I Am a Cat (72 page)

“I asked if you, too, were driven crazy by a troublesome wife.”

“You must be joking again. But, to answer your question, I’m not particularly troubled by my wife, perhaps because she loves me.”

“Oh, I do beg your pardon. How typical of Singleman to have a loving wife.”

“Singleman’s no singleton. The world is full of loving wives.”

Coldmoon, a somewhat unlikely champion of the ladies, pipes up sturdily in their defense.

“Coldmoon’s right,” says Beauchamp. “As I see it, there are only two roads by which a man may come to perfect bliss: by the road of love, and by the road of art. Of all the forms of love, married love is perhaps the noblest. It therefore seems to me that to remain unmarried is to flout the will of Heaven. And what,” asks Beauchamp, bending upon Waverhouse his sad and serious gaze, “do you, sir, think of that?”

“I think you have stated an unanswerable case. I fear that this old bachelor will never enter the sphere of perfect bliss.”

“If you get yourself a wife, you’ll have made it doubly sure that bliss will not be yours.” My master croaks from the bottom of the grim well of experience.

“Be that as it may,” says Beauchamp, “we young bachelors will never grasp the meaning of life unless we open our hearts and minds to the elevating spirituality of the arts. That is why, in the hope that I might learn to improve myself by playing the violin, I am so particularly interested to hear more of Coldmoon’s interrupted account of his actual experience.”

“Ah, yes,” says Waverhouse, “we were going to hear the tale of our own young Werther’s fiddling. Please tell us now. I promise, no more interruptions.” With this belated acknowledgement of his habitual failing,Waverhouse at last shut up.

But the spirit of Waverhouse, like the monstrous Hydra itself, is not easily suppressed. Cut off one head, and in its place grow two. Silence Waverhouse, and Singleman gives tongue. “No man ever,” he waffled,

“became a better man by virtue of a violin. It would be intolerable if universal truth were accessible through self-abandonment to mere fun.

Truly to lose the self and thus to achieve the ultimate reality of the identity of self and non-self, a man must be willing to hang by his nails from a cliff, to let go, and to fall to that death in which his spirit may be reborn.” With these pomposities Singleman sought to reprove Beauchamp’s frivolous materialism; however, he might as well have saved his breath, for Beauchamp knows nothing of Zen and, as his next dry words revealed, has no desire to do so.

“Really?” he comments. “You may be right, but I remain convinced that art is the clearest expression of the highest human aspirations, and I am not to be shaken in that conviction.”

“Good for you,” says Coldmoon. “I shall be glad to speak of my artistic experience to so congenial a soul. Well, as I was saying, I had great difficulties to contend with before I could even start learning the violin. Can you imagine, Mr. Sneaze, the agonies I suffered merely to buy a violin?”

“Well, I assume that in a place so generally God forsaken as not to have even hemp soled sandals for sale, it can’t have been easy to find a shop that offered violins.”

“Oh, there was shop, alright. And I’d saved up cash enough for a purchase. But it wasn’t as simple as that.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I bought a fiddle in a dorp that small, everyone would know, and its brute inhabitants would immediately have made my life unbearable. Believe you me, anyone out there who was thought to be the least bit arty had a very thin time.”

“Genius is always persecuted,” sighed Beauchamp with deep sympathy.

“There you go again. I do wish you’d stop calling me a genius. It’s an embarrassment. Anyway, every day as I passed that shop where the fiddles were displayed, I’d say to myself, ‘Ah, how wonderful it would be just to hold one in my arms, to be the owner of a fiddle. Oh, how I wish and wish that one of them were mine.’”

“Quite understandable,” commented Waverhouse.

“But it’s distinctly odd,” my master mused in a voice where his usual bilious perversity was overlaid with genuine wonder, “that some otherwise sensible lad should wander about a backwoods hamlet drooling over a violin.”

“It simply proves what I’ve just been saying. Drooling’s a sign of genius.”

Only Singleman held aloof, vouchsafing nothing and twisting his foolish beard.

“Perhaps you’re wondering how there came to be violins available in such a graceless place, but the explanation’s quite simple. There was, you see, a ladies academy in the neighborhood, and, since the curriculum included daily violin-practice, the local shopkeepers were quick to exploit such a captive market. Of course, the violins were of poor quality; more rustic gues than genuine violins. And the shop-folk treated them very roughly, hanging them up at the shop entrance in bunches of two or three, like so many vegetables. Yet, as one passed the shop, one could hear them humming in the wind or, in response to some shopboy’s casual finger, quivering into sound. Their singular timbre, every time I heard it, thrilled my heart to such a pitch of excitement that I felt it could but burst.”

“That sounds dangerous. There are, of course, many varieties of epilepsy, such as that brought on by the sight of water and that provoked by the presence of crowds. But our young Werther,” says Waverhouse—never one to miss an opportunity to wallow in the absurd—seems unique in suffering seizures at the thrumming of fiddle strings.”

But the plodding Beauchamp, prosaic even in his passion for the poetic, wouldn’t recognize a flight of fancy if it landed on his nose. “It’s not a matter for mockery,” he snaps. “No man can truly be an artist unless he has sensitivities as keen as Coldmoon’s. I say again, Coldmoon is a genius.”

Coldmoon still looks restless to have such greatness thrust upon him.

“No, no,” he says, “maybe it really is some epileptic variant; but the fact remains that the timbre of those sounds moved me to the core. I’ve played and heard the violin time and again since then, but nothing ever has matched the beauty of that random music. There are no words to convey the faintest echo of its magic. . .”

Nobody paid the slightest attention to Singleman when, rather aptly as it seemed to me, he quoted from an obscure Taoist text: “Only from gems, the jewels in its hilt, could such sweet sounds have issued from the sword.” I felt sorry, not only for Singleman but for Chuang-tzu, too, that the words were left to die.

“Day after day for many months, I walked past that shop, but I heard that marvelous music only thrice. On the third occasion I decided that, come what might, I would have to buy a violin. Reproof from the people of my own district, sneers from the slobs in neighboring prefectures, thumpings organized by my fellow students, fist-lynchers to a man, not even formal expulsion from the school could budge me from my resolution. I had no choice but to satisfy my all-consuming need. I would buy a violin.”

“How characteristic of genius. That drive, that total concentration upon fulfillment of an inner need. Ah, Coldmoon, how I envy you! How I have longed, lifelong and always in vain, to experience feelings of such vehemence. I go to concerts and I strain my ears until they ache in an effort to be carried away, but for all my full-hearted striving, nothing seems to happen. How you must pity,” said Beauchamp in tones that mixed black sadness and green envy, “us earth-bound clods.”

“Count yourself lucky,” Coldmoon answers. “I can speak of my enthrallment now with relative calm. But then it was pure agony.

Excruciating agony. Anyway, my masters, in the end I took the plunge and bought a violin.”

“Say on.”

“It was the eve of the Emperor’s birthday, in November. Everyone in my lodgings had gone off to some hot spring for the night, and the place was empty. I’d reported sick that day and, absenting myself from school, had stayed in bed, where, all day long, I nursed the single thought: this evening I’ll go out and get that violin.”

“You mean you played truant by shamming illness?”

“That’s right.”

“Talent indeed,” says Waverhouse lost in wonder. “Perhaps he really is a genius.”

“As I lay with my head sticking out of the bedclothes, I grew impatient for the nightfall. To break the tension, I ducked beneath the covers and, with my eyes closed tight, entreated sleep; which did not come. So I pulled my head back out, only to find the fierce autumn sun still fully ablaze on the paper-window six feet long. Which niggled me. I then noticed, high up on the paper-window, a long stringy shadow which, every so often, wavered in the autumn wind.”

“What was that long, stringy shadow?”

“Peeled, astringent persimmons strung like beads on raffia cords suspended from the eaves.”

“Hmm. What happened next?”

“Next, having nothing else to do, I got up from bed, opened the paper-window and went out onto the veranda. There I detached one of the persimmons that had dried to sweetness, and ate it.”

“Did it taste good?” My master can be trusted, whatever the subject, to find some childish question to be asked.

“Excellent. Persimmons down there really are superb. You will not taste their like anywhere in Tokyo.”

“Never mind the persimmons. What did you do next?” This time it was Beauchamp who was pressing for clarification.

“Next, I ducked back into bed again, closed my eyes and breathed a silent prayer to all the gods and Buddhas for nightfall to come soon. It then seemed that three, perhaps four, long hours had passed; so thinking the evening must have come, I brought my head out from under the bed clothes. To my surprise, the fierce autumn sun was still fully ablaze on the six-foot paper-window, and, on its upper part, those long and stringy shadows were still swaying.”

“We’ve heard all that.”

“The same sequence happened again and again. In any event, I got up from bed, opened the paper-window, ate one persimmon that had dried to sweetness, went back to bed, and breathed a silent prayer to all the gods and Buddhas for nightfall to come soon.”

“We don’t seem to be making much progress with that promised story about learning to play the violin.”

“Don’t rush me. Just listen, please. Well, having endured the next three, or perhaps four, hours in my bed until, I thought, surely it must now be evening, I popped my head up out of the covers only to find the fierce, autumn sun still fully ablaze on the paper window while, on its upper part, the long stringy shadows were asway.”

“You’re getting us nowhere.’

“Then, I got up from bed, opened the paper-window, went out onto the veranda, ate one persimmon dried to sweetness and. . .”

“So you ate another one? Is there no end to your dreary guzzle of persimmons dried to sweetness?”

“Well, my impatience grew worse.”

“
Your
impatience! What about ours?”

“You want everything so rushed along that I find it hard to continue my story.”

If Coldmoon finds it hard, so does his audience; even the devoted Beauchamp makes little whimpers of complaint.

“If you all find listening too hard, I have no choice but to bring my story abruptly to its end. In short, I repeated this oscillation between eating persimmons and ducking into bed until all the fruit were gone.”

“By the time you’d guzzled that lot the sun must surely have gone down.”

“As a matter of fact, it hadn’t. After I’d eaten the last persimmon I ducked back into bed, and in due course popped my head out yet again, only to find the fierce autumn sun still fully ablaze upon that six-foot paper-window. . .”

“I’ve had enough of this. It just goes on and on.”

“Me too. I’m bored stiff with the way you tell your tiresome story.”

“But it isn’t easy on me, you know.”

“With the degree of perseverance you have already proven you possess, no enterprise whatsoever could be too difficult. If we had sat here uncomplaining, your autumn sun would have gone on blazing until tomorrow morning. Tell me this: do you, and if so when, intend to buy that violin?” Even the indefatiguable Waverhouse is showing signs of wear. Singleman alone seems unaffected by the slow unrolling (or rather the slow unrolling and rerolling) of Coldmoon’s quaint account. For all he cared, Coldmoon’s autumn sun could go on blazing all through the night; even, perhaps, until the day, or days, beyond tomorrow.

Coldmoon, too, shows no sign of strain. Calm and composed, he drones on with his story. “Someone has asked me when I intend to buy my violin. The answer is that I intend to go out and buy it just as soon as the sun has set. It is hardly my fault that, whenever I peer out from the bedclothes, the autumn sun is still so brilliantly ablaze. Oh, how I suffered! It was far, far worse, that deep impatience in my soul, than this superficial irritation which seems, so pettily, to irk you all. After I’d eaten the last of the hanging persimmons and saw the day still bright, I could not help but perish into tears. Beauchamp, my dear fellow, I felt so reft of hope that I wept, I wept.”

“I’m not at all surprised. Your weeping does you credit. All artists are essentially emotional and their tears are distillations of the truth of things. Nevertheless, one does rather wish that you could speed things up a bit.” Beauchamp’s a decent-hearted creature and, even when he’s knee deep in absurdities, maintains his earnest manner.