The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Read online

  Yes. I thought so, even then.

  The Tattoo-master knelt and took the brush. She shivered when she felt the chill, wet tongue of horsehair lick along her spine and I held her hand more tightly. The congregation drummed their hooves. The Cantor chanted and mimed, I think, the DANCE OF THE HORSEHAIR WRITING BRUSH. I do not know how long it took before her back was painted over completely; I do not know how long it took to paint me but when we were both finished, they stopped the ceremony to eat their lunches and brought us some milk and cold pancakes, too, though they would not let us get up because the paint was not yet dry. When the brief meal was over, our ordeal would begin in earnest. She trembled and I remembered how she had looked when she was Lafleur. And yet I knew she was far braver than I.

  It was late morning and the sun was shining very brightly. The morning mist had dried and the sky was amazingly clear and blue. She raised herself up on her elbows as high as she could, and, shading her eyes with her hands, she gazed into the far distance. Again, I remembered Lafleur looking for a storm, although I knew she was searching for her father’s aerial patrols. However, I did not believe in the patrols. Yet, as she trembled, I saw it was not with fear but with hope – or, perhaps, a kind of effortful strain; she gripped my hand more tightly, until her nails dug into my palm. I remembered the scrap of paper in the pocket of the peep-show proprietor’s nephew. ‘My desires, concentrated to a single point…’

  I am sure what happened next was coincidence. I am positive of that. I would stake my life on it.

  ‘Look!’ she hissed on a triumphantly expelled breath.

  In the far distance, the sunlight glinted on the wings of a metal bird.

  But that was not the most remarkable thing; that was not the extraordinary coincidence. The litany began again and the Cantor threw almost on top of us an ecstasy so wonderful I could not see anything but his flailing hooves and sweat-drenched loins whirling above me. His consummation laid him low; he sprawled on the ground, kicking his hooves spasmodically, and in the tremendous silence I heard the whirring of an engine, but either they were too transfigured to hear it or they thought it was the sound of a clattering insect in the corn. And, yes, the sap in the horse-tree went on busily buzzing. Then came the sacerdotal moment. The Awl raised the brush and the piercing instrument. And this was the coincidence. At the very moment he bent down to make the first incision, the buzzing horse-tree went up in flames.

  ‘… ignite all in their way.’

  The Scrivener might have written a new book but it did not allow for so much improvisation. Besides, now the book was burning. The dried dung at the roots of the tree caught almost instantaneously and a lasso of flame captured the bay’s tail. He thrashed his sparking torch this way and that way, howling, and he dropped dung not in prayer, but this time in fear. The Tattoo-master turned into a horse of ivory and flame and suddenly they were all on fire, all the priests around us and our bed of straw was blazing, too. But Albertina and I sprang out and through the wall of fire to run as fast as we could through the whinnying havoc to the helicopter that had landed in the corn field.

  8 The Castle

  While the co-pilot filmed the scene below with a television camera, the helicopter rose up in a rattle of whirling metal. When I looked down, I saw the wide valley of the centaurs open out like a French, eighteenth-century neo-classical fan painted by a follower of Poussin and then close up again as we flew so low above the forest itself the topmost branches scraped against the cabin walls. So all those months of our selves vanished without trace and I heard the pilot call Albertina, ‘Madam’, and then ‘Generalissimo Hoffman’. When I turned from the window, I saw she had already put on one of their spare combat suits of drab, olive twill and was now combing out her black hair, which had grown halfway down her back during our captivity. The co-pilot put away his camera and dug into a locker to produce clothes for me, too. Now she was dressed, I was embarrassed at my nakedness and hurried to cover myself, though my fingers fumbled over the unfamiliar buttons.

  ‘Am I the general’s batman?’ I asked her but she only smiled at me remotely and began to pore over a map the co-pilot handed her. He and the pilot were both swarthy, silent young men in black berets who chewed on long, black cigars. They spoke mainly a laconic French and I felt I had seen men like them very often before but only in newsreel films. I was given coffee from a thermos flask and they cleared me a place in the cramped quarters so that I could sit down. I had not been in the twentieth century for so long that I felt quite stunned. A radio began to squawk messages in the standard speech of my country. I had not heard my own language for a long time; when we were among the centaurs, Albertina and I had used it as a private language, such as secretive children invent for themselves, and I was shocked to recall the speech was common property. The coffee was hot and strong; they opened a wax-paper parcel of ham sandwiches. Albertina absently plaited her hair and, as she did so, so she put away all her romanticism. Her face was hard and brown and impersonal. I sipped my coffee. She spoke into the radio transmitter but I could make out nothing whatsoever of what she said because of the noise the engines made.

  And then Albertina had finished. She gave the pilot back the microphone, sighed, smiled and came to crouch beside me.

  ‘Not my batman,’ she said. ‘The Doctor will commission you. He just told me that.’

  ‘Even though I’m enlisted on the other side?’

  ‘You will go wherever I go,’ she said with such conviction I was silent for I had just seen her passions set fire to a tree and now I was in the real world again I was not quite sure I wanted to burn with her – or, at least, not yet. I felt an inexplicable indifference towards her. Perhaps because she was now yet another she and this she was the absolute antithesis of my black swan and my bouquet of burning bone; she was a crisp, antiseptic soldier to whom other ranks deferred. I began to feel perfidious, for I had no respect for rank.

  ‘And what of my city?’ I asked her, drawing on a cigar the pilot gave me.

  She frowned into her plastic tumbler of coffee.

  ‘The course of the war was dramatically altered by the destruction of the set of samples. While my father was modifying the transmitters, the Minister completed his computer bank and then instituted a programme he called the Rectification of Names. In spite of himself, he was forced to use philosophic weapons – or, as he would probably prefer to call them, ideological weapons. He decided he could only keep a strict control of his actualities by adjusting their names to agree with them perfectly. So, you understand, that no shadow would fall between the word and the thing described. For the Minister hypothesized my father worked in that shadowy land between the thinkable and the thing thought of, and, if he destroyed this difference, he would destroy my father. Do you follow me?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘He set up a new slogan, “If the name is right, you see the light.” He is a man of great intellect but limited imagination. Which is why he can hold out against my father, of course. Once the names were right, he thought perfect order and hence perfect government on his own Confucian terms would follow automatically. So he dismissed all his physicists and brought in a team of logical positivists from the School of Philosophy in the National University and set them to the task of fixing all the phenomena compiled by his computers in the solid concrete of a set of names that absolutely agreed with them. Ironically enough, their task was made all the easier because of the flexibility of identity produced in the state of nebulous time.’

  She paused. A yellowish glare flooded the cabin.

  ‘Look. Now we are crossing the desert, the mother of mirages,’ she said.

  There was no more forest, only sand drifting in dry spirals the very colour of sterility and, above us, a sky as lifeless as the earth.

  ‘This is your Minister’s place,’ she said. ‘He has not got enough imagination to realize that the most monstrous aberrations are bound to flourish in soil once it has been disinfected of the imagination.�
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  And, though I loved her more than anything in the world, I remembered the music of Mozart and murmured to the Queen of the Night:

  ‘I do not think so.’

  But she did not hear me because of the noise of the engines and the turning propellers.

  ‘So, when the transmitters were operating again, the images we sent out bounced off the intellectual walls the Minister had built. My poor father – he was almost disconcerted, because I was lost in Nebulous Time just when he needed me most!’

  The helicopter followed its own shadow over the realm of spiritual death.

  ‘But now I have been in contact with him at last and he is only waiting for our return to start the Second Front.’

  ‘For our return? For you – and for me as well?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said and turned her ensorcellating eyes on me so that all at once I was breathless with desire and the cabin dissolved in our kiss. Yet there was still that duplicity in my heart’s core. I had been marked out at the beginning as the Minister’s man, for all my apathy, for all my disaffection, for I, too, would have worshipped reason if I could ever have found her shrine. Reason was stamped into me as if it were a chromosome, even if I loved the high priestess of passion. Nevertheless, we kissed; and the crew of the helicopter shielded their eyes as though we were too bright for them to bear.

  Then the pilot sighted a walled fort with a landing strip beside it on which stood two spare, lean, military transports. We landed in a helicopter port inside the fort itself, which I believe I had once seen in a film of the Foreign Legion. A complement of troopers manned it. They were as brown and down to earth as the crew of the helicopter and they, too, all called Albertina ‘Generalissimo’. We were given a bath and I got myself a military haircut, for my hair had grown almost as long as Albertina’s. Then we had an austere dinner of army rations – for, although she was a general, she was not given preferential treatment – and lay down on two hard, iron beds with flat pillows and coarse grey blankets in a barracks that smelled of disinfectant where I could not have made love to her even if she had let me because twenty other men were sleeping there. I had forgotten how convenient the real world was; how, for example, hot water came boiling out of taps marked ‘hot’, how good it felt to sleep between sheets, and, though there were no clocks in the fort, all the soldiers had come to an informal agreement on a common standard of time so our breakfast, full of nostalgic flavours of bacon, toast, tea and marmalade, was served at the hour we had all agreed to wake up. Then, when everything was ready, the commandant of the fort kissed Albertina on both cheeks; we climbed into a military transport and flew, far more simply though much more lengthily than in any dream, directly to Hoffman’s castle. And nothing whatever happened to ripple the serene, accommodating surface of events except the constant presence of Albertina’s eyes.

  Ocean and jungle and, finally, remembered peaks jutting against the sky of evening. I waited expectantly for a sense of homecoming but I experienced nothing. With a faint sinking of the heart, as the plane dipped and circled, I thought that perhaps now I was a stranger everywhere.

  It was a hazardous descent into the mountains for Hoffman’s own landing strip was well concealed from the air and I saw nothing of the castle itself as we came down, only the reeling peaks. A jeep was waiting for us; it took us along a rough track through long, black shadows of approaching night but I saw among the rocks before me four moons were already shining high in the secret crests. They were four huge, concave saucers of very highly polished metal that circled like windmills and were all turned towards the city I knew lay below me to the south. Plainly they were part of the transmission system, even though they were so blatantly technological. I was so busy watching them I did not see the castle, though it lay before us, until the jeep stopped and Albertina, with a rush of joy in her voice, said: ‘We’re nearly home.’

  Almost – but not entirely for we still had to cross a chasm in the earth by a wooden bridge so fragile we must walk and so narrow we could only go one at a time. The driver of the jeep spoke a strange mixture of French and Spanish and wore a battered anti-uniform of green twill; he kissed Albertina on both cheeks and roared away, leaving us alone. We went out on to the bridge. The chasm was some sixty feet wide and, from both its lips, sheer precipices fell to a depth of a thousand feet or more, so deep you could not see what lay at the bottom. Beyond the bridge was a little green grove about four acres in area, surrounded on all sides by the crags in which the transmitters were lodged. It was a sweet, female kernel nestling in the core of the virile, thrusting rock. The trees in the grove were full of fruit and the dappled and variegated chalices of enormous flowers seemed to be breathing out all the perfume they had stored up during the day in these last moments before they closed for the night. Brilliant birds sang on the branches in which chattering squirrels swung and the luxuriant grass rustled with rabbits while beautiful roe deer sauntered among the trees, holding up their heads proudly, like princes, under the weights of their antlered crowns. It did not look as though winter had ever touched it and as we drew nearer, our footsteps ringing with a hollow sound on the wooden bridge, I remembered I had seen a picture of Hoffman’s park, a magically transformed picture in which all the detail had been heightened but still recognizably a dream vision of this very park. I had seen it in the peep-show. It was the park framed by the female orifice in the first machine of all and when I looked beyond the trees, I saw the very same castle I had seen then.

  The castle stood with its back up against a cliff. The battlements hinted at Hoffman’s Teutonic heritage; he had built himself a Wagnerian castle like a romantic memory in stone and as the light faded, the castle began to open eyes of many beautiful colours for all the windows were of stained glass. And yet I knew I was not dreaming; my feet left prints on the grass and Albertina picked me an apple from a tree and I brushed away the bloom and bit into it and my teeth went ‘crunch!’ While the transmitters flashed and a roaring in the sky told us the transport had taken off again, or another transport had taken off, for there was a hangar full of the things at the military base at the airstrip.

  ‘What a year it’s been for apples!’ said Albertina. ‘Look how heavy the crop is. The trees are bending almost to the ground. When I went away to quarantine the Count, it was apple blossom time. You can’t imagine how beautiful the apple blossom is, Desiderio!’

  I finished my apple and threw away the core. So the princess was taking it for granted I was interested in her patrimonial apple blossom, was she? What presumption! Perhaps she should not have told me so plainly, in her ownership tone of voice, that all this was hers, the castle, the orchards, the mountains, the earth, the sky, all that lay between them. I don’t know. All I know is, I could not transcend myself sufficiently to inherit the universe. Although it was real, I knew the perfection round me was impossible; and perhaps I was right. But now I am too old to know or care. I can no longer tell the difference between memory and dream. They share the same quality of wishful thinking. I thought at the time perhaps I was a terrorist in the cause of reason; though I probably tried to justify myself with such a notion later. Yet when I close my eyes I see her still, walking through the orchard towards her father’s house, in her soldier’s uniform, her heavy black plaits hanging down her back like a little girl’s.

  Nobody came to meet us but the front door was open, a door at the top of a not in the least grandiloquent but cracked and mossy staircase, for it was not really a castle, only a country house built after the style of a castle. We entered, first, a sombre, low-ceilinged hall scented with pot pourri and furnished with carved chairs, Chinese pots and Oriental rugs. I do not know what I had been expecting – but certainly never this tranquillity, this domestic peace, for were we not in the house of the magician himself? However, the transmitters sent out their beams high over its battlements and did not affect the fortress of the enemy itself. Here, everything was safe. Everything was ordered. Everything was secure.

  A
ll that puzzled me were certain pictures on the wall. These pictures were heavily varnished oils executed in the size and style of the nineteenth-century academician and they all depicted faces and scenes I recognized from old photographs and from the sepia and olive reproductions of forgotten masterpieces in the old-fashioned books the nuns gave us to look at when I was a child, in the evenings after supper, when we had been good. When I read the titles engraved on metal plaques at the bottom of each frame, I saw they depicted such scenes as ‘Leon Trotsky Composing the Eroica Symphony’; the wire-rimmed spectacles, the Hebraic bush of hair, the burning eyes were all familiar. The light of inspiration was in his eyes and the crotchets and quavers rippled from his nib on to the sheets of manuscript paper which flew about the red plush cover of the mahogany table on which he worked as if blown by the fine frenzy of genius. Van Gogh was shown writing ‘Wuthering Heights’ in the parlour of Haworth Parsonage, with bandaged ear, all complete. I was especially struck by a gigantic canvas of Milton blindly executing divine frescos upon the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Seeing my bewilderment, Albertina said, smiling: ‘When my father rewrites the history books, these are some of the things that everyone will suddenly perceive to have always been true.’

  Though the signs of the scrupulous attentions of servants were apparent everywhere, the house seemed quite deserted. We were welcomed only by an ancient, lumbering dog who heaved himself painfully up from a rug in front of a little log fire, burning more for the sake of the scent of applewood and the sight of flame than the need for warmth, who came and thrust his wet nose in Albertina’s palm, whining for joy.