Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“The mind,” replied Crucifer, with a pout of displeasure, “is a hotel room, I’m afraid, where only one person can die.”

He began to walk back and forth, then, stroking that huge witcher-bubber of a belly which seemed to propel him forward on a high drift, as if in caricatured pursuit of something elusive and just out of reach.

“I am constrained, I see,” he said, turning, “to a seeming digression. It is an indisputable fact, right off, that thought in movement seeks thought at rest in resolution. Beliefs are rules for action, and the function of thinking is to step toward thought’s practical consequences, mmmm? Reverence to this! Now you have an enemy , my dear misguided boy — a bitch with a rubber heart who in a recent confustication more like a Goldonian drama than a love story used her smile for make-up and her twam for a Dutch bargain all in pursuit of a marriage founded in deceit and against the long continuance of which I wouldn’t bet a pound to a pinch of shit! (Of course it won’t last: when someone leaves a room, those who remain immediately see themselves differently and always move around to register that difference.) But the point is: you loved her. The point is: she left you to die — the lowest of betrayals of the many there are, the swart crow! A predator, unseen and unseeable, she kept to the night with multiple disguises, using shadow-elimination, outline disruption, and counter-shading all at once! I should have added to my litany Myrionyma, the creature with a thousand names! But, hell, you’ve heard what she’s said, haven’t you? And isn’t the tongue the neck’s enemy? So what could absolve, who acquit, how cleanse this thing who not only hates you but is sitting to virtue in Virginia this very minute as demure as an old whore at a christening? Nothing! No one! Not balsam from mecca, neither musk from the deer, nor civet from the civet’s arsehole! But an enemy provides both a stimulus and a lesson, I repeat, and I wish only for the final time to point out— monstrare —make clear — ostentare —predict— praedicere —and portend— portendere —what henceforth you must simply no longer ignore: force destroys enemies !”

Crucifer paused to swallow his anger.

“Survival is not a desperate affair; it is a natural process! Lost battles,” he shrugged, “make not Pompey less. But shall you either by pointless idling or non-resistance cut off the chance for your own survival in the face of the possibility of it? Forgo justice? Counterpoise evil by silence? Excuse yourself and accuse yourself? You’re standing in your own light!” Crucifer shook his fist, which grew a warning finger. ‘“Tis time; descend; be stone no more! Civilization and murder are compatible, Darconville. Haven’t you read your political history? Is it not better that a life should contract dirt-marks and abuse rather than forfeit usefulness in its despicable efforts to remain unspotted? ‘The dead do not praise the Lord,’ said the Psalmist, ‘nor any that go down in silence.’ Mercy, without retributive punishment, is sentiment! Worst points to best!

“There is no worse lie,” howled Crucifer, wildly waving his arms— the cloister lamp actually trembled—”than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, but, no matter the brand of cant putting it otherwise, reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and quacking appeals to sympathy or mercy or pardon are folly when we are dealing with vile and corrupt deceivers and the beaked and taloned graspers of the world! I mean, he who doesn’t oppose, attack, or even execute such creatures is as though the creator of them! Oh yes, our sympathies are always evoked through ultra vires considerations, aren’t they? For pussyfooting? Piety? A pitying tolerance for our oppressors?” He touched his forehead, wearily. “The ages greatly differ. Your magnificent relatives — the heroic fashion of them,” he sighed, “has passed away. Wherein lies very obviously a truth: did they lie chained, subordinate by this world’s insult; coerced by the Elizabethan brank and block; and then go whimpering into their due subterranean abodes to beat hemp and repent? Or did they walk openly abroad, the envy of a general valet-population, bear sway, and profess war to the death with the very dogs who snapped at their heels? Love your enemies ?” choked Crucifer. “Why, it invokes such a breach with our own instinctive springs of action as a whole that I take it to be nothing more than an oriental hyperbole which castrates poverty and pain and gives over the control of the world to criminal fools, proselytes of capital, and the Set fatuously dubbed Smart! If there be any pretension more philosophically absurd than another, it is that any person or thing can act contrary to his own nature. And if there be any pretension more practically immoral, it is that any person or thing ought to act in that manner! Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, her declare I unto you! Une Grue! Une Goulue! Une Grognew ! She was what she was — and so has done what you must undo. Love, lost, breeds death, found. It’s the very lesson at the heart of that hideous and twofold penalty of blindness and eviration that we have come to call Adam and Eve! And can you then now admit you shall do nothing ? Creed love for a foe crippled with miscreed? Believe someone who could perjure through a six-inch board? Can you actually sit there,” he screamed in an extended wail of monochromatic denial, “and try to tell me there’s to be found a level of emotion so unifying, so obliterative of differences between two enemies, that enmity may proceed to such irrelevant circumstances that one might crawl on his hands and knees to stoop, to kneel, to grovel to kiss the feet of one’s eternal persecutor ?” He gave the word “persecutor” four clear vowels. The echo punctuated the question Darconville, pale as jute, couldn’t answer. “ The Trojan Horse has foaled !”

Dr. Crucifer saw he’d touched a nerve yet waited some minutes for better advantage, his eyes roaming morosely about the room in fake self-objurgation for having gone and wasted his words in an effort that seemed to have fallen on deaf ears. He continued to wait. But the knife was in. So he turned it. “You love her.”

Darconville’s eyes blazed.

“She is panting for someone else like a cat after seafish,” he sneered, “and you positively adore her.”

It was intolerable.

“ I hate her !” shrieked Darconville, gasping for air, frightening himself in the ultrasonic scream to the point of trembling, and he began to bang his head bloody against the wall. “ I hate her! I hate her! I hate her! I hate her !” He turned in convulsed supplication. “ I love to hate her. I’ve cursed her to hell !”

Crucifer’s mouth fell open. With the fingertips of both small white hands fluttering bewilderedly to his neck, he stared in disbelief, thinking: how you must have loved her . But he was fast upon Darconville. Had he? Had he, he asked, actually put a curse on her? And unable to contain his joy — he literally appeared to inflate — he rose huff-shouldered and victorious, bowling in to overpower Darconville in an awkward and obscene embrace while hissing lewdly in his ear, “You are me!”

It all called for a drink. Crucifer reached into a corner and pulled a bell, as Darconville, shaken, felt for a chair and sat down in silence, the wound under his bandaged chest throbbing. Then Lampblack — the face that always seemed its own reflection looking out of a lens— after appearing from nowhere to unwrap and pour a bottle of wine, was told to get out. With a tiny glitter in his spider’s eyes, Crucifer then made a toast, singing, “ La illaha ila Darconville, Crucifer Resoul Darconville !”