Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

As Darconville did not reply, Crucifer pulled himself forward, awkwardly, by his toes and reaching out to touch him in a friendly way whispered, “ La ilaha illa anta subhanaka inni kuntu mizzalimin !”— but his visitor pulled away in horror at the familiarity.

“On the other hand,” continued Crucifer, refusing the insult, unsurprised, his ambition for momentary equality testing affection in a gesture that would be, he knew, either endured by clemency or condescension or, more probably, repelled by custom, breeding, and restraint, “there are pluses — more visible,” he laughed, “than what isn’t, may I add?” It was the humor of the embarrassed man. “We are seldom bald. We sing with voices sweeter than the music of Pachelbel. We look adorable in pants. And then castration, by extending the period of adolescence, prolongs the springtime of beauty. We are skilled to perfection in the art of flattery, I admit it. Languages, for us, are cake. I have not only Arabic but the Berber group, Kabyle, Shilha, Zenaga, Tamashek, plus Amharic, Ethiopian, Cushitic, including Agao, Beja, Bilin — are you impressed? — and inscriptive Numidian, he said humbly. Harvard values this sort of thing, you see? Chat, chat, mumble, mumble. Please,” said Crucifer, looking up suddenly, “you mustn’t think ill of me.” He waited. “Darconville?”

But Darconville said nothing. And so there was nothing to do but keep on talking.

“The eunuch, as well, is marvelously cut out for employment; for the cash register, as for the harem, he is the perfect guardian — in all embezzlements, Darconville, and in all irregularities of accounts, a woman will have influenced a man — but we are also masters at organizing squeezes and douceurs as perquisites for what we do. We are geniuses in the science of observation, accumulators of gossip, and authorities on the art of poisoning. I am, like all of us, a gourmand.” He jostled his belly with both hands. “It’s a fat bird who bastes itself, isn’t it? I love white truffles, shellfish, and pedroximenes wines. Finally, we don’t futter anything, the source, I needn’t have to tell you, of more buboes and bacteria than bad butter. In any case, my dear, I do not conduct sultanas to their baths. But then you didn’t think I did, did you?”

Dr. Crucifer grinned horribly and pointed toward the void between his hamlike thighs. “When you do this, it is not only men who become eunuchs”—a clucking laughter, interrupting him, sounded as though his trachea were rapidly opening and shutting—”but women also!” His thin shoulders collapsed. “Revolting, isn’t it? When the terrible mutilations of one sex are necessary to keep the other pure?”

“The exigencies, of course,” said Darconville, “of your Christianity.”

The big protruding joints, the long bones, stirred, and Crucifer, in two efforts, rose out of his incomprehensible belly like a drommeler, his face a wax mask framed to a somber shape. He twisted close his robe and began to advance on tiptoe with outstretched neck and listening ears.

“Priestianity, you say?” He touched a finger to his nose, meditatively. “But of course!” his voice glubbed. “I see I’ve omitted the best part of my story, digressing as a man with a grievance always does. Shall I pronounce about it?

“My life in Girga continued without occurrence. I loved God. I worked, read, and maintained a singular fidelity, as I said, to the promises I’d made to Fâdi, seeking but to patrizate myself in his holy shadow.” His lips parted, inhaled. “Then in the eighth year of my devotion and donkeyboyhood — my twentieth in life — I suffered the reversal of faith, which, to be brief, after the completion of my education at Cairo and Oxford, haphazardly enjoined me to the secular profession you know me by today: Eunuch-in-Residence, Collegium Harvardiensis , at the sign of the motto, ‘Va-Ni-Tas.’

“But that’s as it is, isn’t it? You want to know what happened to me, of course, back in Girga, and because I want to save you from the same disappointment, I will tell you.” The eyes of most persons converged when they looked at you, but Dr. Crucifer’s, by some habit he had acquired for effect, remained parallel. It gave the impression that he was looking straight through you to a wall beyond. “As I said, I wanted nothing from life but to strive for distinguished inconspicuousness and to live to the letter the lessons of saintly Fâdi. O, but Nature knows terrible and dire ways, doesn’t it? I won’t elaborate. It was, I remember, Holy Week in Lent — Crucover, when Christ was pacified — and I one afternoon on an inconsequential visit happened by Fâdi’s closure”—he took a few steps toward Darconville and paused dramatically—”and in that ultra-violet doorway before I died saw the vidame of all my soul — a civet-cat bent on a stealthy errand of flesh — scumming around on the floor on top of a naked woman !” Crucifer’s fingers knotted angrily. He was staring blankly before him into a distant point. “It was as if the Archangel Gabriel had suddenly visited earth and married a ravening cuckquean. I withdrew, weeping, by a tree, when later the two of them appeared in the darkness — for night is the paradise of cowards — and crept away hand in hand, hers in his, and his the left which even in Egypt couldn’t have been used for a less honorable function.” He leaned over his chair, almost gagging. “My dégringolade from grace can be charted from that day. No human being has ever lived up to the ideal my imagination created out of what I wasn’t for what they should be.” Crucifer’s eyes, as he looked up, were savage. “I hate them all.”

There had never been such silence in that room, with Darconville now bewildered to the soul as to whether that remark were proof of a defect in his understanding or the depravity in his heart. Crucifer twirled in the fishbowl with his finger.

“What’s there to add? Faitery throttled faith. I had seen in an instant of cerebral death what I’d sought from birth and as that magic-muttering, instinct-bound piece of pawkery called Christianity vanished I knew I had learned Fâdi’s lesson with a vengeance: I had reached the no-number, the root of the monad, a light-robe. I was naughted ! There is a limit of ignominy in the consciousness of one’s own nothingness and impotence beyond which a certain kind of man can go,” said Crucifer, the roundels of colored light from the stained glass playing on his face as he crossed by the window, “and beyond which he begins to feel immense satisfaction in his very degradation. I arrived there! I saw Christianity for what it was, a religion expressing its piety in bows, fawnings, and prostrations of servility that went no deeper than themselves! I saw through God!” Darconville went mute, his tongue clave to his throat. “Mysticism, you see, and hoaxes go well together. I can’t tell you how frightful a longing I have to revile God aloud,” whispered Crucifer, “ always .”

“ ‘Woe unto him,’ “ said Darconville, his mouth smacking from dry-ness and gone completely hoarse, “ ‘that striveth with his Maker.’ “

“I hear you call a Maker what I take to be a Personified Inconceivability,” cried Crucifer, his voice like the sound of wind through a patch of dead cat-o’-nine-heads. “God, Zeus, Iddio, Bog, Dieu, Jubmal, Utixo, Bott, Bung, Zung, Gudib, Zenc, Jee, or the Great Kazoo, call him whatever you will — everything suggestive of metaphysical unity disgusts me. Mine is a world essentially manifold! In every man there is a vacuum in the shape of God, but where is he? What is he? That which is not sense! Exactly. Non-sensical. Literally, nonsense! I just adore the clemency he exacts that wears so flatly commercial an aspect, don’t you? The fruit of actual purchase? The literal and cogent quid pro quo duly in hand paid? I tell you, all Christian victuals stink of fish, and his glory depends upon the antagonism of his creature’s shame, degrading all of us whom he owns absolutely — we who re-create him of whom we are creatures — with every one of us, Mnogouvazheamyi Darconville, bound to him by every last goddamned tenure on earth but spontaneous affection! I tell you, the best proof for the tragedy of existence is the proof that is derived from the contemplation of what is said to be its glories ! You will see!” The odd lines by Crucifer’s cheeks drew out like isobars. “God being all things is contrary unto nothing out of which were made all things, and so nothing became something and omneity informed nullity into an existence: now I call that a nice trick, don’t you? And then was he even acquainted with himself? All he could utter was ‘I Am Who Am’—a tautology, excuse me, I take to be the essence of deceit.”