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?
PHILIP SOBER
(gaily) C’etait le sacrй pigeon, Philippe.
(Kitty unpins her hat and sets it down calmly, patting her henna hair. And a prettier, a daintier head of winsome curls was never seen on a whore’s shoulders. Lynch puts on her hat. She whips it off.)
LYNCH
(laughs) And to such delights has Metchnikoff inoculated anthropoid apes.
FLORRY
(nods) Locomotor ataxy.
ZOE
(gaily) O, my dictionary.
LYNCH
Three wise virgins.
VIRAG
(agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his bony epileptic lips) She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orangeflower. Panther, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. (he sticks out a flickering phosphorescent scorpion tongue, his hand on his fork) Messiah! He burst her tympanum. (with gibbering baboon’s cries he jerks his hips in the cynical spasm) Hik! Hek! Hak! Hok! Huk! Kok! Kuk!
(Ben Jumbo Dollard, rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled, hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fatpapped, stands forth, his loins and genitals tightened into a pair of black bathing bagslops.)
BEN DOLLARD
(nakkering castanet bones in his huge padded paws, yodels jovially in base barreltone) When love absorbs my ardent soul.
(The virgins Nurse Callan and Nurse Quigley burst through the ringkeepers and the ropes and mob him with open arms.)
THE VIRGINS
(gushingly) Big Ben! Ben my Chree!
A VOICE
Hold that fellow with the bad breeches.
BEN DOLLARD
(smites his thigh in abundant laughter) Hold him now.
HENRY
(caressing on his breast a severed female head, murmurs) Thine heart, mine love. (he plucks his lutestrings) When first I saw …
VIRAG
(sloughing his skins, his multitudinous plumage moulting) Rats! (he yawns, showing a coalblack throat, and closes his jaws by an upward push of his parchmentroll) After having said which I took my departure. Farewell. Fare thee well. Dreck!
(Henry Flower combs his moustache and beard rapidly with a pocketcomb and gives a cow’s lick to his hair. Steered by his rapier, he glides to the door, his wild harp slung behind him. Virag reaches the door in two ungainly stilthops, his tail cocked, and deftly claps sideways on the wall a pusyellow flybill, butting it with his head.)
THE FLYBILL
K. 11. Post No Bills. Strictly confidential. Dr Hy Franks.
HENRY
All is lost now.
(Virag unscrews his head in a trice and holds it under his arm.)
VIRAG’S HEAD
Quack!
(Exeunt severally.)
STEPHEN
(over his shoulder to Zoe) You would have preferred the fighting parson who founded the protestant error. But beware Antisthenes, the dog sage, and the last end of Arius Heresiarchus. The agony in the closet.
LYNCH
All one and the same God to her.
STEPHEN
(devoutly) And sovereign Lord of all things.
FLORRY
(to Stephen) I’m sure you’re a spoiled priest. Or a monk.
