Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

Vainly, Crucifer waited for Darconville to say something.

“Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame,” he whispered, coming forward in a hunch and depressing himself into a third of his normal displacement. “I must say this, and I wish I might underline it. A nullity and an entity, with like eliminands, yield an entity in which the nullity-retinend changes its sign. Shall I put it flatly? Clip the bitch, Darconville! Send her to hell with the lie in her teeth! Lap her in lead!”

“Never.”

“Never say that,” said Crucifer, his hands coquettishly demential, held high and apart. He pleaded, “You are complete. You don’t need her. You do not need her!” He turned his head sideways to listen. “All right?” Appeased, he tapped the bed three times and rose smiling to himself.

“I do,” Darconville then said softly. “I do need her.”

Dr. Crucifer wheeled around, his face spinach-blue and reptilian, and huffing as if in his rage he would blow a monstrous bubble out of his mouth like the soul which the old artists painted flying from the mouths of the dying he screamed at the top of his lungs, “ You liar! You liar !”

RISING to his full height, Dr. Crucifer split the air with a kind of anonymous shriek and jerked his head with a nervous tic as if he were trying to pull it off his shoulders, and then gasping backed away almost comically on those little pherecratian feet to shake out of his pocket a tiny bottle from which he took a pill. He stumbled agitatedly to the semisecurity of a dark corner where, composing himself, he raised his robed arms like angular fulvous wings and spoke:

Exordium

“The time is come, Darconville, to the confusion I hope of the propagators of this slanderous imputation, that women are necessary, when I find I must address you in a more ceremonious form of speech and submit to your judgment this deliberate exhortation — for what avails the best intentions with the worst administration? — that you may weigh the nearly inexpressible baseness into which, but for this selfsame persuasion, exigi facias , you shall otherwise surely sink. I shall make no commands. I shall ask nothing of you I myself, in celebrating, do not believe and you cannot give, in spite of the fact that with Egyptians the obtaining of victory is a point of honor, for where would be the wisdom in giving such a command to an honorable young man, of illustrious birth, of an ancient family, or to try to interpose a jurisdictive power over the inward and irremediable judgments which in this, as in most cases, must fall to your choosing alone? I shall be witness for the prosecution. I shall plead and squeeze. I sense even now that I am about to come out with violent declarations, but to regulate, to rule? That would, indeed, be righteous overmuch, for forced virtue is as a bolt overshot, going neither forward nor backward and doing no good as it stands. No, I beg you only to think , which like the act of diving is simply to fight the natural tendency towards the surface and to make an exertion to get to the bottom. Pay attention then! Empanel a jury! Prorogue a parliament! I come to prove a crabbed cudgel fits a f roward whore!

“I have heard enough of this serpent who made you eat the apple of your heart! I have felt the Decian persecution of her silence! I have tasted of her inconstant, concocted, and venial sighs and smelt on her a stink of bitchery that not opopanax, nor jasmin d’Espagne, nor all the multi-toned scents on Carmel’s flowery top could perfume. I have seen, finally, more than polite and attentive gravity should require of anyone, what is, I shall not much waver to affirm, far less in appearance a girl than a bass-fiddle of adipose, a steatopygous bulk, a contentious self-conjugating dirigible swollen with its own piety and blown with an appetite that, more greatly to be satisfied, might better betake itself to share in the fate of the dicteriads in the ancient Potters’ Quarter or those shameless courtesans soliciting in the sulks and stews of Desvergonia!

Propositio

“I see you before me free ! Give me the liberty to say what I must ask you to learn not to question to believe. You are unrestricted, unrestrained, unreserved! Can you be blamed for this recent piece of inconvenience thrown at you as if a gift anymore than you should be praised, allured by the need to feed the pistrix of a carnal heart, for overvaluing another and pursuing in her the mortal incapacities and shifting but all-too-human flaws of your own personality? Rhetoric asks what logic must answer. No. No, you cannot be blamed! Two notes an octave apart can sound like the same note! You were not in love with her, only with the desire to win her, for colluctation grows out of concupiscence as quickly as the stricken hydra of old did sprout another head. I would not medicine your eyes, Darconville, for what’s to gain there? But, reason, it is by acknowledging his own sexuality that man denies the absolute in himself, turns to the lowers, and proceeds to give woman existence. When man became sexual he formed woman — that woman is at all, in fact, has happened simply because man has accepted his sexuality, her very creation being the result of that terrible affirmation. Man has a sex; woman is a sex. Woman is only sexual; Man is also sexual. The lares and pénates of a woman reside below the navel — she is sexuality itself, the objective correlative of your weakness. They arrogate to themselves, padlocking upon your neck their multipartitioned grip, the honor you give them and flagitiously conspire to transpose into a deferential treatment toward themselves the weakness usurped from you in the first place in that shameless, false-dealing, thumb-on-the-scale bit of joint-stockery involving only tummies, tushies, and thighs! Bottomry and respondentia!

“There are two sexes, yes, but the perhaps-for-you unpalatable truth of it must be faced: one’s attempt at a merger can only end in heartbreak. When God saw how lonely man was, he tried again and made woman; as to why he gave up there are two opinions — one of them is woman’s. No, the difference between the sexes is a little matter which nature will never be so obliging as to alter. But bless it! You’re free of her! There is no longer an owl perching in your sunshine! Ya, imshi imta, ya bint al-gatt ? O, if only one could be without the things that one should have convinced oneself one could do without, don’t you see? There indeed is the hope, but if her weakness and stupidity should prove to bias you in her favor in spite of my words, I shall gain this point, nevertheless, to have made it apparent to whatever lords of shouting preside over our miserable lives that what was wanting in this case was not a criminal, nor a prosecutor, but only the terrible swift sword of a just and condign punishment to see it through! I shall rise and plead the case, then, and not restrained by the limits of your comprehension, nor aware of any of mine, my friend, I shall kick open the gates — stand aside! — and lose the gynaikopoinarian dogs, for a woman always respects a word she cannot spell.

Partio

“I am overwhelmed by the dire need to take immediate steps and of the many proposals attendant upon, and coincident to, your renewed health and benediction would press upon your attention and energetically prosecute several of greater value, urging myself to the necessity of these several causes: (1) to counsel you on the inefficacy of worldly love; (2) to admonish you against the sin of mulierosity and the sorrow of marriage; (3) to prove that malice and lechery were ever indigenous to the second sex; (4) to define the nature of this apex predator; (5) to encourage you to live the single life and to avoid women who, although made for man, upon him yet were never thrust; and, finally, (6) to advocate that you draw from her lurking hole this skulking neutral behind whose every virtuous act lay only voracious self-interest and pay the crime a punishment!