The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (29 page)

‘I am happy only in that I am a monster.’

Now, when I thought about it, I knew that this man-eating hierophant who recounted his proclivities to us with such pompous arrogance could not possibly be the black pimp of New Orleans; he was only his living image. But the Count identified him rightly in that this princeling of the anthropophagi was yet another demiurge and the Lithuanian aristocrat and the savage were twinned in that both were storm-troopers of the world itself. The world, that is, of earthquake and cataclysm, cyclone and devastation; the violent matrix, the real world of unmastered, unmasterable physical stress that is entirely inimical to man because of its indifference. Ocean, forest, mountain, weather – these are the inflexible institutions of that world of unquestionable reality which is so far removed from the social institutions which make up our own world that we men must always, whatever our difference, conspire to ignore them. For otherwise we would be forced to acknowledge our incomparable insignificance and the insignificance of those desires that might be the pyrotechnic tigers of our world and yet, under the cold moon and the frigid round dance of the unspeakably alien planets, are nothing but toy animals cut from coloured paper.

All this ran through my mind as the monster harangued the Count and Lafleur’s little hand reached out and grasped hold of mine for comfort.

‘Nothing in our traditions suggests history. I have been very careful to suppress history for my subjects might learn lessons from the deaths of kings. I burned all their former idols as soon as I came to power and instituted a comprehensive monotheism with myself as its object. I allowed the past to exist as a series of rituals concerning the nature of my omnipotent godhead. I am a lesson, a model, the perfect type of king and of government. I am far more than the sum of my parts.’

And now he smiled gently at the Count; and, to my amazement, I saw that he reflected the Count’s face perfectly, as if his own face were only a pool of dark water, and the paintings upon it a few blossoms floating on the surface.

‘In a certain brothel in the city of New Orleans, once, I saw you strangle a prostitute solely to augment your own erotic ecstasy, my dear Count. Since that time, I have pursued you diligently across space and time. You excited my curiosity. It seemed I might be able to crown my own atrocities by making my brother in atrocity my victim. That I might, as it were, immolate myself, to see how I should bear it.

‘I wish, you understand, to see how I would suffer.

‘I have a great deal of empirical curiosity. A Jesuit in his black cassock once came to my tribe and lived among us for a year. When he learned my manners, he rebuked me so sternly, in the name of pity, that first I had him crucified – for he professed to admire so much this form of torture – and, while he was still quivering on the tree, I cut out his heart with my own hands, to see if such a professedly compassionate an organ had a different structure from the common kind of heart. But no! it did not.

‘Now I should like to see if we have a heart at all, dear Count. Are we ourselves so much the physical slaves of nature?

‘And I wish to see if I can suffer, like any other man. And then I want to learn the savour of my flesh. I wish to taste myself. For you must know I am a great gourmet.

‘Bind him.’

Two female officers pounced on the Count and tied his wrists together with cords. From the ranks of the chief’s retinue a plump, giggling being wearing only a white chef’s cap and a girdle hung with ladles stepped forward with a jar of salt in one hand and a nosegay of potherbs in the other. He lavishly seasoned the water that now bubbled in the cauldron while the Count began to laugh softly.

‘Don’t you think I’m too old and tough and starveling to make a savoury dish?’

‘I thought of that,’ said the cannibal. ‘That is why I’m going to boil you up for soup.’

The soldiers slit the Count’s tights with the points of their swords so they fell like opening petals from his white, scrawny legs. They slit his waistcoat and it fell. Naked, his tall, skeletal form and great mane of iron grey hair were still clothed in that strange, intangible cloak of exalted loneliness. He was a king whose pride was all the greater because he lacked a country. The chef flung a string of onions into the pot, thoughtfully stirred in more salt, stirred and sipped the stock from his ladle. He nodded. The lady soldiers marched the Count between them to the fire, took firm hold each one of an elbow, lifted him bodily and plunged him feet first into the water, so that his head stuck over the rim. But his face did not change expression as it began to grow rosy. And he endured in perfect silence for far longer than I would have thought possible.

And then, when he was red as a lobster, he began to laugh with joy – pure joy.

‘Lafleur!’ he called from the pot. ‘Lafleur! I am in pain! I’ve learned to name my pain! Lafleur – ’

And, using the very last of his strength, he rose up out of the cauldron in an upward surging leap, as of a fully liberated man.

But when he reached his apex his heart must have burst for his mouth sagged, his eyes started, blood leaked out of his nostrils and he fell back with a splash that scalded half the court with broth. This time, his head disappeared entirely beneath the rim of the stew pot and presently a delicious steam began to drift from the simmering concoction, so that the entire audience licked its lips in unison. At that, the chef clapped a lid on him.

I was touched to see Lafleur’s bandages were soaking up a trickle of tears but then I realized he and I were also to feature as
entremets
for the ensuing feast. The chef ordered a team of apprentices to prepare long beds of glowing charcoal and himself busily began to grease a gridiron.

‘Skin the smallest rabbit first,’ commanded the chieftain negligently and he did not bother to season us first with verbiage since we were only so much meat to him.

Two privates seized Lafleur’s shoulders and dragged him away from me. They cut off his robe, although he struggled, and I saw, not the lean torso of a boy but the gleaming, curvilinear magnificence of a golden woman whose flesh seemed composed of the sunlight that touched it far more kindly than the black hands of the fiendish infantry did. I recognized her even before they sheared away the bandages and showed no noseless, ulcerated, disfigured face but the face of Albertina herself.

Never before, in all my life, had I performed a heroic action.

I acted instantly, without thought. I grasped the knife of one of my own guards and the musket of the other. I stabbed them both in their bellies and then I stabbed the women who were preparing her for the pot. I flung away my knife and embraced her with one arm while, with the other, I pointed the musket at the chieftain’s head and pulled the trigger.

The antique bullet, larger than a grape, pierced the painted eye in the centre of his forehead.

A great spurt of blood sprang out as from an unstoppered tap in such a great arc that it drenched us. He must have died instantaneously but some spasm of muscle jerked him to his feet. The juggernaut rose up on his car and stood there, swaying, a fountain of blood, while the crowd moaned and shivered as if at an eclipse. Somehow his uncoordinated shuddering freed the wheels of his trolley and, at first slowly, it began to move, for there was a downward inclination to the earth. And still the corpse stayed upright, as if rigor mortis had set in straight away. And still it jetted blood, as if his arteries were inexhaustible. So it started on a headlong career, crushing wives and eunuchs and those of his tribe who, maddened at the sight, out of despair or hysteria at the sudden extinction of their autocratic comet, now flung themselves under the wheels of its chariot with maenad shrieks.

Bouncing over a path of flesh, bearing a tottering tower, the car’s mad career took it to the bank of the river and there it plunged into a foaming torrent that carried it to the edge of the waterfall within seconds. There car parted company with rider for the water flung them both high up into the air and they swept separately over the lip of the cascade, to dash to pieces on the rocks below.

Albertina and I kissed.

The soldiers should have killed us, then, for then we should have been perfectly happy. But now the utmost confusion reigned among them for the pole of their world was gone. Their wives, concubines and eunuchs tore their hair and wailed for they could think of nothing else to do but set out at once on the elaborate ritual of mourning. The necromancers had drawn a circle and were standing inside it, attempting to summon back the chieftain’s spirit; while the lady general called a common drill so, as the populace ran this way and that, lamenting, the soldiers ceremoniously formed fours and shifted their blunderbusses from one shoulder to the other with a discipline which, in other circumstances, might have been almost inspiring to watch, since it demonstrated a devotion to duty carried far beyond the point of absurdity. But I was kissing Albertina and so I did not watch them, although I could tell by the heavy odour on the air that the Count had almost finished cooking. Albertina stirred in my arms.

‘I must pay him my last respects,’ she said. ‘We travelled a long way together. And, after all, I admired him.’

Naked as a dream, she lifted the lid of the pot and stirred the scum that had risen with the bay leaves to the surface.

‘And I can’t deny he was a worthy adversary. His slightest gesture created the void he presupposed.’

She clapped back the lid and with businesslike precision started to undress the corpse of one of the female soldiers. When she had dressed herself up in dark blue apron and chocolate brown cloak, she made an armful of as many weapons as she could and said to me purposefully:

‘Come!’

Nobody tried to stop us. Soon even the noises of the convulsive wake were silenced by the massive, viridian door of the forest that we closed behind us.

There was once a young man named Desiderio who set out upon a journey and very soon lost himself completely. When he thought he had reached his destination, it turned out to be only the beginning of another journey infinitely more hazardous than the first for now she smiled a little and told me that we were quite outside the formal rules of time and place and, in fact, had been so since I met her in her disguise. We moved through the landscape of Nebulous Time her father had brought into being but could no longer control because the sets of samples were buried under a mountain. She appeared abstracted and remote.

At first the landscape looked only like that of any tropical forest, though this in itself was marvellous enough to me. Nothing I had seen in the low-lying, poorly forested temperate zones that bore me had prepared me for the supernal and tremendous energy of the rearing colonnades of palm which concluded in an interwoven roof of limbs and lianas high above our heads. I would have experienced a green panic there, among those giant forms far older than even my antique race if Albertina had not walked beside me, picking us a safe path as delicately as a cat through undergrowth where strange, flesh-eating flowers writhed as if in perturbed slumber for this forest was also cannibal and full of perils.

All the plants distilled poisons. This essential hostility was not directed at us or at any comer; the forest was helplessly, motivelessly malign. The blossoms on the creepers snapped their teeth at nothing or something, dragonfly or snake or hushed breeze, with an objective spontaneity. They could not help but be inimical. The leaves let through only a greenish dazzle and a lonely silence pressed against our ears like fur for the trees grew too close together for birds to fly or sing. Heavily armed, Albertina walked with the proud defiance of an Empress of the Exotic.

‘My Albertina, how could you possibly have been both Lafleur and the Madame at the same time?’

‘Nothing simpler,’ she replied. She had the slightest trace of an unfamiliar accent and she chose her words and organized her sentences with the excessive pedantry of one who uses a second language perfectly, though I never found out exactly what her first tongue had been. But her mother tongue, or the tongue of her mother, was Chinese.

‘I projected myself upon the available flesh of the Madame. After all, was it not put out for hire? Lafleur in the stable, among the whickering horses, projected himself, myself, into the Bestial Room, myself in the bodily clothing of the Madame. She was a real but ephemeral show. Under the influence of intense longing, the spirit – or, let us even say, the soul – of the sufferer can create a double which joins the absent beloved while the original template goes about its everyday business. Oh, Desiderio! never underestimate the power of that desire for which you are named! One night, Yang Yu-chi shot what he thought was a wild ox and his arrow pierced a rock up to the feathering because of his passionate conviction the rock lived.’

I did not mind her lecturing me because she was so beautiful. I told her that, at that moment, I desired her with the greatest imaginable intensity but she only said she had been given her orders and was afraid that we must wait.

‘Let us be amorous but also mysterious,’ she said, quoting one of her selves with so much ironic grace that I was charmed enough to shrug away my disappointment and resign myself to walking through the wood beside her. Presently she shot a small, rabbit-like animal as it sat on a boulder washing its face with its paw and when we came to a clearing as the shadows deepened into those of evening, I skinned it while she lit a fire with the tinder box she found in the soldier’s girdle and then cooked supper. After we ate, we sat together watching the red embers dissolve and we talked.