(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!
(Several wellknown burgesses, city magnates and freemen of the city shake hands with Bloom and congratulate him. Timothy Harrington, late thrice Lord Mayor of Dublin, imposing in mayoral scarlet, gold chain and white silk tie, confers with councillor Lorcan Sherlock, locum tenens. They nod vigorously in agreement.)LATE LORD MAYOR HARRINGTON (In scarlet robe with mace, gold mayoral chain and lace white silk scarf) That alder man sir Leo Bloom's speech be printed at the expense of the ratepayers. That the house in which he was born be ornamented with a commemorative tablet and that the thoroughfare hitherto known as Cow Parlour off Cork street be henceforth designated Boulevard Bloom.
COUNCILLOR LORCAN SHERLOCK Carried unanimously.
BLOOM (Impassionedly.) These flying Dutchmen or lying Dutchmen as they recline in their upholstered poop, casting dice, what reck they? Machines is their cry, their chimera, their panacea. Laboursaving apparatuses, supplanters, bug-bears, manufactured monsters for mutual murder, hideous hobgoblins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted labour. The poor man starves while they are grassing their royal mountain stags or shooting peasants and phartridges in their purblind pomp of pelf and power. But their reign is rover for rever and ever and ev...
