Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

The moon was dancing in Darconville’s eyes through a mist of tears, raining from heaven, half blinding them — and he wiped them so as quickly to obtain the knowledge of what in that small carved word he feared otherwise must fade.

It was a duty to forget nothing! The first of faults, Adam’s and Eve’s, was not disobedience but failure of memory —and the concomitant want of understanding that memory is only another perspective on immortality, for inasmuch as one is without continuity, he can have no true reverence for what of life, in pain or pity, in happiness or hope, he owns to utter and utters to shape and shapes to know if he would redeem the time. Memory, rendering the past obsolete, nevertheless relies on it. Continuous memory was not only the vanquisher of time, the logical and ethical phenomenon saving one, Darconville saw almost in ecstasy, from having to bear the grave burden of living one’s own life under the same fault by which, through the very person he’d destroy, he was faulted, but it was also linked to morality, for only through memory were repentance and the rehabilitation of the past possible — the salvation of one’s poor self! Destruction? No, there must be preservation! The past! The past! The past, thought Darconville, was the artist’s playground! The past was the birthplace of the future! He took off Crucifer’s jade ring and threw it as far as he could into the woods. To satisfy our now with the memory of then, to shape to know: that was how Petrarch attained to Laura in the field of eternal light! And if reality were too varied, too abundant, to be mirrored in anything smaller, narrower, less varied than itself? Then?

Suddenly upon Darconville’s heart fell one drop of Brahmic bliss, illuminating what it struck and telling him a truth: Rise up, prophet, see and understand, the death of what is is the birth of what’s to be! — and instantly the outward circumstances of his life transformed into a consciousness of moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling, invincible to all effects of time and change, an elevation, elation, and joyousness passing the very portals of grace itself as the seraph Uriel, with diffraction lights glowing from his face, stood above him. I hear, I forget. I see, I remember. I do, I understand . And he cried out through the woods in astonishment, as if, upon the stroke of creation, he suddenly understood that the occasion is the nothing from which everything comes!

At that very moment, a car’s headlights swept across the trees, beamed away, and then the soft crackling of tires coming through the darkness by the driveway was heard no more. The engine was shut off. As the car doors slammed, the very night seemed to hold its breath, as even the sound of wind and rain had ceased. But there was never any noise, for, unable to move, Darconville was facing away into the forest, remaining completely still, his eyes closed to everything but the light that had flashed upon his soul. He couldn’t see her again. She didn’t exist.

It was done, then, what wasn’t, as in the resolution of dreams, and so what can be recorded of what never took place may, for who looked back in another direction never looked back at all and who was given another life never knew how swiftly one was lost (or how close she came to death that night) and what failed of love in time disappeared into the timelessness of love to return never again. He couldn’t see her again, who would. She didn’t exist anymore, who did. And what had long been done had never been that now would have to be.

“QUIRE ME SOME PAPER!” cried Darconville. “Shear me a sheep for vellum! Nail me out a desk with the timber of redwoods! A quill pluperfect shoots from the sky to occupy my hand! Sound me the Dorian mode! I am alive, O sunset, come back from the dead, and from Thy crucible dost Thou call me forth, even as I am! All is in movement! There are angels come to bandage the wounded angels of battle and bend to lift me from the darkness to the light! Beauséant ! Silence is full of execution, and intuition and desire lie undestroyed! I will squeeze secrets through the tips of my fingers! I will bring noses to windowpanes! I am still Darconville, master of my fate, captain of my soul!”

VENICE is a city of yesterdays. There is in the ancient stone, the narrow and coarsing lagoons, the dark immemorial sea slapping at its very steps an aspect of the eternal which seems to say, in a strange paradox of finality, that time shall endure only if once it comes to an end, a concept reversing the very nature of what it is. There should be no surprise in that. It is a city, in fact, where the natural does not exist, not in St. Mark’s glittering dome, neither in the implacable white of the Doge’s Palace, nor in the cold churches, old museums, and silent galleries with their ikons and golden mosaics: Byzantine madonnas, infant sibyls with electric eyes, and hierogrammarians standing head downward with their feet folded in prayer.

The city, born of art, has long existed more as a measure of the artist’s contemplative imagination than the reality of life in the labyrinth of narrow streets and lanes, smelling of ruin and the sea, might otherwise indicate.

At once conveyed in the deserted gondola stations, however, along the slimy steps, past the empty warehouses and listing palazzi that rise on either hand in the northerly district of the Sacca della Misericordia is a particular destitution, and, leaving the busier, more central quays and piazzetti off the Canal Grande where rows of fantastic façades can be seen with Gothic curved and pointed arches surmounted by circles containing equilateral crosses all rising above grillwork balconies in the Ducal gallery pattern, the tourist becomes suddenly bewildered. The area turns darker, dirtier, more dismal. The water, sucking the walls and welling up in the remotest crevices and steps, is black and foul. The houses on each side rise to great heights still, their lowest stories forming a double line of insignificant shops into which the light of the sun, however, never enters and the dark recesses of which, set so far back from the close rughetti, are poorly illuminated by the flickering rays of the oil lamps which alone are used to serve for light there. Gloomier cells than these are perhaps hard to imagine — being made no less pitiful, to be sure, if viewed through the contrasting light of former days when many of them enjoyed, if not richness of adornment, then at least the comparative wealth of human habitation. Now, many of them were deserted — but not all. Several were still inhabited, by those who, out of either determination or dereliction or both, remained yet undeterred by the dampness, the vermin, or the prospect of a coming Venetian winter.

The old palazzo, for instance — formerly his grandmother’s, now his own — in which Darconville was living was such a one. It was a grey narrow house of stone in the Corte del Gatto, a dead-end street set off the Canale della Misericordia which looked across the Laguna Morta on the north side and lay open to its ferocious squalls and winds. All three floors were unheated. There were fireplaces in only four of the twelve rooms. Wood was available in the trainyards at the Ferroviaria, when he could spend the money.