Darconville's Cat (84 page)

Authors: Alexander Theroux

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BOOK: Darconville's Cat

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Confrontatio

“Do I seem cruel? Then better is by evil thus made
better. Do I seem critical? And yet to tell you little more than
would suffice is something in a warning less than either. Do I seem
cold? Yes, I’m cold —cold enough, I promise, to take the mother out
of crymotherapy, for there’s nothing quite like frost to single out
the weak points in a stone. I’m ugly. I stink. Yes, I can breed in
winter like a whelk. But call me a misogynist? Why, woman has
hitherto been most despised by woman
herself
!— an
assertion that couldn’t have been more vigorously confirmed than by
the testimony of Madame de Staël when she remarked that what most
consoled her in being a woman was that she’d never have to many
one! Who says misogynistic, says biblical! But I needn’t cite Paul,
sing like a goliard, nor gape back to the gynekophobic 1500s. The
Mishmi people will trade one woman for a pig, the Abipona for a
handful of glass pearls, and the Island Caribs actually use two
languages—one for men, another for women. You can buy a pigmy woman
on the Congo border at the
boma
in Bundibugyo for 200
shillings. I’ve always said that the famous equation of women with
livestock—Semonides Amorgos, fragment 7 of his
Elegy and
Iambus
— warrants further study. The Chinese don’t count girls
as children, Mohammed excludes them from Paradise, and the Synod of
Macon actually debated whether women could be termed human beings
at all! No, I offer no more than enough.

“I see how this modest dehortation on the
vulgivaguability of women saddens you, Darconville. If you think it
loud, however, it is because you are deaf. If too large, it is
because you are blind. If you think it false, then consider the
maxim
falsa démonstratio non nocet
which refers to the
general rule that where there is a description which fixes the
identity of that which is referred to, a misdescription elsewhere
will not vitiate it, mmmm? I could pull the law out of my codpiece
all day. But that’s not the question.

“The question is, what will you accept, and in
accepting do, and by doing rectify? This late sweetheart of
yours—an eviscerating tit-shower between whose yes and no it was
impossible to slip a needle— was crooked enough to hide behind a
corkscrew. What lived inside her apparently functioned by something
outside but let her move about as quietly and efficiently as a bird
of prey. Huaman (pronounced ‘woman’ ) is Inca for falcon. She
simply had
craft
, however. It wasn’t intelligence—don’t be
a fool—only the alertness of exaggerated egotism! Those who lack
character, you see, must always rely heavily on method. And in the
matter of method, nothing shows more of a difference, not one woman
from another, but between a given woman and that very woman
herself, whether Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores, Félise, Yolande,
and Juliette! Or Isabel, sweet, my coz!

“What pharisee, tell me, ever scoured the outside of
cup and platter more assiduously than she? She declined to be
alone, I gather, from your very first meeting—a woman refuses the
condition of solitude and knows neither the love of it nor the
worth of it—and battened on to you, I can see it, with more woeful
stories than a Victorian buy-a-broom girl, weeping, like all women,
only with those she knows will pity her and so intensifying her
self-pity by the thought of the pity of others and then slowly,
subtly, forcing you into a détente with her unreserved and
shameless readiness to shed tears and to sham love. A spider’s
silk, you forgot, has a tensile strength greater than steel. You
had, in fact, no more reason to believe her than you had to believe
that winged game argues in favor of angelology—but you did. You
cared. Pitifully, you showed in truth what she shammed which,
ironically, unbelievably, allowed the damn traitor who was waiting
for that enough courage and self-esteem not only to grab someone
else but actually to bump you in the process, for a clever woman
never acknowledges she has fallen in love until the man has
formally avowed his passion and so cut off his retreat—and then
virtue disappears like heather obliterated by bracken! The less the
splash, the better the dive, see?

“She was forbearing and obliging and yielding like
any other fortune-hunting footpad—different, you felt, of course,
than all the other earth-reeking soubrettes and dress-envious
daughters of instinct you’d known—but you failed to understand that
women are always the kindest to those they deceive. You listened to
her; you didn’t watch. And Miss Poxtakeher? Miss Pennyquick?
Ya
zift! Ya sharmuta! Ya sheitan khalida
! She employed sincerity
only when she thought every other form of deception might fail, but
her intention to marry you vanished the instant it was formed
because she had heard those wooden shoes clopping along in the
distance. The voice was Jacob’s voice but the hands were the hands
of Esau! You thought she was an ermine; you didn’t know she was a
weasel, failing, again, to realize that they’re the same thing. And
all the while you kept faith. You spent almost four years to be
near her in a place that even the Centuriators of Magdeburg would
have found dull! You danced, you dipped, you doffed your hat. And
although you left for London at one point, you returned to marry
her. Birds never limed, you see, no secret bushes fear. But as the
argument for loyalty in women is always a hysteron-proteron it
wasn’t enough for her. A neurotic, she was still dissatisfied—a
kind of sloth,
tristitia de bono spirituali
, see?—for in
spite of you and all your efforts, not because of you and none of
your efforts, she could never be freed of herself. She was both
deliberately the maid who serves and instinctively the woman who
commands, the shrew in her detesting everything, the servant
detesting itself—like the society Jew who in putting on a new nose,
a new name, a new servility but proceeds to loathe himself the
more! ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’
Why Adam, of course; how could it have been Eve? So she chose, the
potato cook, what she was—whatever, I suspect, she actually,
wasn’t, i.e., what she
hadn’t
. And why? For purpéses of
increased security and sovereignty. Perhaps she was bitter that she
had to model herself on your estimable image of her for so many
years. Perhaps in knowing herself so well she couldn’t accept
anybody who would have her so readily. Perhaps your genius
frightened her; the why is not explained: substantive pauses after
verbs of fearing, say? And what did she choose? A family
disinclined to risk its middle-class prosperity for abstract,
Utopian ideas. What did she feel pity for? Nothing. She had poison
in the very knops of her tits. And what does she regret? The deed,
I tell you, only becomes a mirror for self-admiration. The hand is
the whore’s second face. O Darconville, Darconville, every woman
has Clytemnestra’s address. What change of heart other than the
pirouetting bit of fantoccini constant to this sex I admonish you
against believing in ever took place? Isn’t the futility of washing
an Ethiopian proverbial? Can you get thigs from fistules?

Peroratio

“This last word—and I shall have done. I urge you to
the work of your left hand! I call upon Lycurgus, Hyperides,
Dinarchus, Hortensius, Calvus, Chrysostom, and Aristides to
inspirit you with the ardor of my words and to quicken you to
revenge! A period of grieving is also a period of healing and zeal
as necessary in every cause as prudence. What then shall be done?
What sport? How flap this bifarious bitch whose faculties ran to
being in two places at once? She must be forced to remember!
Insensitive people must especially be sent to that kind of hell
whose flames must teach exactly what sensitivity means! Look you, I
am here to inspire, not to gratify. Will you simply pray her to
rehabilitation? Recommend a thatched nunnery? Love those you’ll
come to hate and be an ally to your enemies? No, never! Hurl her
after the fault to learn how she likes her own compulsion! Bring
justice to Jedburgh! Wax your black sword, Darconville, and
slaughter them all!

“The temptation, of course, is to wait. And how easy
to prevail by doing nothing more than that, for nothing forbids you
from reflecting that with every passing minute she is growing
older, fatter, homelier. You are avenged 1440 times a day! How old
is the puffin—twenty-three? Why, for a girl that’s late autumn!
She’s got two more years to be loved, ten more to love herself, and
the rest to pray to God! But why wait? Will she not strout? She
will. Did she not spitrack you? She did. Was she not a
spot-powdered, downsical-bearing cat of convenience? She was. So,
being on land, settle; being at sea, sail. Why hesitate? To suit a
natural action to a most unnatural crime? You were her victim; must
you be her dupe? No, my child, the past is the adversary of the
future, and past mirth will have future laughter, don’t you see? A
few luminous and fervent hours are enough to give meaning to an
entire lifetime, the honor of which is at stake and the outcome
hanging in the balance. The very voices of your forebears cry to
you from the ground, ‘My son, scorn to be a slave!’

“Heed to consent! Hearken to comply! Follow not the
dictates of a sloven and unmerited mercy but enlist yourself under
the sacred banner of justice to play out its ends and prevent the
curses of posterity from being heaped upon your memory that both by
this trial and its swift redressai we shall be delivered, that we
shall have deliverance at last, and until the last shock of time
shall bury her memory in ignominious and undistinguished ruin!
Datum serva! Cognatus cole
! There alone shall be peace for
you, and otherwise there won’t, for what makes a person noble? Not
a continued false and smothered love, surely, for love if it’s real
never refuses what love sends. Neither pity, for that is nothing
more than a disagreeable impulse of the instinct for appropriation
at the sight of what seems to be weaker. What makes honor? A person
brave? Constitutes perfection? I will venture to say that no man
ever rose to any degree of perfection but through obstinacy and an
inveterate resolution against the stream of mankind!

“I want a platter—listen to me—and I want a head on
that platter! Inaction itself must otherwise assume the proportions
of a crime. I see a demon behind you standing in the midst of her
own noise, the biology of whose shadow cannot and will not be
studied! Examine it no further! But there is a reality pitched
above
that shadow. It’s yours alone to feast on in
ill-will! Stand upon her—and prevail, overcoming the hound that
bays and rejoicing only that you’ve lived to say, ‘The dog is
dead!’ She was your hell in perspective, was she not, and is it not
written that justice is the punishment of sin? Rack her soul for it
then! There is always more that you can be than what you are! Thaw
out thunder! Dun the reality for what it is!
When are you going
to learn that Satan isn’t a metaphor
?”

LXXXII

The Unholy Litany

Daughters of calumny, I summon you!

—RICHARD
BRINSLEY SHERIDAN

[Note: in the lists that follow, the paper edition contains

ditto marks (") to indicate repetition of the words

“libera nos, Domine” after each entry. It is hoped

the reader will mentally supply these and forgive

their ommission here for the sake of simplicity.

—remz]

THE WORDS were so terrifying that they precluded any
possibility of interruption, anaesthetizing Darconville where he
lay in a silence of sustained disbelief. Dr. Crucifer’s face was
bloodless white, like the underside of a sole, his mouth writhing
with unintelligible words, when suddenly proceeding to the
phonograph he set in a record which came up slowly in the mournful
rhythm of plain chant. It was the “
Dies Irae
”—the saddest,
emptiest, most melancholy determination of sorrow on earth. He
seemed as he closed his eyes to be listening to something beyond
him, as if in bizarre and unhallowed colloquy with his inner self,
and then he turned, moving now around the ancient relics of the
room, and in the falsetto modulations of that impossible voice
began to recite in a cold drawn-out prolation the queerest litany
ever heard:

“—from Eve and her quinces,
libera nos,
Domine

—from Jael, the jakesmaid,

—from Pasiphaë, the Cretan motherlord,

—from Venus Illegitima, goddess of

unnatural
acts,

—from Alice Trip-and-Go, who wardeleth,

—from Dejah Thoris, princess of helium,

—from Beatrice Joanna, the changeling,

—from Galinthia, who was turned into a

cat,

—from Belestiche, mistress of Ptolemy II,

—from Fanny Abington and her harlotries,