Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“The proud wooer?” asked Crucifer, smiling and sitting up. He put his hand in front of his mouth and shook with mirth. He actually took time off to laugh; he devoted himself to it. “A hole in his chin. Ugly beast-ears. Effeminate. But shall we forgive him?” he asked, biting his lip, his heavily lidded eyes mocking his own remark. He spat in sarcasm. “Why, a bat could see he couldn’t be a chum of ours if he chuckled. It looks as though he suffers from suprasellar craniopharyngioma — the affliction of having a less-than-thimblesized penis. I am reminded of the featherless White Orpington — this being one, I have no doubt,” said he, smiling viciously and puncturing the groin in the photo with the hot tip of his cigarette, “you’ll soon caponize.” He dropped the photo. “Here, but this is an IQ 60 Epsilon Minus in a circus suit. She’s the one you want. The blowing datura-apple! The cozening coypu! The culling spick! The mock-humble, footprintless cvoirth! Qui facit per alium facit per se : she who does a thing through another does it through herself.” His face went suddenly cold. “But tell me, have you answered the lies on the tape — or the one that allowed a complete lifetime of them?”

“She loved me once,” whispered Darconville. “I believe that, first of all. I feel she—”

“You feel ?” sneered Crucifer. “Then direct intuition is capable of discerning a priori truths as adequately as the inductive method of intellect reveals them a posteriori ?” He sat back. “You outdo the Egyptians, probably the vainest people in the world.” He wiped his mouth. “She loved you? She loved you?”

“You can’t think that a lie, can you?”

“The Monch!” said Crucifer. “The Eiger! The Jungfrau!”

Disbelieving, Darconville just stood there. It was useless to disagree, for, as with all censors, it was impossible to discuss; the only position possible was acquiescence, a mood increasing with the diffidence he felt standing there under that high lamp and its paradoxical light which didn’t eclipse the darkness but rather somehow made it visible.

“I’ll ask you again: the lies, have you answered them?”

“No.”

Crucifer looked away. “Inference: that you listened to it, that you approved it? O, but she’ll like that.”

“ Approved it,” snapped Darconville, disgustedly. “What do you mean?”

That was better. Crucifer wanted the confrontation.

“What are you talking about?”

“O do don’t , will you.”

“Tell me.”

It was simple.

“Revenge,” said Crucifer, point-blank.

Darconville slowly walked to the window, stood there a moment, then softly made a vow to his reflection. “I will wait,” he said, “I will bide my time. But I will never rest until — I don’t care when or how or where — she comes, in seeing what she has done, to have as heavy a heart as I have now.”

“ Wait ?” asked Crucifer, puckering his right eye in a malicious wink. “While she gobbles chocolates and makes play with her eyes and fans like the fast women of Paris? Stoicism is the disease of young men, isn’t it?” He sighed. “Time is on your side, I don’t doubt — what there is of it. I’ve always said that the best reason for disbelieving in God is that he never gave us enough time in life to pursue enough knowledge to find sufficient truth. That we find it at all — as you,” he cried, pointing at Darconville and raising his voice to an angry trill in which he couldn’t prevent a slight trace of madness from creeping, “apparently have —should always be taken, one would assume, as a welcome if miniature surprise.” He gulped bile. “But you don’t deign to think so, do you?”

“I should explain—”

“Bullfuck!” shrieked Crucifer, pounding out his cigarette and struggling out of his chair in fury. “The only explanation is a bad one! You’re at war ! You will have a cripple’s temper until you have found your feet! You think you should ignore this owl’s pellet simply because she is low, stupid, and insignificant?” The question whistled out of his nosehole.

“Power is subtle. Fiddler crabs can wear away whole jetties. A pin-worm fells an elephant, as Dutch beetles can an elm. The rat flea, not the rat, causes bubonic plague. Cancer chews out the heart of a hero; a kiss in the open air betrays a prophet. And a knife”—he yanked the Egyptian khangar out of his academic hood and violently stabbed the air—”a knife flashes and an emperor dies.”

“And what,” asked Darconville, his voice almost inaudible, “is the lesson here?”

“It’s not enough to raise a storm, you poor fool, unless you follow it with a bolt of thunder and a blow of lightning.” He gestered to the photograph. “I’d send that Geryoneo down to the house of dole. And her ? Blood revenge! The Islamic Thar! Shit fire and save matches! ‘ Hier steh ich treu Dir bis zum Tod ’—her oath, I believe? Then help her out! What goes round comes round. Now is the time your face should form another.”

“My face,” said Darconville, unambivalently looking at Crucifer, “is facing revenge.”

“Yes?” returned Crucifer. “And to be further educated to it is to hazard a loss, in the delay, of the joy of discovery?” He breathed into Darconville’s face. “I’d send her disappearing back into her navel like a black hole. I’d huddle her into the wormy earth. I’d quadrifurcate her fat limbs and feed her parts of herself in choice cuts.” Darconville closed his eyes. “But I see your position: she’s her own worst enemy, that’s it, isn’t it?”

“Not while I’m alive.”

“Then why do you linger with that which you know? It is obsolete. The known is a symbol of the death of the mind! After what she’s done to you, will you now sit by until she’s a worthless old bushrag in her nineties, some stinking bale of cadaverous goods best consigned immediately to Pluto, and then let death come to her as a friend ?” His eyes flashed. “We’re talking about a bitch here — a word, granted, which hasn’t the authority of classical usage, but it certainly has the indubitable authority of fitness, no? No? And safe? Safe? She wanted to be safe?” Grotesquely pursing his mouth into a girlish bow, Crucifer hitched up his robe in a cute little tricot, curtseyed primly, and mocked, “Why, thank you, Darconville, I’ll really miss you”—his face fell—”every chance I get.”

“I’ve done something about it.”

“Overmuch clack,” spat Crucifer.

“I’ve taken steps. I—”

“What, you’ve sent a few letters? Is that your idea of revenge? Sandpapering the anchor? Complaining, inactive, and bored like the endlessly munching ungulates I spoke of who know not hot nor cold? You beat the sack and mean the miller. You’re not going to act,” said Crucifer, blowing disgust out of his great clay cheeks.

Darconville clenched his fists against his eyes and cried out in pain.

“Into each life,” said Crucifer, shrugging unsympathetically — and he pretended to lose himself in a fastidious study of the Delville, touching his little finger to a non-existent speck on the canvas and blowing it away. He arranged some papers on his desk. He tidied up.

“I despise her.”

“Touching.”

“I thirst to see her lifeless.”

“A dried sentence”—Crucifer tossed his head—”stuffed with sage.”

“I mean it.”

“And I’m the Queen of Romania.”

“I promise you.”

“Oh, to be sure, yes indeed.”

Then Darconville dropped his arms, his moist eyes wide open, and desperately confessed, “I am killing her in my mind repeatedly. If I owned a hotel with a thousand rooms in it, I’d like to see her dead in every one of them.”