Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

Confrontatio

“Do I seem cruel? Then better is by evil thus made better. Do I seem critical? And yet to tell you little more than would suffice is something in a warning less than either. Do I seem cold? Yes, I’m cold — cold enough, I promise, to take the mother out of crymotherapy, for there’s nothing quite like frost to single out the weak points in a stone. I’m ugly. I stink. Yes, I can breed in winter like a whelk. But call me a misogynist? Why, woman has hitherto been most despised by woman herself ! — an assertion that couldn’t have been more vigorously confirmed than by the testimony of Madame de Staël when she remarked that what most consoled her in being a woman was that she’d never have to many one! Who says misogynistic, says biblical! But I needn’t cite Paul, sing like a goliard, nor gape back to the gynekophobic 1500s. The Mishmi people will trade one woman for a pig, the Abipona for a handful of glass pearls, and the Island Caribs actually use two languages — one for men, another for women. You can buy a pigmy woman on the Congo border at the boma in Bundibugyo for 200 shillings. I’ve always said that the famous equation of women with livestock — Semonides Amorgos, fragment 7 of his Elegy and Iambus — warrants further study. The Chinese don’t count girls as children, Mohammed excludes them from Paradise, and the Synod of Macon actually debated whether women could be termed human beings at all! No, I offer no more than enough.

“I see how this modest dehortation on the vulgivaguability of women saddens you, Darconville. If you think it loud, however, it is because you are deaf. If too large, it is because you are blind. If you think it false, then consider the maxim falsa démonstratio non nocet which refers to the general rule that where there is a description which fixes the identity of that which is referred to, a misdescription elsewhere will not vitiate it, mmmm? I could pull the law out of my codpiece all day. But that’s not the question.

“The question is, what will you accept, and in accepting do, and by doing rectify? This late sweetheart of yours — an eviscerating tit-shower between whose yes and no it was impossible to slip a needle— was crooked enough to hide behind a corkscrew. What lived inside her apparently functioned by something outside but let her move about as quietly and efficiently as a bird of prey. Huaman (pronounced ‘woman’) is Inca for falcon. She simply had craft , however. It wasn’t intelligence — don’t be a fool — only the alertness of exaggerated egotism! Those who lack character, you see, must always rely heavily on method. And in the matter of method, nothing shows more of a difference, not one woman from another, but between a given woman and that very woman herself, whether Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores, Félise, Yolande, and Juliette! Or Isabel, sweet, my coz!

“What pharisee, tell me, ever scoured the outside of cup and platter more assiduously than she? She declined to be alone, I gather, from your very first meeting — a woman refuses the condition of solitude and knows neither the love of it nor the worth of it — and battened on to you, I can see it, with more woeful stories than a Victorian buy-a-broom girl, weeping, like all women, only with those she knows will pity her and so intensifying her self-pity by the thought of the pity of others and then slowly, subtly, forcing you into a détente with her unreserved and shameless readiness to shed tears and to sham love. A spider’s silk, you forgot, has a tensile strength greater than steel. You had, in fact, no more reason to believe her than you had to believe that winged game argues in favor of angelology — but you did. You cared. Pitifully, you showed in truth what she shammed which, ironically, unbelievably, allowed the damn traitor who was waiting for that enough courage and self-esteem not only to grab someone else but actually to bump you in the process, for a clever woman never acknowledges she has fallen in love until the man has formally avowed his passion and so cut off his retreat — and then virtue disappears like heather obliterated by bracken! The less the splash, the better the dive, see?

“She was forbearing and obliging and yielding like any other fortune-hunting footpad — different, you felt, of course, than all the other earth-reeking soubrettes and dress-envious daughters of instinct you’d known — but you failed to understand that women are always the kindest to those they deceive. You listened to her; you didn’t watch. And Miss Poxtakeher? Miss Pennyquick? Ya zift! Ya sharmuta! Ya sheitan khalida ! She employed sincerity only when she thought every other form of deception might fail, but her intention to marry you vanished the instant it was formed because she had heard those wooden shoes clopping along in the distance. The voice was Jacob’s voice but the hands were the hands of Esau! You thought she was an ermine; you didn’t know she was a weasel, failing, again, to realize that they’re the same thing. And all the while you kept faith. You spent almost four years to be near her in a place that even the Centuriators of Magdeburg would have found dull! You danced, you dipped, you doffed your hat. And although you left for London at one point, you returned to marry her. Birds never limed, you see, no secret bushes fear. But as the argument for loyalty in women is always a hysteron-proteron it wasn’t enough for her. A neurotic, she was still dissatisfied — a kind of sloth, tristitia de bono spirituali , see? — for in spite of you and all your efforts, not because of you and none of your efforts, she could never be freed of herself. She was both deliberately the maid who serves and instinctively the woman who commands, the shrew in her detesting everything, the servant detesting itself — like the society Jew who in putting on a new nose, a new name, a new servility but proceeds to loathe himself the more! ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ Why Adam, of course; how could it have been Eve? So she chose, the potato cook, what she was — whatever, I suspect, she actually, wasn’t, i.e., what she hadn’t . And why? For purpéses of increased security and sovereignty. Perhaps she was bitter that she had to model herself on your estimable image of her for so many years. Perhaps in knowing herself so well she couldn’t accept anybody who would have her so readily. Perhaps your genius frightened her; the why is not explained: substantive pauses after verbs of fearing, say? And what did she choose? A family disinclined to risk its middle-class prosperity for abstract, Utopian ideas. What did she feel pity for? Nothing. She had poison in the very knops of her tits. And what does she regret? The deed, I tell you, only becomes a mirror for self-admiration. The hand is the whore’s second face. O Darconville, Darconville, every woman has Clytemnestra’s address. What change of heart other than the pirouetting bit of fantoccini constant to this sex I admonish you against believing in ever took place? Isn’t the futility of washing an Ethiopian proverbial? Can you get thigs from fistules?

Peroratio

“This last word — and I shall have done. I urge you to the work of your left hand! I call upon Lycurgus, Hyperides, Dinarchus, Hortensius, Calvus, Chrysostom, and Aristides to inspirit you with the ardor of my words and to quicken you to revenge! A period of grieving is also a period of healing and zeal as necessary in every cause as prudence. What then shall be done? What sport? How flap this bifarious bitch whose faculties ran to being in two places at once? She must be forced to remember! Insensitive people must especially be sent to that kind of hell whose flames must teach exactly what sensitivity means! Look you, I am here to inspire, not to gratify. Will you simply pray her to rehabilitation? Recommend a thatched nunnery? Love those you’ll come to hate and be an ally to your enemies? No, never! Hurl her after the fault to learn how she likes her own compulsion! Bring justice to Jedburgh! Wax your black sword, Darconville, and slaughter them all!