The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Read online

  ‘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.

  ‘But after that, I became the object of the vengeance of her enraged pimp, a black of more than superhuman inhumanity, in whom I sense a twin. And that is why I must not let him catch up with me for I know too well what he would do to me if he did so. So Lafleur and I drove over the neck of the continent, through deserts that delighted me since they were far too atrociously barren to sustain life, through jungles altogether envenomed with hatred for the brown maggots of men who dare to try to live in that green, festering meat; and then across those rearing mountains that now lie behind us than which, even in the steppes of Central Asia, I have seen nothing more arid or inimical. Refreshed, we now travel towards the coast for I feel stirring within me a strange desire to return to the peaks where I was born and perhaps I shall try to die there. Unless, that is, the vengeful pimp ensnares me first. Which is a horror beyond thought.’

  When noon came, he bought me beer and bread and cheese at an inn. He had not asked a single question of me or even seemed to ask himself what this stranger was doing in his company but I realized he regarded me as part of his entourage, now. I made a few tentative guesses as to what my role might be. Was I his observer, whose eyes, as they watched him, verified his actions? Did his narcissism demand a constant witness? Or had he other plans for me – would I, perhaps, figure among his amusements? The masked, unspeaking valet and I formed his little world. If one was his hireling victim, for what purpose was the other hired? But I wondered if his servant had more autonomy than he thought. Something in the texture of the valet’s presence hinted he was self-consciously the slave. Occasionally, when he whimpered, he seemed altogether too emphatically degraded. But perhaps he was not yet altogether inured to his position. What would I myself become when I, too, knew what my position was?

  But though the Count had given me a very detailed autobiography, I still suspected he might really be the Doctor and so I knew I must travel with him, no matter what happened. And then again, he was so remarkable! He seemed to cast a shadow as solid as lead. We drove on through the afternoon until we came to a lonely crossroads where suddenly the Count announced:

  ‘I know it, I know it! We must turn right!’

  The signpost which pointed north bore only, in faded blue paint, the legend: THIS WAY TO THE HOUSE OF ANONYMITY and a lonely path overgrown with grass and primroses stretched far away across the faintly burgeoning prairies. There was no sign of any building along its course. The sun had gone in and the sky was now a leaden grey. Because everywhere was so flat, this sky was swollen and inflated; it occupied so much more space in the world than the earth beneath it that the sky seemed to smother us under a transparent pillow. The day had not fulfilled the bright promise of the morning; the weather was full of foreboding. But Lafleur turned the horses to the north, though now they were so overdone they ran with sweat and rolled their eyes until the whites showed. The Count was very excited. He cried out and muttered to himself as we took the deserted track and now clouds began to pile heavily in the sky and a few drops of heavy rain spattered on our faces.

  ‘Faster! Faster!’

  The horses strained their coal-black loins and neighed beneath Lafleur’s whip. Then, at the side of the road, we saw a scarecrow and although there was nothing in the bare field where it stood for it to protect, it carried a bow and arrow. There was no head inside the hat it wore, only a human skull, and the wind, laden with rain, flapped its ragged jacket miserably around its broomstick bones. Round its neck hung a tattered paper sign which read: I AM PERFECTLY EMPTY. I HAVE FORGOTTEN MY NAME. I AM PERFECT BUT YOU ARE ON THE RIGHT ROAD. CONTINUE.

  The Count laughed aloud and we drove on until we came to a door set in a white wall. Here, the road stopped short. Lafleur climbed down and rapped upon the door. A grille opened and we saw a pair of eyes.

  ‘Who is it?’ asked a woman’s voice.

  ‘A hereditary count of Lithuania,’ Lafleur introduced his master.

  ‘Show us the colour of your money,’ said the voice and the Count gave Lafleur a thick roll of banknotes to show. The mere sight of it satisfied her; she nodded approvingly and said: ‘Your bill will be presented upon departure, sir.’

  After some more minutes’ waiting, while the dismal rain sluiced down, the door opened inward with a heavy thunder of bars and chains and we drove into the courtyard. The door banged to behind us and the porteress, a fat woman with a puffed, pale face and haggard lips, came to help us down from the carriage. She wore a black dress and a white apron. She did not know how to smile. But she did not wear a mask. None of the servants were masked; their roles made them sufficiently anonymous.

  The Count sharply dismissed his valet, who drove the carriage round to the stable. As I glanced after Lafleur, I saw, once he left his master, he sprang up again like a branch which has been tied back and is now released. His slight figure took on a sudden, sprightly decisiveness; then he was gone. So the Count and I stood in front of the House of Anonymity, whose door was always open to anyone with a fat enough wallet.

  It was a massive, sprawling edifice in the Gothic style of the late nineteenth century, that poked innumerable turrets like so many upward groping tentacles towards the dull, cloudy sky and was all built in louring, red brick. Every window I could see was tightly shuttered. The porteress rang peremptorily for a maid and a woman who might have been her sister appeared and led us into the house, through a series of dark, gloomy corridors where our footsteps echoed on flags until we came to more formal, carpeted quarters and ascended a winding stair to a little dressing-room done up in moist red velvet, like the interior of a womb. She invited us to undress and while we did so, she took from a cupboard two pairs of black tights made in such a way that, once we put them on, our genitals remained exposed in their entirety, testicles and all. Then she offered us short waistcoats of a soft, suède-like substance which she assured us was the tanned skin of a young negro virgin. The Count began to murmur softly with anticipation and already his prick, which was of monstrous size, stood as resolutely aloft as an illustration of satyriasis in a medical dictionary. Then the maid handed us hood-like masks which went right over our heads, concealing them, and were attached by buttons to buttonholes in the collars of our waistcoats, so that our heads were changed into featureless, elongated, pinkish, rounded towers. The only indentations on these convex surfaces of pink cardboard were two slits, to look through. These masks or hoods completed our costumes, which were unaesthetic, priapic and totally obliterated our faces and our self-respect; the garb grossly emphasized our manhoods while utterly denying our humanity. And the costumes were of no time or place. Now we were ready. With our expressions hidden and the most undifferentiated parts of our anatomies exposed, she led us down another stair to a reception room where she bowed, smiled formally and opened the door for us.

  ‘Welcome to the Bestial Room,’ she said.

  With that, she left us.

  The insides of the windows had all been painted black, so even if you opened the black velvet curtains, nothing disturbed the artificial night inside them. The walls were covered with a figured brocade of such a slum
brous purple the Count murmured: ‘It is the very colour of the blood in a love suicide.’ Everywhere, clinging to the curtains, perched on the heavy gold frames of innumerable immense mirrors or crouched on the swags of a marble fireplace, were dozens of chattering monkeys smartly dressed like bellboys in bum-freezer jackets of braid-trimmed crimson plush. These monkeys were living candelabra; they clutched black candles in their paws, wedged in the coiled kinks of their tails or stuck in sockets in the metal circlets they all wore round their heads. When the hot wax dripped on to their fur or into their eyes, they squealed pitifully.

  The furniture was also alive.

  They had employed a taxidermist instead of an upholsterer and sent him a pride of lions with instructions to make a sofa out of each pair. At both ends of the sofas, flamboyantly gothic arm-rests, were the gigantically maned heads of these lions. Their rheumy, golden eyes seeped gum and their cavernous, red mouths hung sleepily ajar, gaping wider, now and then, in a sleepy yawn or to let out a low, rumbling growl. The serviceable armchairs were brown bears who squatted on their haunches with the melancholy of all the Russias in their liquid eyes. When a girl sat on his shaggy lap, the bear grunted, leaned back and spread her legs out wide apart with his blunt forepaws. The occasional tables ran about, yelping obsequiously; they were toadying hyenas and on their brindled backs were strapped silver trays containing glasses, decanters, bowls of salted nuts and dishes of stuffed olives. Other hyenas crouched in corners, their endless tongues lolling like sopping lengths of red flannel, balancing between their pricked ears a pot of carnivorous flowers or else jars of Japanese porcelain containing tasteful arrangements of bodiless hands. The dark, polished floorboards were scattered with vivid pelts of jaguars that stirred and grumbled underfoot; their hot breaths blasted the ankle as you stepped over them. In all the room, only the prostitutes, the wax mannequins of love, hardly seemed to be alive for they stood as still as statues. But they were the only beings kept in cages.