The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (35 page)

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.

All 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.

‘When I was little, he used to give me rides on his back,’ she said. ‘How white his muzzle is growing!’

Wheezing and panting, the Great Dane followed us up a staircase and along a gallery but we left him outside a room in which a stained glass window dyed the valley outside purple and crimson and Ravel was playing on a very elaborate hi-fi set. A diminutive, dark-haired woman in a long, black dress lay on a couch with her face turned away from us. There, holding her hand, sat the Doctor himself, on a low, padded stool. I knew him at once though he was far older than the pictures I had seen, of course, even if he still wedged open one eye with a monocle just as his old professor had told me he did. There was a strong smell of incense in the room which did not quite conceal the smell of incipient putrefaction. When he let go the woman’s hand, it fell with a lifeless thud. The one discordant note in all this rich man’s sumptuous country estate was the embalmed corpse of his dead wife he kept on a bergère settee in this white-walled room. He was grey-faced and grey-haired and grey-eyed. He wore a handsomely tailored dark suit and his hands were exquisitely manicured. His quality, whatever it had been once, was now only quiet. There was no resemblance whatsoever between the old man and his daughter.

They used the standard language with one another. His first words were:

‘I go to the city tomorrow and arrive there yesterday.’

‘Yes, of course,’ replied Albertina. ‘Because the shadow of the flying bird never moves.’

They smiled. They appeared to understand one another perfectly.

Then he gave her the kisses due to a generalissimo.

They both laughed gently and I felt the hair rising on my scalp. In that room which hung in the castle like a bubble filled with quietude, faced with that strange family group, I felt the most appalling fear. Perhaps because I was in the presence of the disciplined power of the utterly irrational. He was so quiet, so grey, so calm and he had just said something entirely meaningless in a voice of perfect, restrained reason. All at once I realized how lonely we were here, far away in the mountains with only the wind for company, in the house of the man who made dreams come true.

He stroked the nocturnal hair of the corpse and whispered softly: ‘You see, my dear, she has come home, just as I told you she would. And now you must have a refreshing sleep while we must have our dinner.’

But a bell rang and first, it seemed, we must all dress up. Albertina showed me to a chaste, masculine room at the front of the house with a narrow bed and a black leather armchair, many ash trays and a magazine rack containing current numbers of
Playboy
,
The New Yorker
,
Time
and
Newsweek
. On the dressing-table were silver-backed brushes. I opened the door of a closet and found a bathroom where I took a steaming shower, assisted by great quantities of lemon soap. When I came out, wrapped in the white, towelling robe they had provided for me, I found a dinner jacket and everything to go with it laid out ready for me on the bed, down to silk socks and white linen handkerchief. When I was dressed, I felt in the pocket and found a gold cigarette lighter and matching case filled with Balkan Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes. I looked at myself in the oval, mahogany mirror. I had been transformed again. Time and travel had changed me almost beyond my own recognition. Now I was entirely Albertina in the male aspect. That is why I know I was beautiful when I was a young man. Because I know I looked like Albertina.

From my window, I could see the apple orchards, the crevasse and the road that led over the bare mountain to the military installation. Everything was perfectly calm and filled with the mushroomy, winey scents of autumn. Another bell rang and I went down the thickly carpeted staircase to the picture gallery where Albertina and her father were drinking very dry sherry. Dinner was served off an English eighteenth-century table in another of those chaste, restrained, white-walled rooms with a flower arrangement in the disappearing Japanese transcendental style on the sideboard and china, glass and cutlery so extraordinarily tasteful one was hardly aware of its presence. The meal was very simple and perfectly in tune with the season of the year – some kind of clear soup; a little trout; a saddle of hare, grilled; mushrooms; salad; fruit and cheese. The wines all matched. With the very strong black coffee there was a selection of recherché liqueurs and we all smoked probably priceless cigars. Still no servants appeared. All the courses had been sent up from subterranean kitchens in a small service elevator from which Albertina herself served us. There was no conversation during the meal but another stereo set hidden behind a white-enamelled grille was playing a Schubert song cycle,
The Winter Journey
.

‘Do you not feel,’ said the Doctor in his very soft but still crisp-edged voice, ‘that invisible presences have more reality than visible ones? They exert more influence upon us. They make us cry more easily.’

This was the only sentiment or expression of feeling he revealed during the time I knew him. As the silent meal went on, I began to sense in his quietness, his almost quiescence, his silence and slow movements, a willed concentration of thought that, if exploited, might indeed rule the world. He bemused me. He was stillness. He seemed to have refined himself almost to nothing. He was a grey ghost sitting in a striped coat at a very elegant table and yet he was also Prospero – though, ironically enough, one could not judge the Prospero effect in his own castle for he could not alter the constituents of the aromatic coffee we sipped by so much as an iota. Here, nothing could possibly be fantastic. That was the source of my bitter disappointment. I had wanted his house to be a palace dedicated only to wonder.