Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“—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?”

“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.”