The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (22 page)

‘If you are an Arabian, why do you not sleep?’ demanded the older man in the standard speech, which he spoke fluently, though with a slight foreign accent and a very formal intonation.

‘I fear my dreams,’ I replied and, looking up, met eyes as ghastly as burned-out coals set in a face so thinly fleshed the bones pushed sharply against the skin.

‘Then ride with us,’ he invited. I was willing to go anywhere so I climbed over the wheel into the space they made for me and we drove on through the moonlight in silence. My host’s profile was as craggy and arrogant as those of the mountains. He was in his late forties or early fifties. His face was ravaged with pride and bitterness. He wore a black cloak with many layers of capes on the shoulders and a top-hat from which trailers of black crepe depended at the back. He was ready for any funeral and he carried a cane tipped with a silver ball that looked as if it could kill. His diabolical elegance could not have existed without his terrible emaciation; he wore his dandyism in his very bones, as if it was a colour that had seeped out of his essential skeleton to dye his clothes, and he never made a single movement that was not a gaunt but riveting work of art.

I discovered this road must be the low road to the devastated city for soon it found the river, which had so entirely encroached on it I thought we could go no further. The frightened horses bucked and whickered but the driver whipped and cursed them so we went on, though the water swirled around their hocks. When I realized I would see the graveyard of the city again, I moaned involuntarily.

‘Music!’ muttered the older man. ‘Music!’

But I could not tell whether he meant the sound of my pain or that of the gushing swirl of the waters, which rang out like a carillon. When this road also vanished under the surface of the water, the driver urged the horses into the river itself. The carriages floated buoyantly and the horses began to swim. So we went down the river and drove on the moonlit flood over the very heart of the ruins, which were rapidly sinking under the tempestuous waves.

The driver exclaimed: ‘Oh! What an appalling tragedy!’

But my host cuffed him sharply and snapped:

‘Lafleur, do I have to warn you again against softness of heart? Do as I do; salute nature when she offers us another
coup de théâtre
!’

Then he took a flask from his pocket and fed me brandy.

‘Did you witness it? Did many die?’

‘The whole population of the town and also the members of a travelling fair.’

He sighed with gratification.

‘How I should have liked to have seen it! And gloried in the Wagnerian clamour of it all… the shrieks, the crash of rending stone. And little children dashed to smithereens by bounding boulders! What a spectacle!

‘You must know that I am a connoisseur of catastrophe, young man. I witnessed the eruption of Vesuvius when thousands were coffined alive in molten lava. I saw eyes burst and fat run out of roast crackling in Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Dresden. I dabbled my fingers in the blood beneath the guillotine during the Terror. I am a demon for a cataclysm.’

He flung down this speech as if it were a gauntlet but I was far too awestruck by his misanthropy to pick it up. At last we saw signs of a road again on the bank and soon the horses were once more galloping on dry land, by the light of too much indifferent moon.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked. He did not so much reply to my question as speak out of the depths of some unknowable reverie of his own.

‘The journey alone is real, not the landfall. I have no compass to guide me. I set my course by the fitfulness of fortune and perceive my random signposts only by the inextinguishable flame of my lusts.’

That silenced me. The wheels of the carriage wound the road on to an invisible spool and I began to feel the effect of a strange heaviness exerted on me, a perverse, negative fascination exercised by the gaunt aristocrat who sat beside me, though a shudder went through me when I saw his curiously pointed teeth for they were exactly the fangs with which tradition credits vampires. All the same, he drew me. His quality of being was more dense than that of any man I have ever met – always excepting the Minister, of course. Yet, apart from his mind, which was a bruising heavy-weight, I think what made him so attractive to me was his irony, which withered every word before he spoke it. Everything about him was excessive, yet he tempered his vulgarity – for he was excessively vulgar in every respect – with a black, tragic humour of which he was only occasionally conscious himself.

He was particularly extraordinary in this: he had a passionate conviction he was the only significant personage in the world. He was the emperor of inverted megalomaniacs but he had subjected his personality to a most rigorous discipline of stylization so that, when he struck postures as lurid as those of a bad actor, no matter how ludicrous they were, still they impelled admiration because of the abstract intensity of their unnaturalism. He had scarcely an element of realism and yet he was quite real. He could say nothing that was not grandiose. He claimed he lived only to negate the world.

‘It is not in the least unusual to assert that he who negates a proposition at the same time secretly affirms it – or, at least, affirms something. But, for myself, I deny to the last shred of my altogether memorable being that my magnificent denial means more than a simple “no”. Sometimes my meagre and derisive lips seem to me to have been formed by nature only to spit out the word “no”, as if it were the ultimate blasphemy. I should like to speak an ultimate blasphemy and then bask in the security of eternal damnation but, since there is no God, well, there is no damnation, either, unfortunately. And hence, alas, no final negation. I am the hideous antithesis in person and I swear to anyone who wants the word of a hereditary count of Lithuania for it that I am not in the least secretly benignly pregnant with any affirmation of any kind whatsoever.’

He paused to caress his valet, who, with the submissiveness of the born victim, turned to him a face as livid as putrefaction. After my first shock of horror, I saw this was not a real face but one quite covered up with white bandages. This pliant valet was almost extinguished by subservience. His very walk was a kind of ambulant cringe. He abased himself obsequiously at all times. He was only a tool of the Count’s will.

‘Is there nothing in the world you do not to some degree condemn?’ I asked the Count.

He was silent for a long time. I thought he had not heard me and repeated my question; I had not yet grown used to the utterly self-centred nature of his discourse. He only answered questions when he thought that he had posed them to himself. But when he eventually spoke, he did so without his customary disdain.

‘The death-defying double somersault of love.’

The valet made some kind of repressed exclamation at that, probably applause, and the Count sombrely rested his chin on the top of his cane, fixing his eyes only on the road before us. When I spoke a little of the war, I met such a blank wall of unresponsiveness I realized the Count knew nothing at all about it and the journey continued in the silence of the morgue, until, as we were descending to the plain, the Count spoke again.

‘I ride the whirlwind of my desires and I would give this whirlwind, which has driven me to all the four rounded corners of the globe, the emblematic form of a tiger, the most ferocious of beasts, whose pelt yet bears the marks of a flagellation which must have taken place before the dawn of time.’

It was impossible to converse with him for he had no interest in anyone but himself and he offered his companion only a series of monologues of varying lengths, which often apparently contradicted themselves but always, in a spiral-line fashion, remained true to his infernal egoism. I never heard another man use the word ‘I’, so often. But I sensed an exemplary quality in his desperate self-absorption. I had not met anyone who lived with such iron determination since I left the Minister. He reminded me of the Minister.

‘Yet I am always haunted by a pain I cannot feel. Isolated in my invulnerability, yet I am nostalgic for the homely sensation of pain…’

A bloody froth blew back in our faces from the mouths of the straining horses and yet we galloped on without sparing them until we reached a strange place, one of those flamboyant chapels built by the Jesuits in the fallacious expectation of mass conversions among the Indians and long since abandoned. The moon was dying but still fitfully illuminated the crumbling façade and the bushes which grew in the roofless interior, where a startled frog splashed out of the pool of rainwater in the font when we entered with the picnic basket, for the Count wanted to eat breakfast. As if from habit, he pissed on the altar while the valet set out the meal; the Count was always iconoclast, even when the icons were already cast down.

Out of the basket came a feast such as I had not eaten since that memorable luncheon with the Minister and Albertina. There was a can of truffled goose liver paté; glasses of game in aspic; a flock of cold roast pheasant; imported cheese whose savourous reek stung the nostrils; a side of smoked salmon from which the valet shaved curling strips; an exotic gravel of various caviars; an insulated box of salad and another filled with grapes and peaches, while an ice-chest contained a dozen bottles of Veuve Clicquot. There was china and sparkling glassware of the finest quality. The cutlery was of solid silver. The boy laid out an incomparable
fête champêtre
and we all fell to with a will. The Count ate very heartily; indeed, he ate with a blind voracity that demolished the spread so speedily the valet and I were hard put to it to seize enough to satisfy ourselves, although there was so much. When nothing was left but gnawed bones, dirty plates, peach stones, and empty bottles, the Count sighed, belched and grasped the valet. His mute’s hat tumbled to the ground.

‘Watch me! Watch me!’ he cried as though, in order to appreciate the effect of his own actions, he had to know that he was seen. But it was far too dark in the ruined church to see anything. I heard the grunts and whimpers of the valet and the amazing roars which accompanied the Count’s lengthy progress towards orgasm. The vault of heaven above us darkened and all the time frightful cries and atrocious blasphemies issued from the Count’s throat. He whinnied like a stallion; he cursed the womb that bore him; and finally the orgasm struck him like an epilepsy. Ecstasy seemed to annihilate the libertine and there was a silence broken only by the pathetic whimpering of the valet until, in the velvet and luminous darkness, the Count spoke, in a voice drained of all vigour.

‘I have devoted my life to the humiliation and exaltation of the flesh. I am an artist; my material is the flesh; my medium is destruction; and my inspiration is nature.’

Now the valet moved painfully about, gathering together the dishes, and it grew light enough to make out the Count’s shape as he lolled against the desecrated altar, his head bare. His hair, a coarse and uniform grey, hung down to his shoulders.

‘I am impregnable because I always exist in a state of dreadful tension. My crises render me utterly bestial and in that state I am infinitely superior to man, as the tiger, who preys on man if he has any sense, is superior. My anguish is the price of my exaltation.’

I began to wonder if the Count was one of the Doctor’s agents and then I thought, no! This man might be the Doctor himself, under an assumed identity! The suspicion made me quiver.

I can hardly describe to you the man’s appalling, cerebral lucidity. He was like a corpse animated only by a demonic intellectual will. When he had rested a little, we climbed back into the carriage and rolled off across the green, spacious countryside, under a vertiginous arc of sky which began to clear and sparkle. The mountains dwindled behind us. The dew glittered in the budding hedgerows. A lark rose, singing. It was a beautiful morning in early spring.

‘The universe itself is not a sufficiently capacious stage on which to mount the grand opera of my passions. From the cradle, I have been a blasphemous libertine, a blood-thirsty debauchee. I travel the world only to discover hitherto unknown methods of treating flesh. When I first left my native Lithuania, I went at once to China where I apprenticed myself to the Imperial executioner and learned by heart a twelve-tone scale of tortures as picturesque as they are vile. When my studies were complete, I tied my tutor to the trunk of a blossoming apricot tree so the rosy petals showered down upon his increasing mutilations as, with incredible delicacy and a very sharp knife, I carved out little oysters of his living flesh – the torture known as the “slicing”, the dreaded
ling ch’ih
. What a terrible sight he was to behold! The apricot tree wept tears of perfumed flowers over him; that was Nature’s pity, decorative but unhelpful.

‘Subsequently I visited the rest of Asia, where, among other infamies too numerous to mention, I amputated the scarcely perceptible breasts of all the occupants of a geisha house in the exquisitely bell-haunted city of Kyoto. Then I left my crest stamped in wax plugs in all the capacious anuses of the royal eunuchs of the court of Siam. Subsequently I visited Europe where, as a reward for my villainies, I was condemned to burn at the stake in Spain, to hang by the neck in England and to break upon the wheel in a singularly inhospitable France, where, sentenced to death
in absentia
by the judiciary of Provence, my body was executed in effigy in the town square of Aix.

‘I fled to North America, where I knew my barbarities would pass unnoticed, and in Quebec I hired my valet, Lafleur, whose interesting nose has quite caved in under the weight of a hereditary syphilis. Young as he is, his face has already been totally obliterated by the ghastly residue of past pleasures he never tasted personally. Together we travelled the various states. I gave certain evidence in the trials at Salem, Mass., which condemned eighteen perfectly innocent persons to death by pressing. I instigated a rebellion among the slaves on a plantation in Alabama which led to bloody and wholesale retribution; they were all tied to bales of cotton and ignited by ululating Klansmen. Then, in a perfumed bordello in New Orleans, I strangled with my legs a mulatto whore just as she coaxed the incense from my member with a mouth the shape, colour and texture of an overripe plum.