Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

DARCONVILLE

Dark. As a thief s pocket.

ISABEL ( twicking her thumbs )

I want to be safe. I can’t say it any better, I can’t think anymore, I feel something will happen to me, I failed my courses and now have to take a terrible job, I have no friends but you, and you’ll go away, I know you will, I would want to go with you but couldn’t, I know, what bothers me is missing you and wanting to be with you, like everyone does, yes, I appreciate you trying to find out what’s wrong with me, most people wouldn’t do that, which is why I’m afraid of them, and, O, I know I’m lucky about so many many things and shouldn’t be sad, I know that, but then I think of all the wasted opportunities in my life and begin to believe I actually deserve so much trouble for that and all the unhappiness I’ve caused in the past—

DARCONVILLE ( swallowing )

The past?

( pause )

I feel about me the presence of something

Not of this world, a bleak forbidden remnant

Standing in this room.

ISABEL ( stirs up )

In this room?

DARCONVILLE

A shadow.

ISABEL ( frightened )

A shadow?

DARCONVILLE

I hear a perfect echo, making dialogue a mock.

It now arises you must tell me what

Not asked would truly send me mad, in shock.

Please don’t give to me an answer, though,

Born of a desire less than mine,

No answer of deliberation, nor answer fine,

I beg you neither from a page of fairy,

Fantasy, silly fescue, or of formal wit,

Your name below a paraph lovely writ

That might distract me from a truth you owe.

But only give to me an answer. So.

( pause )

Speak it plain. Are you in love with Govert?

( shaking uncontrollably, Isabel cries out )

I have named the name then? Govert.

The simple truth, miscalled simplicity.

ISABEL

You simply do not understand.

DARCONVILLE

I think I’ve not been asked to understand.

ISABEL

The person that you mentioned—

DARCONVILLE

Govert.

ISABEL

Govert, yes! Govert van der Slang ! I do not love him!

I do not! I do not! I do not! I never did!

( pause )

A few years ago, that family moved down the road from us to a farm at the foot of the Blue Ridge mountains, in Fawx’s Mt, as you know. It’s hard to recollect how I—. I remember only seeing them at school, the boys, well, not all of them, I don’t know. I would just visit Zutphen Farm, they were like a family to me, but what does it matter anyway? I guess I — pitied Govert, who was the outsider of the family and different; no one understood him or cared or took the time to listen to him, no, not his mother and his father was always somewhere else. They ridiculed his music, he plays the guitar, and so I tried to do what little I could, although I know what you’re going to think, but it’s not true and never was. So anyway he depended on me, I guess, and I grew closer to him and he to me because his brother, more successful supposedly, were never at home eidier but were always away at—

( pause )

sea.

DARCONVILLE

That would be the coast guard?

ISABEL

The navy.

DARCONVILLE

In which case, you didn’t see any of them.

ISABEL

Not when they didn’t visit.

DARCONVILLE

Which however they sometimes did and sometimes do?

( pause )

Come, any news nourishes the gnawer of himself.

ISABEL

Sometimes, yes.

DARCONVILLE

Whereupon you knew it. You are close to this family.

ISABEL ( softly )

I would say — I don’t know.

DARCONVILLE ( ruefully )

Every division of a line produces another line.

( pause )

My God, will jealousy make questions of itself?

I’m deuce-eyed. I’m shillaber and shaman.

I never metamorphosis I didn’t like.

Creeps in the dusk, it’s true, before

One begins to look about for it.

I can imagine lovers trooping out

To you in afternoons of any weather,

Stealing as they did in Sparta old,

Legally, carelessly, and turning me, dumb,

Beruffianized, an out-fooled fool, sold,

The stupid, unpiperly make-bate I’ve become.

They come to kneel before you, penitential,

Or crouch in the spawl and wood and bits!

I flash a light and look to see lice—

Then look again and find their nits!

Look! Trillions of them, fawning and bowed!

The color of their eyes? Bice. Bice.

( pause, to himself savagely )

Will many be burnt? Crowds. Crowds.

ISABEL

Dreams! Dreams! You talk like a book!

DARCONVILLE

I promise you, I am no dreamer,

For destiny will pass the dreamer by,

Because for nothing ever does he ask

But sits at peace within his very dream;

Whereas, you see, it must be more than clear

That even on a night as this one is

I would freely barter all my soul,

My body, mind, and disappointed hands

To free a mere smile in your lovely face.

But can’t you see that? Can’t you tell?

( pause )

What then, pray, has he to do with dreams

Who wakes away the night he wants to see

In sleep alone: but sleep alone so deems

The restful dreams I see it keeps from me.

I can report what takes the place of dreams:

Red magic, a witch that’s howling a filthy cry,

Helldogs barking in contrapuntal,

A taloned pig that slits its throat to die!

I fear in the night what’s always the same

And descry through the darkness, coming frontal,

Suddenly poising to squat on my chest,

Its eyes dirty gems, its sticky wings high,

A grinning monstrosity that’s flown up from hell

To rasp in my ears one word, only “Govert!”

“Govert!” it rasps; it rasps again “Govert!”

It queaks. It spits. It chatters in fits.

The image will harden and then be dispelled.

I reach to throttle what disappears;

In midstroke, there, I swipe at its face

And there again, again , the same face sits!

It forks out a tongue it wimbles in hate—

In a rush of murder I behead only space.

( pause )

The noctambule? The thing doesn’t stay.

It recedes of course like its antitype true

To some grey shoreline of fierce unrest

And out on the Straits of Lurking abides

Where, if a vow will bind in the modern world

And luck of design a residue, test

Me by holy relic and then by oath

If someday I don’t contrive to meet both.

ISABEL

That “someday” has a cruel ring to it.

DARCONVILLE

Cruel to devildom, sweet frail?

( pause )

There is irony, the figure of speech

Which spits like a bivalve from its cackpipe.

I have an enemy, lady.

( pause )

Forgive me. That dissatisfacts.

ISABEL

He—

( pause )

—is not your enemy.

DARCONVILLE

He is not my enemy, and I am Jack Ketch:

And that is two lies, to tell the truth.

( pause )

But there is, I see, Dutch comfort either way.

It is you for safety, me for fright—

And yet a fear my rashness renders lax,

For with gimp-legged Vulcan I would limp tonight,

Hobble out on stilts like poor Amphionax,

Sit along the yawning edge of hell

Lest otherwise in safety’s reasoned spell

Or in the bland assurances of tidiness

A sacrifice of limit be imposed on us.

But then do we then balance each other so well

That as one of us must love the more

One of us shall love the less?

Does here some existential burden sore—