The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Page 6

  Under all my indifferences, I was an exceedingly romantic young man yet, until that time, circumstances had never presented me with a sufficiently grand opportunity to exercise my pent-up passion. I had opted for the chill restraints of formalism only out of sharp necessity. That, you see, was why I was so bored.

  The appearance of the countryside had not altered. The flat fields of vegetables around the capital stretched, as before, to the horizon and still seemed to produce nothing but commonplace roots and tubers. The villages had put up their shutters to keep out the rain but otherwise looked as vindictively peasant as they had always done. Even the scarecrows looked only like scarecrows. The road itself was the only casualty, or the first casualty, for the volume of wheeled traffic was reduced almost to nothing and already vigorous growths of weeds and flowers pushed up through the cracks in the asphalt while no holes had been repaired, so now brown troughs of water gaped everywhere. The drive took some hours more than it should have done; I reached my destination in the middle of the afternoon when a magnificent rainbow was arching over the town and, together with a shimmering brilliance in the sky over the sea, it heralded the end of the downpour. As I drove into the suburbs, the rain first fell aslant and then ceased altogether. The sun came out and the pavements began to steam gently.

  S. was a bright, pleasant, pastel-tinted town redolent of dead fish and wet face flannels, clean as if the abrasive sea scrubbed it twice a day. Before the war, families came out from the city to spend a summer fortnight at guest houses where the doormats were always full of sand and the hallways littered with tin buckets and tiny spades. There was a pier made of such lacy striations of iron it looked like the skeleton of an enormous bird or a drawing of itself made with a fine pen and Indian ink on the pale blue paper of the well-mannered sea. The fishermen lived at the other end of the beach in cheerful, white-washed cottages overgrown with that summer’s abundance of roses and they hung out their nets to dry on picturesque and primordial poles, weighing them at the corners with balls of dark green glass. It was late August and the shops offered pink rock, coloured postcards, candy floss, straw hats and all the appurtenances of the holiday maker but, though all the doors were open, I could see no shopkeepers within, behind the counters, and the entire place was quite empty of humanity.

  Along the promenade, striped umbrellas cast pools of shade over deserted tables at which no ice-cream eaters sat, though there were plenty of saucers smeared with residual traces and also glasses half full of pink, green and orange drinks in which the ice had not yet melted and the paper straws were still indented at the top from the pressure of lips. The pale acres of sand were empty but for a few waddling sea-birds and I noticed a corpse who lay where the sand had left him, unattended but for a cloud of flies. There was nobody at the turnstile of the pier to take my coin. Some of the sideshows were shuttered but here half a dozen ping pong balls bounced on jets of water and the rifles were laid out in invitation to no cracksmen. Though the bed was made up ready to tip the lady out, the lady herself had vanished. Yet the loudspeakers blared cheerful music and nowhere looked deserted. It was as if the entire population of the town had slipped off somewhere, called to witness some event to which I alone had not received an invitation, and would all be back at their posts in five minutes. A sea breeze blew the bright pennants this way and that way. I passed a fortune teller’s booth and another booth which smelled of hot dogs simmering by themselves in a tin vat of hot water and then, with most suspicious ease, I found my first quarry, the peep-show.

  It was indeed the coloured replica of the canvas tent I had seen in monochrome in the files of the Bureau – coloured but faded, left out too long in the rains of years, a sagging box of pink striped canvas with the flap drawn up and held back with a fraying cord. A yellowed play-bill in old-fashioned lettering announced that the SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD IN THREE LIFELIKE DIMENSIONS awaited one inside and I bent my head and stepped into the warm, dim cave. It was lit only by the beams of the afternoon sun, creeping in through the many gaps in the structure. A startled gull started up from a perch upon an iron wheel with a wild beating of wings as I came in and swooped around the interior until it found the exit. At the sound, an old man whose sleeping shape had been obscured by the thick brown shadows awoke with shouts and curses. There was a chink and rumble of a rolling, overturned bottle and the air filled with fumes of raw spirit.

  ‘Is there no peace?’ demanded the old man, rearing like a seal from a rustling heap of straw and instantly, with a groan, falling back. He was the first living thing I had seen since I arrived in the town and he was nothing but a piece of verminous flotsam overgrown with a white weed of hair. There was not a single tooth left in his head and a stained and matted beard straggled over the lower part of his face while the upper part was hidden by a pair of wire-rimmed, green-tinted glasses, the left lens of which was cracked clean across. He wore the ruins of striped trousers and a dinner jacket, relics, perhaps, of more prosperous days, and no shirt – only a torn, filthy vest. His feet were bare; his blackened toe-nails had grown into claws. He poked about for a few moments until he gained a handhold on one of the curious machines which filled the tent and, clinging to it, steadied himself sufficiently to rise again. He looked in my direction but did not look at me; he looked all about the tent as if trying to locate me and then wearily shook his shaggy head.

  ‘Though this is by no means Gaza, yet I am eyeless,’ he said and I knew for certain he was blind.

  ‘If you are a customer,’ he said, ‘please place twenty-five cents in the receptacle you will find placed for that purpose on the tea-chest beside the door and take your fill of the wonders of the world. But if not,’ he added and his voice began to trail away, ‘then not… However, whatever you are, kindly restore me my bottle.’

  When it rolled out to the middle of the floor, the bottle had spilled all it contained.

  ‘There isn’t a drop left,’ I warned as I handed it to him. He shook it to hear if there was a rattle, sniffed the neck voluptuously and then, leaning behind him, parted the canvas walls and dropped it into the sea below, where it gurgled and sank.

  ‘I have drunk sufficiently deeply of humiliation, anyway,’ he said. ‘Please pay your quarter, do your business and go away.’

  He relapsed on his pallet and made no more sounds but the murmurous roaring of his breathing. The saucer contained two trouser buttons, a shell and a coin I identified as a Japanese one-sen piece, long out of circulation, but I put a quarter there, all the same. The machines were of ancient rusted cast iron decorated with impressions of cupids, eagles and knots of ribbons. Each was the size and shape of an old-fashioned oven and, at the front, a pair of glass eye-pieces jutted out on long, hollow stalks. I examined all the exhibits in turn. Inside each one, underneath the item it represented, was a sign, clumsily lettered by hand, giving a title.

  Exhibit One: I HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE

  The legs of a woman, raised and open as if ready to admit a lover, formed a curvilinear triumphal arch. The feet were decorated with spike-heeled, black leather pumps. This anatomical section, composed of pinkish wax dimpled at the knee, did not admit the possibility of the existence of a torso. A bristling pubic growth rose to form a kind of coat of arms above the circular proscenium it contained at either side but, although the hairs had been inserted one by one in order to achieve the maximal degree of verisimilitude, the overall effect was one of stunning artifice. The dark red and purple crenellations surrounding the vagina acted as a frame for a perfectly round hole through which the viewer glimpsed the moist, luxuriant landscape of the interior.

  Here endlessly receded before one’s eyes a miniature but irresistible vista of semi-tropical forest where amazing fruits hung on the trees, while from the dappled and variegated chalices of enormous flowers the size of millstones, perfumes of such extraordinary potency that they had become visible to the eye exuded as soft, purple dew. Small, brilliant birds trilled silently on the branches; animals of exquis
ite shapes and colours, among them unicorns, giraffes and herbivorous lions, cropped up buttercups and daisies from the impossibly green grass; butterflies, dragonflies and innumerable jewelled insects fluttered, darted or scurried among the verdure so all was in constant movement and besides the very vegetation was continually transforming itself. As I watched, the pent-up force of the sweet juice within it burst open a persimmon and the split skin let out a flight of orange tawny singing birds. An elongated bud on the point of opening must have changed its mind for it turned into a strawberry instead of a waterlily. A fish sprang out of the river, became a white rabbit and bounded away.

  It seemed that winter and rough winds would never touch these bright, oblivious regions or ripple the surface of the lucid river which wound a tranquil course down the central valley. The eye of the beholder followed the course of this river upwards towards the source, and so it saw, for the first time, after some moments of delighted looking, the misty battlements of a castle. The longer one looked at the dim outlines of this castle, the more sinister it grew, as though its granite viscera housed as many torture chambers as the Château of Silling.

  The rest of the machines contained the following items.

  Exhibit Two: THE ETERNAL VISTAS OF LOVE

  When I looked through the windows of the machine, all I could see were two eyes looking back at me. Each eye was a full three feet from end to end, complete with a lid and a tear duct, and was suspended in the air without any visible support. Like the pubic hair in the previous model, the lashes had been scrupulously set one by one in narrow hems of rosy wax but this time the craftsmen had achieved a disturbing degree of life-likeness which uncannily added to the synthetic quality of the image. The rounded whites were delicately veined with crimson to produce an effect like that of the extremely precious marble used in Italy during the late baroque period to make altars for the chapels of potentates and the irises were simple rings of deep brown bottle glass while in the pupils I could see, reflected in two discs of mirror, my own eyes, very greatly magnified by the lenses of the machine. Since my own pupils, in turn, reflected the false eyes before me while these reflections again reflected those reflections, I soon realized I was watching a model of eternal regression.

  Exhibit Three: THE MEETING PLACE OF LOVE AND HUNGER

  Upon a cut-glass dish of the kind in which desserts are served lay two perfectly spherical portions of vanilla ice-cream, each topped with a single cherry so that the resemblance to a pair of female breasts was almost perfect.

  Exhibit Four: EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT THE NIGHT IS FOR

  Here, a wax figure of the headless body of a mutilated woman lay in a pool of painted blood. She wore only the remains of a pair of black stockings and a ripped suspender belt of shiny black rubber. Her arms stuck out stiffly on either side of her and once again I noticed the loving care with which the craftsmen who manufactured her had simulated the growth of underarm hair. The right breast had been partially segmented and hung open to reveal two surfaces of meat as bright and false as the plaster sirloins which hang in toy butcher’s shops while her belly was covered with some kind of paint that always contrived to look wet and, from the paint, emerged the handle of an enormous knife which was kept always a-quiver by the action (probably) of a spring.

  Exhibit Five: TROPHY OF A HUNTER IN THE FORESTS OF THE NIGHT

  A head – purporting, presumably, to have been taken from the victim of the preceding tableau – hung in the air, again with no strings or hooks in sight to reveal how this position was maintained. From the point of severance dripped slow gouts of artificial blood, plop, plop, plop, but the receptacle into which they fell was outside the viewer’s field of vision. A very abundant black wig tumbled around her pallid features, which wore a hideous expression of resignation. Her eyes were closed.

  Exhibit Six: THE KEY TO THE CITY

  A candle in the shape of a penis of excessive size, with scrotum attached, in a state of pronounced tumescence. The wrinkled foreskin was drawn far enough back to uncover in its importunate entirety the grossly swollen, sunset-coloured tip as far as a portion of the shaft itself and, at the minute cranny in the centre, where a wick must have been lodged, burned a small, pure flame. As the viewer watched, the candle tipped forward on its balls and pointed towards one accusingly.

  I was struck with the notion that this was supposed to represent the Minister’s penis.

  Exhibit Seven: PERPETUAL MOTION

  As I expected, here a man and a woman were conducting sexual congress on a black horsehair couch. The figures, again exquisitely executed in wax, looked as though they might have been modelled in one piece and, due to a clockwork mechanism hidden in their couch, they rocked continually back and forth. This coupling had a fated, inevitable quality. One could not picture a cataclysm sufficiently violent to rend the twined forms asunder and neither could one conceive of a past beginning for they were so firmly joined together it seemed they must have been formed in this way at the beginning of time and, locked parallel, would go on thus for ever to infinity. They were not so much erotic as pathetic, poor palmers of desire who never budged as much as an inch on their endless pilgrimage. The man’s face was moulded into the woman’s neck and so could not be seen but the head of the woman was constructed so as to oscillate in the socket of her neck and, as it rolled from side to side, her face was intermittently visible.

  I recognized this face instantly, although it was fixed in the tormented snarl of orgasm. I remained staring at it for some time. It was the beautiful face of Dr Hoffman’s ambassador. The old man interrupted my reverie. His voice was as raucous as a rooster’s.

  ‘Is there enough money in my saucer to buy me a bottle?’ he demanded.

  ‘I’ll buy you a drink with pleasure,’ I said.

  ‘Thank ’ee; thank ’ee kindly,’ he replied and painfully heaved himself to his feet. He fumbled around in his corner until he finally produced a peaked cap of the style worn by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. When he had set this jauntily on his head, he began another search but I soon uncovered his white stick for him.

  Now the pier was peopled. A ragged youth with caked snot in the grooves under his nose stood behind the rifle range idly probing the inside of his ear with a piece of twig and a blowsy woman in a rayon slip, with hair dyed the colour of apricots, yawned and scratched her buttocks at the entrance to the fortune teller’s booth. Three little boys clung to the rails by their feet holding fishing rods over the sea with one hand, and, in the other hand clutched jam jars of water by the string handles tied round the rims. The beach, too, presented an everyday holiday panorama of frisking dogs, children building sandcastles and a great deal of skin exposed to the sun. But all these Johnny-come-latelies had the yawning, vacant air of those just awakened from a deep sleep and walked uncertainly, sometimes, for no reason, breaking into a stumbling run and then halting just as suddenly to stare around them with startled, empty eyes or, turning to speak to a companion, they would stop, mouth ajar, as if they no longer recognized him. And, for so great a number of people, they made very little noise, as if they knew they had no existential right to be here.

  The peep-show proprietor was blind and lame but he certainly knew his way about the town and led me unerringly to a small bar so deep inside the fishermen’s quarter the streets no longer bothered to keep up appearances and relapsed thankfully into slumminess. We sat down at a marble topped table and, without waiting for our order, a black brought us two glasses of the crude spirit that passes for brandy among the poor. He left the bottle on the table. The peep-show proprietor emptied his glass at a draught.

  ‘The purpose of my display,’ he remarked, ‘is to demonstrate the difference between saying and showing. Signs speak. Pictures show.’

  I filled up his glass again for him and he thanked me by leaning across the table and comprehensively stroking my face with his gnarled finger-tips, as if learning my dimensions before sculpting me.

  ‘Who sent you?’ he asked abruptly.
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br />   ‘I’ve come to investigate the disappearance of the Mayor,’ I replied guardedly.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘She sits like Mariana in the moated grange, poor girl! Mary Anne, the beautiful somnambulist.’

  He drank again, more slowly, and then remarked: ‘My life is nothing but a wind-blown rag.’

  With that, he fell silent. I was to learn he spoke only in a series of disconnected, often gnomic statements usually tinged with melancholy, bitterness, self-pity or all three together. I sipped my eau-de-vie quietly and waited for him to speak again. After the third glass, he did.

  ‘I was not Mendoza. I never had that honour.’

  ‘Who were you, then?’

  He became bashful and secretive.

  ‘Once, I was a very important man indeed. Even, you might say, a great man. Once they used to take off their hats to me as I walked down the road and murmur to me ingratiatingly and barmen were glad of my custom, yes! proud and glad! Instead of merely sullenly tolerating me.’

  The barman, who must have heard all this many times before, flashed his teeth and smiled at me as if to create complicity. I poured more brandy into the old man’s glass.

  ‘They used to say, “We’re honoured to have you honour us with your presence, Professor”…’ And then he stopped, as though he knew he had already said too much, which was perfectly true – he had given me the principal letters of a clue and now I had only to fill in the blanks. I made an initial guess.

  ‘The greatest success a teacher can boast is the pupil who surpasses him.’

  ‘Then why has he humiliated me so?’ wailed the old man and I knew instantly he had taught elementary physics to Dr Hoffman at the university all those years ago. When he finished the fifth glass, the last vestiges of his discretion vanished.

  ‘He doesn’t even allow me to work in the laboratories. He gave me a set of samples and let me loose, left me to wander, up and down, here and there, hither and thither, pushing my wheelbarrow in front of me… tripping over stones and rotting my guts with filthy liquor…’