. You might go farther and fare worse. Mother Slipperslapper. (Familiarly.) She's on the job herself tonight with the vet, her tipster, that gives her all the winners and pays for her son in Oxford. Working overtime but her luck's turned today. (Suspiciously.) You're not his father, are you?
BLOOM Not I!
ZOE You both in black. Has little mousey any tickles tonight?
(His skin, alert, feels her fingertips approach. A hand slides over his left thigh.)ZOE How's the nuts?
BLOOM Off side. Curiously they are on the right. Heavier I suppose. One in a million my tailor, Mesias, says.
ZOE (In sudden alarm.) You've a hard chancre.
BLOOM Not likely.
ZOE I feel it.
(Her hand slides into his left trouser pocket and brings out a hard black shrivelled potato. She regards it and Bloom with dumb moist lips.)BLOOM A talisman. Heirloom.
ZOE For Zoe? For keeps? For being so nice, eh?
(She puts the potato greedily into a pocket, then links his arm, cuddling him with supple warmth. He smiles uneasily. Slowly, note by note, oriental music is played. He gazes in the tawny crystal of her eyes, ringed with kohol. His smile softens.)ZOE You'll know me the next time.
BLOOM (Forlornly.) I never loved a dear gazelle but it was sure to.
(Gazelles are leaping, feeding on the mountains. Near are lakes. Round their shores file shadows black of cedargroves. Aroma rises, a strong hairgrowth of resin. It burns, the orient, a sky of sapphire, cleft by the bronze flight of eagles. Under it lies the womancity, nude, white, still, cool, in luxury. A fountain murmurs among damask roses. Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes. A wine of shame, lust, blood exudes, strangely murmuring.)ZOE (Murmuring singsong with the music, her odalisk lips lusciously smeared with salve of swinefat and rosewater.) Schorach ani wenowach, benoith Hierushaloim.
BLOOM (Fascinated.) I thought you were of good stock by your accent.
ZOE And you know what thought did?
(She bites his ear gently with little goldstopped teeth sending on him a cloying breath of stale garlic. The roses draw apart, disclose a sepulchre of the gold of kings and their mouldering bones.)BLOOM (Draws back, mechanically caressing her right bub with a flat awkward hand.) Are you a Dublin girl?
ZOE (Catches a stray hair deftly and twists it to her coil.) No bloody fear. I'm English. Have you a swaggerroot?
BLOOM (As before.) Rarely smoke, dear. Cigar now and then. Childish device. (Lewdly.) The mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder of rank weed.
ZOE Go on. Make a stump speech out of it.
BLOOM (In workman's corduroy overalls, black gansy with red floating tie and apache cap.) Mankind is incorrigible. Sir Walter Raleigh brought from the new world that potato and that weed, the one a killer of pestilence by absorption, the other a poisoner of the ear, eye, heart, memory, will, understanding, all. That is to say, he brought the poison a hundred years before another person whose name I forget brought the food. Suicide. Lies. All our habits. Why, look at our public life!
(Midnight chimes from distant steeples.)
THE CHIMES Turn again, Leopold! Lord Mayor of Dublin!
BLOOM (In alderman's gown and chain.) Electors of Arran Quay, Inns Quay, Rotunda, Mountjoy and North Dock, better run a tramline, I say, from the cattlemarket to the river. That's the music of the future. That's my programme. Cui Bono? But our buccaneering Vanderdeckens in their phantom ship of finance...
AN ELECTOR Three times three for our future chief magistrate!
(The aurora borealis of the torchlight procession leaps.)THE TORCH BEARERS Hooray!
