Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

He soon began to go to the sheds. It was a condition of one anorec-tic day after another, exacerbated by furious smoking — and then drinking. He was now afraid to call Isabel, fearing in an irrational way the grief of fact more than the nothing of fantasy, wishing as he fell to remembering recollected visions of her face — laughing, sad, consenting, surprised, indifferent, affectionate, etc. — for a suspension of that mindless oblivion, if at all, then quickly, the waiting somehow for the worst news of all, the news that does not kill hope because there is none to kill, but merely ends suspense. It was a terrifying freedom, where to be free was to be alone, to be alone to be imprisoned and so to be imprisoned not to be free. The smirking folds in the curtains, the bedsheets, a coat thrown over a chair seemed at moments to leer at him. He sometimes thought he heard whispers, that someone was standing beside him in the darkness there. He would confuse one event with another, beginning to think of one thing as a consequence of something else which had in fact occurred only in his imagination, often the product of nightmares that were followed by an overwhelming apathy which formed, so to speak, the reverse side of his previous terror, all leaving him in utter bewilderment with neither spirit to spend nor resolution to spare. He began to suffer severe attacks of diarrhea for days on end and to experience the illusion of water everywhere — on his bed, on his arms, on the floor. One night he unexpectedly caught his reflection in the bathroom mirror — frightening himself — a matter that gave way to supernatural fears and speculations, the worst of which was that he began to think by performing various acts in combination, no matter how banal, he might, by inadvertence, summon up the Devil. He lost all track of time. Once, when the secretary of the English department telephoned to ask if he knew he had a class waiting for him he hung up on her. He only prayed for day to end, for night to fall, drinking heavily now to stem the tortures of insomnia which he actually began to believe someone was doing to him, and dawn never broke that he didn’t awake— lassatus sed non satiatus —with a weltering grief at the very first start of consciousness. He was in Cambridge no more. He was in the depths of Malebolge, where the pains are not felt if you’re half-dead unless you’re also half-alive.

The agony came to him in tenfold terror one night when, after downing half a bottle of liquor and howling a repetition of wild, importunate cries to heaven-prayers only in the broadest sense, for they grew increasingly more isolated from anything touching on need or belief — he fell upon the bed into a haphazard heap like a dust-devil. It was then that he had the nightmare: he was alone and threading through the weeds of an old graveyard, past half-veiled urns, when he saw an angelic stone figure with flowing hair averting her eyes with a regretful hand and gesturing in pain as she stooped for eternity to lay a stone-wreath on a barely traceable tumulus, woven over with wild witch-grass, in front of which a lichen-covered cross leaned desolately off-true; a crone, her face like an old tin peck-measure, with smears of dough left sticking to its sides, inexplicably appeared nearby and pointing to the angel cackled, “ Is it me? Or is it I ?” He shrank from her and approached the stone figure slowly on dread feet and suddenly froze in fright, for upon closer inspection he saw the angel’s face fixed in a hateful smile, its cruelty sharpened by a livid scar down the cheek just below the eye! And then, underneath a hathi-grey sculpture of himself , he read the legend on the tomb—

Darconville

Le Rival Donc

[[SKULL AND CROSSBONES]]

And then he was sitting up, breathless, his eyes loops of fright. The bedpost assumed the face of a Dutch sooterkin!

Welcome, Sir Diomed!

And, leaping at it, Darconville would have effected the brutal elimination of Gilbert van der Slang right on the spot had not the spectre within his throttling grasp dwindled back just as suddenly into a bedpost. The rage he felt! He had thought he’d heard enough of this shadowy creature in the ostensive reduction Isabel favored him with back in Fawx’s Mt., an ill-concealed pretext lisped as if she were wooing a cat and yet revealing what? — a little baggy-trousered midship-mite with his thumb plugged into his nether land and a mouth shaped like Flanders, the land that traded in many tongues! It was impossible to ignore this creature, as he had his brother, and Darconville now absolutely thirsted for information about him. But the regrets! During all those years when it would have been of capital importance to pay attention, everything conspired to the opposite, with both of them, lover and cuckolder, flying flags of convenience until it was too late. To know him, nevertheless, would surely be to know her! It wasn’t enough that what had happened was true; it had to be explained! And yet only to hear a banal commentary on this thing which was incomprehensible — what was to be learned by that? What would he be told, falsehoods told against one suitor only to be reversed for another, that both might come to believe with a strength proportionate to the inaccuracy or even the unlikeliness of the information what Isabel provided? Come, tell a pin! And then what would he learn? Deceptions pried out of a score of shattering discoveries only to create, in the unchecked bluntness of a nimble investigation, a sudden new value for them they never had and so bring the two closer together in the fierce protection of it? No, strike not a stroke, he thought, for dexterity will obey appetite when the time is right. Govert! Gilbert! The princes orgulous! Newts and blindworms! Jackanapes with scarves! What didn’t they deserve? Thank pity, thought he, if you would keep your ears!

Darconville’s mind, however, now became his eye. He felt as love seemed to die, hate seemed to come alive, as if the very emotions fed on each other for proof, but still determined to it he refused to accept what had taken place and strove, almost superstitiously, to dedicate himself to an ideal of patient clearheadedness lest the demands of fanaticism, coming headlong and malicious, kill the sweetness he saw he needed for Isabel to come back to him. He prayed his pathetic prayers, staying up late and engaging in rigorous nights of exomologesis and palm-thumpings, and then one night found that waiting was no longer enough. It was finished. Had he not tarried? Aye, the grinding, but one must tarry the bolting. Had he not tarried? Aye, the bolting, but one must tarry the leavening. Had he not tarried? Aye, aye, the kneading, the making, the heating, the baking, and the cooling, aye, the cooling, for one may chance to burn one’s lips, but tarry he could no more. Shivering, he felt a sensation of physical cold coming upon him, the kind strangely associated with, and coincident to, either sadness or amorous expectation, and so he picked up the telephone. The time had come.

He dialed: closing his eyes, he clasped the receiver with both hands. When suddenly he heard Isabel’s voice he literally couldn’t speak — the long days gone by, the pointless suffering, the awful love for this girl misassembled in thought’s astonishment all he wanted to say. He could only see her gentle eyes, her mouth, her sun-shot hair. She asked who it was; he whispered her name. The silence that followed reached to forbidding degrees, an incalculable suspension like that moment of unknown consequence that comes when time, by a stare, seems to drop away in the intensity of trance. What, she asked with an overtaxed edge in her voice, what was it he wanted? — a question that became the sudden rectification fact imposes on memory, transforming his desire now into the terrible obsession he expressed and then forcing the answer she used, in a kind of grace, to slay with speed: “ It’s too late— you’d better face it now! You’re mad as a hatter !” And she banged down the phone.