Darconville's Cat (90 page)

  “
Canaille
!” shouted Darconville.

  The librarian looked up.

  “In June—I don’t remember the sequence—that’s when
it began, I think. I was really excited about getting married and
had no intentions of not marrying. Ask my mother. Then I remember I
got scared —I panicked. It was incredible! But by then, I forget
exactly when, you had left for Massa—”

  
Stop.

  The time-frame? It was crucial! What was the
time-frame? Darconville felt an entire period had passed with
Isabel waiting not only for him to leave but to see whether this
neighbor of hers would propose to her! He was certain they had made
their rendezvous sometime during the summer,
long
before
the fall. She was always a coward and cunning all the time, but
while September made her fickle, July made her a liar!

  Perspiring, Darconville quickly tapped the rewind
button, pushed play, and strained with every fiber of his being to
listen beyond the nonversation to the exact words. But she hopped
the hole.

  “—got scared—I panicked. It was incredible! But by
then, I forget exactly when, you had left for Massatoochits. And,
you know, I think if you had said that day, ‘Please come,’ you
know, ‘I beg you,’ I almost wonder if I wouldn’t have come. I
remember
exactly
when I was thinking that—I was wearing
that violet jersey with things, flowers, little ones, on it.”

  “Resign your purple, Pretender,” said Darconville,
who knew that a liar could always be detected by that one
ridiculous use of detail.

  “When you left I missed you, I did. I worried or
wondered—I don’t know—you’d get up there and find—oh, I don’t know.
I have this picture of Harvard, all those tremendous people, and I
always thought I was never quite [
smile
] enough. So
[
yawn
] a couple of days after you left, I didn’t miss you
as much. I wanted to, I guess— miss you, I mean. But after a week
had passed, I just knew. That’s when it began, I think. I just—I
don’t know—
knew
.”

  It was frightening. Darconville was almost now
unable to recognize actual truth as separate from the violence of
her fictions, for she had by her new lights turned revisionary and
set upon and savaged fact, like the voracious Terrare who can seize
a live creature with its teeth, eventrate it, suck its blood, and,
devouring it, leave only the bare skeleton behind. Furthermore, the
mode of speech, all borrowed apocalypse, was itself a
fabrication—at once, honeyed and perfidious. It was more than a
crazy dysphasia fighting ataxaphasia. There was both a fake voice
and a real, with neither, curiously, able to hide the kind of
muflisme
that is fascinated with the analysis of itself,
but while the former was a sort of mistily gentle babytalk, a
canting simulation of virtue spoken as if offered like scented
incense to evaporate in this harsh and brutal world not of her
making, the real voice, cold as proof, might have been muttered in
covens, weaving low in a shuttle of bitter contempt that was full
of unseen and unpropitious events in the throat. She had a soul
like a jackknife, the kind that opened everywhichway.

  There was more, however, and constant observer
continued confronting inconstant object.

  “I’ve told you what I remember. And so we come—to
Gilbert, and if you
dare
to come down here to try to talk
to any of these people, I’ll not be here, and that’s a promise!
I’ve heard about your letters and telephone calls. I knew in a way
they’d be coming, [
cruel laugh
] You didn’t think I was
very perceptive, did you?”

  Darconville found
that
perceptive. In her
words he could see her scar whiten and the ugly close-set bullet
eyes protruding.

  “Well, do your worst! You’re mad as a hatter, that’s
what I think. But it doesn’t matter, you and I have absolutely
nothing
to say to one another, [
long pause
] I
admit it, look, you were nice—that’s not the right
word—[
sigh
] gracious, I suppose, about being willing to
let me go out with other guys if I wanted to. Well, to be honest
about it, there
were
times back in Quinsyburg when I did
want to be with someone else—him. That’s when it began, I think. I
suppose I should have told you. But don’t you see? They were
neighbors, it was nothing, Mrs. van der Slang was like my second
mother. I was close to that family, I knew them so well, but as I
think back, everytime I was with Govert—it’s funny, really—I
actually wanted to be [
audible grinning
] with Gilbert. He
was home, anyway, for a couple of days at Christmas and a couple of
days in July—”

  Darconville, mentally correcting her own emotional
appraisal with hard fact, suddenly jerked his head forward. Naked
discourse can imply the image it lacks.
Keep talking
, he
thought,
stay tired and keep talking
.

  “—although this past year-and-a-half he was on a
ship, nineteen months to be exact. I
didn’t
see him when
he came home this summer. He didn’t get off the ship until the last
week in July and afterwards he went up to New York for—”

  He swiftly jammed stop, rewind, and listened to the
replay.

  “—summer. He didn’t get off the ship until the last
week in July and—”

  The mind whose preoccupation prevents it from
grasping wholes, Darconville knew, must sooner or later focus on
details, and this one detail, out of the blandest and dullest
pantomime of truth he’d ever heard, fairly flew. Again: stop,
rewind, play.

  “—the last week in July—”

  Darconville snapped off the machine and quickly
bolted down the stairs of the library, running out across Mass.
Ave. and through the dismal rain that had begun to fall dashing
over to Adams House. He went to his room, pulled the top drawer
entirely out of the bureau, and began rummaging through the
assortment of odds and ends. It was a jumble: an old watch,
photographs, the inscribed blue cups from England, notebooks, pens
and pencils, the bloodstone Hypsipyle had given him, a Cloogy
pamphlet (“Glints From My Mirror”), rough drafts of several
stories, a missal, and among all the papers, along with that queer
illegible manuscript from Dr. Crucifer’s library, a pile of
correspondence in an elastic band. He sorted out the few she’d
written to him the past summer, some four or five, and set aside
the very first one—suggesting the postponement of their wedding—
ever to broach that subject. His heart fell into his trousers, as
every last one of his aspirations and enthusiasms suddenly
transferred from the upper to the nether regions. The letter was
postmarked Fawx’s Mt., Thursday, July 23!

  The falcon had come to the fist. Isabel seemed all
of a sudden to grow material, a superficies of flesh and bone
merely, a creature of lines and surfaces, a language in living
cipher no more.

  It was goodbye to curtains and crowns, goodbye to
the roses of Thalia and the laurels of Melpomene. It was the end of
all journeys and joyfulness. Darconville saw her as the very
antichrist of deceit, false not through forgetfulness but while
remembering, a figment of his imagination with no mercy, no
meaning, and no memory. To see the creature who has hitherto been
nearly perfect, divine, lose under your very gaze the divinity
which has informed her, defined her, given her life, suddenly grow
commonplace, turn from flame to ashes, from a radiant vitality to a
corpse? It was a sorrow almost literally unable to be borne, a
spectacle without measurable dimensions in this world, for in an
instant, she became a complete—
complete
—mediocrity.

  Through the pouring rain, Darconville walked back to
the library. A poisoned taint was on everything: the poisoned air,
the poisoned buildings, the poisoned city. He shoved through the
doors, the contorted grimace on his face intended to mimic the
satisfaction of the discovery he had made, but he of course knew
otherwise, as he who by being poisoned does poison know. He sat
down directly to the machine again, a hatred in his heart more
deadly than the potions of Exili, and turned it on.

  “—and afterwards he went up to New York for almost a
month which carried him to the end of August practically, getting
the license —his second mate’s license—and so in spite of
what—”

  Darconville punched stop and replayed it.

  “—his second mate’s license—”

  Once again he hit the buttons.

  “—his second mate’s license—”

  Darconville suddenly burst into loud ironic
laughter, for there are passions the choice of which extend way
beyond man’s volition. It revved up to such a high comical pitch
that there might have been local consequences—the librarian looked
up again—had it not as suddenly wept down to vexation and died into
the supplication of a long, pitiable, and despairing sob.

  He banged the machine and the voice continued.

  “—and so, in spite of what you may think, there was
absolutely nothing whatsoever going on here last summer, even if
you decide to think so, which makes me feel nothing is on
my
conscience. I didn’t see him when all this trouble was
going on. It had nothing to do with it. That’s the truth.”

  
The truth
? Pistols without cocks! Helmets
without vizards! A damnable lie! It stuck like corruption in her
throat and could be recognized under whatever complexion, contour,
accent, height, or carriage it might choose to masquerade! It would
dog and chain her, invigilate at her deathbed, and be cast into the
nativities of her children or else impartial Justice wore a
blindfold round her eyes to shield her shame! False spoken! False
sworn!

  The final words that were heard, as Darconville—-his
mind a box of cats—reset the machine to play, were now no longer
Isabel’s, but increasingly the terrible and insistent repetition of
certain others from the recent past, drowning hers out, which
somehow in their echo awakened more evil than had that hideous
falsetto-like whisper in which formerly they’d first been uttered:
if a wrong must be made right, if a way be found, if it should
lead you to, could you? Do something
?

  “I saw Gilbert, anyway, on September 2, I remember
it well, because I asked him if I could come over to Zutphen Farm.
I had a real nice time that day, I just had fun, but I’ve already
told you that. (I don’t think you really ever paid attention to
details, I really don’t.) And the next day when I went back over
there, there was this horse who had this awful cut, and I’d gotten
some medicine—and in a way [
smiling gurgle
] that’s when it
began, I think. I don’t think you understand: I’d known Gilbert
before
; there was no reason to hide anything; we could
talk to each other, don’t you see, openly? [
pause
] I saw
him just about every night after that. We had—fun. Not just fun.
Fun, you know, isn’t the most important thing in life.”[4]

  [[4] The value assigned the abstract notation
(
Fun
) in this rigorous proposition, while it may seem only
putatively factual, actually extends itself here to a philosophical
calculus of common truth-functions beyond ostensive definition
(
isn’t the most important thing
) to the suggestion of an
unsubstitutable and immutable absolute (
in life
) by which,
had it never been uttered, the straightforwardly empirical protocol
established in the pursuit of sufficient linguistic assessment
might otherwise be distorted.]

  Those were the last words she ever spoke to him.

  The tape, ending abruptly, would stop forever there.
There was no more. It was all gone, lost, swallowed like a mineral:
his love, belief, time and trust, self-respect, gifts, all efforts
and energy, kisses and cares. And neither heaven nor hell, gold nor
God, could make it good again. Dreams, he saw, were for devils, not
for men. He put the cassette into his pocket and walked aimlessly
into the absurd streets outside, the rain-smudged sky overhead
looking as if it had been roofed with the oldest lead. He raised a
fist. Spirit of the Sky, remember! Spirit of the Earth,
remember!

  When Darconville returned to his rooms not one of
the many objects scattered about failed to shriek its scorn at the
whole false enterprise. She had lived for years beside him
apparently on terms of hatred and incomprehension, but where had
been the art to read that mind’s construction in that face? He
didn’t know now and no longer had the chance to see. But the
consciousness that the insult was not yet avenged, that his rancor
was still unspent, weighed on his heart and poisoned the artificial
tranquillity he once tried to obtain by other distractions but
could again no more. Darconville was a Venetian. He looked from one
empty memory to another and found nothing lasting or loving in them
of the girl whose soul once touched them all—a person so free from
conviction, so totally dependent on the temptations and
conditioning of her immediate environment that to understand her
now required nothing more complicated than a look. There was an
image of special desolation in the two blue cups that lay on the
floor: in them he seemed to locate all his grief. A whole cloud of
experience condensed into a drop of hatred—again, he had given her
exactly what she wanted—as he picked them up, whirled like a
cornered animal striking out, and threw them with a violent curse
into that fireplace, above which the Harvard shield now seemed the
color of arterial blood, where they shattered to pieces in a sooty
explosion of tongs, dogs, and trammels.

  The succeeding moments seemed but an imitation of
life. Whereas once Darconville had no bond with the darkness for
loving alone in the upper light, that changed—radically now, for as
he stood in the mess of that room he happened to pick up the
strange piece of paper which upon his first visit to that
enfer
of a library had slipped from one of Dr. Crucifer’s
books. Was it—a code? He turned it sideways, then upsidedown. At
first it seemed nothing more than a piece of illogical scribia with
lines of miscast letters running on meaninglessly, irrespective of
whence or whither. It was written in a kind of bizarre agraphia
going right to left, he saw, in looking-glass letters—with the
words spelled backwards!