The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Read online

  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.

  Now a second actor entered the spectacle and engaged him in a duet. The white centaur stepped forward. The persistent beat changed to almost a waltz rhythm. The white was a seductive tenor and, though I only understood the meaning through the tones of the sound itself, I knew he was singing of forgiveness and the baritone was beseeching him to be allowed to suffer more. But the mercy of the tenor was inexorable. At last he took from the tray the paintbrush and the metal object, which I saw was some kind of gouge, parted the bay’s tributaries of hair to reveal his back, dipped the brush in the saucer of ink and made a number of obviously highly stylized passes over the exposed flesh of the kneeling bay, who responded by throwing such a contagious ecstasy that he took most of his audience with him and, in a clamour of tears, abandoned laughter and signs everywhere of the most delirious joy, the service ended with an explosive shedding of all the dung in every bowel present, Albertina’s and mine excepted.

  After the god had visited them, the women went to fetch brooms and wooden buckets from their stables and swept up all the manure into heaping piles, which they used to fertilize their fields, for they wasted nothing. While the women tidied up by the light of the torches, the Cantor and the Tattoo-master turned their attention back to us. Now they concentrated their fingerings upon our private parts and seemed reassured by the familiar shapes although they were lodged between such unfamiliar legs. The white centaur thoughtfully pushed three fingers bunched together up Albertina’s vagina and listened to her scream judiciously, with his head on one side. He lowered his muzzle and began to sniff her comprehensively. His working nostrils travelled over every inch of her skin and occasionally he licked her, to let his palate verify the evidence collected by his nose. His warm breath and rough tongue tickled her; she began to laugh and, when the bay followed suit and started to snuffle over me, soon I was laughing too, though it was a laughter close to hysteria.

  These two elders raised their heads and engaged in a baying colloquy which ended in the following manner. We were both carried bodily to the bay’s stable and laid down on the table from which his wife hastily cleared the supper dishes when they brought us in. The rest of the villagers followed us, so there was a great crowd, every male, female and infant in the village gathered in the enormous room. When I tried to scramble over the great board of oak to reach her and protect her, the bay easily held me down with one hand. His strength was immense. Then the white spread her legs wide and investigated the aperture involuntarily offered him, clearly comparing it with the size of his tumescent organ, which was that of a horse rather than a man. Nevertheless he pulled her down to the edge of the table and in it went, after a hideous struggle.

  The audience, rapt with wonderment, neighed softly and pawed the ground and then, one after the other, all the males took their turn at her. She was soon mired with blood but, after the first exclamation, she did not cry again. I struggled and bit the bay but still he would not let me go though he murmured to himself as if surprised to see evidence of a bond between two members of a species that must have seemed to him the lowest form of horse he had ever seen. They were all bathed in ruddy light and the tattoos performed danses macabres across their backs. None of them seemed to extract the least pleasure out of the act. They undertook it grimly, as though it were their duty.

  And I could do nothing but watch
and suffer with her for I knew from my own experience the pain and indignity of a rape. But the centaurs let me alone in that way, either because my offering was too narrow or else that mode of congress was unknown to them. At the back of my mind flickered a teasing image, that of a young girl trampled by horses. I could not remember when or where I had seen it, such a horrible thing; but it was the most graphic and haunting of memories and a voice in my mind, the cracked, hoarse, drunken voice of the dead peep-show proprietor, told me that I was somehow, all unknowing, the instigator of this horror. My pain and agitation increased beyond all measure.

  While the males made this prolonged and terrible assault upon Albertina, the bay was organizing the females into a line and I knew I would not be left out of the savage game. But me they treated with far less severity because they respected the virile principle and reviled the female one. So my torment was intended only to humiliate their own womenfolk who one by one caressed me, as they were ordered, but only with the gentlest of fingers. I was subjected to the ministrations of twenty or thirty of the tenderest, if the most perverse, of mothers and some even bent to kiss me with mouths like wet velvet in faces covered with permanent masks of lace, so I could not help but quicken with pleasure while the bay held me down so firmly I could only moan. And this was the subtlest of tortures – that I was bathed in a series of the most exquisite sensations on the very table where they cruelly abused the flesh of the one I loved best. My nostrils were full of the mingled stench of horses, of the smoke from their pine wood torches, of the perfumed oil with which the women dressed their hair, of blood, of semen and of pain; the very air thickened and grew red. And though Albertina was the object of a rape, the males clearly did not know it was a rape. They showed neither enthusiasm nor gratification. It was only some form of ritual, another invocation of the Sacred Horse.

  They had a deeply masochistic streak. They did not reserve the whip only for religion but used it continually on themselves and one another, making the slightest real or imagined fault the pretext for a beating. It was a matter of pride as to how thin one could bear one’s bed of straw. They loved to feel the hot steel on their fetlocks when the priest shod them, for the Sacred Horse had taught them the art of the smith and if he had ordained them bits and bridles stuck with inward-turning spikes, they would have donned them luxuriously. The centaurs had all the virtues and defects of a heroic style.

  The bay serviced Albertina last of all, while the white Tattoo-master took a turn at holding me down. Of all the rapists, the bay was most impassive. Then, in silence, they dispersed to their homes and the stable was empty but for the family of the bay.

  The bay’s mate, a Junoesque roan mare, put a great cauldron of water to heat on a hook over the fire and I wondered if they were going to end the evening by boiling us alive. But the bay snorted, wiped himself down with a wisp of hay, took a leather-bound book from a high shelf and sat down before the fire. The three children – a male of perhaps twelve by human reckoning, as yet unshod; a female of about fifteen, part wood nymph and part Palomino; and a foal baby who hardly knew, yet, how to tumble about on her four legs, lined up in front of him and all went down on their front legs. And then he began to hear their catechism.

  The girl-female was already completely sheathed with a pattern of horses and grapes that made her look as if she were peering through a vineyard but the artist had only just begun to work on the boy and nothing more than the centrepiece of a full design, a rampant stallion, was traced in outline on his skin. He went to the Tattoo-master every morning after prayers and a little more was filled in every day so that, under our eyes, the living picture was to grow more and more emphatic the longer we lived there and we could mark the passage of time by the creeping tendrils of the work on his back. Their father asked the questions and the children made the ritual responses; they seemed to have forgotten us and I crawled across the table top to Albertina. She had lost consciousness. I took her in my arms and buried my face in her forlorn hair.

  The proportions of the stable and of the beings who lived there were only just a little larger than those suited to a man but the slightness of the excessive size of everything together with the superhuman strength and flawless gravity of our hosts or captors made me feel like a child at the mercy of uncomprehending adults rather than of ogres. Even the rape had had elements of the kind of punishment said to hurt the giver more than the receiver though I do not know what they were punishing her for, unless it was for being female to a degree unprecedented among them. Now, when the roan mare looked up from tending the fire and saw me grieving over my fainting lover, she did not change mood so much as allow her essential motherliness to intensify. She came and looked at Albertina and then she spoke some low, submissive but reproachful words to her master and stroked Albertina’s face with a piteous hand. I think she had meant to wash the table top with the water she was heating, for the table was now very dirty and her house was very clean, but instead she took the pan off the hook and invited me to clamber in and wash myself while she herself made a soft pad of hay, moistened it and gently wiped the blood and muck from Albertina. The centaur’s saucepan made me a snugly fitting hip bath and, when I had finished, she indicated I should sit in front of the fire and dry myself while she put Albertina to bed on the straw but I saw Albertina’s eyelids flutter and went to her at once.

  Again the mare spoke to her husband and then to me, with the intonation of a question. I thought she must be asking me if Albertina was my mate so I repeated the sound she had made back to her in a strongly affirmative tone. She looked exceedingly surprised; and then she smiled most tenderly and let us both lie down together while she covered us up with straw and the catechism droned softly on.

  The mare must have talked to her husband during the night because he came to our bed in the morning, abased himself and kissed my feet because she was my mate, therefore my property, and so he must apologize to me. Tears ran out of his eyes. He whipped himself for me. Then he went out to conduct morning service and after that I ate my breakfast with the family, sitting on a stump of wood his wife found for me while the males all sat on their haunches and ate with their hands from wooden dishes like sylvan men and the women waited until the men had finished before they took their own meal. But Albertina could not stir from her bed and only feebly sipped a mouthful or two of the milk I tried to feed her.

  Their diet was one of rustic simplicity. The women ground their corn in stone querns and made flat, tortilla-like pancakes which they ate with the wild honey in which they also deliciously preserved fruit. They sometimes roasted the ears of corn on the hot coals. Morning and evening, they milked the cactuses into wooden buckets, fermented the milk to make a sour but invigorating drink and also made flat, white cheeses with a sweet, bland flavour and a crumbling texture. They cultivated orchards of fruit and vegetable gardens of roots and tubers; they gathered salads in the forests and also mushrooms, which they particularly liked to eat raw, dressed with oil and vinegar. They made sweet syrup from berries but the Sacred Horse had not revealed to them the mysteries of alcohol so their religion was only a spartan, teetotal variation upon Dionysianism and their grapes went only into jellies and salad dressings. Their abstemious, vegetarian diet filled them out with iron muscle. Their teeth were white and perfect. They died only of accident and old age and old age took a long time to come to them.

  But their lives were only apparently tranquil. Every day of the week and every week of the year was irradiated by the continuous divine drama unfolding in the voices of the singers and the turning of the year so they lived primarily on dramaturgical terms. This gave the women a certain dignity that would otherwise have been denied them for every one of the most insignificant household tasks, mucking out, bringing water from the spring, picking the lice from one another’s manes and tails, was performed as if in a divine theatre, as if, for example, each mare was the embodiment of the archetypal Bridal Mare as she cleaned the Celestial Stable; even if the Bridal Mare was on
ly a penitent sinner, still she was essential to the Sacred Horse’s passion.

  Therefore, every minute of the day, they were all, male and female alike, engrossed in weaving and embroidering the rich fabric of the very world in which they lived and, like so many Penelopes, their work was never finished. The whole point of their activity was that it was endless, for they unravelled their work at the end of the year and then, with the return of the sun after the shortest day, began on it again. The horse-tree on the Holy Hill was the central node of their world, for it was the living skeleton of the Sacred Stallion left them as an authoritarian reminder by the deity himself; their conduct was regulated by the tree’s responses to the seasons and the Sacred Stallion died when the leaves fell. Yet, for all its sanctity, the tree was really no more than a kind of anthropoid vegetable clock, for it only told them when it was proper to perform certain choric cantatas. For, as I say, their drama was comprehensive enough to be extremely flexible and if the tree had been blasted one night by lightning the Church of the Horse would have absorbed this event into a new mutation of the central myth, after a period of spiritual reorientation.

  They were not fabulous beasts; they were entirely mythic. Sometimes I thought they were not really centaurs at all but only men who possessed such a deep conviction the universe was a horse that it was impossible for them to see any evidence that hinted things might be otherwise.