Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

Darconville gasped.

“There, there,” responded Dr. Crucifer, wagging a chubby finger at his guest. “We are pussycats. We are little slubs. We are only people whose sense of fun has fed on queer food — and not a one of us who isn’t supple as a pair of Italian shoes and harmless as the wing of a chicken in the pip. We’re round and open as wells. I can push my thumb into myself. You really mustn’t wince, my friend.”

Struggling up out of his chair, Dr. Crucifer went to the desk for a cigarette, walking, without free and vigorous use of those long malign limbs, as if he were being carried along by a balloon. Darconville waved away the proffered box of them, and Crucifer again sat down.

“Angels are all alike,” he said, leering horribly, “but devils are various, huh? Nevertheless, to place the eunuch in a category of real perverts is to share the ignorance of ancient times.” He sucked on the cigarette. “Because I ‘left the family’—as the Chinese euphemistically describe my condition — doesn’t mean therefore I’m some kind of incomprehensible bonze and consequently emotionless. In how many far more terrible ways has figurative eunuchry in the sexes ruined the world! Faugh! The Kastrationskomplex has fathered forth more pain than all the spiders in Christendom, has peopled the very fucking university in which you now sit, has—!” He swallowed smoke in the apoplexy of wrath and fought, with swimming arms, for breath. “And romantic love ?” He spat. “It has been responsible for more human misery than any other notion on the face of this pocked earth. Anything lower, more obscene, or feculent the manifold heavings of history have not cast up! And that is why in one blow”—he snapped his fingers in a fillip between his legs—”I have murdered my own posterity!

“I have dared the supreme ordeal!” he cried, grinning through teeth that looked like a crossword-puzzle. “I despise purposivism! I have sneaked out of an exit Mother Nature hadn’t quite planned on! I vail my hat to the Third Sex — Essenes, Valesians, Skoptsy, Rappites, Gynaecomasts, Tribades, Semivirs, Thlibs, Clisti, the Priests of Attis, and any other participles you wish to name neither split nor dangling!”

The creature seemed too fantastic to believe for Darconville seriously to acknowledge, a puzzle-headed caricature of spite with a large share of scholarship but with little geometry or logic in his head and yet a figure of method and merciless egotism, possessing a sinister genius.

“Proudly, I wear the imperial seal: ‘the mounting of the spotted horse.’ Tell me, have you ever looked closely at the pontil mark on the bottom of a hand-blown bottle? There! That’s the badge of my lost, my crushed cremasters! I am a gold pencil, tipped with lead. And, O, but haven’t we been colorful as eringoes? Tricky as thixotrops? Saturn was gelded, Origen became a human abstraction to save his soul, and Xerxes, King of Persia, would never act without the advice of his chief eunuch, Hermotinus. The proud tribe of eunuchs almost single-handedly brought down the Ming emperors of China — my God, I think of the magnificent Li Lien-ying in his dragon robes standing on the foredeck of his barge and addressing under a flying black flag twelve full cohorts of neuters! Farinelli, the famous castrate of the eighteenth century who frequently aroused such enthsuiastic admiration that of him it was often exclaimed ‘One God and one Farinelli!’ sang four songs to the Spanish King Philip V every night and was given his portrait set in diamonds by Louis XV of France. And Heliogabalus himself so loved his eunuch, Jeroles, that he nightly bowed and kissed his groin, swearing that he was celebrating the sacred festival of Flora.” He pulled on the cigarette one last time and ground it out. “On the accession of Pope Leo XIII, in 1878, the practice of castrating small boys for church choirs, alas, came to an end. More’s the pity, I suppose. We can still be found, however. We’re international in a kind of silly secret way and will occasionally sprout up — look closely — in every place from Harvard to Chihli to Ho-chienfu. But the fact is to most of the world we are now obsolete as buggies.

“We’ve multiplied in palaces, ruthlessly acquired the knowledge of secret councils, and instigated the direst court intrigues, often by having been privy to the foulest secrets of women, which is of course a matter not unrelated to our traditional profession. We are, you understand, authorized in the New Testament — in fact, Pope Siricius (385–398 A.D.) actually advocated self-mutilation. Are you scandalized? And gay old Galen in his book, Of Sperm , roundly avers that to possess no heart would be a lesser evil than to be destitute of genitories. I’ve managed both, you say?” asked Crucifer, his arms bent the wrong way, almost tortue, as he leaned forward with a malicious wink. “Too true. No gimlet to drill, no beatlet to beat.” His eyes were now glittering like a basilisk’s. “I’ve always considered it the Devil’s greatest feat to have succeeded in getting himself denied.

“Now, I am asexuated. I can neither enter the Crooked Gate of the female nor”—he cacked—”can I Make Fire Behind the Mountain. But, you see, there are those of us — some with kit and no kaboodle, others with kaboodle and no kit — who can practice the manifold plaisirs de la petite oie (masturbation, irrumation, feuille-de-rose, etc.). Me, I keep a traditional discretion about that which may best be left unsaid. I am docked utterly. I suffered the cut. I am pegless, shaven and shorn — entirely rasé . I answer the call of nature with a silver quill I keep in my pocket. But I once knew of a woman who lived near the Crocodile Grotto at Ma’abdeh who had a eunuch for a husband; he’d dry-bob her and at the point of orgasm — this would be a secondary discharge from the urethra — the great bitch’d wisely hold up a little pillow for her husband to bite lest he tear apart her cheeks and breasts with his teeth! When I was a university student in Cairo? A slovenly berber girl in an imperfectly lighted hall once grabbed my yardless body and leaping back in disbelief screamed, ‘ Ma fîsh! Ma fish !’ She was looking for a clinch. But what did she find?” Crucifer, his voice whistling in laughter, put his hand along his mouth. “Pudding!” He leaned forward. “But then why not? I was snapt. I had out-Potiphar’d Potiphar. I am as smooth as the front of your knee. I am a hollow stoutness, a human abstraction, a contralto. I am empty as Vanity Fair.”

Crucifer suddenly stormed up and, fumbling for the bell-pull by the curtain, jerked it several times. He shook his head in disgust.

“There are minuses,” he continued, sitting down again. “Don’t misunderstand me, it’s not all fun. We are easily susceptible to infection. We for no reason break into hot flushes and sweats and often, though we don’t fly, suffer airplane earache for weeks on end, although under this head I can tell you our bodies are at the same time unfailing barometers, thermometers, manometers, and hygrometers. We prematurely wrinkle, the origin of what years ago became our vulgar nickname, ‘ Lao koun ’—impotent old roosters. We have the pale complexion of pederasts, so obviously the sun can’t be good for us. Eunuchs, like children, often can’t pronounce the letter R. It is often required of certain of us to insert india-rubber sardes or zinc or lead nails to prevent us from leaking. We are fanatical gamblers. We are inclined to have oedematous feet, and we despise Jews to such a degree that it actually affects our health. An intolerable Jew is, for us, intolerable twice. My penishole aches in the damp and the rain. My anus is lost in my weight. Unfortunately, it has fallen to our lot to have had repeatedly to see women at their least readiness — it sickens me to fix on an image — and this doubtless explains the eunuch’s longstanding reputation for having a capricious and nasty temperament. We can be peevish as barn-cats. But the malevolence? Ah, malevolence keeps one alive. It’s a preservative, like alcohol!” Crucifer saw the look of pity, bewilderment, and great sadness on his guest’s face. He leaned forward to intercept that glance and said wistfully, “Here, but is it not the vice of distinctiveness to become queer?”