Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

Darconville, mentally correcting her own emotional appraisal with hard fact, suddenly jerked his head forward. Naked discourse can imply the image it lacks. Keep talking , he thought, stay tired and keep talking .

“—although this past year-and-a-half he was on a ship, nineteen months to be exact. I didn’t see him when he came home this summer. He didn’t get off the ship until the last week in July and afterwards he went up to New York for—”

He swiftly jammed stop, rewind, and listened to the replay.

“—summer. He didn’t get off the ship until the last week in July and—”

The mind whose preoccupation prevents it from grasping wholes, Darconville knew, must sooner or later focus on details, and this one detail, out of the blandest and dullest pantomime of truth he’d ever heard, fairly flew. Again: stop, rewind, play.

“—the last week in July—”

Darconville snapped off the machine and quickly bolted down the stairs of the library, running out across Mass. Ave. and through the dismal rain that had begun to fall dashing over to Adams House. He went to his room, pulled the top drawer entirely out of the bureau, and began rummaging through the assortment of odds and ends. It was a jumble: an old watch, photographs, the inscribed blue cups from England, notebooks, pens and pencils, the bloodstone Hypsipyle had given him, a Cloogy pamphlet (“Glints From My Mirror”), rough drafts of several stories, a missal, and among all the papers, along with that queer illegible manuscript from Dr. Crucifer’s library, a pile of correspondence in an elastic band. He sorted out the few she’d written to him the past summer, some four or five, and set aside the very first one — suggesting the postponement of their wedding— ever to broach that subject. His heart fell into his trousers, as every last one of his aspirations and enthusiasms suddenly transferred from the upper to the nether regions. The letter was postmarked Fawx’s Mt., Thursday, July 23!

The falcon had come to the fist. Isabel seemed all of a sudden to grow material, a superficies of flesh and bone merely, a creature of lines and surfaces, a language in living cipher no more.

It was goodbye to curtains and crowns, goodbye to the roses of Thalia and the laurels of Melpomene. It was the end of all journeys and joyfulness. Darconville saw her as the very antichrist of deceit, false not through forgetfulness but while remembering, a figment of his imagination with no mercy, no meaning, and no memory. To see the creature who has hitherto been nearly perfect, divine, lose under your very gaze the divinity which has informed her, defined her, given her life, suddenly grow commonplace, turn from flame to ashes, from a radiant vitality to a corpse? It was a sorrow almost literally unable to be borne, a spectacle without measurable dimensions in this world, for in an instant, she became a complete— complete —mediocrity.

Through the pouring rain, Darconville walked back to the library. A poisoned taint was on everything: the poisoned air, the poisoned buildings, the poisoned city. He shoved through the doors, the contorted grimace on his face intended to mimic the satisfaction of the discovery he had made, but he of course knew otherwise, as he who by being poisoned does poison know. He sat down directly to the machine again, a hatred in his heart more deadly than the potions of Exili, and turned it on.

“—and afterwards he went up to New York for almost a month which carried him to the end of August practically, getting the license — his second mate’s license — and so in spite of what—”

Darconville punched stop and replayed it.

“—his second mate’s license—”

Once again he hit the buttons.

“—his second mate’s license—”

Darconville suddenly burst into loud ironic laughter, for there are passions the choice of which extend way beyond man’s volition. It revved up to such a high comical pitch that there might have been local consequences — the librarian looked up again — had it not as suddenly wept down to vexation and died into the supplication of a long, pitiable, and despairing sob.

He banged the machine and the voice continued.

“—and so, in spite of what you may think, there was absolutely nothing whatsoever going on here last summer, even if you decide to think so, which makes me feel nothing is on my conscience. I didn’t see him when all this trouble was going on. It had nothing to do with it. That’s the truth.”

The truth ? Pistols without cocks! Helmets without vizards! A damnable lie! It stuck like corruption in her throat and could be recognized under whatever complexion, contour, accent, height, or carriage it might choose to masquerade! It would dog and chain her, invigilate at her deathbed, and be cast into the nativities of her children or else impartial Justice wore a blindfold round her eyes to shield her shame! False spoken! False sworn!

The final words that were heard, as Darconville — his mind a box of cats — reset the machine to play, were now no longer Isabel’s, but increasingly the terrible and insistent repetition of certain others from the recent past, drowning hers out, which somehow in their echo awakened more evil than had that hideous falsetto-like whisper in which formerly they’d first been uttered: if a wrong must be made right, if a way be found, if it should lead you to, could you? Do something ?

“I saw Gilbert, anyway, on September 2, I remember it well, because I asked him if I could come over to Zutphen Farm. I had a real nice time that day, I just had fun, but I’ve already told you that. (I don’t think you really ever paid attention to details, I really don’t.) And the next day when I went back over there, there was this horse who had this awful cut, and I’d gotten some medicine — and in a way [ smiling gurgle ] that’s when it began, I think. I don’t think you understand: I’d known Gilbert before ; there was no reason to hide anything; we could talk to each other, don’t you see, openly? [ pause ] I saw him just about every night after that. We had — fun. Not just fun. Fun, you know, isn’t the most important thing in life.”[4]

[[4] The value assigned the abstract notation ( Fun ) in this rigorous proposition, while it may seem only putatively factual, actually extends itself here to a philosophical calculus of common truth-functions beyond ostensive definition ( isn’t the most important thing ) to the suggestion of an unsubstitutable and immutable absolute ( in life ) by which, had it never been uttered, the straightforwardly empirical protocol established in the pursuit of sufficient linguistic assessment might otherwise be distorted.]

Those were the last words she ever spoke to him.

The tape, ending abruptly, would stop forever there. There was no more. It was all gone, lost, swallowed like a mineral: his love, belief, time and trust, self-respect, gifts, all efforts and energy, kisses and cares. And neither heaven nor hell, gold nor God, could make it good again. Dreams, he saw, were for devils, not for men. He put the cassette into his pocket and walked aimlessly into the absurd streets outside, the rain-smudged sky overhead looking as if it had been roofed with the oldest lead. He raised a fist. Spirit of the Sky, remember! Spirit of the Earth, remember!

When Darconville returned to his rooms not one of the many objects scattered about failed to shriek its scorn at the whole false enterprise. She had lived for years beside him apparently on terms of hatred and incomprehension, but where had been the art to read that mind’s construction in that face? He didn’t know now and no longer had the chance to see. But the consciousness that the insult was not yet avenged, that his rancor was still unspent, weighed on his heart and poisoned the artificial tranquillity he once tried to obtain by other distractions but could again no more. Darconville was a Venetian. He looked from one empty memory to another and found nothing lasting or loving in them of the girl whose soul once touched them all — a person so free from conviction, so totally dependent on the temptations and conditioning of her immediate environment that to understand her now required nothing more complicated than a look. There was an image of special desolation in the two blue cups that lay on the floor: in them he seemed to locate all his grief. A whole cloud of experience condensed into a drop of hatred — again, he had given her exactly what she wanted — as he picked them up, whirled like a cornered animal striking out, and threw them with a violent curse into that fireplace, above which the Harvard shield now seemed the color of arterial blood, where they shattered to pieces in a sooty explosion of tongs, dogs, and trammels.