Ulysses
sir. No, sir. Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Christ!
I pull the wheezy bell of their shuttered cottage: and wait. They take
me for a dun, peer out from a coign of vantage.
—It’s Stephen, sir.
—Let him in. Let Stephen in.
A bolt drawn back and Walter welcomes me.
—We thought you were someone else.
In his broad bed nuncle Richie, pillowed and blanketed, extends over
the hillock of his knees a sturdy forearm. Cleanchested. He has washed
the upper moiety.
—Morrow, nephew.
He lays aside the lapboard whereon he drafts his bills of costs for the
eyes of master Goff and master Shapland Tandy, filing consents and
common searches and a writ of _Duces Tecum_. A bogoak frame over his
bald head: Wilde’s _Requiescat_. The drone of his misleading whistle
brings Walter back.
—Yes, sir?
—Malt for Richie and Stephen, tell mother. Where is she?
—Bathing Crissie, sir.
Papa’s little bedpal. Lump of love.
—No, uncle Richie...
—Call me Richie. Damn your lithia water. It lowers. Whusky!
—Uncle Richie, really...
—Sit down or by the law Harry I’ll knock you down.
Walter squints vainly for a chair.
—He has nothing to sit down on, sir.
—He has nowhere to put it, you mug. Bring in our chippendale chair.
Would you like a bite of something? None of your damned lawdeedaw airs
here. The rich of a rasher fried with a herring? Sure? So much the
better. We have nothing in the house but backache pills.
_All’erta!_
He drones bars of Ferrando’s _aria di sortita_. The grandest number,
Stephen, in the whole opera. Listen.
His tuneful whistle sounds again, finely shaded, with rushes of the
air, his fists bigdrumming on his padded knees.
This wind is sweeter.
Houses of decay, mine, his and all. You told the Clongowes gentry you
had an uncle a judge and an uncle a general in the army. Come out of
them, Stephen. Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh’s
library where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For
whom? The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close. A hater of his
kind ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the
moon, his eyeballs stars. Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled. The oval equine
faces, Temple, Buck Mulligan, Foxy Campbell, Lanternjaws. Abbas father,
furious dean, what offence laid fire to their brains? Paff! _Descende,
calve, ut ne nimium decalveris_. A garland of grey hair on his
comminated head see him me clambering down to the footpace
(_descende!_), clutching a monstrance, basiliskeyed. Get down,
baldpoll! A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the
altar’s horns, the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving burly in their
albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of
wheat.
And at the same instant perhaps a priest round the corner is elevating
it. Dringdring! And two streets off another locking it into a pyx.
Dringadring! And in a ladychapel another taking housel all to his own
cheek. Dringdring! Down, up, forward, back. Dan Occam thought of that,
invincible doctor. A misty English morning the imp hypostasis tickled
his brain. Bringing his host down and kneeling he heard twine with his
second bell the first bell in the transept (he is lifting his) and,
rising, heard (now I am lifting) their two bells (he is kneeling) twang
in diphthong.
Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. Isle of saints. You were
awfully holy, weren’t you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you
might not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in Serpentine avenue
that the fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes still more from
the wet street. _O si, certo!_ Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags
pinned round a squaw. More tell me, more still! On the top of the Howth
tram alone crying to the rain: _Naked women! Naked women!_ What about
that, eh?
What about what? What else were they invented for?
Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young.
You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause
earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one
saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for
titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is
wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval
leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great
libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them
there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della
Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange
pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who
once...
The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a
damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the
unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada.
Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing
upward sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered in seafire under a
midden of man’s ashes. He coasted them, walking warily. A porterbottle
stood up, stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel:
isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze
of dark cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the
higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts. Ringsend: wigwams
of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells.
He halted. I have passed the way to aunt Sara’s. Am I not going there?
Seems not. No-one about. He turned northeast and crossed the firmer
sand towards the Pigeonhouse.
_—Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position?_
_—C’est le pigeon, Joseph._
Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar
MacMahon. Son of the wild goose, Kevin Egan of Paris. My father’s a
bird, he lapped the sweet _lait chaud_ with pink young tongue, plump
bunny’s face. Lap, _lapin._ He hopes to win in the _gros lots_. About
the nature of women he read in Michelet. But he must send me _La Vie de
Jésus_ by M. Léo Taxil. Lent it to his friend.
_—C’est tordant, vous savez. Moi, je suis socialiste. Je ne crois pas
en l’existence de Dieu. Faut pas le dire à mon père._
_—Il croit?_
_—Mon père, oui._
_Schluss_. He laps.
My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want
puce gloves. You were a student, weren’t you? Of what in the other
devil’s name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., you know: _physiques, chimiques et
naturelles_. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of _mou en civet_, fleshpots
of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural
tone: when I was in Paris; _boul’ Mich’_, I used to. Yes, used to carry
punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder
somewhere. Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904
the prisoner was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it: other me.
Hat, tie, overcoat, nose. _Lui, c’est moi_. You seem to have enjoyed
yourself.
Proudly walking. Whom were you trying to walk like? Forget: a
dispossessed. With mother’s money order, eight shillings, the banging
door of the post office slammed in your face by the usher. Hunger
toothache. _Encore deux minutes_. Look clock. Must get. _Fermé_. Hired
dog! Shoot him to bloody bits with a bang shotgun, bits man spattered
walls all brass buttons. Bits all khrrrrklak in place clack back. Not
hurt? O, that’s all right. Shake hands. See what I meant, see? O,
that’s all right. Shake a shake. O, that’s all only all right.
You were going to do wonders, what? Missionary to Europe after fiery
Columbanus. Fiacre and Scotus on their creepystools in heaven spilt
from their pintpots, loudlatinlaughing: _Euge! Euge!_ Pretending to
speak broken English as you dragged your valise, porter threepence,
across the slimy pier at Newhaven. _Comment?_ Rich booty you brought
back; _Le Tutu_, five tattered numbers of _Pantalon Blanc et Culotte
Rouge_; a blue French telegram, curiosity to show:
—Mother dying come home father.
The aunt thinks you killed your mother. That’s why she won’t.
Then here’s a health to Mulligan’s aunt
And I’ll tell you the reason why.
She always kept things decent in
The Hannigan famileye.
His feet marched in sudden proud rhythm over the sand furrows, along by
the boulders of the south wall. He stared at them proudly, piled stone
mammoth skulls. Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders. The sun is
there, the slender trees, the lemon houses.
Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of
farls of bread, the froggreen wormwood, her matin incense, court the
air. Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife’s lover’s wife, the
kerchiefed housewife is astir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand. In
Rodot’s Yvonne and Madeleine newmake their tumbled beauties, shattering
with gold teeth _chaussons_ of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the
_pus_ of _flan bréton_. Faces of Paris men go by, their wellpleased
pleasers, curled conquistadores.
Noon slumbers. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers
smeared with printer’s ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his
white. About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets. _Un demi
sétier!_ A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron. She serves
me at his beck. _Il est irlandais. Hollandais? Non fromage. Deux
irlandais, nous, Irlande, vous savez ah, oui!_ She thought you wanted a
cheese _hollandais_. Your postprandial, do you know that word?
Postprandial. There was a fellow I knew once in Barcelona, queer
fellow, used to call it his postprandial. Well: _slainte!_ Around the
slabbed tables the tangle of wined breaths and grumbling gorges. His
breath hangs over our saucestained plates, the green fairy’s fang
thrusting between his lips. Of Ireland, the Dalcassians, of hopes,
conspiracies, of Arthur Griffith now, A E, pimander, good shepherd of
men. To yoke me as his yokefellow, our crimes our common cause. You’re
your father’s son. I know the voice. His fustian shirt,
sanguineflowered, trembles its Spanish tassels at his secrets. M.
Drumont, famous journalist, Drumont, know what he called queen
Victoria? Old hag with the yellow teeth. _Vieille ogresse_ with the
_dents jaunes_. Maud Gonne, beautiful woman, _La Patrie_, M. Millevoye,
Félix Faure, know how he died? Licentious men. The froeken, _bonne à
tout faire_, who rubs male nakedness in the bath at Upsala. _Moi
faire_, she said, _Tous les messieurs_. Not this _Monsieur_, I said.
Most licentious custom. Bath a most private thing. I wouldn’t let my
brother, not even my own brother, most lascivious thing. Green eyes, I
see you. Fang, I feel. Lascivious people.
The blue fuse burns deadly between hands and burns clear. Loose
tobaccoshreds catch fire: a flame and acrid smoke light our corner. Raw
facebones under his peep of day boy’s hat. How the head centre got
away, authentic version. Got up as a young bride, man, veil,
orangeblossoms, drove out the road to Malahide. Did, faith. Of lost
leaders, the betrayed, wild escapes. Disguises, clutched at, gone, not
here.
Spurned lover. I was a strapping young gossoon at that time, I tell
you. I’ll show you my likeness one day. I was, faith. Lover, for her
love he prowled with colonel Richard Burke, tanist of his sept, under
the walls of Clerkenwell and, crouching, saw a flame of vengeance hurl
them upward in the fog. Shattered glass and toppling masonry. In gay
Paree he hides, Egan of Paris, unsought by any save by me. Making his
day’s stations, the dingy printingcase, his three taverns, the
Montmartre lair he sleeps short night in, rue de la Goutte-d’Or,
damascened with flyblown faces of the gone. Loveless, landless,
wifeless. She is quite nicey comfy without her outcast man, madame in
rue Gît-le-Cœur, canary and two buck lodgers. Peachy cheeks, a zebra
skirt, frisky as a young thing’s. Spurned and undespairing. Tell Pat