The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (30 page)

‘Yes; the Count was dangerous. I was keeping him under the closest surveillance. It was my most important mission of the whole war. I would have taken him to my father’s castle if I could, to enlist him in our campaign for he was a man of great power though he was sometimes a little ludicrous because the real world fell so far short of his desires. But he did what he could to bring it up to his own level, even if his will exceeded his self-knowledge. And so he invented those macabre clowns, the Pirates of Death.

‘What was chilling, even appalling, in the Count’s rapacity was its purely cerebral quality. He was the most metaphysical of libertines. If he had passions, they were as lucid and intellectual as those of a geometrician. He approached the flesh in the manner of one about to give the proof of a theorem and, however exiguous those passions seemed to him, they were never unpremeditated. He acted the tyrant to his passions. However convulsive the grand guignol in his bed, he had always planned it well beforehand and rehearsed it so often in his brain that his performance perfectly simulated an improvisation. His desire became authentic because it was so absolutely synthetic.

‘Yet it remained only a simulation. He may have jetted his sperm in positive torrents but he never released any energy. Instead, he released a force that was the opposite of energy, a devitalizing force quite unlike – though just as powerful as – the kind of electricity which naturally flows between a man and a woman during the sexual act.

(She gently took my hand away from her breast and murmured in parenthesis: ‘Not yet.’)

‘Yet his performance was remarkable. In bed, one could almost have believed the Count was galvanized by an external dynamo. This galvanic mover was his will. And, indeed, his fatal error was to mistake his will for his desire –’

I interrupted her with a certain irritation.

‘But how is one to distinguish between the will and a desire?’

‘Desire can never be coerced,’ said Albertina with the crispness of a pedagogue even though, at that moment, she was coercing mine. She immediately resumed her discourse.

‘– and so he willed his own desires.’

I interrupted her again.

‘How was it he never found out you were a woman?’

‘Because he only ever took me backwardly, i.e.
in anum
,’ she explained patiently. ‘And, besides, his lusts always blinded him completely to anything but his own sensations.’

Then she took up her thread again.

‘His self-regarding “I” willed himself to become a monster. This detached, external yet internal “I” was both his dramatist and his audience. First, he chose to believe he was possessed by demons. Next, he chose to believe he had become a demon. He even designed himself a costume for the role – those gap-fronted tights! That vest of skin! When he reached a final reconciliation with the projective other who was his self, that icon of his own destructive potential, the abominable black, he had merely perfected that self-regarding diabolism which crushed and flattened the world as he passed through it, like an existential version of the cannibal chief’s chariot. But his insistence on the authority of his own autonomy made him at once the tyrant and the victim of matter, for he was dependent on the notion that matter was submissive to him.

‘So, when he first felt pain, he died of shock. And yet he died a happy man, for those who inflict suffering are always most curious about the nature of suffering.

‘As soon as I took service with him, I realized I must abandon my plan of enlisting him for I soon realized he would never serve any master but himself. However, if he had wanted to, or willed it, he could have flattened my father’s castle by merely breathing on it and burst all the test tubes only with laughing at them. After that, I travelled with him to keep him in a kind of quarantine.’

‘At first, I thought he was your father, the Doctor.’

‘My father?’ she cried in astonishment and laughed very musically for a long time. ‘But at first we thought he was the Minister! Even after I met the Minister, I thought it might be possible. Both of them had such earth-shaking treads.’

‘When did you cease to regard me as an enemy agent?’

‘As soon as my father verified you were in love with me,’ she said, as though it were obvious.

Night had completed itself and lesser lights, eyes of snakes and effluvia of fireflies, spangled the black velvet surfaces around us but the eyes of Albertina shone continually, like unquenchable suns. Her eyes were an unutterably lambent brown and the shape of tears laid on their sides. But shape and colour were not the primary quality of these unprecedented eyes; that was the scandalous cry of passion ringing out clamorously from their depths. Her eyes were the voice of the black swan; her eyes confounded all the senses and sleep nor death cannot silence nor extinguish them. Only, they are lightly veiled with incandescent dust.

During the first part of the night, she slept while I kept watch for wild beasts. She watched over me all the second part of the night and so we continued to arrange our rests during the remainder of the journey though days and nights soon resolved together and we had no notion of how much time had passed, or even if any at all of the cloudy stuff had drifted away before the great rain forests thinned out a little. Then we came to a gentler, more feminine country full of jewelled birds with faces of young girls and oviparous trees, where there was nothing that was not marvellous.

‘Because all this country exists only in Nebulous Time, I haven’t the least idea what might happen,’ she said. ‘Now the Professor and his sets of samples are gone, my father cannot structure anything until he makes new models. And desires must take whatever form they please, for the time being. Who knows what we shall find here?

‘If his experiment is a failure, we shall, of course, find nothing.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because the undifferentiated mass desire was not strong enough to perpetuate its own forms.’ When she saw I did not understand her, she grudgingly amplified: ‘It would mean that the castle is not yet generating enough eroto-energy.’

I did not understand her but I nodded, to save face.

‘Anyway, we must watch the sky by day and keep a fire burning at night and then one day we may make contact with one of my father’s aerial patrols.’

‘Has he extended the boundaries of the war so far?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘But he keeps most deserted places under continuous air reconnaissance to discover what, if anything, is peopling the emptiness.’

All this sounded like
folie de grandeur
to me but I was content to leave my fate in her hands, now that I had found her, and we went on through a dangerous wonderland.

We soon learned to identify the grey-green shrubs we called ‘pain trees’ because of the invisible patches scattered over their leaves and bark that stung us when we touched them and left great areas of scarlet inflammation on our skins that irritated us for a long time. But the trees whose trunks were scaled like fish did not harm us, though they stank horribly when the sun was high, unlike the lucidly fragrant white gardenias that wept such hard tears of perfumed gum that I threaded some of them into a necklace of scented amber and gave it to Albertina. Often we walked through intoxicating odoriferous copses composed only of incense trees and we found ourselves in groves of a strange, tall plant which must have been some variety of cactus for its flesh, though soft and white as snow, was formed all over into round bosses tipped with red knobs. When we put our mouths to these nipples we found ourselves drinking sweet milk and were refreshed. These luscious cacti grew all together in tracts of many hundreds at a time and if the country had shown any signs of being inhabited we would have thought that they were farmed in enormous, free-form fields. But we saw no sign of man at all, though we sometimes found the marks of hoofprints of wild horses.

Creeping along the ground and wreathed around branches was an auriculate morning glory with purple ears where the blossoms should have been and often we heard the singing of flowers we never saw. A certain bush with speckled plumage laid clutches of six or seven small brown eggs at a time, eggs the size of pullet’s eggs, in the sandy hollows at its roots. When the bush was laying, it shuddered and clucked; then sighed. In this forest, it seemed that nature had absolved her creations from an adherence to the formal divisions so biology and botany were quite overthrown and the only animals we saw, green-fleshed, marsupial, one-eyed, crawling things, seemed more an ambulant vegetable than anything else. Roasted on a spit, they tasted like barbecued celery.

As far as I can remember, we had been about three days in this
terra nebulosa
before we came to the strangest of all the trees. It grew by itself on the crown of a low hill, and though it was firmly rooted into the earth by four, quivering legs and a massive trunk topped with branches resembling those of a European oak sprang from its neck, beneath the trunk and above the legs was the skeleton of a horse with its entrails visible. A green sap pulsed and throbbed through the entrails, emitting as it did so a hum like that of a hive of happy bees. The first evidence of the hand of man we had seen since we entered the forest was pinned to the branches of this equine tree. It was decorated with ornaments of wrought iron which jangled together in the wind; with what seemed to be amulets in the shape of horseshoes; and on a prominent branch, a very large longbow abruptly broken in half. Every available spot on the trunk was crowded with votive tablets and inscriptions carved in a brusque, cuneiform script, and here and there votive nails were hammered in while little switches of horsehair were tied to all the twigs in neat bows. And the springy turf around the tree was deeply crusted with droppings of horses and indented with the marks of hooves.

We stood on the hill beside the buzzing, bi-partite thing, half horse, half tree, and looked down on the lyrical contours of a Theocritan valley that opened out before us in rich, unfenced fields of ripe corn that rippled under the soft wind. Albertina pointed to them at the very same moment I saw the series of magnificent forms break the cover of the wheatfield and come towards us, moving as soundlessly on the green carpet underfoot as horses in a dream, though only their bodies were those of horses for they were centaurs.

There were four of them, one bay, one black, a dappled grey and one all unspotted white, but their imposing torsos were mostly gleaming bronze though it seemed, from a distance, almost as if spiders had woven webs all round their shoulders for they were covered with mazy decorations like hug-me-tights of lace. The hair they all wore falling straight down their backs accorded to their horse-like colouring, russet, black or white, but their features were cast in the sternest, most autocratic mould of pure classicism. Their long noses were so straight you could have rolled a ball of mercury down them and their lips were set in austere, magisterial folds. All were clean shaven. They wore their genitalia set at the base of the belly, as on a man; because they were animals, they were without embarrassment but, because they were also men, even if they did not know it, they were proud. And, as they trotted towards us, their arms folded on their breasts, the light of a setting sun glittered upon them so they looked like Greek masterpieces, born in a time when gods walked among us. However, they did not believe they were gods; they believed they walked a constant tightrope above damnation.

As they came closer, I saw they were entirely naked for what I had taken for clothing was the most intricate tattoo work I have ever seen. These tattoos were designed as a whole and covered the back and both arms down as far as the forearms; and the middle of the chest, the upper abdomen and the throat and face were all left bare on the males though the womenfolk were tattooed all over, even their faces, in order to cause them more suffering, for they believed women were born only to suffer. The colours were most subtly woven together and the palette had the aesthetic advantages of limitation for it consisted of only a bluish black, a light blue and a burning red. The designs were curvilinear, swirling pictures of horse gods and horse demons wreathed in flowers, heads of corn, and stylized representations of the mammiform cacti, worked into the skin in a decorative fashion that recalled pictures in embroidery.

When they reached the hill, they turned their faces towards the tree and three times uttered, in unison, a singularly piercing neigh, while each dropped a turd. Then the bay, in the most thrilling baritone I have ever heard, began a sacerdotal song or hieratic chant something in the style of the chants of orthodox Jewry, though with the addition of a great deal of dramatic mime. It was the hour when the Sacred Stallion in his fiery form, the Sun Horse, entered the Celestial Stable and closed the bars on himself for the night and the bay was giving thanks for the day’s ending, because, in their theology, every event in the physical world depended solely on the ongoing mercy of the Sacred Stallion and on his congregation’s ongoing atonement for the unmentionable sin at the dawn of time that recurred inexorably every year. But I did not know that then. The bay used his voice like a musical instrument and, since I did not understand their language, I thought it was a wordless song. The other centaurs lent their voices at intervals in a magnificently polyphonic counterpoint and also beat their hooves on the turf to provide rhythm. It was stupendously impressive.

When the bay finished, he bowed his head to show his orisons were over. His black mane and tail were grizzled and his face showed the marks of age in a weathering that added to its heroic beauty. Then he spoke to Albertina and myself in a sonorous sequence of deep, rumbling sounds.