Darconville's Cat (73 page)

  The
facies hippocratica
: Darconville’s
face, as he lay there semiconscious, had lost its subjective
expression; it did not reflect his thoughts, he had none, but only
the objective fact of the approach of death-in-sleep. It belonged
to the supraindividual sphere of the ancestral life of the body,
and had Isabel returned to him, which she didn’t, she would have
seen, in his sunken eyes, taut forehead, and leaden skin color, how
that face in no longer resembling itself had but vacated the
premises, going blank, in a gape of sudden fatality: the shroud in
which, mercifully, one lies down to relax the heart. He spiraled
down into unconsciousness. There was slowly no end of agony, the
dance of unutterable sorrow and pain within causing him to writhe
and twist in ceaseless turmoil as he wondered over and over again
how Divine Providence could allow for such a cruel absurdity as
God. The suffering grew unbearable, the sensations too ungraspable,
too immense to handle, and in an instant, helpless, he sank to the
terrible depths of what night really means, descending far, far
below the reaches of mere sleep to perpetual delirium where flocks
of ravaged, scissor-winged angelbats with pointed ears thrashed
each other in turn to perch upon his toes, suck his blood, and fan
him into further unconsciousness in order to continue the profanity
of complete possession in a darkness that would never disembogue.
Darconville suddenly screamed—and sat bolt upright!

  He was alone in a room.

  It was early morning, about six o’clock by the
fading darkness outside the window. Reflecting on the events of the
previous night, he wasn’t certain of what to do. His first impulse
was to wake Isabel with a kiss, or had what happened really
happened? Reality, he thought, was too varied, too abundant, to be
mirrored in anything smaller, narrower, less varied than itself,
but comprehension on any plane, of any size, was impossible. It was
all he could do to keep in mind who he was at that moment, for
dialogues within him were stumbling doubles out in a profusion that
by reminding him he was no one suggested he be all.

  Darconville dressed and walked outside to the fence
in back of the house where mists hung over the distant cowfields
and the air smelled of deep pools of rain. Some stars were still
shining coldly in the sky. Should he leave? He deliberated, rubbing
his eyes which were dry and inflamed. Should he try to stay? He
walked around to the outside of her bedroom window and softly
called to her. There was no answer. He thought

        Only the false
are falsely true,

        Only the true
are truly false;

        You are false
and you are true,

            Sweet
child. Sweet song.

  He decided, to urge her to the moment, to prepare to
leave and so returned to his room, packed his suitcase, and let
himself—not noiselessly—out the front door. It was a vapor-smoked
morning, and although the lethal dark still sat full on the
uparching hills the east was gradually whitening. There was no one
in sight and not a sound as he headed some ways up the lonely road.
Surely, thought Darconville, this is a dream. This road? The
silence? Miles away from where I’m supposed to be? He turned,
hesitantly, and waited. The light in Isabel’s room came on for a
moment—and his heart leapt. He hadn’t returned a few steps when the
light went off, when the room, significantly, was dark again. He
began to write sentences with his tongue on the top of his mouth.
The panic he felt literally immobilized him. And she? She didn’t
want to know he was leaving, only that he was gone.

  In an instant, Darconville was suddenly standing in
her room—and then desperately shaking her with pleas repeated to
convince her of her mistake. Please, he begged. Please, he ordered:
did she really love someone else? Wasn’t it all a mistake? Was she
going to marry him? Had he touched her? Did she believe that one
could love two people at the same time? Could he still hope? Had
she ever worked on a wedding dress? Would she let him see it? Could
he stay with her, talk to her, just be with her?

  “
No, no, no
,” cried Isabel, pounding the
bed, “
no, no, no, no
!” And in spite of the fact that blind
belief in one thing is often founded upon disbelief in another,
Darconville at last could see in her face how much an object of
detestation he had become for her, how constrained and oppressed he
made her. She fell sobbing onto the blanket, trying to convince him
now she wasn’t worth it, while of course, in spite of this piece of
formal theater, believing she was, and when she looked up—for he’d
grown silent from humiliation—her eyes were dry. She stood up and
told him she would drive him to the airport. That was
it
.

  “You said you’d be understanding,” said Isabel,
wheeling her car back out of the driveway, stopping, and screeching
forward in a lurch.

  “Don’t call me you,” said Darconville.

  She stared straight ahead, her eyes small and
malignant now like bullets, close-set, with that protuberant
root-vegetable look of her mother’s.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “I think you’re the worst
person in the world.”

  “I doubt it,” he replied. “That would be too much of
a coincidence.”

  The fingers of her left hand spread on the wheel and
tightened into a fist. Her eyes glittered cruelly.

  “No,” interjected Darconville, fear vibrating in his
voice, “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I love you
more than my own life, more than life itself. Please listen to me?”
The car careened out of Fawx’s Mt. and turned north by way of the
backroad. “But you don’t want to listen, do you? You want to be
safe,” he said, “the bourgeois need to get through life with the
least unpleasantness, is that it? That’s it, isn’t it? Even though
you know you love me?” He turned to her, but there was a solitude
within her now inaccessible to praise or blame, affection or
accusation, a justice of her own devising completely beyond
appeal.

  “Please don’t. Don’t do this,” he implored, rocking
forward to claim her attention. He fell back. “How could you have
just met someone else, Isabel? I should like to know how, you know?
Even if you convinced me, I wouldn’t believe it.” Isabel kept her
eyes trained to the road. “Do you think I can live? Seriously. I
will not live. I have been given another man’s life and cannot use
it. I
cannot
live. Speak to me!”

  Darconville was frustratedly clasping and unclasping
his hands. “What can I say? What can I do? There’s no time
left!”

  They were speeding now.

  “I’ve been trying to call you for a month, you, your
parents, that nightmare down the road named Mrs. van der Slang, and
where were you? Betraying me?” cried Darconville, his tear-blinded
eyes blurring the landscape. “You said you loved me. Was that an
explanation? An excuse? I think you should offer that bit of logic
to the Museum of Human Imbecility.” He paused. “Look, I know love
can be confusing. I know that. But it doesn’t matter, why
should—”

  Isabel banked a corner, swiftly, rushing the car
dangerously off a shoulder and quickly into the road. Darconville
saw how recklessly determined she was to be free of him.

  “I should denounce you to the world, you”—he almost
choked on the emotional throat-note—”you hypocrite.” He turned to
her. “Your adrift-in-a-world-I-never-made pose disgusts me.”

  One of Isabel’s eyebrows rose humorously, twitched a
little, but, always, she gazed ahead with an expression of both
relief and satisfaction on her face, and she seemed more like a
professor of the equivocal sciences than anything else, showing an
impassive, almost contemptuous air as she listened to the last of
his desperate entreaties with an absent-minded smile.

  “Isabel, forgive me,” cried Darconville, “I-I love
you so much, I love you so much!” They turned into the airport
road. He reached over and pulled her arm. “Do you believe me? When
I say that, do you believe me?” He gripped her arm. She looked at
him. Had he gone mad? He was praying, but it was a hopeless sort of
thing—words spoken but without any sense or understanding. “Tell
me, tell me you love me!” But they had reached the front of the
terminal and stopped. Isabel, dreading this moment, wasn’t sure
what to do; she didn’t move. He fumbled for her hand and took the
white, spatulate, always slightly cold fingers. He waited in agony,
but he had no more words, and overcome with the pity of it all, he
kissed her with what almost seemed a question—one she alone, in
returning, might have answered. But she did nothing. They false and
fearful did their hands undo. And he was out of the car.

  Isabel turned her head away, paused a moment, and
drove away. With his throat constricted, Darconville stood staring
after her into the blank and pitiless morning. The loss of love
loured overhead. He was abandoned.

  LXXIV

  The Empty Egg

  The nothing experienced in anguish reveals
eventually also the being.

        —BARSANAPHIUS,
the Recluse of Gaza

  THERE WAS A DESERT PLACE in Isabel, he saw for the
first time, an emptiness smaller than Nauru and more lethal than
the steady application of artifice or fraud: a cimmeria, a coomb, a
cess. It sat below intuition in a theoretical sphere of fundamental
brainlessness where nothing ever grew, ever existed, was ever felt,
and no sally of genius or wit could be conveyed to the mind of
whatever by it might be understood for its fatality lay precisely
in its vacancy and ghastly implenitude. When she spoke from there
or listened from there, she could agree with anything or not, say
anything or deny it—it didn’t matter. Its residues of ashes and
cinders had nothing in common with fire but lay slaglike in the
deep of its pure apophatica, a not-something excommunicating both
pleasure and pain from the zone of its utter barrenness. No awe
gripped her there, and no grief—no emotion, no concern, no plaints,
no wheedlings, no needlings; it had no reticule of tricks; it
devoured every variable by its own abiogenetic instincts and lived
on the unlimited possibilities of inconstancy and contradiction. It
was a deathmouth, mortally neuter, with killing its ceremonial,
mean-inglessness its motive. It was an empty egg. And
there
he was betrayed.

  LXXV

  Lacerations

  Nature is negative because it negates the Idea.

        —FRIEDRICH
HEGEL

  THE QUINSYBURG ROAD always left one with the
distinct impression he had taken the wrong direction, a suspicion,
even for habitual travelers, impossible to allay. A feeling of
uneasiness sharpened at every curve of that lonely tract, a sense
of oppression in no way commuted along the straight stretches that
ran between russet slopes patched with twisted pines and stunted
oaks into even wilder and bleaker downlands. The absolute stillness
always seemed a preliminary, a shadowy presentiment, to some
perilous undertaking of which one was unaware, and nothing perhaps
better corroborated the threat than at that one point down the road
where, blundering up in a kind of meretricious finale, was the
wooden sign of the town which, instead of welcoming you, seemed to
warn you off.

  “Nature,” sighed Dr. Dodypol, peering out of his car
window, “you know—to me, it’s evil.” He turned to Darconville,
whose head lay fallen back, his eyes open but lifeless. It almost
broke Dodypol’s heart.

  “It frightens me just to say the word. Look,” he
waved his hand, simultaneously downshifting to urge his old car up
a hill, “trees wormed out, sloked ponds, ravaged groves and dark
and forbidding swales. Do you realize that the real name of
Treasure Island was Skeleton Island? Nature is at constant
war—something fails as something prevails. And then half of the
species that have survived the long ceaseless stupid struggle are
parasitic in their habits, lower and insentient forms of life
feasting on higher sentient forms; we find teeth and talons whetted
for slaughter, hooks and suckers molded for torment, claws and
cusps sculptured all for death—everywhere a reign of terror,
hunger, and sickness, with oozing blood and quivering limbs, with
gasping breath and eyes of innocence that dimly close in agonies of
brutal torture. Take these woods. I never drive this road when I
don’t think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the secret wickedness,
that goes on in there, year in, year out, and none the wiser. I
mean, think of all the men whose bones have been bleached by the
relentless blue of that cynically smiling sky. How manifold the
dooms of earth! How singular that of the sea! A burst of
gunfire—have you ever thought of this?—has all the colors of the
rainbow. Nature? It’s grotesque, with confusion its intent and
accident its specialty, a constant reminder—remember, Eve bore no
children in Paradise—of what, having once, we had and yet having
had we lost.” He paused. “There, lean back. Get the benefit. Are
you all right?”

  Darconville merely closed his eyes.

  “It’s in the tilt of the planet,” continued Dr.
Dodypol, a man with one of those special natures whose inner
processes take place in that holy land of sensibility me border of
which so often touches the marches of the kingdom of insanity. He
was talking to himself. He didn’t mind. He was worried about his
friend. “Figure, with no tilt, there’d be no seasons: no seasons,
so no migrations, no color lines, no language differential, no land
grabbing—no war!” He shrugged. “It’s all in the books. I mean,
we’re all arse over tip, aren’t we? Swinish? Mechanically and
sinfully dogged? Knitting guilty wool into the night?” Suddenly,
Dr. Dodypol began waving crazily to the countryside. “Hello,
Hobbes!” he shouted through the window. “Hello, La Rochefoucauld!
Hello, Mandeville, fair grow the lilies on the river-bank? Hello,
Vauvenargues! Hello, Schopenhauer! Christ, Darconville, they all
said it. Jansen, Bayle, Buffon, all of them. Emeric de Crucé? St.
Augustine? Dr. Foster of Gloster? The whole shooting match said it.
I myself said it.