Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“And what exactly does love engender? Self-realization? A shameful paradox. A found ideal? The nature of the ideal is that it is never found. Gratefulness? Why, it is arguable that for a man to feel grateful to a woman is actually injurious to his love for her: he so hates himself for being unable to do for her all he would like to do that he comes to curse himself as small in the reflection of the consequent generosity she, in simply acknowledging as beyond her worth, refuses to blame him for not showing. (We love someone not for what she can actually do for us but for what in fact she allows us to do for her!) No, the spirit is always the heart’s dupe. Hatred realizes, finally, that love has its source in the need either to find one so gullible that he can lie to her or to love someone so blindly that she can lie to him. And what best — because most incontrovertibly — does it do? You can prove one from the other by algebra. Love engenders hate!

“You are now so stricken! You lie below in the flashing storm so deep in pain in its violet light the brightness of day seems an ancient dream in perpetual darkness, perpetual night, but blasted, dying, you now perceive a fateful something that is yours by right. All things, however, struck by a thunderbolt fall in the opposite direction! ‘O true believers,’ says the Koran, ‘the law of retaliation is ordained to you for the slain: the free shall die for the free!’ Tune for you has stopped! Gone is peace of mind! You have become fixed forever— sulphured — in the explosion, alive only in that you would now kill, happily, if only to be given the chance to say why!

“But all will be well! It is the lot of genius, remember, if to be opposed, then also to be invigorated by opposition. Reverence to this! Hatred is meant for those who establish standards, not those who follow them. Ours is a Vatinian hate: the supremest. We behold our enemies in an eternal vigil, like the lifeless cobra in whose eye the murderer’s image is forever imbedded, and actually crave to hate that constant hallucination of face — whether smirking through the attack it signals or the absolution it seeks — which becomes, in fact, almost a badge of those enemies, for we attribute to them not that state of normal human happiness shot through with the common moods of mankind that should move us to entertain for them a feeling of kindly sympathy but a species of arrogant delight which merely pours oil upon the furnace of our rage. Hate, indeed, transfigures people no less than does love. It boils and concocts into poisonous nourishment all the facts and fictions it compounds from the lives of its enemies and fuels the delight it abhors. On the other hand, since it can find satisfaction only in destroying that delight, it imagines it, it believes it to be, it sees it in a perpetual condition of destruction — not unlike yourself, for you are also dead! Dead to pardon! Dead to mercy! Dead to harmony, forgiveness, relief, liberty, and trust! Why, isn’t it clear? No living creature has ever been burnt by lightning without being killed! But, now, you’ve become the burning itself!

“Give your enemy no credit, by reflected glory, for rousing the flame — the passion, the power, the fire is in the flint that is struck, not in the steel that strikes. You alone are consumed. Wherever you go, nevertheless, your enemy is with you. You are baptized now in the Fountain of Ardenne which has the power of changing love to hate for those who drink its waters — you are born in it, confirmed in it, devoted to what can break into open madness even fifty years later in a pain so absolute and unbearable it approaches the most dizzying heights of pleasure, for your grief has found the one thing on earth that ruins it. You shall have no peace before its name. Alive, it is your plague, instigates against you, throttles all you are — you must leave yourself, in fact, to get at it. It is a vice whose name is comprehended in a monosyllable but in its nature not circumscribed by a world. You’re like the chimera — nothing will satisfy you. You would dwell happily within the skirts of Jericho and dare the blast of a ram’s horn if upon it depended her death! You would tattoo crucifixes on the soles of your feet to trample the Savior who has refused your salvation if you could but barter hers! You become the Dog of Montargis! You would rip out your own heart to hurl at her! You would sell your birthright, forfeit an inheritance, and suffer no end of ill-repute simply to spit forth in the spirit of Juvenal whatever Latin hexameters could tell her what she was! You would live in a nightsweat and breed horns and stand a bear and a lion in the way of Assur only to have at her once, cramping your own fortune to mal-promulgate hers and breathing hope but to fly into convulsions of joy that the world be destroyed if only she can suffer in the process!

“The obsession is upon you. You never feel it is accomplished, killing her always, until you never wish it ever had begun, for while perfectly instructed in the tribulation there’s no surcease of trial, and though pausing now and then to wonder of the marvelous once flashed to us and then withdrawn behind black veils and concealments if both might not perhaps exist less in lars and lemurs than in another of ourselves, you are driven hard upon the deed again, and again, and again, until over the waste void that bounds our thoughts and yawns profound between two worlds a bridge of fire has leapt from earth to the unknown shore, and the abyss is spanned.”

“I RUB A SORE, I see,” said Dr. Crucifer, picking a cigarette out of his box, “whose pain will make you mad. I should take heed. You’ll bruise her to jelly.” He paused, raising an eyebrow, for a moment of exquisite registration. “Won’t you?”

Darconville almost smiled.

“You will be forgiven many sins on account of her, let me vouch for it. Now, Al Amin,” he said, his left hand feeling to scratch the bottom of his chair with a questioning matchtip, “put me in the picture.”

“I don’t know where to begin.”

“Speak to the problem anywhere you’d like and speak without pretexts. Crucifer can hear.”

The cloister lamp was lit. Its eerie glow, however, actually darkened rather than illuminated the large living room; the purple walls became shrouded, and the pieces of black oak furniture were drawn out to such long and forbidding shadows that it seemed as if each was determined to revert in shape to the ghostly length of its original state, while the great sideboard loomed up like some ancient and evil deathship run aground against the obscurity of the far wall. It was, for the medieval panelwork, the dap-joint beams above, and the oddities of acquisition placed here and about, every bit as curious and remote a folly as the creature who habitually kept himself confined there and who now sat back to listen — his eyes closed and directed straight up— in a pose of exaggerated deliberation.

It was without hesitation, having been confirmed to the policy by the speech on hatred, that Darconville now made his disclosures: about the tape-recording, the letters he’d written, and the details — excepting the curse — of what had recently taken place. The front of Crucifer’s throat, as he listened, was very long, untenanted, dead white. As he heard his each and every suspicion corroborated, he blew out a ball of smoke but kept stone silent: the conviction he showed by showing no reaction whatsoever made manifest what did not require assertion. Then Darconville showed him the photograph of Gilbert van der Slang.