Darconville's Cat (68 page)

  “This family, in any event, showed little interest
in my doings,
exceptis excipiendis
—for it wasn’t long
before I started to wet the bed. What a disgusting crime, don’t you
agree? Oh, evil! It was a case of eternal recurrence: I was the
more incontinent the more they screamed which caused it in the
first place. I couldn’t stop. Volition? It had nothing to do with
it. I soon saw it was impossible to avoid committing a sin—that, in
fact, sin
happened
to you without your wanting to commit
it, without knowing you committed it, and whether you were contrite
in committing it or not had small bearing on the fact. I thought I
could forget about it. But I was wrong. I had reckoned without any
idea of the commercialization of Lethe water. I had reckoned
without acknowledging the array of goats which, in every letter and
article and speech, butted into my life during that terrible period
of sheepish ignorance. That was not all. I felt it was my fault I
had lost my parents and could not choose but weep to have back that
which, still hoping for, I always feared again to lose,” he said
with trembling voice, “but they never came back, they never came
back, they never came back, they never came back to me.” He looked
across at Darconville, his face sick with memory. “I came to see I
was guilty of not resisting illegitimacies, guilty of possessing a
will bereft of the usual resources by which it can justify itself,
guilty of not having done anything wrong. I was guilty of
innocence.

  “Briefly, I loved, wasn’t loved in return, and so
was shunted off again—this time to be raised in a burnt-brick
convent outside the village under the Arabian mountains. It was a
Roman Catholic holding, the oldest but one in Egypt, for let it be
parenthesized here that we had been converted in those parts by
Franciscan missionaries at the end of the seventeenth century.

  “It was the custom of the monks, now, to take in
wayward boys— yes, there were others, most born o.w. and unwanted,
some insane, all with the grave disposition of the pharaohs. There
were specimens of every kind of child, fellahin, captive Dervishes,
Dinkas and Shilluks, Cushites, Abbasides, Bisharin, Ruwenzori
dwarves, nilotics and niggers of a thousand tints. I wanted to be
the flower of the playground, O Darconville, the glory of the
palaestra! What didn’t I dream, love, hope for! I took readily to
certain subjects and acquired a precocious proficiency in
languages, ponying for others and able to do Greek Unseen better
than the form-master himself. I could have done my Collections,
Determining in Lent, and proceeded to the Great Go at Oxford at
fourteen years old, there’s my hand on it, there is my hand. But
the extreme of joy is the beginning of sorrow, isn’t it? And
Arcadia”—he looked away—”is brief.” He closed his eyes for a
minute. “Brief.

  “My chief delight as a boy, however, was to go down
to the west bank to watch the tourist-steamers pull in or to run
around in the ancient rock-tombs which once belonged to the
high-priest of This.” A smile disinterred from the stern grave of
Crucifer’s face. “Not That.” He took his hand down from his mouth.
“Even then I was struck by the fact that Egyptian art hardly ever
essayed to represent a woman, save with her legs pressed together
as in a sheath. I particularly remember one time running back from
a day rummaging over the walls of those tombs, meeting a monk, and
asking him right then and there about the mysteries of
generation—
sex
. He sat down and answered my question; it
seemed to pique his interest. His reply, I shall never forget,
involved the most revolting and disgusting tale I’d ever heard.”
Crucifer looked up, his eyes like caves.

  “What,” asked Darconville, almost surprised at the
croaking sound of his own voice, “what did he tell you?”

  “The truth.”

  Dr. Crucifer hissed. It was his way of smiling. It
was his way of saying yes. It was his way of saying
see
?

  “I wasn’t a featous boy. I was a fat boy. Disciples
not elephantine can’t know the pain of it. They used to call me
‘Bum Cheeks’ in school, spill my bowls of milk, whip me across the
legs with their
nâbuts
. They made up rude songs about me
and pilfered from my tuck-box. They would thieve my rusks. They
drew saucy pictures of me and chevied me out of my battels and
conduct money and ridiculed me about my size and left me behind
when they went tubbing or playing at bats, taws, or ducking-stones.
They threw balls of camel dung at me in games of kherubgeh. To take
me seriously became for others a form of insanity. The genius at
school—not a gasconade, Darconville, I was —is usually a
disappointing and often ignored figure, for as a rule one must be
commonplace to be a successful boy. In that preposterous world,
however, to be remarkable was not to be overlooked. The barber, as
they say, learns to shave on the orphan’s face. And although I
cried out to them the pitiful error they were making, I saw with
horror I’d become the visual quotation of the bad dreams I feared
and so felt I was being treated as the vile scoundrel whom I
represented deserved to be!

  “For Christ’s sake,” he hooted through the library,
“I only wanted an excuse in the eyes of the world for
existing
! I was a weakling, a trembling mouse of a boy
with dirty hands and eyespots and yet growing in me was this
readiness to substitute the hand of God for any whim of my
persecutors. I gorged myself with sticky sweets. My schoolmates,
broadcasting it, avoided touching the books I’d been using and spat
upon my very shadow. Fat? Awkward?
Seine Figur lacht ihn
aus
? That kind of thing, exactly. I escaped a good deal of
painful attention, I confess, by the periodic
aegrotat
of
the school physician, but then I was always released, wasn’t I?
And, always, there they were waiting for me. They put me in the
middle of circles and pulled down my pants—I was so frightened I
could have killed them—and taunted me with archabominational
threats and heaped up such obscenities upon this subhuman body you
see here, even then as white and plump as that of some fat
woodboring larva, that in that dreadful macédoine at the heart of
all adolescent confusion I found I myself came to
agree
with them! But did I complain? Would I run to the Prior to weep, to
peach, to accuse? I did not, I would not. My altruism, inversely
proportionate to my low esteem of myself, knew no bounds.

  “It had come to this pass, you see, that I began to
love my neighbor
more
than myself. Now what theology, may
I ask, supports that, what paradosis, what transmission of spirit?
To love your neighbor more than yourself? Can you understand? I
saw no fault in others that I might not have committed myself and
forgave in them for doing what I for causing couldn’t absolve in
myself
!”

  Crucifer’s mouth was distended terribly, stretching
as if it would separate. The severe grip he had on the arms of the
chair gradually loosened then, and he paused for composure.

  “I slept in fear, woke in terror, lived in anxiety.
I spent every night of my childhood
listening
. Yes,
Darconville, all the spiteful, vile, stupid, cruel, vulgar, petty,
errant human acts I’d seen from the day I was born taxed me for the
explanation I saw I myself simultaneously provided in the question
the vanity in my very own mind was asking! I knew it was committing
a sin if I continued to think I had sinned, but I thought, at the
risk of presumption of course, I could only not despair by failing
to think, the which paradoxically preoccupied my every waking hour.
A guilty conscience is the mother of invention. So I took another
refuge. I became ashamed. I wanted not to be human, to be
non-human, to be unhuman! I wanted to repudiate myself to the
degree that in that self-repudiation I would necessarily repudiate
the very self repudiating me! The you that is seeing yourself, you
see, is the you that is seen. But one would be all,” he said,
leaning back, “and, in that one cannot be, here is loneliness. I’d
done nothing actually to be ashamed of—except it made me ashamed to
have had to think so. When I tried to become ashamed to be ashamed
to be human, I then felt the ultimate shame—and became stationary.
And, pray, in all this what age do you suppose this boy to be,
Darconville? Name it now before I tell you. Why, twelve or
fourteen. Or say eleven. No such thing:
he is not quite nine
years old
!”

  Dr. Crucifer drew his hands, pausing in a grim
clench at the eyes, down his face.

  “I craved release from the world—was it from pride
or from humility?—and found it. I soon fell under the influence of
a Nubian hieromonk named Fâdi, the very same holy man who had once
answered my prurient question. (The name is Arabic for empty.) His
austere and ruthless intelligence was allied, I noticed even then,
to a certain melancholy. Living alone on an eremitic dependency on
the river brink, though still on cloistered ground, he was a
Christian, as we all were, but with a secret: a subtle dogmatic
difference from the orthodoxy of the neighboring monastic community
who, in countenancing, ignoring, really, what seemed to them to be
the traditional isolation and excesses of the anchorite, bothered
never to learn more— unlike me, who did. But I’m ahead of myself. I
worried about Fâdi, always. He lived on bean-flour bread, onions
and water, and long hesychastic vigils, intervals of prayer he
several times a night imposed on himself, despite broken sleep.
Fâdi alone understood my sorrow; correctly, he saw that the
twentieth-century crisis was the worship of
life
; and one
day he revealed to me how all could be overcome— briefly, simply,
by the rigors of self-denial which I came to call ‘The Naught One
Can’t Untie.’ He told me that the highest spiritual knowledge led
to the union of the knower, the known, and knowledge itself. How, I
wondered, might that be achieved? ‘By privation,’ said Fâdi, ‘for
no spirit can rest until it is naughted of all things that are
made.’ A mystical commonplace? Perhaps. But with what joy did I
receive his words, I who felt in sequent toil all sorrow did
contend, I who had long known it was impossible to seize life
without violating it, I who held humanity to be so spotted, so
tragic a failure. I wanted to be nothing. A circle. A round
straight line with a whole in the middle. I wanted to hear the
inner sound which perforce kills the outer. I wanted to be eyeless
and thouless—to reach
le point vierge
: the inmost center
of the soul, the diamond essence, an absolute poverty. The
Funklein!

  “The existence of a perfect being, you know,” said
Crucifer, ad-monishingly tapping the side of his nose with his
ring-finger, “is comprised in the idea of it alone. It became for
me, somehow, the one universal element in a world of unsatisfying
particulars.

  “I abrogated humanity, then. I realized that
everything human in us is an obstacle in the way of holiness. You
turn away, do you? You sneer at me? But are you aware of Ibn
Roshd’s double truth wherein something may be theologically untrue
but philosophically true at the same time? I found proof of my
hope, comfort in my decision. Will you hear how? Good. Now, realize
here that few nations in the East embraced the Gospel more
zealously than the dwellers on the Nile. Accustomed as they had
long been to regard life as a pilgrimage to death, as a school of
preparation for another world, and weary of their motley and
confused pantheon of divinities, whose self-seeking priesthood
designedly disguised the truth, they eagerly welcomed the simple
doctrines of Christianity. But, like Eutyches, they revered the
divine nature of the Savior
only
, in which they held that
every human element was absorbed; and when the Council of Chalcedon
in 451 sanctioned the doctrine that Christ combined a human with a
divine nature, the Egyptians, with their characteristic tenacity,
adhered to their old views and formed a sect termed Eutychians, or
Monophysites, to which the Copts of the present day still belong.
Such a one was Fâdi.

  “I learned his Gospel by heart—and
lived
it, emptying myself of values generally identified as worldly.
Salacities, during my post-adolescent years, occurred to me. I
fought them, violently. I abounded in youthful cupidity of every
sort in my mind, and as I imagined my wickedness, wailed over what
mentally I wallowed in, I wished I had wilted in my cradle! I was
nightly fitted out at my own pious request with an
Onaniebandagen
—a little suit of armor fitted over my
genitals and attached as a prophylaxis for masturbation to a locked
belt, for the body, as time passed, was the only part of the world,
I felt, which my thoughts alone could alter. A virtue cannot be
said to exist, they say, until it is expressed in nature, correct?
I thought about nothing else: wouldn’t the ultimate action, I
wondered, lead then to the ultimate virtue? But what
was
ultimate action? Ultimate virtue? Was it wrong to believe that
being is not and that non-being must be? That to die out is
distinguished?
Absterben ist vornehm
! Between volition and
nolition there is a middle thing: non-volition. O, the sweet
nothings I whispered in my ears! I desired in the strangest way to
elevate myself above human weakness—from jealousy, voluptuousness,
even the need for
joy
! I craved to emerge from the
illusion and instincts of the universe, a pretense, a mask, I knew,
of the secret beyond it. And Fâdi knew it—who, finally urged by the
impulse of grace to approximate in me the divinity of his Lord, no
longer withheld his final sacramental, and in a cave one night at
the age of sixteen, while morphiated with an admixture of yagé,
hyascin, and anti-convulsant sedatives, I willingly submitted to
the mutilation of my ‘precious.’ Annihilation obtained a foothold
on a living body in one rapid knife-slash. The keys to hell dropped
off the lock. I lost my stones.”