Darconville's Cat (102 page)

  Darconville walked back over the narrow and acute
streets and sudden bridges to the Corte del Gatto, a tired gallery
of ancient chimneys and leaning walls: dwellings of different
styles and epochs and states of preservation all jostled together
but comfortable enough, he remembered, to have made him happy years
ago. What had happened? Had he changed or had they? Now it was all
an appalling, proliferating entrapment of hulks, with no
interruption of line-building, haunted by class disability and
poverty and fetid contamination, a phantom street of oppressive
silence, a
rioterra
of dark mysterious doors that once
opened straight upon the water but now crouched down behind the
dwellings on the dockside of the more respectable Corte della
Miseri-cordia, blind to them on the other side.

  The grey palazzo—Darconville’s—stood at the very
end, the sot-toportico, bolted by a door, once having led straight
through to a walled courtyard at the back where now could be found
only broken statuary, weeds, and several metal pergolas, rusting
away. The voices of orphans out there, once raised in play, had
long gone into the stone.

  He let himself in, to a rush of dampness and Roman
cement; the door, booming shut, echoed through three floors. He
stood down in the antichiesetta, looking up. The walls were cold
and thick and bare. The rooms were empty, long ago having been
despoiled of their furniture and drapes and wall-fixtures, along
with the beautiful desk on which, it seemed so long ago, he’d first
begun to write. The lofty windows, half-covered with pieces of
linoleum, could only be secured by renewing the cross-irons that
had been pulled away, and the stone arches, with open fissures, had
been clumsily buttressed by poor plastering. He took the flight of
stairs, by cornices carved with flowers and broken walls open to
brick facings, to the second-floor landing—where the rain had found
its way between the arch-stones and was there arrested by the
frost, operating like a wedge and dislocating the stones—and
climbed to the upper floor. He quickly built a fire and cut up four
lemons to add to the boiling water in the huge kettle hanging in
the fireplace, an old massive chimney grate with half-dogs for wood
or coal. By the feeble light of the fire, after drinking the weak
toddy, he wrote until three in the morning, his inspiration dying
with the last embers in the hearth. The manuscript had by now grown
to more than three hundred pages, much of it taken directly from
his notebooks, and what had already been done, a kind of
commitment, gave him strength to do more, although this particular
night’s work he couldn’t re-read for want of energy and a terrible
ache in his diaphragm. He felt feverish, so drew a pile of blankets
onto the bed of gamy old wood got at a priory, and slept.

  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.

  XCVIII

  Wear Red for Suffering

  The soul’s dark cottage, batter’d and decay’d,

  Lets in new light through chinks which time has
made.

        —JOHN CLARE

  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.

  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.