The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (6 page)
Read The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Online
Authors: Angela Carter
Tags: #British Literature, #20th Century, #Retail, #Britain, #Amazon.com
I was to go with the Minister to the rendezvous. My task was simple. I was to record every word that passed between the Minister and the agent on a very small tape recorder concealed in my pocket. He sent me home to change my suit and put on a tie. I must say, most of all, I was looking forward to a good meal for such things were hard to come by nowadays – yet I could see what the Minister could not, that Dr Hoffman would not have sent him the invitation had he not believed we were on our knees.
The restaurant was luxuriously discreet. All its staff had unimpeachable reality ratings, even the plongeurs. We waited for our contact in a dim, confidential bar too comfortably redolent of money to be affected by the tempest of fantasy we could not glimpse outside because the windows were so heavily curtained. Sipping his gin and tonic, the Minister alternately consulted his watch and tapped his foot; I was interested to see he was unable to perform these actions simultaneously, perhaps because he was so single-minded. He emanated tension. A muscle twitched in his cheek. He lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the one he had just put out. We knew who it was the instant our contact came in because the lights immediately fused.
A dozen tiny fireflies clicked into life at the nozzle of a dozen cigarette lighters but I could make out only the vaguest outlines of Dr Hoffman’s emissary until the waiters brought in a number of branched candlesticks so that he was illuminated like the icon he resembled. A breeze seemed to play about him, tossing the small flames hither and thither, keeping constantly aflutter the innumerable ruffles on his lace shirt and casting a multitude of shadows over his face. Presumably he was either of Mongolian extraction or else he numbered among his ancestors, as I did, certain of the forgotten Indians who still linger miserably in the more impenetrable mountains or skulk along the waterways, for his skin was like polished brass, at once greenish and yellowish, his eyelids were vestigial and his cheekbones unusually high. Luxuriantly glossy hair so black it was purplish in colour made of his head almost too heavy a helmet to be supported by the slender column of his neck and his blunt-lipped, sensual mouth was also purplish in colour, as if he had been eating berries. Around his eyes, which were as hieratically brown and uncommunicative as those the Ancient Egyptians painted on their sarcophagi, were thick bands of solid gold cosmetic and the nails on his long hands were enamelled dark crimson, to match the nails on his similarly elegant feet, which were fully exposed by sandals consisting of mere gold thongs. He wore flared trousers of purple suede and used several ropes of pearls for a belt around his waist. All his gestures were instinct with a self-conscious but extraordinary reptilian liquidity; when we rose to go to eat, I saw that he seemed to move in soft coils. I think he was the most beautiful human being I have ever seen – considered, that is, solely as an object, a construction of flesh, skin, bone and fabric, and yet, for all his ambiguous sophistication, indeed, perhaps in its very nature, he hinted at a savagery which had been cunningly tailored to suit the drawing room, though it had been in no way diminished. He was a manicured leopard patently in complicity with chaos. Secure in the armour of his ambivalence, he patronized us. His manner was one of wry, supercilious reserve. He was no common agent. He behaved like an ambassador of an exceedingly powerful principality visiting a small but diplomatically by no means insignificant state. He treated us with the regal condescension of a first lady and the Minister and I found ourselves behaving like boorish provincials who dropped our forks, slopped our soup, knocked over our wine glasses and spilled mayonnaise on our ties while he watched us with faint amusement and barely discernible contempt.
In a gracious attempt to put us at our ease, he chatted desultorily about baroque music in a low, dark voice which had a singular, furry quality. But the Minister refused to talk small talk. He spooned his consommé distastefully, grunting now and then, his cold eyes fixed suspiciously on the luring siren before us who ate with an unfamiliar but graceful series of gestures of the hands, like those of Javanese dancers. I drank my soup and watched them. It was like the dialogue between a tentacular flower and a stone. A waiter took away the plates and brought us sole véronique. You would not have believed we were at war. The young man speared a grape with his fork. He folded up Vivaldi and his lesser-known contemporaries and put them away. As we dismembered our fish, the following conversation took place. I found the tape in a lead coffin in the ruins of the Bureau of Determination many years later, and so am able to transcribe it verbatim.
AMBASSADOR:
Dr Hoffman is coming to storm the ideological castle of which at present, my dear Minister, you are the king.
(
This was a minor preliminary sortie. He fluttered his darkened lashes at us and tinkled with diminutive laughter.
)
MINISTER:
He has made his intentions in that direction abundantly clear. As far as we can tell, he opened hostilities perhaps three years ago and by now there are no directions left in the city while the clocks no longer answer to the time.
AMBASSADOR:
Yes, indeed! The Doctor has liberated the streets from the tyranny of directions and now they can go anywhere they please. He also set the timepieces free so that now they are authentically pieces of time and can tell everybody whatever time they like. I am especially happy for the clocks. They used to have such innocent faces. They had the water-melon munching, opaquely-eyed visages of slaves and the Doctor has already proved himself a horological Abraham Lincoln. Now he will liberate you all, Minister.
MINISTER:
But ought the roads to rule the city?
AMBASSADOR:
Don’t you think we should give them a crack at the whip now and then? Poor things, forever oriented by the insensitive feet of those who trample them. Time and space have their own properties, Minister, and these, perhaps, have more value than you customarily allow them. Time and space are the very guts of nature and so, naturally, they undulate in the manner of intestines.
MINISTER:
I see you make a habit of analogies.
AMBASSADOR:
An analogy is a signpost.
MINISTER:
You have taken away all the signposts.
AMBASSADOR:
But we have populated the city with analogies.
MINISTER:
I should dearly like to know the reason why.
AMBASSADOR:
For the sake of liberty, Minister.
MINISTER:
What an exceedingly pretty notion!
AMBASSADOR:
I certainly did not think
that
answer would satisfy you. What if I told you that we were engaged in uncovering the infinite potentiality of phenomena?
MINISTER:
I would suggest you moved your operations to some other location.
(
The Ambassador smiled and dissected a translucent sliver of sole.
)
MINISTER:
I began to perceive a short while ago that the Doctor intended utterly to disrupt any vestige of the social fabric of my country of which he himself was once one of the finest intellectual ornaments.
AMBASSADOR:
You speak of him as if he were a piece of
famille rose
!
(
The Minister ignored this gentle reprimand.
)
MINISTER:
I can only conclude he is motivated purely by malice.
AMBASSADOR:
What, the mad scientist who brews up revengeful plagues in his test-tubes? Were his motives so simple, he would, by now, I assure you, have utterly destroyed everything.
(
The Minister pushed back his plate. I could see he was about to speak direct from the heart.
)
MINISTER:
Yesterday the cathedral dissolved in a display of fireworks. I suppose the childish delight many showed when they saw the rockets, the catherine wheels and the vari-coloured stars and meteors affected me most of all, for the cathedral had been a masterpiece of sobriety. It was given the most vulgar funeral pyre that could possibly have been devised. Yet it had brooded over the city like the most conventual of stone angels for two hundred years. Time, the slavish time you despise, had been free enough to work in equal partnership with the architect; the masons took thirty years to build the cathedral and, with every year that passed, the invisible moulding of time deepened the moving beauty of its soaring lines. Time was implicit in its fabric. I am not a religious man myself and yet the cathedral stood for me as a kind of symbol of the spirit of the city.
It was an artifice –
AMBASSADOR:
– and so we burned it down with
feux d’artifice
–
(
The Minister ignored him.
)
MINISTER:
– and its grandeur, increasing year by year as it grew more massively into time itself, had been programmed into it by the cunning of the architects. It was an illusion of the sublime and yet its symmetry expressed the symmetry of the society which had produced it. The city and, by extension, the state, is an artifice of a similar kind. A societal structure –
(
The Ambassador raised his beautiful eyebrows at these words and tapped his painted nail against his teeth as though in amused reproof of such jargon.
)
MINISTER:
(
intransigently
) A societal structure is the greatest of all the works of art that man can make. Like the greatest art, it is perfectly symmetric. It has the architectonic structure of music, a symmetry imposed upon it in order to resolve a play of tensions which would disrupt order but without which order is lifeless. In this serene and abstract harmony, everything moves with the solemnity of the absolutely predictable and –
(
Here the young man interrupted him impatiently.
)
AMBASSADOR:
Go in fear of abstractions!
(
Pettishly he consumed the last crumbs of fish and fell silent until the waiters had replaced the plates with, to my delight and astonishment,
tournedos Rossini.
The Ambassador brusquely dismissed an offering of
pommes allumettes.
When he spoke again, his voice had deepened in colour.
)
AMBASSADOR:
Our primary difference is a philosophical one, Minister. For us, the world exists only as a medium in which we execute our desires. Physically, the world itself, the actual world – the real world, if you like – is formed of malleable clay; its metaphysical structure is just as malleable.
MINISTER:
Metaphysics are no concern of mine.
(
The Ambassador’s hair abruptly emitted a fountain of blue lights and, suddenly Charlotte Corday, he pointed a dagger at the Minister.
)
AMBASSADOR:
Dr Hoffman will make metaphysics
your
business!
(
The Minister cut his meat phlegmatically.
)
MINISTER:
I do not think so.
(
The words fell from his mouth with so heavy a weight I was surprised they did not drop straight through the table. I was deeply impressed by his gravity. It quenched even the enthusiasm I had experienced at mining a black gem of truffle from my wedge of paté, for it was the first time I had experienced the power of an absolute negative. The Ambassador visibly responded to this change in tone. If he instantly ceased to look like an avenging angel, he also instantly became less epicene.
)
AMBASSADOR:
Please name your price. The Doctor would like to buy you.
MINISTER:
No.