Darconville's Cat (96 page)

  “Power is subtle. Fiddler crabs can wear away whole
jetties. A pin-worm fells an elephant, as Dutch beetles can an elm.
The rat flea, not the rat, causes bubonic plague. Cancer chews out
the heart of a hero; a kiss in the open air betrays a prophet. And
a knife”—he yanked the Egyptian
khangar
out of his
academic hood and violently stabbed the air—”a knife flashes and an
emperor dies.”

  “And what,” asked Darconville, his voice almost
inaudible, “is the lesson here?”

  “It’s not enough to raise a storm, you poor fool,
unless you follow it with a bolt of thunder and a blow of
lightning.” He gestered to the photograph. “I’d send that Geryoneo
down to the house of dole. And
her
? Blood revenge! The
Islamic Thar! Shit fire and save matches! ‘
Hier steh ich treu
Dir bis zum Tod
’—her oath, I believe? Then help her out! What
goes round comes round. Now is the time your face should form
another.”

  “My face,” said Darconville, unambivalently looking
at Crucifer, “is facing revenge.”

  “Yes?” returned Crucifer. “And to be further
educated to it is to hazard a loss, in the delay, of the joy of
discovery?” He breathed into Darconville’s face. “I’d send her
disappearing back into her navel like a black hole. I’d huddle her
into the wormy earth. I’d quadrifurcate her fat limbs and feed her
parts of herself in choice cuts.” Darconville closed his eyes. “But
I see your position: she’s her own worst enemy, that’s it, isn’t
it?”

  “Not while I’m alive.”

  “Then why do you linger with that which you know? It
is obsolete. The known is a symbol of the death of the mind! After
what she’s done to you, will you now sit by until she’s a worthless
old bushrag in her nineties, some stinking bale of cadaverous goods
best consigned immediately to Pluto, and then let death come to her
as a
friend
?” His eyes flashed. “We’re talking about a
bitch here—a word, granted, which hasn’t the authority of classical
usage, but it certainly has the indubitable authority of fitness,
no? No? And safe? Safe? She wanted to be safe?” Grotesquely pursing
his mouth into a girlish bow, Crucifer hitched up his robe in a
cute little tricot, curtseyed primly, and mocked, “Why, thank you,
Darconville, I’ll really miss you”—his face fell—”every chance I
get.”

  “I’ve done something about it.”

  “Overmuch clack,” spat Crucifer.

  “I’ve taken steps. I—”

  “What, you’ve sent a few letters? Is that your idea
of revenge? Sandpapering the anchor? Complaining, inactive, and
bored like the endlessly munching ungulates I spoke of who know not
hot nor cold? You beat the sack and mean the miller. You’re not
going to act,” said Crucifer, blowing disgust out of his great clay
cheeks.

  Darconville clenched his fists against his eyes and
cried out in pain.

  “Into each life,” said Crucifer, shrugging
unsympathetically—and he pretended to lose himself in a fastidious
study of the Delville, touching his little finger to a non-existent
speck on the canvas and blowing it away. He arranged some papers on
his desk. He tidied up.

  “I despise her.”

  “Touching.”

  “I thirst to see her lifeless.”

  “A dried sentence”—Crucifer tossed his head—”stuffed
with sage.”

  “I mean it.”

  “And I’m the Queen of Romania.”

  “I promise you.”

  “Oh, to be sure, yes indeed.”

  Then Darconville dropped his arms, his moist eyes
wide open, and desperately confessed, “I am killing her in my mind
repeatedly. If I owned a hotel with a thousand rooms in it, I’d
like to see her dead in every one of them.”

  “The mind,” replied Crucifer, with a pout of
displeasure, “is a hotel room, I’m afraid, where only one person
can die.”

  He began to walk back and forth, then, stroking that
huge witcher-bubber of a belly which seemed to propel him forward
on a high drift, as if in caricatured pursuit of something elusive
and just out of reach.

  “I am constrained, I see,” he said, turning, “to a
seeming digression. It is an indisputable fact, right off, that
thought in movement seeks thought at rest in resolution. Beliefs
are rules for action, and the function of thinking is to step
toward thought’s practical consequences, mmmm? Reverence to this!
Now you have an
enemy
, my dear misguided boy—a bitch with
a rubber heart who in a recent confustication more like a Goldonian
drama than a love story used her smile for make-up and her twam for
a Dutch bargain all in pursuit of a marriage founded in deceit and
against the long continuance of which I wouldn’t bet a pound to a
pinch of shit! ( Of course it won’t last: when someone leaves a
room, those who remain immediately see themselves differently and
always move around to register that difference. ) But the point is:
you loved her. The point is: she left you to die—the lowest of
betrayals of the many there are, the swart crow! A predator, unseen
and unseeable, she kept to the night with multiple disguises, using
shadow-elimination, outline disruption, and counter-shading all at
once! I should have added to my litany Myrionyma, the creature with
a thousand names! But, hell, you’ve heard what she’s said, haven’t
you? And isn’t the tongue the neck’s enemy? So what could absolve,
who acquit, how cleanse this thing who not only hates you but is
sitting to virtue in Virginia this very minute as demure as an old
whore at a christening? Nothing! No one! Not balsam from mecca,
neither musk from the deer, nor civet from the civet’s arsehole!
But an enemy provides both a stimulus and a lesson, I repeat, and I
wish only for the final time to point out—
monstrare
—make
clear —
ostentare
—predict—
praedicere
—and
portend—
portendere
—what henceforth you must simply no
longer ignore:
force destroys enemies
!”

  Crucifer paused to swallow his anger.

  “Survival is not a desperate affair; it is a natural
process! Lost battles,” he shrugged, “make not Pompey less. But
shall you either by pointless idling or non-resistance cut off the
chance for your own survival in the face of the possibility of it?
Forgo justice? Counterpoise evil by silence? Excuse yourself and
accuse yourself? You’re standing in your own light!” Crucifer shook
his fist, which grew a warning finger. ‘“Tis time; descend; be
stone no more! Civilization and murder are compatible, Darconville.
Haven’t you read your political history? Is it not better that a
life should contract dirt-marks and abuse rather than forfeit
usefulness in its despicable efforts to remain unspotted? ‘The dead
do not praise the Lord,’ said the Psalmist, ‘nor any that go down
in silence.’ Mercy, without retributive punishment, is sentiment!
Worst points to best!

  “There is no worse lie,” howled Crucifer, wildly
waving his arms— the cloister lamp actually trembled—”than a truth
misunderstood by those who hear it, but, no matter the brand of
cant putting it otherwise, reasonable arguments, challenges to
magnanimity, and quacking appeals to sympathy or mercy or pardon
are folly when we are dealing with vile and corrupt deceivers and
the beaked and taloned graspers of the world! I mean, he who
doesn’t oppose, attack, or even execute such creatures is as though
the
creator
of them! Oh yes, our sympathies are always
evoked through
ultra vires
considerations, aren’t they?
For pussyfooting? Piety? A pitying tolerance for our oppressors?”
He touched his forehead, wearily. “The ages greatly differ. Your
magnificent relatives—the heroic fashion of them,” he sighed, “has
passed away. Wherein lies very obviously a truth: did they lie
chained, subordinate by this world’s insult; coerced by the
Elizabethan brank and block; and then go whimpering into their due
subterranean abodes to beat hemp and repent? Or did they walk
openly abroad, the envy of a general valet-population, bear sway,
and profess war to the death with the very dogs who snapped at
their heels?
Love your enemies
?” choked Crucifer. “Why, it
invokes such a breach with our own instinctive springs of action as
a whole that I take it to be nothing more than an oriental
hyperbole which castrates poverty and pain and gives over the
control of the world to criminal fools, proselytes of capital, and
the Set fatuously dubbed Smart! If there be any pretension more
philosophically absurd than another, it is that any person or thing
can act contrary to his own nature. And if there be any pretension
more practically immoral, it is that any person or thing
ought
to act in that manner! Whom therefore ye ignorantly
worship, her declare I unto you!
Une Grue! Une Goulue! Une
Grognew
! She was what she was—and so has done what you must
undo. Love, lost, breeds death, found. It’s the very lesson at the
heart of that hideous and twofold penalty of blindness and
eviration that we have come to call Adam and Eve! And can you then
now admit you shall do
nothing
? Creed love for a foe
crippled with miscreed? Believe someone who could perjure through a
six-inch board? Can you actually sit there,” he screamed in an
extended wail of monochromatic denial, “and try to tell me there’s
to be found a level of emotion so unifying, so obliterative of
differences between two enemies, that enmity may proceed to such
irrelevant circumstances that one might crawl on his hands and
knees to stoop, to kneel, to grovel to kiss the feet of one’s
eternal
persecutor
?” He gave the word “persecutor” four
clear vowels. The echo punctuated the question Darconville, pale as
jute, couldn’t answer. “
The Trojan Horse has foaled
!”

  Dr. Crucifer saw he’d touched a nerve yet waited
some minutes for better advantage, his eyes roaming morosely about
the room in fake self-objurgation for having gone and wasted his
words in an effort that seemed to have fallen on deaf ears. He
continued to wait. But the knife was in. So he turned it. “You love
her.”

  Darconville’s eyes blazed.

  “She is panting for someone else like a cat after
seafish,” he sneered, “and you positively adore her.”

  It was intolerable.

  “
I hate her
!” shrieked Darconville, gasping
for air, frightening himself in the ultrasonic scream to the point
of trembling, and he began to bang his head bloody against the
wall. “
I hate her! I hate her! I hate her! I hate her
!” He
turned in convulsed supplication. “
I love to hate her. I’ve
cursed her to hell
!”

  Crucifer’s mouth fell open. With the fingertips of
both small white hands fluttering bewilderedly to his neck, he
stared in disbelief, thinking:
how you must have loved
her
. But he was fast upon Darconville. Had he? Had he, he
asked, actually put a curse on her? And unable to contain his
joy—he literally appeared to inflate—he rose huff-shouldered and
victorious, bowling in to overpower Darconville in an awkward and
obscene embrace while hissing lewdly in his ear, “You are me!”

  It all called for a drink. Crucifer reached into a
corner and pulled a bell, as Darconville, shaken, felt for a chair
and sat down in silence, the wound under his bandaged chest
throbbing. Then Lampblack—the face that always seemed its own
reflection looking out of a lens— after appearing from nowhere to
unwrap and pour a bottle of wine, was told to get out. With a tiny
glitter in his spider’s eyes, Crucifer then made a toast, singing,
“
La illaha ila Darconville, Crucifer Resoul
Darconville
!”

  Darconville hesitated.

  “
Shrabt! Shrabt
!”

  And they clinked glasses and drank.

  What however, wondered Crucifer, had yet been
established? The pitch of efficacy, yes, but of what inferential
belief? He was not interested in the mere exercise of words,
certainly, but rather the very movement of the spirit putting
itself in a personal relation of contact with the avenging person
of which it felt the presence. Now, he thought, I will bell the
cat.

  “There,” said Crucifer, sampling the winy aftertaste
with his tongue. “I would call it an
amusing
bottle. A
touch of smoke, with attractive mid-mouth flavors. Chewy but not
sec, hmmm? Apropos, did you know it is possible to turn Madeira
into port in the space of a single night?” He took Darconville in
from the side of his fat-encircled eyes. “Do you follow me? I’ve
told you before, a nice vice is really a virtue. The blow of a
sword and the impact of an idea, according to the Bhagavad-Gita,
reach to the same end and have the same justification in the eyes
of God. If a claw be caught, the bird is lost—you can make
pigeon-blood of rubies!” He paused. “Your brows are clouded,” he
asked, leaning under Darconville’s face, “when will they thunder?
No, don’t look away. The inescapable Aquinas is his best on ‘the
right of spoil’ in a just war, and St. Isidore of Damietta, in
fact, pointed out that when the chosen lean over from the heights
of heaven to contemplate the torture of the damned they will feel
unutterable joy at the spectacle: it’s the collaudation of infinite
justice. Knowledge that fails to become action, I’ve said it
before, is bestial perversity, didn’t I say that? I did. I did say
that.”

  He paused theatrically and then picked up the
photograph of Gilbert van der Slang.

  “Lions 1, Christians 0, is that fair?” Crucifer
slowly turned the photograph around toward Darconville and pointed
to it with his little finger. “Shall what poisons you prove
mithridate to her?” He paused. “Or shall I hold the photograph
so”—he turned it sideways—”the way he’d be in bed?”

  There was silence.

  “Darconville?”

  “I am ready.”

  “
Be Ravilliac
!” charged Crucifer, moving
quickly forward in his chair and squeezing its fistclaws. “Have
zero pH! Put honor on the top of your tongue and a knife under it!
Strangle her with her own tharms! I tell you, men who believe they
can do anything they choose to do must presently believe they must
do everything they can! What have you come out to see, a reed
shaken in the wind? A moral temper has often to be cruel; it is a
partisan temper, Valois, and that can be the crudest! I would have
you see her an almanac that you might burn her every
year
!
Stab, strangle, burn—what does it matter? Work only swiftly, as
aqua fortis eats into brass!”