Darconville's Cat (75 page)

  “
I promised to go riding with Col. Watson
,”
she said in a spitting whisper.

  As the car sped away, Darconville turned back one
final time and watched her disappear into the blurred, discolored
distance that receded so fast into the blighted world it seemed
literally gone even before it could say: I am the last picture of
your life.

  LXXVI

  Abomination of Desolation

  A great horror and darkness fell upon Christian.

        —JOHN BUNYAN

  THE LAST SIGHT of Fawx’s Mt. became too much to
bear, and Darconville cried out terribly upon it. May it be cursed
forever! May it wither into the grin of the dead! May flowers and
children die in its shadow! May the birds of the air refuse to fly
over it! May it henceforth stand a desert of recrimination,
spawning hunchbacks to eat ashes for bread and to mingle tears with
drink! May Satan pinch into the faces of its inhabitants the pain
of hell that by them it be sown with salt and continue ever an
abomination to sight! May the maiden that passes it become barren
and the pregnant woman that beholds it abort! May its crops be
given to the caterpillar and the fruits of its labor to the locust!
May the winged monsters be reaved out of the infernal pit to dwell
therein and demons sit high forever in its rébarbative trees to
scourge it in satire and song! May the light of the sun be withheld
therefrom and the light of the moon be hidden from it forevermore,
with accursedness its perpetual condition and doom its eternal
reward!

  LXXVII

  The Nowt of Cambridge

  
Deux fois deux quatre, c’est un mur.

        —DOSTOEVSKY,
Voix souterraine

  ADAMS HOUSE: the one accommodation with its shades
drawn night and day had a melancholy fixedness about it, an aura of
prohibition as if something terrible, having once taken place
there, must now never be disclosed. There was neither light nor
movement nor noise from within, and if the rooms were inhabited it
was as though someone, in trying to acquire the power of
invisibility, had lost sight of himself as he disappeared from the
sight of others. It was like an impatible vacancy in the building,
a statement of the saddest isolation, intimacy without
commitment.

  The rooms, in fact, were not empty. Someone still
lived there who, keeping to the darkness all day, was waiting—he
couldn’t explain it—for waiting to end. And when night fell it was
always the same. Dar-conville rose and went out alone to wander
through the deserted streets of Cambridge looking for his cat.

  The search became an obsession, a desperate
compulsion, only one of several he experienced after he returned to
Harvard. At first, he looked by day, the search no less real for
the parallel quest of which he was unaware, a desperate attempt at
invalescence—an objective, however, separated totally from the
consciousness of the subject who in the passing days was no longer
sure what he was seeking, a cat, lost love, or himself. It became
hardly bearable. He found himself walking mile after mile,
astonished and saddened, wandering in a state of mind that seemed a
parody of all value between two worlds, one dead, the other
powerless to be born; worth disappeared. He would aimlessly pass
his students in the street, leave his change behind in stores, and
in the most unlikely situations actually begin to pray out loud. He
often stopped before shopwindows he didn’t look into. Careless and
sloven, he started to attract the attention of boys in the
neighborhood. It soon became not only unbearable but frightening.
He began to look for cars trailing him and to tremble suddenly for
no reason and then he began to be afraid he’d start screaming in
public places: often in the middle of crowded sidewalks he’d start
to weep, biting his hands to stop. So time reversed: he disappeared
from view, completely, leaving his room now only at night to roam
through the Yard, wander along the banks of the Charles, or go
miles out into old factory yards and back alleys and outlying areas
of Cambridge. Several times, he sat up all night in Longfellow
Park, and one morning in a puddle, rising in a mist, he saw
Isabel’s face, now flushed with excitement, now mournful and
pensive, but when he looked again it was gone.

  Isabel Rawsthome’s face haunted him. He put a vigil
light in front of her picture in his room, slept by it during the
day, sat by it when he returned in the morning.

  There were periods of delirium—from eating nothing,
smoking too much, walking hour upon hour—when he dreamt he was
moving through time into eternity, but in lucid moments, then, he
saw he was going nowhere wherever he went, for just as eternity is
not prolonged time, rather its negation, he realized in wandering
he might extend his area but never abolish space, and the efforts,
he saw, only became foolish failures. But the persecutory delusions
haunted him, the morbid wariness, the unspeakable forebodings. The
night seemed to distend reality even more. Streets sped under him,
cars went motionless, bridges stretched out and broke in the middle
of their arches—even noises began to become removed from their
sources. Things seemed not to live but to exist all the same. He
began to pore over Isabel’s letters and photographs, hundreds of
them, trying to close out the actuality of time and change which he
saw, however, simultaneously destroyed the possibility of
expectation. Rapture without hope: it led either to desolation or a
frightening kind of credulity; he experienced little fugues now—one
in particular that touched a ghostly world whose symbols
represented potentiality rather than reality: somehow, somewhere,
he felt, his cat lived; somewhere, somehow he was loved— a
superposition he repeatedly, self-hypnotically, began to construct
for himself by projecting a hypothetical world where all possible
outcomes could exist! He tried to
will
the fulfillment of
his every desire by supreme efforts of concentration and at such
moments would quickly hurry back to his rooms to see if his cat had
returned, if the vigil light was still burning, if his telephone
might ring, but it hadn’t, it wasn’t, it didn’t.

  There was never any change—only the photograph of
Isabel on the shelf, his enemy twin looking in cold penetrance
through his emptiness toward someone else. Gilbert van der Slang,
the merchant semen. But who was he? A great fly of Beelzebub’s, the
bee of hearts, which mortals name Cupid, Love, and Fie for shame!
And weren’t brothers, having carnal knowledge of the same woman,
damned by Scripture? What found King Henry VIII but Arthur drowned
in the depths of Catherine’s well, forcing him to spawn a dying
nephew on his aunt and then sire in the belly of a six-fingered
whore a most unnatural daughter as an excuse? A most unnatural act,
then! But then what response? There but for the grace of God go I?
But wasn’t the grace of God, thought Darconville, available to all?
It wasn’t! It wasn’t
!

  The long days passed, each instant hideously
widening the fact of separation, multiplying its significance,
leaving him more and more isolated. He rehearsed everything over
and over again in his mind—a mind that whatever its sorties into
the world of experience always returned to sleep only with its
dreams. He was literally sick with love. Obscurely, it had never
really occurred to Darconville that Isabel would leave him, the
purity of which assumption, with the passing days, he sadly came to
reinterpret—for he began to borrow from the delights of love its
implements of torture—as being motivated less by love or any
medieval sense of courtesy than by the promptings of his own
self-esteem. He hoped for what he needed to believe, aspiring to
the measure of what he believed from the very measure of where he
was, almost as if to prove to himself that one can see stars during
the day from the bottom of a well. Still he would not abide a
single thought against her but continued to wait, convinced somehow
that waiting
itself
—as though to obtain love we need but
confess our own, as though to perpetuate love we need only strangle
jealousy—would bring her back. Bring her back! Bring—! He tried to
set his face against emotion but broke down and wept bitterly, his
tears blinding him not only for his own vanity and presumption but
for the terrifying reoccurrences now of sudden, irrational
behavior: he began to speak to whoever it was that lived in the
same body with him, for there were two of them now talking to one
another, a dual form paradoxically shaping to an individual he
didn’t know!

  Darconville declined to be seen anymore—for real
abnormalities, seriously convincing him he was losing his mind,
began to appear— and he locked himself in his rooms. During the
first few days he had tried to write, savagely, but didn’t, coming
to welcome interruptions and obstacles because they could be held
responsible for his crude failures, then the delay, and finally his
mercilessness; now, he fully refused to see anyone, to leave the
rooms, or to answer any of the knocks on his door, delicately
holding his breath under such circumstances until whoever it was
went away. An appalling disorder soon prevailed up there, and
school papers became misplaced, communications went unanswered, as
he fell into more prolonged fits of mental and physical torpor. The
atmosphere of the rooms was now like a little self-contained and
closed universe, a kind of ambiguous gloom in which almost
immediately it became hard to distinguish with certainty between
the menacing and the merely ludicrous. Nothing was real or of any
significance except that which went on in his mind, and over
everything hovered a subdued air not only of constant expectancy
but also of sibylline disappointment, of promises kept to the ear
but broken to the hope.

  Whole days blotted out. He would sit in the darkness
feeling a weird urethral chill, frozen in silence, or go maundering
up and down for hours whispering to himself and trying to follow
his torturous thoughts over every incident of the long four years
as if in thinking, like surpassing the speed of light, he might
move backward in time, but time is a curve, and, rounding around on
him, it only brought him back once more to the immediacy of his own
great grief. The coexistence of his despair with her joy became a
hideous paradox. Did she feel nothing for him? Could there be
nothing between two people? On the one hand, he reasoned, if there
is strictly not anything between two things, then they are
together! Or adjacent, perhaps—so joined? But what that is joined
can then be two? A distinction thus emerged for Darconville between
nothing and
a
nothing—and yet can you “have” a nothing? My
God, he thought, there’s proof of the thing in my very own
heart!

  One night he tried, unsuccessfully, to telephone
Isabel sixteen times. He spoke, several times, into the dead
receiver.

  The terrible sin of
tristitia
set in.
Darconville felt guilty now about his intellectual aspirations to
probe, and, although in his heart he knew the conspiracy in Fawx’s
Mt. had been long in the making, he prayed: let me only understand,
not judge. But why had it happened? What, he wondered, did losing a
father mean to a girl? What immeasurable insecurity, what
anxieties, had to be relieved? What unknowns did she fear she’d
face in leaving that small town? What kind of love could instantly
become so brutal, mocking him with his own words that once so
loosely prophesied that one emotion by the other might be read?
What had she feared in him, then? It occurred to him suddenly that
perhaps Isabel inspired in him a desire for
much more than
herself
! What if she knew, somehow, that she was only that
inspiration and nothing more—even to herself—an insubstantial
creature empty as the light by which someone else sought to find
the very meanings she herself, merely hinting at, never embodied
and never possessed and never would? Could that be? The beloved
object not a beloved object but only a
means
of loving?
The thought stabbed him. He sagged, driven and derided by the
ridiculous and incompetent creature he’d become, by the derangement
erotic passion had caused in him. It had been more than a week
since he’d eaten, and if physical movement had become difficult now
even the simplest reasoning seemed to require enormous effort. The
persistently gnawing feeling of inferiority he felt, living as he
now was between insignificance and silence, might itself be a clue,
he thought, for perhaps she saw she couldn’t be all that he loved,
coming to hate in herself what he expected and yet needing at the
same time to destroy the possibility of what she felt she could
never achieve. Expectation is temptation. Where there’s a won’t
there’s a way. And yet could such things
be
?

  Darconville looked at her photograph, faintly lit by
the flickering candle: had that face, he wondered, been an
inspiration or a challenge to his love? The composition of beauty
could not have been more classical; it reflected what it had
promised, yet in what had been shown was the utter moral defeat of
its form. Content and form were at loggerheads. There were two
simultaneous but incompatible forces within her—a classical love,
embodied, and the disruptive insight, expressed, that that was
precisely what she couldn’t bear. Were both equally real and yet
each unaware of the other? Was it possible? Can the mind prod
itself into deciding which value it will observe in a universe
where those unobserved, but equally real, have also actually
happened? Could she hate the very legs she used to walk away and
wish in the ones she never had to have come? The picture reflected
exactly what it wasn’t, as if framed in a paradox that seemed to
ask “Who speaks of the failure of vision?” and implicitly answering
“I.”