Darconville's Cat (100 page)

  There was nobody yet home in the little house where
Isabel was living: the lights were out, the driveway empty.
Darconville swatted through the brush, rank with patches of
scabious knapweed and the mold of wet decaying leaves, crouching
along toward the sound of water, and there by a familiar stream, a
thing that could barely name itself, he chose a spot. It was a
covert in a folding bracket of bushes, set back and out of the way,
yet with a direct view through the trees, bare except for the last
foliar bundles of late fall, to the conventional little house some
hundred odd yards away. A scared bird whistled away. He took out
his pistol—and waited, the sound of the ghastly susurration in his
chest the only evidence of life in those woods.

  It was absurd for the necessity of it: thrilled with
the evil of where he was, Darconville could nevertheless exclude
himself—out of the inexorability of fortune—from a matter one part
of him could not conceive, not acknowledge, not treat as a thing of
possibility, never mind reason, and to try to behold himself
dwelling in the midst of it, to imagine this was he, became
impossible. An assassin? With leaky shoes? In a mottled wood by
night? Yet there in fact he was, the claustrophile-with-a-vengeance
his students so briefly knew—never ultimate, never emphatic, never
settled, never in sight. His reclusive disposition was at the
extreme. The night brought the forest closer; it was no longer the
place where, as lovers, they’d walked a million years ago; it was
in the interior chilliness of the darkness, and the moving trees
whose every action, travestied by moonlight, almost made him fire
proved every time he looked up to be only the wind and the rain
whispering in repetitious echo of her, “
You’re mad as a hatter!
You’re mad as a hatter
!”

  An hour passed, and another. The covert grew darker
about him, and pulse by pulse Darconville felt time grow weaker in
his veins. He kept still, not stirring, concentrating on the
destruction of her memory and trying to block out all motive,
sense, intention, and consequence— for thought is fatal to
action—sometimes seeing no ground beneath him and then noticing,
suddenly, the serrations in every leaf and every blade of grass.
And then whence the smell of sulphur, of burning and smoke, rising
out of fissures in the earth? A subterranean fire. It had been
burning, like dream into fact, for four years. He blew on his
hands. He felt cramped. Where was she? Where
was
she?

  He listened. It was getting late; there was still no
sign of her: perhaps, he thought, she might never appear. Then he
would have to stalk her—who knew?—even to Zutphen Farm and blast
her away through a window. Overhead a few dry and shrunken leaves
rustled, having points like stars and rising and falling delicately
as fingers playing sad music. Along the bed of the slanting ground,
all between the stools of wood, there were heaps of dead brown
leaves, and sheltered mats of lichen, and drifts of spotted stick
gone rotten, and tufts of rushes here and there, full of fray and
feathering. Darconville stumbled about, shifting in his wet coat,
into several positions until it all became hopeless: the rain came
thundering down now in sheets. He was freezing and, unable to
stifle the coughing from his aching lungs, leapt away with a train
of curses sufficient to poison the light of the moon. The volume of
rain beat eastward into the trees, and shuddering—the ice-cold
water rippling down his collar and into the bandages—he squelched
through the bracken and brakes and thickets of undergrowth, where
the moss held the falling rain like sponges. He took refuge in
disgust under a huge pine by which, still, the little stream ran
like diverted hope and listened to the water brawling darkly along
banks napped with that soaked moss, though he was still able to see
the house.

  It was then that it happened. Darconville, while he
squatted there, hunched and inert, his stiff fingers folded around
the pistol, was suddenly alert to something in the woods,
undeniably like something moving. Turning, he felt his heart shut
like a stopper; he froze—and, instantly, it was as if he had come
there only to understand what he must immediately come to know he
could never learn to forget, for in that moment foreordained his
gaze had fallen upon that simple tree, standing alone across the
water, upon the midrib of which in thin serifs had long ago been
carved a single word:
Remember
.

  He stood before it in the pouring rain.

  What hand made it? Whose carved? The very hand, he
saw without elaborate calculation, that would now mock memory by
murder. It was quietly, an overpowering accumulation, in the midst
of that storm—with the feeling of what was impending swiftly
opening to him in violent contrast the intensity of past
consciousness and the idea that it might cease forever—that
Darconville suddenly realized that the source of all error in life
was failure of memory! A recept, made of many precepts, exploded
into concept—and the past, formerly thought adversary to the
future, spoke to him. Remember! Remember! Remember the king’s words
in the old story: which arrow flies forever? The arrow that has
found its mark! All forgetfulness, he understood, almost on the
edge of exultation, was in itself immoral, for the permanence with
which experiences stay with a man is proportional to the
significance which they had for him: memory must be preserved
from
time! A thing has the more value, it came to him, the
less it is a function of time, and the effort of men to probe the
past? Why, it was nothing less than an exertion toward immortality,
for the consciousness and vision of the past but pointed to a
desire to be conscious in the future, didn’t it? And if, he
suddenly reasoned, we do not free what we have known from time by
memory, can we have any knowledge of remembrance any more than we
can have one jot more of time? Memory was eclogue! “What have I got
left?” asked Time. “Your genius,” answered Eternity.

  The moon was dancing in Darconville’s eyes through a
mist of tears, raining from heaven, half blinding them—and he wiped
them so as quickly to obtain the knowledge of what in that small
carved word he feared otherwise must fade.

  It was a duty to forget nothing! The first of
faults, Adam’s and Eve’s, was not disobedience but failure of
memory
—and the concomitant want of understanding that
memory is only another perspective on immortality, for inasmuch as
one is without continuity, he can have no true reverence for what
of life, in pain or pity, in happiness or hope, he owns to utter
and utters to shape and shapes to know if he would redeem the time.
Memory, rendering the past obsolete, nevertheless relies on it.
Continuous memory was not only the vanquisher of time, the logical
and ethical phenomenon saving one, Darconville saw almost in
ecstasy, from having to bear the grave burden of living one’s own
life under the same fault by which, through the very person he’d
destroy, he was faulted, but it was also linked to morality, for
only through memory were repentance and the rehabilitation of the
past possible—the salvation of one’s poor self! Destruction? No,
there must be preservation! The past! The past! The past, thought
Darconville,
was
the artist’s playground! The past was the
birthplace of the future! He took off Crucifer’s jade ring and
threw it as far as he could into the woods. To satisfy our now with
the memory of then, to shape to know:
that
was how
Petrarch attained to Laura in the field of eternal light! And if
reality
were
too varied, too abundant, to be mirrored in
anything smaller, narrower, less varied than itself? Then?

  Suddenly upon Darconville’s heart fell one drop of
Brahmic bliss, illuminating what it struck and telling him a truth:
Rise up, prophet, see and understand, the death of what is is the
birth of what’s to be!— and instantly the outward circumstances of
his life transformed into a consciousness of moral exaltation, an
indescribable feeling, invincible to all effects of time and
change, an elevation, elation, and joyousness passing the very
portals of grace itself as the seraph Uriel, with diffraction
lights glowing from his face, stood above him. I hear, I forget. I
see, I remember.
I do, I understand
. And he cried out
through the woods in astonishment, as if, upon the stroke of
creation, he suddenly understood that the occasion is the nothing
from which everything comes!

  At that very moment, a car’s headlights swept across
the trees, beamed away, and then the soft crackling of tires coming
through the darkness by the driveway was heard no more. The engine
was shut off. As the car doors slammed, the very night seemed to
hold its breath, as even the sound of wind and rain had ceased. But
there was never any noise, for, unable to move, Darconville was
facing away into the forest, remaining completely still, his eyes
closed to everything but the light that had flashed upon his soul.
He couldn’t see her again. She didn’t exist.

  It was done, then, what wasn’t, as in the resolution
of dreams, and so what can be recorded of what never took place
may, for who looked back in another direction never looked back at
all and who was given another life never knew how swiftly one was
lost (or how close she came to death that night) and what failed of
love in time disappeared into the timelessness of love to return
never again. He couldn’t see her again, who would. She didn’t exist
anymore, who did. And what had long been done had never been that
now would have to be.

  XCVI

  Quire Me Some Paper!

  I’ll write, but with my blood, that

    she may see

  These lines come from my wounds

    and not from me.

        —GEORGE CHAPMAN,
Bussy d’Ambois

  “QUIRE ME SOME PAPER!” cried Darconville. “Shear me
a sheep for vellum! Nail me out a desk with the timber of redwoods!
A quill pluperfect shoots from the sky to occupy my hand! Sound me
the Dorian mode! I am alive, O sunset, come back from the dead, and
from Thy crucible dost Thou call me forth, even as I am! All is in
movement! There are angels come to bandage the wounded angels of
battle and bend to lift me from the darkness to the light!
Beauséant
! Silence is full of execution, and intuition and
desire lie undestroyed! I will squeeze secrets through the tips of
my fingers! I will bring noses to windowpanes! I am still
Darconville, master of my fate, captain of my soul!”

  XCVII

  Venice

  Happy were he could he finish forth his fate

  In some unhaunted desert, where, obscure

  From all society, from love and hate

  Of worldly folk, there should he sleep secure.

        —ROBERT
DEVEREUX, Earl of Essex

  VENICE is a city of yesterdays. There is in the
ancient stone, the narrow and coarsing lagoons, the dark immemorial
sea slapping at its very steps an aspect of the eternal which seems
to say, in a strange paradox of finality, that time shall endure
only if once it comes to an end, a concept reversing the very
nature of what it is. There should be no surprise in that. It is a
city, in fact, where the natural does not exist, not in St. Mark’s
glittering dome, neither in the implacable white of the Doge’s
Palace, nor in the cold churches, old museums, and silent galleries
with their ikons and golden mosaics: Byzantine madonnas, infant
sibyls with electric eyes, and hierogrammarians standing head
downward with their feet folded in prayer.

  The city, born of art, has long existed more as a
measure of the artist’s contemplative imagination than the reality
of life in the labyrinth of narrow streets and lanes, smelling of
ruin and the sea, might otherwise indicate.

  At once conveyed in the deserted gondola stations,
however, along the slimy steps, past the empty warehouses and
listing palazzi that rise on either hand in the northerly district
of the Sacca della Misericordia is a particular destitution, and,
leaving the busier, more central quays and piazzetti off the Canal
Grande where rows of fantastic façades can be seen with Gothic
curved and pointed arches surmounted by circles containing
equilateral crosses all rising above grillwork balconies in the
Ducal gallery pattern, the tourist becomes suddenly bewildered. The
area turns darker, dirtier, more dismal. The water, sucking the
walls and welling up in the remotest crevices and steps, is black
and foul. The houses on each side rise to great heights still,
their lowest stories forming a double line of insignificant shops
into which the light of the sun, however, never enters and the dark
recesses of which, set so far back from the close rughetti, are
poorly illuminated by the flickering rays of the oil lamps which
alone are used to serve for light there. Gloomier cells than these
are perhaps hard to imagine—being made no less pitiful, to be sure,
if viewed through the contrasting light of former days when many of
them enjoyed, if not richness of adornment, then at least the
comparative wealth of human habitation. Now, many of them were
deserted—but not all. Several were still inhabited, by those who,
out of either determination or dereliction or both, remained yet
undeterred by the dampness, the vermin, or the prospect of a coming
Venetian winter.

  The old palazzo, for instance—formerly his
grandmother’s, now his own—in which Darconville was living was such
a one. It was a grey narrow house of stone in the Corte del Gatto,
a dead-end street set off the Canale della Misericordia which
looked across the Laguna Morta on the north side and lay open to
its ferocious squalls and winds. All three floors were unheated.
There were fireplaces in only four of the twelve rooms. Wood was
available in the trainyards at the Ferroviaria, when he could spend
the money.