Cat's Cradle: Chapters 55–81

...tutored by Bokonon, 63-80; writes letter to United Nations, 200; xylophone virtuoso, 71.

A duprass, Bokonon tells us, is a valuable instrument for gaining and developing, in the privacy of an interminable love affair, insights that are queer but true.

By contrast, Johnson and McCabe had the glittering treasures of literacy, ambition, curiosity, gall, irreverence, health, humor, and considerable information about the outside world.

Castle Sugar was founded, as it happened, by Philip Castle’s great-grandfather. In 1922, it owned every piece of arable land on the island.

The form of government was anarchy, save in limited situations wherein Castle Sugar wanted to own something or to get something done. In such situations the form of government was feudalism.

Subsequent expeditions came for gold and diamonds and rubies and spices, found none, burned a few natives for entertainment and heresy, and sailed on.

“The fortifications have never been attacked, nor has any sane man ever proposed any reason why they should be attacked. They have never defended anything. Fourteen hundred persons are said to have died while building them. Of these fourteen hundred, about half are said to have been executed in public for substandard zeal.”

“There was at least one quality of the new conquerors of San Lorenzo that was really new,” wrote young Castle. “McCabe and Johnson dreamed of making San Lorenzo a Utopia.
“To this end, McCabe overhauled the economy and the laws.
“Johnson designed a new religion.”

He told me of idyllic hours he and his Zinka had spent in each other’s arms, cradled in Felix Hoenikker’s old white wicker chair, the chair that faced the sea.

“Something about a Russian dancer.” Crosby was sufficiently addled by booze to see no harm in thinking out loud. “I remember an editorial about how maybe the dancer was a spy.”

When Johnson and McCabe came upon the city, it was built of twigs, tin, crates, and mud—rested on the catacombs of a trillion happy scavengers, catacombs in a sour mash of slop, feculence, and slime.

The shed was neat and new, but plenty of signs had already been slapped on the walls, higgledy-piggledy.

He reported his avocation as: “Being alive.”

I imagined that somewhere far away I heard the blamming of a sledge on a brazen drum.

There was no such sound. My soul was simply resonating the beat of the brassy, clanging heat of the San Lorenzan clime.

There was no such sound. My soul was simply resonating the beat of the brassy, clanging heat of the San Lorenzan clime.

On the fuselage of each plane was painted, with childish bloodlust, a boa constrictor which was crushing a devil to death.

Then, above that tumid silence, there came a nagging song like the song of a gnat. It was a siren approaching.

At a limp, imperious signal from “Papa,” the crowd sang the San Lorenzan National Anthem.

Our enemies quail,
For they know they will fail
Against people so reverent and free.

The pilot next to her, however, had his features composed in the catatonic, orgiastic rigidity of one receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor.

The Crosbys and I were both upset. Our consternation was expressed in questions we had to have answered at once.

“Oh, no, sir,” said the driver piously. “Nobody that crazy.”

San Lorenzo conscripted a hundred men to fight on the side of democracy.

The squalor and misery of the city, being to the sides and back of the Casa Mona, were impossible to see.

“Don’t tell,” begged one querulously. “Please—please don’t tell.”

“One time,” said Castle, “when I was about fifteen, there was a mutiny near here on a Greek ship bound from Hong Kong to Havana with a load of wicker furniture. The mutineers got control of the ship, didn’t know how to run her, and smashed her up on the rocks near “Papa” Monzano’s castle. Everybody drowned but the rats. The rats and the wicker furniture came ashore.”

It straddled a waterfall; had a terrace cantilevered out into the mist rising from the fall.

It was a cunning lattice of very light steel posts and beams.

The interstices of the lattice were variously open, chinked with native stone, glazed, or curtained by sheets of canvas.

I went out onto the giddy terrace that straddled the waterfall and found little Newt asleep in a yellow butterfly chair.

The scratches formed a sort of spider’s web, and I wondered if they might not be the sticky nets of human futility hung up on a moonless night to dry.

He introduced himself to Newt and to me on the cantilevered terrace. He forestalled all references to his possible saintliness by talking out of the corner of his mouth like a movie gangster.

And Castle nodded sagely. “So this is a picture of the meaninglessness of it all! I couldn’t agree more.”

She got very huffy. “You know what movie stars make?”

I expected something pathological, but I did not expect the depth, the violence, and the almost intolerable beauty of the disease.

I waited anxiously, and I remembered what Marvin Breed had told me—that Angela’s one escape from her bleak life with her father was to her room, where she would lock the door and play along with phonograph records.

I was flabbergasted.

She improvised around the music of the Pullman porter’s son; went from liquid lyricism to rasping lechery to the shrill skittishness of a frightened child, to a heroin nightmare.

When the music was done, I shrieked at Julian Castle, who was transfixed, too, “My God—life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?”