Part 184

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 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 Ralegh 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.)