Darconville's Cat (2 page)

  It had long seemed clear, commandmental: to seek out
a relatively distant and unembellished part of the world where, in
the solitude he arranged for himself—rather like the pilgrim who
lives on lentils, pulses, and the tested modes of self-denial—one
might apply himself to those deeper mysteries where nameless
somethings in their causes slept. He sought the obol of Pasetes,
the mallet of Daikoku, the lamp of Aladdin. There were
difficulties, often, in the way of carrying out his plans. But he
overbore them and, hoping to fall prey to neither fascination nor
fatigue, sought only to stem distraction, to learn the secrets
beyond the world he felt belonged to him, and to write. It was the
Beatitude of Destitution.

  Alaric Darconville—insurrect, courteous,
liturgical—was twenty-nine years old. He had the pointed medieval
face of a pageboy, which showed less of mature steadiness than
innocent deliberation, an expensive coloring backlit with a kind of
intangible grace, and his eyes, of a strange tragic beauty, dark
and filled with studying what’s represented by what is, could light
up like a monk at jubilee when rounding the verge of a new idea and
sparkle up in happy conviction as if to say “Excelsior!” He
dreamed, like Astrophel, with his head in the stars. His mind was
like one of those Gothic cathedrals of which he was so fond,
mysterious within, and filled with light, a brightness at once
richer and less real than the light of day, flashing accompaniment,
on occasion, to the long satirical tirades of which he was also
capable and yet wakefully aware, in gentleness, of what in matters
of difficulty he felt should either be removed, pitied, or
understood. He was six feet tall. His hair he wore long, like the
Renaissance prince at his lyre, and it matched in color his coat of
jet which was of an obsolete but distinct cut and as black as the
mundus
where Romans communed with their dead.

  The book he was working on—a grimoire, in the old
style— recapitulated such communication. He scribbled away in the
light of his gooseneck lamp that not only left the rest of the room
in darkness but at such times rendered insignificant any matters of
consequence beyond that. There was a private quality about him as
he worked: a wizard in conical hat conjuring mastertricks; the
sacristan jing-jing-jingling the bells of sext; the alchemist,
counsel to caliphs, shuttling in a cellar enigmatic beaker to tort
for rare demulcents and rubefacients. It was a closed world, his,
arresting thoughts for words to work, to skid around, to
transubstantiate: the writer is the ponce who introduces Can to
Ought. He crafted his writing and loved listening to those tiny
explosions when the active brutality of verbs in revolution raced
into sweet established nouns to send marching across the page a
newly commissioned army of words-on-maneuvers, all decorated in
loops, frets, and arrowlike flourishes. Darconville was bedeviled
by angels: they stalked and leaguered him by night and day, and,
when sitting at his desk, he never failed to acknowledge
Stimulator, the angel invoked in the exorcism of ink, for the storm
and stress of making something from nothing partook no less of the
supernatural than Creation itself. Was doubt the knot in faith’s
muscle? And yet faith required to fill the desert places of an
empty page? Then this was a day in September no different from any
others on which he wrote, the mind making up madness, the hand its
little prattboy hopping along after it to record what it could of
measure—but there was one exception.

  Darconville anxiously kept seeing the face of one of
his students, someone he had noticed on the first day of class. She
was a freshman. He didn’t know her name.

  He might have spent an inattentive afternoon in
consequence but, subdued by what had no charm for him, instead
vexed himself to write as a means of serving notice to a mischief
he’d been uncertain of now for too many days. Beauty, while it
haunted him, also distracted him; unable to resist its appeal, he,
however, longed to be above it. There is a will so strong as to
recoil upon itself and fall into indecision: a deliberate person’s,
often, who, otherwise prompt to action, sometimes leaves everything
undone—or, better, assumes that whatever has been done is something
already charged to an appointed end, relieving him then of calling
into question by subsequent thought the meaning of its worth. Did
Darconville’s mind, then, obsessed and overwhelmed by images and
dreams of the supernatural, crave at last for the one thing
stranger than all these—the experience of it in fact? It is perhaps
easy to believe so.

  He was born—of French and Italian parentage—on the
reaches of coastal New England where the old Victorian house that
was the family seat stands to this day in a small village hard by
the sea. It was always a region of spectacular beauty, infinite
skies and meadows and ocean, and all aspects of nature there seemed
drawn together in a tie of inexpressible benediction. His youthful
dreams were always of a supernatural cast, shot through with
vision, and nothing whatsoever matter-of-fact could avail against
the propagation of his early romantic ideals. It had been instilled
in him early—his Venetian grandmother fairly threw her hands over
her ears at the suggestion of any aspiration less noble—that the
goal of a person’s life must naturally afford the light by which
the rest of it should be read, a doctrine that paradoxically
created in him less a strength against than a disposition to a
belief in unreal worlds, a condition somehow making him
particularly unsuited for the heartache of real life.

  The facts of one’s childhood are always important
when touching on a genius. Darconville was an ardently religious
boy, much attracted to ritual. At six, he won the school ribbon for
a drawing of the face of God—it resembled a cat’s—and illustrated a
juvenile book of his own dramatic making which ended: “
But
wait, there is something coming toward me
—!” There were
illnesses, and a double pneumonia in childhood following a nearly
fatal bout with measles left his lungs imperfect. He would never
forget his father who read to him or his mother who kissed him
goodnight, for he lost both of them before he was fourteen,
whereupon, becoming wayward and discontented with everything else,
he cut short his schooling to join the Franciscan Order, less on
the advice growing out of the newly assumed regency of his
grandmother, though that, than on the investigation of a dream: a
nostalgia for vision, if commonly absent in others, then not so for
a little boy whose earliest memory was of trying to pick up pieces
of moonlight that had fallen through the window onto his bed.

  Seminary life in those early years led to strange
and unaccountable antipathies. It was not that he didn’t feel he
fit, but if particulars went well—in everything, save, perhaps, for
the occasional youthful temptation he suffered during
lectio
divina
while reading Lucretius on the terminology of physical
love—general acceptance came hard. He improvised piano arrangements
at midnight, claimed he could work curses, and put it about that he
believed animals, because of a universal language from which we
alone had fallen, could understand us when we spoke. He astonished
his fellow students, furthermore, with several rapturous edificial
schemes few shared: to rebuild the tomb of St. John at Ephesus; to
set up birdhouses for Christ through upstate New York; and to
reconstruct—he actually stepped off the dimensions on the ballfield
and began to assemble planks—Noah’s Ark. Throughout these years he
showed a splendid but innocent sense of fun.

  Darconville owned a great fat pen he called “The
Black Disaster” —an object, he demoted, no other hand dare touch!
His classmates were solemnly, ceremoniously, assured it was magic,
and it was coveted by all of them only in so far as stealing it
might render its owner a less vivid, if not less bumptious,
antagonist. He managed never to relinquish it, however, and drew
angels all over his copybooks; wrote squibs about some of his
colleagues which, signed “Aenigmaticus,” he secretly distributed in
various library books; and one day, for drawing a fresco—his
capolavoro
—of St. Bernard excommunicating a multitude of
flies at Foigny, where each little creature ingeniously, but
undisguisedly, bore the face of one of the college prefects, he was
slapped so hard by a certain Father Theophane that it effected a
stammer in him that would be activated, during moments of
confrontation, for the rest of his life. Hostility eventually built
up, and his unconventional conduct became the subject of such
unfavorable comment in the college that it was suggested he leave.
A few defended him. (He believed it was because there had once been
a cardinal in his family, as indeed there had been.) The rest, some
silently abusive, naggingly malevolent, or outright vindictive,
more or less concurred in the bizarre if hard to be seriously taken
fiat that he not only vacate the premises but withdraw, meditate,
and summarily impale himself on the same wretched object that had
been the source, in several ways, less of any black disaster than
of their own humorless and over-pious objections.

  As it happened, he never attained to the
priesthood—not, however, because he didn’t again try. For try again
he did, but failed once more. And yet with what reckless audacity,
with what fierce, uncompromising passion did he always charge and
fight and charge again! Resignation to appointed ends? He was not
of an age for that. And as there hovered before him, always, a
sense of disgust in resigning the soul to the pleasures and idle
conveniences of the world, his aspirations, individual and
metaphysical, led abruptly to another decision. He entered a
Trappist monastery at eighteen and yet, again, before long fell
into confusion and a particular variety of quarrels there for which
he was never directly responsible but to which, as we’ve seen, even
the most saintly precincts are liable. The principal agent of the
worst of them was a priggish anathemette named Frater Clement who,
without the gift of reason, much less the gift of faith, had as his
goal not the salvation of his soul but the acquisition in matrimony
of a blond boy, another novice, who thought the world was run and
possibly owned by the Order of Cistercians.
His
submission
was naïveté, but Darconville grew impatient with the other’s venal
disability. And one afternoon as the monks were proceeding to
nones, he snared the hypocrite by the cowl, pulled him into a
side-cloister, and—not without stuttering—adroitly gave him the
lecture on spiritual discipline he found later, much to his own
grief, he himself couldn’t follow, for he saw he couldn’t forgive
Frater Clement, whose jug ears alone at chant and chapter
phosphorized his charity on the spot. Dismal depression followed.
He received the blessing of the Abbot, who repeated the famous
words of the old desert fathers: “
fuge, tace, et quiesce
”
and, leaving the following day in an egg truck—with one suitcase, a
great fat pen, and all his limitations—went bouncing over the hill
in the direction of the declining sunshine.

  At twenty, in what was probably the climactic event
of his life, Darconville discovered writing, the sole subject of
his curiosity at this time being words and the possibility of
giving expression to them. Now, among those fragile loves to which
most men look back with tenderness and passion, certain must be
singled out as of special importance: in young Darconville’s life
it was to be his proud and irrepressible grandmama whose affection
for him was always on the increase and who—never once having failed
to give fortitude to his individuality, although in quaint
deference to his family’s nobility on the paternal side she used
only his surname in matters of address, a habit he would continue
all his life—with rising emphasis that gave words to his inward
instincts encouraged him at this critical juncture of his life to
go live with her in Venice. At every point she was replete with
wise suggestions, the value of which he recognized and the tenor of
which he followed. Did he want to write? she had asked and upon the
instant answered Darconville, who had but to follow the direction
of her raised and superintendent cane to a corner where sat a
beautiful desk.

  It wasn’t long before his grandmother passed away.
The palazzo, immediately becoming the object of what had even long
before been a curious litigation, was locked up. And so with a
certain amount of money earmarked for his education, belated for
the clerical years, he took her cat, Spellvexit—his sole companion
now—and set sail back to the United States, looking once more for
the possibilities of the possible as possible. The spirit of his
youthful dreams, long, strangely enough, having retarded his
purposes rather than advancing them, he studiedly refused to
renounce: of justice and fair play, of living instead of dying, of
loving instead of hating. Single virtue, he always believed, was
proof against manifold vice. And yet all the caprices and aspects
of human life that gratified curiosity and excited surprise in him
continued only as incidents on the way to Glory.

  Darconville—wherever—quite happily chose to live
within his own world, w’thin his own writing, within himself. The
thickest, most permanent wall dividing him from his fellow
creatures was that of mediocrity. His particular sensibility
forbade him to accept unquestioned society’s rules and taboos, its
situational standards and ethics, syntheses that to him always
seemed either too exclusive or too inclusive. His domineering sense
of right, as sometimes only he saw it, and his ardent desire to
keep to the fastness of his own destiny, set him apart in several
ways. Reclusive, he shrank from all avoidable company with
others—it was the prerogative of his faith to recognize, and of his
character to overpower, objection here—and chose to believe only
that somewhere, perhaps on the footing of schoolmaster, he could
inoffensively foster sums, if modest, then at least sufficient to
allow him the time to write. He sought the land of Nusquamia, a
place broadly mapped out in James 4:4, and whether by chance or
perchance by intention one day, wasting no time balancing or
inquiring, he selected a school for the purpose, was hired, and
disappeared again into the arcane. It didn’t really have to have a
name. In fact, however, it did. It was a town in Virginia, called
Quinsyburg.