Darconville's Cat (82 page)

  “Love strives to cover guilt, instead of conquering
it; it elevates woman instead of nullifying her. In women love
becomes an importunate superstition that will not hearken to the
fact that they have no comprehension of paragons, and with no sense
of a man’s love as a superior phenomenon they only perceive that
side of him which unceasingly desires and appropriates—the more
brutally, I’ve heard, the better they like it: an instinct,
nevertheless, I can’t hope to think you’d share. The pathetic
creatures are always happier in the love they inspire than in that
which they feel—that is if they feel anything at all! But, oh my
yes, women do often imagine that they love, and with all that faded
and pettifogulizing ammunition of theirs—lipstick, rouge, pomade,
and no end of swabbings from the stybian pot—pointedly set out to
do so. But what? I can’t think of a more desperate attempt,
funerary sculpture excepted, at the gratification of vanity! The
joke lies in what they are, doesn’t it, in the very act of what
they’d cover up? Why, at the very minute a woman vows she’ll never
flirt, she’s flirting not only in the mention of it but with the
very painted mouth by which simultaneously she denies it—only
another one of those so-called ‘secrets,’ miracle only to the
ignorant, on which they pride themselves and to which, although
they don’t know it themselves, they must give the alluring
impression it’s possible to discover the key! And yet how these
creatures, built strongest where the strain is greatest, wish to
appear to give unwillingly what in fact they’re ravenous to give!
The occupation of an intrigue, the emotional charge gallantry gives
them, the natural bent for needing affection and the fear of its
refusal, all persuade these sectaries of the god Wunsch that they
have passion, when really they have only coquetry, a sexual
hyperaesthesia that wanders singly up and down the town without
pale or partition like a biologically hampered she-pope or some
indefatigable sectary in the rank and borrowed garb of Anteros,
female in sex, mortal in condition! Darconville, Darconville, here
below in this dark region is not love’s proper sphere—wasn’t,
isn’t, and never shall be!

  “What is love? We meet someone we paradoxically want
to need, call this bum little blueprint ‘love’ and hoping such a
thing means something when it doesn’t are trapped into the fallacy
of believing that irony has meaning. All expectation is temptation!
It’s a pity at the heart of life itself, I tell you. A lover is a
gambler reciting ‘
Morituri te salutamus
’ before his chips.
We’ve all jumped out of a rotten potato!

  “Womanishness! Look at this mother-right society of
ours—witches, woe-men, windigos painted in wode! Universal inchoate
sexuality, the source of all irrationality and chaos in the world!
The battle of the sexes is hardly a battle anymore. It is not even
a rear-guard action. It is a rout. I tell you, degree, priority,
and place went out of fashion with personal privacy and the
runcible spoon, and all the brass-titted Thermodontines in the
ascendance now are not simply satisfied to lean their backs against
their marriage certificates and spit defiance at the world, no, for
they haven’t appropriated one thing with the spare cutlery of their
loving fingers before they’re looking around for more— and, taking
everything, they’ve set their pugging teeth on edge to consolidate
their gains and move man to the downside! The bitches are marching
to Spaneria! Have you never heard of the foolish Wanzo peoples and
their women who, frustrated, tied woodpeckers to their twats and
pretended to have phalluses?

  Concessio

  “I say they’re everywhere. You say they’re a
minority. Women are only a minority, my friend, when they are
treated as one! Oh, but you will call them kind, won’t you, for
thinking them frail, gentle because having no defenses, and nicer
than the fruit of sweetsop, for in the unwinking vigilance of
gentlemanliness what solicitude, I think you suppose he, she, or it
feels, can be too great in the preservation of meekness to refine,
exalt, and perpetuate affection? O excellent falsehood! Kind? You
mean ig-nivomous. Nice! It could apply to a dog, a sermon, or a
jam-tart! Gentle, I agree, when their piss doesn’t etch glass and
defenseless utterly when they’re not veneered and secretive as a
Venetian demirep with domino and spiked ring. But frail?
Frail
, sir? Then you admit to knowing nothing of the
female turnix, phalaropus, cassowary, emeu, and other monstrosities
of nature whose maliciousness and size point to, and are certainly
best allegorized by, the sexual turns of habit observed in the
black widow spider? And how widows, peradventure? Why, they are
widows in the same context, by the very reason, and at the explicit
moment that they couple—he fucks her, she bites off his head—and
for this and similar reasons I must here plead and adjure you never
to love if only to tell you never to marry! Jobs cost money to
keep, can’t you see? There’s scarce a thing both loved and loathed.
When loved,
satis, satis
. But if loathed, my dainty duck,
my dear-a? O me! O me, O my!

  Argumentatio

  “I come to the subject of marriage, then, resolved,
lest I offend you, to avoid the rhetoric of exaggeration, which is,
nevertheless, not only inseparable from great oratory but which
punctuates information with the kind of infuriating finality I
fear, in this matter, you still show yourself so deeply in need of
being doctored. I shall speak to the wound, however. If you find
the subject wearisome, I suggest you seek in yourself the
weariness, and if my bouncing candor you can’t stand bethink
yourself then of the frankness you once asked of someone in a
dress! I have spoken words, now, dehortatory, expostulatory, and
supplicatory, but of marriage, confess, need I heap up here,
accumulate, misrepresent on the side of greater size, or
caricature? O laugh it out, you laughsters! O laugh it up
belaughably to the last laughed-out bit of laughter and then laugh
again!

  “Holy deadlock? Why, the observation of married
couples is a postgraduate course in pessimism itself! Never mind
that hard by the temple of Hymen, in the florid words of Hippel,
lies the graveyard of love —if you must insist, of course, that
love exists—the very act of the male stooping to marry the female
makes the mere
concept
of marriage morganatic! And yet can
a man actually devote himself to such a trifle? He can. He will. He
does. How, you ask? Why, it’s easy. The moral misconduct necessary
for intimacy, you see, subsequently fosters in the male a
desperation for justice in relation to his enemy twin—he seeks to
check his precipitancy—and so in a reckless excess of
duty-grafted-to-guilt, for next to happiness confirmed misery does
well, he connupts for a lifetime someone who, ironically enough, is
absolved
by that very act of excess
from the need or
obligation to love in return! Marriage? It is a dualism beyond
comprehension, the plot of the story of the Fall, the primitive
riddle, a ghastly public confession, the binding of the unlimited
in the bonds of space, of the eternal by time, of the spirit by
matter. The State calls it legal, for revenue. The Church sees it
indissoluble, for dynasty—and yet when the deep and ghastly
disjunctures of nature native to it inevitably occur, both serve to
detain by compulsion such of those who from that oppressive and
unpredestined misery would suddenly flee! Marriage? It is nothing
more than a slavery to brief pleasure leading to the lengthy
slavery of one another. The debate is not closed, only the
question. The legend that matrimony is a lottery, in fact, has
almost ruined the lottery business! The world’s reformers, have
they not all been married men? And death on the wedding night, is
it not one of literature’s immortal themes? The
Iliad
,
that bible of war, did it not begin with a wedding? Had Theseus any
need of Ariadne’s thread to find his way
into
the
labyrinth? Didn’t St. Peter himself—Matthew 8:14—drop his wife flat
in the pursuit of what she clearly prevented him otherwise from
seeking? And what that we own, further, have we ever valued as much
as what once we didn’t have? Aren’t possessions generally
diminished
by possession, where even the most fetching
person is no longer assured of our slightest concern after we’ve
known her for a simple few months? Marriage? It is a contract, not
a commitment, nothing but an act of propitiation by men for first
having thought
ill
of women. Women don’t marry men, they
adopt them—to carry baggage, to hail cabs, to fetch! And to what
end does this proprietary institution serve other than to effect
the introduction of order into chaotic sexual relations and to
establish every assurance in behalf of those sweet little apostles
of pairing you so love for the formal acquisition of alimonious
funds and a ticket to Rio for a lifetime of comic viduity?
Marriage? What is it, finally, but a tyrannous routine of
unanswerable female quibbling, enervating habit, and plaguey
amorism, no more a warranty of happiness than prison and no more
natural to us than a cage is to a cuckoo-bird—a
modus
vivendi
that is as incompatible as free-love with the highest
interpretations of the moral law, making the remarks of St.
Ambrose, fourth-century bishop of Milan, perfectly in order when he
asserted that married people ought to blush at the state in which
they were living as it prostituted the members of Christ! No,
Darconville, remove, remove that marriage hearse! And thus remove
that ancient curse!

  “Can you imagine what domestic life with a woman
must be and still gamble away your life for a mere toss at such a
perishable being? It is the single sex for whom marriage for love
is so rare that a vow of obedience, arguable antonym of love, is
still exacted in the nuptial contract, and what they bring to the
hearth must be limited, I’m afraid, to what are their only natural
gifts, three in number: deceit-fulness, spinning, and the capacity
to weep at will. Now, a family’s happiness, it’s been said, is
always in proportion to the cultivation of its female members, but
as they’re congenitally unable to be satisfied— save only by
movable property or the proximity of some male neighbor,
mustachioed like a Circassian, to compare you to—the hygienic
penalty that must be paid, for woman’s denial of her real nature
becomes inescapable, is the hysterical self-dissatisfaction
inherent in striving to be what, to get, they who weren’t once
convinced you they were! The saint then—poof!—becomes a scold. The
portcullis drops! The more a woman’s made an occupation of
torturing her husband, you see, the less right she thinks she has
to lose him, her hold over him increasing to the measure of her
coldness
. Wanting always comes to an end with having. They
nag. They gripe. They breed infidelity. It is impossible, for
instance, to speak of one woman with another without her betraying
the one who’s absent; the Chinese symbol for war is two women under
the same roof. They aren’t even friends—there is no word in the
Latin language that signifies a female friend:
arnica
means mistress. No, what they are, Darconville, are born
lackeys—the word ‘employee,’ remember, is always spelled with two
e’s—serving only to censor. They have no relation to man and no
sense of man, but only to maleness. The periods of matriarchy have
always been periods of polyandry! And although the Koran says that
heaven is at the feet of a mother most men still mutter
Karram
Allah
before even mentioning such a worthless subject as women
in conversation. And yet how quickly they seek to assume
sovereignty, fearing that their husbands will be successful while
at the same time insisting they achieve wondrous things and
accepting the fruitless but heroic efforts of the poor fools to
give them their souls while failing, for want of comprehension, to
strive for that same virtue in themselves. And the polluting
sadness of it all, as you look to escape, can be neither diminished
nor abridged, for no matter where you go or how far you withdraw,
there she is—bored, nagging, censorious—peering like a divedapper
through a wave! Domesticity?
Happy
domesticity? It’s a
Victorian pipe-dream! Why, even then when those spindle-and-broom
deities performed no more banal an act than merely putting a foot
to the treadle the very motion kindled appetites in them they were
too stupid to realize they already had! But then what has ever
curtailed the sexual frenzy of a woman?

  “Don’t say children! As no woman is the perfect type
of mother— something she shares with the penguin, catfish, shark,
and stickleback, among others—how could that be? In fact, the
female essentially seeks in the existence of children nothing more
than a satisfaction to dominate.

        Girls have
mothers

        Upon their necks
to bite ‘em,

        So girls grab
boys

        And so
ad
infinitum
.

  There’s nothing very subtle here, is there? Their
daughters are sexual rivals, on the one hand, and everyone knows,
on the other, that there is always something sexual in the
relationship of mother and son—in fact, the husband of a mother is
always a cuckold.

  “Sexual frenzy? O, when that itching begins, my
friend, how far flung are the perimeters of intrigue and
assassination! It’s the Bottomless Pit! The Fire Not Sated With
Wood! Can it come as a surprise to anyone to see in the Scrovegni
Chapel—for there is no wife who has not been untrue to her husband
in thought—that Lust is led around on a halter by a woman no bigger
than your thumb? Cato believed in fact that kissing among relatives
was a custom maintained only to keep women under control in this
matter. The natal day of Blessed Pudens —as much a warning as an
example—was purposely placed on the church calendar in May, the
month of lust. And because of lust St. Pius V had to foliate the
genitals of every single statue in Vatican City in 1569. No,
Darconville, infidelity is the
mulier puisne
to the
bastard eigne
that is the state of marriage, but there’s
no stopping it, for when any of these sabre-toothed tarts who has
chained herself to someone’s bed for a mere band of miniature
ice-cubes round her finger decides to act, no longer letting the ‘I
would’ wait upon the ‘I dare not,’ it’s open communion to every
passing dunce and dancing master. Nothing can halt it. You can
cringe, swagger, weep, or lie doggo. You can motion for an Act of
Sederunt or read her passages from the life of Pelagia the Harlot.
You can even die. (How many women, however, would actually laugh at
the funerals of their husbands if it were not the custom to weep?)
But whatever you do to try to dissuade her won’t make the smallest
particle of difference—it’s like trying to rub the smell of nickels
off a Jew’s hands: an honest woman is unfair to the entire female
race. And that applies to the lot of them, whether it be Jane
Bedknickers,
Marie Royne d’Escosse douayrière de France
,
or this birding-piece new scoured called Isabel Rawsthorne.