The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Page 16

  A coke stove filled the van with choking warmth. Inside, the van was as soft and excessive as a whore’s bed for they slept three apiece on three divans piled with satin cushions in lingerie tones and these filled up most of the interior. The smell of sweat, liniment and spent semen was almost overpowering. There were no windows and one could not see the walls for they were covered with mirrors and photographs which captured them all in every segmented attitude so that, now stripped of their tunics down to briefs of iridescent elastic, arranged upon their beds, they and their reflected or pictured parts – here, a bubbled head, there a shoulder, elsewhere a knee – seemed to continue, in a subtly enervated fashion, the climax of their act.

  Had I not known all along it was all done with mirrors? I had never seen so many mirrors since the war began.

  Mohammed brewed Turkish coffee in a brass pot on the stove and they made room for me on a pink cushion decorated with a mauve, appliquéd nude. The musician took off his yashmak and crouched down on a strip of white bearskin laid on what of the floor there was. He was a boy of six or seven, quite black, perhaps an Ethiopian; he was a eunuch. He seemed to go in almighty fear of his protectors. He lay in an attitude of utter submission. They suggested I would be more comfortable without my shirt and most comfortable of all without my suit but I insisted on retaining my trousers. After that, they jabbered to themselves in Arabic for a while and I leafed through some of the many body-building magazines that littered the beds until Mohammed served us each a syrupy thimbleful of his concoction.

  We sipped. There was silence and soon I became a little uncomfortable. I realized I was there for a reason and I could hardly believe my intuition as to what that reason was. Out of sheer nervousness, I found myself complimenting them again on their virtuosity.

  ‘We are,’ said Mohammed, with a faint undertone of menace, ‘capable of virtually anything.’

  So I could not say I was not warned. The coke rattled in the stove and the wind buffeted the sides of the van. With a slithering movement, the castrated black boy took his flute from the pile of his discarded veils. He sat down crosslegged on a couch and began to trace on the air an angular, tritonic tune which repeated itself over and over again like a wordless incantation.

  The mirrors reflected not only sections of the Arabs; they reflected those reflections, too, so the men were infinitely repeated everywhere I looked and now eighteen and sometimes twenty-seven and, at one time, thirty-six brilliant eyes were fixed on me with an intensity which varied according to the distance between the images of the eyes and their originals. I was surrounded by eyes. I was Saint Sebastian stuck through with the visible barbed beams from brown, translucent eyes which spun a web of fine, shining threads on the air like strands of candified sugar. Once again, they juggled with their hypnotic eyes and used their palpable eye strings to bind me in invisible bonds. I was trapped. I could not move. I was filled with impotent rage as the wave of eyes broke over me.

  The pain was terrible. I was most intimately ravaged I do not know how many times. I wept, bled, slobbered and pleaded but nothing would appease a rapacity as remorseless and indifferent as the storm which raged outside and now reached a nightmarish hurricane. They stretched me on my face on a counterpane of pale orange artificial silk and took it in turns to pin down my arms and legs. I ceased to count my penetrations but I think each one buggered me at least twice. They were inexhaustible fountains of desire and I soon ceased to be conscious of my body, only of the sensation of an arsenal of swords piercing sequentially that most private and unmentionable of apertures. But I was so far outside myself they might just as well have cut me up and juggled with me and, for all I know, they did. They gave me the most comprehensive anatomy lesson a man ever suffered, in which I learned every possible modulation of the male apparatus and some I would have thought impossible.

  And then, as if obeying an inaudible whistle, they stopped. The wind and the rain still beat down but the acrobats were done with their display though they showed no signs of satiation or weariness, only of conclusion. It was as if they had only been going through a gymnastic exercise and now they once again towelled themselves, searched for their discarded briefs and drew them again over the pistons of their loins with the most offensive insouciance. A blubbered wreck, I lay on the coverlet and I think that I was calling for my mother, though it was probably Albertina. After a time, Mohammed came, fed me more coffee and, I think, a little arak and held me in a fairly warm and comforting embrace, murmuring to me in his vile French that I had been initiated – though into what I had no idea. The liquor stung my throat and slowly brought me back to my senses.

  Mohammed dressed me and then, after a murmured consultation with his colleagues, dug about in a drawer concealed in the lower part of one of the divans. The many coruscating surfaces and the reflections of men were still at last. The men themselves lay on their sides propped on one elbow, with a childlike brightness in their faces as if their innocence had been, somehow, refreshed. I felt a nervous agitation. I longed to be gone but did not dare move until they ordered me for fear of unleashing a fresh assault. Mohammed turned to me holding something coyly concealed behind his back. His g-string throbbed like a sling full of live fish.

  ‘C’est pour toi,’ he said. ‘Un petit cadeau.’

  He pressed into my hands a little purse of coloured, cut and ornamented leather such as they sell to tourists in Port Said. It was decorated with the picture of an Egyptian king listening to his musicians and the sight almost made me weep, to think of Ancient Egypt preserved in the gelid amber of the time it had sustained for all of two thousand years. Then Mohammed drew me gently from the bed and wrapped me in one of those great, dark, hooded, enveloping, desert Arab cloaks to protect me, he told me, from the weather. And after that he put me outside the door, sent me into the teeth of the whirlwind. It hurt me dreadfully to walk.

  The air was full of blown tiles, chimneypots, washing poles and dustbins. The wind had seized the town by the throat and particularly tormented the flimsy tents of the carnival, tossing them about this way and that. The rain came in black, wind-swept palls and the river below the city was fearfully swollen, a concourse of angry waters. I walked up the road, away from the inhabited places, as rapidly as the storm and my pain would let me. I had a great need to leave humanity behind for a while.

  I stumbled over a scrubby field or two and discovered a narrow lane which took me out on to a cliff overhanging the river. Now I had to crawl, for fear the wind would blow me into the gorge. The path took me down on to the face of the cliff itself and when I saw the mouth of a small cave, I instantly clambered into it, drew my Bedouin coverall snugly about me and tried, as best I could, to compose myself a little, though I was in the grip of a terrible reactive shock. Presently I remembered I still clutched the purse Mohammed had given me and I opened it. It contained twenty-seven eyes, brown as ale and shaped like oblate spheroids. I thought he must have plucked these spare eyes off the mirrors. I was a little light-headed and, I remember, must have spent most of that tempestuous day playing a solitary but elaborate game of marbles with those objects, rolling them across the sandy floor of the cave and laughing with childlike pleasure when they bounced off one another. About noon, I remember, I heard a tremendous, roaring crash and part of my roof came down, swallowing up half a dozen of my toys, which irritated me. But I paid no further attention to the world outside until, one way and another, all the marbles were gone, lost in ratholes or crevices or rolled into the dry undergrowth at the mouth of the cave where I did not have the patience to retrieve them.

  When the last one disappeared, I found I was recovered. I felt light-headed and still severely wounded but I discovered I was very hungry and thought my master, if he was sober, probably needed me. Besides, the storm had spent its fury and the rain ceased almost altogether. So I came out of my cave to find that most of the track that had taken me to it was obliterated. I scrambled hand over hand up the cliff while the river gnashed teeth of fo
am in the ravine below and all manner of refuse drifted past.

  I saw there had been a total realignment of the landscape during my oblivion. Everything had a blasted look and the wind still bit and whipped me as I anxiously made my way back to the town, as if tormenting me for being still alive. And I found the town was there no longer.

  The town had vanished from the face of the earth, leaving behind it only its sandstone corpse as its own gravestone. The crag on which it had perched was now as bald of habitations as an egg and, smoking in the midst of the turbid river, lay a mound of yellow rubble through which, here and there, poked a steeple or a weather-cock. The bridge began at its other end and then stopped in mid-air. A jutting, truncated thrust of masonry hung over the valley, endlessly about to fall, and all signs of the bridge on this side were gone forever because the town had been plucked from its foundations in the earth and tossed carelessly into the ravenous water. Bathed in the grey, dying light of the afternoon, the ruins were already indistinguishable from the rest of the tumbled rocks in that hellish valley, through which the hungry waters roared. When I looked at the river more closely, I saw it was full of corpses, plentiful and insignificant as driftwood. Saints and damned had died together and only a few ravens of the peaks drifted above the desolation on the wild currents of the air, uttering inconsolable cries. Nothing human moved.

  The catastrophe was too immense for me to take in at once. I sank down on a stone and buried my head in my hands.

  5 The Erotic Traveller

  At first I thought the landslide must have been the Doctor’s work, but no logic of any kind, no matter how circuitous, could have justified that disaster. He could have gained no tactical advantages by destroying that forgotten place. Besides, his set of samples had perished completely and the peep-show was the greatest single weapon in his armoury; he would never have destroyed it. So the landslide could only be a simple assertion of the dominance of nature herself who, in the service only of the meaningless, reintegrated the city with chaos and then, her business done, casually abandoned it. It was an event of too massive arbitrariness for me to comprehend but, as the rain-washed light fell more and more wistfully on the gigantic tip of sandstone that killed my bearded lady, my reptilian friend, my shooting star and my blind philosopher, I became most deeply aware of mortality. Even the acrobats of desire could not put themselves together again after this dissolution. No phantom dared float above the desolation, though the water roared with as violent a display of energy as I have ever seen. A stranger would never have guessed that, at this same hour, the previous evening, the peak had been crowned with prim streets full of freaks and puritans. Light died on the rocks. I turned my back on a whole sub-universe that had been wiped out as if with a huge eraser and on the corpse of yet another of my selves, that of the peep-show proprietor’s nephew. I stumbled away over the rough fields, vanquished again, now beyond tears.

  I was in altogether unknown country. After a while, I found a rough farmstead built of great blocks of windowless sandstone but they set a pack of lean, snarling dogs on me so I could not even beg a crust of bread there. Then a fat, white moon rose and I wandered down a rugged pathway with only my bleached shadow for company, two pale ghosts against a backdrop of mountains as sharply pointed and unnatural looking as those outlined by the brusque crayon of a child. I thought that if I wandered far enough, I would certainly reach Hoffman’s castle. I was sure I only had to put one foot before the other, indefatigably in the wrong direction, as the old man had told me, and my instinct would guide me there, although I did not know what I would do when I arrived except to look for Albertina. So I lurched on drearily, until I came to a defile through which ran a narrow road.

  At the roadside grew a withered tree and a night-bird perched on one bare branch emitting a hoarse, rasping rattle, the antithesis of song. I looked along the road in both directions and all at once hope deserted me entirely for I did not know which was north and which was south. Suddenly I grew very, very weary. I heard, from far away, the shriek of a mountain lion and wondered indifferently if I might not be eaten during the night. The notion did not affect me one way or the other. I sat down under the tree and drew my hood up over my head for the high, thin air sang bitterly in my ears and made my temples throb. I watched the moon move across the white, cloudless sky and saw many unfamiliar stars. I sank into a mindless reverie. I was altogether drained of thought.

  Presently I heard the clatter of wheels and hoofbeats echoing among the rocks. After some time, a light carriage, a trap of somewhat eighteenth-century design, appeared upon the road and I saw two persons shared the narrow seat, a tall, black-clad figure with a startling air of authority and a slender boy who held the reins. The hooves of the black horses struck sparks from the flinty track. The wheels revolved more slowly. The travellers halted.

  ‘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 pi
ck 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.