The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Read online

  The seed-broker was a pale, flabby, furtive man. When I broke into a flood of invective in the standard speech, he began to quail already and when I demanded to see the contracts, his blustering protests were adequate proof that he was hopelessly in the wrong. I threatened to find a lawyer and sue him for ten thousand dollars’ worth of defamation to Iinoui’s character. Sweat beaded his unhealthy-looking forehead. I had already developed a marked distaste for the insipid colouring and limp bodies of the shore people; they looked like the comic figures Mama would sometimes mould out of the porridge to make the idiot daughter giggle. The broker offered Iinoui five hundred dollars’ compensation for his ‘clerk’s mistake’ and when I told Iinoui this, both he and Nao-Kurai looked at me as though I were a magician. With a good deal of instinctive graciousness, Iinoui accepted the sum in cash but while the broker counted out the notes, the two barge-masters conferred together and then with me so that when Iinoui had stowed the money away in the pouch of his inner belt, I had the pleasure of informing the merchant that none of the river people would henceforward handle goods for him any more. Since the barges were the only remaining form of internal transport, it was he and not his prey who now found ruin staring him in the face. We left him shaking with impotent rage.

  Iinoui insisted I take half his profits but I would not have done so had Nao-Kurai not told me that if I did not, I would hurt Iinoui’s feelings. Then we went to a bar which served Indians and drank a good deal of brandy and all the time they both flattered me unmercifully, so I felt almost ashamed. You must realize that, in spite of his quick wits and native intelligence, Nao-Kurai was not making good progress at his lessons. For one thing, he was far too old for the first grade. After so many years of hauling rope and heaving sacks, his fingers were too gnarled and stiff to handle a pencil with sensitivity. And, for another thing, his mind, which held the patterns of the currents in every river in the country and remembered the sites and quirks of all the locks on each one of half a thousand canals; his mind, a fabulous repository of water-lore, folkways and the mythology of the past; that mind which could calculate like lightning how much freight a barge could carry or how much coal made up a load – this crowded and magnificently functioning mind no longer had a stray corner left in which to store the Roman alphabet. Besides, he did not think in straight lines; he thought in subtle and intricate interlocking circles.

  He conceived of certain polarities – light and darkness; birth and death – which, though they were immutable, existed in a locked tension. He could comprehend orally the most sophisticated concepts in a flash but co-ordinate his hand and eye sufficiently to form a linear sequence as elementary as ‘the cat sat on the mat’, he could not. ‘But, Kiku!’ he would say. ‘The cat sits there, upon your knee, and though she is not the only cat in the world, she is for me the very essence of cat.’ The very shapes of the letters led him astray. He fell to musing on their angularities and traced and retraced them, chuckling to himself with pleasure, until they became cursive abstracts, beautiful in themselves but utterly lacking in signification. Our evenings of study had become a mutual torture. I knew he would never learn to read or write. And his failure only made him respect me more. My success with the seed-broker clinched a decision that must have been growing in his mind for some time.

  At last we broke away from Iinoui and went off to finish our shopping, belching fumes of brandy at one another companionably through our moustaches. I paused to spend some of my new wealth on a bunch of speckled dahlias for Mama and then I bought a cheerful silk handkerchief with violets painted on it.

  ‘Is that a present for someone?’ asked Nao-Kurai with the beautiful, tentative tact of my people.

  ‘For Aoi,’ I replied.

  He had the chickens bundled in the crook of one arm and a whole still life of vegetables crammed in his other while I carried a cheese, a mound of butter wrapped up in straw and a basket containing four dozen eggs. But still he managed to reach out and grasp my hand.

  ‘Does my Aoi please you?’

  We stood in the market and it was the middle of the afternoon. The gipsy girl still danced with her bear and their money box now glinted like a box of herrings from all the silver they had been given. The Irishman had just embarked on an endless lament for dead Napoleon and a few pennies lay in his proffered cap. I remembered the city, the opera-house and the music of Mozart. The voices of Mama and Aoi were now to me the music of Mozart and as I remembered the city, so I gladly said good-bye to it. The brandy I had drunk and Iinoui’s gift and pretty speeches made me warm and sentimental. And then Nao-Kurai might have been my father, from appearances; and I loved him already.

  The river people had evolved or inherited an intricate family system which was theoretically matrilinear though in practice all decisions devolved upon the father. The father – or, nominally, mother – adopted as his son the man whom his eldest daughter married. When he died, this son-in-law inherited the barge and all that went with it. Therefore Nao-Kurai offered me far more than a bride; he offered me a home, a family and a future. If I murdered Desiderio and became Kiku for ever, I need fear nothing in my life ever, any more. I need not fear loneliness or boredom or lack of love. My life would flow like the river on which I lived. I would become officially an outcaste but, since I had signed my allegiance with the outcastes, I would no longer linger on the margins of life with a delicate sneer on my face, wistfully wishing that I were Marvell or that I were dead. My eyes filled with tears. I could hardly speak.

  ‘Yes,’ I stammered. ‘She pleases me.’

  ‘Then she is yours,’ he said with Arab simplicity and with one accord we dropped all our parcels and embraced one another.

  As we did so, the gipsy girl flung back her head at the conclusion of a fandango and I caught sight of her face over Nao-Kurai’s shoulder. For a single, fleeting second, she wore the face of Dr Hoffman’s beautiful ambassador and all my resolution failed, for I would have followed that face to the end of the world. But she raised her hand to wipe the sweat away and it was as if she wiped the ambassador’s face away. She was once again an ordinary gipsy girl, even an ugly gipsy girl, with a wide flat nose, small eyes and gold coins dangling from her pierced ears. So I knew my eyes had deceived me but, all the same, a little of my glory evaporated and I returned to the barge more soberly, though Nao-Kurai laughed all the time from pure joy.

  Because Aoi was only nine years old, I thought there would be a long period of betrothal but everyone assured me she had reached puberty and offered me visual proof if I did not believe them. So I abandoned the last vestiges of my shore-folk squeamishness and Nao-Kurai fixed the date of my wedding for a few weeks ahead, the time of the winter solstice, when we would return to the town of T. after a trip to take a load of manufactured paper goods across the country on the canal system for, beyond the town of T., the river widened to form a natural basin where the river people traditionally met to celebrate weddings, which were always occasions of great festivity among them.

  Mama kissed me and told me how happy she was. Aoi jumped straight up into my arms as if propelled upwards by the force of her own giggling; the middle sister shyly tugged my shirt-tails and asked me if I would marry her as well; while even the youngest seemed to drool with unusual enthusiasm and all the brothers shook my hand and murmured more reticent congratulations. They hung all the barges in our chain with flowers made from golden paper to tell the waterways there was to be a wedding and men from every barge we passed came aboard to embrace me. It was the ritual commencement of the ritual of adoption. Mama and the girls began to stitch a very elaborate trousseau for both my bride and myself and also to make lists of the food they would need for the wedding feast. But when I asked them what kind of dishes they would serve up, they giggled convulsively and said it was to be a surprise.

  Now Aoi began to treat me with a great deal of familiarity. She came and sat down on my knee whenever she had any time to spare and tweaked the ends of my moustaches, she planted wet, child
ish kisses on my cheeks and mouth, and taking hold of my hands firmly, inserted them under the folds of her apron and her blouse, demanding me to tell her if her breasts had grown since the last performance and if so, how much. On the third night of our betrothal, we had a special supper – oyster soup thickened with beaten eggs as well as the usual cereal and fish. We drank this soup from special cups with a pink and purple glaze. I had not seen these cups before; apparently they were kept specially for weddings. Aoi knelt down in front of me to hand me my soup and accompanied her offering with certain verbal formulae too archaic and complex for me to understand but Nao-Kurai, laughing suggestively, refused to translate them. For the first time I felt, however slightly, that they were making my ignorance of their ways the butt of a private joke.

  Indeed, in a curious way, I had become less sure of myself among the river people since that curious trick of eyesight which made me put the ambassador’s face on top of that of the gipsy girl, even though now I had an accredited part to play in their opera. I began to sense, or thought I sensed, a new kind of ambivalence in, especially, Nao-Kurai’s behaviour. For one thing, he had dropped Gulliver’s Travels over the side of the barge and announced, with rather a childish glee, that our lessons were at an end. Well, I could only be thankful for that but I could not by any means interpret the expression of what I can only call incipient triumph I sometimes caught in the fathomless depths of his brown eyes, which were shaped like commas and, as I already knew, in no way expressed his soul. But the principal source of my unease was just this: the betrothal and subsequent marriage already involved me in a whole intricate web of ritual which I knew I must negotiate unerringly – and yet my new almost-father seemed to take a strange pleasure in refusing to give me any clues as to how to traverse it. I already guessed it was part of my function to enthusiastically massage my fiancée’s breasts whenever she offered them to me, even if it were in front of everybody. I assumed by the presence of the oysters that the soup was an aphrodisiac so I drank the three bowls she gave me, smacking my lips ostentatiously, and then I guessed I ought to ask for more. The entire cabin rocked with mirth so I knew my guess was correct and, as I expected, a little scrabbling knock came on my door some time past midnight.

  ‘Who’s there?’ I said softly.

  ‘A poor girl a-shivering with cold this night,’ she answered in the voice of a child who recites a poem she has learned by heart. Her diction was as old-fashioned as her invitation to soup but this time I understood her perfectly and got up to let her in.

  She had washed off the paint for the night, tied up her hair in pigtails with yellow bows and put on a plain white nightdress that reminded me of poor Mary Anne, whom I would much rather have forgotten. However, I was touched to see she still clutched her fishdoll by the tail of its red night-shirt; she must have brought it with her out of habit, for company. She scampered immediately to my bed and jumped between the sheets, arranging her doll neatly with its gills on the white-frilled pillow beside her. She was rather more solemn than usual but still she seemed to have studied every word and movement from a book of manners. Mama must have taught her everything. When I climbed into the bed beside her, she snuggled very prettily in my arms, reached down for my penis in a very businesslike way and began to stroke it with very considerable dexterity.

  Now the sexual mores of the river people were a closed book to me though I felt I could learn them very quickly once I had started; but in this particular situation I simply did not know if actual coitus was expected of me. The heating soup seemed to indicate it was but somehow I thought Aoi would not have been quite so forward in her manner unless it was not. My increasing excitement under her diabolically cunning little fingers made it all the more difficult to decide but when I turned her emphatically over on to her plump backside, she let out an unpremeditated caw of shock and affront so I stopped what I was about immediately and lay quite still, contenting myself with tweaking her pubescent nipples, until, by her own unaided work, she procured me an orgasm I was quite unable to forestall even though, as I sobbed it out, I wondered anxiously that it might be out of order and the whole exercise had been designed to test my stoicism, for they set great store by stoicism and never wept at funerals.

  But Aoi seemed quite content and curled up to sleep until Mama brought us our breakfast in bed next morning, with many expressions of approval and kisses for both of us. When I met Nao-Kurai on deck, he roared with approbation and clapped my back. Since I was half expecting him to be sullen because I had passed another test successfully, I was more taken aback than ever.

  The next night there was no soup but Aoi visited me promptly on the hour. This time she wore green bows on her pigtails. I guessed that Mama, Nao-Kurai and probably the entire family had their ears pressed to the bulwark in order to miss no sound we made and it was probably my duty to come as noisily as possible; so I did. This time she allowed me to caress her diminutive slit and I found, to my astonishment, her clitoris was as long as my little finger. This genuinely puzzled me. I had never encountered anything quite like it and, though I was sure it was against the rules, I decided to ask Mama about it the very next day. I thought she was more likely to explain the phenomenon to me than her son was, for she showed – so far as I could tell – nothing but honest pleasure at the impending marriage.

  I trapped her by herself, for a wonder, as she prepared some savoury messes for our lunch and she embarked on a warbling recitative clotted with archaisms and references to traditions of unspeakable antiquity which boiled down to the following: it was the custom for mothers of young girls to manipulate their daughters’ private parts for a regulation hour a day from babyhood upwards, coaxing the sensitive little projection until it attained lengths the river people considered both aesthetically and sexually desirable. The techniques of these maternal caresses were handed down from mother to mother but, when Aoi’s mother died, Mama had undertaken the indispensable handling of her granddaughters and felt a justifiable pride in having done so well by the girls. She asked me, had she not achieved wonders? And in all sincerity I answered, yes. The origins of this elongatory practice were lost in the mists of myth and ritual; she used the pentatonic phrase that meant ‘snake’ at one point and there were extraordinary snakes in their mythology. But the practice itself was, perhaps, an equivalent of the circumcision ceremonies among the males. Nao-Kurai had told me that the inevitable circumcision always took place without exception in mass surgical ceremonies when a boy reached the age of twelve and, for three weeks after the operation, the barges on which the boys who underwent it lived flew a number of bright red paper kites from flagpoles. Fortunately, the nuns had had me tidied up in that way when I was far too young to notice so I was spared the fear that a belated knife would descend on my foreskin before I could be married.

  When she saw my curiosity about these customs, perhaps she wondered if I thought she might be lying to conceal a natural deformity of her granddaughter’s, so Mama closed the galley door and told me to turn my back. I heard the slithering of garments and, when she told me to look again, she had taken off her trousers and, with those elegant gestures of refined invitation which always moved me so much, she invited me to inspect her own projection, which formed a splendid, quivering growth at the head of the dark red nether lips. The skin of her thighs was still supple and I realized I was quite unable to guess how old she was or even whether she was still attractive because of her white paint. Since all the river women married at puberty, she need not be older than her late forties and when I experimentally caressed her, I found she was already slick with secretions. She twittered a few words of admonition but, at the same time, slid fast the wooden bolt on the galley door and took me against the bulwark with a great deal of gasping, while a pan of shrimp danced and spluttered on the charcoal stove.

  I experienced an almost instantaneous regret as soon as the act was over for I could hardly imagine there was any society in the world which would not think that gaining carnal knowledge
of one’s hostess and foster grandmother was a gross abuse of hospitality but Mama, smiling (as far as I could tell), sighing and fluttering butterfly kisses all over my remorseful face, told me she had not enjoyed sex since the last circumcision festival in the town of T., the previous April, and that was a very long time ago; that my performance, although improvised, had been spirited enough to give her a great deal of pleasure; and that she was always available in the galley every morning after breakfast and before lunch. Then she wiped us both dry with a handtowel, put on her trousers again and turned her attention back to the shrimp, which had scorched a little.

  I went to lie down on my bunk for a while and examined the situation. Once again, I thought I had gone down a snake when in fact I was climbing up a ladder. Now I had acquired a very powerful ally indeed. Mama’s kindness to me increased enormously. The breakfast she brought Aoi and me included, now, all manner of specially juicy tidbits, such as grilled eel. Sometimes I heard her fluting my praises to her son when they were alone together. The promiscuity I had inherited from my mother, so often an embarrassment in the past, was standing me in very good stead. Indeed, I was growing almost reconciled to mothers.

  I thought that night I would come to grips with my child bride because she was wearing purple ribbons but she moved on to fellatio and so it went. Mama confirmed my suspicion that actual intercourse was forbidden until the wedding night itself, so the groom would still have some first fruits to pluck, and those nights of autumn passed in elaborate love play with my erotic, giggling toy, every night adorned with different coloured bows, while in the mornings I screwed the toy’s grandmother up against the wall. I began to feel like a love slave. They fed me very rich food and nobody called on me to perform any tasks on shipboard at all except occasionally to check bills for loading or bills for purchases for, after we delivered our paper goods, were honestly paid for them and turned about for the return journey to the town of T., Nao-Kurai began to lay in sumptuous stocks for the wedding. He bought five dozen jars of the very sweet wine they make in this part of the country from plums and honey; a ten gallon cask of raw brandy; a fifteen pound drum of dried apricots; and all manner of other things, including a live sheep which would be slaughtered for the feast. The dry goods were stored down below in the hold but the sheep was tethered to the deck of the barge which followed us and given boiled barley and oats to eat. It grew fatter as one looked at it, until it was almost too fat to bleat. But when I asked if it was to be the main course, roasted whole as a pièce de résistance, they said, no; there would be something even better. But they would not tell me what it was because, they said, they wanted to astonish me. Then they would laugh softly.