The moon, suddenly, was o’ercast blood-red in an
eclipse. Thunder rumbled. Boding?
Ill.
A rat flea, black in wing and hackle, flittered
out of the shred of blue cloak and flew inland
—
as if
carried along by destiny
—
toward the Crimean trading port
of Kaffa. The infamous date was 1346
.
Stinks were soon smelt
—
in malt, barrels
of sprats, chimney flues. Physicians lost patients in
spates
.
“The plague! The plague!”
squealed the chief
magistrate, biting his thumb, his fauces black, the streaks of jet
vivid along his wicks and nose, and then dropped dead as a stone.
Fires were lighted. The harbor was sealed
.
But it was too late. Ships, laden with produce,
had already set sail in the pestiferous winds and headed out along
the trades to Constantinople, to Cyprus, to Sardinia, to Avignon,
and points beyond
—
Sleutel, among them: a town that, recently, had
expanded and grown to the clink of gold in the guilds, the crackle
of flames in the tile-kilns, and the mercantile sermons in the new
protestant kerks.
Why, there was even entertainment.
The town brothel, formerly the orphanage,
represented the major holding of a certain Mijnheer van Cats who
lived alone with his son, a dissolute half-wit seen once a year
moping into town to paint its shutters and touch up the wooden sign
out front that read
: De Zwarte Hertogin.
It became famous. Merchant sailors, visiting in
droves, always wept with laughter at the idle boast of its madam,
that she had once been the village beauty.
Or was Time, indeed, the archsatirist?
For the place was run by an ooidal-shaped sow
with chin hairs, a venomous breath, and grit-colored hair who
always carried a ladle and trounced her girls. They called her
“Mother Spatula.”
The legacies passed on by the sailors were worse
than the legacies they received. It began with the
“sweats.”
The town of Sleutel was soon aflame with flews,
black spots, boils, pink eye, and the stinking wind that broadcast
one to another. Lost souls screamed aloud to be crimped with knives
like codfish.
A whole Arabian pharmacy could do no
good.
Nothing could stop the contagion, neither
chanters nor flagellants. The townsfolk spun into dancing fits,
cat-concerts, and fell to biting each other and frying jews. Men
castrated themselves and flung their severed genitals into the
hopeless sky to placate an angry God.
”The Black Death” struck, and struck, and
struck. Bodies fell like the leaves of Vattombrosa. It beggared
rhetoric: recorded only by historians as the worst disaster that
had ever visited the world.
Mijnheer van Cats, staring upon his son’s
flapping tongue and hopeless insanity, waddled up high into the
black windmill, took off his clogs, and
—
pinching his
nose
—
stepped past the revolving vanes and cowardly made
his quietus
.
They both went to their accounts
impenitent.
But more. Mother Spatula ran into her dank room,
made mouths in a glass
—
and shrieked! Her drazels,
horrified at the telltale nosebleed, held to her lips a little
statue of St. Roch, the Plague Saint; but she went deaf as a beetle
to their pleas, curled up into a fork and died, notwithstanding the
fact that to her black feet
—
in order to draw the vapors
from her head
—
they had applied two dead pigeons
.
She didn’t seem to attach a good deal of
importance to them before she went.
Darconville whispered, “Isabel?”
But she was fast asleep in his arms, her face still
smeared with dry tears, her complexion washed of its color and
showing a slight an-timonious tint. He noiselessly raised himself
on one elbow and, watching over her in the darkness, first blew
softly on her forehead and cheeks and then stanched with an
ever-so-slight kiss a single tear that sparkled at the edge of one
eye like a tiny drop of chalcedony. He felt the physical ache of
love as he watched her perfect mouth, slightly open, exhaling the
sighs of sleep. They had never made love, but the synecdoche of
desire, he knew, waited crucially upon the larger understanding of
love in whose fiefdom, until proven true, it always walked a
stranger. And, then, he wasn’t even certain she was in love with
him
! Or ever could be!
There was so much he wanted to tell her, and it
seemed a perfect time to confess it, to hear matters spoken which
up to that time he hadn’t, but privately, dared even acknowledge,
and yet he hesitated lest the tiniest utterance break the spell of
that beautiful moment and, somehow, end it—like the angels called
Ephemerae who lived merely for the twinkle of an instant, expiring
upon the second they recited the
Te Deum
. Only let me
live, prayed Darconville, as he watched Isabel there, no longer
than I might love.
A sleepy voice, then, murmured something. It was
inaudible. Isabel suddenly swirked up in alarm. “Oh, if I miss my
curfew—”
Darconville placed a finger to her lips, assuring
her he’d have her back to Fitts in plenty of time. She smiled,
hugging him, and in a sleep-enthralled voice told him about the
strange dream she’d had; she was a princess in a beautiful white
dress, living all alone in a kind of fairy-forest where she was
safe, and then one day—but Isabel clapped her mouth. How
thoughtless of her, she said, to have missed
his
story!
Darconville laughed.
Story, tale, book: what were these, he thought, next
to the gentle creature whose waist he now took, whose eyes he now
searched—and it shamed him to have held back the words of passion,
born in his heart, that still beat against his consciousness for
deliverance. But what, asked Isabel, could she do to make up for
her thoughtlessness?
Tell me you love me
. Darconville,
pushing her back, insisted the story he told was nonsense and that
she didn’t have to do anything.
“Oh please.”
Tell me you love me.
“Well, let me see.” Darconville paused. “All right,”
he said. “Have you visited Miss Trappe yet?”
“That’s what I’ll do!”
“Do you promise? She wanted to see you, you
know.”
Isabel took Darconville’s face in her hands and
kissed him, her eyes, sending out sparkles like a carcanet of
jewels, brightening with resolution. She witched him in one set
gaze, and they fell against each other, giving and taking kisses,
with Isabel pausing only to add, by repetition, to the weight of
her vow.
“I promise.”
XXVIII
A Promise Unfulfilled
Ascend above the restrictions and conventions of the
World, but
not so high as to lose sight of them.
—RICHARD
GARNETT,
De Flagella Myrteo
A WEEK LATER Darconville met Miss Trappe in the
street. She mentioned in passing, again, that she had a special
present she wanted to give to Isabel: the cameo. But, asked
Darconville, hadn’t she yet come by for a visit? Miss Trappe smiled
sadly. That night when Darconville inquired of Isabel why she
hadn’t gone to see Miss Trappe, it was with some surprise that he
heard her reply. “I don’t want to dominate her,” said Isabel.
That seemed very odd, indeed.
XXIX
“Sparks from My Anvil”
Vain are the documents of men
And vain the flourishes of the pen
That keep the fool’s conceit.
—CHRISTOPHER
SMART, “A Song to David”
Rumpopulorum
, meanwhile, was going poorly.
The manuscript had lost its kick, and Darconville, as late as
March, flashing back through the accumulation of sheets, found only
an unedited mess of junk and logomachies, a collection of pages
pierced by arrows of afterthought, marginal loops, and harebrained
squirts and scribbles twad-dleized out of doubt and belated
reflection: a penman’s alibi. It was, he felt, as if his ability to
write were now only a tiny, fitful flame, no, not a flame even, a
scarcely visible vapor flickering over a chaos of conflicting
wishes, purposes, and hopes that were so disorganized as ut-terly
to cancel one another. A line here. A line there.
It was wounding not to be able to write easily,
upgathering what of life seemed barren without the expression of
it, but Darconville hadn’t written well for months and recently had
almost begun to grow ill when walking into the room to work, a dull
nausea overcoming him at the prospect, troubling his mind as a
touch of lust might trouble a soul only half-escaped from it.
Write, wrote, written: it was the most painful verb in the
language. He somehow couldn’t believe in it anymore.
There was nothing to be done. He pulled out a
cuesheet and randomly set to for half an hour with his pencil,
tentative tool, but the words sat on the lines like disgusted birds
forming and fulgurating in a cacophonous gamut along a washwire.
Doodled mimicries pulled faces at him from the margins. Furious,
Darconville x’ed out three trial pages, clicked off the light, and
smoked in the dark thinking of Isabel’s photographs and how,
perhaps, he should never have seen them. Did he mean that? Maybe.
Eurydice is impossible if Orpheus looks away. No, it was a stupid
blasphemy. He wouldn’t think of it again.
At best, Darconville now coped. He who once wrote
with beauty and speed, who in the late hours of creation, even
after those long walks in Venice from his home out to the Isola di
San Pietro and back, could almost forgo any illumination as his
fingers gave out the necessary light, now found himself in the grip
of woeful indolence— not writing, nor organizing to do so, but
waiting around idly leafing through lexicons and coming to resent
the fat cast of characters alphabetically lined up there as if in
some melodramatic pre-theatrical to defy his direction and so
challenge his art.
Verrine, one of the evil Thrones, had begun to tempt
him with long and unrelieved bouts of impatience: “the lyf so
short, the craft so long to lern.” Words! They seemed his
only
experience, his only sophistications. And yet what
were they? Merciless little creatures, crowding about and eager for
command, each with its own physical character, an ancestry, an
expectation of life and a hope of posterity. And yet how he wanted
to scream or stamp his foot and scatter them away, terrorizing them
into disappearance letter by letter, all those clicks, bangs,
buzzes called consonants and vowels that howled and ululated and
cooed! It was frustrating, for he
believed
in the
word-as-written, those sweet puncts, safe from the dangers of loss
and paralalia, which alone rendered ideas clearly, and until words
were written, formulated, he felt, they couldn’t even be considered
properly thought out. No, previous to the word, Darconville had
always thought, one couldn’t argue that even the most elementary
relationships existed. But if they expressed, he wondered, did they
communicate? He didn’t know anymore. He put out his cigarette,
stubbornly to go back to work, and clicked on the light. The skull
on his desk was still smiling.
Darconville set out a bottle of ink and filled “The
Black Disaster,” the pen that had served him so long: it seemed
labor in itself. He felt a sudden dread in the suck of the drawing
nozzle—it sputtered “Govert”! He ignored it. And consulting the
watch on the nail he resumed, with obsessive intensity, trying to
write, with this insane fancy taking possession of him, however,
that at that moment he knew something of what the lonely Power
behind life must have known as it drove towards the purpose of a
creation which then and thereupon, in the form of two humans,
refused to ascribe any benevolence to the act. He hovered over his
desk, the pen motionless. But nothing came. In an absurd kind of
game he then systematically tried to force himself to believe he
was
totally
incompetent to the task of writing, a methodic
dialectic he used with himself on occasion taken from homeopathic
therapy in which, to reverse a mood, he dosed himself with a
relentless and pitiless exaggeration of it in order to reconstruct
its opposite. For who is always what he is at any instant? And so,
hopeful, he went profitably hopeless, to remind sickness of health,
evil of good, and hunger of abundance, but for it all he made small
headway and saw out the profitless forepart of the day with only a
single ragged paragraph, one split in two by a particularly inexact
image that reflected in the mirror of his craft exactly what he
feared he had become—and so he drew his pen in a looping
circumlitio
over the page and walked out of the room.
The afternoon went poorly, as well. Darconville sat
in another room, drinking, wishing to detach himself from the
pressure of reflection, the better to mock memory and the misery it
made in a mind to worry it to words. Parody of anticipation, parody
of meditation: slouching on a sofa, he found the mindless darkness
to be even more venal than his own disabilities, the room a
Piranesian cell where he sat in demented soliloquy, an examination
of his own self-disobedience which, even if it clarified the sense
of order at the core of his worst outrages, still kept him from
work. He drank more and smoked until his lungs, never strong,
ached, thinking, for some reason, of the strange people roaming the
world called Coords who, though hating the devil, worshipped him
lest, unplacated, he destroy them utterly in the fullness of his
malice. Spellvexit, butting about between his legs, was whining—a
sound, terribly, like “Govert! Govert!” It was ridiculous.
Darconville drank even more and, borne up like the duck who floats
on what he drinks, put back his head, concentrating on trying to
improve accident by meditation, and closed his eyes for what seemed
more hours than idleness warranted or despair ever deserved.