Darconville's Cat (65 page)

  “It’s true,” said Darconville calmly, “what they say
about you, isn’t it?”

  “What do they say?”

  “They say you believe in nothing.”

  “It is true,” answered Crucifer, his hands
fluttering like spiders in their lairs within the voluminous folds
of his robe. A green jade ring worn on the left thumb suggested a
great scarab held captive by one of the spiders. “I believe nothing
to know everything, to anti-crusade, to accept the fact that wisdom
must bow down to necessity.” He paused. “ ‘Ay, ay, Antipholus, look
strange and frown.’ “ Then he turned his head madly to the side and
whispered, “I believe love is what people don’t mean by it.”

  “I believe,” replied Darconville, “that love is
better than what you believe.”

  And with a mocking whoop of execration, Dr.
Crucifer, stepping under the lamp, spat with glee and threw back
his head, which with an involuntary stir of horror Darconville saw
for the first time was as pale and round and little as a dirty
boule-de-gomme
.

  Dr. Crucifer could have come from another planet.
His was a face of grue, a little balloon of dead-white cheeks and
jowls with eyes, ringed in black, which seemed to have fixed the
features they no longer animated: two windows, shades drawn. It was
a head that Darconville perhaps had seen only once before—the bust
of Niccolô Strozzi in the Dahlem Museum. There was no beard or
bodily hair, only a parchmentlike, pasty skin which wasn’t
mat-white, neither the Chinese white of oil pigment, nor of that
hue which leprosy had bleached out, but a sleek shiny fat with the
tint of gambroon.

  He was tall and cold and white, showing the same
peculiar mis-configuration of body that was George Washington’s, a
pinball-sized head in striking contrast to the tall elongated trunk
of the obesus which suggested a kind of blown-out gigantism and ran
into swollen breasts, fat pads, and affluent buttocks that seemed
to be pinguefying on their own steaks. The thyroid cartilage was
inconspicuous. He had tits. He had a buffalo hump in his shoulders.
His hands were pudgy, with dimpled knuckles, and his fingers were
long and groomed like a woman’s, the nails left sharp and cut
almost to a triangle. The hair on his head was black, shiny, and
hard, belying an advanced age that could be seen only in his teeth.
The effect was that of seeing a great lubberly boy who
resembled—forgive the unpicturable image—a giant dwarf: the
pendulous belly, a low abdomen big as a budget, a draffsack with
short ineffectual arms that implied poor muscular development,
demineralized bones, and extreme fatigability. A malodorous
perspiration could be detected as he came closer.

  He smiled uncannily, glowered suddenly in a fit:
there was no easy passage in his face from one mood to another.
When he spoke he whistled through his nose, his ogival head moving
slowly from side to side, and yet the expression on his face was
generally blank, mobile only in so much as speaking demanded it.
His mouth looked like a baby’s, puckered out like a file-fish, and
incredibly there was no salivation associated with it, for his
tongue, mouth, and lips were
dry
—with no moisture in
evidence at all—and the sounds of his speech, like cornshucks
rustling, came out in rasps. It was a creature from the moonlight
world.

  “Love?” he screeched. “Love?” He looked as if he had
been whipped in the face. “The impatient disease? The poor man’s
grand opera? That desert of loneliness and recrimination? The
stinkingest word, you mean, in the
Schimpftexicon
of song
and sentiment?” Crucifer banged the table furiously, the sudden and
violent response turning his eyes white in an ophthalmic roll.
“That thing which boys and girls spin tops at? The mood that can
comment on every woe? The delusion, you mean, that one woman
differs from another? That set of alcove manners, the demand for
which hatred owes all its meaning, is this what you have in mind?
That thing of dark imaginings that shapes by chance the perils it
by choice can escape? The emotion that makes you leer like a
sheepbiter, fawn like a spaniel, crouch like a Jew?” Crucifer
swallowed. “Love—pronounced, I believe,
looove
,” he
mocked, “in the southern part of this country—is a state of mind
sustained by a variety of imbecile distractions, the divisor of two
solitudes shoved into the dividend of desperation for a quotient of
what? Division! The inverse of multiplication!

  “Can you eat love?” Crucifer spat air and waltzed
vulgarly forward. “Can you cook love? Can you sit on love? Can you
crawl under love when it’s raining? Can you drive love to the
Leucadian groves? Can you wear love when it’s cold out? Can you
taste it? Touch it? Feel it? Smell? Or depend on it? Can you do
anything besides
breed
with it? Can you?
Well, tell
me, can you
?”

  For a moment, Darconville was actually
frightened.

  “Desire,” whispered Crucifer, “is a sad thing, and
love is all the foolish know to lighten the burden. You can alter a
cat, perhaps, but not the stupidities of mankind. No, there is no
authority but Milton’s for Adam and Eve having left the Garden of
Paradise hand in hand. I suspect he beat the living shit out of
her”—as he laughed he covered his face with his hand—”and was left
alone.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Who—are you?”

  Dr. Crucifer heard the question with one eyebrow
raised in a whimsical vertex. He paused, as if about to take
measures almost fatal to himself, then suddenly his face changed to
an expression that bespoke the obvious pleasure of perhaps adding a
welcome touch of understanding between them.

  “I am a man of principles, and one of my principles
is expediency. But what did you come out to see?” he asked.
Darconville only looked at him. “It’s not that I’m what nobody else
in the world ever was,” he continued, “for you could say the same.
Sit down, won’t you? You won’t sit down? That’s as it is, my
dear.”

  Darconville made to leave.

  “Wait,” interjected Crucifer. “I shall be as cogent,
to use the rhetoric of college examinations, as is reconcilable
with completeness. But let’s have everybody christened before we
begin, shall we?” He closed his eyes, and like some prehistoric
fish, quite white from the aboriginal darkness, of enormous size,
and stone blind, he pipped his lips. “I am, I’m told, of the
ancient Egyptian family named Quirtassi, englished Crucifer. I am
male. I am. a dark article. I am a human truffle which springs up
and exists without any root, unstrengthened by fibers or filaments.
(No one, incidentally, can actually tell whether truffles are alive
or not, did you know that?) I am the Wanderer in the Wilderness,
the solar glyph, a design on a Gnostic gem. I have huge great
breeches full of sin and air and a face like a cutwaist: it buzzes.
I sing hells. I fuck around with the black arts.” He smiled. His
smile was the dimmest thing in nature. “I wants to make your flesh
creep. But what did you come out to see? I am a gynophagite, a
dragontamer, a simple fatiloquent. I sin doubly because I sin
exemplarily and have never read a description of any heaven I would
not have left upon the very instant of my arrival. I pray to
Nodina, goddess of knots. My laughter is deceptive. I can bite
wires. I have no goatstones, no sweetstones, no peepstones. I live
in Middlesex. I am betwixt and between. But what did you come out
to see? I am a pigment of your imagination, a lucifer to light your
fag, a scream with breasts. I am a wicked pack of cards,” he
hissed. “But, please, won’t you come into the library?” He
waited.

  Darconville didn’t move.

  “There’s more to know, I’m afraid.”

  LXVIII

  The Misogynist’s Library

  This is the place must yield account for him.

        —MIDDLETON and
ROWLEY,
The Changeling

  
Burton on Infidelity: Speeches in the Star
Chamber
(1637); Juvenal,
Satire VI
; Rozanov’s
Solitario
;
Der Krebs: A Study of Invertebrates and
Monstrous Women
by Dr. Crouch; André Gide’s
Et Nunc Manet
in Te
; The Works of Aeneas Silvius; Angus Wilson’s “Mother’s
Sense of Fun”;
The Pilgrim’s Scrip
; Sir John Suckling’s
The Tragedy of Brennoralt
; Ploss and Bartels,
Woman
; a pamphlet in boards called “Dr. Rondibilis on
Cuckoldry, Wittols, and Gulls”; Kipling’s
The Betrothed
;
Görres’s
Mystique naturelle et diabolique
(Vol. V);
The Influence of Women
—
and Its Cure
by John
Erskine; The Very Revs. Kraemer and Sprenger’s
Malleus male fie
arum
; Hans Baldung’s
Hexenbilder
;
The
Merry-Thought, or, the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany
(1731);
The Gnomes of Zeeland
by Rex Hout; Quevedo’s
Pintura de la mujer de un abogado, abogado ella del
demonic
(1608); Tertullian’s
De cultu feminarum
; St.
Augustine’s
Soliloquies
; Wedekind’s
Death and the
Devil
; The Ascetic Works of St. Basil.

  Andrew the Chaplain’s
De reprobatione
amoris
; the fragment,
Interludium de clerico et
puella
; W. C. Brann’s
Woman as Hypnotist
; The
Epistulae
of Pope Pius II; Esther Vilar’s
The
Manipulated Man
; Schopenhauer’s
Parerga und
Paralipomena
(1851); Sherlock Holmes’s
Practical Handbook
of Bee Culture, With Some Observations Upon the Segregation of the
Queen
(privately printed, Sussex Downs, 1912); Oliver
Brachfeld’s
Die Furcht vor der Frau
(1928); Pierre du
Moulin’s
Anatomie de la messe
(1624);
The Ribald
Rib
; the fourteenth-century “Pucelle Venimeuse”;
How to
Tell Your Mother from a Wolf
by Roland X. Trueheaxe;
Talmudic She-Things
; George Shorb’s
Mental Nuts to
Crack; The Deceyte of Women
(1490); The Works of Alexander
Neckham; Calderon’s “El Mâgico prodigioso”; Thomas Dekker’s
The
Raven’s Almanac
; “La Légende des eaux sans fond” by A
Gynakophobe; Max Beerbohm’s
The Pervasion of Rouge
;
Psellus’s
De operations daemonum
; the tracts of
La
Société des Ré-Théurigistes Optimales
; The Bannatyne Ms.; N.
M. Penzer’s
Poison-Damsels
; John of Salisbury’s
“Frivolities of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers” from the
twelfth-century
Policraticus
;
The Agenbite of
Inwit
(ca. 1340); Noel Coward’s
The Kindness of Mrs.
Radcliffe
; Xenophon’s
Memorabilia
and
Oeconomicus
; Ovid’s
Remedies of Love
; St. Paul’s
Epistles; Sir Richard Burton’s
Abeokuta and the Cameroons
;
Gregory of Nyssa’s “On the Making of Man”
(Nicene Fathers
,
Sermon 2, V);
De nugis curialium
(1200) by Walter Map;
Adrian Beverland’s
A Discovery of Three Imposters,
Turd-sellers, Slanderers, and Piss-sellers (
1709 ).

  Bernard de Moraix’s
De contemptu mundi
; the
Sermons of Bishop Golias; Sigmund Freud’s
Das
Medusenhaupt
; the monkish chronicle
Gesta romanorum
;
“Das nervöse Weib” by Albert Moll; William H. Smyth’s
Did Man
and Woman Descend from Different Animals
? (1927); the
Etymologiae
of Isidore of Seville;
The Jilts: or,
Female Fortune Hunters
(1756); Somerset Maugham’s
The Moon
and Sixpence
; “I Shall Teach Thee Terrible Things” by William
Hallgarth; the Pseudo-Cyprian’s
De disciplina et bono
pudicitiae
; H. X. Route’s
The Cliteroid Ladies
;
The Chinese Book of Odes
; “Alice, An Adultery” by Alistair
Crowley; Djuna Barnes’s
The Book of Repulsive Women
; The
Opera of Pietro Aretino;
Secretum secretorum: The Letters of
Aristotle to Alexander the Great
;
I Own a Vagina
Dentata
by L. A. Burton; Arthur Schopenhauer’s
Aphorismer
zur Lebensweisheit
;
The Harlot’s Ledger
by
Kshemendra; Rev. Cotton Mather’s
Memorable Providences
;
Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford’s “Fair Fools”; Frederick Rolfe
(Baron Corvo),
Women of a Woman Hater
; Wolfgang Lederer’s
The Fear of Women
;
An Almond for a Parrot
by
Thomas Nashe; The Works of Cillactor; M. Titfist’s
White and
Pink Tyranny
; “Handlyng Synne” (1303) by Robert of Brunne;
Erasmus’s
Senatulus
; Hugh Walpole’s
The Old
Ladies
; the Songs of the Carmina Burana; Thorstein Veblen’s
The Place of Women and Pets in the Economic System
; Thomas
O’Brien’s,
The Tarts of Medford
.

  Grimmelshausen’s
Die Landstörzerin
Courasche
(1670); Saki’s “The Sex That Doesn’t Shop”; Crashaw,
On Marriage
; The Decretals of Pope Soter ( 175-179 A.D.);
Arabella Kenneally’s
Feminism and Sex Extinction
(1920);
Platina’s
Fire Is Not Sated with Wood
; the Gaelic poem “An
Fear Brónach d’éis a Phosda;
Die Schlusselgewalt der
Hausfrau
(Diss. zur Erlangung der Doctorwürde, Jena); Wallace
Rayburn’s
The Inferior Sex
;
Fiancées Financed
by
Lex and Xoe Heartrue, Ph.D.s; E. Belfort Bax’s
The Fraud of
Feminism
; The Works of Simonides; John Milton’s
The
Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce
; Hans Christian Andersen’s
“The Swineherd”; Dr. Jacobus X’s
Célibat et célibataires
;
Mahieu le Bigame’s
Lamentations
; Baudelaire’s “Mon Coeur
Mis A Nu”;
The Chastisement of Mansour
by Hector France;
Thomas Middleton’s
Blurt, Master Constable
; Fra Domenico
Cavalca’s
Specchio de peccati
(1340).