The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (31 page)

But we could not understand a single word and that, I realized when I learned a little of their speech, was because it possessed neither grammar nor vocabulary. It was only a play of sounds. One needed a sharp ear and a keen intuition to make head or tail of it and it seemed to have grown naturally out of the singing of the scriptures, which they held to be vital to their continued existence.

When he saw our perplexity, the bay shrugged and indicated by gesture we should throw down our weapons. When we had done so, he gestured us to mount the dappled grey and the black. I demurred in pantomime, mimicking our unworthiness to ride them and at that he smiled, and told us wordlessly that, even though we were unworthy, we must ride just the same. Only much later, when I learned we had ridden two of the princes of their Church, did I realize how privileged we had been for the black was the Smith and the dappled grey the Scrivener and these were posts the equivalent of cardinals. Each centaur picked one of us up in his brawny arms and swung us up behind him on to his broad back as easily as if we had been children. Although I should not think they had ever carried passengers before, they moved at a stately walk, though less out of consideration for our precarious seats than that they never strolled or ambled but always only processed. We rode through the sea of corn to the cluster of homesteads that lay, half-smothered in vines and flowers, beyond the fields. And there they gently put us down in a kind of agora or meeting place, in the centre of which was a very large wooden rostrum with a brass trumpet hanging from its rail. The bay put his trumpet to his lips and blew.

The centaurs lived in enormous stables fashioned from the trunks of trees, with deep eaves of thatch, a style of architecture with a Virgilian rusticity for it had the severe, meditative quality of classicism and yet was executed in wood and straw. The lofty proportions of these stables were dictated by the size of our hosts; a half-grown centaur, part yearling, part adolescent, was already a whole head taller than I so the doors all had wooden archways more than fifteen feet high and ten feet broad, at least. It was the hour of the evening meal when we arrived and woodsmoke drifted into the fading sky from various holes in the roofs but, as soon as the bay sounded the horn, every inhabitant of the place came trotting from his house until we were surrounded by a throng of the fabulous creatures, inquisitively snuffing the air that blew about us, arching their necks and blowing thoughtfully through their nostrils for, though they were men, they had all the mannerisms of horses.

They thought that, since they had found us on the Holy Hill, we too must be holy in spite of our unprepossessing appearance.

If they had not decided we were holy, they would have trampled us to death.

Though they were men, they did not know what a man was and believed themselves to be a degenerate variety of the horse they worshipped.

Herds of wild horses often came to trample down their plantations of grain and their cacti dairies, to plunge through the townships like a hooved river in full spate and to mount the centaurs’ womenfolk, if they found them. They believed the Sacred Stallion housed the souls of the dead in the wild horses and called their depredations the Visitation of the Spirits. They followed them with weeks of fasting, of the self-mortification to which they were addicted and to the recital of the part of their equine scripture which celebrated the creation of the first principle, the mystic essence of horse, the Sacred Stallion, from a fusion of fire and air in the upper atmosphere. Even before I understood their language, I found myself profoundly moved to hear the impassioned recital of their mythic past, which only the males of a certain caste were allowed to perform. Though they all sang constantly and all their songs were hymns or psalms, sacred narrative poetry was the exclusive property of a single cantor, who to earn the right to sing it had to run with the wild horses for an entire season, an ordeal few candidates for the post survived. Then, when he reached the age of thirty, he began to study the arcane classics under the elder who alone knew them all. By his forty-fifth birthday, he had learned the complete canon and its accompanying gestures and footwork, for this poetry was both sung and danced; then he would present for the first time in public, in the earth-floored agora, the song of the horse who penetrated to the shades to retrieve his dead friend.

They prized fidelity above all other virtues. An unfaithful wife was flayed alive and her hide given to her husband to cover his next marriage bed, a mute deterrent to his new bride to keep from straying, while her lover was castrated and forced to eat his own penis, uncooked. Since they all had the most profound horror of meat, they termed this method of execution ‘Death by Nausea’. However, this rigorous puritanism did not prevent every male in the village from raping Albertina on the night we arrived and their organs were so prodigious, their virility so unmentionable, that she very nearly died. While, as for me, they forced on me the caresses of all their females for they had no notion of humanity in spite of their extraordinary nobility of spirit. Because they were far more magnificent than man, they did not know what a man was. They did not have a word for shame and nothing human was alien to them because they were alien to everything human.

These hippolators believed their god revealed himself to them in the droppings excreted by the horse part of themselves since this manifested the purest essence of their equine natures, and it was quite as logical an idol as a loaf of bread or a glass of wine, though the centaurs had too much good sense to descend to coprophily. The community was governed by a spiritual junta comprising the Cantor, the repository and interpreter of the Gospel; the Scrivener; the Smith; and the Tattoo-master. It went on four legs, as was only natural.

The centaurs did not give one another personal names for they felt themselves all undifferentiated aspects of a universal will to become a horse. So these cardinals were referred to in common speech by the symbols of their arts. The Cantor was called Song, though never to his face; the Tattoo-master Awl, Gouge or Aspiring Line; the Smith Red Hot Nail and the Scrivener, Horse Hair Writing Brush. But this terminology was necessary not because the individuals needed names but because the tasks they performed distinguished them from the others, so that it was not precisely the bay who was known as Song but the idea of the Cantor which he represented. They did not have much everyday social intercourse. The women did not gossip at their work, although they always sang. Daily life was meaningless to them for all they did was done in the shadow of the continuous passion of the Sacred Stallion and only this cosmic drama was real to them. They had no vocabulary to express doubts. Nor were they able to express the notion ‘death’. When the time came to identify this condition, they used for it the sounds that signified also ‘birth’ for death was their greatest mercy. In giving them death, the Sacred Stallion gave them an ultimate reconciliation with Him; they were reborn in the wild horses.

Music was the voice of the Sacred Stallion. Shit signified his presence among them. Their Holy Hill was a dungheap. The twice daily movement of their bowels was at once a form of prayer and a divine communion. Every aspect of their lives was impregnated by the profoundest religious feeling for even the little foal child whose milk teeth were not yet through was a kind of priest, or medium for the spirit, in this faith. But only the males held the secrets of these mysteries. The women were the rank and file of the devotees and had so much to do, working the fields, bearing the children, milking the cacti, making the cheese, grinding the corn, building the houses, they could spare time only to pray, beating staccato patterns of hoof beats and uttering the shrieking neigh that meant: ‘Hallelujah!’ The females were ritually degraded and reviled. They bore the bloody brunt of the tattooing. They dragged whole trunks of trees to build the stables while their menfolk prayed. Yet the women were even more beautiful than the men, each one both Godiva and her mount at the same time. They walked like rivers in floods of variously coloured hair and carried their crimson holes proudly beneath tails that arched like rainbows. It was a heraldic sight to see a pair of centaurs mating.

And now, on our first evening, the setting sun cast a magic aurefaction on their hocks and shoulders and all those profiles off Greek vases and I felt the strange awe I had experienced in the choirs and naves of the forest, for once more we were surrounded by giant and indifferent forms. I felt myself dwindle and diminish. Soon I was nothing but a misshapen doll clumsily balanced on two stunted pins, so ill-designed and badly functioning a puff of wind would knock me over, so graceless I walked as though with an audible grinding of rusty inner gears, so slow of foot our hosts could run me down in a flash for I might even be stupid enough to try to escape. And when I looked at Albertina, I saw that though she was still beautiful, she also had become a doll; a doll of wax, half melted at the lower part.

When the bay spoke to me, I answered him in my own tongue; then French; then the already half-forgotten language of the river people; then my faulty English; then my even scantier German. He rumbled deeply in the back of his throat, possibly in admiration of my facility for making noises, and then Albertina spoke a few phrases in, among other languages I could not even identify, Chinese and Arabic. But the bay shrugged, making a kaleidoscopic confluence of the colours on his shoulders, and, gripping me tightly in his mighty fist, began a mute inspection of me, while the dappled grey investigated Albertina.

They soon discovered that our clothes came off and the sight of these flapping, detachable integuments provoked a sweet thunder of laughter among a breed used to garments embroidered in pain that fitted so intimately they came off only if a back was pared like an apple. Kneeling down in the fashion of horses, the bay and the grey prised, poked and handled every part of our bodies, especially our forked, insubstantial, lower halves, for they had nothing to compare Old Two Legs with. Our feet, especially, were objects of the greatest wonder and, by the sonorous exclamations, clearly also of considerable surmise. When a yearling ran up with an axe, I guessed the bay planned to cut off a foot in order to take it in his hands and examine it more closely. I was interested to see he interpreted my involuntary cry as one of outraged protest and waved the hatchet away. A look of intense curiosity crossed his face while he subjected me to a fresh barrage of incomprehensible questions. But I did not know how to reply except with a few, wordless murmurs because I had not yet grasped the essentially nonverbal nature of the language and he soon abandoned all attempts to talk to me and bent over me afresh to count my toes and exclaim over my toenails, which clearly fascinated him.

As it grew darker, they brought flaming brands set in iron torches to light up the piazza and left us lying on our backs on the stage while the bay conducted vespers. The service consisted of a recital from the scriptures and prayers. The recital of their scriptures
in toto
occupied the entire year, which concluded with the death and resurrection of the Sacred Stallion at midwinter. Then forty days’ mourning was succeeded by a three-day feast and the entire cycle began again. Now, by one of the temporal metastases which occurred constantly in Nebulous Time, we happened to have fallen into their hands at the very time in which they were living again the season, recurring every year in the timeless medium which regulated all their actions, when the Sacred Stallion from the depths of his compassion teaches them the art of tattooing, so that, though the sins of their father had denied them the true shape of horses, they could at least carry the shapes of horses upon their altered skins. So the lesson for today had the text: TRANSMISSION OF THE DIVINE ART NUMBER ONE. Though this was neither more nor less significant to them than any other phase in their theological dramaturgy, for all were of the utmost significance, it had certain repercussions upon the nature of the hospitality they eventually offered us. For their ritual was by no means inflexible; it could be altered and broadened to incorporate any new element they happened upon. As it incorporated the incursions of the wild horses, so eventually they modulated it in order to incorporate us. But that came later.

By its nature, the TRANSMISSION OF THE DIVINE ART NUMBER ONE was one of the less choreographic of their recitals, though the staging was sufficiently impressive. Nevertheless, it was awesome.

First of all, the assembled women began to beat a subdued rhythm with their hooves and an acolyte, a sorrel-coloured foal, ceremoniously brought on to the stage a wooden tray containing a whip, a paintbrush, a saucer full of black liquid and some kind of metal instrument I could not identify. He knelt before the bay who at first seemed sullen and impassive, adopting a statuesque pose with his arms folded. But, as the drumbeats quickened, he began to sing in that most glorious baritone and in response came the nasalized hallelujah chorus that is my strongest memory of our life among the centaurs for it greeted the dawn and foreclosed the day, every day, inevitably, and is inseparably mingled in my mind with the rich smell of fresh horse-dung.

As the music he and his congregation made grew quicker and louder, the bay’s excitement began to rise. He sought after atonement and he chastised himself. He moaned and grovelled and quarrelled with himself until, seizing the whip, he beat his own flanks until the blood came. When they saw the blood, some of the women went off into strange, lonely ecstasies. Puffs of blue flame came out of their holes and they reared, threshed about with their hooves and whinnied convulsively. But when the Cantor dropped his whip and sank to the ground, covering his face, in an attitude of complete abnegation, everyone grew tremulously silent and I saw that even the grown males were weeping.