Darconville's Cat (23 page)

  Away with drawn pentacles! Away with my pretty
pages! Away with formed perfections, compounded electuaries,
phoenixes raised out of hypocritical flames!

  If he didn’t write, Darconville determined, so be
it. He was in love, and the lover who didn’t prove selfless
committed a solecism with his heart. And if his writing became
poorer in image, it would become more human, he felt, in intent.
Away with a prose squeezed free of the real! The shallow jealousies
he’d felt low in his soul ate through to his conscience, shot
through with self-indulgence and merciless egotism where the
difficulty of writing—even the attempt—had its origins. He had
committed, he saw, Durtal’s sin of “Pygmalionism”: corruptly
falling in love with his own work while bearing a grudge against
anything that went against it. Onanism! Onanism and incest! It
was
a new sin, the exclusive crime of artists, a vice
reserved for priests of art and princes of gesture, the father
violating his spiritual child, deflowering his dream, and polluting
it with a vanity that was only a mimicry of love. Was that one not
mad, thought Darconville, who draws lines with Archimedes whilst
his house is ransacked and his city besieged? The slogan of the
artist is
eritis sicut dii
. The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp
is a dissection scene of the physicians.

  Darconville prayed harder. He saw that jealousy was
not the obverse of vanity, rather its ugly twin, the failure in
full sumptuousness of one’s private aesthetic, and that was what he
suddenly came to loathe in the aesthetician—antagonism by
exaggeration for what of nature he couldn’t realize in himself.
Jealousy! Jealousy! Was it the cause or the symptom of his madness?
What did it matter, for mad it was, the madness that parodied love.
A monster! Other’s harm! Self-misery! Beauty’s plague! Virtue’s
scourge! Succor of lies, which to one’s own joys one’s hurt
applies! It proved a faithlessness, not a devotion, to the girl he
loved—and fed on the solitary weaknesses and perverse images of
those symbolist projecticians and chimerical madmen for whom
language, immoderate, diseased, cabalistic, was an entity, not an
activity. To love Isabel was to
live
for Isabel, for what
sculpture casts a shadow that can be touched, what shadow, empty as
shade, thin as fraud, that doesn’t recapitulate the static figure
throwing it? Were his fictive characters then the servants who’d
live for him? Foolish in the conception, twice foolish in the
extreme!

  Sorrowfully, Darconville looked up at the beaten,
traduced Christ, crowned with thorns, stabbed and naked, omnivisual
over all the tragedies of mankind that were as real as sin and as
heartless as betrayal.

  I will polish no massebah with my kisses, vowed
Darconville, nor suffîtes will I light to myself. He rose and,
walking to the front of the church, lighted a votive candle.
Reflected in the shiny obsidian foundation there he saw his face.
It was sculpted to shape affectation and to peddle vanity, like one
of those hieratic or royal effigies in relief on the antique medals
of the Medes. He wished to pray as he watched the asterisk of fire
touch the wick aglow and so prayed more deeply for simple
selflessness than he had ever prayed before—and, feeling an uprush
of grace in the very intention, shed the night in his heart and
called it light. And walking out of the little church he felt
confirmed in not only the worth of his whispered prayer but in the
realization, as well, that Christ had become man and not some
bell-shaped Corinthian column with volutes for veins and a mandala
of stone foliage for a heart.

  XXXI

  A Gnome

  Hang up philosophy.

        —WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE,

              
Romeo
and Juliet

  “I WANT TO BE what I was when I wanted to be what I
am now,” said Darconville to his cat after he got home. Spellvexit,
with one eye raised in a slight circumflex, rather wished his
master might descend into particulars, as aphorisms tended to be
vague. But Darconville said no more, locked his manuscript into the
trunk, and went out for a long walk in the bright sunshine,
stopping several times to listen to the nightingales, for spring
was advancing rapidly, with multitudes of primroses, a prevalence
of crocuses, and on some trees, sycamores, chestnuts, blackthorns,
the lower buds were already opening into leaf.

  XXXII

  Fawx’s Mt.

  I slept and dreamt

  That life was joy;

  I awoke and saw

  That life was duty;

  I acted and beheld

  Duty was joy.

        —RABINDRANATH
TAGORE

  “MY UNCLE is deformed,” said Isabel quietly and kept
staring straight ahead. Although it was the first time she’d ever
mentioned that, Darconville said nothing in reply. The Bentley
wound through several verdant declivities, bumped over a small
wooden bridge, and slowly took the hill when the loaftops of the
Blue Ridge mountains came into view. It was pine country with
faintly Augean smells, a rolling landscape running into lopsided
barns, tiny sikes, and dark groves. This was only one of several
trips that year along that familiar serpentine road through
Scottsville, into Charlottesville, then north over the pummeled
turns to where Isabel lived, but Darconville had, for some reason,
never met the family. It seemed to be more of a consolation,
somehow, for Isabel finally to have got shut of her news— how long
she’d kept silent!—than suddenly to hear Darconville say it didn’t
matter. And then they arrived.

  A tiny man in a queer peddler’s hat was thrashing in
the turnips down behind the house. The name on the mailbox read:
Shiftlett
.

  “O Lord!” squealed Isabel’s mother, snatching at her
haircurlers and bouncing up from the sofa, the springs of which
flexed with the noise of Homerican Mars, “why, welc—” she barked
her shin “—come to Fawx’s Mt.” Rushing to snap off the television
set (a buzzer show) and clapping a bottle (cheap gin) into an under
cabinet, she revocif-erated her boisterous welcome. She took
Darconville’s hand and squeezed it damply. The striped housecoat
she wore—of a croquet-ball pattern—billowed behind her. She
explained to Isabel, while dumping an ashtray sprouting a bouquet
of long butts, explicitly what she wanted Darconville to forgive
and implicitly forgave Isabel what Darconville didn’t really need
explained. It was Saturday, she said. A good ol’ reason, she said,
just to take it easy. She said not to mind her one bit. “We’ve sure
heard right much about you from Isabel, my,” she exclaimed,
straightening on the wall a dime-store painting (browsing horse
ignoring sunset), “I declare we have. Now you make yourself right
at home here, y’hear?”

  Isabel seemed embarrassed. But Darconville was
frankly relieved. The magic flute of his imagination had, previous
to this visit, blown a few melancholy notes: the High Priest
Sarastro caught out trying to rescue Pamina from her wicked mother,
the Queen of Night. It was not perhaps to be overlooked, least of
all by the subject, that he was a Northerner, older, a Catholic, an
artist, and that he drove a foreign
car
! And he never
wanted to put in a position of having to be civil to him anyone
who’d have to be; it seemed discourteous. It would have been
perfect simply to state that he loved Isabel right then and there,
if not to justify his presence then at least to free his mind, but
he knew Isabel felt awkward about expressing intimate words in
front of anyone, especially, as she once confided to him, her
mother.

  “Call me Dot,” smiled Isabel’s mother, lighting a
cigarette and covering with that commodious housecoat most of the
kitchen chair upon which she perched. She was a comic but slightly
nervous woman, a mudsill whose English was a queer gumbo of
mispronounced words and faulty grammar. Suddenly, the filter of her
cigarette, to her great amusement, burst into flames: she’d lit the
wrong end. Her face lost its modest attractiveness when she
laughed, less for the grin that was too wide than for the
myocardial ischemia one heard at the height of risibility.

  A tall long-footed woman, she had short perked hair
and her eyes, too close together, almost oriental, hesitant enough
at times to suggest an affrighted conscience, had a protuberant
root-vegetable look which under certain conditions was more
exaggerated than, but slightly resembled, her daughter’s. Her
cheekbones were pronounced. It was a kind enough face which,
however, became queerly distressed and almost cootlike when she was
drunk or made a stupid remark—the frutex and suffrutex, surely, of
keeping herself too long to the strict boundaries of Fawx’s Mt.—and
she spoke, gesturing with secretarial hands which looked like tough
bast fiber, in a slovenly Southern accent that refaned even the
most regular words into small indistinguishable poverties. Her
conversation consisted only, always, of misdis-tributed stresses,
spoonerisms, and other ingenuities that extended to using the word
“city” as an adjective and even to the founding of a new state,
“
Massatoochits
.” It was, nevertheless, the stupidity that
endears. And she had suffered.

  Mrs. Shiftlett loved to talk. Her surname—a
not-royal one—had been legally reassumed following the dissolution
of her marriage, an acidulous failure she hoped to forget in the
process of lifting herself out of general disenfranchisement into
local respectability. The axiom that has it that there is one good
interview in everyone held true in this case. The story was,
however, an old one. A Scotch-Irish trimmer who’d wandered out of
Arkansas with only one change of socks and even less principle than
education, Mrs. Shiftlett’s husband—Isabel’s father—decamped almost
at the very moment she was born and then remarried soon after. (“He
had no conscience,” confessed his ex-wife, who added not only that
she’d never marry again but vowed, somewhat cynically, that grand
and mighty visions were sure as hell visions not of this world. )
The hapless mother, sans wedbed and getting even further separated
from her alphabet, scrooped about as best she could from Norfolk to
Richmond to Petersburg trailing along her daughter through an
inclement world of hunger, disappointment, and recession for more
than a decade. They lived for periods with relatives, struggled and
saved, and then rented a listing farmhouse on the edge of the woods
adjoining Fawx’s Mt. whereupon, it so fell out, her only brother,
having initially come to the hospital in Charlottesville for a
perilous operation—it was explained he’d been shot in the face
during a card-game—eventually moved down from over the mountains,
some three or four years previous, and settled in with them. They
pooled what money they had for a somewhat better house. Life, such
as it was, continued. And Isabel kept her father’s name.

  Mrs. Shiftlett bird-wittedly gaped through the
window down to the turnip patch and gulped a drink from another
bottle that suddenly appeared. “You know he’s—”

  “Yonder,” interrupted Isabel, nervously. They hadn’t
been in the house ten minutes, but she turned to Darconville with
pained, pleading eyes. “But let’s go, anywhere,” she whispered,
“
please
?”

  And so they did.

  Fawx’s Mt. was a jerkwater—a little rustic
boosterville running in a crazy thalweg along the base of the Blue
Ridge chain and hedged in by slonks and dark deciduous forests of
rotting logs, leaf-mold, and eaten-away pines. The village
consisted of a single street—a woodcart rut brimming with
rainwater, wisps of fallen hay—where hunched together were a midget
post-office, one general store-cum-gas-station, and two sad old
churches of indeterminable denomination. It was a place sunk in
blind ignavia, a chaos, a nulliverse of stifling monotony, little
movement, and a zipcode of ee-i-ee-i-o. Nature itself, weirdly,
seemed not to have existed there in any shape of health. A terrible
seriousness breathed through the place, a grim deutero-canonical
uneasiness in which, with suspicion their mood and subjection their
lodestar, the townsfolk all trod the particular path that
paradoxically led to isolated houses, to isolated lives, and to
isolated fears. It was as if the people there felt preternatural
powers spied down on them with evil intent, with each haunted,
whether in the ghost of blight or the spectre of depression, by
whatever dismal fantasy he chose as penalty for his puppet sins.
There was a subtle mood of guilt there, of unproductive
renunciation, of anger. People kept to themselves. And there was
usually never a soul in sight. You might have heard the sound of a
buzz-saw somewhere, a pigsqueal from a faraway farm, wind. But that
was all.

  On one particular day, however, the hamlet was all
astir. This was
Saturday
—the day of exception in the South
that can repel the heaviest stone melancholy can throw at a man and
which alone among others, even in the hazy-mazy stillness of a
Virginia heat that breeds flies, sloth, and humidity in the
scuppernong vines, can relieve responsibility and somehow refer it
to fun. And with what joy is it met! With what excitement!
Suddenly, everybody appears. The tools and trials of the workaday
week are put away, inhibitions are forgotten, and all tumble-belly
together—in feed-hats and hickory-staved bonnets, chinos and
calicos, crocheted shawls and cracked leather jerkins—for a bit of
community: ice-cream socials, barbecues, country sings, quilting
bees, barn dances, or, hell, just an afternoon of plain ol’ hanging
around. It was the one day in Fawx’s Mt. when all the good ol’ boys
who worked their truck patches or humped pulpwood all week could
put on their boots and boiled jeans—the original straight
stovepipes—and come into town to suck beers, ogle girls, punch each
other with mock sidewinders, and swap stories in terms generally
borrowed from the category of human evacuations. But best of all
they preferred just to sit around and gawp.