Darconville's Cat (67 page)

  Augustus Wolff’s
Die Frauenfeindleichen
Literatur
;
Some of the Reasons Against Women’s
Suffrage
by Francis Parkman; James McGrigor Allan’s “On the
Real Differences in the Minds of Men and Women” (1869) and
The
Intellectual Severance of Men and Women
; T. W. H. Crosland’s
Lovely Woman (
1903); The Works of Chrysippus; Charles
Reade’s
The Woman-Hater
;
On Wives and Wiving
by
Alexander Nicchols; George Gilder’s
Sexual Suicide
;
A
Briefe Anatomie of Women
(1653); “Viraginity and Effemination”
by James Weir, Jr., M.D.; Edward Young’s
The Universal
Passion
(1725); Adnil Notrub’s
The Kept Woman Who Didn’t
Keep Long
; Montherlant’s
Les Jeunes Filles
;
Aristotle’s
Generation of Animals
; Douglas Jerrold’s
Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures
; Washington Irving’s
Rip Van Winkle
; The Works of Nevisanus; Sigmund Freud’s
Civilization and Its Discontents
.

  P. J. Mobius’s “L’Inferiorità mentala délia donna”;
Wolf Solent
by John Cowper Powys; The Works of Jean Weir;
James Thurber’s
Men, Women, and Dogs
; The Works of
Procopius; John Donne’s “Loves Alchymie”; Tolstoy’s
Father
Sergius
; Thomas Middleton’s
Micro-Cynicon ( 1
599 );
Aristophanes’s
Ecclesiazusae
;
Her Royal Highness
Woman
by Max O’Rell; P. J. Proudhon’s
Amour et
Manage
; G. J. Romanes’s
Mental Differences Between Men and
Women
; The Works of St. Bonaventure;
Matrimony: A Novel
Containing a Series of Interesting Adventures
by John
Shebbeare; Ben Jonson’s
Epicoene, or The Silent Woman
(1609); Alistair Crowley’s
White Stains
;
The Corridors
of Time
by Poul Anderson; A. Conan Doyle’s
John Barrington
Cowles
; Ernest Dowson’s
The Pierrot of the Minute
;
Richard Sibbes’s
Bowels Opened
(1641). Francis Bacon’s “On
Marriage and the Single Life.”

  St. Bernardino of Siena’s
Prediche Volgari;
Darwin’s
The Descent of Man
; The Poems of William
Cartwright;
On Sleeping with Women
by Roger Lawson;
The Epic of Gilgamesh
;
The Embattled Male in the
Garden, or Why Women Are Queer in the Country
by Dwight
Farnham; G. E. Moore’s
Celibates
; Philipp Mainländer’s
Philosophie der Erlösing
(1876); the thirteenth-century
Coutumes du Beauvoisis
; Bronislaw Malinowski’s
Sexual
Life Among the Melanesians
; Semonides Amorgos’s
Elegy and
Iambus
; Axel, Thane O’Droxeur’s
Love and Hate
;
Francesco Barbara’s
De re uxoria
; The Works of Paraeus;
August Strindberg’s
Giftas
; the Tomes of La Croix;
De
legibus connubialibus
; Les Opères de Cretin; the Doulaq
Papyrus of 1400 B.C.; The Works of Palladis of Alexandria;
Miroir de Manage
by Eustace Deschamps; the
Speculum
of Vincent de Beauvois.

  Bram Stoker’s
The Squaw
; The Works of St.
Louis;
The Sullens Sisters
by A. E. Coppard;
Feminine
Frailty
by Horace Wyndham;
Smith
by W. Somerset
Maugham;
The Widow That Keeps the Cock Inn
; John Wilkes’s
An Essay on Women
(1763); the
Divinae
Institutiones
of Lactantius (c. A.D. 250-c.317); Johannes
Adelphus Muling’s
Margarita Facetiarum
; Henri Brieux’s
Damaged Goods
;
Manon Lescaut
by L’Abbé Prévost;
The Samayamatrika
of Kashmiri Kshmendra;
François-Charles-Nicholas Racot de Grandval’s
Agathe, ou les
deux biscuits
; William King’s
The Toast
(1732);
Gilbert and Sullivan’s
The Sod’s Opera
(ms. only);
Portrait of Crispa
by Ausonius (4th c. A.D.); Robert
Frost’s
A Masque of Reason
;
The Orestautocleides
of Timocles; Prosper Mérimée’s
La Vénus d’Ille
;
The
Whore’s Rhetorick
(1683) by Ferrante Pallavicino; the Works of
Asopodorus of Phlius;
Songs Compleat, Pleasant, and
Divertive
(1719) by Mr. D’Urfey; Francisco Gomez de Quevedo’s
From One Horned Man to Another
; Alberto Moravia’s
Bitter Honeymoon and Other Stories
; the works of
Simonides; Henry James’s
Longstaff’s Marriage
and
The
Story of a Masterpiece
;
Kara Düses
by A Turk;
The
Eroticon
of Paul the Silentiary.

  LXIX

  Biography of a Eunuch

  And Jehu lifted up his face to the window, and said,
“Who is on my side? Who?”

        —II Kings
9:32

  “I AM A SPADO. I am gibbed. I am only a part of
myself, a maenad, a gelding. I live without heat or light,”
continued Dr. Crucifer, shutting the library door. “I am to the
animal kingdom what good celery is to the vegetable, white and
succulent. I have vowed myself to chastity, like the Jesuits or the
Samurai. I don’t speak to women, look them in the face, eat with,
shake hands, or tolerate. I prefer ducats to daughters. I am like a
Bosch painting: my secret is told in a single spot at the bottom.
Will you look?” he asked, his fat white tongue, with its fissures
and hypertrophied papillae, protruding and withdrawing into his
open mouth. “I have no vagina. I have no penis.
Auf der
Gräntze
,” he smirked, munching the German, “
liegen immer
die seltsamsten Geschöpfe, nein
? But does that shock you?”
There followed a whining involuntary sound under his chewing, a
weird noise like that of a spring peeper or pinkletink whose
flatulence vibrates its wiry tail, and with hands fluttering madly
at his throat, he cacked in exaltation, “I am a eunuch!”

  Darconville had been prepared for anything up in
those rooms, and no outrage, he felt, couldn’t have been
perpetrated there, no excess lessened, no profanity unexplored. But
this he couldn’t quite believe.

  The library was elegant. At the center of one wall
hung an original Palma Vecchio. There was one stained-glass window,
and a woodcut in a wall space showed a Maori carving of the Great
Daughter of Night, eating her son. The rest of the room was taken
over by long oak shelves filled with books on all sides that went
right to the ceiling, and a wooden ladder attached to runners on
the top could be slid on bearings right around to reach specific
heights. The one small table between two leather chairs held a
large fishbowl, filled with tiny, eerie transparent things moving
in rounds of weak-finned and aimless nosing of the dirty glass.

  “Blind cave tétras,” said Crucifer, meticulously
seeing to them with pinchfuls of tetron squidflakes. “I prefer them
to houseplants—the queers of nature, don’t you agree?” He hissed in
laughter. “That
is
what they say I am, all the little
worms and protists out there, don’t they, a homosexual? A tiptoe?
Un entrouducuter
? A dash of lavender?” He rolled open the
diamond-paned window and peered with disgust into the darkness
outside. “No, I am not queer, my dear Darconville, although I do
hail from the sotadic zone—you know, Medi-terra, North Africa, the
Middle East, that area. But I do not collect ephebai or cabana
boys, neither do I engage in what Lord Alfred Douglas referred to
as ‘the familiarities.’ Lampblack?” asked Crucifer, yanking a
bell-pull by the curtain. “He is my servant, for pay. I kick him,
and he does my bidding,” he smiled cruelly, “to show that what he
knew, he knows. No,” he added, “I am an anorchid, an autotome, an
androcrat. Pedicating is not my line.
Je marche à la voile et à
la vapeur
.” He pulled shut the window and meditatively drew a
finger down the mullion-panes of armorial glass. “I am indifferent
to both sexes, for to love man is possibly to love women by
sentimental transfer. The essential trouble with sex, you see, is
that it brings one close to people. And I personally find people
irritating.”

  Dr. Crucifer sprinkled in some more fishfood.

  “The asexual male, of course, is the original sex.
Adam and Eve had first been created sexless, according to Gregory
of Nyssa, and the phrase ‘male and female created He them,’ I
believe, referred to a subsequent act necessitated by Eve’s
disobedience,” explained Crucifer, his eyes narrowing into pouches
of flesh and making him look like an elderly cretin. “Had not that
taken place the human race might have been propagated, I don’t
doubt, by some harmless mode of vegetation—and far more happily.
Sex? I am not empressed. After a meal, tell me, who remembers the
spoon?” He raised his little arms questioningly. “But here, how do
you find Harvard?”

  “I must be careful with my answer,” said
Darconville, “mustn’t I? After all, it was you who brought me
here.”

  “ ‘O world, world, world!’ “ mocked Crucifer,
holding his hand across his face—a gesture without which he never
laughed—” ‘thus is the poor agent despised!’ “

  “You’re mad,” said Darconville.

  “That’s a bit hearty, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”

  “I can save you.”

  “From what?”

  “From a wasted life, from misery, from error. Try
those.” He moved closer. “The subjugation of the Amazons was one of
the labors of Hercules. Why it should have become one of yours I
can’t pretend to fathom,” said Crucifer. “I heard you were living
down South, teaching a school of ribbon-wearing slawbunks their
grammar—the local mechanical college of Laputa, I gather.”

  “And at Harvard, what had you in mind for me?”

  Dr. Crucifer slapped his moist palms together. “In
all the books of etiquette I have read,” he said, “it is explained
that the tactful host does not map out the day too precisely for
his guest in advance. Please, there will be time for everything,
insh’allah bukra mumkin
.” He paused. “I must tell you
right off, however, I have one weakness: I am a kalokaitaphe—I
admire the upper ten, the bonton, the real elite, see? You are
royalty. I wish only to serve you.”

  “Not if I know it.”

  There was no motion in the strange creature’s face:
neither hurt, nor surprise. “My heart is as cold as the northside
of a gravestone,” continued Crucifer, running a finger horizontally
along a row of books, and he selected one. “But for you—?”

  Bowing, he handed it to Darconville, who turned past
the bookplate (a dike-faced Aphrodite thumbing a snub-nose at a
crouched aspirant to her favors) and read on the frisket-printed
title page of the sixteenth-century folio in sixes the name in
black letter he knew: Pierre Christophe Cardinal
Théroux-d’Arconville.

  “You honor me in bearing the name you see there. It
wasn’t his Church won me. I am part of his point of view, that’s
all. But here, the eggs are teaching the hen! Have you no ancestral
memory? I would have him you and seeing you revise a world that
killed what once I might have been.”

  “And that was?”

  He looked meaningfully at Darconville for a few
seconds.

  “A saint.”

  It was as if that had been the most obvious answer
in the world. Again, petulantly, he yanked the bell-pull and looked
toward the door. And then, insinuating himself into a chair, Dr.
Crucifer lolled back like an Eastern pasha, and as his low
slouching stomach ran into his lap out slorbed three balconies of
flesh over which, as he closed his eyes, he porrected his fingers
and, so satisfied, began.

  “The village of Girga lies at a bend on the Nile. I
was born there one tedious and diaphoretic afternoon too long
ago—the inauspicious child
d’un autre lit
—and directly
given over by my father, a famous actor at the Khedivial Opera
House who wouldn’t publicly acknowledge me, to his brother for an
undisclosed sum of money. I never saw him again. My mother was
buried alive: the local penalty for adultery. Good day, goodbye. So
much for gaps in pedigree,” said Dr. Crucifer, his eyes remaining
shut. He was talking. He was listening. “Understand, right away, we
were not Mohammedans but Christians. I am a Nasrani, of Lower
Egyptian Copts, the most civilized people on earth—with the
exceptions just named—and the direct descendants of the ancient
Egyptians. The rancor which we have so long cherished has generally
embittered our character while the persecutions of the Mohammedan
and the Byzantine Supremacy have taught us to be at one time
cringing and at another arrogant and overbearing.

  “We’re both acid and alkaline.” He humped his back
to smirk behind his hand. “I can fart rainbows—but would just as
happily give a scalding-hot penny to an organ grinder’s monkey or
stub out my black cigar on the forehead of a street urchin. I can
both howl out a rat’s hole or cower like a priest.” He tried to
smile. “The power’s in my tits.”

  Then his eyes went cold.

  “My vicious uncle, a Copt whose hereditary aptitude
for mathematics manifested itself in his personally counting out my
barley, had a wife—dear aunt, dear stepmother—whose cruelty could
take the polish out of a mirror. It was an acquaintanceship at best
that had nothing but the sterility of mutually exclusive interests.
I remember them for very little, her for the vanity of ever having
to punctuate her face with rouge, him for beating her for it and
forever screeching, ‘
Sitt al-sawad! Sitt al-sawad
!’ And so
into this marriage, wherein they perhaps still founder as I speak
this sentence, was I dragged—a mere child. Mere,” he breathed.
“What else is a child? In any case, heaven, as they put it, having
denied them offspring of their own, they fell against me with an
unnatural virulence. I remember the Caramanian
fallâh
habitually brought in to bathe me often looking at my genitals and
muttering, ‘How ugly, how ugly!’ “ He shook his head. “Darconville,
we are ruled by hags from birth: nurses, mothers, teachers.
‘Behave, you little phalloggle, or you’ll get no love from me!’
‘Buy me a hoop, runt, to put in my ears, and I’ll promise you
anything!’ Our almae matres, my friend? A figment. Life comes at us
in her creaking shoes, with a cruel birch hidden in the folds of
her skirt.” Darconville looked at Crucifer’s hands. They were
knotted.