Darconville's Cat (64 page)

  Lampblack spat: he recoiled as if to strike, but
Darconville, seizing his wrist, bounced him on a hop backwards into
the room, whereupon, snarling, he disappeared through an inner
door.

  The living-room looked like a medieval oratory,
communicating, apparently, with a bedroom behind it and running
into a long narrow walkway to the right, embellished on both sides
with framed atlases and prints, which led to more rooms. A cloister
lamp hung in this main room. The royal purple plush of the walls
descended four or five feet all around the room to old carved
wainscoting, finely penciled wood waved and variegated with
peculiar dramatic scenes and tetrastichs in middle English. The
ceiling was beamed. The furniture was of black oak, a great
sideboard answering strangely well to the monstrous elbow-chairs in
each corner that rose to ornamental knobs and rounded around to the
front in leonine fistclaws. An Egyptian dagger hung in the liripipe
of the hood of an academic gown (Jesus College, Oxford) draped over
one of them. There was a touch of blasphemy in the antique
prie-dieu which had been cannibalized round the kneeler to hold a
chamberpot, inscribed: “
Mingere cum bombis res est saluberrima
lumbis
.”

  It was the room of a person whose taste was
luxurious to the verge of effeminacy, a person, thought
Darconville, utterly and absolutely selfishly solicitous about his
own wants, some mad decretalist or Sardanapalian whose caprices ran
simultaneously to both lust and asceticism, which, for all anyone
knew, were perhaps both part of the same destitution. There were
rich labels under the heavy cornices of the walls, recessed for
curiosities and antiquities from old châteaux and abbeys, and a
plan of shelves were set off, directly across from the door, by a
fireplace flanked by a pair of imp-faced terms and above that,
framed in dark box, hung the bizarre painting of Delville’s
La
Fin d’un règne
. A Chinese screen stood against a wall. Between
the two windows on the left stood a sofa of eupatorium purple,
fitted at one end with a cellaret for decantered wines arid
liquors. The large old desk intrigued Darconville, for on its
center panel, under a built-in lamp, it bore the carved face of
Osiris, and there on a pulled compartment—where a cigarette box
held a portion of tailor-mades (with blind and foil stamping on the
marque of each paper in the extravagant form of his initial)—lay an
air pistol. At the top of the desk rested a blue ball inside of
which a knight was strangling a nymph.

  Darconville had gone but a few steps into the
walkway and was peering at the series of lugubrious prints on the
walls there—Gotch, Stuck, Degas, Cranach, Baldung, and others—when
he heard the paroxysmal scream. It was a woman with a man’s voice
and a hyena in her womb. The prevalent note was impossible to
comprehend—it struck high C—for its thin wire-drawn pitch of
ee-ee-ee
somehow appropriated the shrillness of
exasperation, pain, terror, and disgust all at once. Was it anger?
Impatience? A protracted yowl of dismissal? Possibly. For all of a
sudden a disarranged Lampblack flew through the living room,
sucking his fist and sobbing for breath, and flung through the
front door as if cast forever into the infinite leagues of black
air. In his surprise, Darconville had turned in astonishment to
follow the theatrical disorder of it all when behind him, suddenly,
the tapestry curtains were drawn with a clash of rings over the
windows. He wheeled around and through the comparative darkness saw
himself under the surveillance of a figure standing across the
room, someone whose footfall had attained the highest perfection of
noiselessness.

  “Welcome to Mother Sulphur’s bagnio,” said a tall
and unat-tenuated shadow. It was Dr. Crucifer.

  The form of the man, gradually, in little minor
details, shaped to an outline in the emphatic darkness which
immediately had something indecent about it.

  “What do you want with me?”

  “Will you sit down?” asked the voice in the
darkness. The figure didn’t stir. “You won’t sit down? That’s as it
is.”

  “
Tell
me.”

  “Your visit is really most opportune, for I wanted
badly to have a few minutes’ chat with you.” It was a voice unlike
any other on earth. “You know I know you’re a Darconville. But hold
thumbs on that. I admire your beautiful face.” Darconville could
hear him smile. “I want to put on your coat. I believe Abelard had
you in mind when he composed his
Pari pulchritudine re present
ans
.”

  Darconville gesticulated disgust.

  “You’ll have heard that countless times, of course.
But you haven’t heard it from me. I’m giving you a plain answer to
a plain question, Al Amin.”

  The voice was a soprano’s, with a little glub-glub
sound in the throat like coffee boiling in a percolator, but there
was a piping up higher in his birdlike syrinx, as if in a dry
whistle it were fluting through a beak. It had no timbre, not at
all what one would expect from such a big man, a hovering,
elongated man. And, what, was that an accent? Mere phrasing? A
glottal defect? As Dr. Crucifer continued speaking, the words in
the darkness seemed disembodied, hanging in the air. “I have
imagined us together having tea on dark afternoons with oatcakes
and double Gloucester and then a late stroll on the misty common to
give our swordsticks an airing.” He added a word. “Alone.”

  Darconville said nothing.

  “Now, what may I offer you? Some tobacco or tuck?
Shall I chill a Muscadet? A glass of brown October?”

  There was no reply.

  “Sincerely yours?” asked Crucifer, earnestly.
“Please. Let it fit gravity if it can’t friendliness?”

  Still Darconville said nothing.

  “I admire your work,
mon fifils
.”

  “Do you.”

  “I’ll try again: I believe you’re troubled.”
Darconville moved toward the door, but Crucifer, stepping forward,
made a swift vibra-tiuncle with his left hand. “Permit me, it takes
two to tell the truth— one to speak, one to listen.” A wheeze of
satisfaction followed. “How I should love to be your confessor!
There, but enough. May I only hope to see you often?”

  “You may hope,” said Darconville, “whenever you
please.”

  “Contentious,” muttered Crucifer.

  Again, Darconville went to leave.

  “Wait,” said Crucifer, his voice glimmering in fun.
“I adore that. Why shouldn’t Stromboli dispute with Vesuvius? A
mountain and a mountain cannot meet, of course—but individuals can.
Your style is like mine. We are co-supremes.”

  “Your flattery disgusts me.”

  “I assure you,” said the voice, lowering
significantly, “I don’t want to bother you, only advise. It is not
in my interest to persuade men to virtue nor to compel men to
truth—in that, I’m typical. You forget, I am a teacher in America.
I have a faculty, that’s all, of seeing what I feel you should
share. Call me a philosopher of error prevented if not of progress
facilitated—you’re a writer, aren’t you curious about it?— and that
being the case I am prompted only to wonder whether you believe
that the true liberation of the spirit is to empty it of the
thought of liberation, that one can legitimately espouse the
destruction of nature, that your personality and its worldly
obligations are no more than the sins you must absolve yourself
from if you would remain an artist. I am compelled to declare that
anyone—no, we don’t need the light just yet—that anyone who shall
dissent must either be very foolish or very dishonest and will make
me quite uncomfortable about the state of his mind.” Glub-glub: an
attempt at laughter. “I’m like the Boeotian lynx. I can see under
the skin.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Everything.”

  “Everything,” said Darconville, “is a subject on
which there is not much to be said.”

  Dr. Crucifer took a step forward. “I mean by
‘everything’ the essential mistake you must avoid. A glorious love
is created in the artist by the least sign of respect.” His dry
lips smacked. “
Breviloquentem
,” he said, “I believe you
intend to marry.”

  So that was it.

  “You know so much,” smiled Darconville ruefully,
“who lives up here in obscurity.”

  “I love cross-wits,” the creature whispered
gleefully. “Pray sit down. You won’t sit down? That’s as it is,
dear Darconville. Am I too solicitous? Yours to hand?
Embrasse
ta maman
? Forgive me, mothers and those without balls bleat
with similar voices. But then would you understand that? I wonder,
you see, for the more manly a man, the less, I’m afraid; he will
understand women—whether beautiful or not.”

  “She
is
beautiful,” shot back
Darconville.

  “You can’t admire what is beautiful,” said the
grotesque voice, “without becoming indifferent to what is
wrong.”

  “And you confirm as you speak what I see I needn’t
fear as I listen.”

  “Blister upon heat!” said Crucifer, laughing.
“Reverence to this. You have the gift of impudence. Enjoy it. Every
man has not the like talent.”

  Solid line played against stipple. Standing there in
the darkness, Darconville at first scolded himself at putting up
with this sudden familiarity, the forward remarks, but then thought
if he bowed to the vexation he might somehow divert the force of
it, so faint was the image of the implication of this passing visit
upon his still as yet uninformed imagination.

  “I must admit, I have always found it easier to
understand women, frankly, than those who are interested in them.
The which brings the meeting to order: why, may I ask, do you need
a woman in your life? Give it over, Darconville, please. Women
slacken the combustion of pure thought—they are analogous to
nitrogen in pure air. Thinking and feeling are identical for them,
whereas for men they are in opposition. I don’t mean to offend you.
You must only emerge from an illusion,” he said, his tongue rasping
around the word. “I am afraid for you.”

  “Your sympathy touches me.”

  “Sympathy? Sympathy is a non-logical sensation and
has no claim to respect. It is a thing at the center of feminine
ethics, a quasi-ethical phenomenon built on feelings like shame and
pride. It’s ready-made. Don’t trust it. Surely you’ve read your
great and revered ancestor on the subject?”

  “Ah yes! Thus drops the other shoe!”

  It was as if a veil had suddenly been torn away from
a foolishness he’d called mystery: some perverse fealty owed to an
ancient in his family was being paid to him in some kind of insane
transferral or reciprocity centuries old.

  “A Prince of the Church, murdered in the red of his
robes,” said Crucifer, adding a reverence intercalated with an
Italian phrase while in the same breath sniping at the woman who in
killing that old man could kill again—such was the madness up
there—in the proxy of Darconville’s bride-to-be.

  “Be careful,” said Darconville coldly.

  “I can see in the dark,” replied Crucifer.

  “You don’t see enough, and you assume more than you
see.” The foulness of it was indescribable but frightening. “You
know nothing about her.”

  “
Her
,” echoed Crucifer. “That word again. I
haven’t heard it for a long time. The possessive case of she, you
mean. Not ‘hirr! hirr!’—the international order urging a dog
forward to attack.”

  Darconville’s eyes blazed. “You—”

  “—are mad?” He drew a breath, his voice whistling
like a teal’s. “No,
mon gogosse
, I would say that I’m
different than most only in that I’m simply ashamed to be human. I
know the jollification of indifference. I am indifference. I have
cheekfuls of words. I talk. They come out.” The strange body of Dr.
Crucifer was meanwhile becoming more distinct, still overshadowed,
but the concealed, the unseen, slowly metamorphosed to contours
discernible as human and yet oddly globoidal and unnatural. “ ‘I am
a man and everything that deals with women disgusts me,’ might have
said Terence,” said Crucifer.

  And then suddenly came a pronouncement spent as
though merely to exercise a long-held fetish of abuse and falsity
and perversion, a dark extravagance, however, that seemed to excite
in the person of the speaker an hilarity that belied its intended
worth.

  “I despise the sex!” he exclaimed. “Bedswervers!
Painted trulls! Dupes of limericks! The tragedy of having to waste
uncounted priceless hours in chasing what, according to Frater
[Psi]2, ought to have been brought to the back door every morning
with the milk! The word woman, my friend, is a lipogram of the
letter E, and he who marries one commits the philosophical
stupidity of trying to subsume the Many in the One. Marriage is
cannibalism! Pauciplicate vanity! Men hunting for bargains in
chastity and triumphantly marrying a waistline!” Crucifer’s voice
was whining like a twanged wire—and he moved to the center of the
room in high giraffe-like steps in the most awkward simulacrum of
motion Darconville had ever seen. But there was no noise! And then
he reached up—he was wearing red slippers and a billowing red robe
tied at the middle with a cincture of silk— and lighted the
cloister lamp.

  My God, thought Darconville, souls are on the
outside
of things, not within!

  “Marriage is for inchlings, stinkards with mops,
cats and mice! It is a reluctant concession to human frailty where
the efficacy of ignorance in the experiment has not produced the
consequence expected except for the single lesson of its history,
collateral or appendant, that proves only once again that blackest
midnight succeeds meridian sunshine. You’d dedicate yourself to
this? To one, of one, still such, and ever so? Matrimony is
matronymry! And if it gave you the smile which you, in contempt of
your conscience, haven’t used, reflecting on the ludicrous means by
which two people have become five billion, then for godsake put the
filthy thought out of your mind! My God, can’t you hear me? Can’t
you tell?”