Darconville's Cat (81 page)

  “The dart of Izdabel prevails!

    ’Twas dipt in double poison.”

  “Then think: in a world where penitence is
boastfulness—is this virtue?—and giving an expression of hostility
whereby, the crudest form of bondage, a person is incapable of
repayment—is this virtue? I smell only cadaver in a living body. Is
this the zeal you’d have surround your cause? Think on
‘quietism’—the gift of virtue she’d have you get. The slave accepts
the kindness: it dulls the edge of rebellion and wins the donor a
lifetime of subservience. The virtue that violates, the kindness
that kills!” He shook his head. “Is it any wonder, my God, that the
gospel of Laodicea urges people to be temperate in what they call
goodness
as in everything else?”

  Dr. Crucifer took a breath, folding his tongue in
the mouth that constricted in an ugly munch.

  “I tell you, hard cases make bad law and where the
law is so broad as to be applicable to all circumstances there is
no obligation to obey it in any circumstance. A man must sometimes
rise
above
principle!” he said with an angry smile. “Law,
as I say, is ultimately the consequence of man’s fallen nature.
Hence came first the law of corrupted nature, which they call
jus naturale
or natural law, and among its excellent
principles and rules—hope, ye miserable; ye happy, take heed—can be
found these:
vim vi repellere licet
, violence may be
driven out with violence;
frangentem fidem fides frangatur
eidem
, there is no need to keep trust with one who does not
keep trust;
falsa causa non nocet
, an error in motive does
not effect the validity of an injury in those who deserve it for
another just reason;
fallere fallentem non est fraus
,
swindling a swindler is no swindle;
volenti non fit
injuria
, to one who asks for it, there can be no injury;
si te vel me confundi apport eat potius eligam te confundi quam
me
, if one of the two of us must come to harm, you or I—this,
of course, to be applied,” said Crucifer, his eyes taking on a
lurid look as if lit by the fires of hell, “to whom it fits— then
rather you than I. Oh yes, and much more of the same kind which
must be reckoned among the laws. Why, tongues I could hang on every
tree that might civil sayings show, but that’s as it is, isn’t it?
I don’t think you have to hear more, Al Amin.” Crucifer touched
Dar-conville’s arm, confidentially, as if to bring him further
under his influence and with slippery eyes moved even closer. “You
know what I’m asking for, don’t you?” He looked over his shoulder
like a conspirator in a play and with sudden evaporating
cheerfulness directly asked in a low, low whisper, “tell me, have
you no rasp in your farrier’s kit?”

  Darconville looked up at him.

  “You smell.”

  Crucifer’s rigid eyes shot contempt, and he stumbled
up, caught by reason of its bunchiness, on the hem of his robe and
almost sprang to the far side of the room where as if seized
convulsively he sought to expel, and expel again, and expel once
again his sudden breath which, rattling, seemed to indicate a
valvular disease of the heart. The indurated pause that followed
did not last long. He made a forlorn show of jauntiness, and, as he
turned, his face became more insinuatingly piggy.

  “I told you,” he smirked, walking to the étagère,
“we ‘leaked’—an inadvertence causative to my operation. Repellent,
you’re thinking.” He took up a Stiegel-type bottle and,
unstoppering it, quickly perfumed various parts of his body. “But
you wouldn’t intentionally insult me, would you? Because I have no
dowsets? Have a care, Sir Formal. I am inexact, I told you. I have
no will. I have no tail. I am like the
New England
Primer
,” he said, “ ‘adorn’d with Cuts.’ I’m—incomplete.”
Amused, he held the stopper between his legs and dropped it.
“Here,” he pointed, “I do not stand; I cannot do otherwise. It’s a
wound, you see, I cannot help. But yours,” he said, “you can.”

  Vainly, Crucifer waited for Darconville to say
something.

  “Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame,” he whispered, coming
forward in a hunch and depressing himself into a third of his
normal displacement. “I must say this, and I wish I might underline
it. A nullity and an entity, with like eliminands, yield an entity
in which the nullity-retinend changes its sign. Shall I put it
flatly? Clip the bitch, Darconville! Send her to hell with the lie
in her teeth! Lap her in lead!”

  “Never.”

  “Never say that,” said Crucifer, his hands
coquettishly demential, held high and apart. He pleaded, “You are
complete. You don’t need her. You do not
need
her!” He
turned his head sideways to listen. “All right?” Appeased, he
tapped the bed three times and rose smiling to himself.

  “I do,” Darconville then said softly. “I do need
her.”

  Dr. Crucifer wheeled around, his face spinach-blue
and reptilian, and huffing as if in his rage he would blow a
monstrous bubble out of his mouth like the soul which the old
artists painted flying from the mouths of the dying he screamed at
the top of his lungs, “
You liar! You liar
!”

  LXXXI

  Oratio Contra Feminas

  I’ll set her on the stove and then she’ll melt.

        —HANS C.
ANDERSEN,
The Snow Queen

  RISING to his full height, Dr. Crucifer split the
air with a kind of anonymous shriek and jerked his head with a
nervous tic as if he were trying to pull it off his shoulders, and
then gasping backed away almost comically on those little
pherecratian feet to shake out of his pocket a tiny bottle from
which he took a pill. He stumbled agitatedly to the semisecurity of
a dark corner where, composing himself, he raised his robed arms
like angular fulvous wings and spoke:

  Exordium

  “The time is come, Darconville, to the confusion I
hope of the propagators of this slanderous imputation, that women
are necessary, when I find I must address you in a more ceremonious
form of speech and submit to your judgment this deliberate
exhortation—for what avails the best intentions with the worst
administration? —that you may weigh the nearly inexpressible
baseness into which, but for this selfsame persuasion,
exigi
facias
, you shall otherwise surely sink. I shall make no
commands. I shall ask nothing of you I myself, in celebrating, do
not believe and you cannot give, in spite of the fact that with
Egyptians the obtaining of victory is a point of honor, for where
would be the wisdom in giving such a command to an honorable young
man, of illustrious birth, of an ancient family, or to try to
interpose a jurisdictive power over the inward and irremediable
judgments which in this, as in most cases, must fall to your
choosing alone? I shall be witness for the prosecution. I shall
plead and squeeze. I sense even now that I am about to come out
with violent declarations, but to regulate, to rule? That would,
indeed, be righteous overmuch, for forced virtue is as a bolt
overshot, going neither forward nor backward and doing no good as
it stands. No, I beg you only to
think
, which like the act
of diving is simply to fight the natural tendency towards the
surface and to make an exertion to get to the bottom. Pay attention
then! Empanel a jury! Prorogue a parliament! I come to prove a
crabbed cudgel fits a f roward whore!

  “I have heard enough of this serpent who made you
eat the apple of your heart! I have felt the Decian persecution of
her silence! I have tasted of her inconstant, concocted, and venial
sighs and smelt on her a stink of bitchery that not opopanax, nor
jasmin d’Espagne, nor all the multi-toned scents on Carmel’s
flowery top could perfume. I have seen, finally, more than polite
and attentive gravity should require of anyone, what is, I shall
not much waver to affirm, far less in appearance a girl than a
bass-fiddle of adipose, a steatopygous bulk, a contentious
self-conjugating dirigible swollen with its own piety and blown
with an appetite that, more greatly to be satisfied, might better
betake itself to share in the fate of the dicteriads in the ancient
Potters’ Quarter or those shameless courtesans soliciting in the
sulks and stews of Desvergonia!

  Propositio

  “I see you before me
free
! Give me the
liberty to say what I must ask you to learn not to question to
believe. You are unrestricted, unrestrained, unreserved! Can you be
blamed for this recent piece of inconvenience thrown at you as if a
gift anymore than you should be praised, allured by the need to
feed the pistrix of a carnal heart, for overvaluing another and
pursuing in her the mortal incapacities and shifting but
all-too-human flaws of your own personality? Rhetoric asks what
logic must answer. No. No, you cannot be blamed! Two notes an
octave apart can sound like the same note! You were not in love
with her, only with the desire to win her, for colluctation grows
out of concupiscence as quickly as the stricken hydra of old did
sprout another head. I would not medicine your eyes, Darconville,
for what’s to gain there? But, reason, it is by acknowledging his
own sexuality that man denies the absolute in himself, turns to the
lowers, and proceeds to give woman existence. When man became
sexual he formed woman—that woman is at all, in fact, has happened
simply because man has accepted his sexuality, her very creation
being the result of that terrible affirmation. Man has a sex; woman
is a sex. Woman is only sexual; Man is also sexual. The
lares
and
pénates
of a woman reside below the
navel—she is sexuality itself, the objective correlative of your
weakness. They arrogate to themselves, padlocking upon your neck
their multipartitioned grip, the honor you give them and
flagitiously conspire to transpose into a deferential treatment
toward themselves the weakness usurped from you in the first place
in that shameless, false-dealing, thumb-on-the-scale bit of
joint-stockery involving only tummies, tushies, and thighs!
Bottomry and respondentia!

  “There are two sexes, yes, but the perhaps-for-you
unpalatable truth of it must be faced: one’s attempt at a merger
can only end in heartbreak. When God saw how lonely man was, he
tried again and made woman; as to why he gave up there are two
opinions—one of them is woman’s. No, the difference between the
sexes is a little matter which nature will never be so obliging as
to alter. But bless it! You’re free of her! There is no longer an
owl perching in your sunshine!
Ya, imshi imta, ya bint
al-gatt
? O, if only one could be without the things that one
should have convinced oneself one could
do
without, don’t
you see? There indeed is the hope, but if her weakness and
stupidity should prove to bias you in her favor in spite of my
words, I shall gain this point, nevertheless, to have made it
apparent to whatever lords of shouting preside over our miserable
lives that what was wanting in this case was not a criminal, nor a
prosecutor, but only the terrible swift sword of a just and condign
punishment to see it through! I shall rise and plead the case,
then, and not restrained by the limits of your comprehension, nor
aware of any of mine, my friend, I shall kick open the gates—stand
aside!—and lose the gynaikopoinarian dogs, for a woman always
respects a word she cannot spell.

  Partio

  “I am overwhelmed by the dire need to take immediate
steps and of the many proposals attendant upon, and coincident to,
your renewed health and benediction would press upon your attention
and energetically prosecute several of greater value, urging myself
to the necessity of these several causes: ( 1 ) to counsel you on
the inefficacy of worldly love; (2) to admonish you against the sin
of mulierosity and the sorrow of marriage; (3) to prove that malice
and lechery were ever indigenous to the second sex; (4) to define
the nature of this apex predator; (5) to encourage you to live the
single life and to avoid women who, although made for man, upon him
yet were never thrust; and, finally, (6) to advocate that you draw
from her lurking hole this skulking neutral behind whose every
virtuous act lay only voracious self-interest and pay the crime a
punishment!

  Narratio

  “Woman is the sin of man. He tries to pay the debt
by love. It should come as no surprise that woman was nothing
before the Fall and yet she cannot be understood without it: man
does not rob her of anything she had before. The tragedy man has
committed in creating woman, and still commits in assenting to her
purpose, he excuses to woman by his eroticism, for of all the paths
that lead to a woman’s love guilt is the straightest! (Whence comes
it, by the way, that a child cannot love until love coincides with
sexuality, the stage of puberty?) Figuratively, woman is nothing
but man’s expression and projection of his own sexuality; man
merely creates himself a woman in which he embodies that
disposition to carnality and guilt at being incomplete she
initially caused. The woman who resembles us is always
antipathetic—what we seek in the opposite sex is indeed the
opposite of ourselves, a quasi-electrical phenomenon in which to
find satisfaction we’re attracted by resistance, driving away, at
the same time, the things we truly need. And thus remorse follows.
The vagina is a human denunciation box, I tell you, into which men
drop then- grief, their complaints, their guilt.

  “You say you love. Let that stand, momentarily.
First, however, tett me, in relation to that falsehood iterated
succinctly in the famous Eclogue X of Vergil’s—’
Omnia vincit
amor
’—what has ever worked, won, conquered, or in your behalf
called up recompense that you’d still swear it true? Or shall you
let it serve a Dutchman just to keep that oath? And yet, wooh!—the
thing
does
conquer, for there you lie to copartner the
assault where’s suborned your very own defeat! Feign love, would
you? It’s all very well if you’ve a mate to feign co-equally. But
where is she? I’ll tell you, Al Amin, that hybrid, ambiguous, and
scheming shape—strutting in the vizard of the very Queen of Sorrows
—is wedding her perishable breath to another’s and making
overpoli-tic fetches with her tongue at the very minute you see fit
to chafe and pine over her with your beggarly love! Whispering
impudence! And paddling in his hands! You speak as if forsooth you
knew not the facts! A woman is like your shadow: follow her, she
flies; fly from her, she follows. Resistance, man? Why, resistance
is proof of her
experience
, not proof of her virtue, and
the pity of it all shall never be otherwise despite whatever
despicable little frauenlobs you may hale in to shake their heads
and mutter, ‘Jub, jub!’ You need only look under this head at the
Homeric epics behind the action of which in both, notice, is to be
found the question of fidelity: what are the women doing —it’s
implicitly asked—while we’re here? And all the fighting, adventure,
and sex with goddesses in distant lands is pitted against the
potential betrayal by women of the male world. (All religion, I
suspect, is created to minimize the fear men have of being
betrayed.) When Odysseus and Penelope go to bed—Book XXIII, line
296—it’s the real end of the song. Give the woman no credit,
however. The loyalty got lax. Penelope was only Helen hounded by a
son.