Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

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.

“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.”