Darconville's Cat (88 page)

  Swiftly, Darconville took up a pencil nearby,
crossed out the name with a petulance that broke the lead in
midstroke, and shut off the light. The weighty darkness bore in on
him in a sudden synathroismus, crowding a million terrible
particulars upon him and paralyzing him head to foot, and though he
opened his mouth to gasp he was prevented from either calling or
crying out under the action of the crippling inexplicable force
pressing him to death. He lay motionless in the dark, with tears
rippling down his cheeks, waiting for the rest of his life to show
him what it would be. Then he could suddenly breathe. Then the
darkness began to dissolve. Then he could again discern necessary
shapes out of unnecessary shadows. And then he knew that the
detective to solve a crime must become an accessory to it. He
turned on the light again.

  And he picked up the photograph.

  LXXXIV

  What Is One Picture Worth?

  If the Devil did ever take good shape, behold this
picture.

        —JOHN WEBSTER,
The White Devil

  GILBERT VAN DER SLANG, Ensign (USNR)—it would be a
graduation photo—stands at attention in the full dress of
regimental commander in the boy navy: white gloves, a sash at the
waist, the shoddy-for-broadcloth jacket with its ventral rows of
brass-buttons. The subject is stiff as a stork—poker-backed, eyes
front, arse tight as a trapdrum—but the martial stance,
nevertheless, fails to supply the proper pointing, not for want of
high-seriousness certainly—the little chin juts out
niet zander
arbljt
—but for the uniform, impressive indeed were it not the
type that conventionally attracts ice-cream vendors, doormen, and
South American officials. It’s the pose of a smugly pretentious
deluxe: the Count of Trumpet on maneuvers from the stage of
sugarplum opera! The picture, were it hung in a museum, would be
entitled, “Are You Proud, Mother?”

  The student medals and sigla are very nice, but it’s
the kind of military respectability with which vulgarity is always
on speaking terms, for the white ducks, foreshortened like a
clumperton’s, are in painful collaboration with those black
government-issue shoes—the sort that never seem to be fellows—and
the sleeves mooch down too far over the hands. Alongside the left
leg, facing oddly inward and suggesting a slight effeminacy, hangs
a toy sword with which by optimistic transfer he doubtless seeks to
counteract that impression.

  It’s a sallow face, plain as the way to market, one
of those drawn yellow lamplit complexions best exemplified in the
work of minor Dutch painters of the seventeenth century. The small
blunket-colored eyes, cold as a boomslang’s, are looking straight,
if unseeingly, toward Cape Disappointment where those who graduate
from service academies are of course doomed, for want of
imagination, to spend the rest of their lives. He has a bifid chin
and the sharp grypanian nose of a logical positivist. The lank hair
characteristic of him has always been considered indicative of
pusillanimity, enough so to advance by way of suggestion a distinct
androgen deficiency—or even possible impotence.

  There is a humorless and hard-natured line to the
mouth, Protestant in cast, shaped to the possibility of generating
inauspiciously vexatious abuse like sending common seamen for
non-existent tools (still deemed wit at sea) or ordering a battue
of porpoises as a holiday diversion on some dull cruise to the
Leeward Islands or the Hawaiian chain of Kukeke Eleele. It would be
a high immature voice, slick with alloquia and sea-bop and nautical
drunts in the quasi-linguistic bluff of logbook narrative about
jackstays ‘n’ jumper struts ‘n’ jibbin’ the kibber. The head is
capitalupine, the hands thin and spidery, deft at small tasks.
There is a sapped but inflexible tonality to the general appearance
of this brisk little fart, the lack of repose conveyed especially
in the adolescent legs, elongating the outline, which run out of
the effortfully dovetailed imposture of uniform and down to feet
long as kippers—the body actually taking on the appearance of
having issued from the feet
themselves
! He is, in fact,
quite short.

  This is a figure of fun—a cross-grained,
long-waisted clockcase of opposability with the generic temperament
of a satrap and a talent for extrapolating cues from postures with
indefatigable readiness. He loves bandmusic, probably ran
cross-country (
les Pays-Bas, certain
!), and would have had
the best “cargo project” at the Academy—the kind of officious
little pickstraw who’d go into a complete shitfit if anyone in his
presence ever failed to refer, for instance, to a ship as a boat.
He’s a dog to procedure. There is in that bast and Nankeen-yellow
mask a sunken and repugnant mood of refusal—spitefully
incloistered— showing a person in whom secrecy would erroneously be
taken for reserve and for whom everything drops into categories
made familiar only by his indifference, as a makeweight to a scale
adjusts a gain. An underbutler squats in an esquire: he finds
meaningful what he can verify by counting on his fingers,
discerning no limit between achievement and ambition, and thus is
beauty duly converted by that transubstantiating process of the
functionist, once again, to use. There are, however, more wheels
and counterpoises in this engine than are easily imagined. His
thoughts are executed only to matters of dogged purpose, his
emotions but to formulate accumulations—and Either piggybacks Or,
the while, for the acquisition of both. Here is Ambidexter, for
good or for the time being, whichever comes first.

  We discern a sharp composite picture of a prattboy
so null in effect —his mind an abode of anything—that in nothing
isn’t something to which he wouldn’t promise all he seemed for
everything he lacked. And if a girl? Occasion is his cupid. He is
what is his shadow: it is and it is not; he’d strut and fleer and
fumble with his hat with untaught fists and with a smile that aches
to shield his mouth as glasses would his eyes proceed to peep love
ditties in her neck and seek to mirror lies—until such time when
promises reflect what’s far too malcon-formed for sight to see he’d
turn and gaze inward with the lost half of his double face, and
then would turpitude purvey to malice in a flash! It is a
photograph of utter vacancy. Vain, pale, fragmentary, silly, indeed
almost nothing—wait!—O my God,
but what about those
ears
?

  His ears are absolutely monstrositous! No, it’s not
simply that they stand noticeably away from the head—lobeless,
horizontal, shaped like eraserwheels!—they actually
shoot
out of the haircut like those xanthodermic warballs made of
Hoggland clay with which van Tromp and his sullen brabantois sought
to obliterate the English and establish the legitimacy of that
cheesemongering, guilder-grubbing, tulip-sniffing,
drainage-scheming Gomorrah of the North where people live below
sea-level, exact payment from guests, and sport footwear made of
trees! His ears?

  Are you in quest of comparisons?

  LXXXV

  A Digression on Ears

  To strike at eares is to take heed there bee

  No witnesse, Peter, of thy perjury.

        —RICHARD
CRASHAW

  THE EARS, which master the face of a dunce, are that
part of the head which most publishes stupidity. It was into none
other than these, fluting up moronically like foolish
squills—
penchant à la réception de suggestions
négatives
—wherein was poured, thought Darconville, more
venomous lies than even Hearsay of Satinland and all his polyotical
side-intelligencers could accommodate! It was astounding: they
seemed both to strain away from the cheeks in such vicious
inflexions of helix and anti-helix and yet draw up to such devilish
points that ugliness was announced instantly and absolutely, as if
in those oversized dirt-traps, shutting out all melodies and
comprehending only discord, no plot could hatch fouler than
themselves. The pinna looked hard and mollusk-shaped, the tragus
hemorrhoidal, and the conch darker than the keyhole to hell. There
were no lobes.

  What is there in the malformed ear that is so
revolting? It is the ideographic mark of perverts, penny-simples,
and Puritans, and be disarranged in whatever way they might,
nothing better indicates a blemished soul. Contour—whether
prick-eared, flap-eared, tulip-eared, lop-eared, or jug-eared—does
not establish periphery, for what it is is only a poor remnant of
what it means: small ones announce madness; flat, brutishness and
rusticity; spheroidal, talkativeness; twisted, silliness or
imbecility; pointed, cunning, deceit, and that hypocritical kind of
lust commonly associated with those face-pulling and dissenting
Anabaptists and Allobrogensians with their bowl-haircuts and
venereal poxes who were ever ready to club quotations and descant
on bare supposais and bantle scripture about in order to preach the
dresses off the neighborhood girls, until, you’ll recall, King
Charles II took the matter in hand—toy those twin appendages, in
fact, which he found could be gloriously cropped or notched or slit
to fit several fashions of contrition. But
large
ears?
They are the sumps of rumor and redundance, each a whirlpool fierce
to suck in fabrications of a thousand sorts. These are the
penetralia of the body, known to every Dumbo, Jumbo, and woebegone
basset hound of a detractor who’s tripped on them—flags that
semaphore treachery—which historically denote flight before
spiritual responsibility, natures playing at modesty while working
hard at things like ruses, and those meager, choleric, inconstant,
and unethical schemes observable from without yet confined within
the twisted and grotesque mule-pulleys of people like Wycliffe,
Prynne, Calvin, Vickers, Wither, Cranmer, Herr Ludder and other
nasal Protestant archdapifers who’d have left the world a far, far
better place had they all been immediately banished to the infamous
island of Panotiorum where the cruel aboriginals of that place are
so monstrously fluked that they live out their lives actually
wrapped in their ears! “A long-ear’d Beast and Flanders College,”
wrote Swift, “is Dr. Tisdale to my knowledge.” To big ears we owe
our universal death. Eve, the first macrotus, wished to hearken
only to what she heard she wanted. Acousticus first brought
wickedness into the world.

  There is more to the ear than meets the eye. It
looks
awful, for one thing—the asymmetrical non-whorls and
misvolutions of its general format showing a factual resemblance to
nothing whatsoever on earth, except perhaps for that one striking
correspondence to Dutch landscape. A simile is applied to it as
schnaps to a Voortrekker: one is never sufficient. Is it an
air-conditioner? A love-lure? A gravity ball? It is a human
question mark with a cochlea like a snail, a center like a
diphthong, and a rim like a last quarter moon or the symbol for a
suffruticose shrub. It never trumpets, though it resembles one.
Sound goes through it perforating nothing—as theologians explain
the Virgin birth—like saffron through a bag. Its squashed-up shape
is a poor vestige of the mobile catchment-cup of many other
mammals. It cannot be hid. (The contraptions, in fact, contrived
for whatever good reason to cover them
temporarily—
oreillettes
, muffs, earcaps—are more hideous
than the ears themselves!) It is the only aperture impossible to
shut by itself. It is forever open to fungi, otosis, and the
mendacities of talebearers, false delators, and tare-sowing dogs.
It cannot discriminate between noises it will and will not
hear.

  It is a vicious circle, like all circles. It has no
other one like it. It begins to hum for no apparent reason. It
aches at simple heights and depths. It cannot move. Insert an
insect: there sounds a deafening heavy-footed tread—and yet it is
unable to hear higher pitches commonly available to the lower
beasts. It can claim no exact certitude in relation to distance,
space, and often time. It cannot determine truth. Of itself it can
retain and remember nothing, and nothing produces, save an ignoble
dirty mulch called “cerumen” which gathers in the dark like
mushrooms and deafens before it disgusts. It is therefore the worst
tool to grasp philosophical knowledge. It freezes, it shrinks, it
sprouts hairs, it turns color, and, worst of all perhaps, it
repeatedly reports—for if one sleeps on one ear, the other can
always bring bad news. By our ears our
hearts
become
tainted! We speak of being
up to one’s ears
, meaning
involved or implicated, in debt, or in trouble; or
on one’s
ear
as captiously or excessively irritated or irritable; or
all ears
, indicating ambitiously opportunistic or vulgarly
eager; or
by the ears
as entering into a state of strife
or discord. It is a noun with as many contemptuous and derogatory
implications in English as has the word “Dutch.” The ears of people
do not follow suit with the rest of them as they age, remaining not
only large, if initially so, but the efflorescence of ugliness
until the very moment of death. There is little loveliness, indeed,
even for the normal ear, often failing to correspond regularly
between the tip of the nose and eyebrow line at the base of the
forehead. It is the single tragic constant on the head of man.

  But what of those ears of
Gilbert les Grands
Écoutilles
? They were goosewings—tegumentary expansions of
skin, suggesting the distinct possibility of aerial flight,
stretched from head side to the elongated digits of their points as
if ready to crow and flap away. It was a comic set of volutes, each
proof against each, one slightly forward of the other, like an
owl’s. They flew up only to be pulled down, ballasted by the
priapic weight that wouldn’t let them leave and, wallowing
unwieldy, enormous in their gait, stuck out while infolding to a
flat welt as if not belonging to their bearer. The placement was no
better than the spread which was worse than the shape, a contortion
best put somewhere between a potato chip and a reporter’s logograph
for the word “impostor”= p. It was volume, nevertheless, without
bounty, size without grandeur, bulk without any aura of command, an
enlargement, though empty, enouncing far more than exceeds enough.
They shot up suddenly from ears to shears to sheaths to wreaths! He
himself almost narrowed in the competition. He was as if pinned to
them, his weak face left in a posture of gawk like a
Doofes
Vogelscheuche
seeming to refuse the outlandish ascendancy they
simultaneously usurped. He looked like a taxi going down the street
with both doors open.