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PARTISAN REVIEW
room, like a Crooks tube, with subtle emanations that pierced the
walls better than Roentgen rays. Then he recognized the absurdity
of this idea, and he continued, with one hand, to strike with the
hammer while with the other hand he held up his trousers, which were
slipping down. The cat was more alive, its life exalted by danger,
suffering and fear. There was still no blood, and Riton was tired of
striking it. Then he also became afraid that this animal was the devil
who sometimes changes himself into a cat in order to enter human
dwellings more easily.
-If
it's the devil, I'm cooked!
He thought of taking it down, but he was afraid that the devil,
standing on
his
feet, would split his belly with one crook of
his
finger.
The stories tell how three drops of holy water thrown on the cat are
enough to restore to the devil
his
human shape. There was no holy
water in the room, not even a box-wood branch, not even an image
of first communion.
If
he made the sign of the cross? The devil would
remain hanging, and maybe he would retain, while taking human
shape, the dimensions of the cat. What could be done with a devil's
corpse of that size? Then Riton did not dare make a single gesture for
fe'ar of making involuntarily the sign of the cross over the cat. Tired,
sweating, pale, when he unstrung the cat and put it in a tarpaulin
sack, which he closed, he struck with all his strength, with the hammer,
on this grotesque, mysterious, and wailing mass. The cat was still
alive. When Riton imagined that the head was crushed, he: drew out
the animal, which was still shuddering. At last, he attached it to
that nail in the wall of which I have spoken, and he carved it up.
The job lasted for a long time. Hunger, which had disappeared for
an instant, returned to Riton's belly. The cat was still warm, smoking,
when he cut off the two thighs and set them boiling in a stewpan.
Confronting the mutilated hide, the skin turned up like a bleeding
glove, he ate several pieces almost raw, tasteless, for he had no salt;
and ever since that day, Riton has been aware of a feline presence
marking his body-more precisely,
his
belly, like those animals in gold
brocade on the dresses of women of oldentimes. Whether the cat had
been sick, or it had become so- and also become enraged-during its
torture, or because its flesh had not yet become cold, or because the
fight had upset the kid-Riton suffered that night from head to foot.
He believed he: was poi<>oned, and he addressed fervent prayers to
the cat. The next day he enlisted in the Militia. It pleases me to know
that he is thus marked in his innermost flesh by the royal seal of
hunger.
(Translated by William Barrett)
