Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

That night he had a frightful nightmare; it was as though someone were handling him secretly, locating the place to drive a knife into him. The touch seemed to spread lightly, fluttering over him delicately, until it gripped him in the small of his back. Darconville woke up shouting, snatching at the point on his back where the hand was — and then leapt up, shivering in horror. It was a rat.

Unable to shake off the frisson, he dragged the blankets to the window and sat up, beside himself, searching the floor. The wind that had earlier been howling outside as if it would tear the very festoons off the pediment had died down. How long had he slept? He rubbed the window. Then he noticed for the first time, falling beyond the cracked and dirty panes, the light flaughts of snow.

THE WINTER settled in hard, descending in ice and sleet that chilled the waste of snow around Darconville’s palazzo, looming spectral in the feeble light like the last human dwelling at the end of the habitable world. It was a place uncheered by a touch of changing light or a solitary ray of sun, where the gloomy vault of darkness above and beyond the fire in his room seemed in collusion with the dismal recollections, distinct in ferocity, he wrote with unrestrained gratitude to be free of. There was no relief in the weather; the days were brief, dark, and frigid. He stopped up the wide chimneys, reinforced cracks where he could, and closed himself off in one room.

It was with some pains, initially, that Darconville placed before himself the undeniable advantages to be gained by way of novel occupation for his senses from the coldness of the room. And yet he scarcely made the adjustment before he realized the terrible depth that could be reached by such penetrating cold. At a pace adapted to his waning strength, however, he continued writing morning and night, alive, as time passed, to this new possibility, that figures, originating in the disease of delicate nerves, actually ministered to functions of the imagination unconscious of one’s affliction, and whatever he dreamed of, when lethargy got possession of him, something importunate in the pages underhand called out of those dreams and made use of, like the infractions of a law that are dragged in only to prove it. There was often dreadful loneliness. Still, the loneliness was not the old loneliness, because there was a term put to it, however long to look forward to— and while his poor thoughts constantly reverted to those remote but rapturous early days spent with Isabel (the kite-flying, the engagement on London Bridge, the kisses and cares of so long ago) he found them briefer than the beauty of trees that only blossom to fertilize to reproduce, and so he shook out of his wasted hands every miracle of memory ever beheld or thought of, as if, instantaneous in passage, it might otherwise disappear and never come back again.

Christmas Day was, perhaps, the loneliest of them all. He walked out into a morning that was so cold that one could have cracked it with one’s fingers, the first breath taken coincident with a sharp feeling of diffusion and dilation in his chest. It seemed to him that he could see his past in the ornateness of the palazzi and his abandonment in other dead romances of that city as he made his way on foot to St. Mark’s for Mass.

The whiteness of the huge piazza, as he entered it, hurt his eyes, and the cold sun, refracting off the snow and houses of whitest stone, somehow cast a cruel objective light onto that dark disheveled self, shaped to shadows, walking into the pitiless glare. The pigeons flew double, bird and shadow, against the Campanile. He stood a moment before the great cathedral, its façade flat as a drop-scene, golden with old mosaics, the four fantastic horses in gilded bronze galloping over the five byzantine domes into the winter light. There was almost no room inside, the close air dispelled only in the extremity of sudden drafts from doors opening and shutting. The enormous crowd of people, visitors and tourists, reached all the way back to the atrium where Darconville, listening to the anthems, prayers, and then the solemn chant of the Puer Natus Est , thought back on a Christmas three years before, tears filling his eyes as he looked up at the thirteenth-century vestibule mosaics on the small domes overhead and portentously focused on the first, the Adam and Eve group, with Eve, a curiously forbidding figure, summoning to mind in an instant of phantom paradox the terrible machinations of Dr. Crucifer. Remorse flooded Darconville’s soul. His throat swelled with a cough he couldn’t expel. He suddenly heard the constant pushing and pulling of his own breath in the crowded darkness there and, turning in panic, quickly staggered outside where he was overcome with an attack of violent hemorrhage.

There was no question whatsoever now that Darconville was chronically ill. Repeated infections, in destroying the bronchi, essentially left only arteries and veins of the lungs encased in scar tissue, and because a constant stream of mucus ran through the bronchioles to the mainstream bronchi, swollen now, no longer clear, and almost useless in terms of elasticity, particularly severe episodes of coughing threatened to rupture the already frail bullae. He had grown accustomed to the situation, however — with almost every day during the month of January being spent over basins and slops — and would accept nothing but the most random and cosmetic attention (often, with threats to the doctor) lest greater distractions prevent the work he was almost maniacally driven to finish. Time! He wanted only more time!

It seemed less important, somehow, to be well than to write well. To require two things, he felt, was to have them both undone. So he was inspired to feverish activity, and his forsakenness brought a renewed flowering of language when nothing of sickness could make him stop and nothing could swerve his pen, the very one, he could not forget, of which in the dramatic boast of his youth it was said no other hand dare touch —”The Black Disaster.” He felt in his fingers that magic pen which, explaining the void, filled it, and taking it up repeatedly returned to work. In pages of violent beauty, slashed across with fierce bitterness, he poured out his threnody. The worse he grew the more furiously he wrote, the words of love and hate snapping into place about this girl — deceitful, common, infantile, cruel, and yet utterly necessary to him — who, in fact, was herself the formal cause of the entire, unpremeditated enterprise, an action she hastened as did Penelope, who supplied the weapon for her suitors’ downfall, for although it was Odysseus who took on the more than one hundred able-bodied men it was she, not he, who remembered the big hunting bow that had been hanging in the inner room. And of method? Darconville only kept fixed to his desk — like Odysseus, again, who sent each bowshot through the holes of the ax-heads while seated —triumphing over the pains of the living to discover thoughts trembling to be born, a situation, oddly enough, that rendered only time for him, not health, the single want in that room.

The month of February, its skyscape dark as thunder, brought no relief. A storm in mid-month left Venice to the mercy of the bitter northwind, the wind-chill factor plummeting temperatures to below zero, splitting brass, stiffening clothes, and forming ice across the pan of the faces of those who dared to try to make their way out over the blast-broken crusts of snow, gelid streets, and ice-choked canals where mere sounds in the air were as sharp and crackling as artillery.