The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Read online

  And there were no more transformations because Albertina’s eyes were extinguished.

  On I went, through the lifeless vegetation of winter, and I thought myself free from all the clouds of attachment because I was a traveller who had denied his proper destination. I saw no colours anywhere around me. The food I begged from cottagers had no savour of either sweetness or rankness. I knew I was condemned to disillusionment in perpetuity. My punishment had been my crime.

  I returned slowly to the capital. I had neither reason nor desire to do so. Only my inertia, dormant for so long, now reasserted itself and carried me there by its own passive, miserable, apathetic force. In this city I am, or have been, as you know, a hero. I became one of the founders of the new constitution – largely from the negative propulsion of my own inertia for, once I was placed and honoured on my plinth, I was not the man to climb down again, saying: ‘But I am the wrong man!’ for I felt that, if what I had done had turned out for the common good, I might as well reap what benefits I could from it. The shrug is my gesture. The sneer is my expression. If she was air and fire, I was earth and water, that residue of motionless, inert matter that cannot, by its very nature, become irradiated and may not aspire, even if it tries. I am the check, the impulse of restraint. So I effectively evolved into a politician, did I not? I, an old hero, a crumbling statue in an abandoned square.

  I returned slowly through the mists of winter. Time lay more thickly about me than the mists. I was so unused to moving through time that I felt like a man walking under water. Time exerted great pressure on my blood vessels and my eardrums, so that I suffered from terrible headaches, weakness and nausea. Time clogged the hooves of my mare until she lay down beneath me and died. Nebulous Time was now time past; I crawled like a worm on its belly through the clinging mud of common time and the bare trees showed only the dreary shapes of an eternal November of the heart, for now all changes would henceforth be, as they had been before, absolutely predictable. And so I identified at last the flavour of my daily bread; it was and would be that of regret. Not, you understand, of remorse; only of regret, that insatiable regret with which we acknowledge that the impossible is, per se, impossible.

  Well, I walked the heels out of my silk socks and the soles off my patent leather pumps and I fell down to sleep and rose to walk again until this filthy scarecrow in ragged evening dress, his matted hair falling over his shoulders and his gaunt jaw sprouting unkempt beard, his lapel still stuck through with a blackened rose of stiffened blood – until I saw before me, one moonlit dawn, the smoking ruins of a familiar city.

  But as I drew nearer, I saw the ruins were inhabited.

  Old Desiderio lays down his pen. In a little while, they will bring me my hot drink before they put me to bed and I am glad of these small attentions for they are the comforts of the old, although they are quite meaningless.

  My head aches with writing. What a thick book my memoirs make! What a fat book to coffin young Desiderio, who was so thin and supple. My head aches. I close my eyes.

  Unbidden, she comes.

  *A pastel-coloured joke, designed to produce a discreet titter among freshmen. Desiderio.

  *Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams. Desiderio.