Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

The weather in northern Italy had been bleak, the sudden changes of temperature giving way to a searching cold, and the skies, scarlet in the morning, always turned a dark variegated africano by afternoon, leaving the fastlands sunless and the seawater slick and grey almost without exception. The first few weeks in November had taxed Darconville sorely: he had landed as he was with little in the way of provisions, his one suitcase filled less with clothes and personal articles than with notebooks, letters, and papers relating to the book (how long, in retrospect, had been the preparation!) he’d already begun to write in earnest — not, however, before having made a solemn dedication to the task upon the same day of disembarkation before the high altar of St. Mark’s. There would be no income anymore, and much of the money he’d set aside for the wedding, along with the few paychecks earned at Harvard, had been spent on rent for the full year at Adams House, several wasted nights south, and the trip abroad. The city had also dunned him for a host of back taxes on the property. The remaining monies had to be rationed for food and fuel and, as ill-luck would have it, several doctor’s bills right from the start, for a cold caught in the woods at Fawx’s Mt. — one, exacerbated by the dampness of his rooms, he couldn’t shake — pulled him down considerably with a sore throat, shortness of breath, and a persistent cough. The doctor, at the very first examination, said flatly that it was worse than a cold, couldn’t he tell? — and he fumed at the irregularity of the entire situation. Did no one know where he was? Couldn’t he give any other information? Was there no forwarding address in case of emergency? “ Imbecille !” cried the doctor, who was also worrying about his fees.

The symptoms were indisputable: anemic pallor, coarse wheezing, and a cough that had already scored the larynx. There was further evidence, above and beyond the recent rupture, of chronic bronchial infection, probably acquired from a neglected pneumonia in childhood. He was in a late and aggravated stage of chronic bronchitis with resulting bronchiectasis.

An unaccountable figure in black, unkempt and unshaven, Darconville — fixed to no hope now but completing his book — soon became a curiosity to the neighborhood in those first weeks, before, that is, he retreated more and more into extreme austerity. The children liked him, and he several times took them to the Campo della Abbazia for balloons upon which, to their delight, he carefully inked their faces. He seemed to possess a curious influence over cats, as well, and on several occasions he was seen standing in the moonlight in front of his house and apparently talking to ten or a dozen cats from far and near who were all looking at him. He kept to himself and could admit to no acquaintances save with an old toothless squalcira across the way who, remembering him from earlier years, sometimes brought him over bags of biscotti. The rather saturnine and avaricious doctor who periodically happened by for reasons as much inquisitive as professional refused to understand why he was spending the winter there. Why didn’t he go to one of the southern provinces? Wasn’t he an American? Hadn’t he the money? (The doctor, at the doubt, debated further visits.) A good listener only because an intrigued one, he often sat muddled while the young man’s extraordinary talk flowed on — talk that scaled the heavens and ransacked the earth, talk in which memories of a curious past mingled preposterously with doctrines of art, comic mimicries, and prevaricating theories about love and hate — and yet this visitor.could not help feeling that as soon as he was alone he would sink down, fatigued and listless, with all the spirit gone out of him. The few neighbors in the corte called him “ Il Monaco .” They had no idea what he did, although at night from the top room of that grey palazzo, dimly lit, they could sometimes hear coils of unnatural laughter or the sounds of phantasmagorical tears, a monodrama that seemed, for all they knew, to have its source in some kind of secret and inscrutable theopathy impossible to fathom.

Darconville, in fact, was writing.

The month of November came in and went out in a pitiless drench of rain, decades of days, uncounted and ignored, in which he rarely left that upper room but worked steadily on, hour upon hour, galvanized into concentrated exertion and punching his head hard with resolutions to restrain his nerves against inner warnings of the exhaust-ibility of human patience. The manuscript grew, quickly. No longer meditating the direst revenge nor passing from one crazed project to another, with each one no less cowardly than extravagant, he wrote down everything he could remember — for victory without blood, he saw, was twice achieved — filling page after page of what had happened to him, not lying, telling the truth, writing to record rather than to imagine, not inventing what never existed by trying to discover the meaning of what had, and as he worked, distinguishing between the impulse to impose a meaning ( animus impotentium ) and the impulse to interpret ( animus interpretantium ), language became the objective of which self-consciousness was the subjective. The bee had fertilized the flower it robbed. Words were all he had left.

The story was simple, a fable about Isabel Rawsthorne and himself: doubt is double. He loved her. He hated her. There was a peculiar agony, however, to this counterbalancing anti-miracle, as if at the precise moment one was well pleasure alone became too insufficient fully to define a man, so one sought pain. The truth of each, incompatible with that of the other, fed from whichever wrong or right was posited by what one had to believe to keep the other real to avoid. What other story in life was there?

Darconville’s art seemed to rise superior to its own conditions in that Venetian palazzo, endowing even the dross with a sense of mystery he watched to solve. He was perfectly cognizant of the difficulty of the task of writing this book, its unpleasantness, the uncertainty of achievement, but with that awareness he only redoubled his efforts and scratched into his work a useful refractivity of theme and theory out of the very doubts and fears anterior to it — almost unable, always, to control his impatience over, his devotion to, the need for furnishing proof of himself, denied by pain, and to change that pain into considered prose: a prose of love, a prose of hate. This was his perpetual twilight. He retained his inventive powers only by subordinating himself to them, and yet, so fragile was his hold upon his work, he dared not tie himself to any other engagement whatsoever lest even the foreknowledge of it upset a whole day’s work. He began to write up to ten pages a day, pausing only for meager meals or to throw another piece of wood onto the fire or to consult his notebooks, rehearsing exact chronology, rifling out a detail, reckoning a fact in the light of delayed revelation. It would be impossible, of course, to understand the fire with which he wrote unless one also understood the passion with which he’d sought that bond of rare and divine love, too rare, too divine perhaps, even for the realization of the one he loved herself. But work he did. His output increased and, somehow, seemed inversely proportionate to his physical discomfort, now a violent perspiration, now a dry and sinister stiffness, but always the ache in his lungs that left a palpable feeling of cavitation there. He determined to leave out nothing of the four years spent with her, and while he lived no more in thrall of what she did or didn’t, would or wouldn’t, he repeatedly reviewed the photographs and read and re-read all the letters, notes, and messages she lived in once but inhabited no more, a spirit as infinitely far away in time now as she was in space, flash frozen in a past as old as memory was strong, but a past, a memory, calling him back to search and remember what in the knowledge that is revealed at the heart of all violation can be transfigured by the hand of art. The real, engulfed once in the unreal, emerged, and there was rebirth by water. Laurel was the first plant that grew after the Flood.