Darconville's Cat (76 page)

  The close reasoning somewhat deranged Darconville,
and it became the point of departure for another one of his fugues,
a theory whereby, in trying to re-establish his hope, he formulated
an approach to experience in which radically opposed and yet
equally total commitments to whatever event might be able to
coexist in a single harmonious vision, and with painstaking
exactitude he tried to make an existence assertion out of
exhibitive but seemingly irresolvable paradoxes and contrarieties:
a realibus ad reliora
. Every negation, he concluded, is
also a determination! And in that dismal set of rooms he resumed
again that strange and willful attempt at psychokinesis—trying to
move something by the power of the mind—and as if convinced that
miracles must exist and didn’t only for want of someone around to
be amazed by them (for wasn’t opportunity but chance favoring the
prepared mind?) he this time began to reason that there must be an
alternate universe that constructs the opposite decision points of
those made in
this
universe, for if what doesn’t happen
could have, so somewhere, in-determinism says, it must! Desperately
he tried to reason logical necessity into his love, for reality, he
decided, was not thinkable but in relation to an activity by means
of which it becomes thinkable: nothing that couldn’t come to happen
is unthinkable; nothing could come to happen that won’t; nothing
that could come to happen doesn’t. I am who am not, thought
Darconville, walking in circles and mounting fertile and despairing
explanations for his own barrenness, for who can affirm, he
concluded, that meaning does not exist in terms which don’t also
imply it does? Am I ignored, he wondered then, only that I might
love the more, to savor in the breach what I can’t in the
observance? How else could Laura have been Petrarch’s when she
married someone else?

  It was insane, Darconville suddenly saw, all of it!
To try to divine exactly and scientifically the ultimate reality
which is not
? With a raw glare of grief into these
monstrous distortions, he saw the tangle of logic for what it was,
a confusion which pointed only toward itself as an example of the
silence it feared and the truth it cowered before. The humiliation
of not-knowing: it was a black fast of the mind, for what he knew
was little, and worthless in the face of what he tried to believe
without knowing, and still less in respect of that which he had
been prevented from finding out. There was no light. There was no
noise. There was nowhere to turn. He felt only the ceaseless
thumping of his heart under the bedclothes, the rigid stillness of
what passed for repose, and, occasionally, the absurd begging
whisper in the darkness, “
Un altro, un altro, gran’ Dio, ma
meno forte
.”

  He soon began to go to the sheds. It was a condition
of one anorec-tic day after another, exacerbated by furious
smoking—and then drinking. He was now afraid to call Isabel,
fearing in an irrational way the grief of fact more than the
nothing of fantasy, wishing as he fell to remembering recollected
visions of her face—laughing, sad, consenting, surprised,
indifferent, affectionate, etc.—for a suspension of that mindless
oblivion, if at all, then quickly, the waiting somehow for the
worst news of all, the news that does not kill hope because there
is none to kill, but merely ends suspense. It was a terrifying
freedom, where to be free was to be alone, to be alone to be
imprisoned and so to be imprisoned
not
to be free. The
smirking folds in the curtains, the bedsheets, a coat thrown over a
chair seemed at moments to leer at him. He sometimes thought he
heard whispers, that someone was standing beside him in the
darkness there. He would confuse one event with another, beginning
to think of one thing as a consequence of something else which had
in fact occurred only in his imagination, often the product of
nightmares that were followed by an overwhelming apathy which
formed, so to speak, the reverse side of his previous terror, all
leaving him in utter bewilderment with neither spirit to spend nor
resolution to spare. He began to suffer severe attacks of diarrhea
for days on end and to experience the illusion of
water
everywhere—on his bed, on his arms, on the floor. One night he
unexpectedly caught his reflection in the bathroom
mirror—frightening himself—a matter that gave way to supernatural
fears and speculations, the worst of which was that he began to
think by performing various acts in combination, no matter how
banal, he might, by inadvertence, summon up the Devil. He lost all
track of time. Once, when the secretary of the English department
telephoned to ask if he knew he had a class waiting for him he hung
up on her. He only prayed for day to end, for night to fall,
drinking heavily now to stem the tortures of insomnia which he
actually began to believe someone was
doing
to him, and
dawn never broke that he didn’t awake—
lassatus sed non
satiatus
—with a weltering grief at the very first start of
consciousness. He was in Cambridge no more. He was in the depths of
Malebolge, where the pains are not felt if you’re half-dead unless
you’re also half-alive.

  The agony came to him in tenfold terror one night
when, after downing half a bottle of liquor and howling a
repetition of wild, importunate cries to heaven-—prayers only in
the broadest sense, for they grew increasingly more isolated from
anything touching on need or belief—he fell upon the bed into a
haphazard heap like a dust-devil. It was then that he had the
nightmare: he was alone and threading through the weeds of an old
graveyard, past half-veiled urns, when he saw an angelic stone
figure with flowing hair averting her eyes with a regretful hand
and gesturing in pain as she stooped for eternity to lay a
stone-wreath on a barely traceable tumulus, woven over with wild
witch-grass, in front of which a lichen-covered cross leaned
desolately off-true; a crone, her face like an old tin
peck-measure, with smears of dough left sticking to its sides,
inexplicably appeared nearby and pointing to the angel cackled,
“
Is it me? Or is it I
?” He shrank from her and approached
the stone figure slowly on dread feet and suddenly froze in fright,
for upon closer inspection he saw the angel’s face fixed in a
hateful smile, its cruelty sharpened by a livid scar down the cheek
just below the eye! And then, underneath a hathi-grey sculpture of
himself
, he read the legend on the tomb—

              
Darconville

              
Le
Rival Donc

        [[SKULL AND
CROSSBONES]]

  And then he was sitting up, breathless, his eyes
loops of fright. The bedpost assumed the face of a Dutch
sooterkin!

  Welcome, Sir Diomed!

  And, leaping at it, Darconville would have effected
the brutal elimination of Gilbert van der Slang right on the spot
had not the spectre within his throttling grasp dwindled back just
as suddenly into a bedpost. The rage he felt! He had thought he’d
heard enough of this shadowy creature in the ostensive reduction
Isabel favored him with back in Fawx’s Mt., an ill-concealed
pretext lisped as if she were wooing a cat and yet revealing
what?—a little baggy-trousered midship-mite with his thumb plugged
into his nether land and a mouth shaped like Flanders, the land
that traded in many tongues! It was impossible to ignore this
creature, as he had his brother, and Darconville now absolutely
thirsted
for information about him. But the regrets!
During all those years when it would have been of capital
importance to pay attention, everything conspired to the opposite,
with both of them, lover and cuckolder, flying flags of convenience
until it was too late. To know him, nevertheless, would surely be
to know her! It wasn’t enough that what had happened was true; it
had to be explained! And yet only to hear a banal commentary on
this thing which was incomprehensible—what was to be learned by
that? What would he be told, falsehoods told against one suitor
only to be reversed for another, that both might come to believe
with a strength proportionate to the inaccuracy or even the
unlikeliness of the information what Isabel provided? Come, tell a
pin! And then what would he learn? Deceptions pried out of a score
of shattering discoveries only to create, in the unchecked
bluntness of a nimble investigation, a sudden new value for them
they never had and so bring the two closer together in the fierce
protection of it? No, strike not a stroke, he thought, for
dexterity will obey appetite when the time is right. Govert!
Gilbert! The princes orgulous! Newts and blindworms! Jackanapes
with scarves! What didn’t they deserve? Thank pity, thought he, if
you would keep your ears!

  Darconville’s mind, however, now became his eye. He
felt as love seemed to die, hate seemed to come alive, as if the
very emotions fed on each other for proof, but still determined to
it he refused to accept what had taken place and strove, almost
superstitiously, to dedicate himself to an ideal of patient
clearheadedness lest the demands of fanaticism, coming headlong and
malicious, kill the sweetness he saw he needed for Isabel to come
back to him. He prayed his pathetic prayers, staying up late and
engaging in rigorous nights of exomologesis and palm-thumpings, and
then one night found that waiting was no longer enough. It was
finished. Had he not tarried? Aye, the grinding, but one must tarry
the bolting. Had he not tarried? Aye, the bolting, but one must
tarry the leavening. Had he not tarried? Aye, aye, the kneading,
the making, the heating, the baking, and the cooling, aye, the
cooling, for one may chance to burn one’s lips, but tarry he could
no more. Shivering, he felt a sensation of physical cold coming
upon him, the kind strangely associated with, and coincident to,
either sadness or amorous expectation, and so he picked up the
telephone. The time had come.

  He dialed: closing his eyes, he clasped the receiver
with both hands. When suddenly he heard Isabel’s voice he literally
couldn’t speak—the long days gone by, the pointless suffering, the
awful love for this girl misassembled in thought’s astonishment all
he wanted to say. He could only see her gentle eyes, her mouth, her
sun-shot hair. She asked who it was; he whispered her name. The
silence that followed reached to forbidding degrees, an
incalculable suspension like that moment of unknown consequence
that comes when time, by a stare, seems to drop away in the
intensity of trance. What, she asked with an overtaxed edge in her
voice, what was it he wanted?—a question that became the sudden
rectification fact imposes on memory, transforming his desire now
into the terrible obsession he expressed and then forcing the
answer she used, in a kind of grace, to slay with speed: “
It’s
too late
—
you’d better face it now! You’re mad as a
hatter
!” And she banged down the phone.

  And then suddenly a hideous scream filled the
room—the most dreadful and abject sound Darconville had ever heard:
he sat white with terror, quivering, as it rang in his ears with
inflexible steadiness until a silence, like denial, fell about him
telling him what he could not feel and still could not believe. It
had been his very own voice.

  He sat there, in the darkness, shivering in the
dreadful chill of his diarrhea. Then he stumbled over to the
mantel, blew out the vigil light, and took a bottle over to his
desk where he slowly prepared the moment—he artfully composed a
letter to the Naval Academy on official Harvard stationery
requesting a photograph of Gilbert van der Slang on the pretext of
his having been selected by the college for some special award of
merit: a sprat to catch a mackerel. He drank from the bottle in
long pulls, gulping more, then finished it all, wishing he would
die—not that he faced death with fortitude, he merely faced life
without any. Laboriously, he proceeded to dress and for the first
time in weeks went out of his room, the effort in simply descending
the stairs—where he called and called and called his cat—leaving
him weak to the bones and whiter than a corpse.

  He made his way to the corner of Mt. Auburn St. and
mailed the letter:
extinctus pudor
. It was a very cold
night, making the simple act of walking—a struggle in illness and
fatigue and drunkenness— next to impossible. Crossing back to Adams
House, he looked up toward the morbid rooms with the pulled shades
and tears of bitterness sprang to his eyes. You are crueler, you
that we love, he thought looking toward the sky, than hatred,
hunger, or death. He reeled. “You have eyes and breasts like a
dove, and you kill men’s hearts with a breath.” A group of students
stood in the Adams doorway on Bow St., and the gaunt unkempt figure
pushed past them.

  “You could say excuse me,” exclaimed one of them
with disdain. Darconville turned slowly.

  “I would have,” he said, seriously, “if I didn’t
have to speak to you.”

  The door closed, and he was no sooner inside before
the hallway suddenly moved; the floor seemed to buckle. A strange
black light leapt in front of his eyes. Darconville reached for the
nearest wall to steady himself but fell to the floor, his face a
greyslick, and lay there in a state of obdormition, more dead than
alive, but alive still, alive nevertheless, relentlessly alive to
the mysterious and deathless reality in which for no known reason
he was living.

  LXXVIII

  The Prodigal Son

  But now experience, purchased with grief, has made
me see the difference of things.

        —CHRISTOPHER
MARLOWE,
The Jew of Malta