Darconville's Cat (95 page)

  “But who can speak of the injustice of hatred? O say
otherwise! It’s almost comical, isn’t it, that somehow our sense of
justice never turns in its sleep until long after the sense of
injustice, nudging it half the night, has been thoroughly roused?
What makes so many applied Salvationists and advowees-of-nicety
think so highly of love is that it hides their defects in the
observer’s eye. But hate, disabused of such notions, sees those
defects—and wakes to act! It douses the fairy lamps! It chooses
direct verbs over substantives! It screams for the Lord of the
Psalmist who breaks the ships of Tarshish with an east wind to pull
someone apart! It multiplies its pain. The very nature of such a
hunger is that it’s forever unappeased. The morrow of every victory
is an-ticlimactic. It is a step toward reality, a spasm of will, a
shout in the face of all violation of rights to
equalize
.
Feel no guilt, then, Nes-torian. Blows break, that’s all. The
shattering is only the natural
contre coup
of the
strike.

  “I have asserted that hatred is only love outraged,
for the privation of something presupposes being accustomed to it
(
privatio presupponit habitum
), and that between these two
natures, so antipathetic, something essential is shared: each
remains, by definition, the single and sole reservation of the
other without which its own grandeur carries no weight—whom we love
more than are indifferent to we are never far from hating. What
other lesson can be found in the vine and the bays, the burr and
the lintle? But then what is abstractly taught of the two that is
ever heard, ever touched, ever seen? How miserably one ignores the
other in the passion of what it wants, dismisses the other in the
heat of what it seeks! But the tragedy is not that hatred is love
outraged, nor that it is love gone by, but that an ideal has been
squandered in innocence only to have to buy another to redeem it in
guilt. How
mistakenly
can a person have wanted what, taken
away, repudiates the meaning of life itself!

  “And what exactly does love engender?
Self-realization? A shameful paradox. A found ideal? The nature of
the ideal is that it is never found. Gratefulness? Why, it is
arguable that for a man to feel grateful to a woman is actually
injurious to his love for her: he so hates himself for being unable
to do for her all he would like to do that he comes to curse
himself as small in the reflection of the consequent generosity
she, in simply acknowledging as beyond her worth, refuses to blame
him for not showing. (We love someone not for what she can actually
do for us but for what in fact she allows us to do for her! ) No,
the spirit is always the heart’s dupe. Hatred realizes, finally,
that love has its source in the need either to find one so gullible
that he can lie to her or to love someone so blindly that she can
lie to him. And what best—because most incontrovertibly—does it do?
You can prove one from the other by algebra. Love engenders
hate!

  “You are now so stricken! You lie below in the
flashing storm so deep in pain in its violet light the brightness
of day seems an ancient dream in perpetual darkness, perpetual
night, but blasted, dying, you now perceive a fateful something
that is yours by right. All things, however, struck by a
thunderbolt fall in the opposite direction! ‘O true believers,’
says the Koran, ‘the law of retaliation is ordained to you for the
slain: the free shall die for the free!’ Tune for you has stopped!
Gone is peace of mind! You have become fixed forever— sulphured—in
the explosion, alive only in that you would now kill, happily, if
only to be given the chance to say why!

  “But all will be well! It is the lot of genius,
remember, if to be opposed, then also to be invigorated by
opposition. Reverence to this! Hatred is meant for those who
establish standards, not those who follow them.
Ours
is a
Vatinian hate: the supremest. We behold our enemies in an eternal
vigil, like the lifeless cobra in whose eye the murderer’s image is
forever imbedded, and actually crave to hate that constant
hallucination of face—whether smirking through the attack it
signals or the absolution it seeks—which becomes, in fact, almost a
badge of those enemies, for we attribute to them not that state of
normal human happiness shot through with the common moods of
mankind that should move us to entertain for them a feeling of
kindly sympathy but a species of arrogant delight which merely
pours oil upon the furnace of our rage. Hate, indeed, transfigures
people no less than does love. It boils and concocts into poisonous
nourishment all the facts and fictions it compounds from the lives
of its enemies and fuels the delight it abhors. On the other hand,
since it can find satisfaction only in destroying that delight, it
imagines it, it believes it to be, it sees it in a perpetual
condition of destruction—not unlike yourself, for you are
also
dead! Dead to pardon! Dead to mercy! Dead to harmony,
forgiveness, relief, liberty, and trust! Why, isn’t it clear? No
living creature has ever been burnt by lightning without being
killed! But, now, you’ve become the burning itself!

  “Give your enemy no credit, by reflected glory, for
rousing the flame -—the passion, the power, the
fire
is in
the flint that is struck, not in the steel that strikes. You alone
are consumed. Wherever you go, nevertheless, your enemy is with
you. You are baptized now in the Fountain of Ardenne which has the
power of changing love to hate for those who drink its waters—you
are born in it, confirmed in it, devoted to what can break into
open madness even fifty years later in a pain so absolute and
unbearable it approaches the most dizzying heights of pleasure, for
your grief has found the one thing on earth that
ruins
it.
You shall have no peace before its name. Alive, it is your plague,
instigates against you, throttles all you are—you must leave
yourself, in fact, to get at it. It is a vice whose name is
comprehended in a monosyllable but in its nature not circumscribed
by a world. You’re like the chimera—nothing will satisfy you. You
would dwell happily within the skirts of Jericho and dare the blast
of a ram’s horn if upon it depended her death! You would tattoo
crucifixes on the soles of your feet to trample the Savior who has
refused your salvation if you could but barter hers! You become the
Dog of Montargis! You would rip out your own heart to hurl at her!
You would sell your birthright, forfeit an inheritance, and suffer
no end of ill-repute simply to spit forth in the spirit of Juvenal
whatever Latin hexameters could tell her what she was! You would
live in a nightsweat and breed horns and stand a bear and a lion in
the way of Assur only to have at her once, cramping your own
fortune to mal-promulgate hers and breathing hope but to fly into
convulsions of joy that the world be destroyed if only she can
suffer in the process!

  “The obsession is upon you. You never feel it is
accomplished, killing her always, until you never wish it ever had
begun, for while perfectly instructed in the tribulation there’s no
surcease of trial, and though pausing now and then to wonder of the
marvelous once flashed to us and then withdrawn behind black veils
and concealments if both might not perhaps exist less in lars and
lemurs than in
another
of ourselves, you are driven hard
upon the deed again, and again, and again, until over the waste
void that bounds our thoughts and yawns profound between two worlds
a bridge of fire has leapt from earth to the unknown shore, and the
abyss is spanned.”

  XCI

  A Carthaginian Peace

  “There are four sweets in my confectionary—sugar,
beauty, freedom, and revenge,” said Egyptiacus.

        —RALPH WALDO
EMERSON,
Journal

  “I RUB A SORE, I see,” said Dr. Crucifer, picking a
cigarette out of his box, “whose pain will make you mad. I should
take heed. You’ll bruise her to jelly.” He paused, raising an
eyebrow, for a moment of exquisite registration. “Won’t you?”

  Darconville almost smiled.

  “You will be forgiven many sins on account of her,
let me vouch for it. Now, Al Amin,” he said, his left hand feeling
to scratch the bottom of his chair with a questioning matchtip,
“put me in the picture.”

  “I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Speak to the problem anywhere you’d like and speak
without pretexts. Crucifer can hear.”

  The cloister lamp was lit. Its eerie glow, however,
actually darkened rather than illuminated the large living room;
the purple walls became shrouded, and the pieces of black oak
furniture were drawn out to such long and forbidding shadows that
it seemed as if each was determined to revert in shape to the
ghostly length of its original state, while the great sideboard
loomed up like some ancient and evil deathship run aground against
the obscurity of the far wall. It was, for the medieval panelwork,
the dap-joint beams above, and the oddities of acquisition placed
here and about, every bit as curious and remote a folly as the
creature who habitually kept himself confined there and who now sat
back to listen—his eyes closed and directed straight up— in a pose
of exaggerated deliberation.

  It was without hesitation, having been confirmed to
the policy by the speech on hatred, that Darconville now made his
disclosures: about the tape-recording, the letters he’d written,
and the details—excepting the curse—of what had recently taken
place. The front of Crucifer’s throat, as he listened, was very
long, untenanted, dead white. As he heard his each and every
suspicion corroborated, he blew out a ball of smoke but kept stone
silent: the conviction he showed by showing no reaction whatsoever
made manifest what did not require assertion. Then Darconville
showed him the photograph of Gilbert van der Slang.

  “The proud wooer?” asked Crucifer, smiling and
sitting up. He put his hand in front of his mouth and shook with
mirth. He actually took time off to laugh; he devoted himself to
it. “A hole in his chin. Ugly beast-ears. Effeminate. But shall we
forgive him?” he asked, biting his lip, his heavily lidded eyes
mocking his own remark. He spat in sarcasm. “Why, a bat could see
he couldn’t be a chum of ours if he chuckled. It looks as though he
suffers from suprasellar craniopharyngioma—the affliction of having
a less-than-thimblesized penis. I am reminded of the featherless
White Orpington—this being one, I have no doubt,” said he, smiling
viciously and puncturing the groin in the photo with the hot tip of
his cigarette, “you’ll soon caponize.” He dropped the photo. “Here,
but this is an IQ 60 Epsilon Minus in a circus suit. She’s the one
you want. The blowing datura-apple! The cozening coypu! The culling
spick! The mock-humble, footprintless cvoirth!
Qui facit per
alium facit per se
: she who does a thing through another does
it through herself.” His face went suddenly cold. “But tell me,
have you answered the lies on the tape—or the one that allowed a
complete lifetime of them?”

  “She loved me once,” whispered Darconville. “I
believe that, first of all. I feel she—”

  “You
feel
?” sneered Crucifer. “Then direct
intuition is capable of discerning
a priori
truths as
adequately as the inductive method of intellect reveals them
a
posteriori
?” He sat back. “You outdo the Egyptians, probably
the vainest people in the world.” He wiped his mouth. “She loved
you? She
loved
you?”

  “You can’t think that a lie, can you?”

  “The Monch!” said Crucifer. “The Eiger! The
Jungfrau!”

  Disbelieving, Darconville just stood there. It was
useless to disagree, for, as with all censors, it was impossible to
discuss; the only position possible was acquiescence, a mood
increasing with the diffidence he felt standing there under that
high lamp and its paradoxical light which didn’t eclipse the
darkness but rather somehow made it visible.

  “I’ll ask you again: the lies, have you answered
them?”

  “No.”

  Crucifer looked away. “Inference: that you listened
to it, that you approved it? O, but she’ll like that.”

  “
Approved
it,” snapped Darconville,
disgustedly. “What do you mean?”

  That was better. Crucifer wanted the
confrontation.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “O do
don’t
, will you.”

  “Tell me.”

  It was simple.

  “Revenge,” said Crucifer, point-blank.

  Darconville slowly walked to the window, stood there
a moment, then softly made a vow to his reflection. “I will wait,”
he said, “I will bide my time. But I will never rest until—I don’t
care when or how or where—she comes, in seeing what she has done,
to have as heavy a heart as I have now.”

  “
Wait
?” asked Crucifer, puckering his right
eye in a malicious wink. “While she gobbles chocolates and makes
play with her eyes and fans like the fast women of Paris? Stoicism
is
the disease of young men, isn’t it?” He sighed. “Time
is on your side, I don’t doubt—what there is of it. I’ve always
said that the best reason for disbelieving in God is that he never
gave us enough time in life to pursue enough knowledge to find
sufficient truth. That we find it at all—as you,” he cried,
pointing at Darconville and raising his voice to an angry trill in
which he couldn’t prevent a slight trace of madness from creeping,
“apparently
have
—should always be taken, one would assume,
as a welcome if miniature surprise.” He gulped bile. “But you don’t
deign to think so, do you?”

  “I should explain—”

  “Bullfuck!” shrieked Crucifer, pounding out his
cigarette and struggling out of his chair in fury. “The only
explanation is a bad one! You’re at
war
! You will have a
cripple’s temper until you have found your feet! You think you
should ignore this owl’s pellet simply because she is low, stupid,
and insignificant?” The question whistled out of his nosehole.