Darconville's Cat (103 page)

  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
!

  Paper is patient. The creative pen kept to the
receptive paper—it
leapt
to use, through every phase of
perception, with thoughts, unsummoned and unannounced, pensioned
out of the blandishments of common reality, constantly stealing
upon him for inclusion, transmitted down through the memory of
those who lived in ancient times, races illimitable, to be resumed
across the years in all the emotions, passions, experiences of the
millions and millions of men and women whose lives of love and the
loss of it insensibly passed into his own and so composed it. The
room
itself
was a lesson compacting his goal: there was
absolutely nothing else to do but write. He wrote doggedly,
stopping only to rotate his wrist to relieve a graphospasm or to
try to press an ache out of his diaphragm. He wrote desperately,
searching the past, as fear picks out objects in the dark, to
identify what would otherwise forever loom as phantoms to his
sight. When there seemed to be nothing left, he slept, then rose
again to write—no, not with an elevation available at will, but
through the whispering of innumerable responsive spirits within him
that stirred like the invisible motions of the mind wavering
between dreams and sleep to remind him that out of fatal mortality
could be snatched something in the life of the world that did
not
participate in disintegration but could transfigure
it. The end, indeed, was near. And then one night, alone, with only
the Holy Logoi standing above him in a thousand diaphanous shades
of ether, Darconville looked under his hand and found that from
disorder—from the spectacle of order that was so vast it only
resembled disorder—a civilization had emerged. Future became a
fiction. The work was finished at last.

  It was March by now. A deep peripneumonia had set
in, causing pooling of secretions in Darconville’s lungs, the
exudation of pus, and the dissolution of already scarred mucosa.
Small blood vessels were rupturing, sending up viperish clots of
black blood in remorseless acceleration. The inadvertent swallowing
of clots produced nausea and retching which the doctor sought to
check by drastically limiting his food. At first, he thought he
would utterly go mad from hunger, but soon he could eat nothing
solid without suffering immediately, neither the loathly bowls of
milksop which appeared at every meal nor the whimsical
remedies—jills of broth, lac ammoniacum, and the mixtures of
vulnerary roots of plants—which the old lady credulously hoped
might overcome this terrible illness that by now had set all
medicines at defiance. He lay silent, flushed with fever, the only
sound being his labored breathing and the clup-a-clup of tongue
upon arid palate. Curiously, he kept the manuscript by him, as if
reluctant to surrender it, sometimes reaching weakly for a page to
add a note, to turn a phrase, to knock off the waste marble.
Suddenly the fever, denominated ardent and inflammatory, rose
higher, ushering in a bounding pulse and a hammering pain in the
head. There was a coarse twitching of his muscles and impossible
congestion. The manuscript was placed in a black tin box.

  Darconville had now come under the shadow. His body
was completely extenuated by the hectic fever and colliquative
sweats which mutually succeeded one another, the one towards night,
the other in the morning—and then he was cold, a chill creeping
over him like another emotion sent to temper one already there, too
absolutely there, a terrible and unresolvable complementarity in
which radically opposed but equally total commitments to the
meaning of life seemed to coexist in what became a single
phenomenon that, irreconcilably, was also and was at the same time
nevertheless the secret at the center of all truth. Under his
bedclothes at night he shook like jelly, unable to think for cold.
He was no longer able to turn in the bed. An unpleasant odor, like
dissolution itself, emanated from his cold sweat. His mouth was
cold. His cheeks were cold, hollow, withering into themselves. He
could feel an inrush of bitter cold from the window through which,
silently, he watched the night-by-night movement of the moon
eastward through the stars. Distance was a mocking vision to his
fever-lurden eyes, but he said nothing, for when a person’s trouble
comes down to the final intimacy he gives no one access to it.
Custodi nos, custodi nos
, he thought as he lay there
awaiting the resolution of the mystery, for the lights of heaven
itself were dim. The very stars wandered.

  It was a windy, whispering moonlit night in Venice,
the frost-fog looping around the lower sky in mid-March when
Darconville was hit with a sudden eruption in the forepart of his
chest, a slam that gave him such violent pain when he sprang up to
gasp for breath that he quickly drew in his bowels to prevent the
motion of the diaphragm. He screamed out in agony, as his back
seemed to break. The old lady, praying the rosary in a corner,
crashed over a chair spilling a posset of tea as she rushed to wash
his mouth of spittle, at first thin, then becoming grosser and
streaked with blood, now filling his throat as infection eating
through the weakened wall of a bronchial artery tore through a
rupturing bulla, fragile from repeated coughing spasms, and boiled
into his lungs. He clutched for the old lady’s hand, impossibly
trying to say something—but, heaving, vomited up a tremendous rush
of bile and blood and, completely beyond himself, incapable of
explanation, he suddenly couldn’t speak. Confusion, utter and
horrible, surrounded him, because confusion was complete
within.

  Astonished, he leapt to his feet in the grip of
massive shock.

  It was as if, evacuating at every step—his wild
protesting hands streaming with blood—he were being driven
backwards with each violent convulsion. But the hands were reaching
out as his brain, fleeing the onrushing hypoxia, was rapidly
flashing images he was unable to control, and with memory distorted
in the replaying reflexes of acute cerebral damage he for an
instant actually looked into the
past
! He seemed to be
struggling out of the hematosis in an attempt to describe or call
upon something he couldn’t yet see, and then with a terrible
snorting noise which seemed, as it rose through the phlegm filling
his throat, to burst his nose in a lethal explosion of bright blood
that spattered all over the bed and sheets and cold floor, he tried
to speak— mouthing words that wouldn’t form. Groping blindly, he
made a motion with his hands as if something were coming towards
him and stumbling forward, just before he fell, reached up in a
last fatal moment of blindness to cry out inexplicably and
desperately and loud, “
My cat! My cat
!”

  Then something came towards him at last.

  XCIX

  The Black Duchess

  Like as it was with Aesopes Damosell, turned from a
Catt to a Woman, who sate very demurely, at the Boards End, till a
Mouse ranne before her.

        —FRANCIS
BACON

  
The Black Duchess
, a 15,000-h.p. tanker
built specifically to carry liquid cargoes, was meanwhile steaming
back up the Atlantic with Gilbert and Isabel van der Slang on
board. They had been married, on deck, by the ship’s captain on
March 13 with no relatives in attendance and spent their honeymoon
on the island of St. Maarten by the Virgin Islands. There had been
no announcement of the wedding beforehand. A small notice of the
event appeared one week later on page six of a Charlottesville
newspaper with no other details, no mention of witnesses, and no
accompanying photograph.

  C

  The End

  Attired with stars, we shall forever sit triumphing
over Death and Chance and Thee, O Time.

        —JOHN MILTON

  IT WAS FIVE O’CLOCK in the morning, the earth’s
shadow still undisturbed by dawn, when a municipal traghetto took
Darconville’s body across the grey Rio dei Mendicanti to the
mortuary of the Ospedale Civile for the post-mortem examination.
The chimes of the Campanile sounded the hour through the fog. The
burial took place after a fortnight’s delay on the cemetery island
of San Michèle in a reused gravesite, dug out of the frozen ground
when the sketching of clouds on the dismal horizon, after that
interval, blew in a cold rain. There were no mourners, no rites,
and no funerary exequies other than that of a recitation over the
coffin by a Capuchin friar who read from a simple hymn:

        ”Veni, Creator
Spiritus,

        Mentes tuorum
visita,