Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“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.

“This family, in any event, showed little interest in my doings, exceptis excipiendis —for it wasn’t long before I started to wet the bed. What a disgusting crime, don’t you agree? Oh, evil! It was a case of eternal recurrence: I was the more incontinent the more they screamed which caused it in the first place. I couldn’t stop. Volition? It had nothing to do with it. I soon saw it was impossible to avoid committing a sin — that, in fact, sin happened to you without your wanting to commit it, without knowing you committed it, and whether you were contrite in committing it or not had small bearing on the fact. I thought I could forget about it. But I was wrong. I had reckoned without any idea of the commercialization of Lethe water. I had reckoned without acknowledging the array of goats which, in every letter and article and speech, butted into my life during that terrible period of sheepish ignorance. That was not all. I felt it was my fault I had lost my parents and could not choose but weep to have back that which, still hoping for, I always feared again to lose,” he said with trembling voice, “but they never came back, they never came back, they never came back, they never came back to me.” He looked across at Darconville, his face sick with memory. “I came to see I was guilty of not resisting illegitimacies, guilty of possessing a will bereft of the usual resources by which it can justify itself, guilty of not having done anything wrong. I was guilty of innocence.

“Briefly, I loved, wasn’t loved in return, and so was shunted off again — this time to be raised in a burnt-brick convent outside the village under the Arabian mountains. It was a Roman Catholic holding, the oldest but one in Egypt, for let it be parenthesized here that we had been converted in those parts by Franciscan missionaries at the end of the seventeenth century.

“It was the custom of the monks, now, to take in wayward boys— yes, there were others, most born o.w. and unwanted, some insane, all with the grave disposition of the pharaohs. There were specimens of every kind of child, fellahin, captive Dervishes, Dinkas and Shilluks, Cushites, Abbasides, Bisharin, Ruwenzori dwarves, nilotics and niggers of a thousand tints. I wanted to be the flower of the playground, O Darconville, the glory of the palaestra! What didn’t I dream, love, hope for! I took readily to certain subjects and acquired a precocious proficiency in languages, ponying for others and able to do Greek Unseen better than the form-master himself. I could have done my Collections, Determining in Lent, and proceeded to the Great Go at Oxford at fourteen years old, there’s my hand on it, there is my hand. But the extreme of joy is the beginning of sorrow, isn’t it? And Arcadia”—he looked away—”is brief.” He closed his eyes for a minute. “Brief.

“My chief delight as a boy, however, was to go down to the west bank to watch the tourist-steamers pull in or to run around in the ancient rock-tombs which once belonged to the high-priest of This.” A smile disinterred from the stern grave of Crucifer’s face. “Not That.” He took his hand down from his mouth. “Even then I was struck by the fact that Egyptian art hardly ever essayed to represent a woman, save with her legs pressed together as in a sheath. I particularly remember one time running back from a day rummaging over the walls of those tombs, meeting a monk, and asking him right then and there about the mysteries of generation— sex . He sat down and answered my question; it seemed to pique his interest. His reply, I shall never forget, involved the most revolting and disgusting tale I’d ever heard.” Crucifer looked up, his eyes like caves.

“What,” asked Darconville, almost surprised at the croaking sound of his own voice, “what did he tell you?”

“The truth.”

Dr. Crucifer hissed. It was his way of smiling. It was his way of saying yes. It was his way of saying see ?

“I wasn’t a featous boy. I was a fat boy. Disciples not elephantine can’t know the pain of it. They used to call me ‘Bum Cheeks’ in school, spill my bowls of milk, whip me across the legs with their nâbuts . They made up rude songs about me and pilfered from my tuck-box. They would thieve my rusks. They drew saucy pictures of me and chevied me out of my battels and conduct money and ridiculed me about my size and left me behind when they went tubbing or playing at bats, taws, or ducking-stones. They threw balls of camel dung at me in games of kherubgeh. To take me seriously became for others a form of insanity. The genius at school — not a gasconade, Darconville, I was — is usually a disappointing and often ignored figure, for as a rule one must be commonplace to be a successful boy. In that preposterous world, however, to be remarkable was not to be overlooked. The barber, as they say, learns to shave on the orphan’s face. And although I cried out to them the pitiful error they were making, I saw with horror I’d become the visual quotation of the bad dreams I feared and so felt I was being treated as the vile scoundrel whom I represented deserved to be!