Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

THIS IS A STORY of murder, which, as an act, is as apt to characterize deliverance as it is to corroborate death. There are certain elemental emotions that touch upon powers other and larger than our own discrete wishes might allow — for every consciousness is continuous with a wider self open to the hidden processes and unseen regions created in the soul by the very nature of an opposite effort — and while, taken together, each may prove the other simply by contrast, considered separately neither may admit of various shades in the law of whichever whole it finds reigning at the time. That which produces effects within one reality creates another reality itself. I am thinking, specifically, of love and hate.

We cannot distinguish, perhaps, natural from supernatural effects, nor among either know which are favors of God and which are counterfeit operations of the Devil. Who, furthermore, can speak of the incubations of motives? And of love and hate? Are they not too often, in spite of the comparative chaos within us, generally taken to be little more than a set of titles obtained by the mere mechanical manipulation of antonyms? I have no aspiration here to reclaim mystery and paradox from whatever territory they might inhabit, for there is, indeed, often a killing in a kiss, a mercy in the slap that heats your face.

There is, nevertheless, a particular poverty in those alloplasts who, addressing tragedy, seek to subdistinguish motives beyond those we have best, because nearest, at hand, and so it is with love and hate— emotions upon whose necks, whether wrung or wreathed, may be found the oldest fingerprints of man. A simple truth intrudes: the basic instincts of every man to every man are known. But who knows when or where or how? For the answers to such questions, summon Augurello, your personal jurisconsult and theological wiseacre, to teach you about primal reality and then to dispel those complexities and cabals you crouch behind in this sad, psychiatric century you call your own. It is the anti -labyrinths of the world that scare. Here is a story for you. Your chair.

A.L.T.

DARCONVILLE, the schoolmaster, always wore black. The single tree, however, that shanked out of the front yard he now crossed in long strides showed even more distinct a darkness, a simulacrum of the dread probationary tree — trapfall of all lost love — for coming upon it, gibbet-high and half leafless in the moonlight, was to feel somehow disposed to the general truth that it is a dangerous and pagan notion that beauty palliates evil.

He was alone. It had always seemed axiomatic for him that he be alone: a vow, the linchpin of his art, his praxis.

The imperscrutable winds of autumn, blowing leaves across the porch, had almost stripped the tree, leaving it nearly naked and essential against the moon that shone down on the quiet little town in Virginia. It was late as he let himself into the house and walked up the creaking stairs to his rooms where, pulling a chair to the window, he sat meditatively in that dark chamber like a nomadic gulsar — his black coat still unbuttoned — and was left alone with those odd retrospective prophecies borne in on one at the start of that random moment we, for some reason, choose to call the beginning of a new life.

The night, solemn and beautiful, seemed fashioned to force those who would observe it to look within themselves. He watched awhile and then grew weary. He took a late mixt of some rolls and a bottle of ale and soon dropped asleep on his bed, dreaming out of fallen reason the rhymes received with joy he shaped accordingly. It was only early the following morning that he found on the bedside table next to his pen and unscrewed cap — a huge Moore’s Non-Leakable — the open commonplace book in which, having arisen in the middle of the night to do so, he had written a single question: “Who is she?”

SEPTEMBER: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret. The shutters were open. Darconville stared out into a small empty street, touched with autumnal fog, that looked like the lugubrious frontispiece to a book as yet to be read. His obligate room, its walls several shades of distemper, was spare as the skite of a recluse — a postered bed, several chairs, and an old deal desk he’d just left, confident in the action of moderating powers, to ease his mind of some congested thoughts. He looked at his watch which he kept hung on a nail. The afternoon was to have been spent, as the morning had, writing, but something else was on his mind.

There was an unfinished manuscript, tentatively called Rumpopulorum , spread out there, a curious, if speculative, examination of the world of angels, archistrateges, and the archonic wardens of heaven in relation — he appropriated without question the right to know both — to mortal man. The body of material, growing over the last few months, was formidable, its sheets pied with inky corrections and smudged with the additions that overheated his prose and yet brought it all to test.

The human skull, his pencils in its noseholes, that had been ritually placed on that desk a week previous — his first days in the South— seemed appropriate to his life, a reminder, mysteriously elate, of what actually wasn’t, something there but not, a memory of man without one, for not only had he more or less withdrawn from the world, long a characteristic of the d’Arconvilles, but the caricatures of mortal vanity were as necessary to his point of view as the unction of religious conventionality was featureless.

Darconville’s cat leaped onto the windowsill and peered up, as if collating the thoughts of his master: where were they? How had they come to be here? What reason, in fact, had they to be in this strange place? The young man, however, continued leaning by the window and reviewing what he saw. But there was another view, for behind it, or perhaps beyond somewhere, in vague, half-blind remembrances of wherever he’d been — sources of endless pleasure to him — he dwelled awhile to find himself, looking back in time, surprised at the absence in it of any figure but his own. He felt no particular responsibility to memory but accepted his dreams, to which, living altogether as a twin self in the depths of him, he could speak in inviolable secrecy.