Darconville's Cat (101 page)

  The weather in northern Italy had been bleak, the
sudden changes of temperature giving way to a searching cold, and
the skies, scarlet in the morning, always turned a dark variegated
africano
by afternoon, leaving the fastlands sunless and
the seawater slick and grey almost without exception. The first few
weeks in November had taxed Darconville sorely: he had landed as he
was with little in the way of provisions, his one suitcase filled
less with clothes and personal articles than with notebooks,
letters, and papers relating to the book (how long, in retrospect,
had been the preparation! ) he’d already begun to write in
earnest—not, however, before having made a solemn dedication to the
task upon the same day of disembarkation before the high altar of
St. Mark’s. There would be no income anymore, and much of the money
he’d set aside for the wedding, along with the few paychecks earned
at Harvard, had been spent on rent for the full year at Adams
House, several wasted nights south, and the trip abroad. The city
had also dunned him for a host of back taxes on the property. The
remaining monies had to be rationed for food and fuel and, as
ill-luck would have it, several doctor’s bills right from the
start, for a cold caught in the woods at Fawx’s Mt.—one,
exacerbated by the dampness of his rooms, he couldn’t shake—pulled
him down considerably with a sore throat, shortness of breath, and
a persistent cough. The doctor, at the very first examination, said
flatly that it was worse than a cold, couldn’t he tell?—and he
fumed at the irregularity of the entire situation. Did no one know
where he was? Couldn’t he give any other information? Was there no
forwarding address in case of emergency? “
Imbecille
!”
cried the doctor, who was also worrying about his fees.

  The symptoms were indisputable: anemic pallor,
coarse wheezing, and a cough that had already scored the larynx.
There was further evidence, above and beyond the recent rupture, of
chronic bronchial infection, probably acquired from a neglected
pneumonia in childhood. He was in a late and aggravated stage of
chronic bronchitis with resulting bronchiectasis.

  An unaccountable figure in black, unkempt and
unshaven, Darconville—fixed to no hope now but completing his
book—soon became a curiosity to the neighborhood in those first
weeks, before, that is, he retreated more and more into extreme
austerity. The children liked him, and he several times took them
to the Campo della Abbazia for balloons upon which, to their
delight, he carefully inked their faces. He seemed to possess a
curious influence over cats, as well, and on several occasions he
was seen standing in the moonlight in front of his house and
apparently talking to ten or a dozen cats from far and near who
were all looking at him. He kept to himself and could admit to no
acquaintances save with an old toothless
squalcira
across
the way who, remembering him from earlier years, sometimes brought
him over bags of biscotti. The rather saturnine and avaricious
doctor who periodically happened by for reasons as much inquisitive
as professional refused to understand why he was spending the
winter there. Why didn’t he go to one of the southern provinces?
Wasn’t he an American? Hadn’t he the money? (The doctor, at the
doubt, debated further visits. ) A good listener only because an
intrigued one, he often sat muddled while the young man’s
extraordinary talk flowed on—talk that scaled the heavens and
ransacked the earth, talk in which memories of a curious past
mingled preposterously with doctrines of art, comic mimicries, and
prevaricating theories about love and hate—and yet this visitor
.could not help feeling that as soon as he was alone he would sink
down, fatigued and listless, with all the spirit gone out of him.
The few neighbors in the corte called him “
Il Monaco
.”
They had no idea what he did, although at night from the top room
of that grey palazzo, dimly lit, they could sometimes hear coils of
unnatural laughter or the sounds of phantasmagorical tears, a
monodrama that seemed, for all they knew, to have its source in
some kind of secret and inscrutable theopathy impossible to
fathom.

  Darconville, in fact, was writing.

  The month of November came in and went out in a
pitiless drench of rain, decades of days, uncounted and ignored, in
which he rarely left that upper room but worked steadily on, hour
upon hour, galvanized into concentrated exertion and punching his
head hard with resolutions to restrain his nerves against inner
warnings of the exhaust-ibility of human patience. The manuscript
grew, quickly. No longer meditating the direst revenge nor passing
from one crazed project to another, with each one no less cowardly
than extravagant, he wrote down everything he could remember—for
victory without blood, he saw, was twice achieved—filling page
after page of what had happened to him, not lying, telling the
truth, writing to record rather than to imagine, not inventing what
never existed by trying to discover the meaning of what had, and as
he worked, distinguishing between the impulse to impose a meaning
(
animus impotentium
) and the impulse to interpret
(
animus interpretantium
), language became the objective of
which self-consciousness was the subjective. The bee had fertilized
the flower it robbed. Words were all he had left.

  The story was simple, a fable about Isabel
Rawsthorne and himself: doubt is double. He loved her. He hated
her. There was a peculiar agony, however, to this counterbalancing
anti-miracle, as if at the precise moment one was well pleasure
alone became too insufficient fully to define a man, so one sought
pain. The truth of each, incompatible with that of the other, fed
from whichever wrong or right was posited by what one had to
believe to keep the other real to avoid. What other story in life
was
there?

  Darconville’s art seemed to rise superior to its own
conditions in that Venetian palazzo, endowing even the dross with a
sense of mystery he watched to solve. He was perfectly cognizant of
the difficulty of the task of writing this book, its
unpleasantness, the uncertainty of achievement, but with that
awareness he only redoubled his efforts and scratched into his work
a useful refractivity of theme and theory out of the very doubts
and fears anterior to it—almost unable, always, to control his
impatience over, his devotion to, the need for furnishing proof of
himself, denied by pain, and to change that pain into considered
prose: a prose of love, a prose of hate. This was his perpetual
twilight. He retained his inventive powers only by subordinating
himself to them, and yet, so fragile was his hold upon his work, he
dared not tie himself to any other engagement whatsoever lest even
the foreknowledge of it upset a whole day’s work. He began to write
up to ten pages a day, pausing only for meager meals or to throw
another piece of wood onto the fire or to consult his notebooks,
rehearsing exact chronology, rifling out a detail, reckoning a fact
in the light of delayed revelation. It would be impossible, of
course, to understand the fire with which he wrote unless one also
understood the passion with which he’d sought that bond of rare and
divine love, too rare, too divine perhaps, even for the realization
of the one he loved herself. But work he did. His output increased
and, somehow, seemed inversely proportionate to his physical
discomfort, now a violent perspiration, now a dry and sinister
stiffness, but always the ache in his lungs that left a palpable
feeling of cavitation there. He determined to leave out nothing of
the four years spent with her, and while he lived no more in thrall
of what she did or didn’t, would or wouldn’t, he repeatedly
reviewed the photographs and read and re-read all the letters,
notes, and messages she lived in once but inhabited no more, a
spirit as infinitely far away in time now as she was in space,
flash frozen in a past as old as memory was strong, but a past, a
memory, calling him back to search and remember what in the
knowledge that is revealed at the heart of all violation can be
transfigured by the hand of art. The real, engulfed once in the
unreal, emerged, and there was rebirth by water. Laurel was the
first plant that grew after the Flood.

  It was mid-December now, with winterkill in the air.
As on every Friday—the only day of the week he stopped
working—Darconville set off through the cold-faced city to visit
his grandmother’s grave. It was a habit he had formed from the
first week of his arrival, initially with only the complication of
money spent he couldn’t afford, later against a doctor’s orders. He
faced away from the wind and hurried across a few blocks to the
Fondamenta Nuove, paid the rampino, an old silent scaramouche there
who, recognizing the black muffler and familiar black coat
(threadbare now), unhooked the gondola from the steps, and they
sloomed out in long lateral pushes toward the island-contained
graveyard offshore, the Cimitero Communale.

  The gravestone was a simple one, crowded into a
shamble of sunken burial plots and old blackened tombs, many of
them with skulls on the entablature and inscriptions relating to
both plague and poison, open all to the melancholy requiem of wind
and water. A spiked iron gatehouse, set in the circular wall, gave
entrance. Darconville walked to the grave and, standing against the
rapacious gusts of wind, tried to settle his thoughts around her
memory. He tried to offer up a prayer, an attempt that became only
a self-conscious reflection defeated by the hypocrisy he found in
himself—in his failed love—which required forgetting to overcome
and forgiving to absolve.
I can’t forget, I can’t forget
!
he thought. No! No! No! And what of forgiving, he thought bitterly,
wasn’t circumscribed and so contravened by reinventing the
imagination to acknowledge in art the questions life refused? He
whispered to his grandmother but realized that the condition of our
nature was such that we lived only to see those whom we love drop
successively away, our circle of relation growing less until
finally we are almost unconnected with the world. All union with
the inhabitants of earth must in time be broken, he realized, and
all hopes that terminate here must end in disappointment in spite
of what by the desperate intercession of the heart we seek to
keep.

  The impossibility of being able to discover the
results of prayer by any merely human test plagued Darconville.
How, he wondered, could one determine when a true prayer was
offered? If so much depends on the character and spirit of the
suppliant, how could anyone who is unable to read the heart tell
when the request which a seeker presents is such as God can
approve? And how could any external observer take cognizance of
such spiritual considerations as those which must enter into the
determination of the questions whether, and in what form, a prayer
has been answered? Where were the delicate instruments to measure
the results in the suppliant produced, sometimes by the denial and
sometimes by the granting of his requests? There were no answers
given that didn’t force one to have to
find
them. And so
he walked for hours into the darkening afternoon, the winter light
disappearing abruptly as if the cover of the universe had suddenly
banged shut, and he brooded over the questions interrogating him by
the echo created in the void of his poor prayers.

  The strong winds, snatching at his coat, almost took
away his breath. He ducked into the chapel of San Michèle to get
out of the weather, overcome as he entered by a severe tetany of
coughing, strange in the silence, and he sat down in a pew and
tried again to pray. His prayer became dreams, a slow wandering to
an upper level of consciousness beyond the preteressential
candlelight and scent of wax, and the dreams in their
measurelessness showed him by way of his failed effort in what form
a prayer might be answered: yes, he thought, I will make the
ultimate confession! It must be the story of
all
lovers,
with the ethical and aesthetic sense in the work leaving no means
of reaching the truth uninvestigated. Not a simple reproduction of
the sensible appearance of things but a representation of their
inner reality, embodying and illustrating the truth by the laws of
general validity! No, I shall write, thought Darconville—but to
forget, and so by forgetting, forgive. It was almost as if he had
never known what a certainty was until that night. Prayer, he
realized, is utterance! The answer was in itself. Art creates the
Eden where Adam and Eve eat the serpent.

  Suddenly, Darconville was bending over, almost
motionsick, with something fluttering in his chest, and, dizzy, his
arms drawing in, he caught himself over a cramp, coughing violently
from the lungs—and a spattering of black blood dropped onto the
marble floor. It was the first sign of his indisposition, a second
new truth to cope with but ignored, fatally, by the splendor of the
one that came before.

  The gondolier told him to hurry—it was late enough,
he complained, to be asking double the fee—for the sea had grown
choppy and a nightfog had blown in, ominously closing down over
them. They rowed back to the city over the ebony swells, the bluish
watery lights of Venice showing dimly through the vaporous night,
and the clanking of invisible buoys, with their pitiful lack of
resonance, sounded more lost and lonesome in the obscurity of the
sea than ever could be imagined. The city from this approach had an
aspect of death, as livid as a drowned person. Washed, undermined,
and long worn by the lapping waters that rose each day with the
powerful flow of the tide, working as a prisoner files his chains,
the north side was being slowly eaten away. The façades of the
palazzi, their rough coats faded and discolored by the salty air,
were many of them blacked, the stucco astragals crumbling off them
like sugar. The slick cobblestones under the lamplight shone and
were strewn here and about with dead bits of calamaretti and scampi
which had fallen from the boats, sails unfurled now, cordage
stacked, all jerking in their moorings. The Merceria clock struck
ten. It was late and the streets were nearly empty, except for a
few old women wearing black shawls who hobbled through the shadows
with bread and produce in net bags. There was the rattle of a
descending shop shutter. A herring-gull screeched.