Ulysses - Gabler Edition [235]
FATHER COFFEY
(yawns, then chants with a hoarse croak) Namine. Jacobs. Vobiscuits. Amen.
JOHN O’CONNELL
(foghorns stormily through his megaphone) Dignam, Patrick T, deceased.
PADDY DIGNAM
(with pricked up ears, winces) Overtones. (he wriggles forward and places an ear to the ground) My master’s 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 tail stiffpointed, his ears cocked.)
PADDY DIGNAM
Pray for the repose of his soul.
(He worms down through a coalhole, 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 twocolumned 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 through the sump. Kisses chirp amid the rifts of fog. A piano sounds. 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! Yummyyum, Womwom! (warbling) Big comebig! Pirouette! Leopopold! (twittering) Leeolee! (warbling) O Leo!
(They rustle, flutter upon his garments, alight, bright giddy flecks, 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 glides 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