Darconville's Cat (99 page)

  “Rowel her lips with scissors! Gavage her in the
neck with a dental lancet! Infect her with blotch, fire blight,
pink rot, smut, bacterial wilt, leaf spot, black leg, hopper burn,
and anthracnose! Pull Christmas crackers next to her ears! Rake her
cheeks with a dry rice root brush! Force her to eat a banana
stuffed with MAO Inhibitor drugs! Cut her throat with a thrush
searcher! Thwack her in two with a whinyard!

  “Conculcate her! Bugle her! Stone her with fistfuls
of coprolite! Ram the big toe of an ostrich foot into her temple!
Scotchtape three-hundred pigeons to her arms and then hurl sacks of
popcorn into a rocky gorge! Order her to sew the intricate Peking
stitch by remote candlelight in a dungeon for one year! Tip her
upsidedown and conquassate her! Punch her with a left hook to the
solar plexus, the fiercest punch to absorb! Give her a panclastic
sandwich!

  “Pound hand-fids into her nociceptors! Tattoo her
down the spine with Symmes’ Abscess Knife! Rasp her around the neck
with a xyster! Enter her in a marathon to run with a silver thimble
between her buttocks! Fit her out lodgings on the Mont Saint-Michel
sandflats or in Tunguska, Siberia or by the Bay of Fundy! Bash her
with a nache! Suffocate her with a wet windsock! Sprinkle seed
weevil into her breakfast food! Give her a frightful case of the
bots!

  “Bash her on the thinkball with Ubaldo’s Wand!
Remove her cochlea, attach an electromechanical driving unit to the
oval window there, and bounce her across the room at will. Hurl her
onto a set of maiming caltrops! Pack her mouth with nostrilcress!
Knot her around the neck with her lover’s cremasters and pull them
tight! Snip her psoas muscle and make her run up a slide, sideways!
Freeze her in quicksilver and tap her apart into little chunks!
Pitch her into a pool of lampreys, and watch them suck her faint!
Smyte her in pecys! Langle her by the neck on a leaping-house
flagpole!

  “Press her into a torture cravat, pump helium into
her mouth, and force her to sing, ‘I Love You Truly’! Embroider
obscene words on her cheeks with red thread! Hammer her into bone
ash and round it all into a cupel! Hobble her to her mother and
force them to play Wipe the Scut, Donkeyshines, and Sow to Her Pen!
Drench her in elder vinegar and chase her naked through the Ragged
Mts. in the dead of whiter! Frush her! Pettuse her! Bumrowl her!
Cuff her! Spancel her like a cow!

  “Pickle her as a voucher specimen! Invultuate a
waxen image of Beelzebub and with it plug up her jakeshole! Send
her an immortelle and develop the obvious meaning! Force her to
absterge herself with a swatch of her own hair! Inject her with
black mamba distillates until she assumes the nature of a snake!
Whip her with the winter branch of a whiffletree! Throw her into a
stewpool to fatten up your caribes! Grill steaks out of her baby’s
feet!

  “Shower her with burbolts! Set her impossible tasks,
like sorting out an infinite mixture of millet and barley! Make her
suck on a musket-barrel, fire it, and send her to hell with her
clothes on! Truss her, rub salt on the soles of her feet, let goats
lick it off, and watch her die from laughter! Glue a sinapism on
her mouth after a hearty meal of drastics and peristalts! Press her
between two wheels of gritstone and breccia! Make her peer into the
boiler of a steaming locomotive, then nudge her! Stitch her into a
sack and wing her into the Bosphorus! Douche her with slacked lime,
borax, and alkaline flux!

  “Pisk her! Smout her! Minge her! Whinge her! Drop
her into a revolving water-screw! Decartilage her completely and
make her tap-dance! Reverse her eyes, then place her lover’s
picture in front of her, and watch her leap for it the wrong way!
Sit her in a tub filled to the brim with Dutch Mordant! Swipe open
her mouthends with a billhook! Cut a spot in her breast and place a
window before her heart as an aquarium for stinging butterfly cods!
Sigmoidoscope her with a harpoon, heated white!

  “Drop balls of rattlesnakes down her chimney! Sew
her ears to her inner thighs and, staring into her anus, let her
beslubber her face! Incinerate her alive at 2000° F. and dust a
brothel floor in Tirana with her cremains! Scald the bottom of her
feet with a candle until the fat drops down to fan the flame! Fill
your library with books fashioned with skin provided by her first
child! Decapitate her, mesh her mouth, and make her head into a
radio!

  “Pour hot clay into her vagina and make little
ceramic witches of her! Drive a yataghan into her brainbox! Drill
holes into each of her teeth, wire them, and drag her over miles of
naming bitumen! Paint her skin with belladonna, morphia, drachms of
King’s Yellow, thring-sene and cause dermal asphyxia! Assault her
with Japanese moon-chucks! Deploy an
envoûtement
and hex
her! Pour ice-water into her ear and set massive fans to work!
Force her at gunpoint to geek the head off a puffer-fish! Gut her
facial cords, temple to jawbone, and watch the character of her
face collapse—and, as in all cases of disfigurement, keep mirrors
around her!

  “Vapulate her! Wherret her! Sneg her! Bash her on
the panbone! Thwitch out her innards! Strip off portions of her
skin, paint them, and then use them for tiny kites! Abacinate her
by placing a red-hot basin near her eyes! Take her first-born
infant by the ankle and flog her with it until both are dead! Carve
an Eskimo tupelak with her face on it and blaspheme it, scomfitting
it with whispers, obscenities, and dark curses! Throw her into a
huge thirlpool! Break a needle in her finger and watch her die of
lockjaw!

  “Estrapade her with jerking ropes! Stuff her every
orifice with grain, strap her down, and let her be pecked alive by
117 marabout storks, the ugliest birds on earth! Cut her heart into
a thousand gammons! Drop raccoons full of diphtheria viruses down
her chimney! Pry off her fingernails with metal
turkas
!
Draw off quarts of her blood to use for ink to correct the first
drafts of your next book! Stuff her ears with her lobes! Lower her
alive into a sarcophagus made of limestone quarried at Asas! Exile
her to the island of Pandataria! Send her wandering into the fogs
of Exmoor! Beat her to death with mop-sticks! Seal her into a room
with mygales, bushmasters, and coral snakes and amplify her
screams! Hoise her! Souse her! Bounce her! Trounce her! Punch her!
Stunch her in the umbo! Pull out her throatball!”

  XCIV

  Journey to the Underworld

  Let it be at last; give over words and sighing;
vainly were all things said.

        —ERNEST DOWSON,
“Venite Descendamus”

  THERE WAS AN END to it only when Darconville,
suffering more than tongue could tell or heart could hold in
silence—a ridiculous figure, a failure, a fool—packed that night to
leave Cambridge with complete disagreeable detachment of soul from
every earthly sentiment, possession, hope, and desire, for having
no proper defense against the anguish of human relationships
anymore he simply turned away from them, spontaneously writing his
feelings in a brief note that became a minute, then a short
confession, and finally an explanation of fuller statement he could
finish only to the point when it was thrown, despairingly, after a
heap of consequential letters, photos, and papers into the suitcase
he banged shut.

  The demeanor of the d’Arconvilles in direst straits
had long been the demeanor of men who had no doubt regarding their
own integrity; it applied no longer. He couldn’t care again;
neither explore; nor feel; and succumbing to whatever doom was now
his with no more sense of responsibility than of that meted out to
him by a destiny he took to be nothing more than the terrible
intensification of chance, he accepted what he thought about no
more.

  Goaded by insult, heaped by lies, despoiled by
injustice, tried beyond his strength, beyond all patience, he left
his rooms for the last time and mounted the stairs to receive both
a final malediction and the means to carry it out. He reached the
top floor of Adams House. As prearranged, someone was waiting for
him, someone at the far end of the dark corridor, coming no closer
but standing back out of the feeble light, and then the moment,
almost interminable in apprehension, was upon him. He hugged his
shadow to him like a warm fear. Darconville stood for the final
time before Dr. Crucifer. (Of the third he felt in this company? It
was a matter God alone understood, if His mercy allowed Him to
think about it. )

  A sudden and desperate impulse at that moment, a
longing to love somebody, anybody, anything not imbued with
wickedness overcame Darconville. He stopped. He shook his head. He
moved a few steps backwards. There wasn’t yet a word spoken.

  “
He who will not when he may
,” Crucifer
then whispered from the shadows, the voice respirating low in its
unsleeping malevolence, “
when he will he shall have
nay
.”

  “Are you talking about me—or G-God?” asked
Darconville, his voice pleading as inconfidently he went further
forward. But it was too late.

  The glare of Crucifer’s boiled eyes in their
unnatural flush and the severe fat line of his mouth determined to
mirror what they themselves wouldn’t reflect on, and Darconville
saw himself in the corruption: two negatives made an affirmative.
They never shook hands. There were no goodbyes. A shadow merely
handed him a pistol. And Darconville turned and was gone.

  The singlemindedness of love? It can pursue a single
aim with a concentration of energy, with a fullness and pertinacity
of unwavering will near matchless in power. The wheel of feeling,
however, makes an unerring revolution, and, lo, there is hatred.
For Darconville, wasted by illness and discredited by disaster, the
infection was upon him; his face was like no human face and nearly
unrecognizable. Life at its highest and best, such as he himself
once enjoyed, offered the possibility of its alternative which as
it replaces the other none can escape. Curbed by no limitations, he
made no pretensions anymore to the discovery of new and striking
facts; out of savage pain, then, out of reckless mockery and loss
and long weeks of self-abandonment was wrought a new resolve—and so
like the black princes of the Renaissance who would step not a foot
in the streets until they had buckled on a sword or sharp dagger by
their sides, Darconville set off alone, bought his butcher’s ticket
at the airport, and began his journey to the underworld where no
darkness, however close, could either save or shelter one from that
fate in which victim and executioner would alike be instruments. He
felt for the pistol: Tartars gave as gifts to the tortured the
canes with which they’d been flogged. It would be like the algebra
of love, what he was now about to do, suddenness in passion fit to
matters of eternal consequence, with one lover firing and another
lover dying—shot, unexpectedly, straight through the heart.

  XCV

  The Night of Power

  The Night of Power is better than a thousand
months.

        —JACOB
BOEHME

  THE WOODS in Fawx’s Mt. were wet and cold.
Darconville stirred through the leaves, cut through the
water-rat-smelling underbrush, and quickly crossed down a dark
path, shadowed by funeral pines, that ran parallel to Isabel’s
street where in a hidden spot he parked the car—stolen at the
Charlottesville airport—which he’d spotted from the rainy booth
while making a certain telephone call: Hypsipyle Poore, breathing
low through the receiver, confided that she
had
managed to
sleep with van der Slang, twice, and with words like that of a
sweet-natured child drawn into a game it was ready to play without
full understanding reported the details to Darconville which he
recorded in a little notebook with one hand while the other opened
and shut on the instrument as if it were galvanized. He did not
pity himself. He did not hate himself. He just endured himself,
waiting until darkness fell.

  It was windy. The moon was like a golp sitting in
the rainy sky, disappearing now and again in the fog, lifting the
weight of darkness from the earth while turning the world, the
woods, into a place of phantoms and shadows, and finally the pale
sickly gleam over the Blue Ridge mountains threw a last ambivalent
shadow down the valley to beckon the night he’d been waiting almost
all day for, leaving the entire area under the full cloven hoof of
darkness. The whipping, but intermittent, rain had chilled
Darconville to the flesh, congesting his lungs to the point of
actual pain. It didn’t matter, he thought, as he ducked, thrashing,
through limbs and branches. Hill and valley scarcely seemed to be
step and landing for him; rooted trees seemed but as sticks he
could smite down. There were only his footsteps— fiends in the fog
coming after him—each one nulling the last, as fate overtakes free
will, steps past chance toward destiny, and halts at
predetermination. He would fix her forever to the very spot on
which when last he’d seen her she stood—then
bang
! It
would be her last night on earth.

  As had been the case all day, hiding in the car, he
kept turning over and over Hypsipyle’s description of Gilbert van
der Slang, which confirmed almost everything—it was astounding with
what accuracy —he’d conjectured: pinched nose; scrawny neck; wiry
hair; a nasal, airy voice; a motionless cast of features, with
rabbity teeth showing when he smiled; and the habit, when making a
point, of jerking his mouth in an ugly way, a twitch on the right
side as if upon whatever pronouncement to be adding something of
force or authority to it. It was, she said, like making love to a
broomstick.