Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“I should tell you,” explained Crucifer, his babylike mouth puckering and making little glub-glubs, “there is a doctor’s order involved. Your lungs, I’m told, aren’t as they should be. And it’s left for me to see that you eat and rest. Trust me, now, won’t you?” Darconville waved aside the drink. “There is a bottle of tablets next to your bed: benperidol. It will relax you,” he smiled, “—to say nothing of completely eliminating sexual desire. Take two.” He waited. “No? Then keep them handy. You’ve been hurt, Al Amin. You went down there to the outreaches, like Alexander the Great, to find yourself surrounded by enemies on all sides: the licentious members of the Confederacy of Corinth; the tributary splacknucks of the province of Thrace; the inveterately hostile Illyrians with their steeple-hats and peaked shoes and dental preterites — and what happened to you? Futuata !” Dr. Crucifer removed the counterpane from the chair and in one belswaggering move sat down, awkwardly. It looked as though he could have taken up the slag of his belly and wiped his eyes with it. “Like a wood tick,” he smirked, covering his mouth, “I grow big when I sit down. Now, tell me everything. The true riddle, remember, always asks a question that can be answered. I’m yours to the rattle, my child. Give me your hand.”

“That,” answered Darconville in an exhausted voice, “is a favor, I’m afraid, you must grieve to be denied.”

“What are you think ing?” giggled Crucifer coyly, lilting the phrase musically and wagging a finger. “I wish but to console you. I am chaste, you forget. I have no feelings below the waist, although to that,” he added, crudely grabbing his empty crotch, “I cannot testify. Gone are my ding-dongs,” he said, laughing until his ears grew quite red, “my pair of dear indentures, king of clubs, dainty duckers, rose-nobles, myrmidons. I experience the Hang zum Tiefen in mind alone. I am as hollow as a chicken’s vent. My temptations exist only in dreams.”

“The reality is otherwise for me. Leave me alone.”

Then Crucifer’s face dropped as if the smile had been struck from his mouth by some invisible hand. His diminutive fingers twisted, whitening the dimpled knuckles. “Reality is never otherwise!” he screamed. “And the attempt to realize one’s ideal in a woman — the expression is as unfortunate as the undertaking — instead of the woman herself, is a necessary destruction of the empirical personality of the thing. Love is murder,” he said, blinking furiously. “As for the higher platonic love of man, women do not want it; it flatters them and pleases them, but it has no significance for them, and if your sweet little homage on bended knee to some doxy o’er the dale lasts too long, as it apparently has, Beatrice will transmogrify into a Medusa, as she apparently did.” He smiled cruelly, his ordinary discourse as grave and sententious as ever abounding with those aphorisms and apologues so popular among the Arabs. “One signature, as they say in the book trade, is sprung. Call yourself a departee. You have been deserted.”

Darconville peered sorrowfully over the coverlet.

“She is gone.”

Crucifer passed him the glass again, and this time Darconville drank, greedily. He held it out for a refill, drank that, and then in a monotone characterized more by lassitude than sorrow or distress — his lips dry, his head back on the pillow — he took the whole confused story, almost as if he were trying to clarify it for himself, from the previous summer down to the present. But when he had finished, he wondered why he’d even bothered to tell it, for the abdominous creature beside him only fleered and nodded, dumbly and arrogantly, and it seemed more a blasphemy of the sacrament of confession than a shared confidence. Crucifer sat meditatively, blind as his fish, being urged on, or so Darconville now feared, to the lunacy of one of his enantiopathic remedies and the consideration, as a response, of perhaps trying to obtain an effect opposite to the symptoms of the disease. And yet a disease it was. Darconville was dying for love.

“I see it all now,” muttered Dr. Crucifer. “The frame gives the picture perspective. She had a divided uterus, like a seal, ready to carry a pup in one horn one year and in the other the following year.” He leaned back. “It was too late, of course, to grab her by the hypogaster and clap on a chastity belt. The Unfaithful Foul! She may not be the best girl in the world, but at least she’s the worst, mmm?”

Crucifer went to the étagère by the window and took a cigarette from a box.

“She did not believe her own belief, from what you tell me, had doubts even as to her own doubts. She was never absorbed by her own joy or engrossed by her own silly sorrow. Casual, she pretended to be intimate, like all the smouch-faced Hebrews and Ibrim and Terachites from o’er the Euphrates with whom in guile she bears more than a passing resemblance.” He lighted his cigarette, spat out a ball of smoke, and shook his fist at the ceiling. “ Le-Al-tahrir filistin ! With that selective memory, I think she was half-Jew! You know, forget the Palestinian diaspora, but remember the Holocaust, right? O Christ yes, Darconville, women in mischief are wiser than men. She never took herself in earnest and so never took anyone else in earnest — was neither enthusiastic nor indifferent, neither ecstatic nor cold, reached neither the heights nor the depths. Her restraint became meagerness, her copiousness bombast, don’t tell me, I know, and I trust when trying to reach into the boundless realms of inspired thought — for her enjoyed no sooner, like sex, than despised straight — she seldom reached beyond pathos, right? No, she couldn’t embrace the whole world but was forever covetous of it, correct? Believing in nothing, however, she took refuge in materialism, an avarice put on to convince herself, leaving you to die, that something had permanent value, and what value, what wonderful wonderful value! The Southpaw! And yet how many tales the while to please you had she coined, dreading your love, the loss whereof still fearing? But when she chose another — assured, of course, that whom she chose chose her — chose as well to rob you of your choice!” He drew on his cigarette. “‘I, Helen, holding Paris by the lips,’ “ he purled smoke at Darconville, “ ‘smote Hector through the head!’ And you won’t call it hateful? Why, not all the subur-bicarian churches of Latium, Campania, Apulia, and Bruttium could send enough prayer through the sky to forgive the most harmless act of this smiling psychocorrupter whom you call a woman but I call cat whore! Do you hear me? Cat whore!”

Darconville closed his eyes in anguish.

“I can see her now. Can’t you see her?” he asked as if trying to show the speakable by clearly displaying the unspeakable. “Walking with stretched-forth neck, and wanton eyes, and mincing as she goes to Maître Gilbert Grippeminaud, making a tinkling with her feet, anticipating his every move, and then coming out with a little moue— the hypocrite! the glozer! — ’O, I am mithunderthtood!’ And while you are spending a month up here suffering the tortures of the damned for her, what is she doing?” Dr. Crucifer, grinding out his cigarette, smiled angrily at his friend — then bounced at him and in a lewd geste à l’appui drove Ms thumb into the well of his fist. “Hardly the work of a lady, my friend, but I suppose one should always applaud initiative.” He turned to the tapestry. “No, Darconville, I take it to be axiomatic, a matter of breviary, that Eve, being a mere woman, was less like Adam than a serpent with a woman’s face was like Eve.”

Crucifer sat down again.