The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Page 9

  I waited until I judged from the position of the moon it was some hours past midnight. By then, my entire right arm was gripped rigid in a vice of pain and of no further use. Besides, my rising fever parched and racked me though there was nothing left to drink and I had to fight against a growing light-headedness which verged on delirium. Yet I was determined to escape. At last I crept to the door and listened. I thought I heard a faintly sawing snore and, fevered as I was, this was enough to encourage me. I had been stripped of everything but my trousers and my bandage; I was quite suitably dressed for climbing a chimney. I approached the fireplace.

  Dank, powdered soot filled my mouth and nostrils and, before I had effortfully ascended three or four yards, my left hand before me was as black as the wall on which it rested and blood ran out of the rough bandaging, trickling down my right arm. The sky watched me from above with a single blue eye that looked so blithely indifferent to my predicament that tears of self-pity carved deep channels in the filth on my cheeks. The sweep had used a child to clamber up and down the chimney for him with the brushes but I was a grown man and it was a chamber of unease to me, an unease which increased with every moment of tortured confinement for my movements were too restricted to allow me to progress with any speed and the necessity for absolute silence forbade me to so much as clear my throat. Besides, my overwrought senses soon convinced me the passage was steadily growing narrower and the walls were shrinking to crush me. The building was some six storeys high. I shuddered at every dark mouth announcing the fireplace of some other room for fear a fall of soot would betray my ascent to anyone who waited there and when, now and then, one-handed, I mishandled a cleft, I nearly died with fear to hear how my own struggle betrayed me.

  But up, up, I went, like an ambitious rat traversing an unaccommodating, horizontal hole and I gradually grew certain there was nobody in the upper storeys but my striving self. Yet, for some reason, this did not diminish my fear for the memory of the blasted face of the dead girl visited me very often and it seemed at times I still carried all her weight on my throbbing right arm and saw her teeth gleam from a mass of pulped flesh whenever I glanced down. At times, the sky seemed a mile away and at others I felt I could touch it if I stretched out my hand so the moment when my head broke into the fresh air surprised me as much as if I were a baby suddenly popped from the womb. At first I could only drink the fresh air in thirsty gulps, still half wedged within the chimney, but as soon as I got my breath back, I managed to clamber perilously out of the stack and rolled down the roof until I came to rest in the gutter where I lay still for a long time, for I was almost at the end of my strength.

  The gutters were mercifully wide and a pediment of carved stone some three feet high concealed the domestic look of the furniture of the roof from the street, so I, too, was quite hidden. As soon as I returned to myself a little, I saw that the moon was setting and soon would come an hour or two of perfect darkness before the first signs of dawn. I waited for that darkness as for a friend. The dressings on my wound were so torn and filthy I ripped them off and flung them away. A persistent dull pulse like the pulse of pain itself reminded me they had not taken out the bullet and, unless I went to a doctor very soon, I might not last much longer. But I still had enough endurance left to escape.

  The nearest building was the town bank. It lay across a narrow alley a mere six feet away and, by some miracle, it had a flat roof; but it was built on only three floors so the drop was of some eighteen feet. However, I could see the most inviting fire escape on the shady side of the building which, if I could reach it, offered me a clear route to freedom. But I do not think I would have attempted that frightful, downward plunge if my wits had not been shaking with fever. When it was quite dark, I made it; I pitched forward into the abyss and the sprawling fall winded me completely – but I landed on the other side, alive.

  On this roof was a water tank and, though it contained no more than a puddle of scum, I scooped up a little in fingers where soot was now grained in the very whorls and was refreshed in proportion to the quality of the refreshment – that is, not much; but a little. I could see the silver salver of the ocean dewed at the rim with a pale shadow of dawn but otherwise the night was profound, for the street lights did not work any more. So I walked down the fire escape on my bruised, bare feet as bravely as you please and crept off down the alleys, steering clear of guard dogs, keeping my eyes skinned for the gleam of a patrolling policeman’s torch – though the fever was in my eyes and I trembled unnecessarily many times before I had left the town behind me.

  On my way, I stole fresh trousers and a shirt from a clothesline and took the sandals from the feet of a drunken peasant sleeping in a doorway but I did not stop to wash myself at any of the dripping waterpumps. I waited until I came to a stream well away from the last of the suburbs and there sluiced myself down with the icy water. I screamed out loud when it touched my wound. I buried my rag of an old garment under a stone and dressed myself in my new clothes. Now nothing at all was left of the brisk young civil servant who had left the city such a short while ago. I looked the perfect offspring of the ancestors my mother had so strenuously denied and to that, perhaps, I owe my life.

  I came to the main road and found a telephone box where I tried to ring the Minister but all the lines were out of order or had been cut for the instrument did not even crackle. So I left the highway and took a green path between hedgerows drenched with dew where soon the sweet birds sang. The day had begun and, moment by moment, the early morning mists grew brighter. I wished I did not keep glimpsing Mary Anne’s face behind the hawthorns where the hips were red already. I passed a public house, miles from anywhere, and resting against the rustic bench outside the door, wet with dew like everything else, lay a bicycle. I mounted the bicycle and rode on, though I could only steer with the one hand for a bicycle may be ridden only by a continuous effort of will and the will to live was all I had left.

  I do not possess a very clear memory of this part of my journey. I was consumed by a terrible sickness and weak from hunger, too; I had eaten nothing but the dead Mayor’s biscuits since the treacherous housekeeper’s breakfast twenty-four hours before. I know I came to a very wide river towards the end of the morning and cycled along the embankment as the sun beat down on my uncovered head. My tyres described great, crazy arcs behind me. I was now, I think, very near to the end.

  I saw a dappled horse cropping grass beside the path and, leaning against a post, a tall, brown, rangy man in rough garments smoking a meditative pipe. He watched me curiously as I wobbled faintly towards him and held out his arms to catch me before I fell. I remember his lean, dark face, almost the face I had seen so recently in Mary Anne’s mirror; and I remember the sensation of being carried through the air in a pair of strong arms; and then the creaking of boards and the motion of rocking on water, so I knew I had been placed in some kind of boat on the river. I recall the touch of fresh linen against my cheek and the sound of a woman’s voice speaking a liquid and melodious language which took me back to my earliest childhood, before the time of the nuns.

  Then, for a long time, nothing more.

  3 The River People

  The Portuguese did us the honour of discovering us towards the middle of the sixteenth century but they had left it a little late in the day, for they were already past their imperialist prime and so our nation began as an afterthought, or a footnote to other, more magnificent conquests. The Portuguese found a tenuous coastline of fever-sodden swamp which, as they reluctantly penetrated inland, they found solidified to form a great expanse of sun-baked prairie. Lavishly distributing the white spirochete and the word of God as they went, they travelled far enough to glimpse the hostile ramparts of the mountains before they turned back for there was no gold or silver to be had, only malaria and yellow fever. So they left it to the industrious Dutch a century later to drain the marshes and set up that intricate system of canals, later completed and extended during a brief visit by the British, to wh
ich the country was to owe so much of its later wealth.

  The vagaries of some European peace treaty or other robbed the Dutch of the fruits of their labours, although some of them stayed behind to add further confusion to our ethnic incomprehensibility and to the barbarous speech which slowly evolved out of a multiplicity of elements. But it was principally the Ukrainians and the Scots-Irish who turned the newly fertile land into market gardens while a labour force of slaves, remittance men and convicts opened up the interior and a baroque architect imported for the purpose utilized their labours to build the capital, which was founded in the early eighteenth century at a point where the principal river formed an inland tidal basin. Here they built a house for Jesus, a bank, a prison, a stock exchange, a madhouse, a suburb and a slum. It was complete. It prospered.

  During the next two hundred years, a mixed breed of Middle Europeans, Germans and Scandinavians poured in to farm the plains and even though a brief but bloody slave revolt put a stop to slavery at the time of the French Revolution, enough black slaves ran away from the plantations of the northern continent to provide cheap labour in the factories, shipyards and open-cast mines which brought the country prosperously enough into the twentieth century. You could not have said we were an undeveloped nation though, if we had not existed, Dr Hoffman could not have invented a better country in which to perform his experiments and, if he brought to his work the ambivalence of the expatriate, then were we not – except myself – almost all of us expatriates?

  Even those whose great, great, great grandfathers had crossed the ocean in wooden ships felt, in the atavistic presence of the foothills, that they were little better than resident aliens. The expatriates had imposed a totally European façade on the inhospitable landscape in which they lived nervously, drawing around them a snug shawl of remembered familiarities although, with the years, this old clothing grew threadbare and draughts blew in through the holes, which made them shiver. The very air had always been full of ghosts so that the newcomers took their displeasure into their lungs with every breath. Until the introduction of D.D.T., the area between the capital and the sea was a breeding ground for fever mosquitoes; until the drinking water was filtered, it was always full of cholera. The country itself was subtly hostile.

  It turned out that the extremely powerful bourgeoisie and by far the greater part of the peasantry around the capital, from the rich farmers to the white trash, was of variegated European extraction, united by the frail bond of a language which, although often imperfectly understood, was still held in common while the slum dwellers presented an extraordinary racial diversity but were all distinguishable by the colour black, for that pigmentation, to some degree, was common to them all. But, if the conquistadors had found nothing they valued, the Jesuits who sailed with them discovered a rich trove of souls and it is to the accounts of attempted conversions and the journals of those indefatigable storm-troopers of the Lord that we owe most of our knowledge of the aborigines. Certain of the tribes and many of the customs the Jesuits ascribe to those days are certainly fallacious; the famous stories of highlanders with such stiff, muscular spikes at the base of their spines that all their stools were perforated do not even need to be discredited. But not one of the tribes could write down the language they spoke, could tame horses nor could build in stones. They were no Aztecs or Incas but brown, naïve men and women who fished, hunted, trapped birds and then died in great numbers, for those who did not become running targets for the crossbows of the Portuguese survived as quarries for the bluff English, who hallooed and tally-ho’d after them in imported red coats. While most of the rest succumbed to smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis or those sicknesses of the European nursery, measles and whooping cough, which prove deadly if exported to another hemisphere.

  But those defunct Amerindians had possessed a singular charm. Near the coast, a certain tribe had lived in reed hutches on islands in the marshes and they used to paste feathers together to make themselves robes and mantles, so they darted about on stilts above the still water like brilliant birds with long legs. And they used to make tapestries which showed no figures, only gradations of colour, woven out of feathers in such a way the colours seemed to move. I have seen the tattered ruins of one of these feathered mantles in the unfrequented Museum of Folk Art; ragged, now, but still unwearied by time, the pinks, reds and purples still dance together. Another tribe which lived beside the sea, a glum, deferential people who subsisted on raw fish, had a dialect which contained no words for ‘yes’ or ‘no’, only a word for ‘maybe’. Further inland, people lived in mud beehives which had neither doors nor windows so you climbed into them through a hole in the roof. When the spring rains washed their homes away, as happened every year without fail, they stoically retired to caves where they carved eloquent eyes in stone for reasons the Jesuits never fathomed. Here and there, in the dry tundra and even the foothills, the Jesuits set the Indians, who were all sweet-natured and eager to please, to build enormous, crenellated churches with florid façades of pink stucco. But when the Indians had completed the churches and had gazed at them for a while with round-eyed self-congratulation, they wandered away again to sit in the sun and play tritonic melodies on primitive musical instruments. Then the Jesuits decided the Indians had not a single soul among them all and that wrote a definitive finis to the story of their regeneration.

  But not all the Indians died. The Europeans impregnated the women and the children in turn impregnated the most feckless of the poor whites. The blacks impregnated the resultant cross and, though filtered and diffused, the original Indian blood finally distributed itself with some thoroughness among the urban proletariat and the occupations both whites and blacks deemed too lowly to perform, such as night-soil disposal. Yet it was perfectly possible – and, indeed, by far the greater majority of the population did so – to spend all one’s life in the capital or the towns of the plain and know little if anything of the Indians. They were bogeymen with which to frighten naughty children; they had become rag-pickers, scrap-dealers, refuse collectors, and emptiers of cess-pits – those who performed tasks for which you do not need a face.

  And a few of them had taken to the river, as if they had grown to distrust even dry land itself. These were the purest surviving strain of Indian and they lived secret, esoteric lives, forgotten, unnoticed. It was said that many of the river people never set foot on shore in all their lives and I know it was taboo for unmarried girls or pregnant women to leave the boats on which they lived. They were secretive, proud, shy and rigidly exclusive in their dealings with the outside world. Those who married outside the river clans were forbidden to return to their families or even to speak to any member of the tribe again as long as they lived but taboos against any kind of exogamy with the fat Caucasians who rooted themselves at ease along the river banks were so rigid I do not think above half a dozen of the women and, among the men, only the masters of the boats – or, rather, barges – had ever so much as exchanged a score of sentences with any except their own. Besides, they retained a version of one of the Indian dialects and I rather think they were the remote and however altered descendants of the birdmen of the swamps, for the meaning of their words depended not so much on pronunciation as intonation. They speak in a kind of singing; when, in the mornings, a flock of womenfolk twitter about the barge emptying the slops over the side and getting the breakfast, it is like a dawn chorus. The only way to transcribe their language would be in a music notation. But I have found very few of their customs in the writings of the Jesuits.

  Over the years, their isolated and entirely self-contained society had developed an absolutely consistent logic which owed little or nothing to the world outside and they sailed from ports to cities to ports as heedlessly as if the waterways were magic carpets of indifference. I soon realized they were entirely immune to the manifestations. If the hawk-nosed, ferocious elders who handled their traditional lore said such a thing was so, then it was so and it would take more than the conjuring tricks o
f a cunning landlubber to shake their previous convictions. Since, however, they bore no goodwill to the whites and very little to the blacks, if it came to that, they took a cool pleasure to witness from the security of their portholes the occasional havoc in the towns through which they passed.

  I blessed that touch of Indian blood my mother had all her life cursed for it gave me hair black enough and cheekbones high enough to pass among the river people for one of their own, when they were the only ones who could help me. The bargemaster who took me in knew quite well I came from the city but he spoke enough of the standard tongue to reassure me they were well disposed to fugitives from justice, provided they were of Indian extraction. He told me that during my faint he had dug the bullet out of my shoulder with a knife while his mother held an infusion of narcotic herbs under my nose when I showed signs of regaining consciousness. Now he applied a boiling poultice of leaves to the wound, bandaged it and left me in the care of the old woman.

  When she smiled at me, I thought at first she did not have a tooth in her head for my eyes were still dim with fever, but soon I learned it was the custom for all the women to stain their teeth black. Every time she came into the cabin she shut the door sharply behind her but not before I saw a curious press of children crowding outside on deck to catch a glimpse of me. But I did not meet his family until Nao-Kurai had taught me to sing something of his language.