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 bye
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 grapses
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 Iacchia, 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?_