Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

A snowstorm followed. It was a blizzard of incredible dimension, the white winds blowing in havoc and flooding at the crest of the tide and driving monstrous drifts into houses half-tilting into the sea over the battered seawalls. The shrieking winds, rattling windows, blew down every corte and calle, with great drifts rolling and curling beneath each violent blast, tufting and combing with rustling swirls and twisting up into vertical spirit-spouts that tore down chimneys, rang bells, and shattered glass. For days the storm wreaked havoc, snatching little whiffs from the edges of the sea, twirling them round, and making them dance into the chines and chinks of the piles of the old city, pointed with barbs of frost. Darconville was almost unable to control his patience in the maddening cold. Blowing smoke, suffering severe headaches, he worked on steadfastly with a kind of desperate courage, clinging to the thing whose worth, increasing, could now only be realized through the knowledge that it would soon be taken away, and, finding a degree of force and enthusiasm that is given alone to the doomed man, he never gave up. A death sentence concentrates the mind wonderfully. He knew he had no time to lose.

The room got colder and colder, its mold fusty in spite of the fire, and the black east wind, having changed, was now striking off the raw Adriatic. By now, the lattices were quite blocked up with snow, sifting in where the lead in the iron-frame had failed, and water stains spread down the inner walls. Darconville began not to be able to bear it. His feet, freezing, began to sting. He rubbed oil into his leg joints. He covered himself with blankets and went through the house, trying to walk the stiffness out. Downstairs, he saw that the frost had pierced through the ribs of the old house, striking to the pith of hollow places, and in several places the frost-blow had burst the walls. The windows, coated with ice like ferns and flowers and dazzling stars, were opaque where they hadn’t fallen weakly inward from the weight of the snow against them, and in the empty front room a mere whisper of wind through the chimney had come to the old kettle upon the hearth-cheeks and cracked it in two.

After five days, from over across the Lido the sun burst forth upon the world of white, but what it brought wasn’t warmth, only a clearer shaft of cold from the violet depth of sky. The temperature never rose a degree outside, and the sunless rooms of the palazzo thawed not a whit. Darconville, utterly frail, his body almost attenuated to pure spirit, looked more like a forpined ghost than a living man, his face thin, the long hands once so full of power now drawn and pale. He sought to distract his mind by several quick excursions from priory to priory for wood, begging for fuel to stay alive. The icy air made him giddy and lightheaded, his feet feeling like weights as he plodded through the thick snow. As he walked the streets, it seemed to him that passers-by looked at him malevolently or suspiciously, and each step somehow became a step toward the sharp edge of the grave, each corner more unreachable, and every bridge a bleak wicket to Elysium. But of all things the very gravest to his apprehension was that he wouldn’t finish his book, the completion of which, he felt, waited now on less than several weeks, possibly sooner. And so driven, he would get his necessities, return, and immediately go back to work.

The body’s distresses often made Darconville restless and irritable, and yet, while gathering ills assailed him, he found serenity of spirit in his writing — no longer an attack now on the nature of someone who, three thousand miles west of his writing hand, was so wayward she was without peer but a cosmic perspective on love and hate which, while relating to a personal subject, reached to the nature of man himself. The quest overrode the goal, in fact. The manuscript had changed, developed, and the death of every tender sentiment in him, as brought home by the mute but marshaling evidence he was forced to discover about her in retrospect, miraculously gave birth to a freedom from her — a release to see that ends touch beginnings, for if a necessary function of the imagination is to imagine its own absence, that absence allows one a glimpse into a world even more excessively interior than even fancy can devise, a desert of contemplation, a retreat, in which, with one’s senses atrophied or impoverished, truth is no longer created but divulged. The familiar is too familiar to know. And so living in solitude as he had been for so long, he saw with increasing amazement that universal thoughts were infinitely richer to reflect upon than the particular people who engendered them were to study. Every word is a metaphor for a deeper truth that sign hides. Description is interrogative.

The old lady in the Corte del Gatto, guessing the serious nature of Darconville’s illness, came to increase her visits and toward late February, shocked at the extreme disorder of his condition — a wasting diarrhea had begun and the room took on a noticeable malignancy — no longer felt she could leave him alone. She carted firewood up to the room, left him various nostrums, and scolded him apprehensively, muttering with various but incomprehensible signs of resignation. His moods changed. He became impatient and fretful. When she considered how ill he was and what allowance should be made for the influence of sickness upon his temper she tried to indulge. He went from seeming imperturbability to sudden explosions of anger to bouts of sighing. Then on February 27 he had another frightful hemorrhage — one might have tracked his path from one cold room to another, the bleeding was so profuse. She immediately notified the doctor.

There was nothing to be done anymore to dissuade Darconville by argument from further exhaustion, and the imminence of dire peril only increased his resolve to work down to the last pages, but then all this went over as, vomiting blood and yellowish-green sputum, he could no longer muffle alarm with still another effort. The doctor, wailing in impatience, forced him by compulsion to his bed, administering some old tetracycline pills which, having lost their effectiveness if not their color, he’d found in the musty reaches of a samples drawer and pressing him, all the while, to go immediately to the hospital on the Rio dei Mendicanti as the weather would be getting worse. Darconville refused. The doctor asked him where he would be willing to go, to Kreuznach or Soden? Bagneres-de-Bigorre or Luchon? Bournemouth or Brindisi? Darconville, coughing, struggled up and banged the bed. “I will stay here ,” he cried, almost in tears, “in this Capharnaum! In this Capharnaum !”

The winter days, darkening early, seemed interminable, and all the following week the feeble light, swallowed up in swift successive shadows, left the sloping snowdrifts machined hard against houses frozen to the inner stones. The skies looked sick, and at the end of the week the soft and silent snow again began to fall.

Darconville’s bed, to stem the chill, was pulled around to the fireside. A salamander, filled with oil — sitting next to a pail in which, repeatedly, his poisonous effusions were spent — had been secured to supplement the loss of heat that seemed to evaporate so quickly through the cold-packed walls. The wind whistled through rags stuffed into the windows. The air, confined, was unwholesome but worked somewhat against the night air, the damp bed, and the swelling in his feet and legs, lately come to a continuously aggravated condition. He would not stop writing. Nor would he permit himself to be undressed out of apprehension of the pain he would have to suffer in being dressed again. He felt cold and then complained of a more than usual degree of heat, a pain and oppression of the chest, especially after motion; his spittle was of a saltish taste and sometimes mixed with blood, especially after long fits of coughing which were all invariably proven dangerous now, with increasingly severe hemoptysis. He became hoarse. Water was steamed in pans to foment his lungs and ease breathing, and yet all the while, in spite of the cold sweats, the nausea, and the apostemes which appeared in the lower body, he shaped his last and best efforts in a shaky calligraphy around the work at hand for yet another page. Another page. And another. Un altro, un altro, gran’ Dio, ma più forte , thought Darconville, ma più forte !