PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

The Infernal Desire Machines of

Doctor Hoffman

Angela Carter was born in Eastbourne in 1940 and later

evacuated to live with her grandmother in Yorkshire. She
studied English at Bristol University and published the first
of her nine novels, Shadow Dance, in 1966. After escaping
an early marriage, she used the proceeds of a Somerset
Maugham Award to enable her to live in Japan for two years,
a transforming experience. Her final novel, Wise Children,
was published in 1991, a year before her death from lung
cancer at the age of fifty-one. In an obituary from the
Observer, Margaret Atwood wrote that ‘She was the
opposite of parochial … She relished life and language
hugely, and revelled in the universe.’
Perhaps best known for her last two novels, Nights at the
Circus and Wise Children, Carter was much admired for her
work’s exuberant mix of fantasy, philosophy, science fiction
and satire. The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman,
published in 1972, is, according to Ali Smith, ‘her real, still
underrated, classic’.
Both The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault and Heroes and
Villains are also published in Penguin Modern Classics
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in
Cambridge. She is the author of Free Love, Like, Hotel World,
Other Stories and Other Stories, The Whole Story and Other
Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy and The First Person
and Other Stories.
ANGELA CARTER
The Infernal Desire Machines of
Doctor Hoffman

With an introduction by ALI SMITH

PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASICS
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www.penguin.com
First published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis 1972
First published in the United States of America under the title The War of Dreams
by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973
Published in Penguin Books 1982
Reissued with a new introduction in Penguin Books 2010
Published in Penguin Classics 2011
Copyright © Angela Carter, 1972
Introduction copyright © Ali Smith, 2010
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author and introducer has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition
that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or
otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding
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ISBN: 978-0-14-139965-2
 Contents

Introduction by ALI SMITH

Dedication
Epigraphs
THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN

Introduction
1. The City Under Siege
2. The Mansion of Midnight
3. The River People
4. The Acrobats of Desire
5. The Erotic Traveller
6. The Coast of Africa
7. Lost in Nebulous Time
8. The Castle
 Introduction

‘Love is the synthesis of dream and actuality; love is the

only matrix of the unprecedented; love is the tree which
buds lovers like roses.’ From the intoxicating dream-roses
covering the warring city in its opening chapter – so
powerfully imagined that they seem to perspire perfume,
‘make the very masonry drunk’, even sing piercing
pentatonics heard by the inside of the nose – all the way to
the novel’s end and the bloodstained handkerchief that
blooms from its hero Desiderio’s pocket, The Infernal Desire
Machines of Doctor Hoffman was itself, in literary terms,
what might be called a matrix of the unprecedented.
It opens Proustianly: ‘I remember everything. Yes. I
remember everything perfectly.’ But then, just a couple of
pages on: ‘I cannot remember exactly how it began.’ Who
can we trust in this or any story, when memory is so human
and dream and actuality so inextricable? Our narrator is
Desiderio, an old man now, an ageing politician and
venerable historic figure, recalling his youth and the bygone
era of Doctor Hoffman, a scientist who, by means of mass
hallucination, can alter what reality looks like whenever he
chooses.
The Doctor resembles a god, ‘probably omnipotent’, and
has brought about a state of emergency in this unnamed
South American metropolis by playing sumptuously poetic
and insidious games with time and space: ‘I often glanced at
my watch only to find its hands had been replaced by a
healthy growth of ivy or honeysuckle.’ Such disruptive and
seductive power messes with trade and challenges state
control – anathema to the government of the city. A war of
extremes, between rationality and the imagination, is soon
raging, a war of power-envy too, between the Doctor and
the Minister, who, with their capitalized roles, rule this novel
like leftovers from Victorian socio-realism. But this is
another literary landscape altogether. The Minister enlists
Desiderio, half-Indian, half-outsider, a low-ranking civil
servant crucially unmoved, even ‘bored’, by the Doctor’s
baroque and beautiful illusions, a good candidate for
tracking the Doctor down. ‘It was the day before my twenty-
fourth birthday. In the afternoon, the Cathedral expired in a
blaze of melodious fireworks.’ Soon everything ex cathedra
in this novel is ablaze, and Desiderio, passionately in love
with Hoffman’s beautiful and elusive daughter, Albertina, is
on a veering picaresque journey that shifts and shimmers
like Albertina herself in a postponement of narrative and
sexual climax, through landscape after landscape, from
seedy British seaside to primitive tribal, to Sadeian, to
Swiftian, to Kafkaesque.
In a ‘bouquet of ferocious images of desire’, The Infernal
Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman declares itself a post-
war novel. It was Carter’s sixth novel, published in 1972.
Though she is renowned now for her rewritten fairy tales
and the winning characterizations of the winged trapeze-
artist and music-hall cockney-girl starlets in her two final
novels, Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children
(1991), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is
surely her real, still underrated, classic. This imagistically
cornucopic and virtuoso performance is a visionary book for
a virtual age.
It takes apart the ‘machines’ of love, of narrative, of social
structure, in a fusion (and simultaneous analysis) of fantasy,
fin-de-siècle richness, pastiche, sci-fi, thriller,
postmodernism, picaresque, quest literature, adventure
story, pornography and political and sociological theorizing.
It was an unforeseeable leap forward in terms of form, voice
and technique, even for Carter (whose novels tended to
redefine her originality each time she published a new one).
She had specialized in the medieval period at Bristol
University: ‘As a medievalist, I was trained to read books as
having many layers.’ But this is a work not so much layered
with as organically formed by a shimmering body of allusion
to the literary and visual arts. Try to pinpoint its influences
(Kafka, Swift, Poe, Mallarmé, Freud, the Bible, cinema, de
Sade, Shakespeare, Surrealism, Pope, Proust – and that’s
just a surface skim) and it’s as if its author has swallowed
literary and visual culture whole, from Chaucer to Calvino,
de Mille to Fassbinder, Defoe to Foucault.
Perhaps it was too far ahead of its time for critical
comfort: ‘Autobiographically, what happened next, when I
realised that there were no limitations to what one could do
in fiction, was… I stopped being able to make a living.’ It
was, she said, ‘the beginning of my obscurity. I went from
being a very promising young writer to being ignored.’ Her
first five novels had earned her several literary awards and
had gone out of their way to reveal the artifice of the
literary realism which characterized the 1960s literary
novel, outfacing kitchen-sinkism with gaudiness and
anarchy. In among the unwashed clothes and pubs and
parties, the shops and city streets and parks, Carter
unveiled megalomania, sexual mastery, a surreality of social
and sexual puppeteering. She saw this as no less realist.
‘I’ve got nothing against realism,’ she said. ‘But there is
realism and realism. I mean, the questions that I ask myself,
I think they are very much to do with reality.’ She wrote
Hoffman in Japan, where she’d gone in 1969 on the money
she’d won from a Somerset Maugham award, drafting the
novel ‘in three months, in a Japanese fishing village on an
island where she seems to have been the only European’, as
the critic Susan Rubin Suleiman notes in a seminal essay on
Hoffman and Surrealism. ‘Since I kept on trying to learn
Japanese, and kept on failing to do so, I started trying to
understand things by simply looking at them very, very
carefully, an involuntary apprenticeship in the interpretation
of signs.’ By all accounts, when she came back both her
fiction and her life had been transformed. ‘In Japan, I
learned what it is to be a woman and became radicalized.’
She wrote some of her most experimental short stories,
later published in her first short story collection, Fireworks
(1974), and published this novel, in which the roots of later
works like The Passion of New Eve (1977) and Nights at the
Circus can clearly be seen, but which arguably remains, on
its own terms, her most formally courageous work.
Its demonic Doctor Hoffman was one of the last and best
defeated of her recurring megalomaniac male authority
figures. By name he alludes to E. T. A. Hoffmann, the highly
influential nineteenth-century German Romantic writer
whose Tales of Hoffmann she parodies here in her own
version of the magician-father/beautiful-but-dangerous-
daughter matrix. (Perhaps Heinrich Hoffmann, the German
psychiatrist and poet who published the grotesque and
arresting collection of gothic morality poems for children,
Der Struwwelpeter (1845), is also somewhere in the mix.)
Doctor Hoffman’s daughter, the elusive and allusive
Albertina, is a cunning mirroring of Proust’s Albertine, the
object of desire in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, with a
very different Albertine, the eponymous heroine of the
Norwegian novel of 1886 by the artist and writer Christian
Krohg, the subject of which was prostitution and the realism
of which saw it impounded by the police.
But enough about allusion. ‘From The Magic Toyshop
onwards,’ as Carter told an interviewer in the mid-1980s,
‘I’ve tried to keep an entertaining surface to the novels, so
that you don’t have to read them as a system of
signification if you don’t want to.’ This rolling narrative
hooks its readers, in the best tradition of storytelling, by
means of a meld of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Each of
its chapters functions as its own seductive and terrifying
peep-show ‘desire machine’. Ever opening to something
new while simultaneously (and this is one of its technical
feats) repeating itself – in other words, treading new ground
over an age-old, echo-filled literary landscape – the novel is
very much about the business of entertainment, about what
it means to be both liberated and held, fixed in place, by it.
It dissects the cheapness and richness of fantasy, from high
art to low. Whether we’re in the city, or the land of myth, or
an American upper-class country house, or a wet and empty
backstreet British seaside resort, we’re just one step away,
if we look, from the surreal and the grotesque, and from the
same old stalwarts of story: attraction and terror and relief,
sex and death and survival.
A thesis on power, it returns repeatedly to images of eyes
and notions of vision while teasing apart the connections
between the nature of desire and the repeating deceptions,
expectations and satisfactions, over time, of what might be
called cultural media. It examines continuum and survival
alongside the incendiary creative/destructive powers of
passion. It is curious about all of these things, but
particularly about the connections between passion and
power, since this, as it demonstrates, is one of the
fundamental ways by which narrative propels itself, in an
alternation of boredom and attraction, promise and
postponement. What is pure in such a narrative ‘machine’,
and what is debauched? Carter always treats both purity
and debauchery wryly. One of the great achievements of
Hoffman is its liberating revelation of pornography as just
another genre. She would shortly publish her devastatingly
witty study of de Sade, The Sadeian Woman (1979). Here, in
Hoffman, (as, to some extent, in all her work), she is taking
issue with ‘ideational femaleness’, the ways in which she
perceives women to be the particular victims of social or
gender or power fantasies, reduced to ‘benign automata’,
‘sinister, abominable, inverted mutations, part clockwork,
part vegetable and part brute’, wearing masks of ‘hideous’
resignation – none of which resemble in any way the
brilliant, flashing unpindownability of Albertina herself.
But even for Albertina the land of myth means rape. In
The Sadeian Woman Carter would spell out exactly what she
thought of myth: ‘… all the mythic versions of women, from
the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the
healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and
consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth,
anyway.’ Here, although she gifts her male protagonist
throughout with his own crucial mutability (in a twinning
with his beloved), she also demythologizes the spangly
mirror-show of desire, putting him through some of the
painful objectification with which this novel is centrally
concerned. The violent gang rape he suffers at the hands of
the Acrobats of Desire begins with the power of the eyes ‘to
bind me in invisible bonds’.
Desiderio’s outsider status, the fact that he is part-Indian
(descended from a people so lowly in status that they
‘performed tasks for which you do not need a face’), is one
of the keys to his survival, his ability to stay fluid and
mutable when it comes to identity. But in the end he has
become a historic fixture, a statue-man, a bloodless old
politician. Carter, a committed socialist, believed the novel
had a moral function and that art was always political; this
book ends on a note of class war and in a kind of dual
triumph and defeat. But the real triumph of Hoffman is that
it was, and still is, a new kind of novel – the novel as
mutable form – a meld of genres which results in something
beyond genre; a hypnotic mixture of poetry, dilettantism
and morality; half-fiction, half-lecture and, above all, a thing
of beauty in itself (for, as Desiderio says at one point, gazing
at Albertina, ‘I did not mind her lecturing me because she
was so beautiful’). Its narrative and sexual postponement is
Scheherazade-like. It makes practical use of ‘the picaresque,
where people have adventures in order to find themselves
in places where they can discuss philosophical concepts
without distractions… it’s a very eighteenth-century pursuit
to make imaginary societies which teach one about our own
society,’ as Carter put it later. It leaves its readers
questioning and asks them to be wise – both to the
structures which work to categorize or limit who and what
we are, and to the ways and potentials of the imagination.
It is a book full of curiosity about what’s real, what’s
artifice, how we live, and what art can do. It is swooningly
romantic, indifferently and knowingly beautiful, rigorously
philosophical and cunning beyond belief. Its double act of
fidelity to and anatomizing of ‘the death-defying double
somersault of love’ makes it timeless. Right now, in the
emergence of the virtual age, the age she foresaw nearly
forty years ago in her ‘kingdom of the instantaneous’, The
Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman never looked
more relevant.
Ali Smith 2010
For the family, wherever they are, reluctantly including
Ivan who thought he was Alyosha.
 Les lois de nos désirs sont les dés sans loisir.
Robert Desnos

(Remember that we sometimes demand definitions for the sake not of the
content, but of their form. Our requirement is an architectural one: the definition
is a kind of ornamental coping that supports nothing.)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Imagine the perplexity of a man outside time and space, who has lost his watch,
his measuring rod and his tuning fork. Alfred Jarry, Exploits and Opinions of
Doctor Faustroll Pataphysician
 Introduction

I remember everything.
Yes.
I remember everything perfectly.
During the war, the city was full of mirages and I was
young. But, nowadays, everything is quite peaceful.
Shadows fall only as and when they are expected. Because I
am so old and famous, they have told me that I must write
down all my memories of the Great War, since, after all, I
remember everything. So I must gather together all that
confusion of experience and arrange it in order, just as it
happened, beginning at the beginning. I must unravel my
life as if it were so much knitting and pick out from that
tangle the single, original thread of my self, the self who
was a young man who happened to become a hero and then
grew old. First, let me introduce myself.
My name is Desiderio.
I lived in the city when our adversary, the diabolical Dr
Hoffman, filled it with mirages in order to drive us all mad.
Nothing in the city was what it seemed – nothing at all!
Because Dr Hoffman, you see, was waging a massive
campaign against human reason itself. Nothing less than
that. Oh, the stakes of the war were very high – higher than
ever I realized, for I was young and sardonic and did not
much like the notion of humanity, anyway, though they told
me later, when I became a hero, how I had saved mankind.
But, when I was a young man, I did not want to be a hero.
And, when I lived in that bewildering city, in the early days
of the war, life itself had become nothing but a complex
labyrinth and everything that could possibly exist, did so.
And so much complexity – a complexity so rich it can hardly
be expressed in language – all that complexity… it bored
me.
In those tumultuous and kinetic times, the time of
actualized desire, I myself had only the one desire. And that
was, for everything to stop.
I became a hero only because I survived. I survived
because I could not surrender to the flux of mirages. I could
not merge and blend with them; I could not abnegate my
reality and lose myself for ever as others did, blasted to
non-being by the ferocious artillery of unreason. I was too
sardonic. I was too disaffected.
When I was young, I very much admired the Ancient
Egyptians, because they searched for, arrived at and
perfected an aesthetically entirely satisfactory pose. When
every single one of them had perfected the stance which
had been universally approved, profiles one way, torsos
another, feet marching away from the observer, navel
squarely staring him in the eye, they stayed in it for two
thousand years. I was the confidential secretary to the
Minister of Determination, who wanted to freeze the entire
freak show the city had become back into attitudes of
perfect propriety; and I had this in common with him – an
admiration for statis. But, unlike the Minister, I did not
believe statis was attainable. I believed perfection was, per
se, impossible and so the most seductive phantoms could
not allure me because I knew they were not true. Although,
of course, nothing I saw was identical with itself any more. I
saw only reflections in broken mirrors. Which was only
natural, because all the mirrors had been broken.
The Minister sent the Determination Police round to break
all the mirrors because of the lawless images they were
disseminating. Since mirrors offer alternatives, the mirrors
had all turned into fissures or crannies in the hitherto hard-
edged world of here and now and through these fissures
came slithering sideways all manner of amorphous spooks.
And these spooks were Dr Hoffman’s guerrillas, his soldiers
in disguise who, though absolutely unreal, nevertheless,
were.
We did our best to keep what was outside, out, and what
was inside, in; we built a vast wall of barbed wire round the
city, to quarantine the unreality, but soon the wall was stuck
all over with the decomposing corpses of those who, when
they were refused exit permits by the over-scrupulous
Determination Police, proved how real they were by dying
on the spikes. But, if the city was in a state of siege, the
enemy was inside the barricades, and lived in the minds of
each of us.
But I survived it because I knew that some things were
necessarily impossible. I did not believe it when I saw the
ghost of my dead mother clutching her rosary and
whimpering into the folds of the winding sheet issued her by
the convent where she died attempting to atone for her
sins. I did not believe it when Dr Hoffman’s agents playfully
substituted other names than Desiderio on the nameplate
outside my door – names such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
and Andrew Marvell, for they always chose the names of my
heroes, who were all men of pristine and exquisite genius.
And I knew that they must be joking for anyone could see
that I myself was a man like an unmade bed. But, as for my
Minister, he was Milton or Lenin, Beethoven or Michelangelo
– not a man but a theorem, clear, hard, unified and
harmonious. I admired him. He reminded me of a string
quartet. And he, too, was quite immune to the tinselled fall-
out from the Hoffman effect, though for quite other reasons
than I.
And I, why was I immune? Because, out of my discontent,
I made my own definitions and these definitions happened
to correspond to those that happened to be true. And so I
made a journey through space and time, up a river, across a
mountain, over the sea, through a forest. Until I came to a
certain castle. And…
But I must not run ahead of myself. I shall describe the
war exactly as it happened. I will begin at the beginning and
go on until the end. I must write down all my memories, in
spite of the almost insupportable pain I suffer when I think
of her, the heroine of my story, the daughter of the
magician, the inexpressible woman to whose memory I
dedicate these pages… the miraculous Albertina.
If I believed there were anything of the transcendental in
this scabbed husk which might survive the death I know will
come to me in a few months, I should be happy, then, for I
could delude myself I would rejoin my lover. And if Albertina
has become for me, now, such a woman as only memory
and imagination could devise, well, such is always at least
partially the case with the beloved. I see her as a series of
marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of
desire. Oh, she was her father’s daughter, no doubt about
that! So I must consecrate this account of the war against
her father to the memory of the daughter.
She closed those eyes that were to me the inexhaustible
well-springs of passion fifty years ago this very day and so I
take up my pen on the golden anniversary of her death, as I
always intended to do. After all these years, the clothes of
my spirit are in tatters and half of them have been blown
away by the winds of fortune that made a politician of me.
And, sometimes, when I think of my journey, not only does
everything seem to have happened all at once, in a kind of
fugue of experience, just as her father would have devised
it, but everything in my life seems to have been of equal
value, so that the rose which shook off its petals as if
shuddering in ecstasy to hear her voice throws as long a
shadow of significance as the extraordinary words she
uttered.
Which is not quite like saying that my memory has all
dissolved in the medium of Albertina. Rather, from beyond
the grave, her father has gained a tactical victory over me
and forced on me at least the apprehension of an alternate
world in which all the objects are emanations of a single
desire. And my desire is, to see Albertina again before I die.
But, at the game of metaphysical chess we played, I took
away her father’s queen and mated us both for though I am
utterly consumed with this desire, it is as impotent as it is
desperate. My desire can never be objectified and who
should know better than I?
For it was I who killed her.
But you must not expect a love story or a murder story.
Expect a tale of picaresque adventure or even of heroic
adventure, for I was a great hero in my time though now I
am an old man and no longer the ‘I’ of my own story and my
time is past, even if you can read about me in the history
books – a strange thing to happen to a man in his own
lifetime. It turns one into posterity’s prostitute. And when I
have completed my autobiography, my whoredom will be
complete. I will stand forever four square in yesterday’s
time, like a commemorative statue of myself in a public
place, serene, equestrian, upon a pediment. Although I am
so old and sad, now, and, without her, condemned to live in
a drab, colourless world, as though I were living in a faded
daguerreotype. Therefore –
I, Desiderio, dedicate all my memories
to
Albertina Hoffman
with my insatiable tears.
 1 The City Under Siege

I cannot remember exactly how it began. Nobody, not even

the Minister, could remember. But I know it started well after
my abysmal childhood was mercifully over. The nuns who
buried my mother fixed me up with a safe berth; I was a
minor clerk in a government office. I rented a room with a
bed and a table, a chair and a gas ring, a cupboard and a
coffee pot. My landlady was still comparatively young and
extremely accommodating. I was always a little bored yet
perfectly content. But I think I must have been one of the
first people in the city to notice how the shadows began to
fall subtly awry and a curious sense of strangeness invaded
everything. I had, you see, the time to see. And the Doctor
started his activities in very small ways. Sugar tasted a little
salty, sometimes. A door one had always seen to be blue
modulated by scarcely perceptible stages until, suddenly, it
was a green door.
But if remarkable fruits, such as pineapples with the
colour and texture of strawberries or walnuts which tasted
of caramel, appeared among the apples and oranges on the
stalls in the market, everyone put it down to our increased
imports, for business had boomed since the man who later
became the Minister of Determination took over the post of
Minister of Trade. He was always the model of efficiency. I
used to put away the files in the Board of Trade. After that, I
used to help the Minister with his crossword puzzles and this
mutual pastime bred a spurious intimacy which made my
promotion parallel his own. He admired the indifferent speed
with which I led him up and down the tricksy checkerboard
of black and white and I do not think he ever realized the
speed was bred only of indifference.
How was the city before it changed? It seemed it would
never change.
It was a solid, drab, yet not unfriendly city. It throve on
business. It was prosperous. It was thickly, obtusely
masculine. Some cities are women and must be loved;
others are men and can only be admired or bargained with
and my city settled serge-clad buttocks at vulgar ease as if
in a leather armchair. His pockets were stuffed with money
and his belly with rich food. Historically, he had taken a
circuitous path to arrive at such smug, impenetrable,
bourgeois affluence; he started life a slaver, a pimp, a gun-
runner, a murderer and a pirate, a rakish villain, the exiled
scum of Europe – and look at him lording it! The city was
built on a tidal river and the slums and the area around the
docks still pullulated with blacks, browns and Orientals who
lived in a picturesque squalor the city fathers in their
veranda’d suburbs contrived to ignore. Yet the city, now,
was rich, even if it was ugly; but it was just a little nervous,
all the same. It hardly ever dared peer over its well-
upholstered shoulder in case it glimpsed the yellow
mountains louring far towards the north, atavistic reminders
of the interior of a continent which inspired a wordless fear
in those who had come here so lately. The word ‘indigenous’
was unmentionable. Yet some of the buildings, dating from
the colonial period, were impressive – the Cathedral; the
Opera House; stone memorials of a past to which few, if
any, of us had contributed though, since I was of Indian
extraction, I suffered the ironic knowledge that my
forefathers had anointed the foundations of the state with a
good deal of their blood.
I was of Indian extraction. Yes. My mother came from
feckless, middle-European immigrant stock and her
business, which was prostitution of the least exalted type,
took her to the slums a good deal. I do not know who my
father was but I carried his genetic imprint on my face,
although my colleagues always contrived politely to ignore it
since the white, pious nuns had vouched for me. Yet I was a
very disaffected young man for I was not unaware of my
disinheritance.
When I had enough money, I would go to the Opera House
for the inhuman stylization of opera naturally appealed to
me very much. I was especially fond of The Magic Flute.
During a certain performance of The Magic Flute one
evening in the month of May, as I sat in the gallery enduring
the divine illusion of perfection which Mozart imposed on me
and which I poisoned for myself since I could not forget it
was false, a curious, greenish glitter in the stalls below me
caught my eye. I leaned forward. Papageno struck his bells
and, at that very moment, as if the bells caused it, I saw the
auditorium was full of peacocks in full spread who very soon
began to scream in intolerably raucous voices, utterly
drowning the music so that I instantly became bored and
irritated. Boredom was my first reaction to incipient
delirium. Glancing round me, I saw that everyone in the
gallery was wearing a peacock-green skull cap and behind
each spectator stirred an incandescent, feathered fan. I am
still not sure why I did not instantly clap my hand to my own
arse to find out whether I, too, had become so bedecked –
perhaps I knew the limitations of my sensibility positively
forbade such a thing might happen to me, since I admired
the formal beauty of peacocks very much. All around me
were the beginnings of considerable panic; the peacocks
shrieked and fluttered like distracted rainbows and soon
they let down the safety curtain, as the performance could
not continue under the circumstances. It was Dr Hoffman’s
first disruptive coup. So I went home, disgruntled, balked of
my Mozart, and, the next morning the barrage began in
earnest.
We did not understand the means by which the Doctor
modified the nature of reality until very much later. We were
taken entirely by surprise and chaos supervened
immediately. Hallucinations flowed with magical speed in
every brain. A state of emergency was declared. A special
meeting of the cabinet took place in a small boat upon so
stormy a sea that most of the ministers vomited throughout
the proceedings and the Chancellor of the Exchequer was
washed overboard. My Minister dared walk on the water and
retrieved his senior dryshod since there was, in fact, not one
drop of water there; after that, the cabinet gave him full
authority to cope with the situation and soon he virtually
ruled the city single-handed.
Now, what Dr Hoffman had done, in the first instance, was
this. Consider the nature of a city. It is a vast repository of
time, the discarded times of all the men and women who
have lived, worked, dreamed and died in the streets which
grow like a wilfully organic thing, unfurl like the petals of a
mired rose and yet lack evanescence so entirely that they
preserve the past in haphazard layers, so this alley is old
while the avenue that runs beside it is newly built but
nevertheless has been built over the deep-down, dead-in-
the-ground relics of the older, perhaps the original, huddle
of alleys which germinated the entire quarter. Dr Hoffman’s
gigantic generators sent out a series of seismic vibrations
which made great cracks in the hitherto immutable surface
of the time and space equation we had informally
formulated in order to realize our city and, out of these
cracks, well – nobody knew what would come next.
A kind of orgiastic panic seized the city. Those bluff,
complaisant avenues and piazzas were suddenly as fertile in
metamorphoses as a magic forest. Whether the apparitions
were shades of the dead, synthetic reconstructions of the
living or in no way replicas of anything we knew, they
inhabited the same dimension as the living for Dr Hoffman
had enormously extended the limits of this dimension. The
very stones were mouths which spoke. I myself decided the
revenants were objects – perhaps personified ideas – which
could think but did not exist. This seemed the only
hypothesis which might explain my own case for I
acknowledged them – I saw them; they screamed and
whickered at me – and yet I did not believe in them.
This phantasmagoric redefinition of a city was constantly
fluctuating for it was now the kingdom of the instantaneous.
Cloud palaces erected themselves then silently toppled to
reveal for a moment the familiar warehouse beneath them
until they were replaced by some fresh audacity. A group of
chanting pillars exploded in the middle of a mantra and lo!
they were once again street lamps until, with night, they
changed to silent flowers. Giant heads in the helmets of
conquistadors sailed up like sad, painted kites over the
giggling chimney pots. Hardly anything remained the same
for more than one second and the city was no longer the
conscious production of humanity; it had become the
arbitrary realm of dream.
The boulevards susurrated with mendicants who wore
long, loose, patchwork coats, strings of beads and ragged
turbans; they carried staffs decorated with bunches of
variegated ribbons. They claimed to be refugees from the
mountains and now all they could do to make a living was to
sell to the credulous charms and talismans against domestic
spectres who turned the milk sour or lurked in fireplaces
eating up the flames so the fires would not light. But the
beggars possessed only the most dubious reality status and
at any moment might be caught in the blasts of radar
emanating from the Ministry of Determination, when they
would vanish with a faint squeak, leaving some citizen with
his proffered pennies still clutched in his hand, gazing at
empty air. Sometimes the talismans they sold vanished with
them even though they had already been stowed away in
the household shrines of their purchasers; and sometimes
not.
The question of the nature of the talismans was one of
both profane and profound surmise, for in some instances
the spectral salesmen must have carved their crude icons
out of solid wood which did not have the faculty of vanishing
but, if so, how could a knife of shadows cut real flesh from a
living tree? Clearly the phantoms were capable of inflicting
significant form on natural substances. The superstitious
fear of the citizens rose to a pitch of feverish delirium and
they often raised hue and cries against any unfortunate
whose appearance smacked in some way of transparency or
else who seemed suspiciously too real. The suspects were
often torn to pieces. I remember a riot which began when a
man snatched a baby from a perambulator and dashed it to
the ground because he complained that its smile was ‘too
lifelike’.
By the end of the first year there was no longer any way
of guessing what one would see when one opened one’s
eyes in the morning for other people’s dreams insidiously
invaded the bedroom while one slept and yet it seemed that
sleep was our last privacy for, while we slept, at least we
knew that we were dreaming although the stuff of our
waking hours, so buffeted by phantoms, had grown thin and
insubstantial enough to seem itself no more than seeming,
or else the fragile marginalia of our dreams. Sheeted teasing
memories of the past waited to greet us at the foot of the
bed and these were often memories of someone else’s past,
even if they still wished us ‘Good morning’ with an
unnerving familiarity when we opened our enchanted eyes.
Dead children came calling in nightgowns, rubbing the sleep
and grave dust from their eyes. Not only the dead returned
but also the lost living. Abandoned lovers were often lured
into the false embrace of faithless mistresses and this
caused the Minister the gravest concern for he feared that
one day a man would impregnate an illusion and then a
generation of half-breed ghosts would befoul the city even
more. But as I often felt I was a half-breed ghost myself, I
did not feel much concerned over that! Anyway, the great
majority of the things which appeared around us were by no
means familiar, though they often teasingly recalled aspects
of past experience, as if they were memories of forgotten
memories.
The sense of space was powerfully affected so that
sometimes the proportions of buildings and townscapes
swelled to enormous, ominous sizes or repeated themselves
over and over again in a fretting infinity. But this was much
less disturbing than the actual objects which filled these
gigantesque perspectives. Often, in the vaulted architraves
of railway stations, women in states of pearly, heroic nudity,
their hair elaborately coiffed in the stately chignons of the
fin de siècle, might be seen parading beneath their parasols
as serenely as if they had been in the Bois de Boulogne,
pausing now and then to stroke, with the judiciously
appraising touch of owners of race-horses, the side of
steaming engines which did not run any more. And the very
birds of the air seemed possessed by devils. Some grew to
the size and acquired the temperament of winged jaguars.
Fanged sparrows plucked out the eyes of little children.
Snarling flocks of starlings swooped down upon some
starving wretch picking over a mess of dreams and refuse in
a gutter and tore what remained of his flesh from his bones.
The pigeons lolloped from illusory pediment to window-
ledge like volatile, feathered madmen, chattering vile
rhymes and laughing in hoarse, throaty voices, or perched
upon chimney stacks shouting quotations from Hegel. But
often, in actual mid-air, the birds would forget the
techniques and mechanics of the very act of flight and then
they fell down, so that every morning dead birds lay in drifts
on the pavements like autumn leaves or brown, wind-blown
snow. Sometimes the river ran backwards and crazy fish
jumped out to flop upon the sidewalks and wriggle around
on their bellies for a while until they died, choking for lack of
water. It was, too, the heyday of trompe l’œil for painted
forms took advantage of the liveliness they mimicked.
Horses from the pictures of Stubbs in the Municipal Art
Gallery neighed, tossed their manes and stepped delicately
off their canvases to go to crop the grass in public parks. A
plump Bacchus wearing only a few grapes strayed from a
Titian into a bar and there instituted Dionysiac revelry.
But only a few of the transmutations were lyrical.
Frequently, imaginary massacres filled the gutters with
blood and, besides, the cumulative psychological effect of
all these distortions, combined with the dislocation of
everyday life and the hardship and privations we began to
suffer, created a deep-seated anxiety and a sense of
profound melancholy. It seemed each one of us was trapped
in some downward-drooping convoluted spiral of unreality
from which we could never escape. Many committed
suicide.
Trade was at an end. All the factories closed down and
there was wholesale unemployment. There was always the
smell of dissolution in the air for the public services were
utterly disorganized. Typhoid took a heavy toll and there
were grim murmurs of cholera or worse. The only form of
transport the Minister permitted in the city was the bicycle,
since it can only be ridden by that constant effort of will
which precludes the imagination. The Determination Police
enforced a strict system of rationing in an attempt to eke
out the city’s dwindling supplies of food as long as possible
but the citizens lied freely about their needs and those of
their dependants, broke into shops to steal and gleefully
submitted to the authorities the forged bread tickets with
which Dr Hoffman flooded the streets. After the Minister
sealed off the city, our only news of the country outside the
capital came from the terse, laconic reports of the
Determination Police and the gossip of the few peasants
who had the necessary credentials to pass the guards at the
checkpoints with a basket or two of vegetables or some
coops of chickens.
Dr Hoffman had destroyed time and played games with
the objects by which we regulated time. I often glanced at
my watch only to find its hands had been replaced by a
healthy growth of ivy or honey-suckle which, while I looked,
writhed impudently all over its face, concealing it. Tricks
with watches and clocks were pet devices of his, for so he
rubbed home to us how we no longer held a structure of
time in common. Inside the twin divisions of light and
darkness there was no more segmentation, for what clocks
were left all told a different time and nobody trusted them
anyway. Past time occupied the city for whole days together,
sometimes, so that the streets of a hundred years before
were superimposed on nowadays streets and I made my
way to the Bureau only by memory, along never-before-
trodden lanes that looked as indestructible as earth itself
and yet would vanish, presumably, whenever someone in Dr
Hoffman’s entourage grew bored and pressed a switch.
Statistics for burglary, arson, robbery with violence and
rape rose to astronomical heights and it was not safe, either
physically or metaphysically, to leave one’s room at night
although one was not particularly safe if one stayed at home
either. There had been two cases of suspected plague. By
the beginning of the second year we received no news at all
from the world outside for Dr Hoffman blocked all the radio
waves. Slowly the city acquired a majestic solitude. There
grew in it, or it grew into, a desolate beauty, the beauty of
the hopeless, a beauty which caught the heart and made
the tears come. One would never have believed it possible
for this city to be beautiful.
At certain times, especially in the evenings, as the
shadows lengthened, the ripe sunlight of the day’s ending
fell with a peculiar, suggestive heaviness, trapping the
swooning buildings in a sweet, solid calm, as if preserving
them in honey. Aurified by the Midas rays of the setting sun,
the sky took on the appearance of a thin sheet of beaten
gold like the ground of certain ancient paintings so the
monolithically misshapen, depthless forms of the city took
on the enhanced glamour of the totally artificial. Then, we –
that is, those of us who retained some notion of what was
real and what was not – felt the vertigo of those teetering on
the edge of a magic precipice. We found ourselves holding
our breath almost in expectancy, as though we might stand
on the threshold of a great event, transfixed in the
portentous moment of waiting, although inwardly we were
perturbed since this new, awesome, orchestration of time
and space which surrounded us might be only the overture
to something else, to some most profoundly audacious of all
these assaults against the things we had always known. The
Minister was the only person I knew who claimed he did not,
even once, experience this sense of immanence.
The Minister had never in all his life felt the slightest
quiver of empirical uncertainty. He was the hardest thing
that ever existed and never the flicker of a mirage distorted
for so much as a fleeting second the austere and
intransigent objectivity of his face even though, as I saw it,
his work consisted essentially in setting a limit to thought,
for Dr Hoffman appeared to me to be proliferating his
weaponry of images along the obscure and controversial
borderline between the thinkable and the unthinkable.
‘Very well,’ said the Minister. ‘The Doctor has invented a
virus which causes a cancer of the mind, so that the cells of
the imagination run wild. And we must – we will! – discover
the antidote.’
But he still had no idea how the Doctor had done it
although it was clear that day by day he was growing better
at it. So the Minister, who had not one shred of superstition
in him, was forced to become an exorcist for all he could do
was to try to scare the spooks off the bedevilled streets and
although he had a battery of technological devices to help
him, in the last resort he was reduced to the methods of the
medieval witch-hunter. I rarely had the stomach to pass
Reality Testing Laboratory C for the smell of roast pork
nauseated me and I wondered if the Minister, out of
desperation, intended to rewrite the Cartesian cogito thus: ‘I
am in pain, therefore I exist,’ and base his tests upon it for,
in cases of stubborn and extreme confusion, they operated
a trial by fire. If it emerged alive from the incineration room,
it was obviously unreal and, if he had been reduced to a
handful of ash, he had been authentic. By the end of the
second year, most other expedients – the radar and so on –
were proving fallible, anyway. The Determination Police
claimed the Incineration Room had carbonized a number of
Hoffman’s agents but, as for myself, I was suspicious of the
Determination Police for their ankle-length, truculently
belted coats of black leather, their low-crowned, wide-
brimmed fedoras and their altogether too highly polished
boots woke in me an uncomfortable progression of
associations. They looked as if they had been recruited
wholesale from a Jewish nightmare.
In the early days of the war the first counter-weapon we
devised was the Determining Radar Apparatus, which was
both offensive and defensive as it incorporated a laser effect
in its beam. The Determining Radar Apparatus worked on
the theory that non-solid substance which could, however,
be recognized by the senses had a molecular structure
which bristled with projections. The model of the unreality
atom in the Minister’s office consisted of a tetrahydron
improvised out of a number of hairbrushes. The radar
beams were supposed to bruise themselves on this bed of
thorns and certainly let out an inaudible shriek instantly
visible on the screens at H.Q. This shriek automatically
triggered the laser and at once annihilated the offending
non-substance. For a time, during the last half of the first
year, the Minister wore a faint smile for daily we
disintegrated whole battalions of eldritch guerrillas but the
Doctor’s research laboratories must have swiftly
restructured their own prototype molecule for, by Christmas
time, the screens at H.Q. were gradually falling silent, letting
out only a few very occasional squeaks when a beam
accidentally brushed the teeth of what was now patently an
obsolete illusion probably only used as a decoy – such
things, for example, as a man whose hat had become his
head; while more and more outrageous spectacles danced
and shouted in a city only intermittently recognizable. The
Minister’s smile died. Our physicists, all of whom had a
three-star reality rating and the patience of Job, finally
turned out a new hypothetical model for this modification of
the unreality atom. It was a sphere of looking glass, like a
reflective tear, and the leader of the team, Dr Drosselmeier,
explained to the Minister and myself how the molecules
must fit together like a coalescence of raindrops.
At this point, Dr Drosselmeier went mad. He did so without
warning but most melodramatically. He blew up the physics
laboratory, the records which contained the sum total of his
researches, four of his assistants and himself. I do not think
his breakdown was caused by some obscure machination of
the Doctor, even though I was beginning to feel the Doctor
was probably omnipotent; I suspect Drosselmeier had
unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality and it
had destroyed his reason. However, this disaster left us
utterly defenceless and the Minister was forced to rely more
and more on the primitive and increasingly brutal methods
of the Determination Police while he himself supervised
work on a project he believed would finally save us from the
Doctor. When he spoke of this project, a guarded but
Messianic gleam crept into his usually cool and sceptical
eyes.
He was in the process of constructing an immense
computer centre which would formulate a systematic
procedure for calculating the verifiable self-consistency of
any given object. He believed the criterion of reality was
that a thing was determinate and the identity of a thing lay
only in the extent to which it resembled itself. He was the
most ascetic of logicians but, if he had a fatal flaw, it was his
touch of scholasticism. He believed that the city – which he
took as a microcosm of the universe – contained a finite set
of objects and a finite set of their combinations and
therefore a list could be made of all possible distinct forms
which were logically viable. These could be counted,
organized into a conceptual framework and so form a kind
of check list for the verification of all phenomena, instantly
available by means of an information retrieval system. So he
was engaged in the almost superhuman task of
programming computers with factual data concerning every
single thing which, as far as it was humanly possible to
judge, had ever – even if only once and that momentarily –
existed. Thus the existence of any object at all, however
bizarre it might at first appear, could first be checked
against the entire history of the world and then be given a
possibility rating. Once a thing was registered as ‘possible’,
however, there followed the infinitely more complex
procedure designed to discover if it were probable.
Sometimes he talked to me about politics. His political
philosophy had the non-dynamic magnificence of
contrapuntal, pre-classical music; he described to me a
grooved, interlocking set of institutions governed by the
notion of a great propriety. He called it his theory of ‘names
and functions’. Each man was secure in possession of a
certain name which also ensured him a certain position in a
society seen as a series of interlinking rings which, although
continually in movement, were never subjected to change
for there were never any disturbances and no usurpation of
names or ranks or roles whatsoever. And the city circled in
this utterly harmonious fashion with the radiant serenity of a
place in which everything was inevitable for, as soon as the
death of a ruler completed one movement in this celestial
concerto, the inauguration of another ruler signalled the
start of another movement precisely similar in form. The
Minister had a singular passion for Bach. He thought that
Mozart was frivolous. He was as sombre and sedate as a
mandarin.
But although he was the most rational man in the world,
he was only a witch-doctor in the present state of things,
even if the spooks he was pledged to eradicate were not
real spooks but phenomena perpetrated by a man who was
probably the greatest physicist of all time. Yet, essentially, it
was a battle between an encyclopedist and a poet for
Hoffman, scientist as he was, utilized his formidable
knowledge only to render the invisible visible, even though
it certainly seemed to us that his ultimate plan was to rule
the world.
The Minister spent night after night among his computers.
His face grew grey and drawn with overwork and his fine
hands shook with fatigue and yet he remained indefatigable.
But it seemed to me that he sought to cast the arbitrarily
fine mesh of his predetermined net over nothing but a sea
of mirages for he refused to acknowledge how palpable the
phantoms were, how they could be seen and touched,
kissed and eaten, penetrated and picked in bunches, to be
arranged in a vase. The variegated raree-show which now
surrounded us was as complicated as a real man himself,
walking, but the Minister saw the entire spectacle as a
corrugated surface of various greys, the colourless corpse of
itself. Yet this limitation of his imagination gave him the
capacity to see the city as an existential crossword puzzle
which might one day be solved. I passed the days beside
him, making innumerable pots of the tea he drank black,
with neither lemon nor sugar, emptying his brimming
ashtrays and changing the records of Bach and the pre-
classicals he played softly all the time to aid his
concentration. I was at the hub of things but still I was
indifferent. My mother came to see me; my name fluctuated
on my nameplate; my dreams were so amazing that, in spite
of myself, I had become awe-struck at the approach of
sleep. And yet I could summon up no interest in all this.
 I felt as if I was watching a film in which the Minister was
the hero and the unseen Doctor certainly the villain; but it
was an endless film and I found it boring for none of the
characters engaged my sympathy, even if I admired them,
and all the situations appeared the false engineering of an
inefficient phantasist. But I had one curious, persistent
hallucination which obscurely troubled me because nothing
about it was familiar and, each time I saw her, she never
changed. Every night as I lay on the borders of a sleep
which had now become as aesthetically exhausting as
Wagner, I would be visited by a young woman in a négligé
made of a fabric the colour and texture of the petals of
poppies which clung about her but did not conceal her quite
transparent flesh, so that the exquisite filigree of her
skeleton was revealed quite clearly. Where her heart should
have been there flickered a knot of flames like ribbons and
she shimmered a little, like the air on a very hot summer’s
day. She did not speak; she did not smile. Except for those
faint quiverings of her unimaginable substance, she did not
move. But she never failed to visit me. Now I know that the
manifestations of those days were – as perhaps I then
suspected but refused to admit to myself – a language of
signs which utterly bemused me because I could not read
them. Each phantom was a symbol palpitating with
appalling significance yet she alone, my visitor with flesh of
glass, hinted to me a little of the nature of the mysteries
which encompassed us and filled so many of us with terror.
She stayed beside me until I slept, waveringly, brilliantly,
hooded in diaphanous scarlet, and occasionally she left an
imperative written in lipstick on my dusty windowpane. BE
AMOROUS! she exhorted one night and, another night, BE
MYSTERIOUS! Some nights later, she scribbled: DON’T
THINK, LOOK; and, shortly after that, she warned me: WHEN
YOU BEGIN TO THINK, YOU LOSE THE POINT. These
messages irritated yet haunted me. They itched away all
day inside my head like a speck of dust trapped beneath my
eyelids. She was qualitatively different from the comic
apparition purporting to be my mother who perched on the
mantel-piece in the guise of a fat, white owl begging my
forgiveness and hooting her orisons. This visible skeleton,
this miraculous bouquet of bone, the formal elements of
physicality, was one of the third order of forms who might
presently invade us, the order of angels, speaking lions and
winged horses, the miraculous revenants for whom the city
sometimes seemed hushed in expectation and who
themselves would only be the amazing heralds of the arrival
of the Emperor of the Marvellous, whose creatures we would
by that time have all become.
We knew the name of our adversary. We knew the date at
which he graduated in physics with honours from the
national university. We knew his father had been a
gentleman banker who dabbled a little in the occult and his
mother a lady who liked to organize soup kitchens in the
slums and sewing schools for repentant prostitutes. We
even discovered, to the Minister’s tactful embarrassment,
that my own mother, during one of her atoning fits, had
stitched for me at one of Mrs Hoffman’s schools a
pathetically disintegrating flannel under-garment which I
wore for a day before the seams unravelled altogether, an
appropriate symbol for my mother’s repentance. I suppose
this coincidence gave me a certain tenuous sense of
involvement with the Hoffman family – as if, one rainy
afternoon, I had talked with an aunt of his briefly about the
weather, on a stopping, country train. We knew the very
date, 18 September 1867, on which Dr Hoffman’s great-
grandfather arrived in this country, a minor aristocrat of
slender means fleeing from unmentionable troubles in a
certain wolf-haunted mountainous Slavonic principality
which was subsequently rendered into legislative non-being
during the Franco–Prussian war or some such war. We knew
that, when his son was born, the father cast his horoscope
and then gave the midwife who had delivered him a tip of
several thousand dollars. We knew the boy Hoffman had
been involved in a homosexual scandal at his preparatory
school and we even knew how much it had cost to hush the
scandal up. The Minister devoted an entire bank of
computers to data on Dr Hoffman. We even tabulated his
childhood illnesses and the Minister found especially
significant an attack of brain fever in his seventh year and a
crise de nerfs in his sixteenth.
However, one day some twenty years previously, Dr
Hoffman, the already enormously distinguished Professor of
Physics at the University of P., dismissed with a few kind
words and a handsome present the valet who looked after
him; made a bonfire of his notebooks; packed in a valise a
toothbrush, a change of shirts and underwear and the
choicest of his father’s library of cabbalistic books; took a
taxi to the central railway station; bought a single ticket to
the mountain resort of L.; went to the correct platform,
where he purchased a pack of imported cigarettes and a net
of tangerines from the kiosk; was observed by a porter to
peel and consume a fruit; was seen by another porter to
enter the gentlemen’s lavatory; and then vanished. He
vanished so expeditiously there were even obituaries in the
press.
In the years preceding the Reality War, an itinerant
showman who gave his name as Mendoza made a small
living touring country fairs and carnivals with a small
theatre. This theatre did not have any actors; it was a peep-
show cum cinematograph but it offered moving views in
three dimensions and those who visited it were impressed
by the lifelikeness of what they saw. Mendoza prospered. In
time he came to the Whitsun Fair in the capital with his
theatre, but by this time his art had progressed and now he
offered a trip in a time machine. Customers were invited to
take off their clothes and don all manner of period costumes
provided for them by the impresario. When they were
suitably garbed, the lights dimmed and Mendoza projected
upon a screen various old newsreels and an occasional early
silent comedy. These films had, as it were, slots in them in
which the members of the audience could insert themselves
and so become part of the shadow show they witnessed. I
spoke with a man who, as a child, had been in this fashion
an eye-witness of the assassination at Sarajevo. He said it
had been raining heavily at the time and everybody moved
with the spasmodic jerkiness of clockwork figures. This
showman, Mendoza, must have been one of Dr Hoffman’s
first disciples or even perhaps an early missionary.
Hoffman’s undergraduate class list included a fellow student
named Mendoza, said to be psychologically unstable, who
did not complete his course of study. But one day a drunken
crowd burned down his booth and Mendoza was burned with
it, so badly that he died a few days later in some
anonymous charity ward, attended by Sisters of Mercy. What
linked him unambiguously to Hoffman had been his
repeated mutterings: ‘Beware the Hoffman effect!’ On his
board-hard death bed, under a casque of lint, he muttered
away, an elderly nun remembered. But now Mendoza was
irretrievably dead and the Minister wondered if he were not
a red herring.
The Minister had built up a hypothetical model of the
invisible Dr Hoffman much as Dr Drosselmeier had built up a
model of the unreality atom. From the scientist’s academic
record, we could see there was scarcely a branch of human
knowledge with which he had not familiarized himself. We
knew of his taste for the occult. We knew his height, his size
in hats, shoes and gloves; his favourite brands of cigars, eau
de cologne and tea. The Minister’s model was that of a
crazed genius, a megalomaniac who wanted absolute power
and would go to extreme lengths to grasp it. He thought
Hoffman was satanic and yet I knew my master too well not
to realize he was tainted with a little envy for the very
power the Doctor abused with such insouciance, the power
to subvert the world. This did not lessen my admiration for
the Minister. On the contrary, I was so lacking in ambition
myself that the spectacle of his, which ravaged him,
impressed me enormously. He was like a Faust who cannot
find a friendly devil. Or, if he had done so, he would not
have been able to believe in him.
The Minister had all the Faustian desires but, since he had
rejected the transcendental, he had clipped his own wings.
In my meditative days, I used to think that the Faust legend
was a warped version of the myth of Prometheus, who
defied the wrath of god to gain the prize of fire and was
punished for it. I could not see what there might be wrong
with knowledge in itself, no matter what the price. In spite
of my post, I had taken no sides in the struggle between Dr
Hoffman and the Minister. At times I even speculated that
Hoffman was altogether Prometheus and no Faust at all, for
Faust had been content with conjuring tricks while the
manifestations around us sometimes looked as though they
were formed of authentic flame. But I kept these thoughts to
myself. Nevertheless, you must realize the adversaries were
of equal stature. The Minister possessed supernatural
strength of mind to have stood out so long and it was his
phenomenal intransigence alone which upheld the city.
Indeed, he had become the city. He had become the
invisible walls of the city; in himself, he represented the
grand totality of the city’s resistance. His movements began
to take on a megalithic grandeur. He said continually: ‘No
surrender!’ and I could not deny his dignity. I even revered
it. But, for myself, I had no axe to grind.
The siege went into its third year. Supplies of food were
almost at an end. An epidemic of cholera decimated the
eastern suburbs and thirty cases of typhus had been
reported that week. Even the discipline of the Determination
Police was fraying and now and then one of them would slip
into the Minister’s office to tell tales on a colleague. My
landlady vanished. Somehow, without anybody knowing,
she was dead somewhere, so now I was alone in my house.
Every day, the police suppressed riots with tear gas and
machine gun fire. And it was blinding, humid, foetid
summer, a summer that smelled of shit, blood and roses, for
there had never been such roses as those that bloomed that
summer. They clambered everywhere and dripped as if
perspiring the heaviest, most intoxicating perfume, which
seemed to make the very masonry drunk. The senses fused;
sometimes these roses emitted low but intolerably piercing
pentatonic melodies which were the sound of their deep
crimson colour and yet we heard them inside our nostrils.
The citronade of the pale morning sun shimmered like a
multitude of violins and I tasted unripe apples in the rare,
green, midnight rain.
It was the day before my twenty-fourth birthday. In the
afternoon, the Cathedral expired in a blaze of melodious
fireworks.
It was our greatest national monument. It had been of
immense size and architecturally sublimely chaste. Until
then, its severe, classical revival façade had grandly ignored
all the Doctor’s whimsical attempts to transform it into a
funfair or a mausoleum for ships’ figureheads or a
slaughterhouse so he finally detonated it with pyrotechnics.
The Minister and I watched the illuminations from our
window. The dome rose up and dissolved against the clear
blue sky of the middle of the afternoon like a fiery parasol
but, while I was faintly regretting that the spectacle had not
taken place at night when I should have enjoyed it better, I
saw that the Minister was weeping. Berlioz crashed about
us; we stood in the heart of a fantastic symphony, awaiting
the climacteric, death, which would come in the form of a
fatal circus.
For my supper, I ate a salad of dandelions I picked from
the wall of my house, which had begun to sprout flowers. I
brewed myself a pot from my four-weekly ounce ration of
coffee substitute and, I remember, read a little. I read a few
pages of The Rape of the Lock. When it was time to sleep,
she came to me. For the first time, I smiled at her; she made
no response. I slept; and early the next morning, I awoke
and yet I knew I was still sleeping for my bed was now, in
fact, an island in the middle of an immense lake.
Night was approaching although I knew it was nearly
dawn for outside – outside, that is, of the dream – a cock
continued to crow. However, within my dream, the shadows
of evening took the colours from the shifting waters round
me and a small wind rustled the quills of the pine trees, for
my island was covered with pines. Nothing moved except
this little, lonely wind. I waited, for the dream imperiously
demanded that I wait and I seemed to wait endlessly. I do
not think I have ever felt so alone, as if I were the last living
thing left in the world and this island and this lake were all
that was left of the world.
Presently I saw the object of my vigil. A creature was
approaching over the water but it did not assuage my
loneliness for though I could see it was alive, it did not seem
to be alive in the same sense that I was alive and I
shuddered with dread. I know I must have stood in an
attitude of awed listening, as if to hear the scratching of the
claws of the unknown on the outside rind of the world. The
oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear and the
oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown; I
was afraid. I had been afraid when I was a child, when I
would lie awake at night and hear my mother panting and
grunting like a tiger in the darkness beyond the curtain and I
thought she had changed into a beast. Now I was even more
afraid than I had been then.
As it drew near, I saw it was a swan. It was a black swan. I
cannot tell you how ugly it was; nor yet how marvellous it
was. Its vapid eyes were set too close together on its head
and expressed a kind of mindless evil that was quite without
glamour, though evil is usually attractive, because evil is
defiant. Its elongated neck had none of the grace
traditionally ascribed to the necks of swans but lolled
foolishly, now this way, now that, like a length of hose. And
the beak, which was the clear, pinkish scarlet of scentless
roses, striped with a single band of white, was flat, broad
and spatulate, fit only for grubbing worms from mud. It
swam remorselessly and terribly towards me but, when only
a few yards of shifting water lay between us, it paused to
unfurl its enormous wings as if it were opening a heraldic
umbrella.
Never have I seen such blackness, such a soft, feathered,
absolute black, a black as intense as the negation of light,
black the colour of the extinction of consciousness. The
swan flexed its neck like a snake about to strike, opened its
beak and began to sing so that I knew it was about to die
and I knew, too, she was a swan and also a woman for there
issued from her throat a thrilling, erotic contralto. Her song
was a savage, wordless lament with the dramatic cadences
of flamenco in a scale the notes of which were unfamiliar to
me yet seemed those of an ultimate Platonic mode, an
elemental music. The shadows deepened yet one last ray of
the invisible sun drew a gleam from a golden collar around
her throbbing throat and on the collar was engraved the
single word: ALBERTINA. The dream broke like a storm and I
woke.
The room was full of muffled sunlight. The cock had
ceased to crow. But I did not wake properly even though my
eyes were open; the dream left my mind full of cobwebs and
I scarcely saw the morning though I went, as usual, to the
office and found the Minister going through his mail. He was
studying a letter which had arrived in an envelope bearing
the postmark of one of the solid suburbs in the north of the
city. He began to laugh softly.
‘Dr Hoffman’s special agent would like me to take him to
lunch today,’ he said and handed me the letter. ‘Test this
immediately.’
It went through innumerable computers. It went through
Reality Testing Laboratories A and B and we photocopied it
before it went through Laboratory C. This was fortunate for
it was authentic.
 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.
AMBASSADOR: Allow me to suggest a tentative figure… five provinces; four
public transport systems; three ports; two metropolises and an entire civil
administration.
MINISTER: No.
AMBASSADOR: The Doctor will go even higher, you know.
MINISTER: No!
(The Ambassador shrugged and we all continued to eat our delicious meat
until it was gone and the salad came. We were drinking red wine. The skin
of the Ambassador’s throat was so luminously delicate one could see the
glowing shadow of the burgundy trickle down his gullet after he had taken
a sip.)
AMBASSADOR:The Doctor’s campaign is still only in its preliminary stages and
yet he has already made of this city a timeless place outside the world of
reason.
MINISTER: All he has done is to find some means of bewitching the
intelligence. He has only induced a radical suspension of disbelief. As in
the early days of the cinema, all the citizens are jumping through the
screen to lay their hands on the naked lady in the bathtub!
AMBASSADOR: And yet, in fact, their fingers touch flesh.
MINISTER: They believe they do. Yet all they touch is substantial shadow.
AMBASSADOR: And what a beautiful definition of flesh! You know I am only
substantial shadow, Minister, but if you cut me, I bleed. Touch me; I
palpitate!
(Certainly I had never seen a phantom who looked at that moment more
shimmeringly unreal than the Ambassador, nor one who seemed to throb
with more erotic promise. The Minister, however, laughed.)
MINISTER: Whether you are real or not, I know for sure that I am not inventing
you.
AMBASSADOR: How is that?
MINISTER: I don’t have enough imagination.
(Now it was the Ambassador’s turn to laugh and then he paused and harked
for a moment, as if listening to an invisible voice. It was a childish trick
but remarkably effective.)
AMBASSADOR: The Doctor’s offer has just risen by four opera houses and the
cities of Rome, Florence and Dresden before the fire. We will throw in John
Sebastian Bach as your Kapellmeister, to clinch the bargain.
(dismissively) Come, now! We are well at work upon our counter
MINISTER:
measures!
AMBASSADOR: Yes, indeed. We have been watching the progress of your
electronic harem with considerable interest.
(I had never thought of the Minister’s computer centre as an electronic
harem. The simile struck me as admirable. But the Minister bit his lip.)
MINISTER: How?
(The Ambassador ignored this question.)
AMBASSADOR: You are in the process of tabulating every thing you can lay your
hands on. In the sacred name of symmetry, you slide them into a series of
straitjackets and label them with, oh, my God, what inexpressibly boring
labels! Your mechanical prostitutes welcome their customers in an alien
gibber wholly denied to the human tongue while you, you madame, work
as an abortionist on the side. You murder the imagination in the womb,
Minister.
Somebody must impose restraint. If I am an abortionist, your
MINISTER:
master is a forger. He has passed off upon us an entire currency of
counterfeit phenomena.
AMBASSADOR: Do you regard the iconographic objects – or, shall we say,
symbolically functioning propositions – which we transmit to you as a
malign armoury inimical to the human race, of which you take this city to
be a microcosm?
(The Minister put his knife and fork together symmetrically on his empty
plate and spoke with great precision.)
MINISTER: I do.
(The Ambassador leaned back in his chair and smiled the most seductive of
smiles.)
AMBASSADOR: Then you are wrong. They are emanations only of the
asymmetric, Minister, the asymmetric you deny. The doctor knows how to
pierce appearances and to allow real forms to emerge into substantiality
from the transparency of immanence. You cannot destroy our imagery;
you may annihilate the appearances but the asymmetric essence can
neither be created nor destroyed – only changed. And if you disintegrate
the images with your lasers and your infra red rays, they only revert to
their constituent parts and soon come together again in another form
which you yourself have rendered even more arbitrary by your
interference. The Doctor is about to reveal the entire truth of the
cosmogony. Please wait patiently. It will not take much longer.
(They brought us fruit and cheese. The Ambassador cut himself a sliver of
brie.)
AMBASSADOR: You do appreciate, Minister, that very soon death, in
innumerable guises, will walk these teeming streets.
MINISTER: She does already.
(The Ambassador shrugged, as if to say: ‘You have seen nothing yet.’ He
pulled off a sprig of grapes.)
AMBASSADOR: Are you prepared to capitulate?
MINISTER: What are your master’s terms?
AMBASSADOR: Absolute authority to establish a regime of total liberation.
(The Minister ground out his cigarette and cut a portion of Stilton. From the
bowl of fruit, he selected a Cox’s Orange Pippin.)
 MINISTER: I do not capitulate.
Very well. Prepare yourself for a long, immense and deliberate
AMBASSADOR:
derangement of the senses. I understand you have broken all the mirrors.
MINISTER: That was to stop them begetting images.
(The Ambassador produced a small mirror from his pocket and presented it
to the Minister, so that he saw his own face. The Minister covered his eyes
and screamed but almost at once regained his composure and went on
paring the skin from his apple. The walls of the world did not cave in and
the feline smile of the Ambassador did not waver. The meal concluded.
The Ambassador refused coffee but, with a return of his original, de haut
en bas manner, rose to bid us farewell. As he left the restaurant, all the
flowers in every vase shed every single one of their petals. I switched off
the tape recorder; now I must rely on my memory.)
I myself ordered coffee and the Minister took his habitual
black tea, though this afternoon he tipped into his cup the
contents of a balloon of brandy. He had me play over the
recording of their conversation and then stayed sunk in
thought for a while, lost inside a cloud of cigarette smoke.
‘If I were a religious man, Desiderio,’ he said at last, ‘I
would say we had just survived an encounter with
Mephistopheles.’
The Minister had always struck me as a deeply religious
man.
‘Let me tell you a parable,’ he went on. ‘A man made a
pact with the Devil. The condition was this: the man
delivered up his soul as soon as Satan had assassinated
God. “Nothing simpler,” said Satan and put a revolver to his
own temple.’
‘Do you cast Dr Hoffman as God or Satan?’
The Minister smiled.
‘As my parable suggests, the roles are interchangeable,’
he replied. ‘Come. Let us go.’
But, for myself, I was bewildered, for certain timbres in the
young man’s voice had reawakened all my last night’s
dream and, as if his voice had struck those mysterious notes
which are supposed to shatter glass, a fine tracery of cracks
had all at once appeared in the surface of my indifference.
The young man fascinated me. As the Minister signed the
check, I saw the curious ambassador had left behind him on
the chair he had occupied a handkerchief of the same
exquisite lace as the fabric of his shirt. I picked it up. Along
the hem, stitched in a flourish of silk so white it was virtually
invisible, was the name I had only seen before in my dream,
the name: ALBERTINA. The hieratic chant of the black swan
rang again in my ears; I swayed as if I were about to faint.
The Minister slipped the head waiter a fat tip and lit a
fresh cigarette as he led me by the arm into the equivocal
afternoon, where the sunlight was already thickening.
‘Desiderio,’ he said. ‘How would you like to go on a little
trip?’
 2 The Mansion of Midnight

The Minister was clutching at straws but he clutched

ferociously.
That very morning, as I tested the Ambassador’s letter in
another part of the Bureau of Determination, the Minister’s
computers had startled him by registering a significant
analogy. They posited certain correspondences between the
activities of the proprietor of a certain peep-show who had
operated his business upon the pier at the seaside resort of
S. throughout the summer and now showed signs of
quartering himself there for the winter. It seemed a small
enough clue to me; hardly worth the importance the
Minister placed on it – and hardly enough to justify my new
promotion. Nevertheless, promoted I was; between lunch
and teatime, I became the Minister’s special agent and my
mission was, if I could find him, to assassinate Dr Hoffman
as inconspicuously as possible.
I was chosen for the mission because: (a) I was in my right
mind; (b) I was dispensable and (c) the Minister’s computers
decided my skill at crossword puzzles suggested a facility in
the processes of analogical thought which might lead me to
the Doctor where everyone else had failed. I think the
Minister himself thought of me as a kind of ambulant
computer. Even so, in spite of the encouraging voice with
which he wished me farewell, I guessed it was something of
a forlorn hope.
The computers constructed me an identity sufficiently
foolproof to take me past the checkpoints of the
Determination Police, for I was the most secret of agents. I
was to pose as an Inspector of Veracity, first class. At the
town of S., some sixty miles further up the coast, I was to
make a special report on the mysterious affair of the Mayor,
who had disappeared some time before. The inscrutable
business of bureaucracy went on, war or no war, and my
bureaucratic credentials were impeccable. I was issued with
a small car, a complement of petrol coupons and a pocket
arsenal of revolvers, etc. I packed a bag with a notebook or
two and a shirt. I took with me no souvenirs or objects of
sentimental value because I had none. Even though I did not
know when, if ever, I would see it again I did not bother to
say good-bye to my arid room. I left the city the next
morning; as I passed the Bureau of Determination, I saw a
slogan had appeared on the wall. It read: DR HOFFMAN
PISSES LIGHTNING. I drove off through a gigantic storm. It
was still before breakfast time but the sky was so black that
an unnatural darkness filled the streets which today, as if on
purpose to speed my departure, had reverted to the forms I
had always known, streets without magic or surprise, streets
as boring as only those of home can be.
I did not have much hope of returning to them; nor did I
believe the city would survive very long after I had gone, not
only because I had always obscurely felt I was one of the
invisible struts of reason which had helped to prop it up for
so long but because it seemed inevitable it would soon
collapse. Yet I felt no nostalgia when, after I speeded up the
interminable negotiations with the Police by the gift of
several cartons of the Minister’s cigarettes, I took the road
that led north. I suppose I hoped that, if the city fell, at least
it would coffin the environment which bred my
unappeasable boredom. There was nothing in the great
heap of stucco, brick and stone behind me to which I felt the
least attachment except the memory of a certain
mysterious dream and that I took with me. And, if I felt a
certain excitement as the miles wound away beneath me, it
was because of that dream and the name, which seemed to
shelter three magic entities, the glass woman, the black
swan and the ambassador. The name was a clue which
pointed to a living being beneath the conjuring tricks, for
such tricks imply the presence of a conjurer. I was
nourishing an ambition – to rip away that ruffled shirt and
find out whether the breasts of an authentic woman swelled
beneath it; and if around her neck was a gold collar with the
name ALBERTINA engraved upon it.
And then? I would fall on my knees in worship.
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
exquisite 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.
‘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…’
‘His set of samples?’
‘Plenty more in my sack,’ he said. ‘Lots and lots of
samples. Dozens and scores and hundreds and thousands of
samples. You’d think they breed in there and I just put them
in the machines, don’t I, and stick a sign along with them
and sometimes people pay and sometimes they don’t and
sometimes they scream and sometimes they giggle and
sometimes the police turn me out of town and off I go down
the road again, pushing my barrow. And times grow worse,
since he began to put it into practice. No more money to
spare for an old man’s disgusting if didactic demonstrations;
you can get as good at home. Soon I’ll have to charge a pin
to see it – or a jam jar, or a cigarette card. And who will
exchange such rubbish for liquor, then? When that day
dawns, poor robin must tuck his head under his wing, poor
thing, and pretend to be warm, yes!’
‘But,’ he added, pouring out the seventh glass for himself,
‘the singular privilege of becoming Mendoza was never
granted me. I was allowed to make my own transformations
and if you look at me you can see how well I have
succeeded.’
A tear trickled out from under his glasses so that I knew
he had eyes even if they were sightless and I seemed to
remember a cutting in the files that said Dr Hoffman’s old
professor had suffered some injuries in an accident in a
laboratory many many years before. I judged the old man
was now sufficiently drunk and handed the bottle back to
the barman.
‘I should like to kill him,’ said the peep-show proprietor. ‘If
I were ten years younger, I would go to the castle and
murder him.’
‘Do you know the way to the castle?’
‘I should follow my nose,’ he said.
But then a cock crowed and the sound affected the old
man curiously. He sat up and listened attentively; it crowed
a second time and then a third.
‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ shrieked the old man.
With that, he struck me full in the face with his cane so
that blood streamed into my eyes from a cut above my
forehead and, when I could see again, he was gone. I
hurried immediately back to the pier but, though he could
only hobble, I caught no sign of him along the way and
when I reached the place where his booth had been, it was,
of course, also completely gone. So I made my way to the
Town Hall, to do my official business.
The plaster scrolls and garlands on the pompous exterior
of the Town Hall were crumbling like dry sponge cake and all
the windows were screened with green blinds but the heavy
mahogany doors swung open readily enough and, though
puffs of dust rose up when I trod on the maroon plush
carpeting and most of the offices were empty but for
cobwebs spun from inkwell to pen-rack across blurred
surfaces of desks, at last a yawning clerk came out of the
ante-room of the Mayor’s office to greet me. Metal bracelets
hoisted up his shirt-sleeves to bare his wrists for work; he
had been left in charge.
The Mayor’s office itself was a mausoleum. It had been
tidied since he left so there were no papers or files to be
seen and they had drawn his carved, pompous chair so
tightly up to the scrupulously denuded desk that it looked as
though it were denying admittance there to any future body.
The Mayor’s pink blotter was thickly furred with mildew and
his dried-out water flask, topped with an inverted tumbler,
had grown hunched shoulders of settled dust. The
indefatigable spiders had woven a canopy across a
photograph of the late President on the wall. The clerk
opened a cupboard to reveal half a decanterful of mayoral
sherry, now grown viscous as treacle, groped on a lower
shelf and produced the fur-collared overcoat the Mayor had
left behind him on the snowy morning he vanished. The
pockets contained only a single balled glove and a dirty
handkerchief, nothing of significance.
But after only the briefest search through the other
offices, I found evidence that a certain peep-show proprietor
had filed an official request to open a booth on the pier in
the preceding month of April; this form, signed with a
tentative cross, still waited for the official stamp so my
ramshackle friend had clearly gone ahead on his own and
set up shop regardless. It was, at least, a connection. I
tucked away this form to take back to the Minister, took the
clerk’s name and briefly checked his reality rating with my
information. It appeared satisfactory. Then I asked him to
ring the Mayor’s home, where his daughter still lived with a
housekeeper. The clerk got through after only seven or eight
minutes and I noted the services were still functioning
satisfactorily though the clerk told me the telephone
switchboard could neither take nor receive calls outside the
immediate neighbourhood while even these local calls were
constantly interrupted by voices in unknown languages.
After a good deal of country town chat with the Mayor’s
house, he ensured me some nights’ lodging there, at the
probable source of my bureaucratic mystery.
‘It’s all got very run down since the Mayor left,’ he said
dubiously. ‘Just the old woman and the, er, girl…’
Something in his voice indicated a strangeness in the girl.
I pricked up the ears of my mind, briskly jotted down the
directions he gave me and went to my car. It was now early
evening and, since I stopped on my way to eat a supper of
meat pies in a fly-blown café too squalid to be illusory, I did
not reach the house until it was almost dark. It lay some
way out of town at the end of an old-fashioned, rutted lane,
where there were no other habitations than one abandoned
barn. The sky was the tender, transparent blue of a late
summer’s night and a slender intimation of the moon hung
above a copse of fir although the tiger lilies of the setting
sun still growled in the west. I parked my car in the road
and, once the engine ceased to throb, there was no other
sound but a faint shimmer of birdsong and the rattle of the
quilled boughs of the pines.
Although I knew it was inhabited, at first I thought the
house was quite forsaken for the extensive garden which
surrounded it was sunk in the neglect of years. Whoever
made the garden first must have loved roses but now the
roses had quite overrun the garden and formed dense,
forbidding hedges that sent out such an overpowering
barrage of perfume that my head was soon swimming.
Besides, roses sprayed out fanged, blossoming whips from
cupolas which almost foundered under their weight; roses
reared up in groves of sturdy standards now the size of
young oaks; and roses sent vine-like tendrils along the
sombre branches of yew trees, of ornamental rowans, of
cherry trees and apple trees already half-suffocated with
mistletoe so this summer, which had suited roses so well,
seemed to have conspired with the gardener to produce an
orgiastic jungle of all kinds of roses, and though I could not
distinguish any of their separate shapes or colours, their
individual scents all blended into a single, intolerably sweet
essence which made every nerve in my body ache and
tingle.
Roses had climbed up the already luxuriantly ivied walls
and lodged in knots on the roofs where flowering weeds
were rooted in the gaps between the mossy tiles while a
great, unlopped elm with lice of rooks in its hair towered
over the house as if about to drop its great limbs upon it, to
smash it, while at the same time its roots clutched the
foundations under the earth in a ferocious embrace. The
garden had laid claim to the house and was destroying it at
its arborescent leisure. Those within the house were already
at the capricious mercy of nature.
Enormous clumps of mugwort had torn apart the gate and
blocked the path entirely so I had to clamber over the
tumbledown wall, dislodging a few more stones as I did so.
Looking towards the shaggy outlines of the house, I saw a
greenish glimmer of light on the ground floor filtering
through the leaves which obscured the windows and took
this for my clue out of the hostile, vegetable maze which, as
I moved forward, lashed me, scored me, stung me and left
me sick, bleeding and dizzy with its odorous excess. As I
drew nearer to the house I heard, over the pounding of the
blood in my ears, notes of music falling ‘plop’, like goldfish
in a quiet pool. Breathless, I halted for a moment to find out
if the sound was true. It went wistfully on. Somebody in that
ruinous place was playing Debussy on the piano.
At last I reached the lighted window and parting the
foliage which covered it, I peered through. I saw a drawing
room with worn Persian rugs on the floor and walls hung
with a once crimson brocaded paper that was now faded
and figured with damp and mould, rucking and buckling
over the dank walls beneath. There was an alabaster
fireplace with a bouquet of shell flowers in a misted glass
dome upon it and a fan of silver paper in the grate. Oil
paintings so heavily varnished one could not make out their
subjects hung here and there askew in pompous frames of
tarnished gilt and an unlit cut-glass chandelier in the centre
of the ceiling scintillated with reflections from the two
candles in a branched stick which stood on the grand piano
and threw a soft light over the girl who played it.
Her back was turned towards me but when I craned my
neck I could see her white, thin, nervous fingers on the
keyboard and caught a glimpse of the pale curve of her
cheek. Her hair, the lifeless brown of a winter forest, hung
down the back of her black dress. She played with
extraordinary sensitivity. The room was full of a poignant,
nostalgic anguish which seemed to emanate from that
slender figure whose face I could not see.
I thought it best not to disturb her and made my way
round to the back of the house where I found a black cat
washing itself on an up-turned bucket, and inside an open
door, a fat old woman who sat in a darkened kitchen to
save, she said, the electricity; and that was also the reason
why she made the mistress of the house play the piano by
candlelight. The housekeeper guessed who I must be from
my lumpish shape in the shadows. She greeted me warmly
and turned on the lights in my honour to reveal a blessedly
commonplace kitchen with a gas stove, a refrigerator and a
saucer of milk put down for pussy. She settled me down at
the scrubbed table with a cup of tea and a saucerful of
shortbread biscuits, asked about my journey and hoped, too
solicitously, that I would find the accommodation adequate.
‘Though how could we put you up luxuriously, sir, I mean –
in the circumstances…’
She had a slippery, ingratiating quality which was meant
to disarm but somehow offended me and she loquaciously
set sail on a rattling stream of nothings while the girl in the
drawing room continued to play the piano exquisitely and
the music echoed down a corridor into the room. The old
woman spoke of the vanished Mayor with neither
embarrassment nor surmise. She had apparently absorbed
the fact that he was gone so well into her world that if, one
day, he returned, she would feel subtly affronted. She hinted
that she suspected a woman might lie behind it for, she
said: ‘Not many women would want Mary Anne for a step-
daughter. Oh, no! Oh, no!’ She rolled her eyes significantly
and chatted on about the difficulty of obtaining women’s
magazines and knitting wool. Presently the music ceased
and Mary Anne herself came into the kitchen, on some
errand she forgot as soon as she saw me for the
housekeeper had not bothered to tell her an unexpected
guest would arrive at her home. She stood in the doorway,
transfixed with surprise and apprehension; in her face, only
eyes the colour of a rainy day moved this way and that, as if
looking for a way out.
She had the waxen delicacy of a plant bred in a cupboard.
She did not look as if blood flowed through her veins but
instead some other, less emphatic fluid infinitely less red.
Her mouth was barely touched with palest pink though it
had exactly the proportions of the three cherries the
artmaster piles in an inverted triangle to illustrate the
classic mouth and there was no tinge of any pink at all on
her cheeks. Now she was standing up, she was almost
hidden in her dress and her tiny face, shaped like a locket,
looked even smaller than it was because of a disordered
profusion of hair streaming down as straight as if she had
just been plucked from the river. I could see her hair and
dress were stuck all over with twigs and petals from the
garden. She looked like drowning Ophelia; I thought so
immediately, though I could not know how soon she would
really drown, for she was so forlorn and desperate. And a
chilling and restrained passivity made her desperation all
the more pathetic. The housekeeper clucked to see the
wraith-like girl’s bare feet.
‘Put your slippers on at once, Miss! Bare feet on those
stone flags! I never did! You’ll catch your death!’
 Mary Anne moved awkwardly from one foot to the other
as if her chances of catching death from the stone floor of
the kitchen were halved if only one foot came in contact
with it at a time. She was about seventeen. Her distant gaze
wandered vaguely over the table and she whispered in a
pleading undertone:
‘Perhaps a little tea…’
‘Not unless you step on to the rag rug,’ said the
housekeeper, too authoritatively for the circumstances
perhaps.
The girl edged into the room until she stood on the bright
strip of carpet, allowing her eyes to rest on me again while
the housekeeper got her a cup and even a biscuit, although
she muttered to herself as she did so.
‘I am Mary Anne, the Mayor’s daughter. Who are you?’
‘I am a civil servant and my name is Desiderio.’
She repeated the name quietly to herself but with a
curious quiver in her voice which might have been pleasure
and eventually she confided:
‘Desiderio, the desired one, did you know you have eyes
just like an Indian?’
The housekeeper went ‘tsk! tsk!’ with annoyance for we
whites were not supposed to acknowledge the Indians.
‘My mother always found it embarrassing,’ I replied and at
that the girl seemed obscurely pleased and thrust out her
hand in such a sudden, unexpected gesture of goodwill it
was more like a thwarted blow than an offer to shake. But I
took her hand and found it was icy. She would not let go of
me for a long time.
‘Mr Desiderio is going to stay in the spare room for a
while,’ said the housekeeper grudgingly, as if reluctant to
share the information with her mistress. ‘He’s come from
the government.’
 Mary Anne found this very mysterious; her eyes grew
wide.
‘You won’t find my father, you know,’ she informed me.
‘Why not?’ I asked. My fingers were still in the snow trap
of her clutch.
‘If he didn’t come back in time to prune the roses, he
won’t come back at all,’ she said, and shook with such silent
but vigorous laughter her tea slopped from her cup on to
her dress, which was already stained with all manner of
other spilled food and drink.
‘What do you think happened to him, Mary Anne?’ I asked
gently for, though I knew from the records and my own
intuition she was quite real, I had never before met a
woman who looked so conversant with shadows as she.
‘He disintegrated of course,’ she said. ‘He resolved to his
constituents – a test-tube of amino-acids, a tuft or two of
hair.’
She gestured with her cup for more tea. She had not given
me any answer I might have expected and, when I tried to
question her further, she only giggled again and shook her
head so that a twist of apple leaves fell to the floor and her
hair flopped over her eyes. Then she put her cup down on
the table with the excessive care of the born clumsy and ran
up the dark corridor again. She must have left the door of
the drawing room open, for her piano sounded louder this
time, and she must have changed her music, for some
irrational reason; now she played the lucid nonsense of Erik
Satie. With a sigh, the housekeeper gathered up the cups.
‘A screw loose,’ she said. ‘A piece missing.’
Soon she took me to a bed with a patchwork quilt in a
simple but pleasant room at the back of the house. It was a
soft, warm night and the girl at her piano picked out an
angular fretwork of audible lace on the surface of my first
sleep. I think I woke because the music stopped. Perhaps
her candles had burned out.
Now the moon had fully risen and shone straight into my
room through the screen of ivy and roses so that dappled
shadows fell with scrupulous distinction on the bed, the
walls and the floor. Inside looked like the negative of a
photograph of outside and the moon had already taken a
black and white picture of the garden. I woke instantly and
completely, with no residue of sleep in my mind, as though
this was the proper time for me to wake although it could
only have been a little past midnight. I was too wakeful to
stay in my bed and got restlessly up to look out of the
window. The grounds were far more extensive than I had at
first thought and those behind the house were even further
on the way to wilderness than those through which I had
passed. The moon shone so brightly there was not a single
dark corner and I could see the dried-up bed of a large pond
or small lake which was now an oval of flat-petalled lilies
while the roses had entirely engulfed in their embrace a
marble Undine who reclined on her side in a touching
attitude of provincial gracefulness. Delineated with the
precision of a woodcut in the moonlight, a family of young
foxes rolled and tumbled with one another on a clearing
which had been a lawn. There was no wind. The night sighed
beneath the languorous weight of its own romanticism.
I do not think she made a sound to startle me but all at
once I grew conscious of a presence in the room and cold
sweat pricked the back of my neck. Slowly I turned from the
window. She lived on the crepuscular threshold of life and so
I remember her as if standing, always, hesitantly in a
doorway like an unbidden guest uncertain of her welcome.
Her eyes were open but blind and she held a rose in her
outstretched fingers. She had taken off her plain, black
dress and wore a white calico nightgown such as convent
schoolgirls wear. As I went towards her, so she came to me
and I took the rose because she seemed to offer it to me. A
thorn under the leaves pierced my thumb and I felt the red
rose throb like a heart and saw it emit a single drop of blood
as if like a sin-eater it had taken on the pain of the wound
for me. She wound her insubstantial arms around me and
put her mouth on mine. Her kiss was like a draught of cold
water and yet immediately excited my desire for it was full
of an anguished yearning.
I led her to the bed and, in the variegated shadows,
penetrated her sighing flesh, which was as chill as that of a
mermaid or of the marmoreal water-maiden in her own
garden. I was aware of a curiously attenuated response, as if
she were feeling my caresses through a veil, and you must
realize that all this time I was perfectly well aware she was
asleep, for, apart from the evidence of my senses, I
remembered how the peep-show proprietor had talked of a
beautiful somnambulist. Yet, if she was asleep, she was
dreaming of passion and afterwards I slept without
dreaming for I had experienced a dream in actuality. When I
woke in the commonplace morning, nothing was left of her
in the bed but some dead leaves and there was no sign she
had been in the room except for a withered rose in the
middle of the floor.
Mary Anne did not appear at breakfast though the
housekeeper supplied me so amply with eggs, bacon,
sausages, pancakes, coffee and fruit that I guessed, for
whatever reasons, she was well satisfied with her house
guest. In the bright light of morning, the old woman’s
plump, lugubrious face looked indefinably sinister, even
malign. She pressed me to return to the Mayor’s house for
supper and at last, to quiet her, I agreed to do so and gave
seven o’clock as the probable hour of my return, although I
did not know if I would still be in the town at that time.
When I went to my room to collect my briefcase, I passed an
open door and, glancing inside, saw my nocturnal visitant
sitting in front of a dressing-table mirror in an untidy room
full of scores. She was still in her austere night-shift as she
gave her tangled hair its (probably) single combing of the
day.
‘Mary Anne?’
She smiled at me remotely in the mirror and I knew she
was awake.
‘Good morning, Desiderio,’ she said. ‘I hope you had a
good night’s sleep.’
I was bewildered.
‘Yes,’ I stammered. ‘Oh, yes.’
‘Though occasionally people are frightened by the
nightingales, because they make such a noise, sometimes.’
‘Mary Anne, did you dream last night?’
Her comb caught in a knot and she tugged it impatiently.
‘I dreamed about a love suicide,’ she said. ‘But then, I
always do. Don’t you think it would be very beautiful to die
for love?’
It is always disquieting to talk with a person in a mirror.
Besides, the mirror was contraband. Her voice was high and
clear and, though she always talked softly, very sweetly
piercing, like the sight of the moon in winter.
‘I’m not at all sure it would be beautiful to die for
anything,’ I said.
‘One only resolves to one’s constituents,’ she said with a
trace of precocious pedantry. I stepped into the room,
leaving a crude trail of heavy footprints on her white carpet,
and, lifting her hair, I bent to kiss the nape of her neck. As I
did so, I saw my own reflection for the first time since the
beginning of the war. I saw that I had aged a little and was
now as cynical as a satyr in a Renaissance painting. My face,
poor mother, had all the inscrutability of the Indian. I
greeted myself like a friend. Mary Anne allowed me to kiss
her but I do not think she noticed it.
‘What will you do today, Mary Anne?’
 ‘Today, I shall play the piano, of course. Unless I think of
something better to do, that is.’
And I do not know if, for a moment, I saw another person
glance briefly out of her eyes for I was not looking at her in
the mirror, only myself.
By the time I left the house, it had become a musical box
for she was already playing. Now she was practising
Chopin’s Etudes. By daylight, I could see the house was very
large, one of those rambling country houses, half farmhouse
and half mansion, though it must already have been three-
quarters tumbledown when the Mayor himself lived there for
whole sections of the roof had caved in beneath the
monstrous burden of vegetation upon it while what had
once been stables and outhouses now lay open to the
weather and nature had already thrown too thick a green
blanket over them to have been woven in only a few
months. In the pure light of the morning, the fallen bricks,
the exposed beams, the roses and the trees still seemed to
sleep, murmuring and stirring a little as if a vague,
unmemorable dream disturbed a slumber as profound as
that of their mistress, the beauty in the dreaming wood, who
slept too deeply to be wakened by anything as gentle as a
kiss.
I slipped into the Town Hall and glanced desultorily once
more through the Mayor’s files but I could find nothing that
threw any further light on a disappearance I was now
inclined to believe was quite unconnected with Dr Hoffman
but just a simple suicide which might have taken place
anywhere, at any time, on the spur of a despairing moment,
for somehow I guessed the Mayor had been prone to
anguish. When I had satisfied the conditions of my post as
an Inspector of Veracity, I once again left the Town Hall in
the sole hands of the yawning clerk and went to the bar
where the peep-show proprietor had taken me. But even the
massive black presided there no longer. Only a golden girl
far more Indian than I, in a skimpy dress of bright striped
cotton, wiped glasses as she stared aimlessly at the sunlight
in the street outside, where only blow-flies buzzed in the
choked gutters and, though I described the peep-show
proprietor to her, she did not remember ever seeing him.
So I downed a single brandy and then sauntered along the
Promenade, a place now dedicated solely to the joys of
summer, although these joys were undertaken with a
singular, silent listlessness. As I leaned on the iron railing
gazing out over the prim corrugations of the ocean, I heard
a tapping behind me. As inconspicuously as I could, I looked
round. He scuttled past me, accompanied by the staccato
rattle of his cane, muttering to himself; at a discreet
distance, I followed him.
I cannot begin to describe his crabbed, crouched,
scrambling walk – how first he tapped with his cane, then
set it upon the ground and half swung himself forward on it
with a wheezing, triumphant gasp as if at every step he
defied and vanquished the ordinary laws of motion. And he
managed to perform these senile acrobatics with immense
speed, as if there were springs in his stick and the worn
heels of his boots, too. He was indescribably filthy. He might
have spent the night in a sewer.
He had moved his pitch to a dreary quarter of creosoted
warehouses in which, from the stench, dried fish was stored.
At the end of the alley hung with banners of washing, was a
small shrine to a fisherman’s madonna with a few dead
flowers stuck before it in a chipped coca-cola bottle and,
behind it, a little bare plot of grass now almost filled by the
familiar, pink-striped tent. And here I lost him. One moment
he was there, hopping jerkily through the thick barriers of
wet laundry, and the next he was gone, slipped, perhaps,
into one of the hovels along the way. So I decided to wait for
him in his own booth for a while.
This time, the poster read: SEE A YOUNG GIRL’S MOST
SIGNIFICANT EXPERIENCE IN LIFELIKE COLOURS. To while
away the time, I strolled from machine to machine,
unaccountably disturbed by the things I saw there although,
unlike the seven wonders of yesterday’s world, none
contained any element of the grotesque. All were as
haunting as the cards in Tarot and the very titles of each
set-piece were set like an integral medallion into each
elegant design. These new tableaux were not, like
yesterday’s, models but actual pictures painted with
luscious oils on rectangular plates in such a way that the
twin eye-pieces of the machine created a stereoscopic
effect. These plates were arranged in several layers which
slid in and out of one another by means of a system of
programmed clockwork which announced itself with a faint
click and gave the impression of stilted movement in the
figures. It also allowed sudden transformation scenes. Each
picture was lit from behind and glowed with an unnatural
brilliance so that the moonlight which suffused the first
scene was far more luxuriously pure than everyday
moonlight and looked like the Platonic perfection of
moonlight. This transcendental radiance bathed ivied ruins
and the slide shifted back and forth to allow bats to flit stiffly
around them. A lugubrious owl perched on the crumbling
chimney stack and slowly beat its wings upon the darkened
air where hung in iridescent characters the words: THE
MANSION OF MIDNIGHT.
In the second machine, the mansion split in half to reveal
a crimson room and the warning: HUSH! SHE IS SLEEPING!
She was as white as my last night’s anaemic lover and, like
her, she was dressed in black, but this one had a medieval
gown of sheer black velvet with sleeves that came to points
on the backs of her hands while her streaming hair
contained several shades of darkness. She lay back in the
voluptuous abandonment of sleep in a carved armchair
where spiders propelled themselves up and down on the
high-wires they had spun themselves among the hangings.
When I looked into the third machine I saw a ferocious
hedge of thorns; but then, before my very eyes, a young
prince with juicy bunches of golden ringlets hanging on the
shoulders of his slashed and padded doublet was
superimposed on the hedge in a balletic attitude of pleading
and from his mouth issued a scroll which read: I COME! The
hedge parted forthwith to reveal, in a set of cunning
perspectives, the sleeper inside the haunted house of the
first machine complete with owl above, etc.
A KISS CAN WAKE HER. In the crimson room, the pretty
prince with skin as pink as sugar candy and lips like
strawberry ice cream bent over the sleeping girl; another
slide slipped into place and showed them so close together,
his ringlets mixed with her locks and his face pressed so
close to hers her pallor took his colour and blushed. A click
of the internal mechanism. The tints of warm flesh rushed
back into her face. Her eyes opened. Her newly red lips
parted.
With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth
machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers
thrust monstrous horned tusks and trumpets ending in
blaring teeth through the crimson walls, rending them; the
ravenous garden slavered over its prey and every brick was
shown in the act of falling. Amid the violence of this
transformation, the oblivion of the embrace went on. The
awakened girl, in all her youthful loveliness, still clasped in
the arms of a lover from whom all the flesh had fallen. He
was a grinning skeleton. In one set of phalanges he carried a
scythe and with the other pulled out and squeezed a ripe
breast from the girl’s bodice while his bony knees nudged
apart her thighs. The emblem read: DEATH AND THE
MAIDEN.
The remaining two machines were empty.
It was now in the middle of the day and the heat inside
the tent grew oppressive. I went outside and sat on a
doorstep, smoking and waiting, but still there was no sign of
the peep-show proprietor. A child with crinkled hair tied up
in the innumerable pigtails the poor and superstitious adopt
for, I think, reasons of voodoo approached and stared at me.
Her plaits were so tight they revealed wide areas of the
glossy, brown skin covering her skull and, though I
questioned her, she answered me incomprehensibly in the
multilingual patois of the slums and began to poke
indifferently in a clogged drain with a stick. Her face was
covered with the whorled eruptions of a skin disease. The
good nuns had taken me away from such pastimes and such
afflictions but, all the same, you will have noticed I
possessed a degree of ambivalence towards the Minister’s
architectonic vision of the perfect state. This was because I
was aware of what would have been my own position in that
watertight schema.
No shadows fell in the drowsing noonday. I inquired at
several houses but even those who spoke the standard
language knew nothing of the peep-show proprietor except
that his booth had suddenly arrived in the shrine garden the
previous evening. My shirt was soaked with sweat and at
last I walked down to the ocean to catch the possibility of a
breeze.
I wondered if all the holiday makers were nothing but
phantoms. Nevertheless, most of them had dispersed for
lunch and an afternoon nap and the beaches were again
deserted. I strolled beside the margin of the water, among a
detritus of discarded sandals and plastic sun-tan lotion jars
the sea could not digest, watching the dancing white lace
hems of the petticoats of the ocean and so, while I was
thinking of nothing but sunshine, the breakers delivered her
to my feet.
Mary Anne had indeed found something else to do that
day besides play the piano. And now she had suffered a sea
change, already. She was wreathed and garlanded in
seaweed and shells clung to her white night shift. When I
lifted her up, water spouted from her mouth. Dead, she
could not have had a whiter skin than when she lived. She
was dead. But still I tried to revive her.
 I was overwhelmed with shock and horror. I felt I was in
some way instrumental to her death. I crouched over the
sea-gone wet doll in an attitude I knew to be a cruel parody
of my own the previous night, my lips pressed to her mouth,
and it came to me there was hardly any difference between
what I did now and what I had done then, for her sleep had
been a death. The notion ravaged me with guilty horror. I do
not know how much time passed while I attempted to
manipulate her lifeless body but, when the sound of voices
at last broke into my waking nightmare, the sun was far in
the west and cast long beams which fell with a peculiar
lateral intensity over the sand. She and I were now both
utterly bedaubed with wet sand, so that we looked like those
Indian shamans who paint themselves with coloured mud
when they want to summon back the spirits of the departed.
And I was attempting to do no more than that. I looked up.
On the promenade I saw a dark, hump-backed figure who
gesticulated in my direction with a white stick. Down the
iron steps to the beach clattered a posse of the
Determination Police in their long, leather overcoats and, at
their head, ran the clerk from the Town Hall, an unusual
animation contorting his features, and the housekeeper
from the Mayor’s house, still in her white apron, plumply
stumbling, crimson and breathless but radiating a horrid
gratification. These two formed the very picture of
malevolent glee and I was seized with the conviction they
had, in collusion, murdered the Mayor for reasons of their
own, probably connected with money or property, and
trusted to the confusion of the times to hide their guilt. They
thought I might discover it. Perhaps they had even
murdered poor Mary Anne, too, and dropped her into the
sea, in order to frame me, for how could I accuse them if I
was myself accused?
They all came nearer and nearer and nearer and I realized
I must quickly run away.
 I do not know why I scooped up the dripping corpse of the
girl in my arms and tried to make my escape with her. I
think I wanted to rescue her from the housekeeper for I
knew with instantaneous clairvoyance the old woman hated
her, dead or living. Burdened with Mary Anne, I lurched
along the beach for perhaps a hundred yards while she,
twice her weight with water, slithered about so that it was
like carrying a huge fish. Then one of the Determination
Police drew his pistol and fired. I felt a tearing pain in my
shoulder and fell. The second bullet whistled past my ear
and, while I watched, shattered the exquisite rind of the
dead girl’s features so that her blood and brains spattered
over my face. At that, I fainted.
I was charged on four counts.
(1) obtaining carnal knowledge of a minor (for, in fact,
Mary Anne had been even younger than she looked, only
fifteen years old);
(2) procuring death by drowning of the said minor;
(3) practising necrophily on the corpse of the said minor,
which act the police had witnessed with their own eyes;
and:
(4) posing as an Inspector of Veracity Class Three when I
was really the fatherless son of a known prostitute of Indian
extraction, an offence against the Determination
Regulations Page Four, paragraph I c, viz.: ‘Any thing or
person seen to diverge significantly from it or his own
known identity is committing an offence and may be
apprehended and tested.’
From the look in the eyes of the Determination Police, it
seemed very likely to me that I would not survive the testing
in order to stand my trial.
I was terrified to realize how much the autonomous power
of the police had grown. Although I pleaded with them to let
me telephone the Minister’s private number, they laughed
at me and beat my head with the butts of their pistols. The
papers in my briefcase had, of course, all been altered so
that they presented masterpieces of the dubious; this was
clearly the work of the clerk, done while I examined the
files. My weapons were all gone, every one. I was uncertain
of the role of the peep-show proprietor in all this except that
clearly he wished to be rid of me and all the time I was
waiting for him, he had himself been blindly spying on
everything I did.
All the cells in the Police Station were filled with reality
offenders so they took me to the Town Hall and put me in
the Mayor’s office. They had tied up my wounded shoulder
in a rough sling and treated it only with a douse of dilute
carbolic acid but at least they were sensitive enough to let
me wash away Mary Anne’s blood. They gave the clerk an
overly melodramatic machine gun and posted him outside
the door, to make sure I did not escape. I heard the key turn
in the lock and the harsh, retreating clang of the heels of
their jackboots. After a while, I heard a cackle of female
laughter and then nothing more.
It was now night and the room was in utter darkness. I
was in considerable pain but a seething fury kept me from
despair. I knew I should sleep a little to clear my disoriented
brain enough to face the ordeal I knew next day would bring
but sleep was out of the question. Besides, I was ravenously
hungry and as dry as a bone. I felt my way to the bureau to
grope for the decanter of Mayoral sherry and discovered
there an airtight tin of Marie biscuits, too, so I munched
them all down, in spite of their earthy flavour. I pulled the
stopper from the decanter with my teeth. The sherry had
turned to liquid demerara sugar but I managed to keep it
down and it and the food gave me sufficient strength to seat
myself at the Mayor’s desk and look at my situation coolly.
When I did so, I found it hopeless enough to be risible.
The moon soon came up and since it was full, shone
through the blind over the window and let me see my
makeshift prison fairly well. I listened carefully but could
hear no sound in the corridor outside. I stood up, went to
the window and pulled the blind aside a little. The room was
on the second storey at the front of the building and the
window was flanked on either side by a pair of stone
goddesses. Anyone could have scaled that façade easily for
the stucco breasts, rumps, pillars and pediments which
covered it offered a multiplicity of foot- and handholds but,
on the window-ledge itself, I would have been visible to any
watcher in the square as if it had been daylight and, when I
let the blind fall with a faint rattle, the sound provoked a
volley of knocking on the door so I knew the guard was
wakeful. I looked around the room for a better exit and my
eyes fell upon the fireplace.
It, too, was flanked by a brace of caryatids who bore the
massive, brown marble mantelpiece on their serene
foreheads. In the grate was a screen embroidered with the
town coat of arms. Although my shoulder was badly
inflamed and I could hardly use my right hand, I managed to
move the heavy screen without a clang or rattle and I poked
my head into the fireplace. Looking up, I saw a disc of pure
blue sky on which shone a few stars. A light fall of soot
showered my head and I withdrew it but when I re-examined
the interior of the chimney, I saw that, although caked with
the soot of years, a series of clefts cut in the sides of it to
facilitate the work of the chimney sweep made a staircase
to the roof all ready for me. I could hardly believe my luck.
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 which 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 of 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.
The speech of the river people posed philosophical as well
as linguistic problems. For example, since they had no
regular system of plurals but only an elaborate system of
altered numerals for denoting specific numbers of given
objects, the problem of the particular versus the universal
did not exist and the word ‘man’ stood for ‘all man’. This
had a profound effect on their societization. Neither was
there a precise equivalent for the verb ‘to be’, so the kernel
was struck straight out of the Cartesian nut and one was left
only with the naked, unarguable fact of existence, for a
state of being was indicated by a verbal tag which could
roughly be translated as ‘one finds oneself in the situation
or performance of such and such a thing or action’, and the
whole aria was far too virtuoso a piece to be performed
often so it was replaced by a tacit understanding. The
tenses divided time into two great chunks, a simple past
and a continuous present. Neither contained further
temporal shading. A future tense was created by adding
various suffixes indicating hope, intention and varying
degrees of probability and possibility to the present stem.
There was also a marked absence of abstract nouns, since
they had very little use for them. They lived with a complex,
hesitant but absolute immediacy.
Besides her blackened teeth, Nao-Kurai’s mother – whom I
was quickly invited to call ‘Mama’ – used a great deal of
paint on her face, in spite of her age. The paint was applied
in a peculiarly stylized manner. A coat of matt white covered
her nose, cheeks and forehead but left her neck and ears as
brown as nature made them. On top of this white crust she
put a spherical scarlet dot in the middle of each cheek and
over the mouth a precisely delineated scarlet heart which
completely ignored the real contours of the lips, which one
could make out beneath as vague indentations, like copings
under snow. Thick black lines surrounded her eyes, from
which radiated a regular series of short spokes all round the
circumference. The eyebrows were painted out and painted
in again some three inches above the natural position,
giving her an habitual look of extreme surprise. Sometimes
she would also paint, in black, a crescent, a star or a
butterfly at the corner of her mouth, on her temples or in
some other antic position. I could see that the young girls
who came to peek at me were decorated in much the same
way, though less elaborately. This traditional maquillage
could not have originally been intended to repel landsmen,
but, however fortuitously, it repelled them completely, if
ever one chanced to see it.
Mama hid her coils of black hair in a coloured
handkerchief tied loosely over her head and knotted in the
nape. She always wore loose trousers nipped in at the ankle
with green or red cords; split-toed socks of black cotton
which allowed her to keep thonged sandals on her feet; a
loose blouse of checked or floral cotton; and protecting that,
a short, immaculate, white starched apron which had
armholes and tied at the back of both neck and waist, so
that it covered her upper part almost completely. The
aprons and also the bed-linen and the curtains at the
portholes were all trimmed with a coarse white lace the
women made themselves in the evenings, three or four of
them clustered round a single candle. I think it was a craft
the nuns had taught them in the seventeenth century,
before the river people signed their quittance to the world,
for the designs were very old-fashioned.
Mama’s costume was universal among the women. It gave
them a top-heavy appearance, as if they would not fall down
if you pushed but only rock to and fro. I realized that, though
I had sometimes seen the dark barges moving slowly along
the river, I had never seen this characteristic shape of a
woman on deck and later I learned the women were all
ordered below whenever they reached a place of any size.
Mama always smelled faintly of fish but so did my sheets
and blankets and the smell had soaked into the very wood
of the bulkhead beside me for fish was their main source of
protein. When she brought me my food, Mama never
brought me a fork or knife or spoon to eat it with – she only
brought a deep plate of a stiff kind of porridge made from
maize topped with fish in a highly flavoured sauce and I was
to discover the whole family habitually ate together round a
round table in the main cabin, each scooping a handful of
maize from the common bowl, rolling it in the palm until it
was solid and then dipping it into another common bowl and
scooping up the sauce with it.
Whenever she offered me my dinner, or dressed my
wound, or washed me, or smoothed my bed, or undertook
the more intimate tasks she performed without distaste or
embarrassment, she used a limited repertoire of stiff, exact
gestures, as if these gestures were the only possible
accompaniments to her actions and also the only possible
physical expressions of hospitality, solicitude or motherly
care. Later I found that all the women moved in this same,
stereotyped way, like benign automata, so what with that
and their musical box speech, it was quite possible to feel
they were not fully human and, to a certain extent,
understand what had produced the prejudices of the Jesuits.
The appearance and manners of the men were by no
means so outlandish, perhaps because, although
reluctantly, they were forced to mix more with the shore
people and so had adopted a rough version of peasant
manners and also of peasant dress. They wore loose white
shirts over loose trousers with a loose, sleeveless waistcoat
usually made from a web of small, knitted, multi-coloured
squares, which they donned when the weather grew cool. In
winter, both men and women would put on jackets of
padded cotton. Mama was already patching and refurbishing
a trunkful of these jackets ready for another season’s wear.
The men sometimes wore earrings and various talismans
on chains around their necks but did nothing to their faces
except grow on them flamboyant moustaches whose
drooping lines stressed the brooding shapes of the Indian
nose and jaw. Since nobody offered to shave me and I could
not shave myself, I, too, sported one of those moustaches
before I was up and about again and, once I was supplied
with it, I did not bother to remove it for I found I liked my
new face far better than my old one. The weeks of pain and
sickness passed with the remains of the summer; through
my porthole, I saw the shorn cornfields of the great plain
and the colours of autumn glowing, then falling, from the
trees. My best companion was the ship’s cat, a thick-set,
obese, skulking beast, white, with irregular black patches on
the rump, the left fore-quarter and the right ear, who
became very attached to me for some reason – perhaps
because I kept so still he could sleep undisturbed on the
warm cushion of my stomach for hours, where he made me
throb with the vibrations of his purr. I was fond of him
because he was painted up like Mama.
When Nao-Kurai told me I was well enough to go on board,
I saw that the entire boat was strung with chains made,
each one, of hundreds of little birds folded out of paper and I
learned this was not only to advertise to the other river
dwellers the presence of a sick man on board but was also
an offering to the spirits who had caused my sickness.
These birds increased my conviction that Nao-Kurai’s tribe
was descended from the painters in feathers. When I
learned more of their medicine, however, I began to wonder
why I had survived his doctoring for Mama had sterilized the
knife with which Nao-Kurai had performed his surgery by
dipping it in the fresh urine of a very healthy virgin while
reciting a number of antique mantras.
Nao-Kurai occupied an important position in the tribe and I
was very lucky to have fallen under his protection. Their
business consisted of the marine transportation of goods
from one part of the central plain to another via the
waterways and, since Dr Hoffman had put the railways out
of action, business was enjoying a boom. We drew behind us
a whole string of barges which carried imported timber up to
a city in the north where work still went on as usual. The
entire country was poorly afforested and we were forced to
import timber for building or even for the manufacture of
furniture from other sources along the sea-board. Nao-Kurai
owned the longest string of barges among all the river
people and his skill at the standard speech and a
remarkable flair for mental arithmetic had made him the
spokesman and administrator for the whole community. To a
considerable extent the tribe held all its goods in common
and tended to think of itself as a scattered but unified
family. When I lived among them, there were some five or
six hundred river people who travelled mostly in convoys of
five or six chains of barges each but I should think their
numbers have greatly dwindled since then and perhaps by
now they have all abandoned the river, the women have
washed their faces for good and they have become small
tradesmen on dry land.
Nao-Kurai was a gaunt, hollow-eyed man of somewhat
embittered integrity and, though he had a very quick
intelligence and, indeed, considerable intellectual powers,
even if he were extremely cynical, he was – like the entire
tribe – perfectly illiterate. When I was well enough to get up
every day, had enough phrases on the tip of my tongue to
chirrup morning greetings to the family and could share the
porridge bowl at mealtimes without spilling my food, Nao-
Kurai took me more and more into his confidence and finally
told me he wanted me to teach him to read and write for he
was sure the shore people cheated him badly on all the
consignments he undertook. When we stopped at a village,
he sent one of his sons off to buy pencils, paper and any
book he could find, which happened to be a translation of
Gulliver’s Travels. So, after that, every evening, when the
barges were moored for the night, the supper cleared away
and the horse attended to, we sat at the table under a
swinging lantern, smoking and studying the alphabet while
the boys, under strict orders to be good, sulked in the
corners or sat on the deck, too intimidated even to play
quietly, while Mama and two of the daughters sat in smiling
silence, making lace, and the littlest girl belched and
gurgled to herself like a faulty tap, for she was simple-
minded.
 I had been given Nao-Kurai’s cabin but he would not let
me move out of it now that I was well again though it placed
a great strain on the sleeping quarters, for all the family had
to fit themselves somehow into the main cabin by dint of
hammocks slung from hooks and mattresses spread on the
boards. The only other room in the barge was a cramped
galley where Mama prepared our meals on two little
charcoal stoves, using extremely simple, even primitive
utensils.
There were six children. Nao-Kurai’s wife had died at the
last birth, a boy now three years old. The eldest was also a
boy, who suffered from a hare lip; for two centuries of
inbreeding had produced a generation of webbed hands,
ingrowing eyelashes, lobeless ears, a number of other slight
deformities and, Nao-Kurai told me, a high rate of idiocy. The
youngest daughter was five years old and still could only
crawl. But his other children were strong and healthy
enough. I still remember the two elder boys, strapping,
handsome lads, diving into the river every morning to wash.
But I could not tell what the girls looked like because of their
thick, white crust. Even the five-year-old was painted over,
although she drooled so much it made the red and white
grease run comically together. The next girl was seven and
the eldest nine. Though this one, Aoi, was a great big girl
and worked hard all day at household chores under her
grandmother’s supervision, she still played with dolls. I often
saw her cradling in her arms and lullabying a doll dressed
like the river babies, a knitted skull cap on its head to stop
the demons who grabbed hold of babies’ topknots and
pulled them bodily through the portholes, and the rest of it
stuffed into a tailored sack, to stop other demons who
sucked out babies’ entrails through their little fundaments.
And the sack was bright red in colour because red kept
away the demons who gave babies croup, colic and
pneumonia. But when she offered me the doll so that I could
play with it myself, I saw it was not a doll at all but a large
fish dressed up in baby clothes. Whenever the fish began to
rot, Mama exchanged it for a fresh one just like it so that,
though the doll was always changing, it always stayed
exactly the same.
That she showed me the doll at all shows on what close
terms I had grown with her for even with their own menfolk
the girls displayed a choreographic shyness, giggling if
addressed directly and hiding their mouths with their hands
in a pretty pretence of being too intimidated to reply. But as
the weeks went by, I grew more and more attuned to the
slow rhythms and amniotic life of the river, I learned to trill
their speech as well as anyone and I became, I suppose, a
kind of elder brother to them, although Nao-Kurai half hinted
at certain plans for me which would make me closer than a
brother. But I took no notice of him because I thought Aoi
was clearly too young to be married.
As for myself, I knew that I had found the perfect place to
hide from the Determination Police and, besides, some
streak of atavistic, never-before-acknowledged longing in
my heart now found itself satisfied. I was in hiding not only
from the Police but from my Minister as well, and also from
my own quest. I had abandoned my quest.
You see, I felt the strongest sense of home-coming.
Soon my new language came to my tongue before my
former one. I no longer relished the thought of any food
except maize porridge and well-sauced fish. Even now, I
carry the memory of that barge and my foster family warmly
at my heart’s core. I remember one evening in particular. It
must have been late November, for the nights were chilly
enough for Mama to have lit the stove. The stove burned
wood and its long chimney puffed smoke out above the
cabin in a homely fashion; it warmed us with its great,
round, metal belly that glowed red from the heat it
contained. Mama set down the bowl of stiff porridge on the
table and Aoi brought us the bowl of stewed fish. Nao-Kurai
said a few words of pagan blessing over the food and we
began sedately to ball our porridge to a firm enough
consistency to sustain its freight of fish. We ate sedately; we
always ate sedately. And during the meal we exchanged a
few domestic trivialities about the weather and the distance
we had come that day. Aoi fed the youngest girl because
she could not feed herself. The lamp above us moved with
the motion of the boat at the whim of the current and
rhythmically now illuminated, now shadowed the faces
around the table.
I saw no strangeness in the whitened faces of the girls.
They no longer looked like pierrots in a masquerade for I
knew each individual feature under the cosmetic, the hollow
in the seven-year-old’s cheek that showed where she had
lost the last of her milk teeth the previous week and the
little scratch the cat had given Aoi’s nose. And Mama looked
just as every mother in the world should look. The limited
range of feeling and idea they expressed with such a
meagre palette of gesture no longer oppressed me; it gave
me, instead, that slight feeling of warm claustrophobia I had
learned to identify with the notion, ‘home’. I dipped my fist
into the pungent stew and, for the first time in my life, I
knew exactly how it felt to be happy.
The next day we came into the town of T. and the girls all
went below when we moored beside the woodyard. Nao-
Kurai asked me to go with him to the wood merchant and so
I left the barge for the first time since I had boarded it. I
found I was walking with a rolling gait. I was able to
convince him that the wood merchant, at least, was one of
the honest shoremen, but when we went to the market to
get in stocks of maize for the long journey back down the
river, I was able to render the river people a service which
Nao-Kurai valued more highly than it was worth.
T. was a small, old-fashioned town so far to the inland
north that a few sandstone outcrops of the mountains lay
beyond the river. Yet here life seemed relatively unaffected
by the war and people went about their daily business as if
it were nothing to them that the capital had been cut off for
three and a half years. This sense of suspended time
comforted me. It made me feel that the capital, the war and
the Minister had never existed, anyway. I had quite
forgotten my black swan and the ambiguous ambassador
for I had come back to my people. And Desiderio himself
had disappeared because the river people had given me a
new name. It was their custom to change a given name if
someone had suffered bad luck or misfortune, as they
guessed I had done, so now I was called Kiku. The two
syllables were separated by the distance of a minor third.
The name meant ‘foundling bird’; it seemed to me most
wistfully appropriate.
In the market-place, peasant farmers displayed baskets of
gleaming eggplants, whorled peppers, slumbrously overripe
persimmons and blazing tangerines – all the fruits of late
autumn. There were coops of live chickens, tubs of butter
and cartwheel cheeses. There were stalls for toys and
clothes, cloth by the yard, candy and jewellery. A ballad
singer stood up on a stone to give us a vocal demonstration
of his Irish origins and a bear in an effeminate hat trimmed
with artificial daisies lumbered through the parody of a waltz
in the arms of a gipsy woman with red ribbons in her hair.
The market-place was full of the liveliest bustle and there
were enough Indian faces in the crowds of country people to
make us feel a little more at ease than we usually did on dry
land, for this town was a kind of headquarters for the river
people, for reasons I was to learn later.
First, we went to the corn chandlers and ordered fourteen
stone of hulled maize to be delivered to the boat; then we
wandered about the market making Mama’s commission of
purchases. As they thrust three squawking chickens into
paper bags for us, a man whose features and dress showed
he was one of the clan came rushing up breathlessly and
poured out a complaint as dramatically as Verdi.
Pared of the histrionic grace notes, it was a simple story.
He had brought a consignment of grain from the plains to a
seed-broker here. He had made his mark on a contract he
could not read with the farmer and now the broker claimed
he had contracted to carry a whole two tons more than had
now been removed to the godowns and our brother, Iinoui,
must pay the difference from his own pocket. Which would
ruin him. Tears ran down his brown cheeks. He was fat, old,
poor and quite at a loss.
‘This will be easy to settle!’ said Nao-Kurai. ‘Kiku here can
read and write, you see.’
Iinoui’s eyes grew round with awe. He bowed to me stiffly
and made one or two flattering remarks in the heightened
language of respect they used when they wished to honour
somebody’s skill or beauty, for they loved to abnegate
themselves before one another. So we went all three
together to the seed-broker’s. On the way, in the glass of a
shop-window, I saw the reflections of three brown men in
loose, white, shabby clothes, with tattered straw hats pulled
down over our oblique eyes, a deep thatch of black hair
above our upper lips and below austere noses that
expressed contempt for those unlike themselves in the very
whorls of our nostrils. I could have been Nao-Kurai’s eldest
son or youngest brother. This idea gave me great pleasure.
The seed-broker was a pale, flabby, furtive man. When I
broke into a flood of invective in the standard speech, he
began to quail already and when I demanded to see the
contracts, his blustering protests were adequate proof that
he was hopelessly in the wrong. I threatened to find a
lawyer and sue him for ten thousand dollars’ worth of
defamation to Iinoui’s character. Sweat beaded his
unhealthy-looking forehead. I had already developed a
marked distaste for the insipid colouring and limp bodies of
the shore people; they looked like the comic figures Mama
would sometimes mould out of the porridge to make the
idiot daughter giggle. The broker offered Iinoui five hundred
dollars’ compensation for his ‘clerk’s mistake’ and when I
told Iinoui this, both he and Nao-Kurai looked at me as
though I were a magician. With a good deal of instinctive
graciousness, Iinoui accepted the sum in cash but while the
broker counted out the notes, the two barge-masters
conferred together and then with me so that when Iinoui
had stowed the money away in the pouch of his inner belt, I
had the pleasure of informing the merchant that none of the
river people would henceforward handle goods for him any
more. Since the barges were the only remaining form of
internal transport, it was he and not his prey who now found
ruin staring him in the face. We left him shaking with
impotent rage.
Iinoui insisted I take half his profits but I would not have
done so had Nao-Kurai not told me that if I did not, I would
hurt Iinoui’s feelings. Then we went to a bar which served
Indians and drank a good deal of brandy and all the time
they both flattered me unmercifully, so I felt almost
ashamed. You must realize that, in spite of his quick wits
and native intelligence, Nao-Kurai was not making good
progress at his lessons. For one thing, he was far too old for
the first grade. After so many years of hauling rope and
heaving sacks, his fingers were too gnarled and stiff to
handle a pencil with sensitivity. And, for another thing, his
mind, which held the patterns of the currents in every river
in the country and remembered the sites and quirks of all
the locks on each one of half a thousand canals; his mind, a
fabulous repository of water-lore, folkways and the
mythology of the past; that mind which could calculate like
lightning how much freight a barge could carry or how much
coal made up a load – this crowded and magnificently
functioning mind no longer had a stray corner left in which
to store the Roman alphabet. Besides, he did not think in
straight lines; he thought in subtle and intricate interlocking
circles.
He conceived of certain polarities – light and darkness;
birth and death – which, though they were immutable,
existed in a locked tension. He could comprehend orally the
most sophisticated concepts in a flash but co-ordinate his
hand and eye sufficiently to form a linear sequence as
elementary as ‘the cat sat on the mat’, he could not. ‘But,
Kiku!’ he would say. ‘The cat sits there, upon your knee, and
though she is not the only cat in the world, she is for me the
very essence of cat.’ The very shapes of the letters led him
astray. He fell to musing on their angularities and traced and
retraced them, chuckling to himself with pleasure, until they
became cursive abstracts, beautiful in themselves but
utterly lacking in signification. Our evenings of study had
become a mutual torture. I knew he would never learn to
read or write. And his failure only made him respect me
more. My success with the seed-broker clinched a decision
that must have been growing in his mind for some time.
At last we broke away from Iinoui and went off to finish
our shopping, belching fumes of brandy at one another
companionably through our moustaches. I paused to spend
some of my new wealth on a bunch of speckled dahlias for
Mama and then I bought a cheerful silk handkerchief with
violets painted on it.
‘Is that a present for someone?’ asked Nao-Kurai with the
beautiful, tentative tact of my people.
‘For Aoi,’ I replied.
He had the chickens bundled in the crook of one arm and
a whole still life of vegetables crammed in his other while I
carried a cheese, a mound of butter wrapped up in straw
and a basket containing four dozen eggs. But still he
managed to reach out and grasp my hand.
‘Does my Aoi please you?’
We stood in the market and it was the middle of the
afternoon. The gipsy girl still danced with her bear and their
money box now glinted like a box of herrings from all the
silver they had been given. The Irishman had just embarked
on an endless lament for dead Napoleon and a few pennies
lay in his proffered cap. I remembered the city, the opera-
house and the music of Mozart. The voices of Mama and Aoi
were now to me the music of Mozart and as I remembered
the city, so I gladly said good-bye to it. The brandy I had
drunk and Iinoui’s gift and pretty speeches made me warm
and sentimental. And then Nao-Kurai might have been my
father, from appearances; and I loved him already.
The river people had evolved or inherited an intricate
family system which was theoretically matrilinear though in
practice all decisions devolved upon the father. The father –
or, nominally, mother – adopted as his son the man whom
his eldest daughter married. When he died, this son-in-law
inherited the barge and all that went with it. Therefore Nao-
Kurai offered me far more than a bride; he offered me a
home, a family and a future. If I murdered Desiderio and
became Kiku for ever, I need fear nothing in my life ever,
any more. I need not fear loneliness or boredom or lack of
love. My life would flow like the river on which I lived. I
would become officially an outcaste but, since I had signed
my allegiance with the outcastes, I would no longer linger
on the margins of life with a delicate sneer on my face,
wistfully wishing that I were Marvell or that I were dead. My
eyes filled with tears. I could hardly speak.
‘Yes,’ I stammered. ‘She pleases me.’
‘Then she is yours,’ he said with Arab simplicity and with
one accord we dropped all our parcels and embraced one
another.
As we did so, the gipsy girl flung back her head at the
conclusion of a fandango and I caught sight of her face over
Nao-Kurai’s shoulder. For a single, fleeting second, she wore
the face of Dr Hoffman’s beautiful ambassador and all my
resolution failed, for I would have followed that face to the
end of the world. But she raised her hand to wipe the sweat
away and it was as if she wiped the ambassador’s face
away. She was once again an ordinary gipsy girl, even an
ugly gipsy girl, with a wide flat nose, small eyes and gold
coins dangling from her pierced ears. So I knew my eyes
had deceived me but, all the same, a little of my glory
evaporated and I returned to the barge more soberly,
though Nao-Kurai laughed all the time from pure joy.
Because Aoi was only nine years old, I thought there
would be a long period of betrothal but everyone assured
me she had reached puberty and offered me visual proof if I
did not believe them. So I abandoned the last vestiges of my
shore-folk squeamishness and Nao-Kurai fixed the date of
my wedding for a few weeks ahead, the time of the winter
solstice, when we would return to the town of T. after a trip
to take a load of manufactured paper goods across the
country on the canal system for, beyond the town of T., the
river widened to form a natural basin where the river people
traditionally met to celebrate weddings, which were always
occasions of great festivity among them.
Mama kissed me and told me how happy she was. Aoi
jumped straight up into my arms as if propelled upwards by
the force of her own giggling; the middle sister shyly tugged
my shirt-tails and asked me if I would marry her as well;
while even the youngest seemed to drool with unusual
enthusiasm and all the brothers shook my hand and
murmured more reticent congratulations. They hung all the
barges in our chain with flowers made from golden paper to
tell the waterways there was to be a wedding and men from
every barge we passed came aboard to embrace me. It was
the ritual commencement of the ritual of adoption. Mama
and the girls began to stitch a very elaborate trousseau for
both my bride and myself and also to make lists of the food
they would need for the wedding feast. But when I asked
them what kind of dishes they would serve up, they giggled
convulsively and said it was to be a surprise.
Now Aoi began to treat me with a great deal of familiarity.
She came and sat down on my knee whenever she had any
time to spare and tweaked the ends of my moustaches, she
planted wet, childish kisses on my cheeks and mouth, and
taking hold of my hands firmly, inserted them under the
folds of her apron and her blouse, demanding me to tell her
if her breasts had grown since the last performance and if
so, how much. On the third night of our betrothal, we had a
special supper – oyster soup thickened with beaten eggs as
well as the usual cereal and fish. We drank this soup from
special cups with a pink and purple glaze. I had not seen
these cups before; apparently they were kept specially for
weddings. Aoi knelt down in front of me to hand me my
soup and accompanied her offering with certain verbal
formulae too archaic and complex for me to understand but
Nao-Kurai, laughing suggestively, refused to translate them.
For the first time I felt, however slightly, that they were
making my ignorance of their ways the butt of a private
joke.
Indeed, in a curious way, I had become less sure of myself
among the river people since that curious trick of eyesight
which made me put the ambassador’s face on top of that of
the gipsy girl, even though now I had an accredited part to
play in their opera. I began to sense, or thought I sensed, a
new kind of ambivalence in, especially, Nao-Kurai’s
behaviour. For one thing, he had dropped Gulliver’s Travels
over the side of the barge and announced, with rather a
childish glee, that our lessons were at an end. Well, I could
only be thankful for that but I could not by any means
interpret the expression of what I can only call incipient
triumph I sometimes caught in the fathomless depths of his
brown eyes, which were shaped like commas and, as I
already knew, in no way expressed his soul. But the
principal source of my unease was just this: the betrothal
and subsequent marriage already involved me in a whole
intricate web of ritual which I knew I must negotiate
unerringly – and yet my new almost-father seemed to take a
strange pleasure in refusing to give me any clues as to how
to traverse it. I already guessed it was part of my function to
enthusiastically massage my fiancée’s breasts whenever
she offered them to me, even if it were in front of
everybody. I assumed by the presence of the oysters that
the soup was an aphrodisiac so I drank the three bowls she
gave me, smacking my lips ostentatiously, and then I
guessed I ought to ask for more. The entire cabin rocked
with mirth so I knew my guess was correct and, as I
expected, a little scrabbling knock came on my door some
time past midnight.
‘Who’s there?’ I said softly.
‘A poor girl a-shivering with cold this night,’ she answered
in the voice of a child who recites a poem she has learned
by heart. Her diction was as old-fashioned as her invitation
to soup but this time I understood her perfectly and got up
to let her in.
She had washed off the paint for the night, tied up her
hair in pigtails with yellow bows and put on a plain white
nightdress that reminded me of poor Mary Anne, whom I
would much rather have forgotten. However, I was touched
to see she still clutched her fishdoll by the tail of its red
night-shirt; she must have brought it with her out of habit,
for company. She scampered immediately to my bed and
jumped between the sheets, arranging her doll neatly with
its gills on the white-frilled pillow beside her. She was rather
more solemn than usual but still she seemed to have
studied every word and movement from a book of manners.
Mama must have taught her everything. When I climbed
into the bed beside her, she snuggled very prettily in my
arms, reached down for my penis in a very businesslike way
and began to stroke it with very considerable dexterity.
Now the sexual mores of the river people were a closed
book to me though I felt I could learn them very quickly
once I had started; but in this particular situation I simply
did not know if actual coitus was expected of me. The
heating soup seemed to indicate it was but somehow I
thought Aoi would not have been quite so forward in her
manner unless it was not. My increasing excitement under
her diabolically cunning little fingers made it all the more
difficult to decide but when I turned her emphatically over
on to her plump backside, she let out an unpremeditated
caw of shock and affront so I stopped what I was about
immediately and lay quite still, contenting myself with
tweaking her pubescent nipples, until, by her own unaided
work, she procured me an orgasm I was quite unable to
forestall even though, as I sobbed it out, I wondered
anxiously that it might be out of order and the whole
exercise had been designed to test my stoicism, for they set
great store by stoicism and never wept at funerals.
But Aoi seemed quite content and curled up to sleep until
Mama brought us our breakfast in bed next morning, with
many expressions of approval and kisses for both of us.
When I met Nao-Kurai on deck, he roared with approbation
and clapped my back. Since I was half expecting him to be
sullen because I had passed another test successfully, I was
more taken aback than ever.
The next night there was no soup but Aoi visited me
promptly on the hour. This time she wore green bows on her
pigtails. I guessed that Mama, Nao-Kurai and probably the
entire family had their ears pressed to the bulwark in order
to miss no sound we made and it was probably my duty to
come as noisily as possible; so I did. This time she allowed
me to caress her diminutive slit and I found, to my
astonishment, her clitoris was as long as my little finger.
This genuinely puzzled me. I had never encountered
anything quite like it and, though I was sure it was against
the rules, I decided to ask Mama about it the very next day. I
thought she was more likely to explain the phenomenon to
me than her son was, for she showed – so far as I could tell –
nothing but honest pleasure at the impending marriage.
I trapped her by herself, for a wonder, as she prepared
some savoury messes for our lunch and she embarked on a
warbling recitative clotted with archaisms and references to
traditions of unspeakable antiquity which boiled down to the
following: it was the custom for mothers of young girls to
manipulate their daughters’ private parts for a regulation
hour a day from babyhood upwards, coaxing the sensitive
little projection until it attained lengths the river people
considered both aesthetically and sexually desirable. The
techniques of these maternal caresses were handed down
from mother to mother but, when Aoi’s mother died, Mama
had undertaken the indispensable handling of her
granddaughters and felt a justifiable pride in having done so
well by the girls. She asked me, had she not achieved
wonders? And in all sincerity I answered, yes. The origins of
this elongatory practice were lost in the mists of myth and
ritual; she used the pentatonic phrase that meant ‘snake’ at
one point and there were extraordinary snakes in their
mythology. But the practice itself was, perhaps, an
equivalent of the circumcision ceremonies among the
males. Nao-Kurai had told me that the inevitable
circumcision always took place without exception in mass
surgical ceremonies when a boy reached the age of twelve
and, for three weeks after the operation, the barges on
which the boys who underwent it lived flew a number of
bright red paper kites from flagpoles. Fortunately, the nuns
had had me tidied up in that way when I was far too young
to notice so I was spared the fear that a belated knife would
descend on my foreskin before I could be married.
When she saw my curiosity about these customs, perhaps
she wondered if I thought she might be lying to conceal a
natural deformity of her granddaughter’s, so Mama closed
the galley door and told me to turn my back. I heard the
slithering of garments and, when she told me to look again,
she had taken off her trousers and, with those elegant
gestures of refined invitation which always moved me so
much, she invited me to inspect her own projection, which
formed a splendid, quivering growth at the head of the dark
red nether lips. The skin of her thighs was still supple and I
realized I was quite unable to guess how old she was or
even whether she was still attractive because of her white
paint. Since all the river women married at puberty, she
need not be older than her late forties and when I
experimentally caressed her, I found she was already slick
with secretions. She twittered a few words of admonition
but, at the same time, slid fast the wooden bolt on the
galley door and took me against the bulwark with a great
deal of gasping, while a pan of shrimp danced and
spluttered on the charcoal stove.
I experienced an almost instantaneous regret as soon as
the act was over for I could hardly imagine there was any
society in the world which would not think that gaining
carnal knowledge of one’s hostess and foster grandmother
was a gross abuse of hospitality but Mama, smiling (as far
as I could tell), sighing and fluttering butterfly kisses all over
my remorseful face, told me she had not enjoyed sex since
the last circumcision festival in the town of T., the previous
April, and that was a very long time ago; that my
performance, although improvised, had been spirited
enough to give her a great deal of pleasure; and that she
was always available in the galley every morning after
breakfast and before lunch. Then she wiped us both dry with
a handtowel, put on her trousers again and turned her
attention back to the shrimp, which had scorched a little.
I went to lie down on my bunk for a while and examined
the situation. Once again, I thought I had gone down a
snake when in fact I was climbing up a ladder. Now I had
acquired a very powerful ally indeed. Mama’s kindness to
me increased enormously. The breakfast she brought Aoi
and me included, now, all manner of specially juicy tidbits,
such as grilled eel. Sometimes I heard her fluting my praises
to her son when they were alone together. The promiscuity I
had inherited from my mother, so often an embarrassment
in the past, was standing me in very good stead. Indeed, I
was growing almost reconciled to mothers.
I thought that night I would come to grips with my child
bride because she was wearing purple ribbons but she
moved on to fellatio and so it went. Mama confirmed my
suspicion that actual intercourse was forbidden until the
wedding night itself, so the groom would still have some
first fruits to pluck, and those nights of autumn passed in
elaborate love play with my erotic, giggling toy, every night
adorned with different coloured bows, while in the mornings
I screwed the toy’s grandmother up against the wall. I
began to feel like a love slave. They fed me very rich food
and nobody called on me to perform any tasks on shipboard
at all except occasionally to check bills for loading or bills for
purchases for, after we delivered our paper goods, were
honestly paid for them and turned about for the return
journey to the town of T., Nao-Kurai began to lay in
sumptuous stocks for the wedding. He bought five dozen
jars of the very sweet wine they make in this part of the
country from plums and honey; a ten gallon cask of raw
brandy; a fifteen pound drum of dried apricots; and all
manner of other things, including a live sheep which would
be slaughtered for the feast. The dry goods were stored
down below in the hold but the sheep was tethered to the
deck of the barge which followed us and given boiled barley
and oats to eat. It grew fatter as one looked at it, until it was
almost too fat to bleat. But when I asked if it was to be the
main course, roasted whole as a pièce de résistance, they
said, no; there would be something even better. But they
would not tell me what it was because, they said, they
wanted to astonish me. Then they would laugh softly.
So we drifted back past the melancholy landscape of early
winter, through terrain so flat the light fell from an excess of
sky with a peculiar, visionary intensity. These would be the
last days of freedom of choice; I could still choose to leave
them now, but after my wedding the barge and the river
would have to be sufficient world for me and though I was
kept busy enough oscillating between my two lovers, I
sometimes felt an acrid nostalgia for those ugly streets
where nobody cared for me and I cared for nothing, though I
instantly quenched this nostalgia for I thought it must be
nothing but a marsh-fire of the mind. There was no news at
all of the capital in any of the villages along the canals and
although at nights extraordinary lights played around the
mountains we now approached again, there were no other
signs of the war itself in this forgotten, pastoral country
which seemed to have turned so deeply inward on itself
under the great burden of sky which pressed down upon it
that nothing outside itself had any significance. This was the
sky which covered the world of the river people. I felt
intolerably exposed to those enormous heavens. In self-
defence, I became introspective but the more I brooded, the
more convinced I grew that this meandering formalization of
life they offered me was worth the trouble of the risky ritual
of induction into it.
The canals were full of barges and by the time we reached
the great river, we headed a long convoy all flying paper
streamers. In the evenings other barge-masters joined us in
the cabin while the women were relegated to the galley or
to my little bedroom and we drank brandy, smoked our
corn-cob pipes and I listened to many discussions of their
politics, which seemed mainly to turn on the maintenance of
the barges and the arrangements of the adoption-marriages
which linked them all together. More than ever I realized
their life was a complex sub-universe with its own inherent
order as inaccessible to the outsider as it went unnoticed by
him. And yet they were somehow frozen in themselves.
Even the method of pouring a drink was hallowed by
tradition and never altered. One held out one’s glass to the
offered jug, then took the jug after one’s own glass was
filled and filled the other’s glass, so nobody ever poured out
a drink for himself. The community spirit reigned among
them to that extent! And in this lack of self, I began to sense
a singular incapacity for being, that sad, self-imposed
limitation of experience I recognized in myself and must
also, like my cheekbones, be my inheritance from the
Indians. And yet I knew it was in me and though I felt
constraint, I was learning to love that constraint. Nao-Kurai
treated me with overt pride, yet more than ever I sensed an
undertow of veiled hostility until I wondered if it were simply
this – he was scared that, at the last moment, I would get
away from him.
So we entered the town of T. again and did the last of our
festival shopping in a market full of tinsel, Christmas trees
and other souvenirs of a festival we ourselves were too
pagan to comprehend. There were posters everywhere
advertising a fair that would come to town on Christmas Eve
and the church announced it would celebrate Midnight Mass
but we would burn our candles only to the primordial spirits
of the solstice whose roots lay in the turn of the seasons and
the principle of fertility. It was, said Nao-Kurai, the most
suitable time for a wedding. This time we took no orders in
the town but sailed further up the river a little way to the
basin, where it seemed all the barges in the world were
waiting for us, garlanded with paper emblems and each one
flying a blaze of paper candle-lanterns decorated with
phallic symbols in my honour, for tomorrow was my wedding
day.
For inscrutable, hieratic reasons, Aoi did not come to my
bed that night and the winter moon shone so brightly
through the white curtains at my porthole that it hurt my
eyes and I could not sleep. At last I went up on deck and
found Nao-Kurai, wakeful too, was sitting on a coil of rope
beneath a great cloud of pipe-smoke, sipping at a jug of
brandy decanted from his big barrel. He seemed pleased to
see me, though he did not greet me by name. He fetched
me a glass and poured me a drink. I could tell by the way he
walked to the galley that he had already been drinking on
his own for some time.
For a long time, we watched the moonlight on the water
together in silence. Then he began to speak and I soon
realized he was very drunk for the words seemed to drift up
at random out of a mind which had become a pool of
memory in which an idea or two rose up to the surface now
and then, like hazy strands of water-weed. As he went on, I
became less and less sure that he remembered who I was
and by the end of the story I was certain of it. Perhaps he
had mistaken me for the eldest boy or for one of the
bargees who had come aboard to pay their respects. He
spoke the thickest version of the river argot and used many
expressions that had long fallen out of common use but I
could make out the drift of his story well enough.
‘It was a long time ago – oh! such a very long time ago, it
was, before we got to living on the water. And then we used
to live in huts made out of down and bits of feather and to
make tough enough fabric to keep the weather out we stuck
them all together with spit, or so Mama’s mama used to say
and she never told a lie. Besides, she was quite old enough
to remember everything and she’d been hatched from a
parrot’s egg when she was a little girl, oh, yes she had. She
said so. She was old enough to remember everything and
she was such an old lady when she died of the coughing she
was bent right over like a snake eating its tail and she’d
eaten snakes herself, you know. I’m coming to that in a
moment.
‘She was so bent over when she died a great to-do we had
of it to straighten her out enough to fit her into a natural
coffin, oh, yes! what a time we had! But all this was such a
long time ago, all this when it happened what I’m
remembering tonight, it was such a long time ago there was
hardly any dark at night and, on the whole, it was a good
time, because there weren’t any shore folk, but, then, it was
a bad time, because we didn’t know how to make fire, did
we. So it was always a wee bit cold and we couldn’t cook
nothing, of course, because of not having fire.
‘But it’s a lie to say we didn’t know how to make fire until
the black ships came! What a lie! But even so, in those
days, the days I’m talking about, we ate nothing but slugs
and snakes and crawly things that lived in the water
because if we didn’t actually live on the water, then, we
lived, so to speak, in it. Or rather, there wasn’t much
difference in those days, none of your harsh divisions. No
day, no night, but light sufficient; no solid, no fluid, but
footholds a-plenty; no hard, no soft but everything
chewable… everything all at once, just as it should be. Or so
my granny used to say. Except it was just a wee bit cold.’
Most of the last sequence issued from his mouth in the
weird chant of one who recounts details of a legendary past
and I was pleased to find more evidence that my family
might derive from the beautiful bird-people of antiquity. The
night air chilled me so I took another mouthful or two of
brandy. Around us the sleeping boats rocked gently at
anchor, each one decorated with paper garlands to
celebrate my wedding, and my wife slept beyond the
bulkhead behind me, probably nursing her curious doll in
her innocent arms. Nao-Kurai rambled on in a drowsy voice,
inadvertently flattening notes here and there, which subtly
altered various meanings, but I continued to listen because
these picturesque ancient survivals were, were they not, the
orally transmitted history of my people.
‘Now in those days, the women weren’t supposed to touch
the snakes, not with their hands, that is. But one young girl
picked off of the floor this head of a snake her father had
caught and it spat its venom right up between her legs and
she conceived straight off, didn’t she. So she had this snake
in her belly and it rattled around and writhed and she got
very uncomfortable and said: “Mr Snake, won’t you come
out, please?” And Snake said: “All in my own good time.” So
she went on doing her chores but the wonder of it was, she
never got cold, no matter how hard the wind blew. So Snake
said: “That’s because I’ve built my little fire. Don’t you know
what a fire is?” And the girl said: “Well, no. Not precisely.”
So out pops Snake from her hole with a bit of fire in his jaws
and she rubs her hands to feel the glow and jumps for joy
and says: “It’s good!” So he taught her the word for “warm”,
which she needed to know, see, because she’d never felt
like that before.
 ‘Well, she was just going to eat her dinner, a little bit of
lizard, that’s what she’d got for dinner, and Snake says:
“Why don’t you toast your bit of lizard over my fire? I’m sure
you’ll find it ever so much more tasty.” So she did and it was
the most savoury thing she’d ever eaten, much more
savoury than all those raw slugs and snails and things. Then
they heard somebody coming and Snake slithered back up
inside her quick as a flash and all was as it had been before.
Except, after that, whenever she was by herself, Snake
came out and she toasted and roasted her dinners and kept
lovely and warm all winter, too.
‘Now her father and brothers began to prick up their
nostrils and lick their lips when they smelled the lovely
savoury smells in the hut and they found some bones she
hadn’t picked quite clean and chewed the crumbs of meat
off them and oh! it was nice but they hadn’t the least idea
why. But they saw the girl round as a ball and still she
showed no signs of going into labour, though when they
leaned against her belly, they would have thought it was as
hot as an oven if they’d known what an oven was, of course.
‘So, one day, the youngest brother hid in the cabin trunk
and saw Snake come out of his sister and a big flame
flickered all round the hut and cooked her dinner. “What’s
this?” he thought and he jumped out and caught hold of
Snake and said: “Show me your trick or I’ll kill you!” But
Snake slithered out of his hands and vanished up the sister
before you could say “Jack Robinson” and Sister cried and
pleaded but it wasn’t any good because she didn’t know
how to make fire, did she.’
Nao-Kurai spoke more and more slowly and began to
leave great gaps between the sentences to be filled by the
mournful lapping of the waters against the sides of the
barge, while his head slid further down his chest.
Somewhere, a tethered dog howled.
‘When Father and the other Brothers came back, Youngest
Brother told them what he’d seen so they picked up their
big knives and cut Sister open just like you’d fillet a fish. But
Snake was sulking and wouldn’t show them how to make
fire. They teased him and bullied him and dangled Sister’s
head in front of him by the hair so at last he consented to
give them lessons. Every day, in the evenings, after supper,
he’d rub two sticks together and make the flame and say
“See! It’s easy!” But they couldn’t learn, no matter how they
tried. They racked their poor old brains and inked their
fingers but they could never learn as much as A, B, C, or
what spells “cat”, could they. So then they knew it was
magic and they killed Snake and cut him into little pieces.
Then they each ate their piece and… after that… they could
all make fire…
‘… every one of them could scribble away in fire in a
twinkling, easy as anything…’
With that, his eyes closed and he spoke no more except to
mumble, with intense satisfaction, ‘Do anything easy as
anything,’ before he passed entirely into a thick sleep. I
seized the jug and gulped down a great slug of brandy for I
was shaking though not, this time, with cold; I shook with
terror and despair. I remembered a story I had read once in
an old book about some tribe of Central Asia who ‘made a
point of killing and eating in their own country any stranger
indiscreet enough to commit a miracle or show any
particular sign of sanctity, for thus they imbibe his magic
virtue.’ The name of the tribe, Hazara, had once helped me
in a difficult crossword puzzle; now the remembered
information helped me solve another clue. If the bird-people
had wanted the Jesuits’ magic, they would have eaten the
priests to get it. As they would eat me.
All at once I filled in the suspicious gaps my lonely
sentimentality had refused to acknowledge. Nao-Kurai’s air
of furtive triumph after I had accepted his daughter; Mama’s
excessive cordiality; their suspicious eagerness to adopt me
when they knew, against all appearances, I was really
nothing but a feared, mysterious dweller upon the shore all
the time, one who had not all his life felt beneath him only
the shifting motion of the insubstantial river yet who owned
the most precious, most arcane knowledge they could only
gain for themselves by desperate measures. And I knew as
well as if Nao-Kurai had sung it out that they proposed to kill
me and eat me, like Snake, the Fire-Bringer, in the fable, so
that they would all learn how to read and write after a
common feast where I would feature as the main dish on the
menu at my own wedding breakfast. I was torn between
mirth and horror. At last I got up, covered my father-in-law
with my jacket to stop him catching cold and went silently
below, prowling for further evidence.
In the main cabin my brothers and sisters lay sweetly
sleeping and the moonlight mixed with festive lantern light
slanted through the portholes and shone on their beloved
faces. Because, yes, I am not ashamed to say I loved them
all, even the dribbling baby who could not speak her name
and peed on my lap when I took her on my knee. Mama and
my child bride shared the same mattress and when I saw in
one another’s arms the old flesh and the young flesh which
were, in some sense, interchangeable and whose twinned
textures was already part of my flesh, then I fell down on my
knees beside them, ready at that moment to pledge myself
entirely to them and even to give my own flesh to them, in
whatever form they pleased, if they thought it would do
them any good. I was almost overcome with trust and good
faith. I do believe that I was crying, young fool that I was.
And Aoi had her doll beside her; her hand clasped its red
dress. It was an inexpressibly touching detail.
Then the child shifted position in her sleep and muttered
something. As she stirred, so she uncovered what should
have been the scaled head of her baby in its white cap. I
saw there was no fish’s head under the lace but the tip of
the blade of one of the very large knives Mama used in the
kitchen. The boat swayed with the current and Aoi, half-
waking, drowsily clutched the knife to her bosom. With great
distinctness, she said, ‘Tomorrow. Do it tomorrow.’
Then she turned on her back and began to snore.
Perhaps the knife was involved in some bizarre ritual of
defloration. And, again, perhaps not. I sat back on my heels
and wiped the sudden sweat from my forehead; then I
realized I was not willing to take the slender chance they did
not mean me harm. But, all the same, I kissed their cool
cheeks before I left, first poor Aoi, who would have
murdered me because they told her to, a programmed
puppet with a floury face who was not the mistress of her
own hands, and then Mama, whose skin I had never tasted
before without savouring the odour of the mutton fat base
of her cosmetics. I do believe my heart came as near as it
ever did to breaking, that night – as near as it came to
breaking, that is, before I said good-bye to Albertina, when
my heart broke finally and forever.
I had nothing to take with me from the ship except
memories. I went outside and said a silent good-bye to the
stupefied figure of my father-in-law, who had tumbled from
his seat and sprawled beside the brandy bottle that had
betrayed him. As I let myself noiselessly over the side down
into the freezing water, the candles in the paper lanterns
began to gutter and by the time I reached the river bank,
they were beginning to go out, one by one.
The wind blew through my soaking clothes and the cold
woke up the old Desiderio. As I turned my back on the
barges and set my face towards the distant lights of the
town, I welcomed myself to the old home of my former self
with a bored distaste. Desiderio had saved Kiku from the
dear parents who would have dined off him but Kiku still
could not find it in his heart just yet to thank Desiderio for it,
as all his hopes of ease and tranquillity ran off and away
from him like the river water that dripped from his clothing
at every step.
 The clock in the market square told me it was a quarter to
four in the morning and the market square was full of the
booths and sideshows of the Christmas fair, all locked,
shuttered and deserted at this hour. I thought I might find a
little shelter against what remained of the night in one of
the tents and so I went down the canvas alleys until I found
an entrance held open by a rope, as if someone inside were
waiting for me. I recognized the booth instantly. This time,
the sign outside said: EVERYBODY’S SPECIAL XMAS
PRESENT. I went inside. He rustled in his straw.
‘Candle and matches on the box,’ he said. ‘And close up
the flap now you’re inside, boy. Brass monkey weather,
dammit.’
As I expected, I saw in the machine, rotating as on a pole,
a woman’s head flung back as if in ecstasy, so that the
black hair unfurled like grandiloquent flags around her. The
head of Dr Hoffman’s ambassador turned like the world on
its axis and one severed hand pressed its forefinger against
her lips as if to tell me she was keeping a delicious secret
while the other was extended as if to joyfully greet my
return to her.
It was titled: PRECARIOUS GLIMMERING, A HEAD
SUSPENDED FROM INFINITY.
 4 The Acrobats of Desire

‘If you’ve seen all you want, you can save me the candle,’
he said and I blew it out so that the only light was the
serrated luminous disc cast upwards on to the ceiling by a
small oil stove. I knelt gratefully beside the stove for I was
shivering while he, muttering, began to potter about making
a meal for me. I was surprised and touched by these
unhandy preparations. He opened a cardboard box, his
larder, and took out half a loaf and a heel of rat-trap cheese
on a tin plate; then he poured cold coffee from a bottle into
a chipped enamel saucepan and set it on top of the stove to
warm.
‘I had a change of orders,’ he explained. ‘Got to look after
you. Got to see you get there safe and sound. She came
herself and told me.’
‘She?’
‘The she of she’s. His daughter.’
‘Albertina?’
I had never spoken the name aloud before.
‘You’re smart,’ he applauded. ‘Oh, you know the nature of
plus all right’.
‘I can,’ I said, ‘put two and two together.’
 ‘Where’ve you been since you did for poor Mary Anne?’
But he leered and grimaced as he spoke so I knew he knew I
knew he knew I had not, in fact, murdered the unfortunate
girl but that, for some reason, I was now forced to pretend
that I had. However, I was too tired to continue with such
Byzantine perplexities.
‘Hiding,’ I said briefly.
‘They thought you’d most likely try to find me sooner or
later, if you were still alive, that is.’
He tested the temperature of the coffee with his thumb.
‘Seeing,’ he added with a certain smugness, ‘that I’m your
only clue.’
So he gave me back my quest but I could not think about
it yet. I ate his food and let him wrap a blanket round me for
I had taken a violent chill and, no matter how closely I
hugged the stove, my teeth would not stop chattering.
‘You mustn’t get sick, you know,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a
goodish long trip before we get there.’
‘I’m to go with you, am I?’
‘Oh, yes. I’m to give you a job as my assistant and also
identification: to wit, my nephew. You’ll drive my little new
old truck for me and put up the tent for me and oil the
machines for me and so on, for I am getting on in years and
not so active as I was.’
‘How long will it take to reach there?’
‘Oh, there’ll be ample time,’ he said. ‘He’s coped
wonderfully with time, hasn’t he. Worried about your city,
are you?’
‘Not particularly,’ I confessed.
‘He could probably use a smart young man like you in his
organization.’
He gave me a mug of hot coffee and I warmed my hands
on it.
 ‘But I do have my own orders, you know.’
My tongue tripped on the standard speech and, as I had
become aware of positive happiness among the river people
for the first time in my life, now I knew at last the flavour of
true misery for I would never speak their musical tongue
again. The old man cocked his head inquisitively and I
waited for him to ask me where I had been hiding but he
was attending only to what I said, not the manner in which I
said it.
‘Licensed to kill?’ he queried.
‘What is your precise relationship to Dr Hoffman?’ I
parried.
He motioned me to pass him the mug and took some
bitter sips before he replied. When he did so, his voice had
lost something of its querulous senescence, so that I
wondered to what extent he covered an authentic role in the
Doctor’s play with that of an embittered old sot.
‘I am not necessarily connected with him,’ he said. ‘There
are no such things as necessary connections. Necessary
connections are fabulous beasts. Like the unicorn.
Nevertheless, since things occasionally do come together in
various mutable combinations, you might say that the
Doctor and I have made a random intersection. He
remembered me in my blindness. I was blind and old and
had half drunk myself to death. He remembered me and he
saved me. He even made me the curator of his museum.’
There was a note of quiet pride in his voice that did not
suit the rotting old hut in which we sat and bed of straw on
which he slept so I knew he was of more importance than he
seemed and the Minister’s computers had known what they
were about when they put me on his trail.
‘His museum?’ I asked tentatively.
‘The sack… behind you. Look.’
 The sack was immensely heavy and contained
innumerable small boxes each marked on the lid with an
indented device so that the old man in his blindness could
inform himself of their contents by a single touch. Each one
of these boxes contained, as I expected, the models, slides
and pictures which went inside the machines and were there
magnified by lenses almost to life-size. A universality of
figures of men, women, beasts, drawing rooms, auto-da-fés
and scenes of every conceivable type was contained in
these boxes, none of which was bigger than my thumb. I
spilled out a mass of variegated objects on my lap, each a
wonder of miniaturization and some of scarcely credible
complexity.
‘The set of samples,’ he explained. He was beginning to
address me as if I were a lecture theatre. As I watched
them, they seemed to wriggle and writhe over my knees
with the force of the life they simulated but I knew it was
only a trick of the vague light from the oil stove.
‘I am proud to say he was my pupil,’ said the peep-show
proprietor. ‘If I feel a little resentment against him from time
to time, when my bones ache with the travelling – well, it is
only to be expected. I wasn’t even his John the Baptist, you
know. I queried his doctoral thesis. I mocked his friend,
Mendoza. Yet he trusts me with his set of samples.’
He leaned over and plucked out a handful of figures.
‘Look at them. Do they look like toys?’
‘Yes. Like toys.’
‘They are symbolic constituents of representations of the
basic constituents of the universe. If they are properly
arranged, all the possible situations in the world and every
possible mutation of those situations can be represented.’
‘Like the Minister’s computer bank?’
‘Not in the least,’ he snapped. ‘By the correct use of these
samples, it would be possible to negate the reality of the
Minister of Determination. Ironically enough, your Minister
seeks the same final analysis my former pupil made long
ago. But then the Doctor transcended it.’
He held out a bouquet of ferocious images of desire in my
direction. They seemed almost to leap from his hand, such
was their synthetic energy.
‘The symbols serve as patterns or templates from which
physical objects and real events may be evolved by the
process he calls “effective evolving”. I go about the world
like Santa with a sack and nobody knows it is filled up with
changes.’
I poured myself more coffee for I needed to keep my wits
about me. After all, he had once been a rationalist even if
now he were a charlatan.
‘I am very confused,’ I said. ‘Give me at least a hint of his
methodology.’
‘First theory of Phenomenal Dynamics,’ he said. ‘The
universe has no fixed substratum of fixed substances and its
only reality lies in its phenomena.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I comprehend that.’
‘Second theory of Phenomenal Dynamics: only change is
invariable.’
This sounded more like an aphorism than a hypothesis to
me but I held my peace.
‘Third theory of Phenomenal Dynamics: the difference
between a symbol and an object is quantitative, not
qualitative.’
Then he sighed and fell silent. I saw through a rent in the
canvas wall that though it was still night inside the booth,
the dawn began in violet outside; and then I fell asleep.
Now I was in hiding from both the police – for my picture
with a WANTED sign was posted outside the town police
station – and also from the river people. I passed myself off
as the peep-show proprietor’s renegade nephew. My new
identity was perfect in every detail. I tailored my hair and
moustache to new shapes and threw away my Indian
clothes, putting on instead some dark, sober garments
which came with my new identity. I guessed that in the
Minister’s reckoning I was listed dead, among the casualties
of the war, and that was why Dr Hoffman was taking such
pains over me but all I had to do was to hide in the shadows
of the booth, polish the lenses of the machines, watch my
master arrange each day’s fresh, disquieting spectacles and
listen to the various accounts of his former pupil’s activities
that he gave me in the evenings as we sat beside the stove
after our business was done for the day.
I was not competent, then, to comment on any of the
information I received and I am not competent to do so now,
even though I have seen the laboratories themselves, the
generators and even the inscrutable doctor himself, at work
among them with the awful conviction of a demiurge. But
from the notes I made at the time, I extracted the following
unlikely hints as to the intellectual principles underpinning
the Doctor’s manifestations.
His main principles were indeed as follows: everything it is
possible to imagine can also exist. A vast encylopedia of
mythological references supported this initial hypothesis –
shamans of Oceania who sang rude blocks of wood ship-
shape without the intervention of an axe; poets of medieval
Ireland whose withering odes scalded their kings’ enemies
with plagues of boils; and so on and so forth. At a very early
point in his studies Hoffman had moved well out of the
realm of pure science and resurrected all manner of antique
pseudo-sciences, alchemy, geomancy and the empirical
investigation of those essences the ancient Chinese claimed
created phenomena through an interplay of elemental
aspects of maleness and femaleness. And then there was
the notion of passion.
 In the pocket of my dark suit I found a scrap of paper with
the following quotation from de Sade written on it in the
most exquisite, feminine handwriting; though the message
was undirected and unsigned, I knew it was meant for me
and that it came from Albertina.
‘My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble
the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass; they
immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their
way.’
Yet I could see no personal significance in these words and
finally decided they must refer to the machinery of the
peep-show itself for I had even begun to believe that the
manipulation of those numinous samples might indeed
restructure events since, in a poetic and circuitous fashion,
they had certainly helped to organize my disastrous night at
the Mayor’s house.
But I was wistfully impressed by the grandiloquence of
both de Sade and the girl who quoted him to me for I knew
myself to be a man without much passion, even if I was a
romantic. If I once again existed only in the vague hope I
would one day see Albertina herself again, I could not
imagine this desire might make me incandescent enough to
glimpse her whereabouts by my own glow – let alone to
utilize what my instructor in hyperphysics described to me
as the ‘radiant energy’ which emanated from desire to blaze
a path to her. A blind old man, playing with toys in a
fairground, lost in a mazy web of memories of things he had
not seen… it was a case of the blind leading the blind, for he
could never have been a man who burned with passion
himself, either! So when he spoke of Albertina as if she were
lambent flame made flesh, his words rang curiously false,
although I could remember my dream of the
inextinguishable skeleton and wonder if she had visited him
in a dream, too, for he could only see when he was asleep.
He had formed a loose attachment with the fairground
people and so the old man, the carnival and I travelled on
together. I found that the peep-show proprietor, anticipating
my arrival, had rented a broken-down truck from the
Armenian who operated the wheel of fortune. This was his
new little old truck and I drove it for him as we moved with
our new companions from place to place, part of a
tumultuous cavalcade moving towards other towns along
the winter roads. On the road I was as safe from the Indians
as I had been from the police while I lived on the river. I was
as safe from everything as I would have been in the Opera
House, listening to The Marriage of Figaro, because the road
was another kind of self-consistent river.
The travelling fair was its own world, which acknowledged
no geographical location or temporal situation for
everywhere we halted was exactly the same as where we
had stopped last, once we had put up our booths and
sideshows. Mexican comedians; intrepid equestriennes from
Nebraska, Kansas or Ohio whose endless legs and scrubbed
features were labelled ‘Made in U.S.A.’; Japanese dwarfs
who wrestled together in arenas of mud; Norwegian motor-
cyclists roaring vertically around portable walls of death; a
team of dancing Albinos whose pallid gavottes were like
those of the luminous undead; the bearded lady and the
alligator man – these were my new neighbours, who shared
nothing but the sullen glamour of their difference from the
common world and clung defensively together to protect
and perpetuate this difference. Natives of the fairground,
they acknowledged no other nationality and could imagine
no other home. A polyglot babel manned the sideshows, the
rifle ranges and coconut shies, dive-bombers, helter-skelters
and roundabouts on which, hieratic as knights in chess, the
painted horses described perpetual circles as immune as
those of the planets to the drab world of the here and now
inhabited by those who came to gape at us. And if we
transcended the commonplace, so we transcended
language. Since we had few tongues in common, we mostly
used a language of grunt, bark and gesture which is,
perhaps, the common matrix of language. And as we rarely
had anything more complicated to say to one another than
how miry the roads were, we all got on well enough.
They were not in the least aware how extraordinary they
were because they made their living out of the grotesque.
Their bread was deformity. Their biographies, however tragic
or bizarre, were all alike in singularity and many of them,
like myself, were permanently in hiding from a real world
which they understood so badly nobody knew how much it
had changed since the war began. Sometimes I thought the
whole savage and dissolute crew were nothing but the
Doctor’s storm troops but they did not know anything at all
about the Doctor. Nobody had heard his name. They only
knew a little about themselves and this knowledge, in itself,
was quite sufficient to create a microcosm with as gaudy,
circumscribed, rotary and absurd a structure as a
roundabout.
I often watched the roundabouts circulate upon their static
journeys. ‘Nothing,’ said the peep-show proprietor, ‘is ever
completed; it only changes.’ As he pleased, he altered the
displays he had never seen, murmuring: ‘No hidden unity.’
The children of the fairground pressed their snot and filth-
caked faces to the eyepieces and giggled at what they saw.
Nothing was strange to those whose fathers rode the wall of
death three times a day while their mothers elegantly
defined gravity on a taut, single leg atop the white back of a
pirouetting horse. And they seemed to see so little of their
parents they might have been spontaneously generated by
the evanescent paraphernalia of the passing show around
them which, no sooner had it been set up, was dismantled,
piled up in segments on erratic trucks and shifted in its
entirety to some other new venue. The fairground was a
moving toyshop, an ambulant raree-show coming to life in
convulsive fits and starts whenever the procession stopped,
regulated only by the implicit awareness of a lack of rules.
‘First will come Nebulous Time, a period of absolute
mutability when only reflected rays and broken trajectories
of an entirely hypothetical source of light fitfully reveal a
continually shifting surface, like the surface of water, yet a
water which is only a reflective skin and has neither depth
nor volume. But you must never forget that the Doctor’s
philosophy is not so much transcendental as incidental. It
utilizes all the incidents that ripple the depthless surfaces
of, you understand, the sensual world. When the sensual
world unconditionally surrenders to the intermittency of
mutability, man will be freed in perpetuity from the tyranny
of a single present. And we will live on as many layers of
consciousness as we can, all at the same time. After the
Doctor liberates us, that is. Only after that.’
The toasting cheese sweated a few drops of grease on to
the flame in the stove so that it flared and stank. I filled the
glass he held out to me, watching as I did so the reflected
flame splutter on the cracked lenses of his dark glasses.
Sometimes he looked like an old, blind evangelist. As he
grew more used to having once again an audience, he
ordered his periods more and more succinctly and phrased
his lecturettes with more resonance. He started to impress
me not so much with the quality of his discourse as with the
awed wonder with which he delivered it. He often combined
prophetic fervour with sibylline obscurity. Since I always got
up before him in the mornings, sometimes I caught sight of
him waking up. It was always poignant to watch him open
his sightless eyes and blink a little as if this time there might
be a chance he would blink away the darkness forever.
Thrust as I was into such intimacy with the peep-show
proprietor, I could not help beginning to feel affection for
him and I found myself ministering to the needs of an
occasionally incontinent, always foul-mannered old man
with a generosity I would never have expected of myself,
though he made few demands upon me and those were
mostly upon my attention.
My tasks were simple and housewifely, for he did not allow
me to meddle with the set of samples. I assembled our
meals, swept out the booth, shook out our sleeping straw,
dusted the machines and, behind a spare pair of discreet
sunglasses, sat at the counter during his frequent absences
in bars, for his drunkenness was real enough. Then I would
make notes of the things he told me and try to tease out
from them some notion of the practical means by which his
former pupil performed his conjuring tricks, though this was
a very difficult task for the essence of the Hoffman theory
was the fluidity of its structure and, besides, I was
constantly interrupted by visits from the roving packs of
children and their elders also.
A clatter of scales announced the arrival of homo reptilis
for a bleak chat and several of my cigarettes, a whiff of
gunpowder and imported perfume, that of Mamie Buckskin
the sharp-shooter, while a more fragile and tentative
clearing of the throat told me Madame la Barbe was here.
Madame la Barbe kept her chestnut moustache to neat,
discreet, Vermeer proportions and it disguised an
uncommonly maternal nature. She would bring me a brioche
freshly baked in the oven she had installed in her French
provincial caravan full of plants in pots, pet cats, over-
upholstered sofas and framed photographs of kin. On the
frames of those of her relatives who were deceased she
hung rosettes of black ribbons.
I must admit that all my guests enchanted me and I, in
turn, enchanted them for, here, I had the unique allure of
the norm. I was exotic precisely to the extent of my
mundanity. The peep-show proprietor’s nephew was a small
businessman bankrupted by the catastrophe in the capital
and all those freaks could not get enough of my accounts of
the world of typewriters and telephones, flush toilets, tiled
bathrooms, electric lights and mechanical appliances. They
wondered at the masterpiece of sterility I remembered for
them as if it were an earthly paradise from which they were
barred forever. So I gave them an imitation of another
reality while the peep-show proprietor offered me far
stronger meat.
Proposition: Time is a serial composition of apparently
indivisible instants.
Since the inception of the mode of consciousness we refer
to as ‘the world’, man has always thought of time as in itself
a movement forward, an onward flow leaving only a little
debris behind it. Evanescence is the essence of time. And
since temporality is the medium in which this mode of
consciousness has itself been expressed, since time is, as it
were, the canvas on which we ourselves are painted, the
empirical investigation of the structure of time poses certain
acute methodological problems. Could the Mona Lisa turn
round, scratch her own background and then submit to a
laboratory analysis the substance she found under her nail?
No, indeed!
Now this analogy, a striking one, implies that all
phenomena are necessarily temporal in nature and roll
forward en masse on wheels at the corners of the four-
square block of space-time they occupy, shoulder to
shoulder and bearing always at their backs the wall against
which they all must meet that shooting-squad, mortality. Yet
this model of the world does not make even so much as the
formal acknowledgement of the synthesizable aspect of
time as was made to space by the introduction of
perspective into painting. In other words, we knew so little
about the geometry of time – let alone its physical
properties – that we could not even adequately simulate the
physical form of so much as a single instant.
The introduction of cinematography enabled us to corral
time past and thus retain it not merely in the memory – at
best, a falsifying receptacle – but in the objective
preservative of a roll of film. But, if past, present and future
are the dimensions of time, they are notoriously fluid. There
is no tension in the tenses and yet they are always
tremulously about to coagulate. The present is a liquid jelly
which settles into a quivering, passive mass, the past, as
soon as – if not sooner than – we are aware of it as the
present. Yet this mass was intangible and existed only
conceptually until the arrival of the preservative, cinema.
The motion picture is usually regarded as only a kind of
shadow play and few bother to probe the ontological
paradoxes it presents. For it offers us nothing less than the
present tense experience of time irrefutably past. So that
the coil of film has, as it were, lassooed inert phenomena
from which the present had departed, and when projected
upon a screen, they are granted a temporary revivification.
My student, Mendoza, offered me some investigations
along these lines to justify the many hours he spent each
day in the neighbourhood fleapits gazing at the panorama of
revived phenomena with glazed, visionary eyes. Once he
remarked to me in conversation: ‘Lumière was not the
father of the cinema; it was Sergeant Bertrand, the violator
of graves.’
The images of cinematography, however, altogether lack
autonomy. Locking in programmed patterns, they merely
transpose time past into time present and cannot, by their
nature, respond to the magnetic impulses of time future for
the unachievable future which does not exist in any
dimension, but nevertheless organizes phenomena towards
its potential conclusions. The cinematographic model is one
of cyclic recurrences alone, even if these recurrences are
instigated voluntarily, by the hand of man viz. the
projectionist, rather than the hand of fate. Though, in
another sense, the action of time is actually visible in the
tears, scratches and thumbprints on the substance of the
film itself, these are caused only by the sly, corrosive touch
of mortality and, since the print may be renewed at will, the
flaws of ageing, if retained, increase the presence of the
past only by a kind of forgery, as when a man punches
artificial worm-holes into raw wood or smokes shadows of
fresh paint with a candle to produce an apparently aged
artefact.
Mendoza, however, claimed that if a thing were
sufficiently artificial, it became absolutely equivalent to the
genuine. His mind puffed out ideas like the dandelion seed-
head his chevelure so much resembled but we did not take
any of his ideas seriously, not one of us, not any of them.
Yet Hoffman refined Mendoza’s initially crude hypotheses of
fissile time and synthetic authenticity and wove them
together to form another mode of consciousness altogether.
But we did not know that. We were content to laugh at
Mendoza. We laughed uproariously.
He dreamed of fissile time – of exploding the diatonic
scale with its two notes, past and present, into a chromatic
fanfare of every conceivable tense and many tenses at
present inconceivable because there is no language to
describe them. He produced sheet after sheet of
mathematics in an exceedingly neurotic script to prove to
me that time was amenable to the rigours of scientific
analysis as any other notion; and, indeed, he convinced me,
at least, that time was elastic for it always seemed to
stretch out to eternity as I read them through!*
His attitude to abstractions was this: abstractions only
were true because, since they did not exist, they could be
proved or disproved entirely at the whim of the investigator.
How his wild eyes flashed as he spoke!
By the end of his sophomore year, Mendoza was the clown
of the senior common room. We looked forward to his
essays much as London clubmen look forward to their
weekly Punch. How we chuckled richly over our port as I
read aloud the choicest tidbits! His classmates mocked him,
too. Only Hoffman, with his Teutonic lack of humour, listened
to the outrageous Mendoza with a straight face. In time, he
and Mendoza became almost inseparable, though they
made a strangely ill-assorted couple and together gave an
impression of vaudeville rather than the laboratory for
Mendoza sported flowing hair, abundant neckties,
herbaceous shirts and suits of black velvet while his
gleaming, impassioned gaze seemed to warn one to weave
a circle round him thrice before approaching him. As for
Hoffman, he was a model of propriety, well starched and
stiffly suited, one of his cold, blue eyes wedged open with a
monocle. His handshake was moist and chill; his smile was
alpine in its austerity and he always smelled of medicated
soap. He was already unnaturally brilliant and even his
teachers feared him. Mendoza was his only friend.
They worked together and they played together. Soon we
began to hear the most disreputable stories of their exploits
in the red light quarter. Now Mendoza had a streak of
Moorish blood and read Arabic fluently. He followed up
certain hints from obscure books and became more and
more obsessed with the nature of time in relation to the
sexual act. At length he devised a hilarious thesis
concerning the fissile/tensile nature of the orgasm. He
claimed that the actual discharge took place in neither past,
present nor future but precipitated an exponential
polychromatic fusion of all three, especially if impregnation
were effected. He submitted to me an end of term paper
titled, I recall: ‘The Fissile Potential of the Willed Annihilation
of the Orgiastic Instant’. It described an experiment utilizing
the talents of seven of the town’s most notorious whores
and, if it proved nothing else, it showed that Mendoza was
something of an athlete while his technical assistant, none
other than our decorous Hoffman, possessed, against all
appearances, quite remarkable sexual versatility.
Mendoza described his results as ‘the perpetration of a
durationless state possibly synthesizing infinity’. He claimed
their enthusiasm had set up such intense vibrations every
clock in the establishment burst its case. He submitted to
the university bills not only for the services of the
prostitutes but also for those of the clock-repairer. So we
dismissed Mendoza. When he learned he had been sent
down, he broke into the laboratory and smeared faeces all
over the blackboards. After that, we heard no more of him.
But Hoffman, of course, kept in touch with him. Indeed, it
was the beginning of the first great period of their
research…
And so on and so on and so on.
As he grew used to my continual presence, he gave me
such heady blends of theory and biography three or four
times a week and various forgotten tricks of the lecturer
came back to him. He often hunted for forgotten chalk to
draw diagrams on a blackboard which existed only in a
memory of the university and bunched his fingers in an
invisible academic gown. I found these gestures
unspeakably moving. I filled his glass and listened.
But none of these gobbets and scraps issuing from a mind
blunted by age and misfortune made much sense to me.
Sometimes a whole hour of discourse plashed down on me
like rain and I would jot down from it only a single phrase
that struck me. Perhaps: ‘Things cannot be exhausted’; or
‘In the imagination, nothing is past, nothing can be
forgotten.’ Or: ‘Change is the only valid response to
phenomena.’ I grew aware that Hoffman’s Phenomenal
Dynamics involved a hypothetical dialectic between
mutuality and transformation; the discovery of a certain
formula which speeded up the processes of mutability; and
that he had often spoken to his teacher of a ‘continuous
improvisation of correlatives’. But, for the most part, I was
utterly mystified. And I would toast a little cheese on top of
the stove, to eat with bread and beer for our suppers,
rumble vague, indeterminate sounds I hoped the old man
would interpret as those of a quickened interest and brood
upon the changes I myself had undergone.
‘Mutable combinations,’ he would say, swig beer and
belch. Then, scooping up a handful of magic samples, he
tossed them in the air as in the game of five-stones, letting
them fall with such solemnity I was almost tempted to
believe, with him, that the haphazard patterns they made as
they fell at the blind dictation of chance were echoed in
flesh in the beleaguered city which, he informed me with
irritation, was still managing to hold out.
Now and then I asked a few questions, though these were
mainly concerned with the facts of Hoffman rather than his
conceptual framework.
‘Why did he and Mendoza quarrel?’
‘Over a woman,’ he said. ‘Or so Hoffman once told me, in
a voice choked either with tears or with anger – I could not
tell which for by then, of course, I was blind and reduced to
nothing more than a cipher in his formulae.’
It was a long time before he told me that woman had been
the mother of Albertina.
‘And what happened to Mendoza?’
‘In the end, he spattered himself over infinity in a
chromatic arc, like a rainbow.’
Well, nobody would ever know, now, the cause of the fire
that destroyed his itinerant time machine!
And then there were my other distractions.
Madame la Barbe was as reticent as a young girl. She
raised the flap of the tent, deposited her gifts of cake,
smoking pots of delicious coffee and now and then a
savoury cassoulet on our counter and vanished with the
most fleeting of smiles. Without her beard, she would have
been a fat, aproned, hard-mouthed, grim-visaged French
countrywoman who never stirred one half kilometre from
her native ville. Bearded, she was immensely handsome,
widely travelled and the loneliest woman in the world. She
sat in her caravan and picked out sentimental songs on a
parlour organ, crooning the wistful words of love and longing
in a high-pitched, over-elocuted voice. Slowly, when she saw
I found her neither risible nor disgusting, she started to
confide in me.
 She had only the one dream: to wake up one day in the
town where she was born, in her bed of childhood, the
geranium on the windowsill, the jug and basin on the wash-
stand. And then die. I found her sympathetic. She exposed
her difference to make her living and had done so for thirty
years, yet each time the gawping peasants came into her
booth as she posed for them in white satin and artificial
orange blossom, the Bearded Bride felt all the pangs of
defloration although, of course, she was a virgin. ‘Each
time,’ she said in her prettily broken accent, ‘a fresh
violation. One is penetrated by their eyes.’
The beard appeared with her breasts; she was thirteen.
Never a pretty girl, always bulky and dowdy, she had hoped
only to pass unnoticed. Perhaps a neighbouring tradesman
in that grey, sedate town in the Loire valley where all the
chairs wore antimacassars and even the shadows fell with
propriety might marry her for her dot. Her father was a
notary. The daughter took her first communion with a blue
stubble of five o’clock shadow showing under the veil. The
mother died of cancer and the father took to peculation. He
was found out; he slit his throat with the common razor. It
was an utterly commonplace tragedy. She started to live
alone in the echoing, narrow house, hiding behind the
shutters. She was fifteen. Soon there was nothing left to sell
and the charity of the neighbours was exhausted. A circus
came to town. Trembling, in mourning, muffled in veils, she
visited the ringmaster and next day she was a working
woman. She celebrated her sixteenth birthday at the
carnival in Rio and had visited in the course of her career all
the fabled cities of the world from Shanghai to Valparaiso,
Tangiers to Tashkent.
It was not her beard that made her unique; it was the fact
that, never, in all her life, had she known a single moment’s
happiness.
‘This,’ she would say, touching the frilled leaves of one of
her potted plants, ‘is my monstra deliciosa, my delicious
monster.’
And her eyes would involuntarily stray to the little mirror
on the wall. She had fixed one of her black mourning
rosettes to its gilt frame. I visited her caravan with great
circumspection and never without a small gift – a bunch of
violets, candy, a French novel picked up in a second-hand
bookstore. In return, she brewed me hot chocolate and
played and sang for me.
‘Plaisirs d’amour ne durent plus qu’un moment…’
But she herself had known no pleasure at all. She was a
perfect lady. She had the wistful charm of a flower pressed
inside a perfectly enormous book. She always used to call
me ‘Désiré’. It was always refreshingly boring to call on her,
like calling on an aunt one had loved very much in
childhood.
In the oracular limbo between sleeping and waking, my
master once cried out: ‘Everything depends on persistence
of vision.’ Did he refer to the peep-show alone or to the
phantoms in the city? I took advantage of his blindness and
his sleeps to go through the set of samples and, as far as I
could, make a comprehensive catalogue of them, though
this self-imposed inventory was complicated by the difficulty
of ascertaining how many samples there were, since the
numbers in the sack varied constantly and the work of
classifying was almost impossible because they were never
the same if you looked at them twice.
I lost the notebooks containing the rough, inadequate list
in the earthquake which, according to Mendoza’s theory,
was already organizing the events which preceded it with
the formal rhetoric of tragedy. And, with reference to the
landslide, I do not know if I would remember Madame la
Barbe as so pitiful, Mamie Buckskin as so ferocious or my
master with such affection if I did not know, with hindsight,
how soon they were all going to die. However, I remember
that, however much the symbolic content of the samples
altered, they all came in one of three forms e.g.:
(a) wax models, often with clockwork mechanisms, as
described;
(b) glass slides, as already described;
and:
(c) sets of still photographs which achieved the effect of
movement by means of the technique of the flicker books of
our childhood.
These sets usually consisted of six or seven different
aspects of the same scene which might be, typically, a
nursemaid mutilating a baby, toasting him over a nursery
fire and then gobbling him up with every appearance of
relish. As one moved from machine to machine watching the
various panels of this narrative unfold each one another
facet of the same action, one had the impression of viewing
an event in, as it were, temporal depth. The photographs
themselves had every appearance of authenticity. I was
particularly struck by a series showing a young woman
trampled to death by wild horses because the actress bore
some resemblance to Dr Hoffman’s own daughter. There
were also pictures of natural catastrophes such as the San
Francisco earthquake, but I did not feel a shudder of
anticipatory dread as I handled these; indeed, I even played
through one set of theme and variations upon the subject of
an earthquake through the machine, when my master was
away drinking. And perhaps I should not have meddled with
the machines, just as he warned me, at that… though
Albertina told me her father always retreated in front of the
boundaries of nature, so I do not think I had anything to do
with the landslide, in reality.
From my investigations in the sack, I came to the
conclusion that the models did indeed represent everything
it was possible to believe by the means of either direct
simulation or a symbolism derived from Freud. They were
also, or so the peep-show proprietor believed, exceedingly
numinous objects. He would never let me put them in the
machines for him; he had even forbidden me to peek in the
bag.
‘Just let me catch you poking in my sack,’ he remarked,
‘and I’ll cut your hands off.’
But I was too cunning to be caught.
Mamie Buckskin lived alone in a rifle range. Every morning
she set up a row of whisky bottles along a nearby fence and
shot the neck off each one. So she practised her art. She
claimed she could shoot the tail-feathers off a pheasant in
flight; she claimed she could shoot out the central heart of
the five of hearts at twenty paces; she claimed she could
shoot a specified apple from the bough of a specified tree at
forty paces; and she often lit my cigarettes for me with a
single, transverse bullet. Her rifles were fire-spitting
extensions of her arms and her tongue also spat fire. She
always dressed herself in fringed leather garments of the
pioneers of the old West yet her abundant yellow hair was
always curled and swept up in the monumental style of the
saloon belle while a very feminine locket containing a
picture of her dead, alcoholic mother always bounced
between her lavish breasts. She was a paradox – a fully
phallic female with the bosom of a nursing mother and a
gun, death-dealing erectile tissue, perpetually at her thigh.
She boasted a collection of more than fifty antique or
historic rifles, pistols and revolvers, including specimens
once owned by Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday and John Wesley
Hardin. She spent three hours a day polishing them, oiling
them and lovingly fingering each one. She was in love with
guns. She was twenty-eight years old and as impervious as
if shellacked.
Imprisoned in the far West for shooting the man who held
the mortgage when he tried to take possession of her dying
father’s farm, she easily seduced the gaoler, escaped and
disposed of the sheriff’s posse by shooting them too. But
she soon grew weary of a life of crime for she was an artist
with her weapons; killing was only an effect of her virtuosity.
A Winchester repeater was a Stradivarius to her and her
world was composed only of targets. Sexually, she preferred
women. At one time she had worked a double act in an
American burlesque house, where, in the trappings of a
cowboy hero, she shot every stitch of clothing off her
beloved mistress, a fluffy exuberant blonde of Viennese
extraction whom she had abducted from a convent. But this
soubrette ran off with a conjurer and took up a fresh career
in which she was sawn in half nightly. After that, Mamie,
made only the more cynical by this brush with love, blazed
away by herself.
She loved to travel and joined the fair only to see the
world. Besides, if she ran her own sideshow, she could keep
her hands on all the profits and, next to guns and the open
road, she loved money. She took a great liking to me for she
admired passivity in a man more than anything and she
offered me a job as her straight man, to set up her targets
and let her blast hats and oranges off my head on stage.
But I told her my uncle could not manage without me. Her
strident vigour was both exhilarating and exhausting. Now
and then, when she could not entice an equestrienne into
her fur-lined sleeping bag, she morosely made do with me
and these nights were as if spent manning a very small
dinghy on a very stormy sea. Her caravan contained nothing
but racks of guns, targets and a tiny, inconspicuous
afterthought of a cooking stove on which she occasionally
cooked burning chili and the leaden biscuits she consumed
with syrup and a slug of rye for breakfast. Yet, sometimes, in
sleep, I surprised her brass features relaxed and then she
looked once more the wistful, belligerent tomboy who stole
her father’s Colt45 to roar away at rattlers but wept when
she shot the family German shepherd dog in the paw, in
error. And I occasionally caught her glancing at Madame la
Barbe’s beard with a certain envy. Mamie, too, was a tragic
woman.
 I see them all haloed in the dark afterlight of
accomplished tragedy, moving with the inexorability of the
doomed towards a violent death.
In the fairground, it was a fact of nature that things were
not what they seemed. Mamie once took me to watch the
pretty riders servicing their horses in the privacy of the
loosebox. We lay concealed in the hay as they conjugated
the ultimate verb below us. The whinneys we heard could
have come from the throats of either the stallions or their
riders and the violence of their movements rocked the box
so tempestuously back and forth that at every moment we
threatened to fall from our perch. The swaying paraffin
lamps which hung from the roof lent the lurid scene a
dramatically expressionist chiaroscuro so intermittent I
began to doubt some of the things I saw and I remembered
how the peep-show proprietor had muttered in his sleep: ‘It
all depends on persistence of vision.’ Meanwhile, my virile
mistress, reeking already with sympathetic lust, pawed and
clawed me so our position was all the more insecure and, in
that resounding box of passion, I must admit I did indeed
experience Mendoza’s durationless infinity. I should say I
substantiated his theory for I have no idea how long the
orgy lasted after we did indeed tumble into the morass of
satin limbs and flailing hooves and, had there been a clock
in the van, I am sure it would have exploded. I was also
disturbed because the scene had certainly some
resemblances to the sequence of photographs in the sack of
samples showing a girl trampled by horses; yet it was
teasingly different. Even so, I wondered how far I might
have prefigured it. Though often, the whole fair seemed only
another kind of set of samples, anyway.
Mamie broke a rib where a horse kicked her and went
about in an unbecoming corselet of bandages for a while.
Her eyes, grey as a rifle barrel, took on a curious expression
of surmise when she saw me, as though I had revealed
unsuspected talents during the evening, and finally she
astonished me by offering to teach me how to improve my
draw.
I discovered the peep-show proprietor was in the habit of
performing some kind of divination by means of the samples
though I never found out what it was, precisely, he divined
or forecast; nor how he did it; nor – for that matter – why.
Certainly he got no previous information about the landslide
from his investigations, or he would have run away. But he
would sometimes thrust blindly into the neck of the sack
and pull out the first boxes he touched. He would read the
braille inscriptions sometimes with a worried frown,
sometimes with shrill squeaks of glee.
‘To express a desire authentically,’ he told me, ‘is to
satisfy it categorically.’
I puzzled over this gnomic utterance for a long time. Did
he merely mean what he said – which was patently
nonsense? Or was he referring to Mendoza’s other theory,
that if a thing were artificial enough, it became genuine?
I touched his shoulder lightly to wake him for his morning
tea and in his sleep he exhorted: ‘Objectify your desires!’
This seemed somehow very important but I was not at all
sure why.
The third of my friends, the Alligator Man, gave me the
simplest pleasure. He was a Creole and sometimes played
the mouth organ and sang to me rough, dark melodies in a
uniquely savorous French. Born in a Louisiana swamp, his
affliction was genetic; he owed it to an unhappy interlocking
of the genes of his picturesquely fey mother, who rocked all
day on the porch in a white nightdress while her home went
to rack and ruin, and his picturesquely crazy father, who
spent his time building an ark on the bayou, for he believed
the second Flood was imminent. The Alligator Man spent his
childhood up to his neck in another part of the same bayou
because he found his own company more stimulating than
that of his family and so lolled all day among the weeds
under the drifting ghosts of Spanish moss, playing his
harmonica and doing nobody any harm. When he was
twelve, his father sold him to a travelling showman for the
price of fourteen pounds of nails and that was the last he
saw of his parents, who did not even bother to wave him
good-bye. He spent the rest of his life similarly immersed up
to the neck in a glass water tank where he lay somnolently
as a log, staring at those who came to stare at him with an
unblinking malice.
For a man who had spent most of his life under water, he
had a remarkable knowledge of the world and, of all the
fairground people, he was the only one with some inkling of
the war or the way in which it was conducted. He and his
tank had spent three months in a Gallery of Monsters in the
slums of the capital when the hostilities were beginning and
he had grasped to a surprising extent what was going on,
though he was as bored by mutability as any immutable
stone must be. In his tank he had learned patience, cunning
and duplicity. He had trained himself in the spiritual
discipline of absolute apathy.
‘The freak,’ he said, ‘is the norm.’
He was fond of the peep-show and sometimes came out of
his tank, leaving a watery trail behind him, to visit us,
moving from machine to machine, his flat feet sonorously
slapping the ground with the sound of flaccid applause. The
scales covered his entire face and body except for a small
patch of infantine softness, pale peach in colour, above his
genitals, which were perfectly normal. He could not bear the
sunlight and had shivering fits if he were out of the water for
more than two or three hours. As far as I could tell, he
suffered from no human feelings whatsoever but I grew very
fond of him for he had refined his subjectivity until he
believed in absolutely nothing. He taught me to play the
harmonica and finally gave me his very own spare one. I
think it was the first gift he had made in his entire life.
Though I was very pleased to receive it, I was sorry to see
the Alligator Man’s inflexible misanthropy soften a little.
So, with one thing and another, life passed pleasantly
enough and I was never bored. The travelling fair tacked
back and forth across the uplands, now teasingly taking me
high into the foothills and then withdrawing far back, almost
into the plain. But, in his sleep, the peep-show proprietor
murmured: ‘The way South lies along the Northern road’ and
I knew I must leave myself in his hands and dare not hurry
things, even when I realized the tentative beginnings of
spring were already here.
As I drove our ramshackle truck along the rutted roads, I
saw the fresh young grass disturbing the drifts of last year’s
leaves and Madame la Barbe shyly gave us little bunches of
fragile snowdrops which she crept out to gather in the
concealing dusk. It was now six months since I left the
capital and I still had no means of communicating with the
Minister. I tried to telephone his private number from time to
time but all the lines were defunct. Yet I felt a vague stirring
in my blood which was almost the prickings of incipient
action, as if I, too, were awakening with the spring and now
the cavalcade turned incontrovertibly towards the spires of
the mountains and the road began to climb all the time. We
were to provide the Easter fair at the highest city in the
country, a place where eagles were said to nest in the
steeples. Our wheels consumed the pocked asphalt.
‘Nebulous Time,’ said the peep-show proprietor with a
certain anticipatory excitement, ‘will be succeeded by
synthetic time.’
However, he did not elaborate on the statement.
At our last stop before a destination that would be a
terminus for all my companions, had they but known it, we
were joined by a team of Moroccan acrobats. There were
nine of them and a musician, yet somehow they all packed
themselves neatly into a slickly vulgar motorized trailer in
the latest American style, sprayed the luscious pink of
plastic orchids yet ornamented with various Islamic
talismans such as black-inked prints of hands to keep away
the Evil Eye. They spoke with others infrequently and then in
a French more dislocated even than the Alligator Man’s but
my French had grown very supple during my conversations
with Madame la Barbe and I managed to gain their
confidence sufficiently for them to let me watch them as
they rehearsed their extraordinary performance, though
talking to them was like gossiping with hyenas, for they had
a slippery viciousness of manner. I was a little afraid of
them, even though I thought they were wonderful.
All nine were the same height and shared a similar, almost
female sinuosity of spine and marked development of the
pectorals. In the daytime, they wore sharp, flared trousers
and bright shirts painted with flowers and palm trees, styles
more suited to Las Vegas or the Florida beach resorts than
to the arid, yellow peaks through which our road now took
us; for their stunning gyrations they donned costumes which
might have been designed by Cocteau… or Caligula – brief
tunics made of a network of gold crescents with a central
projection between the horns, so their amber skin looked
netted with hooked freckles and they did not look clothed at
all, only extravagantly naked. A larger half moon hung from
the left ear of each of them and they painted their eyes
thickly with kohl and curled their hair so tightly their heads
looked like bunches of black grapes. They gilded their finger
and toenails and rouged their lips a blackish red. When they
were dressed, they negated physicality; they looked entirely
artificial.
To enter their circular arena was to step directly into the
realm of the marvellous. To the weird music of a flute played
by a veiled child, they created all the images that the
human body could possibly make – an abstract, geometrical
dissection of flesh that left me breathless.
 When I told the peep-show proprietor about them, he
cursed his blindness.
‘The acrobats of desire have come!’ he said. ‘Nebulous
Time is almost upon us!’
But they had never even heard the name, Hoffman,
although four times a day they transcended their own
bodies and made of themselves plastic anagrams. I
suspected an arrangement of mirrors. I inspected their
arena and found nothing but sawdust in which ashed half
moon glittered here and there. Their act went something
like this.
A clumsy spotlight focused on their minuscule sawdust
ring. The flute wailed a phrase. A faint tintinnabulation of
their metallic shifts heralded their coming. They entered one
by one. First they formed a simple pyramid – three, three,
two and one; then they reversed themselves and formed the
pyramid upside down – one on his hands, whose feet
supported two, and so on. Their figures flowered into one
another so choreographically it was impossible to see how
they extricated or complicated themselves. They did not
give out an odour of sweat; no effortful grunt escaped any
of them. For perhaps thirty minutes they went through the
staple repertory of all acrobats anywhere, though with
incomparable grace and skill. And then Mohammed, the
leader, took his head from his neck and they began to
juggle with that until, one by one, all their heads came off
and went into play, so that a fountain of heads rose and fell
in the arena. Yet this was only the beginning.
After that, limb by limb, they dismembered themselves.
Hands, feet, forearms, thighs and ultimately torsos went into
a diagrammatic multi-man whose constituents were those of
them all. At times, the juggled elements composed an
image like those of the many-handed Kuan-Yin of the Four
Cardinal Points and the Thousand Arms whose multiplication
of limbs and attributes signified flashing action and infinite
vigour to the ancient Chinese; but this Arab image was
continually in motion, a visual synthesis of the curves and
surfaces along which any single body always moved
suddenly happening all at once.
And then, the pièce de résistance, they began to juggle
with their own eyes. The severed heads and arms and feet
and navels began to juggle with eighteen fringed, unblinking
eyes.
I would repeat to myself as I watched them the peep-show
proprietor’s maxim: ‘It all depends on persistence of vision’,
because, of course, I could not entirely suspend my
disbelief, although I might lay it aside for a while. I knew
there was more to it than met the eye although, in the
finale, so many eyes met and greeted one’s own! Such a
harmonious concatenation of segments of man, studded
with incomplete moons and brown pupils!
And then this demonstration of juxtaposition and
transposition was over. Each torso took from the common
heap its due apparatus back again and, composed again as
nine complete Moroccans, they took their bows.
I went to watch them whenever I could and I haunted their
tent. But I never managed to discover their secret.
The chill brilliance of early spring struck a dazzle of mica
from the sandstone enfilades of the mountains. They were
appallingly barren, for the scanty soil could support only
those plants that love dry, arid places, spiny cacti and low-
growing, warped, daisy-like things with stems wiry enough
to cut your fingers. The gloomy road took us to a gloomy
destination for the city, which functioned only as a trading
post, was as sullen as the perpendicular perspectives
around us. We crossed an enormous bridge above a mighty
river in the bleakest of valleys and saw the town perched,
itself like an eagle, on a precipitous outcrop of rock above
the rushing torrent. This town was full of malevolent saints.
Shut in on themselves in their isolation, they were an inbred
mixture of Carpathian Poles and mountain French whose
forefathers had fled to Europe in the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries due to persecutions of the
scrupulous sects of the reformed religion to which they
belonged. There had been both Calvinists and Jansenites
among them and the town itself had finally evolved such a
rigorous blend of the more mortifying aspects of both that I
was astonished they allowed a carnival there at all, for they
usually entertained themselves only with hymns of the
simplest melodic structure. But the high, rarefied air had
caused some singular mutations of their practices. After the
fast of Lent, when they drank only water and ate only beans,
they spent the whole of Good Friday without stirring from
shuttered houses in which they brooded on the inherent evil
of all mankind, and then devoted Easter Week itself to
exposing themselves to the temptations of the flesh. Which
the fair was judged to represent well enough. My cynical
friend, the Alligator Man, was delighted to find himself
defined as a siren and took to preening himself lasciviously
in his tank. To some degree we all became more voluptuous,
in self-justification.
But the townsfolk were kindness itself to us and brought
us all small presents of wine and cake. I soon realized their
charity sprang from pity. They thought we were all
hopelessly damned.
The peep-show proprietor industriously changed his
samples daily. They were all the most outrageous tableaux
of blasphemy and eroticism, Christ performing innumerable
obscenities upon Mary Magdalene, St John and His Mother;
and, in this holy city, I was fucked in the anus, against my
will (as far, that is, as I was conscious of my desires), by all
nine of the Moroccan acrobats, one after the other.
Those who had caravans parked them in a paddock near
the market square usually used for grazing goats and drying
linen; the booths were set up in the square itself. After we
closed up for the night, the old man, who had drunk a gift of
dandelion wine with his supper, nodded off to sleep by the
stove and I slipped out to watch the Arabs’ last
performance. The day had lowered with incipient storm and
now violent winds whipped about the square, blowing the
posters and bunting in all directions. It was so cold that only
the intense puritanism of the inhabitants kept them out
enjoying themselves. In the acrobats’ tent, the sober clothes
of the customers ringed the spangled contortionists in solid
shadow and their massed conviction that they watched the
devil’s work weighed the air with disapproval. The white
faces, arranged on the darkness in concentric circles around
the ring, were inexpressive as teeth in a maw although the
Arabs pelted them with a confetti of fingers and gilded
finger nails and when the last atom of flesh was retrieved
from the sawdust and slotted back into place, the audience
heaved a great, convulsive sigh that billowed the canvas, a
sigh of gratification that not one of them had succumbed to
delight.
They filed out in silence.
Mohammed and his tinkling brethren rubbed themselves
briskly with huckaback towels and invited me to take coffee
with them in their mobile home, an unexpected gesture of
hospitality I attributed to an appreciation of the enthusiasm
I had often expressed for their work. The storm had already
risen to a tempest and we sprinted to their van through
sheets of rain. Lightning flashed and all nine, in their
Heliogabalian finery, flared briefly like magnesium,
reflecting a glare so harsh and violent it wounded the retina.
And then the rain obscured them again.
A coke stove filled the van with choking warmth. Inside,
the van was as soft and excessive as a whore’s bed for they
slept three apiece on three divans piled with satin cushions
in lingerie tones and these filled up most of the interior. The
smell of sweat, liniment and spent semen was almost
overpowering. There were no windows and one could not
see the walls for they were covered with mirrors and
photographs which captured them all in every segmented
attitude so that, now stripped of their tunics down to briefs
of iridescent elastic, arranged upon their beds, they and
their reflected or pictured parts – here, a bubbled head,
there a shoulder, elsewhere a knee – seemed to continue, in
a subtly enervated fashion, the climax of their act.
Had I not known all along it was all done with mirrors? I
had never seen so many mirrors since the war began.
Mohammed brewed Turkish coffee in a brass pot on the
stove and they made room for me on a pink cushion
decorated with a mauve, appliquéd nude. The musician took
off his yashmak and crouched down on a strip of white
bearskin laid on what of the floor there was. He was a boy of
six or seven, quite black, perhaps an Ethiopian; he was a
eunuch. He seemed to go in almighty fear of his protectors.
He lay in an attitude of utter submission. They suggested I
would be more comfortable without my shirt and most
comfortable of all without my suit but I insisted on retaining
my trousers. After that, they jabbered to themselves in
Arabic for a while and I leafed through some of the many
body-building magazines that littered the beds until
Mohammed served us each a syrupy thimbleful of his
concoction.
We sipped. There was silence and soon I became a little
uncomfortable. I realized I was there for a reason and I could
hardly believe my intuition as to what that reason was. Out
of sheer nervousness, I found myself complimenting them
again on their virtuosity.
‘We are,’ said Mohammed, with a faint undertone of
menace, ‘capable of virtually anything.’
So I could not say I was not warned. The coke rattled in
the stove and the wind buffeted the sides of the van. With a
slithering movement, the castrated black boy took his flute
from the pile of his discarded veils. He sat down crosslegged
on a couch and began to trace on the air an angular, tritonic
tune which repeated itself over and over again like a
wordless incantation.
The mirrors reflected not only sections of the Arabs; they
reflected those reflections, too, so the men were infinitely
repeated everywhere I looked and now eighteen and
sometimes twenty-seven and, at one time, thirty-six brilliant
eyes were fixed on me with an intensity which varied
according to the distance between the images of the eyes
and their originals. I was surrounded by eyes. I was Saint
Sebastian stuck through with the visible barbed beams from
brown, translucent eyes which spun a web of fine, shining
threads on the air like strands of candified sugar. Once
again, they juggled with their hypnotic eyes and used their
palpable eye strings to bind me in invisible bonds. I was
trapped. I could not move. I was filled with impotent rage as
the wave of eyes broke over me.
The pain was terrible. I was most intimately ravaged I do
not know how many times. I wept, bled, slobbered and
pleaded but nothing would appease a rapacity as
remorseless and indifferent as the storm which raged
outside and now reached a nightmarish hurricane. They
stretched me on my face on a counterpane of pale orange
artificial silk and took it in turns to pin down my arms and
legs. I ceased to count my penetrations but I think each one
buggered me at least twice. They were inexhaustible
fountains of desire and I soon ceased to be conscious of my
body, only of the sensation of an arsenal of swords piercing
sequentially that most private and unmentionable of
apertures. But I was so far outside myself they might just as
well have cut me up and juggled with me and, for all I know,
they did. They gave me the most comprehensive anatomy
lesson a man ever suffered, in which I learned every
possible modulation of the male apparatus and some I
would have thought impossible.
And then, as if obeying an inaudible whistle, they stopped.
The wind and the rain still beat down but the acrobats were
done with their display though they showed no signs of
satiation or weariness, only of conclusion. It was as if they
had only been going through a gymnastic exercise and now
they once again towelled themselves, searched for their
discarded briefs and drew them again over the pistons of
their loins with the most offensive insouciance. A blubbered
wreck, I lay on the coverlet and I think that I was calling for
my mother, though it was probably Albertina. After a time,
Mohammed came, fed me more coffee and, I think, a little
arak and held me in a fairly warm and comforting embrace,
murmuring to me in his vile French that I had been initiated
– though into what I had no idea. The liquor stung my throat
and slowly brought me back to my senses.
Mohammed dressed me and then, after a murmured
consultation with his colleagues, dug about in a drawer
concealed in the lower part of one of the divans. The many
coruscating surfaces and the reflections of men were still at
last. The men themselves lay on their sides propped on one
elbow, with a childlike brightness in their faces as if their
innocence had been, somehow, refreshed. I felt a nervous
agitation. I longed to be gone but did not dare move until
they ordered me for fear of unleashing a fresh assault.
Mohammed turned to me holding something coyly
concealed behind his back. His g-string throbbed like a sling
full of live fish.
‘C’est pour toi,’ he said. ‘Un petit cadeau.’
He pressed into my hands a little purse of coloured, cut
and ornamented leather such as they sell to tourists in Port
Said. It was decorated with the picture of an Egyptian king
listening to his musicians and the sight almost made me
weep, to think of Ancient Egypt preserved in the gelid
amber of the time it had sustained for all of two thousand
years. Then Mohammed drew me gently from the bed and
wrapped me in one of those great, dark, hooded,
enveloping, desert Arab cloaks to protect me, he told me,
from the weather. And after that he put me outside the door,
sent me into the teeth of the whirlwind. It hurt me dreadfully
to walk.
The air was full of blown tiles, chimneypots, washing poles
and dustbins. The wind had seized the town by the throat
and particularly tormented the flimsy tents of the carnival,
tossing them about this way and that. The rain came in
black, wind-swept palls and the river below the city was
fearfully swollen, a concourse of angry waters. I walked up
the road, away from the inhabited places, as rapidly as the
storm and my pain would let me. I had a great need to leave
humanity behind for a while.
I stumbled over a scrubby field or two and discovered a
narrow lane which took me out on to a cliff overhanging the
river. Now I had to crawl, for fear the wind would blow me
into the gorge. The path took me down on to the face of the
cliff itself and when I saw the mouth of a small cave, I
instantly clambered into it, drew my Bedouin coverall snugly
about me and tried, as best I could, to compose myself a
little, though I was in the grip of a terrible reactive shock.
Presently I remembered I still clutched the purse
Mohammed had given me and I opened it. It contained
twenty-seven eyes, brown as ale and shaped like oblate
spheroids. I thought he must have plucked these spare eyes
off the mirrors. I was a little light-headed and, I remember,
must have spent most of that tempestuous day playing a
solitary but elaborate game of marbles with those objects,
rolling them across the sandy floor of the cave and laughing
with childlike pleasure when they bounced off one another.
About noon, I remember, I heard a tremendous, roaring
crash and part of my roof came down, swallowing up half a
dozen of my toys, which irritated me. But I paid no further
attention to the world outside until, one way and another, all
the marbles were gone, lost in ratholes or crevices or rolled
into the dry undergrowth at the mouth of the cave where I
did not have the patience to retrieve them.
 When the last one disappeared, I found I was recovered. I
felt light-headed and still severely wounded but I discovered
I was very hungry and thought my master, if he was sober,
probably needed me. Besides, the storm had spent its fury
and the rain ceased almost altogether. So I came out of my
cave to find that most of the track that had taken me to it
was obliterated. I scrambled hand over hand up the cliff
while the river gnashed teeth of foam in the ravine below
and all manner of refuse drifted past.
I saw there had been a total realignment of the landscape
during my oblivion. Everything had a blasted look and the
wind still bit and whipped me as I anxiously made my way
back to the town, as if tormenting me for being still alive.
And I found the town was there no longer.
The town had vanished from the face of the earth, leaving
behind it only its sandstone corpse as its own gravestone.
The crag on which it had perched was now as bald of
habitations as an egg and, smoking in the midst of the
turbid river, lay a mound of yellow rubble through which,
here and there, poked a steeple or a weather-cock. The
bridge began at its other end and then stopped in mid-air. A
jutting, truncated thrust of masonry hung over the valley,
endlessly about to fall, and all signs of the bridge on this
side were gone forever because the town had been plucked
from its foundations in the earth and tossed carelessly into
the ravenous water. Bathed in the grey, dying light of the
afternoon, the ruins were already indistinguishable from the
rest of the tumbled rocks in that hellish valley, through
which the hungry waters roared. When I looked at the river
more closely, I saw it was full of corpses, plentiful and
insignificant as driftwood. Saints and damned had died
together and only a few ravens of the peaks drifted above
the desolation on the wild currents of the air, uttering
inconsolable cries. Nothing human moved.
The catastrophe was too immense for me to take in at
once. I sank down on a stone and buried my head in my
hands.
 5 The Erotic Traveller

At first I thought the landslide must have been the Doctor’s

work, but no logic of any kind, no matter how circuitous,
could have justified that disaster. He could have gained no
tactical advantages by destroying that forgotten place.
Besides, his set of samples had perished completely and the
peep-show was the greatest single weapon in his armoury;
he would never have destroyed it. So the landslide could
only be a simple assertion of the dominance of nature
herself who, in the service only of the meaningless,
reintegrated the city with chaos and then, her business
done, casually abandoned it. It was an event of too massive
arbitrariness for me to comprehend but, as the rain-washed
light fell more and more wistfully on the gigantic tip of
sandstone that killed my bearded lady, my reptilian friend,
my shooting star and my blind philosopher, I became most
deeply aware of mortality. Even the acrobats of desire could
not put themselves together again after this dissolution. No
phantom dared float above the desolation, though the water
roared with as violent a display of energy as I have ever
seen. A stranger would never have guessed that, at this
same hour, the previous evening, the peak had been
crowned with prim streets full of freaks and puritans. Light
died on the rocks. I turned my back on a whole sub-universe
that had been wiped out as if with a huge eraser and on the
corpse of yet another of my selves, that of the peep-show
proprietor’s nephew. I stumbled away over the rough fields,
vanquished again, now beyond tears.
I was in altogether unknown country. After a while, I found
a rough farmstead built of great blocks of windowless
sandstone but they set a pack of lean, snarling dogs on me
so I could not even beg a crust of bread there. Then a fat,
white moon rose and I wandered down a rugged pathway
with only my bleached shadow for company, two pale
ghosts against a backdrop of mountains as sharply pointed
and unnatural looking as those outlined by the brusque
crayon of a child. I thought that if I wandered far enough, I
would certainly reach Hoffman’s castle. I was sure I only had
to put one foot before the other, indefatigably in the wrong
direction, as the old man had told me, and my instinct would
guide me there, although I did not know what I would do
when I arrived except to look for Albertina. So I lurched on
drearily, until I came to a defile through which ran a narrow
road.
At the roadside grew a withered tree and a night-bird
perched on one bare branch emitting a hoarse, rasping
rattle, the antithesis of song. I looked along the road in both
directions and all at once hope deserted me entirely for I did
not know which was north and which was south. Suddenly I
grew very, very weary. I heard, from far away, the shriek of
a mountain lion and wondered indifferently if I might not be
eaten during the night. The notion did not affect me one
way or the other. I sat down under the tree and drew my
hood up over my head for the high, thin air sang bitterly in
my ears and made my temples throb. I watched the moon
move across the white, cloudless sky and saw many
unfamiliar stars. I sank into a mindless reverie. I was
altogether drained of thought.
Presently I heard the clatter of wheels and hoofbeats
echoing among the rocks. After some time, a light carriage,
a trap of somewhat eighteenth-century design, appeared
upon the road and I saw two persons shared the narrow
seat, a tall, black-clad figure with a startling air of authority
and a slender boy who held the reins. The hooves of the
black horses struck sparks from the flinty track. The wheels
revolved more slowly. The travellers halted.
‘If you are an Arabian, why do you not sleep?’ demanded
the older man in the standard speech, which he spoke
fluently, though with a slight foreign accent and a very
formal intonation.
‘I fear my dreams,’ I replied and, looking up, met eyes as
ghastly as burned-out coals set in a face so thinly fleshed
the bones pushed sharply against the skin.
‘Then ride with us,’ he invited. I was willing to go
anywhere so I climbed over the wheel into the space they
made for me and we drove on through the moonlight in
silence. My host’s profile was as craggy and arrogant as
those of the mountains. He was in his late forties or early
fifties. His face was ravaged with pride and bitterness. He
wore a black cloak with many layers of capes on the
shoulders and a top-hat from which trailers of black crepe
depended at the back. He was ready for any funeral and he
carried a cane tipped with a silver ball that looked as if it
could kill. His diabolical elegance could not have existed
without his terrible emaciation; he wore his dandyism in his
very bones, as if it was a colour that had seeped out of his
essential skeleton to dye his clothes, and he never made a
single movement that was not a gaunt but riveting work of
art.
I discovered this road must be the low road to the
devastated city for soon it found the river, which had so
entirely encroached on it I thought we could go no further.
The frightened horses bucked and whickered but the driver
whipped and cursed them so we went on, though the water
swirled around their hocks. When I realized I would see the
graveyard of the city again, I moaned involuntarily.
 ‘Music!’ muttered the older man. ‘Music!’
But I could not tell whether he meant the sound of my
pain or that of the gushing swirl of the waters, which rang
out like a carillon. When this road also vanished under the
surface of the water, the driver urged the horses into the
river itself. The carriages floated buoyantly and the horses
began to swim. So we went down the river and drove on the
moonlit flood over the very heart of the ruins, which were
rapidly sinking under the tempestuous waves.
The driver exclaimed: ‘Oh! What an appalling tragedy!’
But my host cuffed him sharply and snapped:
‘Lafleur, do I have to warn you again against softness of
heart? Do as I do; salute nature when she offers us another
coup de théâtre!’
Then he took a flask from his pocket and fed me brandy.
‘Did you witness it? Did many die?’
‘The whole population of the town and also the members
of a travelling fair.’
He sighed with gratification.
‘How I should have liked to have seen it! And gloried in
the Wagnerian clamour of it all… the shrieks, the crash of
rending stone. And little children dashed to smithereens by
bounding boulders! What a spectacle!
‘You must know that I am a connoisseur of catastrophe,
young man. I witnessed the eruption of Vesuvius when
thousands were coffined alive in molten lava. I saw eyes
burst and fat run out of roast crackling in Nagasaki,
Hiroshima and Dresden. I dabbled my fingers in the blood
beneath the guillotine during the Terror. I am a demon for a
cataclysm.’
He flung down this speech as if it were a gauntlet but I
was far too awestruck by his misanthropy to pick it up. At
last we saw signs of a road again on the bank and soon the
horses were once more galloping on dry land, by the light of
too much indifferent moon.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked. He did not so much reply
to my question as speak out of the depths of some
unknowable reverie of his own.
‘The journey alone is real, not the landfall. I have no
compass to guide me. I set my course by the fitfulness of
fortune and perceive my random signposts only by the
inextinguishable flame of my lusts.’
That silenced me. The wheels of the carriage wound the
road on to an invisible spool and I began to feel the effect of
a strange heaviness exerted on me, a perverse, negative
fascination exercised by the gaunt aristocrat who sat beside
me, though a shudder went through me when I saw his
curiously pointed teeth for they were exactly the fangs with
which tradition credits vampires. All the same, he drew me.
His quality of being was more dense than that of any man I
have ever met – always excepting the Minister, of course.
Yet, apart from his mind, which was a bruising heavy-weight,
I think what made him so attractive to me was his irony,
which withered every word before he spoke it. Everything
about him was excessive, yet he tempered his vulgarity – for
he was excessively vulgar in every respect – with a black,
tragic humour of which he was only occasionally conscious
himself.
He was particularly extraordinary in this: he had a
passionate conviction he was the only significant personage
in the world. He was the emperor of inverted
megalomaniacs but he had subjected his personality to a
most rigorous discipline of stylization so that, when he
struck postures as lurid as those of a bad actor, no matter
how ludicrous they were, still they impelled admiration
because of the abstract intensity of their unnaturalism. He
had scarcely an element of realism and yet he was quite
real. He could say nothing that was not grandiose. He
claimed he lived only to negate the world.
 ‘It is not in the least unusual to assert that he who
negates a proposition at the same time secretly affirms it –
or, at least, affirms something. But, for myself, I deny to the
last shred of my altogether memorable being that my
magnificent denial means more than a simple “no”.
Sometimes my meagre and derisive lips seem to me to have
been formed by nature only to spit out the word “no”, as if it
were the ultimate blasphemy. I should like to speak an
ultimate blasphemy and then bask in the security of eternal
damnation but, since there is no God, well, there is no
damnation, either, unfortunately. And hence, alas, no final
negation. I am the hideous antithesis in person and I swear
to anyone who wants the word of a hereditary count of
Lithuania for it that I am not in the least secretly benignly
pregnant with any affirmation of any kind whatsoever.’
He paused to caress his valet, who, with the
submissiveness of the born victim, turned to him a face as
livid as putrefaction. After my first shock of horror, I saw this
was not a real face but one quite covered up with white
bandages. This pliant valet was almost extinguished by
subservience. His very walk was a kind of ambulant cringe.
He abased himself obsequiously at all times. He was only a
tool of the Count’s will.
‘Is there nothing in the world you do not to some degree
condemn?’ I asked the Count.
He was silent for a long time. I thought he had not heard
me and repeated my question; I had not yet grown used to
the utterly self-centred nature of his discourse. He only
answered questions when he thought that he had posed
them to himself. But when he eventually spoke, he did so
without his customary disdain.
‘The death-defying double somersault of love.’
The valet made some kind of repressed exclamation at
that, probably applause, and the Count sombrely rested his
chin on the top of his cane, fixing his eyes only on the road
before us. When I spoke a little of the war, I met such a
blank wall of unresponsiveness I realized the Count knew
nothing at all about it and the journey continued in the
silence of the morgue, until, as we were descending to the
plain, the Count spoke again.
‘I ride the whirlwind of my desires and I would give this
whirlwind, which has driven me to all the four rounded
corners of the globe, the emblematic form of a tiger, the
most ferocious of beasts, whose pelt yet bears the marks of
a flagellation which must have taken place before the dawn
of time.’
It was impossible to converse with him for he had no
interest in anyone but himself and he offered his companion
only a series of monologues of varying lengths, which often
apparently contradicted themselves but always, in a spiral-
line fashion, remained true to his infernal egoism. I never
heard another man use the word ‘I’, so often. But I sensed
an exemplary quality in his desperate self-absorption. I had
not met anyone who lived with such iron determination
since I left the Minister. He reminded me of the Minister.
‘Yet I am always haunted by a pain I cannot feel. Isolated
in my invulnerability, yet I am nostalgic for the homely
sensation of pain…’
A bloody froth blew back in our faces from the mouths of
the straining horses and yet we galloped on without sparing
them until we reached a strange place, one of those
flamboyant chapels built by the Jesuits in the fallacious
expectation of mass conversions among the Indians and
long since abandoned. The moon was dying but still fitfully
illuminated the crumbling façade and the bushes which
grew in the roofless interior, where a startled frog splashed
out of the pool of rainwater in the font when we entered
with the picnic basket, for the Count wanted to eat
breakfast. As if from habit, he pissed on the altar while the
valet set out the meal; the Count was always iconoclast,
even when the icons were already cast down.
 Out of the basket came a feast such as I had not eaten
since that memorable luncheon with the Minister and
Albertina. There was a can of truffled goose liver paté;
glasses of game in aspic; a flock of cold roast pheasant;
imported cheese whose savourous reek stung the nostrils; a
side of smoked salmon from which the valet shaved curling
strips; an exotic gravel of various caviars; an insulated box
of salad and another filled with grapes and peaches, while
an ice-chest contained a dozen bottles of Veuve Clicquot.
There was china and sparkling glassware of the finest
quality. The cutlery was of solid silver. The boy laid out an
incomparable fête champêtre and we all fell to with a will.
The Count ate very heartily; indeed, he ate with a blind
voracity that demolished the spread so speedily the valet
and I were hard put to it to seize enough to satisfy
ourselves, although there was so much. When nothing was
left but gnawed bones, dirty plates, peach stones, and
empty bottles, the Count sighed, belched and grasped the
valet. His mute’s hat tumbled to the ground.
‘Watch me! Watch me!’ he cried as though, in order to
appreciate the effect of his own actions, he had to know that
he was seen. But it was far too dark in the ruined church to
see anything. I heard the grunts and whimpers of the valet
and the amazing roars which accompanied the Count’s
lengthy progress towards orgasm. The vault of heaven
above us darkened and all the time frightful cries and
atrocious blasphemies issued from the Count’s throat. He
whinnied like a stallion; he cursed the womb that bore him;
and finally the orgasm struck him like an epilepsy. Ecstasy
seemed to annihilate the libertine and there was a silence
broken only by the pathetic whimpering of the valet until, in
the velvet and luminous darkness, the Count spoke, in a
voice drained of all vigour.
‘I have devoted my life to the humiliation and exaltation of
the flesh. I am an artist; my material is the flesh; my
medium is destruction; and my inspiration is nature.’
 Now the valet moved painfully about, gathering together
the dishes, and it grew light enough to make out the Count’s
shape as he lolled against the desecrated altar, his head
bare. His hair, a coarse and uniform grey, hung down to his
shoulders.
‘I am impregnable because I always exist in a state of
dreadful tension. My crises render me utterly bestial and in
that state I am infinitely superior to man, as the tiger, who
preys on man if he has any sense, is superior. My anguish is
the price of my exaltation.’
I began to wonder if the Count was one of the Doctor’s
agents and then I thought, no! This man might be the
Doctor himself, under an assumed identity! The suspicion
made me quiver.
I can hardly describe to you the man’s appalling, cerebral
lucidity. He was like a corpse animated only by a demonic
intellectual will. When he had rested a little, we climbed
back into the carriage and rolled off across the green,
spacious countryside, under a vertiginous arc of sky which
began to clear and sparkle. The mountains dwindled behind
us. The dew glittered in the budding hedgerows. A lark rose,
singing. It was a beautiful morning in early spring.
‘The universe itself is not a sufficiently capacious stage on
which to mount the grand opera of my passions. From the
cradle, I have been a blasphemous libertine, a blood-thirsty
debauchee. I travel the world only to discover hitherto
unknown methods of treating flesh. When I first left my
native Lithuania, I went at once to China where I
apprenticed myself to the Imperial executioner and learned
by heart a twelve-tone scale of tortures as picturesque as
they are vile. When my studies were complete, I tied my
tutor to the trunk of a blossoming apricot tree so the rosy
petals showered down upon his increasing mutilations as,
with incredible delicacy and a very sharp knife, I carved out
little oysters of his living flesh – the torture known as the
“slicing”, the dreaded ling ch’ih. What a terrible sight he was
to behold! The apricot tree wept tears of perfumed flowers
over him; that was Nature’s pity, decorative but unhelpful.
‘Subsequently I visited the rest of Asia, where, among
other infamies too numerous to mention, I amputated the
scarcely perceptible breasts of all the occupants of a geisha
house in the exquisitely bell-haunted city of Kyoto. Then I
left my crest stamped in wax plugs in all the capacious
anuses of the royal eunuchs of the court of Siam.
Subsequently I visited Europe where, as a reward for my
villainies, I was condemned to burn at the stake in Spain, to
hang by the neck in England and to break upon the wheel in
a singularly inhospitable France, where, sentenced to death
in absentia by the judiciary of Provence, my body was
executed in effigy in the town square of Aix.
‘I fled to North America, where I knew my barbarities
would pass unnoticed, and in Quebec I hired my valet,
Lafleur, whose interesting nose has quite caved in under the
weight of a hereditary syphilis. Young as he is, his face has
already been totally obliterated by the ghastly residue of
past pleasures he never tasted personally. Together we
travelled the various states. I gave certain evidence in the
trials at Salem, Mass., which condemned eighteen perfectly
innocent persons to death by pressing. I instigated a
rebellion among the slaves on a plantation in Alabama
which led to bloody and wholesale retribution; they were all
tied to bales of cotton and ignited by ululating Klansmen.
Then, in a perfumed bordello in New Orleans, I strangled
with my legs a mulatto whore just as she coaxed the
incense from my member with a mouth the shape, colour
and texture of an overripe plum.
‘But after that, I became the object of the vengeance of
her enraged pimp, a black of more than superhuman
inhumanity, in whom I sense a twin. And that is why I must
not let him catch up with me for I know too well what he
would do to me if he did so. So Lafleur and I drove over the
neck of the continent, through deserts that delighted me
since they were far too atrociously barren to sustain life,
through jungles altogether envenomed with hatred for the
brown maggots of men who dare to try to live in that green,
festering meat; and then across those rearing mountains
that now lie behind us than which, even in the steppes of
Central Asia, I have seen nothing more arid or inimical.
Refreshed, we now travel towards the coast for I feel stirring
within me a strange desire to return to the peaks where I
was born and perhaps I shall try to die there. Unless, that is,
the vengeful pimp ensnares me first. Which is a horror
beyond thought.’
When noon came, he bought me beer and bread and
cheese at an inn. He had not asked a single question of me
or even seemed to ask himself what this stranger was doing
in his company but I realized he regarded me as part of his
entourage, now. I made a few tentative guesses as to what
my role might be. Was I his observer, whose eyes, as they
watched him, verified his actions? Did his narcissism
demand a constant witness? Or had he other plans for me –
would I, perhaps, figure among his amusements? The
masked, unspeaking valet and I formed his little world. If
one was his hireling victim, for what purpose was the other
hired? But I wondered if his servant had more autonomy
than he thought. Something in the texture of the valet’s
presence hinted he was self-consciously the slave.
Occasionally, when he whimpered, he seemed altogether
too emphatically degraded. But perhaps he was not yet
altogether inured to his position. What would I myself
become when I, too, knew what my position was?
But though the Count had given me a very detailed
autobiography, I still suspected he might really be the
Doctor and so I knew I must travel with him, no matter what
happened. And then again, he was so remarkable! He
seemed to cast a shadow as solid as lead. We drove on
through the afternoon until we came to a lonely crossroads
where suddenly the Count announced:
 ‘I know it, I know it! We must turn right!’
The signpost which pointed north bore only, in faded blue
paint, the legend: THIS WAY TO THE HOUSE OF ANONYMITY
and a lonely path overgrown with grass and primroses
stretched far away across the faintly burgeoning prairies.
There was no sign of any building along its course. The sun
had gone in and the sky was now a leaden grey. Because
everywhere was so flat, this sky was swollen and inflated; it
occupied so much more space in the world than the earth
beneath it that the sky seemed to smother us under a
transparent pillow. The day had not fulfilled the bright
promise of the morning; the weather was full of foreboding.
But Lafleur turned the horses to the north, though now they
were so overdone they ran with sweat and rolled their eyes
until the whites showed. The Count was very excited. He
cried out and muttered to himself as we took the deserted
track and now clouds began to pile heavily in the sky and a
few drops of heavy rain spattered on our faces.
‘Faster! Faster!’
The horses strained their coal-black loins and neighed
beneath Lafleur’s whip. Then, at the side of the road, we
saw a scarecrow and although there was nothing in the bare
field where it stood for it to protect, it carried a bow and
arrow. There was no head inside the hat it wore, only a
human skull, and the wind, laden with rain, flapped its
ragged jacket miserably around its broomstick bones. Round
its neck hung a tattered paper sign which read: I AM
PERFECTLY EMPTY. I HAVE FORGOTTEN MY NAME. I AM
PERFECT BUT YOU ARE ON THE RIGHT ROAD. CONTINUE.
The Count laughed aloud and we drove on until we came
to a door set in a white wall. Here, the road stopped short.
Lafleur climbed down and rapped upon the door. A grille
opened and we saw a pair of eyes.
‘Who is it?’ asked a woman’s voice.
 ‘A hereditary count of Lithuania,’ Lafleur introduced his
master.
‘Show us the colour of your money,’ said the voice and the
Count gave Lafleur a thick roll of banknotes to show. The
mere sight of it satisfied her; she nodded approvingly and
said: ‘Your bill will be presented upon departure, sir.’
After some more minutes’ waiting, while the dismal rain
sluiced down, the door opened inward with a heavy thunder
of bars and chains and we drove into the courtyard. The
door banged to behind us and the porteress, a fat woman
with a puffed, pale face and haggard lips, came to help us
down from the carriage. She wore a black dress and a white
apron. She did not know how to smile. But she did not wear
a mask. None of the servants were masked; their roles
made them sufficiently anonymous.
The Count sharply dismissed his valet, who drove the
carriage round to the stable. As I glanced after Lafleur, I
saw, once he left his master, he sprang up again like a
branch which has been tied back and is now released. His
slight figure took on a sudden, sprightly decisiveness; then
he was gone. So the Count and I stood in front of the House
of Anonymity, whose door was always open to anyone with
a fat enough wallet.
It was a massive, sprawling edifice in the Gothic style of
the late nineteenth century, that poked innumerable turrets
like so many upward groping tentacles towards the dull,
cloudy sky and was all built in louring, red brick. Every
window I could see was tightly shuttered. The porteress
rang peremptorily for a maid and a woman who might have
been her sister appeared and led us into the house, through
a series of dark, gloomy corridors where our footsteps
echoed on flags until we came to more formal, carpeted
quarters and ascended a winding stair to a little dressing-
room done up in moist red velvet, like the interior of a
womb. She invited us to undress and while we did so, she
took from a cupboard two pairs of black tights made in such
a way that, once we put them on, our genitals remained
exposed in their entirety, testicles and all. Then she offered
us short waistcoats of a soft, suède-like substance which she
assured us was the tanned skin of a young negro virgin. The
Count began to murmur softly with anticipation and already
his prick, which was of monstrous size, stood as resolutely
aloft as an illustration of satyriasis in a medical dictionary.
Then the maid handed us hood-like masks which went right
over our heads, concealing them, and were attached by
buttons to buttonholes in the collars of our waistcoats, so
that our heads were changed into featureless, elongated,
pinkish, rounded towers. The only indentations on these
convex surfaces of pink cardboard were two slits, to look
through. These masks or hoods completed our costumes,
which were unaesthetic, priapic and totally obliterated our
faces and our self-respect; the garb grossly emphasized our
manhoods while utterly denying our humanity. And the
costumes were of no time or place. Now we were ready.
With our expressions hidden and the most undifferentiated
parts of our anatomies exposed, she led us down another
stair to a reception room where she bowed, smiled formally
and opened the door for us.
‘Welcome to the Bestial Room,’ she said.
With that, she left us.
The insides of the windows had all been painted black, so
even if you opened the black velvet curtains, nothing
disturbed the artificial night inside them. The walls were
covered with a figured brocade of such a slumbrous purple
the Count murmured: ‘It is the very colour of the blood in a
love suicide.’ Everywhere, clinging to the curtains, perched
on the heavy gold frames of innumerable immense mirrors
or crouched on the swags of a marble fireplace, were dozens
of chattering monkeys smartly dressed like bellboys in bum-
freezer jackets of braid-trimmed crimson plush. These
monkeys were living candelabra; they clutched black
candles in their paws, wedged in the coiled kinks of their
tails or stuck in sockets in the metal circlets they all wore
round their heads. When the hot wax dripped on to their fur
or into their eyes, they squealed pitifully.
The furniture was also alive.
They had employed a taxidermist instead of an
upholsterer and sent him a pride of lions with instructions to
make a sofa out of each pair. At both ends of the sofas,
flamboyantly gothic arm-rests, were the gigantically maned
heads of these lions. Their rheumy, golden eyes seeped
gum and their cavernous, red mouths hung sleepily ajar,
gaping wider, now and then, in a sleepy yawn or to let out a
low, rumbling growl. The serviceable armchairs were brown
bears who squatted on their haunches with the melancholy
of all the Russias in their liquid eyes. When a girl sat on his
shaggy lap, the bear grunted, leaned back and spread her
legs out wide apart with his blunt forepaws. The occasional
tables ran about, yelping obsequiously; they were toadying
hyenas and on their brindled backs were strapped silver
trays containing glasses, decanters, bowls of salted nuts
and dishes of stuffed olives. Other hyenas crouched in
corners, their endless tongues lolling like sopping lengths of
red flannel, balancing between their pricked ears a pot of
carnivorous flowers or else jars of Japanese porcelain
containing tasteful arrangements of bodiless hands. The
dark, polished floorboards were scattered with vivid pelts of
jaguars that stirred and grumbled underfoot; their hot
breaths blasted the ankle as you stepped over them. In all
the room, only the prostitutes, the wax mannequins of love,
hardly seemed to be alive for they stood as still as statues.
But they were the only beings kept in cages.
Though the bars of these cages were exceedingly stout
and enamelled a glistening black, the shapes of the cages
and the whimsical elaboration of the intricate wrought
ironwork itself resembled those of the cages in which
singing birds were housed in Victorian drawing rooms,
though each container was some seven feet high in order to
accommodate its inmate, who looked more than humanly
tall because each cage was mounted on an ivied marble
pedestal, three feet high. The doors of the cages were
secured by very large padlocks and all the keys hung from a
length of ribbon around the Madame’s neck, though she,
too, sat so still you could not hear them jingle. And the
candlelight danced on locked-up breasts, breasts as white
as immortelles, the only flowers that blossomed in this
zoological garden that stank vilely of the reek and echoed
hideously with the cries of the wild beasts who furnished it.
Though the mirrors reflected the hangings, sofas, chairs,
tables, candlesticks and every cageful of venereal statuary,
they did not give the Count and me our blank, pink faces
back to us because here we had no names.
The Madame sat beside the door behind an elaborate
wrought iron cash register in the fin de siècle style one finds
in suburban Parisian brasseries, on which she rang up each
item her customers purchased. She was still a young woman
and she was quite naked but for her necklace of keys and a
cache-sexe made of sequined eyes; stockings of coarse
black mesh; and a mask of supple, funereal black leather
like the masks worn by old-fashioned executioners. This
mask covered her entire face except for the drooping peony
of her mouth and the area around it. She was naked
because she was human and she did not have a reflection
either. Her skin had the blurred sheen of a yellow metal
which has been attacked by verdigris and sweated out a
scarcely bearable stench of musk.
She spoke. I am ashamed to say I did not recognize her
voice, although it stirred me.
‘My house is a refuge for those who can find no
equilibrium between inside and outside, between mind and
body or body and soul, vice versa, etcetera, etcetera,
etcetera.’
 A hyena sprang up, eager to curry favour, and the
Madame poured us each a glass of curaçao from the battery
of beverages it carried. She rang up the price on her till and,
glass in hand, we went to inspect the merchandise.
‘A meridional vigour arises within me,’ confided the Count.
(Was I, then, to be his confidant?)
The costume the House forced upon us may have hidden
his appearance but it also transfigured him. He stalked,
erect, among this garden of artificial delights with a crazy,
apocalyptic grandeur. He was so magnificently,
preposterously obscene that the sofas bowed their heads to
see him pass and the tables all ran up to lick his hands and
fawn over him. As we approached each girl, the monkeys
darted up to her cage and hung in furry clusters from the
bars, holding out their candles so that all her subtly spurious
charms were clearly visible and she extended her arms
while opening and closing her eyes with every mannerism of
the siren.
There were, perhaps, a dozen girls in the cages in the
reception room and, posed inside, the girls towered above
us like the goddesses of some forgotten theogeny locked up
because they were too holy to be touched. Each was as
circumscribed as a figure in rhetoric and you could not
imagine they had names, for they had been reduced by the
rigorous discipline of their vocation to the undifferentiated
essence of the idea of the female. This ideational
femaleness took amazingly different shapes though its
nature was not that of Woman; when I examined them more
closely, I saw that none of them were any longer, or might
never have been, woman. All, without exception, passed
beyond or did not enter the realm of simple humanity. They
were sinister, abominable, inverted mutations, part
clockwork, part vegetable and part brute.
Their hides were streaked, blotched and marbled and
some trembled on the point of reverting completely to the
beast. If beasts of prey had become furnishings, some of the
sexual appliances of the establishment were about to
become their victims. Perhaps that was why they kept them
in cages. The dazed, soft-eyed head of a giraffe swayed on
two feet of dappled neck above the furred, golden shoulders
of one girl and another had the striped face of a zebra and a
cropped, stiff, black mane bristling down her spine. But, if
some were antlered like stags, others had the branches of
trees sprouting out of their bland foreheads and showed us
the clusters of roses growing in their armpits when they held
out their hands to us. One leafy girl was grown all over with
mistletoe but, where the bark was stripped away from her
ribcage, you could see how the internal wheels articulating
her went round. Another girl had many faces hinged one on
top of the other so that her head opened out like a book,
page by page, and on each page was printed a fresh
expression of allure. All the figures presented a dream-like
fusion of diverse states of being, blind, speechless beings
from a nocturnal forest where trees had eyes and dragons
rolled about on wheels. And one girl must have come
straight from the whipping parlour for her back was a
ravelled palimpsest of wound upon wound – she was neither
animal nor vegetable nor technological; this torn and
bleeding she was the most dramatic revelation of the nature
of meat that I have ever seen.
A sweating, odoriferous heat filled the salon and all their
thighs were opulent but I shivered as though they breathed
out gusts of iced air, though I do not think that any of them
breathed. The libidinous images all bared their sexual parts
with a defiant absence of provocation that was not bred of
innocence, for in their primitive simplicity the dozen orifices
were shockingly made manifest, the ugly, undeniable,
insatiable nether mouths of archaic and shameless,
anonymous Aphrodite herself, the undifferentiated partner
in the blind act who has many mouths, even if not one of
them ever asks for a name. And I had come with orders to
worship here, I, Desiderio, the desired one, to kneel down
before the twelve hairy shrines of this universal church of
lust in a uniform that made of me only a totem of carnality
myself.
The Count now ostentatiously and continually increased
his stature by such an effort of will I thought the swollen
veins of his forehead would burst. His breast heaved like
thunder. He seemed to graze the ceiling with the round tip
of that bland, peachy, concupiscent hood, which turned his
head itself into a monumental symbol of sexuality. He took
on a ponderous and ecclesiastical gait, as if it were a kind of
mitre that he wore – he, the Pope of the profane, officiating
at an ultimate sacrament, the self-ordained, omnipotent,
consecrated man-phallus itself; and when he snatched a
candle from a monkey’s paw and used it to ignite the rosy
plumage of a winged girl, I knew he was about to preach us
a sermon and she was to be his text.
His eyes rolled in delirious agitation, as if they might start
out of the holes in his mask. Striking the pose of a man
possessed, he flung back his head and there issued from his
thunderous mouth the following, agonized psalm in the
intervals and cadences of plain-song, while the girls silently
opened and closed their arms with the helpless, automatic
reaction of so many sea anemones behind their black bars,
and the furniture snuffled, howled and grunted, and the
angel burned so quickly, with such a smoky flame, I realized
she had only been a life-like construction of papier mâché
on a wicker frame.
I am the zodiacal salamander man
because flesh is a constellation of flame
and I am universal flesh
I am an oxyacetylene pen
who scrawled all over the face of the sky
in my incendiary rage
segmented constellations fleshly novas.
I am the willed annihilation of the orgiastic moment in
person, ladies.
I pricked up my ears at that. Could he be, not the Doctor,
but that other mystery man, Mendoza, who had written on
just such a theme before he annihilated himself in a manner
unknown? Could Mendoza have reconstituted himself out of
infinity – perhaps by running a film of his own explosion
backwards, so that he hatched out of the inward-turning egg
of an implosion without a stain upon him? But the Count did
not allow me to ponder this sufficiently; he surged on down
a remorseless torrent of metaphor.
I ride the pyrotechnic tiger
that eats nothing but fire
 I burn away inexorably
until nothing is left but bare, rhetorical bone
that burns and burns and is not consumed

I burn in my white-hot, everlasting, asbestos flesh!

At that, I thought immediately of Albertina, but he turned

all the imagery of desire on its head and diabolically
inverted its meanings, like a warlock saying the Pater Noster
backwards. He bewildered me utterly. And he swept on like
the landslide that devoured the set of samples.
I, the bane of bone!
I, the denuded skeleton comet!
I, volcanic enigma, phallic aspiration, unfallen
Icarus!

So I came to the conclusion he was only lamenting his

own frigidity. Then his voice dropped an octave as if he were
about to intone a blessing.
I am my own antithesis.
My loins rave. I unleash negation.
The burning arrows of negation.
Come!
Incinerate yourself with me!

The paper angel flickered and went out. Her ashes

crumbled into a surprisingly small heap. The Madame rang
up the price of a replacement on her till.
‘Yes,’ she said in the voice of a governess congratulating a
child who has recited well. ‘There is no matter more grave
than pleasure.’
 The Count rattled the bars of the cage of the whipped girl.
‘Give me my striped tiger woman! Flagellated past the
bone, she is bleeding fire, a cannibal feast.’
The Madame obligingly unlocked the door and the Count
seized the meat voraciously. As he humped it towards the
door on his back, like a porter, he snapped at me:
‘Select your harlot immediately! I must have a stimulus.’
I was in a quandary. None of the metamorphosed objects
before me aroused the slightest desire in me. Even though
they came in all the shapes of every imaginable warped
desire, they seemed to me nothing but malicious satires
upon eroticism and I felt the same mixture of laughter and
revulsion that the Count’s ode had inspired in me. But I was
his creature and so I must do whatever he wanted. The
Madame rescued me. After she rang up the Count’s
purchase, she stepped from her post and clasped her
yellowish hand firmly round my wrist.
‘I shall come with you myself,’ she said and her fingers
tightened so authoritatively I did not have much option but
to go with her. Because I had never touched her before,
nobody could have expected me to know her from her
touch, although her touch was thrilling. Besides, we were in
the House of Anonymity and had put away ourselves when
we put on our masks.
The whole house had the close humidity of a groin and the
blue smoke of the incense burning everywhere in faience
bowls made it smell like an embalming shop. She led us up
a formal staircase with carpets of black panther under foot
but now we were out of the Bestial Room, the furs were
safely dead. Light came from the glowing eyes of bronze
birds with outspread wings hanging from the basalt vaulting
over our heads and both these and also the eyes in her
loincloth winked lasciviously now and then. She walked with
a free, proud, sensual grace. She smelled like a rutting
leopard. Her skin was almost green.
 The heavy, mahogany door of our common bedroom was
guarded on either side by jasper colossi, Babylonian
monsters with curved, brooding beaks and feathered arms
that brushed the faces of those who went inside with a
menacing voluptuous caress.
‘We call this room the Sphere of Spheres,’ she said.
She ushered us into a circular chamber filled with a
shifting medley of colours from a lamp with a stained glass
shade that turned in a slow circle in the middle of the
ceiling. The Count carried his victim to the bed as
ceremoniously as if it were a sacrificial altar but I did not
bother to watch him or even to look more closely at this
place of consummated desires for the Madame had turned
towards me and placed her finger on her incomparable lips.
I remembered that mouth and that gesture perfectly. I
gasped. I think I sobbed. She plucked away my mask and
kissed me lightly on the lips. I saw her eyes through the
clefts of her sheath of black leather; their incalculable
depths were blurred with tears.
‘I am Albertina,’ she said.
She pulled off her head covering and her black hair fell
down around her well-remembered face.
I do not know why she loved me at first sight, as I loved
her, even though I first saw her in a dream. Yet we pursued
one another across the barriers of time and space; we dared
every vicissitude of fortune for a single kiss before we were
torn apart again and we saw the events of the war in which
we were enlisted on opposite sides only by the light of one
another’s faces.
I took her in my arms. We were exactly the same height
and the arches of our bosoms met with a sonorous clang. A
terrible cry from the Count’s whore did not interrupt our first
embrace. The earth turned on the pivot of her mouth. The
sense of seraphic immanence which had afflicted me in the
city was now fulfilled. Her arms clasped my neck and her
belly pressed against my nakedness as if striving to
transcend the mortal flaw that divided us and so effect a
total, visceral mingling, binding us forever, so that the same
blood would flow within us both and our nerves would knit
and our skins melt and fuse in the force of the electricity we
generated between us.
We moved towards the round bed that spun round like the
world on an axis in the middle of the room. Here the Count
crouched slavering over the ruins of his unfortunate
prostitute who was now only a bleeding moan. We glanced
at them with the indifference natural to lovers and I turned
back the coverlet of dark fur to lay my Albertina down on
sheets that bore stains as tragic and mysterious as those on
a pavement after a nude had been thrown down from a
balcony. I knelt above her and kissed her cool breasts. I
sucked great mouthfuls of the cold water of her breasts, as
though my thirst would never be slaked. The eyes on her
single garment closed one by one.
At that very moment a hail of machine-gun fire crashed
through the windows, tore through the velvet curtains and
ploughed into the mattress beneath us.
The Count darted to the shattered window, yelling an
invitation to further violence. An inrushing gale pattered a
tattoo of fragmented glass against the cardboard hood he
still wore. Fresh bullets spattered into the whipped woman,
who danced and opened out beneath them. Albertina lay
quite still and did not move at all. She let me drag her off
the bed and bundle her safe out of range of the bullets,
while she lay limp as a doll and all the time she wept very
bitterly.
‘They’ve come for you,’ she said. ‘I can’t do anything
about it. All hell has been let loose since we lost the set of
samples.’
She clung to me and cried like a child.
 Then came running footsteps outside the room and a
pounding at the door.
‘The police!’ cried the porteress. ‘The police are looking
for two murderers! There’s two murderers in bed with you!’
Albertina pushed me away and opened the door.
‘She’ll take you out the back door,’ she said through her
tears. ‘Go, now.’
‘Tears?’ said the Count, sliding towards her. ‘Whorish
tears?’
He unmasked himself in order to savourously lick her face
but she was crying too much to notice.
‘I won’t leave you,’ I said and took her into my arms again.
‘No!’ she said. ‘That’s quite impossible.’
I felt I was stronger than anyone in the world.
‘How can your father’s daughter possibly say anything is
impossible?’
I picked her up and carried her bodily into the passage but
there she began to melt like a woman of snow. As I was
holding her, she grew less and less. She dissolved. Still
weeping, she dissipated into the air. I saw her. I felt her. I felt
her weight diminish. I saw her, first, flicker a little; then
waver continuously; then grow more and more indistinct, as
if she herself were gradually erasing the pattern she made
upon the air. Her eyes vanished last of all and the last tears
that fell from them hung for a little while on the air after she
had gone, like forgotten diamanté ear-drops. Then all that
was left of this fragile bequest of tears was an evanescent
trace of moisture on my shoulder. In the midst of my grief
and bewilderment, bullets crashed round me from within the
house and I heard the cruel voices of the Determination
Police and heard their voices clang and rattle like sabres.
It had suddenly grown very cold.
 The lights of their own electric torches glimmered on the
leather coats of the police, for all the lights had gone out
though terrified monkeys, their fur ablaze, flashed past like
meteors. The candles they had dropped rolled underfoot,
and here and there the hangings were already on fire. The
Count picked up a fallen candle and lighted whatever
curtains we passed with such rapidity it seemed the fire
sprang from his fingers rather than from the flame. The
porteress led us this way and that, threading us like a
cunning needle through narrow, unused corridors, up
unexpected spiral staircases, through echoing galleries full
of instruments of torture and the apparatus of fetishism. We
could hear the oceanic roaring of the lions for the furniture
was running loose. Once we pushed past a lumbering chair;
a howling pack of tables fled away from us down a hall of
dark mirrors as we ourselves ran through – just in time, for,
as we pushed past the bead curtain hanging over the outer
doorway, bullets shivered the mirrors back to chips of
unreflecting silvered glass. Albertina must somehow have
let all the prostitutes out of their cages for, freed from the
petrification of their profession once they were free of bars,
the prostitutes, too, were trying to escape the police, who
were the sworn enemies of objects so candidly unreal. We
often glimpsed a leafed or feathered shape transfixed in the
beam of a torch upon a staircase; it would let out a
shuddering cry before disintegrating at the impact of an
authentic bullet or it would collapse in a whispering rustle of
waste paper or the bullets cracked open the carapace and
all the springs and wheels sprang whizzing out.
Then, as we waited on an obscure gallery while the
porteress wrestled with a rusty lock, the Count, who had
been peering at the holocaust through the banisters with an
eager but detached interest, slumped against me, quivering.
‘He is there,’ he said with a certain wry pleasure, as if
savouring an unfamiliar sensation which might have been
fear.
 A shape had materialized in the shadows below us, a
black some six and a half feet tall, with shoulders of a bison
and a Plutonian head, armed with a knife, waiting in the well
of the stairs. He wore the leather overcoat of a policeman
but I knew he was no other than the man who searched for
the Count because of the baleful mass of his presence and
the appalling pressure it exerted, so that my eardrums
throbbed as though I stood in a great depth of water. He
seemed to wait only for the Count to show himself. He bore
his vigil like a cloak and a certain quality in his waiting
indicated the Count would come to him, in time; that the
Count would roll to him as one drop of mercury rolls to
another across a plate. He was like a man made of magnetic
stone.
‘That man – if man he be – is my retribution,’ said the
Count. ‘He is my twin. He is my shadow. Such a terrible
reversal; I, the hunter, have become my own prey. Hold me
or I will run into his arms.’
Fortunately the porteress impatiently tugged his shoulder
for she had unlocked the door to another staircase which
took us to the roof, out into the wind and rain, and so the
Count was saved from himself for the time being. We went
down a root of ivy hand over hand, the porteress last, and
she led us dexterously through a formal garden where we
could see nothing except the spurt of flame from the
mouths of the machine guns stationed there. When I looked
back, I saw that most of the house was burning, now, but
there was no time to look back more than once. The
porteress took us through a little gate and here was Lafleur,
with travelling cloaks and horses. I was extraordinarily
pleased to see him. It was about nine o’clock. Behind us the
burning brothel already tinted the sky with crimson. The
porteress reached into her pocket and now presented us
with a lengthy roll of bill. The Count, stupendously ironic,
swung on to his mount and, leaning down, pressed his wad
of banknotes into her hand.
 ‘One must pay for one’s pleasures,’ he said.
Despising roads, we galloped over the open country in
headlong flight, the Count and I still in our phallic carnival
costume, riding as wildly as crazed psychopomps. When we
came to a spinney of poplars, we halted briefly to see what
lay behind us. All within the House of Anonymity had turned
to air and fire in an awesome, elemental transmutation and
rising above the high walls, the fireball seemed to tug
impatiently at its moorings within the earth while the turrets
spouted jets of flame directly into the hearts of the
rainclouds. Even from the distance of a mile, we could hear
a symphony of agony and crashing brick, orchestrated like
Berlioz. But the Count’s satanic laughter rang more loudly
than all that tumult of destruction.
‘I, the lord of fire!’ he said in a low but piercing voice and I
knew he thought his hunter must be destroyed. But I was
too stunned by my own misery to rejoice with him for he
meant nothing to me.
To have her so unexpectedly thrust into my arms and, the
next minute, to have her vanish! As if, all the time she
kissed me, she had been only a ghost born of nothing but
my longing – the first ghost who had deceived me in all
those years of ghostly visitants! I felt I was nothing but a
husk blown this way and that way by the winds of
misfortune and the only light that guided me was the
deceitful iridescence on the face of my beloved. The
Japanese believe that foxes light bonfires on marshland and
lure travellers towards them. The Japanese fox is a beautiful
lady, a marvellous prestidigitator with a whole boxful of
tricksy delights and, once she has you in her luring arms,
then, with a whiff of rancid excretions, she derisively shows
you the real colour of her brush and vanishes, laughing.
Albertina’s face was the treacherous mask of the rarest of
precious black foxes; and yet her tears were the last thing of
all to disappear. Could tears be a token of deceit? Ought I to
trust the authentic grief of her tears?
 Then we saw the headlights of the police cars coming
towards us and by their straightforward beams, the massive
figure of the black pimp leading them on a motorcycle. The
Count blasphemed horribly and moaned. We spurred on our
horses.
Much later, we stopped by a stream to let the beasts drink
and Lafleur came up to me as I sat gazing abstractedly at
the dark water. He knelt beside me. The submissive curve of
his back was exquisitely graceful. He spoke to me gently. His
voice was muffled by his bandages.
‘You haven’t lost her,’ he said. ‘She is safe.’
Though I did not know why he spoke with such assurance,
he comforted me a little. Then we rode once more. The
countryside sped by us in the changing light of night and
day. We went in silence, stopping only to buy a loaf of bread
or a length of sausage and cram it hastily into our mouths
as we stood in the shop. I was very much afraid of the
Determination Police but I was not half so scared of them as
the Count was of the black pimp. His pursuit was the
impulse of our desperate career. The Count’s terror showed
itself in fits of hysterical laughter and outbursts of crazed
blasphemies. His fear had a theatrical intensity not at all out
of the character of a self-created demiurge – which is how I
saw the Count. I did him the courtesy of seeing him as he
wished to be seen, as the living image of ferocity, even if
sometimes I found him risible. And yet his fear infected us
all with such a quaking fever I wondered again if he might
not be the Doctor in disguise, for he could communicate to
us so well his own imaginings. Each time a twig snapped as
we passed by, we all shuddered together.
But, if he were the Doctor, why had his daughter not
acknowledged him in the brothel? Out of tact and
discretion?
The first chance I had, I took off the uniform of the
customers in the House of Anonymity and got the Count to
buy me new clothes. He chose me as elegant and sober an
outfit as he could find in a little country haberdashers, for he
had offered me the post of his secretary and wanted to see
me well dressed. I did not know what the job would entail,
except for admiring him all the time, but I accepted it
because I did not have much choice although I knew the
Count was going to take a ship as soon as we reached a
seaport and I must go with him to Europe, to another
continent, to another hemisphere, where everything would
be new because it was so old and there was no war, no Dr
Hoffman, no Minister, no quest, no Albertina – nothing
familiar except myself. I cannot say I made a conscious
decision to abandon everything and go with the Count.
Under the influence of his shadow, it was possible to do only
as he desired, though I did not even like him much. Already I
was just as much his creature as was the miserable Lafleur.
The Count refused to take off his tights and waistcoat,
though the costume was even more paradoxical without the
mask.
‘The livery of hyper-sexuality becomes me,’ he said,
though he was hypocrite enough to keep his cloak wrapped
tightly round him when it came to encounters with shop-
keepers.
Days melted into nights until, in my weariness, I could
hardly sort out the one from the other. At last, one morning,
we saw a grey ribbon of ocean on the horizon and, before
sunset, we entered the port, our spent and weltered horses
foundering beneath us. We went at once to the docks to find
a ship and, after speaking to innumerable captains, we
found a cargo vessel sailing under the Liberian flag for The
Hague on that very evening’s tide, whose captain was
willing to take us with him for a very substantial sum. We
went aboard at once, abandoning our horses in the stable of
a public house.
They gave the three of us a single, narrow cabin with two
hard bunks one above the other and a hammock for Lafleur.
Stretching out immediately, we all fell into the profound
sleep of absolute exhaustion and, when we woke the next
day, we had been delivered over entirely to the grey, wet,
shifting hands of the waters and there was no sign of land
anywhere.
It seemed to me I sailed unwillingly against the strongest
current in the world, a current of tears, because I thought
the boat was taking me away from Albertina. I did not then
understand that the reciprocal motion of our hearts, like the
oscillation of the waves, was a natural and eternal power
and those who tried to part us were like men who take a
great comb and try to make a parting through the ocean. I
did not know then that she travelled with me for she was
inextricably mingled with my idea of her and her substance
was so flexible she could have worn a left glove on her right
hand – if she had wanted to, that is.
 6 The Coast of Africa

Now the world was confined to the ship and its crew of
sullen Lascars, dour Swedes and granite Scots, who
raucously shouted lewd shantys as they swung about the
rigging hauling on great hawsers and performed all the
other tasks that, added together, kept this fragile shell of
wood and canvas on its course across a sea which blurred
into the sky in the morning haze and at night contained as
many stars in its bosom as blazed above us, for we were
very exposed to the heavens and to the weather. At first, I
was plagued with sea-sickness and could not stir from my
bunk but soon I got my sea legs and then I fell prey to the
dreadful boredom of the traveller by sea.
There was nothing to do all day but keep out of the way of
the crew, to watch the cyclorama of the sky, to applaud the
dances of sea-birds and flying fish, to listen to the wind in
the canvas and to wait for the thick stews of salt fish and
potatoes, all the menus at mealtimes offered. The Count
bore this ennui with a stoicism I would not have expected of
him. Perhaps he was restoring his energies with a period of
silence for he rarely, if ever, spoke, lying all day in our cabin
as still as a corpse to emerge only in the evenings, when he
would come out just as the sailors, the deck swabbed down
for the night, sat sipping from their cans of watered rum
upon the coops that housed the hens who gave the captain
eggs for breakfast, puffing on their pipes, or else danced
together to the wheezing music of an accordion. I
sometimes joined in these diversions exercising the skills
the Alligator Man had taught me on a borrowed harmonica
to give them a barn dance or two from the bayous and
Lafleur, also, crept out to join us, slight and shy and
bandaged, adding a husky, hesitant, still unbroken voice to
the choruses, a voice which sometimes seemed to me
disguised for occasionally it woke in me strange, vibrating
echoes as mysterious as if it were the sea who was singing
to me.
But the Count scorned these simple pleasures. He stalked
straight to the prow, whirling in the folds of his cloak, and
sat there in aquiline solitude, gazing into the night towards
which we sailed, for we left the sun folding up its crimson
banners in the west behind us. He sat there sometimes all
night, like the very figurehead of the ship if it had been
called The Wandering Jew or The Flying Dutchman; he had
retreated into an impenetrable impassivity and yet
sometimes he seemed to have become the principle that
moved the ship, as if it were not the wind that drove us
towards Europe but the power of that gaunt, barbarous will.
His conviction that he was a force of nature always
suspended my disbelief for a time, if never for long.
Woman-starved, dreaming of mermaids, satisfying
themselves desultorily with one another, the sailors cast
scowling but hungry eyes on little Lafleur and on myself,
too, but I had learned enough to keep them at their
distance. Strange, blue days at sea! One day so like another
I often went to gaze at our creaming wake for visible proof
we had budged an inch. But, in this constriction and this
apparent immobility, the sea-miles strung one upon the
other like beads on a thread of passage until no weed
bobbed on the water and soon we were too far from land to
sight any but the most intrepid of seabirds. I slept but did
not dream. All my life now seemed a dream from which I
had woken to the boredom of the voyage. We endured a
storm; we endured a torrid calm. I reconciled myself to the
gnawing longing for the sight of a girl I would never see
again unless her father cramped the world into a
planisphere and I had not the least idea what time or place
the Count might take me to though, since his modes of
travel were horseback, gig and tall-masted schooner, I
guessed, wherever it was, it would be somewhere in the
early nineteenth century.
A kind of silent camaraderie had sprung up between
Lafleur and myself. He often came to sit beside me, a little
black shadow with a concealed face in which only the eyes
were visible, eyes that seemed gentle enough and were of
such an immense size and so liquidly brown they reminded
me of those of a sad, woodland animal. We deceive
ourselves when we say the eye is an expressive organ; it is
the lines around the eye that tell their story and, with
Lafleur, these lines were hidden. But I sensed a certain
wistful kindliness in that abused little valet, though he
hardly ever spoke to me and seemed only to communicate
in sighs. Yet he pointed out to me one or two teasing
anachronisms on shipboard.
The cook, a sour, dyspeptic Marseillais, had a wind-up
gramophone with a large horn on which, all through the
starry nights, he played hiccoughing records of Parisian
chanteuses whose voices, brought to us fitfully on the
breeze, mingled with the plash of the waters, were the
essence of a nostalgia which affected me strangely for it
was an entirely vicarious emotion for places I had never
seen. The obnoxious Finn, a first mate of memorable ill-
temper and vile oaths, had a sea-chest full of magazines
containing photographs of plump girls in corsets and boots
laced up to the thigh; he showed them to me, once, in a rare
fit of good nature. The cabin-boy once told Lafleur of a
motorbike he kept in his father’s house in Liverpool but
when, curious, I asked him about his toy, he shook his head
blankly and, denying all knowledge of it, hurried off
pretending he had to feed immediately the stinking pig they
kept on deck to supplement our fare when the salt fish ran
low.
The sailors would sometimes halt, open-mouthed, in the
middle of a shanty, as if they were actors who had suddenly
forgotten their lines, and mouth away vacantly for a few
seconds, their hands suddenly dangling as if they had
forgotten how to hold the ropes. But these lapses of
continuity lasted no more than a moment. Then all would be
saltily nautical again, in the manner of an old print. But
sometimes there was a jarring effect of overlapping, as if
the ship that bore us was somehow superimposed on
another ship of a quite different kind, and I began to feel a
certain unease, an unease which afflicted me most when I
heard the sounds the Captain coaxed out of the air as he
twisted the dial of his radio when he relaxed in his private
cabin at the end of the day. Lafleur seemed to catalogue
these puns in the consistency of the vessel with a certain
relish but the Count did not even notice them. He noticed
nothing. He even ignored his servants.
I decided that, after all, he was not the Doctor, unless he
was some bizarre emanation of the Doctor. I concluded he
was some kind of ontological freelance who could certainly
determine the period in which the ship sailed and this was
quite enough to speculate upon. I would not have believed
such a thing possible before I started on my journey. His
monumental silence continued and then, before my eyes, he
crumbled away to nothing so that I never admired him
again. For we were betrayed.
The Captain’s little radio betrayed us.
One bright, azure morning, the Captain listened in on the
short waves as he ate his eggs in bed and, though his native
language was Dutch, he made out enough of the standard
speech of my country to hear how the Count and I were
both wanted for murder. And there was a price on my head,
for I was a war criminal.
They came for us with guns as we lay sleeping. The
Captain and the first mate came. They handcuffed us and
took us down to the malodorous hold where they chained us
to rings in the floor and left us there in misery and
deprivation while the Captain turned the ship round in mid-
ocean and steered back on our course, for the
Determination Police and the State of Louisiana both offered
rewards to those who delivered me to the one, and the
Count to the agents of the other.
I expected the Count to bear this reversal with ironic self-
containment, but no. For the first twenty-four hours of our
incarceration, he screamed all the time on a single, high-
pitched note and when the first mate came in with our
meagre rations, he cowered away as if he expected the Finn
to kick him, a perfectly justified fear. This display of
quivering pusillanimity fascinated me. I waited eagerly for
the Count to speak. I had to wait for only two days.
What were our rations? Traditional fare. The first mate put
a tin platter down on the floor twice a day. It contained three
segments of ship’s biscuit alive with weevils and we had to
scrabble for it as best we could, all encumbered with our
irons. He brought us a small can of stale water, too, and was
at least sufficiently humane to free us for a few moments so
that we could attend to the needs of nature in a bucket
provided for the purpose. I never dreamed I could regret
those rank fish stews but otherwise I found I bore up to
captivity well enough, perhaps because we were returning
to my lover’s country, even if I could hope for nothing but
the torture chamber once I got there. Lafleur, however,
seemed curiously content. Perhaps he felt the gloomy
period of his bondage to the Count was over. Sometimes, in
the rolling darkness of the hold, the seeping bilge washing
around my feet, I even heard him chuckling to himself.
 On the third day, the Count spoke. I could tell it was about
sunset because the accordion was playing and the feet of
the dancing sailors beat a tattoo overhead. We had no other
means of marking the time in the close darkness below. The
Count’s screams had modulated to a low, dull moaning and
this moaning, in turn, seemed to alter quantitatively until it
was a moan in words.
‘These men are not my equals! They have no right to
deprive me of my liberty! These adversaries are unfit for
me! It is unjust!’
‘No such thing as justice,’ observed the valet with
unaccustomed briskness but the Count ignored him. All this
time he had been preparing another oration and would not
be interrupted.
‘By all the laws of natural justice, I was pre-eminent
because I, the star-traveller, the erotic conflagration,
transcended all the laws! Once, before I saw my other, I
could have turned this mountain into a volcano. I would
have fired these rotten timbers round us with a single
sneeze and risen from the pyre, a phoenix.
‘Terror of a fire at sea! How the tars brutally trample each
other down; they stab and murder their comrades in the
mad tussle for the lifeboat but the lifeboat was the first to
blaze. My tumultuous bowels vomit forth flaming wrack! And
I did not forget to invite the sharks to dinner, oh, no. They
have formed up around the ship, their dinner table; they
wait for their meal to cook. They wait for the involuntary
tributes of sea-boys’ sinewy limbs.
‘But when I opened my mouth to order the plat du jour, I
found my grammar changed in my mouth. No longer active;
passive.
‘He has tampered with my tongue. He has bridled it.
‘I always eschewed the Procrustean bed of circumstance
until he pegged me out on it.’
 (Lafleur was seized with a fit of coughing but it only lasted
a few moments.)
‘If I am indeed the Black Prometheus, now I must ask for
other guests to dine. Come, every eagle in the world, to this
most sumptuous repast, my liver.’
(His chains clanged as he tried to throw himself
backwards in an attitude of absolute abandonment but he
did not have enough room for such exercises. His moaning
again intensified to a scream and then diminished to a moan
again.)
‘They have eaten me down to an immobile core. I, who
was all movement. My I is weaker than its shadow used to
be. I is my shadow. I am gripped by the convulsive panic of
a mapless traveller in a virgin void. Now I must explore the
other side of my moon, my dark region of enslavement.
‘I was the master of fire and now I am the slave of earth.
Where is my old, invincible I! He stole it. He snatched it from
the peg where I hung it beside the mulatto’s mattress. Now I
am sure only of my slavery.
‘I do not know how to be a slave. Now I am an enigma to
myself. I have become discontinuous.
‘I fear my lost shadow who lurks in every shadow. I, who
perpetrated atrocities to render to the world incontrovertible
proof that my glorious misanthropy overruled it, I – now I
exist only as an atrocity about to be perpetrated on myself.
‘He let his slaves enslave me.’
During the lengthy, wordless recitative of shuddering
groans that followed, Lafleur said unexpectedly, in the voice
of a scholarly connoisseur:
‘Not a bad imitation of Lautréamont.’
But the Count, unheeding, sang out with delighted
rapture:
 ‘I am enduring the keenest, most piercing pangs of
anguish!’
With that, he concluded his aria. The renewed silence was
broken only by the sound of waves and the tread of the
dancers above us, until Lafleur, with more insolence than
solicitude, demanded:
‘Do you feel any pain?’
The valet was undergoing some kind of sea change.
The Count sighed.
‘I feel no pain. Only anguish. Unless anguish is the name
of my pain. I wish I could learn to name my pain.’
This was the first time I ever heard him, however
obliquely, answer a question, though it was hard to tell
whether, in his reply, he acknowledged the presence of the
person who posed it or if he thought the question was a
fortuitous externalization of the self-absorption which had
already doubled or tripled the chains with which he was
bound, until he could no longer breathe without our hearing
them rattle. But, to my astonishment, Lafleur coughed again
to clear his throat and, with a touch of pedantry, in a
curiously gruff, affected voice, gave the following exposition.
‘Master and slave exist in the necessary tension of a
twinned actuality, which is transmuted only by the process
of becoming. A sage of Ancient China, the learned Chuang
Tzu, dreamed he was a butterfly. When he woke up, he was
hard put to it to tell whether a man had dreamed he was a
butterfly or a butterfly was still dreaming he was a man. If
you looked at your situation objectively for a moment, my
dear Count, you might find that the principal cause of your
present discomfort is a version of Chuang Tzu’s dilemma.
You could effectively evolve a persona from your
predicament, if you tried.’
But the Count was incapable of the humility of objectivity
and took only a few hints to further his soliloquy from
Lafleur.
‘Am I the slave of my aspirations or am I their master? All I
know for certain is, I aspired to a continuous sublimity and
my aspirations accentuate the abyss into which I have
fallen. In the depths of this abyss, I find the black pimp.’
But Lafleur continued to expand his theme.
‘You were a man in a cage with a monster. And you did not
know if the monster was in your dream or you were the
dream of the monster.’
The Count clanged his chains with dreadful fury.
‘No! No! No!’
But this triadic reiteration was addressed to the shadows,
not to Lafleur, who commented with some asperity:
‘Now you believe yourself to be the dream of the black
pimp, I suppose. That is the reverse of the truth.’
But the Count did not hear him.
‘I toppled off my pyrotechnic tiger and, as I plunge
downwards, endlessly as Lucifer, I ask myself: “What is the
most miraculous event in the world?” And I answer myself:
“I am going to fall into my own arms. They stretch out to me
from the bottom of the pit.”
‘I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.’
Lafleur gasped at that and so did I for I felt myself
instantly negated. To my horror, I discovered I immediately
grew thinner and less solid. I felt – how can I describe it? –
that the darkness which surrounded us was creeping in at
every pore to obliterate me. I saw the white glimmer of
Lafleur’s face and held out my hands to him imploringly,
beseeching him to go with me together into the oblivion to
which the Count had consigned us, so that I should have
some company there, in that cold night of non-being. But,
before my senses failed me, there was a sudden, dreadful
clamour on deck.
 The accordion sputtered a final, distracted, terrified chord.
There were screams, thuds and an awful wailing, suddenly
cut short, that the pig must have made when the pirates cut
its throat, while a hundred tongues announced that chaos
was come. Abruptly I fell out of the magic circle of the
Count’s self-absorption; my dissolution was cut short. The
end of our imprisonment had come. The ship had been
attacked by pirates.
They were swart, thick-set, yellowish men of low stature,
equipped with immense swords and massive moustaches.
They spoke a clicking, barking, impersonal language and
never smiled though, when they decapitated the crew in a
lengthy ritual by the light of flares on the deck, they laughed
to see the heads roll and bounce. Once they knew we were
murderers, they treated us with respect, cut off our chains
with swift blows of their heavy swords, which were of
incredible sharpness, and let us up on deck to watch the
débâcle.
No one was spared except ourselves. After all their heads
were off, the torsos went into the sea, while the pirates set
about improvising small fires to cure the heads, which they
proposed to keep as souvenirs. The Count visibly grew fatter
at the smell of blood. He watched the ghastly ballet of the
execution with the relish of a customer at a cabaret. When
he flung off his cloak and the pirates saw he still wore the
uniform of the House of Anonymity in all its arrogant
exoticism, they gasped with admiration and bowed deeply
to him in a display of servility. Another reversal had re-
established his continuity. He was in the ascendance again.
But Lafleur lost all the crispness he had displayed in the
cabin. He became wary and uneasy and stayed close beside
me. Later, I learned he was very much afraid and almost
about to reveal himself so that we might not die without
knowing one another again, for the pirates were the
mercenaries of Death itself.
 They sailed these angry waters, far from the land that
spawned them, in a black ship with eyes painted on the
bows and the stern fashioned into the shape of the tail of a
black fish. The triangular sails were black and they flew a
black flag. They were some mixed tribe of Kurds, Mongols or
Malays but their saturnine visages hinted at an infernal
origin and they worshipped a sword.
As soon as the crew was dead, they set about stripping
the cargo vessel and transferring its contents to their own
boat. When they found the casks of rum in the forecastle,
they greeted them with obscure grunts of glee but they did
not broach them immediately. Instead they piled them as a
votive offering around the altar of the sword they kept on
the poop of the black ship. Now Lafleur and I clung to the
Count like scared children for the pirates offered him
instinctive reverence. When they saw our wrists were chafed
from the manacles, they wrapped rags soaked in oil and
spices round them and gave us for nothing a far more
spacious cabin than the one the Count had hired – a wide
room – with straw mats on the floor, mattresses for sleeping
and a tasteful water-colour of a black cockerel, a little sea-
stained, hanging on the wall. They brought us satisfying and
delicious meals of rice, curried fish and pickles. The ship was
frail and lightly built. I felt far closer to the sea than I had
done before and hence far nearer to death, for the slightest
breeze could tip it over and fling us and our hosts into the
sea. But they were the most expert sailors.
During his adventures in the East, the Count had picked
up a smattering of many tongues and found some words
and phrases he could share with the pirate leader, so he
spent most of his time with this brooding, diminutive killer
whose face was as unyieldingly severe as the object he
worshipped, intent on learning some of their art of
swordsmanship. He also learned our destination. We would
cross the Atlantic in their mournful cockleshell, boarding
whatever craft we passed, round the Cape of Good Hope,
cross the Indian Ocean and any other ocean that lay in our
path and eventually drop anchor in an island off the coast of
China where they kept their booty, their temples, their
forges and their womenfolk. A long, weary journey full of
dangers lay before us and a landfall I was sure we should
find replete with horrors. Now we were free, I was far more
frightened than I had been in chains.
The shrine on the deck consisted of a sword laid between
two ebony rests. From a pole above it hung a number of
garlands of heads, all smoked a dusky, tan colour and
shrunk to the size of heads of monkeys by the process of
curing. Every morning, after prayers, the pirate leader
removed the black loincloth which was his only garb and
bent over on the poop in front of the altar while each of his
men filed past him in devout silence, kissed his exposed
arse and emitted a sharp bark of adulation while slapping
his buttocks briefly with the flat of their blades. Their fidelity
to their lord was so great one could have thought each
pirate was only an aspect of the leader, so that the many
was the one. They were indistinguishable from one another.
They were like those strings of paper figures, hand in
identical hand, that children cut out of sheets of paper. After
this display or refreshment of fidelity, they practised with
their swords.
These were heavy, double-bladed shafts of steel half the
height of the pirates themselves, with handles constructed
in such a way they had to be grasped with both hands.
Though their use required great skill, it needed no finesse
for the most telling stroke was a murderous, chopping blow
that easily split a man in half. It was impossible to fence
with such a sword. It was equally impossible to defend
oneself except by attacking first. They were weapons which
denied forethought, impulses of destruction made of steel.
And the pirates themselves, so slight, so silent, so cruel, so
two-dimensional, seemed to have subsumed their beings to
their swords, as if the weapons were their souls or as if they
had made a pact with their swords to express their spirit for
them, for the flash of the sword seemed by far a more
expressive language than the staccato monosyllables that
came so grudgingly to their lips. Their exercises lasted for
six hours a day. They transformed the decks into an arcade
of flashing light, for the blades left gleaming tracks behind
them that lingered in the air for a long time. After they had
finished, they polished their swords for another hour and, as
the sun went down, joined together to sing a tuneless hymn
which might have been a requiem for the day they had
killed with their swords. After that came a night of perfect
silence.
The pirates fed us and left us alone, for which I was
heartily thankful. The ship was a black sea-bird, a marine
raven. It skimmed over rather than cut through the waves
and though there was only this thinnest of matchwood skins
between us all and death, the sheer virtuosity of their
seamanship maintained us in a position something like that
of a ship navigated along a tightrope. Their seamanship was
as amazing as their swordsmanship and, from the risks they
took, seemed also to imply an intimate complicity with
death. Lafleur and I, alone in our cabin, spent the days in
quiet and foreboding. I discovered his hooded, luminous
eyes watched me all the time with affection, even devotion,
and I began to feel I had known him all my life and he was
my only friend; but you could not have said this new warmth
blossomed for now he took on an almost Trappist
speechlessness and scarcely said more than ‘Good morning’
or ‘Good evening’ to me. I began to feel I would soon lose
the use of my tongue. I counted the days by scratching a
line with my fingernail on our cabin wall. On the twelfth
monotonous day, it was the full moon and when they staved
in the covers of the rum barrels, I realized they meant to
release their pent-up inhibited passions in a debauch.
They set about the initial processes of becoming drunk
with the same glum diligence that characterized all their
actions. It was a night of sweltering, ominous calm. A
gibbous moon fired the phosphorescence in the waters so
that the black ship rocked on a bed of cold, scintillating
flame and they wreathed the sails so that the ship could
look after itself for the rest of the night and most of the next
day, if need be, for every single one proposed to drink
himself to complete insensibility. Then they arranged
themselves in ranks on the deck, cross-legged on round
straw mats, as was their custom, facing the poop where
their leader sat facing them under the shrine with his guest,
the Count, beside him and the cask of rum before him. Each
man held his cannikin ready and the leader, after barking a
grace before drink, scooped out a ladleful of rum from the
cask into the Count’s cannikin and then helped himself. The
pirates went up one by one for their shares. The outlines
were as distinct as those of Indonesian shadow puppets.
They each wore a black loincloth and each carried at his
side a sword in its scabbard. They twisted black sweatbands
round their heads and none of them was taller than four and
three-quarter feet, death’s weird hobgoblins. As he took
hold of his spilling portion, each pirate took off his sword
and put it down on a growing pile beside the leader, either
in a gesture of trust or as a hygienic precaution intended to
forestall the ravages they might wreak with their weapons
when they had drunk enough.
As the crew passed up its cans for its rations, Lafleur,
gazing beside me through the window, softly tugged my
sleeve.
‘Look!’ he said. ‘There is land against the sky.’
Across the undulating plateau of bright water, far, far
away, the shapes of a tropical forest flung up their fringed
arms against the white sky. We had already travelled many
hundreds of miles to the south; the distant landscape was
as unfamiliar to me as that of another planet and yet it was
land and the sight of it cheered my heart, although I would
be denied the comfort of it.
 ‘The currents around here are deceitful and the tornadoes
come swiftly, unheralded and treacherous,’ said Lafleur.
‘They have chosen a foolish time for a drinking bout.’
‘The demands of ritual are always stronger than those of
reason,’ I replied. ‘When the full moon comes, they must get
drunk even in the teeth of a hurricane.’
‘I wish they did not worship steel,’ he said.‘Steel is so
inflexible.’
It was delightful to talk to somebody again and to feel his
goodwill beside me, although again his disguise was far too
cunning and complete for me to penetrate.
‘Well, we can’t persuade the hurricane to smash the ship
and let us live through it,’ I said.
‘No, indeed,’ said Lafleur. ‘But the hurricane is governed
only by chance and chance at least is neutral. One can rely
on the neutrality of chance. And when I look at the sky, I
think I see a storm.’
I, too, looked at the sky but saw only moonlight and the
drifting banks of cloud. But as the pirates lined up for their
second round, they were already grunting with savage mirth
and poking one another, for they had only the most
primitive idea of fun. Their behaviour moved between only
the two poles of melodrama and farce. As soon as they took
off their frivolous armour, laid by their swords and had a
drop or two of rum inside them, they frolicked with the
mindlessness but not the innocence of infants. Even from
our cabin, I could see the Count was growing disillusioned
with them. He had admired their deathward turning
darkness yet, after a third round, they stripped off their
loincloths and, one and all, embarked on a farting contest.
They made the radiant welkin ring with a battery of broken
wind. Exposing to the moon the twin hemispheres of their
lemon-coloured hinder cheeks, each banged away as loudly
as he was able, amid a great deal of unharmonious laughter,
and soon they began to set light to the gases they expelled
with matches, so a blue flame hovered briefly above every
backside.
‘The clouds are piling up,’ said Lafleur breathlessly and,
indeed, the sky was growing sullen so that now the
moonlight fell with a baleful glare the convives were too
drunk to see.
They fell to wrestling and horseplay, tripping one another
over as they passed on an endless chain to receive the
apparently inexhaustible rum and their leader, who took two
or three drinks for each one the men received, often missed
their cannikins altogether and upset the ladle on his
creature’s head. This convulsed them with laughter.
Someone untied the trophies from the shrine and they
began to play a stumbling game of football with them. The
Count sat quite still above them, brooding above these
Breughel-like antics, his face set in lines of aristocratic
distaste.
‘The moon has put on a halo,’ said Lafleur excitedly.
When I looked up, I saw the angry moon was surrounded
with a sulphurous aura and from its white mouth now
belched vile, hot gusts. The pirates, however, were beyond
knowing or caring. Some, as if felled, tumbled down where
they stood and snored immediately. Others first puked
weakly and staggered before they slumped to the deck. But
most simply sank down and slept the deep sleep of the
newly purified. The cries, laughter and bursts of drunken
song slowly faded away. Though he had absorbed most, the
leader was the last to go. He slithered slowly from an
upright position, clasped the rum-tub to break his fall and
then he and the tub together rolled along the poop for a
while and lay still in a pool of spilled liquor. The Count rose
up and seized the holy sword from its shrine with a gesture
that implied their god was too good for them. He was as tall
as a stork and as wild as the spirit of the storm, which now
broke upon us in a sudden squall. Lightning danced along
the blade and the rain struck the oblivious revellers with
tropic fury while the Count hissed: ‘Scum!’ and spat upon
the pirate leader. Stepping through the bodies and the
puddles of vomit and excrement with fastidious distaste, he
went to the stern of the ship and inexorably directed us into
the eye of the whirlwind.
We ran from the cabin to crouch at his side, like his dogs,
for his protection, for now again we saw him in his
tempestuous element. The tempest seemed his tool; he
used this tool to destroy the black ship and its sailors.
The very air turned to fire. The topmast, an incandescent
spoke, snapped and crashed; storm-born luminescence
danced upon every surface and the rain and driving waves
lashed us and soaked us until we were half-drowned before
we sank. Lafleur and I clung to one another while the ship
tilted this way and that, tossing its freight of sleeping swine
hither and thither, flinging them senseless into the boiling
sea or crushing them beneath its disintegrating timbers. The
black sails unfurled and flew away on the wings of the
storm; he flourished the sword like a wand or a baton, for he
conducted the tempest as though it was a symphony
orchestra and again we heard his dishevelled laughter,
louder than the winds and waters put together. The currents
and the wind were driving us nearer and nearer land in the
random flares of the lightning. We saw the giant palms
threshing and bowing double as if in homage to the Count.
Yet we could see nothing clearly for our motion was too
uncertain and soon the ship broke up in a succession of
shivering concussions and all who sailed in it were flung into
the water.
Yet not a single one of the sodden pirates flickered so
much as an eyelid while the sea engorged them and we, the
living, were washed up on a white beach which the wind
moulded into fresh dunes at every moment, together with a
great quantity of black driftwood and yellow corpses.
Yes, we were saved – Lafleur, the Count and I; though we
were little more than skins swollen with salt water and our
ears were still as full of the hurricane as if shells were
clapped to them, blotting out all other sounds. But the
great-grandfather of all breakers tossed me negligently on
the spar to which I clung almost to the margin of the forest
and Lafleur followed me on a lesser wave, holding on to the
rudder. I stumbled down the beach and dragged him up the
sand, out of harm’s way, and then a lightning flash showed
me the Count walking out of the water as simply as if he
had been bathing, in his eyes a strange glow of satisfaction
and, in his hand, still the mighty blade.
We followed him a little way into the forest and there
Lafleur and I made ourselves a kind of nest in the
undergrowth and slept as soon as our battered heads
touched the grassy pillow, but the Count sat up awake all
night, keeping some kind of vigil with his sword. He was still
kneeling among the brushwood when we woke. The playful
monkeys were pelting us with leaves, twigs and coconuts.
The sun was high in the sky. The mysterious susurration of
the tropic forest trembled sweetly in my ears after the
clamour of the oceans. The air was soft and perfumed.
The storm was over and a miraculous peace filled the
vaulted, imperial groves of palms. A web of lianas let a
translucent green light down upon us three, ill-assorted
babes in the wood and it was already so hot that steam was
rising in puffs from our drenched clothing and the now filthy
bandaging Lafleur obstinately refused to take off his face. It
was marvellous to feel the solid ground beneath my feet
again, even if I was not at all sure to which continent the
ground belonged. I thought it must be my own far American
South but the Count opted hopefully for savage Africa while
Lafleur observed remotely that we had not the least notion
where we really were but had probably been blown willy-
nilly on to the coast of some distant island. When we went
down to the beach to wash ourselves, we soon saw the
inhabitants were black and so felt certain we were in Africa.
 The tide, in receding, had left corpses strewn with shells
all along the endless, white beach and the glistening purity
of the sand emphasized the surpassing ebony of the
inhabitants who, clad in long robes of coloured cottons and
necklaces of dried beans, diligently searched among the
debris for its trove of swords. They were men and women of
great size and dignity, accompanied by laughing children of
extraordinary charm, and when they saw us, they lowed
gently among themselves like a congregation of wise cattle.
Our garments smoked. We stood still and allowed them to
approach us. They did so slowly, some trailing the pirates’
swords unhandily behind them. Their faces and chests were
whorled and cicatrized with tribal marks, knife cuts
discoloured because white clay had been rubbed into them.
As we waited, more and more of them came out of the
margin of the jungle, walking with such grace they might all
have been carrying huge pots on their heads, while their
naked children danced round them like marionettes carved
out of coal. When he saw their colour, the Count began to
shiver as if he had caught a fever in the sea but I knew he
shivered out of fear. But these solid, moving shadows
showed no fear of us though soon they formed a great ring
about us, hemming us in on all sides, and we knew we had
been captured.
Then we heard the sound of crude but martial music and a
jaunty detachment of Amazons marched out of the forest.
These women were elderly and steatopygous. They were the
shapes of ripe pears bursting with juice and their wrinkled
dugs swung loosely back and forth, inside and outside the
silver breastplates they wore but, all the same, they were a
splendid sight, some with scarlet cloaks and loose white
breeches made of swathes of cloth tucked up between the
legs, others with cloaks of chocolate brown and dark blue
breeches, all with metal helmets crowned with decorations
of black horsehair. Their officers, chosen, it would seem, as
much for the size of their bottoms as anything, marched
beside them playing long-stemmed, brass trumpets and
little hand drums and these female soldiers were
aggressively armed with duck-guns, blunderbusses, muskets
and razor-like knives, a museum of ancient weapons. They
easily made us understand by signs we were under arrest
again and took us, heavily if quaintly guarded, down the
green path to a clearing where their village lay, while the
black host fell in behind us with the same decorum that
marked all they did.
The village was a seemly place of roomy huts made of
dried mud and we were taken into a neat, clean house and
offered a breakfast of some kind of pounded grain mixed
with minced pork, served on fronds of palm. Lafleur and I
ate heartily but the Count, unmanned again, a quaking
skeleton, ate nothing. He cowered deep under the quilts
they had given us to rest on, repeating over and over again:
NEMESIS COMES. But they were far too polite to even raise
their eyebrows when they saw him. Indeed, the only
discordant notes in all this sober, harmonious decency were
the low stools on which we were invited to sit and the low
tables off which we ate, for they were ingeniously fashioned
out of bones which, from their shapes, could only have been
human. But these bones were dressed up so prettily that at
first one hardly realized they were bones at all for they had
been painted dark red and then adorned with tessellations
of gummed shells and feathers.
They took away our ragged, filthy clothes with polite
exclamations of distaste and Lafleur hid himself in a corner
with a touching, virginal modesty until they brought us
some of their lengths of cotton printed in blacks, indigos and
crimsons so that we could cover ourselves. We made
ourselves togas after the Roman fashion and then Lafleur
and I sat at the door of our hut in the sunshine, trying to
chat wordlessly with the little children who stared at us with
huge, solemn eyes. The children fingered Lafleur’s
bandages curiously because they thought the covering was
a kind of upper face and he laughed with them with such
affecting motherliness I ought to have suspected… but I
suspected nothing! Shape-shifting was so much hocus-
pocus to me. So the morning whiled away peacefully
enough with never a hint of dread though we saw the
women were busily tending huge cauldrons which hung over
fires in the open air and, when the sun stood directly
overhead, the captain of the female soldiers came to us and
informed us that now we must go and pay our respects to
the village chief whose grand ceremonial hut lay a little way
out of the village. So we straightened our togas and combed
our fingers through our hairs. But the Count would not come
of his own free will so the captain had to poke him with the
butt of her musket until he crept reluctantly out to join us.
Oh, what a bedraggled demiurge he was! His black tights
were all tattered and torn, so a fringe of toe peeped out at
the foot of each, and his prick hung out of the aperture as
limp and woebegone as a deflated balloon. He limped like
an eagle with a broken wing. Poor, yellow tiger! And yet he
had ridden out his tempest in triumph the previous night
and even as we walked through the village, he took on, as if
he summoned up all his flagging courage to do so, a few
shreds of enigmatic charisma, enough to fling back his head
proudly, as if, perhaps, invigorated by the high, brazen
clamour of the trumpets which accompanied us.
The path climbed steeply through the vaulted architraves
of the palms which sprang straight up to the sky in soaring,
prodigious, bluish-greyish columns towards the tasselled
parasols of emerald feathers which formed the capitals of
this vegetable cathedral. A muted solemnity governed the
tread of our guards. They changed their music to a more
mournful key and played what was almost a lament and
when we came to a waterfall, everyone fell on their faces to
worship it. Beyond this waterfall was a cave in a rock face,
with its entrance curtained in the printed cotton that
covered us. The soldiers prostrated themselves again so we
knew this was where the chief lived and also that his people
held him in religious awe. The Count had turned pale as if all
the blood had been drained from his body but still he held
his ground with something of his old, defiant spirit. The
brass and the kettledrums fell silent but we could hear the
liquid music of the waterfall and the crackling of the wood
that burned under a great pot outside the cave.
When I looked behind me, I saw the entire village had
followed us, and in the arborescent silence we were the only
men left standing up for everyone else crouched with their
faces deep in grass or flat on earth. The presence of a
hundred silent people filled the green twilight with a sacral
quietude that made me uneasy. And then a sensuous
parade of the chief’s wives and concubines came from the
cave without drawing the curtains apart so we could not see
what lay beyond them. Intensely black and perfectly naked,
these women wore plumes of ostrich in their hair and
arranged themselves around the entrance to the cave in a
frame of submissive adoration. Many bore the bleeding
marks of gigantic bites in their breasts and buttocks. Some
had a nipple missing, most were minus one or several toes
and fingers. One girl had a ruby set in the socket in place of
a lost eyeball and some wore false teeth carved in strange
shapes out of the tusks of elephants. Yet all had been
beautiful and their various disfigurements lent them an
exquisite pathos. After them came a number of eunuchs and
then the royal castrater, the royal barber and several other
barbarous officials, until the whole court was displayed
before us, lined up before the cave as if they were posing
for a group photograph.
The drums now began to play again, a dismal throbbing
like the palpitation of a dying heart. The tribe lay still on
their faces but two of the royal wives crawled forward and at
last drew back the curtains as the drums rolled and the
trumpets suddenly whined. And we saw him. The chief.
He sat on a throne of bones on a dais of bones which, as
we watched, rolled ponderously forward on four wheels
made of skulls, wheels that crushed the hands of half a
dozen concubines before it came to a halt. Seated, he was
six and a half feet high. He was far, far blacker than the
blackest night. He was a very sacred and very monstrous
idol.
On his head he wore a ceremonial wig consisting of three
thick fringes arranged in concentric rings. That next to the
skin of his head was brown; the middle one was crimson;
and the outside fringe was of bright gold, like a diadem.
Through this arresting chevelure was wound a chain of
mixed carbuncles and round his neck, virtually clothing the
upper part of his body, were a great many golden chains
with pendants, charms and skulls of babies dangling from
them. His face was brilliantly painted with four discs on
either cheek, each one rimmed with white and coloured
inside yellow, green, blue and red. A brown, white-rimmed
eye was painted on his forehead between and above his
own eyes. He carried the thigh-bone of a giant for a sceptre,
painted scarlet and once again decorated with inlay and
feathers. He wore the pelt of a tiger wrapped round his
middle and the root-like toes which protruded from his
sandals were stuck with rings containing gems of amazing
size and peerless water, as were his hands, which were so
heavily be-ringed they looked as if they were mailed with
jewels. His appalling face suggested more than Aztec
horrors and, now the curtain was open, I could see that the
cave behind him was an arcade of human skeletons.
‘Welcome to the regions of the noble children of the sun!’
he said in a cavernous voice that sank to thrilling depths,
while the drums pounded on and on. But he did not speak to
Lafleur and me; he addressed himself only to the Count.
‘You are my only destination,’ replied the Count. ‘You
altered my compass so that it would point only to you, my
hypocritical shadow, my double, my brother.’
Then I saw this dreadful chieftain was indeed the black
pimp who was now about to avenge his lover’s murder, for
such was the Count’s desire he should be and do so. The
chieftain rose from his throne, stepped from his dais on to a
footstool of grovelling concubines and took the Count into
the warmest, most passionate embrace. But he concluded it
by striking the Count such a heavy blow that he reeled out
of the great black arms and fell to the ground. The chief set
one foot on the Count’s chest in the attitude of a successful
hunter and spoke, it seemed, to the sky above us, which
showed in patches of azure electricity through the vivid
fronds of the palms.
‘The customs of my country are as barbarous as the
propriety with which they are executed. For example, not
one of those delightful children who seem, each one, to
have stepped straight off the pen of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
but has not, since he put forth his first milk teeth, dined
daily off a grilled rump, or roasted shoulder, a stew, a
fricassée, or else a hash of human meat. To this usually
most abhorred of comestibles they owe the brightness of
their eyes, the strength of their limbs, the marvellous gloss
of health on their skins, their longevity and a virility as great
as it is discreetly practised, since this diet is certain to triple
the libidinal capacities, as my wives and concubines can
willingly testify. But we have learned to let circumspection
sharpen our pleasures and we conduct the most loathsome
profligacy with no public show of indecency at all.
‘How do I rule my little kingdom? With absolute severity.
Only if a king is utterly ruthless, only if he hardens his heart
to the temper of the most intransigent metal, will he
maintain his rule. I am a ruler both secular and divine. I
hedge about my whims, which I term my “laws”, with an
awesome incomprehensibility of superstitious fears. The
least rebellious thought rising weed-like in my subjects’
hearts is instantly transmitted to me by my espionage
system of telepaths whose minds are magic mirrors and
reflect not only faces but thoughts. Those incipient rebels
and their entire families are condemned for the most
fleeting wish alone for we do not give them time to act.
They are forthwith shipped directly to the army catering
staff and boiled down to nourishing soups which contribute
towards the excellent, indeed, prolific physique of my army
while my punishments extend even towards that
insubstantial part of themselves, their souls, for I encourage
a belief in the soul in order to terrify them better. The least
rebellious inclination rising weed-like condemns the subject
and his seed to damnation for three generations. So it
behoves them to tend their gardens well and only let the
lilies of obedience grow there!’
The Count now rose painfully to his feet but the chieftain
instantly kicked him back into a kneeling position and the
Count knelt at his feet for the rest of the interview.
‘Why, you may ask, have I built my army out of women
since they are often held to be the gentler sex? Gentlemen,
if you rid your hearts of prejudice and examine the bases of
the traditional notions of the figure of the female, you will
find you have founded them all on the remote figure you
thought you glimpsed, once, in your earliest childhood,
bending over you with an offering of warm, sugared milk,
crooning a soft lullaby while, by her haloed presence, she
kept away the snakes that writhed beneath the bed. Tear
this notion of the mother from your hearts. Vengeful as
nature herself, she loves her children only in order to devour
them better and if she herself rips her own veils of self-
deceit, Mother perceives in herself untold abysses of cruelty
as subtle as it is refined. Not one of my callipygian soldiery
but has not earned her rank by devouring alive, first
gnawing limb from limb and sucking the marrow from its
bones, her first-born child. So she earns her colours. To a
woman, they are absolutely ruthless. They have passed far
beyond all human feeling.’
The army, as one woman, lifted its head and smiled to
hear this tribute so I guessed they were still capable of
responding to flattery.
 ‘And, since my early researches soon showed me that the
extent of a woman’s feelings was directly related to her
capacity for feeling during the sexual act, I and my surgeons
take the precaution of brutally excising the clitoris of every
girl child born to the tribe as soon as she reaches puberty.
And also those of my wives and concubines who have been
brought from other tribes where this practice is not
observed. Therefore I am proud to say that not a single one
of my harem or, indeed, any of the tribe of more than
Roman mothers you see before you, has ever experienced
the most fleeting ecstasy, or even the slightest pleasure,
while in my arms or in the arms of any of my subjects. So
our womenfolk are entirely cold and respond only to cruelty
and abuse.’
At that there was a rumbling murmur of approbation from
all the men and many broke into spontaneous applause. The
soldiers jumped at once and ran among the ranks of the
tribe, beating them with the flats of their swords until they
were quiet.
‘In these regions, you may observe Man in his
constitutionally vicious, instinctively evil and studiously
ferocious form – in a word, in the closest possible harmony
with the natural world. I am, in my hard-hearted way, most
passionately in love with harmony. As an emblem of
harmony, I would take the storm that rent your ship last
night, resolving that poignant little fabrication of the human
hand to constituents in harmony with this world as it would
be without man – that is, natural. I would take the lion
rending the lamb as an emblem. In a word, I would take all
images of apparent destruction – and mark how I use the
word, “apparent”, for, in essence, nothing can be created or
destroyed. My notion of harmony, then, is a perpetual,
convulsive statis.
‘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.
 7 Lost in Nebulous Time

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.
‘Yes; the Count was dangerous. I was keeping him under
the closest surveillance. It was my most important mission
of the whole war. I would have taken him to my father’s
castle if I could, to enlist him in our campaign for he was a
man of great power though he was sometimes a little
ludicrous because the real world fell so far short of his
desires. But he did what he could to bring it up to his own
level, even if his will exceeded his self-knowledge. And so he
invented those macabre clowns, the Pirates of Death.
‘What was chilling, even appalling, in the Count’s rapacity
was its purely cerebral quality. He was the most
metaphysical of libertines. If he had passions, they were as
lucid and intellectual as those of a geometrician. He
approached the flesh in the manner of one about to give the
proof of a theorem and, however exiguous those passions
seemed to him, they were never unpremeditated. He acted
the tyrant to his passions. However convulsive the grand
guignol in his bed, he had always planned it well beforehand
and rehearsed it so often in his brain that his performance
perfectly simulated an improvisation. His desire became
authentic because it was so absolutely synthetic.
‘Yet it remained only a simulation. He may have jetted his
sperm in positive torrents but he never released any energy.
Instead, he released a force that was the opposite of energy,
a devitalizing force quite unlike – though just as powerful as
– the kind of electricity which naturally flows between a man
and a woman during the sexual act.
(She gently took my hand away from her breast and
murmured in parenthesis: ‘Not yet.’)
‘Yet his performance was remarkable. In bed, one could
almost have believed the Count was galvanized by an
external dynamo. This galvanic mover was his will. And,
indeed, his fatal error was to mistake his will for his desire –’
I interrupted her with a certain irritation.
‘But how is one to distinguish between the will and a
desire?’
‘Desire can never be coerced,’ said Albertina with the
crispness of a pedagogue even though, at that moment, she
was coercing mine. She immediately resumed her discourse.
‘– and so he willed his own desires.’
I interrupted her again.
‘How was it he never found out you were a woman?’
‘Because he only ever took me backwardly, i.e. in anum,’
she explained patiently. ‘And, besides, his lusts always
blinded him completely to anything but his own sensations.’
Then she took up her thread again.
‘His self-regarding “I” willed himself to become a monster.
This detached, external yet internal “I” was both his
dramatist and his audience. First, he chose to believe he
was possessed by demons. Next, he chose to believe he had
become a demon. He even designed himself a costume for
the role – those gap-fronted tights! That vest of skin! When
he reached a final reconciliation with the projective other
who was his self, that icon of his own destructive potential,
the abominable black, he had merely perfected that self-
regarding diabolism which crushed and flattened the world
as he passed through it, like an existential version of the
cannibal chief’s chariot. But his insistence on the authority
of his own autonomy made him at once the tyrant and the
victim of matter, for he was dependent on the notion that
matter was submissive to him.
‘So, when he first felt pain, he died of shock. And yet he
died a happy man, for those who inflict suffering are always
most curious about the nature of suffering.
‘As soon as I took service with him, I realized I must
abandon my plan of enlisting him for I soon realized he
would never serve any master but himself. However, if he
had wanted to, or willed it, he could have flattened my
father’s castle by merely breathing on it and burst all the
test tubes only with laughing at them. After that, I travelled
with him to keep him in a kind of quarantine.’
‘At first, I thought he was your father, the Doctor.’
‘My father?’ she cried in astonishment and laughed very
musically for a long time. ‘But at first we thought he was the
Minister! Even after I met the Minister, I thought it might be
possible. Both of them had such earth-shaking treads.’
‘When did you cease to regard me as an enemy agent?’
‘As soon as my father verified you were in love with me,’
she said, as though it were obvious.
Night had completed itself and lesser lights, eyes of
snakes and effluvia of fireflies, spangled the black velvet
surfaces around us but the eyes of Albertina shone
continually, like unquenchable suns. Her eyes were an
unutterably lambent brown and the shape of tears laid on
their sides. But shape and colour were not the primary
quality of these unprecedented eyes; that was the
scandalous cry of passion ringing out clamorously from their
depths. Her eyes were the voice of the black swan; her eyes
confounded all the senses and sleep nor death cannot
silence nor extinguish them. Only, they are lightly veiled
with incandescent dust.
 During the first part of the night, she slept while I kept
watch for wild beasts. She watched over me all the second
part of the night and so we continued to arrange our rests
during the remainder of the journey though days and nights
soon resolved together and we had no notion of how much
time had passed, or even if any at all of the cloudy stuff had
drifted away before the great rain forests thinned out a
little. Then we came to a gentler, more feminine country full
of jewelled birds with faces of young girls and oviparous
trees, where there was nothing that was not marvellous.
‘Because all this country exists only in Nebulous Time, I
haven’t the least idea what might happen,’ she said. ‘Now
the Professor and his sets of samples are gone, my father
cannot structure anything until he makes new models. And
desires must take whatever form they please, for the time
being. Who knows what we shall find here?
‘If his experiment is a failure, we shall, of course, find
nothing.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Because the undifferentiated mass desire was not strong
enough to perpetuate its own forms.’ When she saw I did
not understand her, she grudgingly amplified: ‘It would
mean that the castle is not yet generating enough eroto-
energy.’
I did not understand her but I nodded, to save face.
‘Anyway, we must watch the sky by day and keep a fire
burning at night and then one day we may make contact
with one of my father’s aerial patrols.’
‘Has he extended the boundaries of the war so far?’
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘But he keeps most deserted places
under continuous air reconnaissance to discover what, if
anything, is peopling the emptiness.’
All this sounded like folie de grandeur to me but I was
content to leave my fate in her hands, now that I had found
her, and we went on through a dangerous wonderland.
We soon learned to identify the grey-green shrubs we
called ‘pain trees’ because of the invisible patches scattered
over their leaves and bark that stung us when we touched
them and left great areas of scarlet inflammation on our
skins that irritated us for a long time. But the trees whose
trunks were scaled like fish did not harm us, though they
stank horribly when the sun was high, unlike the lucidly
fragrant white gardenias that wept such hard tears of
perfumed gum that I threaded some of them into a necklace
of scented amber and gave it to Albertina. Often we walked
through intoxicating odoriferous copses composed only of
incense trees and we found ourselves in groves of a strange,
tall plant which must have been some variety of cactus for
its flesh, though soft and white as snow, was formed all over
into round bosses tipped with red knobs. When we put our
mouths to these nipples we found ourselves drinking sweet
milk and were refreshed. These luscious cacti grew all
together in tracts of many hundreds at a time and if the
country had shown any signs of being inhabited we would
have thought that they were farmed in enormous, free-form
fields. But we saw no sign of man at all, though we
sometimes found the marks of hoofprints of wild horses.
Creeping along the ground and wreathed around branches
was an auriculate morning glory with purple ears where the
blossoms should have been and often we heard the singing
of flowers we never saw. A certain bush with speckled
plumage laid clutches of six or seven small brown eggs at a
time, eggs the size of pullet’s eggs, in the sandy hollows at
its roots. When the bush was laying, it shuddered and
clucked; then sighed. In this forest, it seemed that nature
had absolved her creations from an adherence to the formal
divisions so biology and botany were quite overthrown and
the only animals we saw, green-fleshed, marsupial, one-
eyed, crawling things, seemed more an ambulant vegetable
than anything else. Roasted on a spit, they tasted like
barbecued celery.
As far as I can remember, we had been about three days
in this terra nebulosa before we came to the strangest of all
the trees. It grew by itself on the crown of a low hill, and
though it was firmly rooted into the earth by four, quivering
legs and a massive trunk topped with branches resembling
those of a European oak sprang from its neck, beneath the
trunk and above the legs was the skeleton of a horse with
its entrails visible. A green sap pulsed and throbbed through
the entrails, emitting as it did so a hum like that of a hive of
happy bees. The first evidence of the hand of man we had
seen since we entered the forest was pinned to the
branches of this equine tree. It was decorated with
ornaments of wrought iron which jangled together in the
wind; with what seemed to be amulets in the shape of
horseshoes; and on a prominent branch, a very large
longbow abruptly broken in half. Every available spot on the
trunk was crowded with votive tablets and inscriptions
carved in a brusque, cuneiform script, and here and there
votive nails were hammered in while little switches of
horsehair were tied to all the twigs in neat bows. And the
springy turf around the tree was deeply crusted with
droppings of horses and indented with the marks of hooves.
We stood on the hill beside the buzzing, bi-partite thing,
half horse, half tree, and looked down on the lyrical contours
of a Theocritan valley that opened out before us in rich,
unfenced fields of ripe corn that rippled under the soft wind.
Albertina pointed to them at the very same moment I saw
the series of magnificent forms break the cover of the
wheatfield and come towards us, moving as soundlessly on
the green carpet underfoot as horses in a dream, though
only their bodies were those of horses for they were
centaurs.
There were four of them, one bay, one black, a dappled
grey and one all unspotted white, but their imposing torsos
were mostly gleaming bronze though it seemed, from a
distance, almost as if spiders had woven webs all round
their shoulders for they were covered with mazy decorations
like hug-me-tights of lace. The hair they all wore falling
straight down their backs accorded to their horse-like
colouring, russet, black or white, but their features were
cast in the sternest, most autocratic mould of pure
classicism. Their long noses were so straight you could have
rolled a ball of mercury down them and their lips were set in
austere, magisterial folds. All were clean shaven. They wore
their genitalia set at the base of the belly, as on a man;
because they were animals, they were without
embarrassment but, because they were also men, even if
they did not know it, they were proud. And, as they trotted
towards us, their arms folded on their breasts, the light of a
setting sun glittered upon them so they looked like Greek
masterpieces, born in a time when gods walked among us.
However, they did not believe they were gods; they believed
they walked a constant tightrope above damnation.
As they came closer, I saw they were entirely naked for
what I had taken for clothing was the most intricate tattoo
work I have ever seen. These tattoos were designed as a
whole and covered the back and both arms down as far as
the forearms; and the middle of the chest, the upper
abdomen and the throat and face were all left bare on the
males though the womenfolk were tattooed all over, even
their faces, in order to cause them more suffering, for they
believed women were born only to suffer. The colours were
most subtly woven together and the palette had the
aesthetic advantages of limitation for it consisted of only a
bluish black, a light blue and a burning red. The designs
were curvilinear, swirling pictures of horse gods and horse
demons wreathed in flowers, heads of corn, and stylized
representations of the mammiform cacti, worked into the
skin in a decorative fashion that recalled pictures in
embroidery.
 When they reached the hill, they turned their faces
towards the tree and three times uttered, in unison, a
singularly piercing neigh, while each dropped a turd. Then
the bay, in the most thrilling baritone I have ever heard,
began a sacerdotal song or hieratic chant something in the
style of the chants of orthodox Jewry, though with the
addition of a great deal of dramatic mime. It was the hour
when the Sacred Stallion in his fiery form, the Sun Horse,
entered the Celestial Stable and closed the bars on himself
for the night and the bay was giving thanks for the day’s
ending, because, in their theology, every event in the
physical world depended solely on the ongoing mercy of the
Sacred Stallion and on his congregation’s ongoing
atonement for the unmentionable sin at the dawn of time
that recurred inexorably every year. But I did not know that
then. The bay used his voice like a musical instrument and,
since I did not understand their language, I thought it was a
wordless song. The other centaurs lent their voices at
intervals in a magnificently polyphonic counterpoint and
also beat their hooves on the turf to provide rhythm. It was
stupendously impressive.
When the bay finished, he bowed his head to show his
orisons were over. His black mane and tail were grizzled and
his face showed the marks of age in a weathering that
added to its heroic beauty. Then he spoke to Albertina and
myself in a sonorous sequence of deep, rumbling sounds.
But we could not understand a single word and that, I
realized when I learned a little of their speech, was because
it possessed neither grammar nor vocabulary. It was only a
play of sounds. One needed a sharp ear and a keen intuition
to make head or tail of it and it seemed to have grown
naturally out of the singing of the scriptures, which they
held to be vital to their continued existence.
When he saw our perplexity, the bay shrugged and
indicated by gesture we should throw down our weapons.
When we had done so, he gestured us to mount the dappled
grey and the black. I demurred in pantomime, mimicking
our unworthiness to ride them and at that he smiled, and
told us wordlessly that, even though we were unworthy, we
must ride just the same. Only much later, when I learned we
had ridden two of the princes of their Church, did I realize
how privileged we had been for the black was the Smith and
the dappled grey the Scrivener and these were posts the
equivalent of cardinals. Each centaur picked one of us up in
his brawny arms and swung us up behind him on to his
broad back as easily as if we had been children. Although I
should not think they had ever carried passengers before,
they moved at a stately walk, though less out of
consideration for our precarious seats than that they never
strolled or ambled but always only processed. We rode
through the sea of corn to the cluster of homesteads that
lay, half-smothered in vines and flowers, beyond the fields.
And there they gently put us down in a kind of agora or
meeting place, in the centre of which was a very large
wooden rostrum with a brass trumpet hanging from its rail.
The bay put his trumpet to his lips and blew.
The centaurs lived in enormous stables fashioned from the
trunks of trees, with deep eaves of thatch, a style of
architecture with a Virgilian rusticity for it had the severe,
meditative quality of classicism and yet was executed in
wood and straw. The lofty proportions of these stables were
dictated by the size of our hosts; a half-grown centaur, part
yearling, part adolescent, was already a whole head taller
than I so the doors all had wooden archways more than
fifteen feet high and ten feet broad, at least. It was the hour
of the evening meal when we arrived and woodsmoke
drifted into the fading sky from various holes in the roofs
but, as soon as the bay sounded the horn, every inhabitant
of the place came trotting from his house until we were
surrounded by a throng of the fabulous creatures,
inquisitively snuffing the air that blew about us, arching
their necks and blowing thoughtfully through their nostrils
for, though they were men, they had all the mannerisms of
horses.
They thought that, since they had found us on the Holy
Hill, we too must be holy in spite of our unprepossessing
appearance.
If they had not decided we were holy, they would have
trampled us to death.
Though they were men, they did not know what a man
was and believed themselves to be a degenerate variety of
the horse they worshipped.
Herds of wild horses often came to trample down their
plantations of grain and their cacti dairies, to plunge
through the townships like a hooved river in full spate and to
mount the centaurs’ womenfolk, if they found them. They
believed the Sacred Stallion housed the souls of the dead in
the wild horses and called their depredations the Visitation
of the Spirits. They followed them with weeks of fasting, of
the self-mortification to which they were addicted and to the
recital of the part of their equine scripture which celebrated
the creation of the first principle, the mystic essence of
horse, the Sacred Stallion, from a fusion of fire and air in the
upper atmosphere. Even before I understood their language,
I found myself profoundly moved to hear the impassioned
recital of their mythic past, which only the males of a certain
caste were allowed to perform. Though they all sang
constantly and all their songs were hymns or psalms, sacred
narrative poetry was the exclusive property of a single
cantor, who to earn the right to sing it had to run with the
wild horses for an entire season, an ordeal few candidates
for the post survived. Then, when he reached the age of
thirty, he began to study the arcane classics under the elder
who alone knew them all. By his forty-fifth birthday, he had
learned the complete canon and its accompanying gestures
and footwork, for this poetry was both sung and danced;
then he would present for the first time in public, in the
earth-floored agora, the song of the horse who penetrated
to the shades to retrieve his dead friend.
They prized fidelity above all other virtues. An unfaithful
wife was flayed alive and her hide given to her husband to
cover his next marriage bed, a mute deterrent to his new
bride to keep from straying, while her lover was castrated
and forced to eat his own penis, uncooked. Since they all
had the most profound horror of meat, they termed this
method of execution ‘Death by Nausea’. However, this
rigorous puritanism did not prevent every male in the village
from raping Albertina on the night we arrived and their
organs were so prodigious, their virility so unmentionable,
that she very nearly died. While, as for me, they forced on
me the caresses of all their females for they had no notion
of humanity in spite of their extraordinary nobility of spirit.
Because they were far more magnificent than man, they did
not know what a man was. They did not have a word for
shame and nothing human was alien to them because they
were alien to everything human.
These hippolators believed their god revealed himself to
them in the droppings excreted by the horse part of
themselves since this manifested the purest essence of their
equine natures, and it was quite as logical an idol as a loaf
of bread or a glass of wine, though the centaurs had too
much good sense to descend to coprophily. The community
was governed by a spiritual junta comprising the Cantor, the
repository and interpreter of the Gospel; the Scrivener; the
Smith; and the Tattoo-master. It went on four legs, as was
only natural.
The centaurs did not give one another personal names for
they felt themselves all undifferentiated aspects of a
universal will to become a horse. So these cardinals were
referred to in common speech by the symbols of their arts.
The Cantor was called Song, though never to his face; the
Tattoo-master Awl, Gouge or Aspiring Line; the Smith Red
Hot Nail and the Scrivener, Horse Hair Writing Brush. But
this terminology was necessary not because the individuals
needed names but because the tasks they performed
distinguished them from the others, so that it was not
precisely the bay who was known as Song but the idea of
the Cantor which he represented. They did not have much
everyday social intercourse. The women did not gossip at
their work, although they always sang. Daily life was
meaningless to them for all they did was done in the
shadow of the continuous passion of the Sacred Stallion and
only this cosmic drama was real to them. They had no
vocabulary to express doubts. Nor were they able to express
the notion ‘death’. When the time came to identify this
condition, they used for it the sounds that signified also
‘birth’ for death was their greatest mercy. In giving them
death, the Sacred Stallion gave them an ultimate
reconciliation with Him; they were reborn in the wild horses.
Music was the voice of the Sacred Stallion. Shit signified
his presence among them. Their Holy Hill was a dungheap.
The twice daily movement of their bowels was at once a
form of prayer and a divine communion. Every aspect of
their lives was impregnated by the profoundest religious
feeling for even the little foal child whose milk teeth were
not yet through was a kind of priest, or medium for the
spirit, in this faith. But only the males held the secrets of
these mysteries. The women were the rank and file of the
devotees and had so much to do, working the fields, bearing
the children, milking the cacti, making the cheese, grinding
the corn, building the houses, they could spare time only to
pray, beating staccato patterns of hoof beats and uttering
the shrieking neigh that meant: ‘Hallelujah!’ The females
were ritually degraded and reviled. They bore the bloody
brunt of the tattooing. They dragged whole trunks of trees
to build the stables while their menfolk prayed. Yet the
women were even more beautiful than the men, each one
both Godiva and her mount at the same time. They walked
like rivers in floods of variously coloured hair and carried
their crimson holes proudly beneath tails that arched like
rainbows. It was a heraldic sight to see a pair of centaurs
mating.
And now, on our first evening, the setting sun cast a
magic aurefaction on their hocks and shoulders and all
those profiles off Greek vases and I felt the strange awe I
had experienced in the choirs and naves of the forest, for
once more we were surrounded by giant and indifferent
forms. I felt myself dwindle and diminish. Soon I was nothing
but a misshapen doll clumsily balanced on two stunted pins,
so ill-designed and badly functioning a puff of wind would
knock me over, so graceless I walked as though with an
audible grinding of rusty inner gears, so slow of foot our
hosts could run me down in a flash for I might even be
stupid enough to try to escape. And when I looked at
Albertina, I saw that though she was still beautiful, she also
had become a doll; a doll of wax, half melted at the lower
part.
When the bay spoke to me, I answered him in my own
tongue; then French; then the already half-forgotten
language of the river people; then my faulty English; then
my even scantier German. He rumbled deeply in the back of
his throat, possibly in admiration of my facility for making
noises, and then Albertina spoke a few phrases in, among
other languages I could not even identify, Chinese and
Arabic. But the bay shrugged, making a kaleidoscopic
confluence of the colours on his shoulders, and, gripping me
tightly in his mighty fist, began a mute inspection of me,
while the dappled grey investigated Albertina.
They soon discovered that our clothes came off and the
sight of these flapping, detachable integuments provoked a
sweet thunder of laughter among a breed used to garments
embroidered in pain that fitted so intimately they came off
only if a back was pared like an apple. Kneeling down in the
fashion of horses, the bay and the grey prised, poked and
handled every part of our bodies, especially our forked,
insubstantial, lower halves, for they had nothing to compare
Old Two Legs with. Our feet, especially, were objects of the
greatest wonder and, by the sonorous exclamations, clearly
also of considerable surmise. When a yearling ran up with
an axe, I guessed the bay planned to cut off a foot in order
to take it in his hands and examine it more closely. I was
interested to see he interpreted my involuntary cry as one
of outraged protest and waved the hatchet away. A look of
intense curiosity crossed his face while he subjected me to a
fresh barrage of incomprehensible questions. But I did not
know how to reply except with a few, wordless murmurs
because I had not yet grasped the essentially nonverbal
nature of the language and he soon abandoned all attempts
to talk to me and bent over me afresh to count my toes and
exclaim over my toenails, which clearly fascinated him.
As it grew darker, they brought flaming brands set in iron
torches to light up the piazza and left us lying on our backs
on the stage while the bay conducted vespers. The service
consisted of a recital from the scriptures and prayers. The
recital of their scriptures in toto occupied the entire year,
which concluded with the death and resurrection of the
Sacred Stallion at midwinter. Then forty days’ mourning was
succeeded by a three-day feast and the entire cycle began
again. Now, by one of the temporal metastases which
occurred constantly in Nebulous Time, we happened to have
fallen into their hands at the very time in which they were
living again the season, recurring every year in the timeless
medium which regulated all their actions, when the Sacred
Stallion from the depths of his compassion teaches them the
art of tattooing, so that, though the sins of their father had
denied them the true shape of horses, they could at least
carry the shapes of horses upon their altered skins. So the
lesson for today had the text: TRANSMISSION OF THE DIVINE
ART NUMBER ONE. Though this was neither more nor less
significant to them than any other phase in their theological
dramaturgy, for all were of the utmost significance, it had
certain repercussions upon the nature of the hospitality they
eventually offered us. For their ritual was by no means
inflexible; it could be altered and broadened to incorporate
any new element they happened upon. As it incorporated
the incursions of the wild horses, so eventually they
modulated it in order to incorporate us. But that came later.
By its nature, the TRANSMISSION OF THE DIVINE ART
NUMBER ONE was one of the less choreographic of their
recitals, though the staging was sufficiently impressive.
Nevertheless, it was awesome.
First of all, the assembled women began to beat a
subdued rhythm with their hooves and an acolyte, a sorrel-
coloured foal, ceremoniously brought on to the stage a
wooden tray containing a whip, a paintbrush, a saucer full of
black liquid and some kind of metal instrument I could not
identify. He knelt before the bay who at first seemed sullen
and impassive, adopting a statuesque pose with his arms
folded. But, as the drumbeats quickened, he began to sing
in that most glorious baritone and in response came the
nasalized hallelujah chorus that is my strongest memory of
our life among the centaurs for it greeted the dawn and
foreclosed the day, every day, inevitably, and is inseparably
mingled in my mind with the rich smell of fresh horse-dung.
As the music he and his congregation made grew quicker
and louder, the bay’s excitement began to rise. He sought
after atonement and he chastised himself. He moaned and
grovelled and quarrelled with himself until, seizing the whip,
he beat his own flanks until the blood came. When they saw
the blood, some of the women went off into strange, lonely
ecstasies. Puffs of blue flame came out of their holes and
they reared, threshed about with their hooves and whinnied
convulsively. But when the Cantor dropped his whip and
sank to the ground, covering his face, in an attitude of
complete abnegation, everyone grew tremulously silent and
I saw that even the grown males were weeping.
Now a second actor entered the spectacle and engaged
him in a duet. The white centaur stepped forward. The
persistent beat changed to almost a waltz rhythm. The
white was a seductive tenor and, though I only understood
the meaning through the tones of the sound itself, I knew he
was singing of forgiveness and the baritone was beseeching
him to be allowed to suffer more. But the mercy of the tenor
was inexorable. At last he took from the tray the paintbrush
and the metal object, which I saw was some kind of gouge,
parted the bay’s tributaries of hair to reveal his back, dipped
the brush in the saucer of ink and made a number of
obviously highly stylized passes over the exposed flesh of
the kneeling bay, who responded by throwing such a
contagious ecstasy that he took most of his audience with
him and, in a clamour of tears, abandoned laughter and
signs everywhere of the most delirious joy, the service
ended with an explosive shedding of all the dung in every
bowel present, Albertina’s and mine excepted.
After the god had visited them, the women went to fetch
brooms and wooden buckets from their stables and swept
up all the manure into heaping piles, which they used to
fertilize their fields, for they wasted nothing. While the
women tidied up by the light of the torches, the Cantor and
the Tattoo-master turned their attention back to us. Now
they concentrated their fingerings upon our private parts
and seemed reassured by the familiar shapes although they
were lodged between such unfamiliar legs. The white
centaur thoughtfully pushed three fingers bunched together
up Albertina’s vagina and listened to her scream judiciously,
with his head on one side. He lowered his muzzle and began
to sniff her comprehensively. His working nostrils travelled
over every inch of her skin and occasionally he licked her, to
let his palate verify the evidence collected by his nose. His
warm breath and rough tongue tickled her; she began to
laugh and, when the bay followed suit and started to snuffle
over me, soon I was laughing too, though it was a laughter
close to hysteria.
These two elders raised their heads and engaged in a
baying colloquy which ended in the following manner. We
were both carried bodily to the bay’s stable and laid down
on the table from which his wife hastily cleared the supper
dishes when they brought us in. The rest of the villagers
followed us, so there was a great crowd, every male, female
and infant in the village gathered in the enormous room.
When I tried to scramble over the great board of oak to
reach her and protect her, the bay easily held me down with
one hand. His strength was immense. Then the white spread
her legs wide and investigated the aperture involuntarily
offered him, clearly comparing it with the size of his
tumescent organ, which was that of a horse rather than a
man. Nevertheless he pulled her down to the edge of the
table and in it went, after a hideous struggle.
The audience, rapt with wonderment, neighed softly and
pawed the ground and then, one after the other, all the
males took their turn at her. She was soon mired with blood
but, after the first exclamation, she did not cry again. I
struggled and bit the bay but still he would not let me go
though he murmured to himself as if surprised to see
evidence of a bond between two members of a species that
must have seemed to him the lowest form of horse he had
ever seen. They were all bathed in ruddy light and the
tattoos performed danses macabres across their backs.
None of them seemed to extract the least pleasure out of
the act. They undertook it grimly, as though it were their
duty.
And I could do nothing but watch and suffer with her for I
knew from my own experience the pain and indignity of a
rape. But the centaurs let me alone in that way, either
because my offering was too narrow or else that mode of
congress was unknown to them. At the back of my mind
flickered a teasing image, that of a young girl trampled by
horses. I could not remember when or where I had seen it,
such a horrible thing; but it was the most graphic and
haunting of memories and a voice in my mind, the cracked,
hoarse, drunken voice of the dead peep-show proprietor,
told me that I was somehow, all unknowing, the instigator of
this horror. My pain and agitation increased beyond all
measure.
While the males made this prolonged and terrible assault
upon Albertina, the bay was organizing the females into a
line and I knew I would not be left out of the savage game.
But me they treated with far less severity because they
respected the virile principle and reviled the female one. So
my torment was intended only to humiliate their own
womenfolk who one by one caressed me, as they were
ordered, but only with the gentlest of fingers. I was
subjected to the ministrations of twenty or thirty of the
tenderest, if the most perverse, of mothers and some even
bent to kiss me with mouths like wet velvet in faces covered
with permanent masks of lace, so I could not help but
quicken with pleasure while the bay held me down so firmly
I could only moan. And this was the subtlest of tortures –
that I was bathed in a series of the most exquisite
sensations on the very table where they cruelly abused the
flesh of the one I loved best. My nostrils were full of the
mingled stench of horses, of the smoke from their pine wood
torches, of the perfumed oil with which the women dressed
their hair, of blood, of semen and of pain; the very air
thickened and grew red. And though Albertina was the
object of a rape, the males clearly did not know it was a
rape. They showed neither enthusiasm nor gratification. It
was only some form of ritual, another invocation of the
Sacred Horse.
They had a deeply masochistic streak. They did not
reserve the whip only for religion but used it continually on
themselves and one another, making the slightest real or
imagined fault the pretext for a beating. It was a matter of
pride as to how thin one could bear one’s bed of straw. They
loved to feel the hot steel on their fetlocks when the priest
shod them, for the Sacred Horse had taught them the art of
the smith and if he had ordained them bits and bridles stuck
with inward-turning spikes, they would have donned them
luxuriously. The centaurs had all the virtues and defects of a
heroic style.
The bay serviced Albertina last of all, while the white
Tattoo-master took a turn at holding me down. Of all the
rapists, the bay was most impassive. Then, in silence, they
dispersed to their homes and the stable was empty but for
the family of the bay.
The bay’s mate, a Junoesque roan mare, put a great
cauldron of water to heat on a hook over the fire and I
wondered if they were going to end the evening by boiling
us alive. But the bay snorted, wiped himself down with a
wisp of hay, took a leather-bound book from a high shelf and
sat down before the fire. The three children – a male of
perhaps twelve by human reckoning, as yet unshod; a
female of about fifteen, part wood nymph and part
Palomino; and a foal baby who hardly knew, yet, how to
tumble about on her four legs, lined up in front of him and
all went down on their front legs. And then he began to hear
their catechism.
The girl-female was already completely sheathed with a
pattern of horses and grapes that made her look as if she
were peering through a vineyard but the artist had only just
begun to work on the boy and nothing more than the
centrepiece of a full design, a rampant stallion, was traced
in outline on his skin. He went to the Tattoo-master every
morning after prayers and a little more was filled in every
day so that, under our eyes, the living picture was to grow
more and more emphatic the longer we lived there and we
could mark the passage of time by the creeping tendrils of
the work on his back. Their father asked the questions and
the children made the ritual responses; they seemed to
have forgotten us and I crawled across the table top to
Albertina. She had lost consciousness. I took her in my arms
and buried my face in her forlorn hair.
 The proportions of the stable and of the beings who lived
there were only just a little larger than those suited to a
man but the slightness of the excessive size of everything
together with the superhuman strength and flawless gravity
of our hosts or captors made me feel like a child at the
mercy of uncomprehending adults rather than of ogres.
Even the rape had had elements of the kind of punishment
said to hurt the giver more than the receiver though I do not
know what they were punishing her for, unless it was for
being female to a degree unprecedented among them. Now,
when the roan mare looked up from tending the fire and saw
me grieving over my fainting lover, she did not change
mood so much as allow her essential motherliness to
intensify. She came and looked at Albertina and then she
spoke some low, submissive but reproachful words to her
master and stroked Albertina’s face with a piteous hand. I
think she had meant to wash the table top with the water
she was heating, for the table was now very dirty and her
house was very clean, but instead she took the pan off the
hook and invited me to clamber in and wash myself while
she herself made a soft pad of hay, moistened it and gently
wiped the blood and muck from Albertina. The centaur’s
saucepan made me a snugly fitting hip bath and, when I had
finished, she indicated I should sit in front of the fire and dry
myself while she put Albertina to bed on the straw but I saw
Albertina’s eyelids flutter and went to her at once.
Again the mare spoke to her husband and then to me,
with the intonation of a question. I thought she must be
asking me if Albertina was my mate so I repeated the sound
she had made back to her in a strongly affirmative tone. She
looked exceedingly surprised; and then she smiled most
tenderly and let us both lie down together while she covered
us up with straw and the catechism droned softly on.
The mare must have talked to her husband during the
night because he came to our bed in the morning, abased
himself and kissed my feet because she was my mate,
therefore my property, and so he must apologize to me.
Tears ran out of his eyes. He whipped himself for me. Then
he went out to conduct morning service and after that I ate
my breakfast with the family, sitting on a stump of wood his
wife found for me while the males all sat on their haunches
and ate with their hands from wooden dishes like sylvan
men and the women waited until the men had finished
before they took their own meal. But Albertina could not stir
from her bed and only feebly sipped a mouthful or two of
the milk I tried to feed her.
Their diet was one of rustic simplicity. The women ground
their corn in stone querns and made flat, tortilla-like
pancakes which they ate with the wild honey in which they
also deliciously preserved fruit. They sometimes roasted the
ears of corn on the hot coals. Morning and evening, they
milked the cactuses into wooden buckets, fermented the
milk to make a sour but invigorating drink and also made
flat, white cheeses with a sweet, bland flavour and a
crumbling texture. They cultivated orchards of fruit and
vegetable gardens of roots and tubers; they gathered salads
in the forests and also mushrooms, which they particularly
liked to eat raw, dressed with oil and vinegar. They made
sweet syrup from berries but the Sacred Horse had not
revealed to them the mysteries of alcohol so their religion
was only a spartan, teetotal variation upon Dionysianism
and their grapes went only into jellies and salad dressings.
Their abstemious, vegetarian diet filled them out with iron
muscle. Their teeth were white and perfect. They died only
of accident and old age and old age took a long time to
come to them.
But their lives were only apparently tranquil. Every day of
the week and every week of the year was irradiated by the
continuous divine drama unfolding in the voices of the
singers and the turning of the year so they lived primarily on
dramaturgical terms. This gave the women a certain dignity
that would otherwise have been denied them for every one
of the most insignificant household tasks, mucking out,
bringing water from the spring, picking the lice from one
another’s manes and tails, was performed as if in a divine
theatre, as if, for example, each mare was the embodiment
of the archetypal Bridal Mare as she cleaned the Celestial
Stable; even if the Bridal Mare was only a penitent sinner,
still she was essential to the Sacred Horse’s passion.
Therefore, every minute of the day, they were all, male
and female alike, engrossed in weaving and embroidering
the rich fabric of the very world in which they lived and, like
so many Penelopes, their work was never finished. The
whole point of their activity was that it was endless, for they
unravelled their work at the end of the year and then, with
the return of the sun after the shortest day, began on it
again. The horse-tree on the Holy Hill was the central node
of their world, for it was the living skeleton of the Sacred
Stallion left them as an authoritarian reminder by the deity
himself; their conduct was regulated by the tree’s responses
to the seasons and the Sacred Stallion died when the leaves
fell. Yet, for all its sanctity, the tree was really no more than
a kind of anthropoid vegetable clock, for it only told them
when it was proper to perform certain choric cantatas. For,
as I say, their drama was comprehensive enough to be
extremely flexible and if the tree had been blasted one night
by lightning the Church of the Horse would have absorbed
this event into a new mutation of the central myth, after a
period of spiritual reorientation.
They were not fabulous beasts; they were entirely mythic.
Sometimes I thought they were not really centaurs at all but
only men who possessed such a deep conviction the
universe was a horse that it was impossible for them to see
any evidence that hinted things might be otherwise.
Their language was far simpler than it seemed at first. It
consisted primarily of sound clusters and intuition and,
though it was quite different from any human language, it
was easy enough for a man to grasp and before three weeks
passed both Albertina and I had enough of the rudiments to
make simple conversation with our hosts and so learn
something of the consternation into which our arrival had
plunged them. We had disrupted their cycle and they were
still going through a painful period of readjustment. They
had searched all through their holy books and found there
no formulas of hospitality. We were the first visitors they had
ever had in their entire legendary history and when we
learned to say their equivalent of ‘good morning’, their
consternation reached a giddy height for there was no
sound in their language with which to define a sentient,
communicable being who was not mostly horse.
But, since they had found us on the Holy Hill, they knew
we were a sign from heaven though they had not yet
decided just what it was we signified. While they racked
their brains over the problem, they took certain hygienic
precautions. They would not let us go and watch their
matins and their evensong and they never left us entirely
alone together, for fear we might propagate other as yet
indigestible marvels before they could find a means of
digesting us. Apart from that, they treated us kindly and,
after I received permission from the bay to browse among
his books, I soon filled my days by turning my old talents at
the crossword puzzle to solving the riddle of their runes.
Poor Albertina took a long time to recover from her ordeal.
The roan mare and I looked after her and fed her warm milk
mixed with honey and a rich porridge made from corn, kept
her warm and attended to everything but her fever did not
leave her for three days and she could hardly walk but only
hobble for more than a fortnight. She was brave and soon
stopped flinching when she saw the bay while the children
shyly brought her wild strawberries arranged on platters of
fresh leaves or bunches of the poppies and moon daisies
that grew in the corn, because she was so holy. I sat beside
Albertina with my books as the roan mare did the
housework and Albertina told me, in the way of those who
are sick far from home, of her childhood in Hoffman’s
Schloss, of her rarely seen father, who had seemed so
formidable to the little Albertina, of the frail mother with
bridled eyes who died so soon and of certain pet rabbits,
birds and other playthings. She did not speak of the war or
of her father’s researches; she seemed content to rest for a
while and gather her strength. She begged me to watch for
the aerial patrols and so I went up to the Holy Hill every
morning and scanned the sky; though I always saw only
clouds and birds, she never gave up hope but said:
‘Perhaps, tomorrow…’ My trips to the hill only helped
confirm our host’s theory that we must be numinous.
The more I was beside her, the more I loved her.
At last I began to gain some glimmerings of the centaurs’
cosmogony.
The Books of the Sacred Stallion were painted with the
brushes they used in the tattooing operation on a kind of
parchment made from the barks of certain trees
characterized by a leaf formation like a horse’s tail, for they
believed in an elaborate system of correspondence. Their
cuneiform script was based on the marks of their own
hooves and, though all the men could read, only the
Scrivener was allowed to practise the art of writing. It was
hermetic knowledge and handed down only from eldest son
to eldest son. When the Scrivener’s wife bore him no sons,
they considered the sequential inheritance so important he
was permitted to put his old wife away and take a new one,
the only circumstances in which they allowed divorce. But
the script was simplicity itself; it was a system of marks
corresponding in size exactly to sounds and, after a few
lessons from the astonished bay, I was soon able to figure it
out well enough.
They called themselves the Distorted Seed of the Dark
Archer, although this name was so terrible it could not be
spoken aloud, only whispered from one cantor to his
successor during the course of his three-week-long
initiation. It was an awareness of imminent damnation that
kept them at their devotions with such fervour and the mark
of Cain they printed upon their backs. It was clearly a
matter of pride with them to grow as glorious in their
mutilations as they possibly could. And all this was the
brooding counterpoint, unspoken yet known, that lent such
passion to their worship.
I sheared the thick flesh of rhetoric from the contents,
ignored the stories of lesser heroes and was left with this
skeleton: the Bridal Mare marries the Sacred Stallion, who
instantly impregnates her but, while in foal, she deceives
him with a former suitor, the Dark Archer. Spurred by
jealousy, the Dark Archer shoots the Sacred Stallion in the
eye with an arrow. As he dies, the Sacred Stallion tells the
Dark Archer his children will be born in degenerate forms.
The Dark Archer and the Bridal Mare cook and eat the
Sacred Stallion to hide their crime, but a desolation
immediately comes upon the country and, repentant, they
whip themselves ferociously for thirty-nine days. (This
corresponded to the fast at midwinter and must have been
truly astonishing to watch; but we did not stay among them
long enough to have the chance of seeing it.) On the fortieth
day, the Mare, in a uroboric parturition, gives birth, with
extraordinary suffering, to none other than the Sacred
Stallion himself, who ascends into the Celestial Stable in the
shape of his own foal. The remainder of the liturgical year
was taken up with lengthy and overbearing forgiveness and
his many teachings – of the art of singing; of the techniques
of the smithy; of corn growing; of cactus culture; of cheese-
making; and of writing – and all the almost countless ways
in which they must conduct their lives in order to atone for
their sins. And then, matured, the Sacred Stallion descends
from the sky and once again marries the Bridal Mare.
So that was why they held women in such low esteem!
And why they would not touch meat! And why they hung a
broken bow on the horse-tree! And now I understood they
were not so much weaving a fabric of ritual with which to
cover themselves but using the tools of ritual to shore up
the very walls of the world.
Albertina was as concerned as I with the texture of the life
of our hosts but not from any simple, childish curiosity such
as mine. She had become engrossed in the problem of the
reality status of the centaurs and the more she talked of it,
the more I admired her ruthless empiricism for she was
convinced that even though every male in the village had
obtained carnal knowledge of her, the beasts were still only
emanations of her own desires, dredged up and objectively
reified from the dark abysses of the unconscious. And she
told me that, according to her father’s theory, all the
subjects and objects we had encountered in the loose
grammar of Nebulous Time were derived from a similar
source – my desires; or hers; or the Count’s. At first,
especially, the Count’s, for he had lived on closer terms with
his own unconscious than we. But now our desires, perhaps,
had achieved their day of independence.
I remembered the words of another German savant and
quoted to her: ‘ “In the unconscious, nothing can be treated
or destroyed.”* Yet we saw the Count destroyed; and I
myself destroyed the Cannibal Chief.’
‘Destruction is only another aspect of being,’ she said
categorically and with that I had to be content.
Yet we ate the bread of the centaurs and were nourished
by it. So I saw that, if what she believed were so, these
phantoms were not in the least insignificant for the
existence of the methodical actuality on whose beds of
straw we slept, whose language we were forced to learn,
this complex reality with its fires, it cheeses, its complicated
theology and its magnificent handwriting, this concrete,
authentic, self-consistent world was begotten from
phenomenal dynamics alone, the product of a random
becoming, the first of the wonderful flowers that would
bloom in the earth her father had prepared for them by
means she, as yet, refused to so much as hint at, except to
say they had to do with desire, and radiant energy, and
persistence of vision. We were living, then, according to the
self-determined laws of a group of synthetically authentic
phenomena.
Because they did not have a word for ‘guest’, or even for
‘visitor’, they began to treat us, at last, with a nervous
compassion but until they expanded their liturgy to absorb
us we were at best irritating irrelevancies, distracting them
from the majestic pageant of their ritual lives. We did not
even have anything to teach them. They knew all they
needed to know and when I tried to tell the bay that by far
the greater number of social institutions in the world were
made by weak, two-legged, thin-skinned creatures much the
same as Albertina and I, he told me in so many words that I
was lying. For, because they were men, they had many
words to describe conditions of deceit; they were not
Houyhnhnms.
When we could speak the language fluently and Albertina
had quite recovered, they put her to work in the fields with
the women, because it was harvest time. The women
reaped the corn and brought it into the village in sheaves on
their backs. When all was gathered in, they would thresh it
during the performance of semi-secular harvest songs on a
communal threshing floor. Soon Albertina became as brown
as an Indian, for the yellowish pigment of her Mongolian
skin took to sunshine in as friendly a fashion as my own did.
She would come home in the golden evenings, wreathed
with corn like a pagan deity in a pastoral and naked as a
stone, for they did not give us back our clothes and we
never needed to cover ourselves, for the weather was
always warm. But even when all her wounds were healed,
she would not let me touch her, though she would not tell
me why except to say that the time was not yet ripe. So we
lived like loving brother and sister, even if I was always a
little in awe of her for sometimes her eyes held a dark,
blasting lightning and her face fell into the carven lines of
the statue of a philosopher. At these times a sense of her
difference almost withered me for she was the sole heir to
her father’s kingdom and that kingdom was the world. And I
had nothing. Familiarity did not diminish her strangeness
nor her magnetism. Every day I found her all the more
miraculous and I would gaze at her for hours together, as
though I were feeding on her eyes. And, as I remember, she,
too, would gaze at me.
But we were prisoners of the centaurs and did not know if
we would ever be free, unless her father’s aerial patrols
sighted us.
Because I was male, they did not let me do any work and
seemed happy enough to let me wander around the village,
learning what I could learn. Perhaps they even thought,
when they saw me poring over their books, they might even
be able to enlist me in their ceremonies, one day, as an
inkbearer or an assistant fustigator. I do not know. But I do
know they were making their plans for us. When the Cantor,
the Tattoo-master, the Smith and the Scrivener talked
together, they always talked in whispers. But now they met
together more and more frequently; they were always at
their whisperings. And the Scrivener, with a choir around
him, chanting, would sit at the table in his stable and write
in a new big book in the evenings.
When I went to watch the tattooing, I found the art was as
remarkable as the method was atrocious. First, they chose a
design from the pictures in the ancient volumes of
blueprints and drew it on the skin with the brush. But then
the pain began for the artist did not use a relatively humane
needle; he kept in a consecrated chest his artillery of
triangular-shaped awls and gouges. He ground and mixed
his pigments himself. He and his sons, his apprentices, went
into the forest to search for the ingredients for their mixes
and the colours, taken from minerals in the earth and dried,
powdered plants, were often toxic enough to produce an
effect as of scalding, and always a terrible itching, although
the skin of the man-parts was far tougher than human skin.
So one often saw young boys feverishly scratching their
half-embroidered backs against rough trunks of trees in the
mornings after their visits to the master. During a tattooing,
the Tattoo-master’s stable was halfway between an
operating theatre and a chapel.
His wife scrubbed down the table and set out a pillow of
straw on which the boy victim rested his head as he lay face
down while the master’s three sons lined up, chanting, one
carrying the awls, another the paint and the third a bowl of
water and a sponge. The Cantor, at the head of the table,
began to sing; he sang the sympathetic magic of the
emblem, how he who wore the horse indented on his skin
took on the virtue of horses while the master plunged the
brush in the ink with his left hand and, taking in the other an
awl or gouge, depending on the thickness of the desired
line, he rubbed the instrument in the wet brush and pushed
the colouring matter under the skin. And then the third son
wiped the blood away with a sponge. Each of the children’s
visits lasted an hour. The Tattoo-master always had a full
day’s work. The more complicated designs, those for the
children of the church dignitaries, could take up to a year to
complete and the women, especially, suffered terribly in the
regions around their nipples. And all the time they suffered,
the song went on; religion was their only analgesic.
Work on the tattoo of the bay’s son was almost complete.
Only another few hours’ work and he would become a work
of religious art as preposterous as it was magnificent. But
we never saw him in his final, ridiculous splendour for one
day at breakfast the bay said to me:
‘She is not to go to the fields today. I shall come for both
of you after prayers and you will go to the Holy Hill with me.’
He smiled grimly and with even a certain affection, or,
rather, with a tolerant acquiescence in my presence at his
breakfast table when I could not even sit down decently on
all fours, and at Albertina’s presence as she waited quietly
with his mate and daughter for her own share of the meal.
We did not have the least idea what would happen to us
on the Holy Hill for we were in Nebulous Time. All we could
do was help the roan mare clean the wooden platters and
wait for his return. I knew from my studies of their books no
special ritual was scheduled for today. We were in the time
of TRANSMISSION OF DIVINE KNOWLEDGE NO. TWO and that
was concerned with the art of the Smith. Yet, foolishly, I felt
no suspicion. When they saw how badly the rape had injured
Albertina, they had realized we were both more delicately
put together than they and treated us, physically, with the
greatest respect. Yet I do not think they even understood
quite how feeble we were. It was impossible for them to do
so. And, like all grown ups, they were quite sure they always
knew what was best.
Yet I felt the first misgivings when I saw a solemn
procession line up before the bay’s stable and the Cantor
lead them all in a song I had never heard before.
It was plainly an unusual day for none of the women had
gone to the field. Even the Tattoo-master had left his table
to take a prominent place in the procession with his sons
ranked behind him and the soot-stained Smith, the black,
had abandoned his forge while the dapple grey Scrivener
stood at the head of them all and his son ceremoniously
carried the suspiciously new book on which he had been
working. Perhaps it was a holiday, for all the women were
carrying picnic baskets; but they did not have a word for
‘holidays’. And then the bay took Albertina and me one by
each hand and so we went out of the village and all the time
he sang a new song called: CONSECRATION OF A NEWLY
DISCOVERED BOOK OF THE SCRIPTURES.
A light mist lay over the fields that morning, so we could
see no further than the golden tassels of ripe corn that
brushed us as we passed, and hear nothing besides the
bay’s mahogany coloured baritone but the soft, regimented
clop of their hoofbeats on the rutted path. Because it was
Nebulous Time, one could have imagined it the dawn of
time, the anteriority of all times, since Nebulous Time was
the womb of time. For the first time, led like a child by the
great bay whose form was so much nobler than mine and
whose sense of the coherence of his universe was so
inflexible, my own conviction that I was a man named
Desiderio, born in a certain city, the child of a certain
mother, lover of a certain woman, began to waver. If I was a
man, what was a man? The bay offered me a logical
definition: a horse in a state of ultimate, biped, maneless,
tailless decadence. I was a naked, stunted, deformed dwarf
who one day might begin to forget what purpose such a
thing as a name of my own served. And the brown thing
with breasts who held the bay’s other hand was my mate.
From the waist upwards, she was passable, if ugly because
not equine; but, from the waist down, vile. And, besides, she
was incomplete because there were none of the necessary
scars on her skin. How naked we were! I had begun to think
of the centaurs as our masters, you see, although Albertina
had warned me: ‘The pressures of Nebulous Time alone
force them to live with such certitude!’ And perhaps I was
indeed looking for a master – perhaps the whole history of
my adventure could be titled ‘Desiderio in Search of a
Master’. But I only wanted to find a master, the Minister, the
Count, the bay, so that I could lean on him at first and then,
after a while, jeer.
If Albertina had known how despicable I was, she would
not have given me a second thought.
When we came to the Holy Hill, they all neighed
‘Hallelujah!’ and evacuated. Then they spread down straw
they had brought with them under the tree so that we
should not have to lie down in horse dung when they laid us
down. The Scrivener nailed the new book to the tree. The
prayers were interminable. The Tattoo-master and the
Cantor performed an endless cantata for tenor and baritone
while the three boys who bore the instruments of torture
waited with the blind indifference of trees.
As I listened to the singing, I learned from the text how
the master I longed for proposed to treat us.
We would be tattooed upon the Holy Hill where the Sacred
Stallion had first set us down. He had sent us into the world
to show his flock what fearful shapes they might all still
come to if they did not adhere even more strictly than
before to his dogmas. But, in his infinite compassion, the
Stallion had decided to integrate us with the celestial herd.
They would paint us with his picture and then, to make us
resemble him even more, they would nail the iron shoes on
our feet with red hot nails. After that, they would take us
into the forest and give us to the Spirits. That is, the wild
horses, who would certainly trample us to death.
Red Hot Nail in person threw back his mane and neighed.
We heard every word. I turned my head a little and saw she
was crying. I stretched out my hand towards her and
grasped it. Whatever the reality status of the centaurs, they
certainly had the power to deprive us forever of any reality
at all for it was certain we would die together, if not from
the first sacrament, then from the second, and, if we
managed to survive that, the third would certainly end us. I
felt a certain clarity and composure, for matters were quite
out of our control; if we were the victims of unleashed,
unknown desires, then die we must, for as long as those
desires existed, we would finish by killing one another.
Yes. I thought so, even then.
The Tattoo-master knelt and took the brush. She shivered
when she felt the chill, wet tongue of horsehair lick along
her spine and I held her hand more tightly. The congregation
drummed their hooves. The Cantor chanted and mimed, I
think, the DANCE OF THE HORSEHAIR WRITING BRUSH. I do
not know how long it took before her back was painted over
completely; I do not know how long it took to paint me but
when we were both finished, they stopped the ceremony to
eat their lunches and brought us some milk and cold
pancakes, too, though they would not let us get up because
the paint was not yet dry. When the brief meal was over, our
ordeal would begin in earnest. She trembled and I
remembered how she had looked when she was Lafleur. And
yet I knew she was far braver than I.
It was late morning and the sun was shining very brightly.
The morning mist had dried and the sky was amazingly clear
and blue. She raised herself up on her elbows as high as she
could, and, shading her eyes with her hands, she gazed into
the far distance. Again, I remembered Lafleur looking for a
storm, although I knew she was searching for her father’s
aerial patrols. However, I did not believe in the patrols. Yet,
as she trembled, I saw it was not with fear but with hope –
or, perhaps, a kind of effortful strain; she gripped my hand
more tightly, until her nails dug into my palm. I remembered
the scrap of paper in the pocket of the peep-show
proprietor’s nephew. ‘My desires, concentrated to a single
point…’
I am sure what happened next was coincidence. I am
positive of that. I would stake my life on it.
‘Look!’ she hissed on a triumphantly expelled breath.
In the far distance, the sunlight glinted on the wings of a
metal bird.
But that was not the most remarkable thing; that was not
the extraordinary coincidence. The litany began again and
the Cantor threw almost on top of us an ecstasy so
wonderful I could not see anything but his flailing hooves
and sweat-drenched loins whirling above me. His
consummation laid him low; he sprawled on the ground,
kicking his hooves spasmodically, and in the tremendous
silence I heard the whirring of an engine, but either they
were too transfigured to hear it or they thought it was the
sound of a clattering insect in the corn. And, yes, the sap in
the horse-tree went on busily buzzing. Then came the
sacerdotal moment. The Awl raised the brush and the
piercing instrument. And this was the coincidence. At the
very moment he bent down to make the first incision, the
buzzing horse-tree went up in flames.
‘… ignite all in their way.’
The Scrivener might have written a new book but it did
not allow for so much improvisation. Besides, now the book
was burning. The dried dung at the roots of the tree caught
almost instantaneously and a lasso of flame captured the
bay’s tail. He thrashed his sparking torch this way and that
way, howling, and he dropped dung not in prayer, but this
time in fear. The Tattoo-master turned into a horse of ivory
and flame and suddenly they were all on fire, all the priests
around us and our bed of straw was blazing, too. But
Albertina and I sprang out and through the wall of fire to run
as fast as we could through the whinnying havoc to the
helicopter that had landed in the corn field.
 8 The Castle

While the co-pilot filmed the scene below with a television

camera, the helicopter rose up in a rattle of whirling metal.
When I looked down, I saw the wide valley of the centaurs
open out like a French, eighteenth-century neo-classical fan
painted by a follower of Poussin and then close up again as
we flew so low above the forest itself the topmost branches
scraped against the cabin walls. So all those months of our
selves vanished without trace and I heard the pilot call
Albertina, ‘Madam’, and then ‘Generalissimo Hoffman’.
When I turned from the window, I saw she had already put
on one of their spare combat suits of drab, olive twill and
was now combing out her black hair, which had grown
halfway down her back during our captivity. The co-pilot put
away his camera and dug into a locker to produce clothes
for me, too. Now she was dressed, I was embarrassed at my
nakedness and hurried to cover myself, though my fingers
fumbled over the unfamiliar buttons.
‘Am I the general’s batman?’ I asked her but she only
smiled at me remotely and began to pore over a map the
co-pilot handed her. He and the pilot were both swarthy,
silent young men in black berets who chewed on long, black
cigars. They spoke mainly a laconic French and I felt I had
seen men like them very often before but only in newsreel
films. I was given coffee from a thermos flask and they
cleared me a place in the cramped quarters so that I could
sit down. I had not been in the twentieth century for so long
that I felt quite stunned. A radio began to squawk messages
in the standard speech of my country. I had not heard my
own language for a long time; when we were among the
centaurs, Albertina and I had used it as a private language,
such as secretive children invent for themselves, and I was
shocked to recall the speech was common property. The
coffee was hot and strong; they opened a wax-paper parcel
of ham sandwiches. Albertina absently plaited her hair and,
as she did so, so she put away all her romanticism. Her face
was hard and brown and impersonal. I sipped my coffee.
She spoke into the radio transmitter but I could make out
nothing whatsoever of what she said because of the noise
the engines made.
And then Albertina had finished. She gave the pilot back
the microphone, sighed, smiled and came to crouch beside
me.
‘Not my batman,’ she said. ‘The Doctor will commission
you. He just told me that.’
‘Even though I’m enlisted on the other side?’
‘You will go wherever I go,’ she said with such conviction I
was silent for I had just seen her passions set fire to a tree
and now I was in the real world again I was not quite sure I
wanted to burn with her – or, at least, not yet. I felt an
inexplicable indifference towards her. Perhaps because she
was now yet another she and this she was the absolute
antithesis of my black swan and my bouquet of burning
bone; she was a crisp, antiseptic soldier to whom other
ranks deferred. I began to feel perfidious, for I had no
respect for rank.
‘And what of my city?’ I asked her, drawing on a cigar the
pilot gave me.
She frowned into her plastic tumbler of coffee.
 ‘The course of the war was dramatically altered by the
destruction of the set of samples. While my father was
modifying the transmitters, the Minister completed his
computer bank and then instituted a programme he called
the Rectification of Names. In spite of himself, he was forced
to use philosophic weapons – or, as he would probably
prefer to call them, ideological weapons. He decided he
could only keep a strict control of his actualities by adjusting
their names to agree with them perfectly. So, you
understand, that no shadow would fall between the word
and the thing described. For the Minister hypothesized my
father worked in that shadowy land between the thinkable
and the thing thought of, and, if he destroyed this
difference, he would destroy my father. Do you follow me?’
‘More or less.’
‘He set up a new slogan, “If the name is right, you see the
light.” He is a man of great intellect but limited imagination.
Which is why he can hold out against my father, of course.
Once the names were right, he thought perfect order and
hence perfect government on his own Confucian terms
would follow automatically. So he dismissed all his physicists
and brought in a team of logical positivists from the School
of Philosophy in the National University and set them to the
task of fixing all the phenomena compiled by his computers
in the solid concrete of a set of names that absolutely
agreed with them. Ironically enough, their task was made all
the easier because of the flexibility of identity produced in
the state of nebulous time.’
She paused. A yellowish glare flooded the cabin.
‘Look. Now we are crossing the desert, the mother of
mirages,’ she said.
There was no more forest, only sand drifting in dry spirals
the very colour of sterility and, above us, a sky as lifeless as
the earth.
 ‘This is your Minister’s place,’ she said. ‘He has not got
enough imagination to realize that the most monstrous
aberrations are bound to flourish in soil once it has been
disinfected of the imagination.’
And, though I loved her more than anything in the world, I
remembered the music of Mozart and murmured to the
Queen of the Night:
‘I do not think so.’
But she did not hear me because of the noise of the
engines and the turning propellers.
‘So, when the transmitters were operating again, the
images we sent out bounced off the intellectual walls the
Minister had built. My poor father – he was almost
disconcerted, because I was lost in Nebulous Time just when
he needed me most!’
The helicopter followed its own shadow over the realm of
spiritual death.
‘But now I have been in contact with him at last and he is
only waiting for our return to start the Second Front.’
‘For our return? For you – and for me as well?’
‘Yes,’ she said and turned her ensorcellating eyes on me
so that all at once I was breathless with desire and the cabin
dissolved in our kiss. Yet there was still that duplicity in my
heart’s core. I had been marked out at the beginning as the
Minister’s man, for all my apathy, for all my disaffection, for
I, too, would have worshipped reason if I could ever have
found her shrine. Reason was stamped into me as if it were
a chromosome, even if I loved the high priestess of passion.
Nevertheless, we kissed; and the crew of the helicopter
shielded their eyes as though we were too bright for them to
bear.
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.
Even at the worldly level I was disappointed, for I could
plainly see that, on everyday terms alone, he was very rich
and I was very, very poor. As the very poor often do, I felt
the rich could only justify their wealth by making a lavish
and conspicuous display of it. My grill disgruntled me; I
scorned his good taste. If I were as rich as he, why, I would
barbecue peacocks nightly. Besides, good taste has always
bored me a little and, in the enemy H.Q., I felt a little bored.
It was then, to revive my flagging interest in my
surroundings, that I consciously reminded myself I was a
secret agent for the other side. They were not the enemy. I
was.
The white evening dress of a Victorian romantic heroine
rustled about Albertina’s feet and clung like frost to her
amber breasts yet I wished she had worn the transvestite
apparel of her father’s ambassador or had come to the table
naked, with poppies in her hair, in the style she had adopted
for dinner in the land of the centaurs. My disillusionment
was profound. I was not in the domain of the marvellous at
all. I had gone far beyond that and at last I had reached the
power-house of the marvellous, where all its clanking, dull,
stage machinery was kept. Even if it is the dream made
flesh, the real, once it becomes real, can be no more than
real. While I did not know her, I thought she was sublime;
when I knew her, I loved her. But, even as I pared my
dessert persimmon with the silver knife provided, I was
already wondering whether the fleshly possession of
Albertina would not be the greatest disillusionment of all.
The habit of sardonic contemplation is the hardest habit of
all to break.
When we finished our coffee, the Doctor excused himself
for he said he had some business in his study, which was
housed in a tower, but he gave me another of his fine cigars
and Albertina said, Would I not like to walk outside for a
while and enjoy my cigar in the mild evening? So we went
out into the park. I have forgotten what month it was but, by
the scents, I guessed it must be October.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘This way.’
The face of the precipice opened before her but I knew it
opened only because she had pressed an unmagical switch.
Her abundant skirts swirling before us, she led me up a
steep cleft in the rock, a secret passage to the rooftree of
the mountain, which issued among the tumbled rocks where
one of the transmitters turned like a transfigured mill wheel.
But she turned her back on it and led me some little
distance through the dishevelled boulders, under a faint half
lemon slice of moon, both of us so elegant in evening dress
we were ourselves like a poignant anachronism projected
backwards upon primeval wilderness. And then we came to
a kind of circular amphitheatre hollowed out of the yellow
rock and peopled with a silent multitude of immobile shapes
in rows and columns and ranks, like the guardians of the
place.
‘It was a cemetery,’ said Albertina. ‘The Indians made it,
before the Europeans came. But they did not come here.
Then the Indians died, most of them. So these are all that
remains of the Indians.’
 In the centre of this amphitheatre was an oblong tumulus
containing, presumably, the bones of my dead ancestors
and all the mute spectators who surrounded it were meant
to scare away grave robbers, mountain lions, or mountain
dogs, or any other thing that might disturb the sleepers in
the earth. The Indians had shaped unglazed pottery into
men on horseback armed with swords and women with
bows, into dogs that snarled, and also urns, small houses
and cooking implements as if to make a city for the earthen
regiments, these crude, brown figures sadly chipped by time
and the weather whose eyes were holes through which you
could see that all were hollow within. We went down the
stepped side of the hollow through these thickets of
imitation men and her skirts drifted out behind her and her
hair flowed down her bare, richly coloured shoulders as
freely as the hair of a Druid priestess. She, formed of the
colours of the rocks and the figurines, the darkness and the
moonlight.
Love is the synthesis of dream and actuality; love is the
only matrix of the unprecedented; love is the tree which
buds lovers like roses. In white, vestal majesty, she spoke to
me of love among the funerary ornaments on the naked
mountain and then I, like an intrepid swimmer, flung myself
into the angry breakers of her petticoats and put my mouth
against the unshorn seal of love itself. And that was as close
as I ever got to consummation. It took place in the
graveyard of my forefathers.
Albertina seated herself on a rock that might have been
an altar, once, and motioned me to sit beside her. We were
the cynosure of the sightless eyes of a countless pottery
audience.
‘The state of love is like the South in Hui Shih’s paradox:
“The South has at once a limit and no limit.” Lu Teming
made the following commentary on this paradox: “He spoke
about the South but he was only taking it as an example.
There is the mirror and the image but there is also the
image of the image; two mirrors reflect each other and
images may be multiplied without end.” Ours is a supreme
encounter, Desiderio. We are two such disseminating
mirrors.’
In the looking glasses of her eyes, I saw reflected my
entire being whirl apart and reassemble itself innumerable
times.
‘Love is a perpetual journey that does not go through
space, an endless oscillating motion that remains unmoved.
Love creates for itself a tension that disrupts every tense in
time. Love has certain elements in common with eternal
regression, since this exchange of reflections can neither be
exhausted nor destroyed, but it is not a regression. It is a
direct durationless, locationless progression towards an
ultimate state of ecstatic annihilation.’
She lectured me and the grave ornaments with the most
beautiful gravity and, if I felt my attention wandering, it was
only because of the chill in the night air and the teasing
presence in my pocket of the cigar the Doctor had given me
that I felt would be rude to light up, now. And, besides, my
nostrils were full of the musky odour of her skin. Then she
put her hand on my wrist; her touch electrified me.
‘My father has discovered that the magnetic field formed
by our reciprocal desire – yes, Desiderio, our desire – may
be quite unique in its intensity. Such desire must be the
strongest force in the world and, if it could be crystallized,
would show itself as a deposit which is the definitive
residuum of the most powerful inherited associations. And
desire is also the source of the greatest source of radiant
energy in the entire universe!’
Her intellectual grasp impressed me but I could have
wished she was a little less earnest. She had inherited in full
her father’s lack of humour. The peep-show proprietor had
warned me of his lack of humour. Yet I found her most
endearing when she was so serious. When I thought she was
endearing, suddenly she looked exactly like the angel the
nuns put on top of the convent Christmas tree. And yet she
was very eloquent. Her eloquence moved me, as the music
of Mozart and the wall-paintings of the Ancient Egyptians
used to move me.
‘In theory, one can reduce everything to a series of
ultimate simples. When my father perfects this theory,
which he will do in perhaps three or four years time, he will
name it Hoffman’s Principle of Unwrought Simplicity and
once he fully understands its laws, he will reduce everything
in the world to the non-created bases from which the world
is built. And then he will take the world apart and make a
new world.’
What? The grey man in the monocle who so hated
humanity he could not bear to see a servant and reserved
his affection for a wife who was safely dead? Yes. That grey
man. Her black mane brushed my cheek and I touched her
shoulders. The texture of her skin was like suède.
‘Because, you see, the world is built from these simples.
Everything else in the world is only an irrelevant accessory
of certain simples. These simples have a kind of reality that
does not belong to anything else. The ultimate simplicity,
Desiderio, is Love. That is to say, Desire, Desiderio. Which is
generated by four legs in bed.’
Roused beyond endurance, I was naïve enough to take
this as an invitation and I flung her backwards on the burial
mound and dived straight into her beating, foaming skirts.
But, though I managed to get high enough to kiss her
simplicity, she fought me so skilfully I could do nothing else.
Then she began to laugh.
‘Don’t you see it’s quite out of the question, at the
moment?’ she said. ‘You have never yet made love to me
because, all the time you have known me, I’ve been
maintained in my various appearances only by the power of
your desire.’
 I was disconcerted to find my physicality thwarted by
metaphysics. I struck her in the face with the heavy flat of
my hand. Her cut lip bled a little but she did not flinch from
the blow nor reprimand me afterwards.
‘Oh, Desiderio, soon! soon! When we go to the laboratory
together, you will see me as I really am.’
I did not understand her at all. The segment of moon
leaked out a thin, ugly, sepia-coloured light that crumbled
everything around us to degenerate forms. I was troubled in
mind and very uneasy for the magician’s castle was not the
home of unreason at all but a school for some kind of to me
incomprehensible logic and now she told me we must go
back there, for her father was waiting to take me on a tour
of the laboratories.
She took me up to his study high in a tower in a smoothly
gliding elevator and she left me outside the door. She kissed
me on the cheek and said with infinite promise: ‘Tonight.
Later.’ She vanished inside the doors of the elevator, like a
white bird, engulfed; I watched her go with I do not know
what presentiment of ill-fortune. How could I know that,
when I saw her next, I would have no option but to kill her?
I knocked. The Doctor greeted me. He had changed into a
white coat for he was a scientist, but whatever clothes he
wore he could not have been more impersonal than he had
been at first. He was cold, grey, still and fathomless – not a
man; the sea. I found I was afraid of him.
His study, his private work-room, his inner sanctum, his
lair, his observatory, had windows from which he could
check the movements of the transmitters, though he must
have watched the stars, too, for there was an antique map
of the heavens hanging on the wall. And now I think I must
have imagined some, at least, of the decor I found in the
room for it satisfied my imagination so fully I was half
suspicious, even when I remembered how the peep-show
proprietor had told me his former pupil had delved deeply
into the Arabic and Oriental and medieval pseudo-sciences.
It was half Rottwang’s laboratory in Lang’s Metropolis but it
was also the cabinet of Dr Caligari and, more than either, as
I remember it, very probably fallaciously, it was the
laboratory of a dilettante aristocrat of the late seventeenth
century who dabbled in natural philosophy and tried his
hand at necromancy, for there were even martyrized shapes
of pickled mandrake in bottles on the shelves and a mingled
odour of amber and sulphur filled the air.
The room was cluttered with curiosities – whales’ teeth,
narwhals’ horns and skeletons of extinct creatures left
higgledy-piggledy wherever they had happened to be put
down, all thick with dust and most satisfactory cobwebs,
and on the right of the great, black, locked cupboard that
dominated the room were alembics, furnaces, Bunsen
burners and various other instruments of chemistry as well
as jars of preserved monsters and heaps of fossils in forms I
would not have thought possible before I had seen less of
the world. The shelves to the left of the cupboard bowed in
the middle under the weight of the books they bore. Most of
the books were very ancient; some were in Arabic and a
great number in Chinese. The bulk of his library seemed to
be devoted to rare treatises on various forms of divination,
though there was no branch of human knowledge that was
not represented. On a workbench lay a curious collection of
optical toys, a thaumatrope, a Chinese pacing horse lamp
and several others, all of types which worked on the
principle of persistence of vision. These were all free from
dust and seemed to be the objects of his most recent
researches. I remembered he had lately been trying to
replace the set of samples.
The Doctor laid his hand on the work-bench.
‘At this very bench, I, personally, assisted only by my
daughter and my former professor whose fingers were not
blind, collected, selected and graded all the complex
phenomena in the universe before I could even begin to
submit it to changes.’
I murmured my admiration in the back of my throat. He
took a ring of keys from his pocket and unlocked the
cupboard. The black door swung open to reveal three long
shelves crammed with very thick files.
‘Here are the tabulated records of my researches.’
But I was far more interested to see the six shelves given
over to the raw materials for the fabrication of all the
images in the peep-show – two shelves of trays of glass
slides; two of envelopes labelled ‘negs.’ which must contain
the negatives of the photographic sequences; and two of
moulds for casting small objects in wax, neatly arranged
under inscrutable headings consisting of various
combinations of sets of three broken and unbroken lines,
like so: ; and so ; and so ; and so on.
Hoffman said: ‘Once the samples are selected,
interpreted, painted, cast and articulated, I can exhibit pain
as positively as I can exhibit red. I show love in the same
way that I show straight. I demonstrate fear just as precisely
as I exemplify crooked. And ecstasy and tree and despair
and stone, all exhibited in the same fashion. I can make you
perceive ideas with your senses because I do not
acknowledge any essential difference in the
phenomenological bases of the two modes of thought. All
things co-exist in pairs but mine is not an either/or world.
‘Mine is an and + and world.
‘I alone have discovered the key to the inexhaustible
plus.’
His voice never rose above a drab monotone, never
expressed enthusiasm, never invited astonishment. In him,
the pedantry he had handed down to his daughter went
unmodified by charm or leavened by intellectual passion.
‘What is the nature of that key, Doctor?’
 ‘Eroto-energy,’ he said tonelessly. ‘Here. I have something
that will interest you.’
He took a tape recorder from the bowels of the cupboard
and switched it on. After a preliminary crackle, I heard the
voice of the Minister. After all that time, all those changes, I
heard him speak again. The tape must have been monitored
from a propaganda broadcast to the besieged city.
‘– and though real plagues have ravaged us and most of
our buildings have tumbled stone from stone, so those of us
who are left skulk like rats in the ruins; even if, for a time,
our very spirits were tormented without cease by deceitful
images springing from that dark part of ourselves humanity
must always consent to ignore if we are to live in peace
together; although unreason has run rampant through our
streets, nevertheless, reason can – will – must! restore order
in the end. For light to guide us, we have nothing but our
reason. Night and day, day and night, we are tirelessly at
work on the immediate problem before us. Our only weapon
in the fight is inflexible rationalism and, since we brought
reason into the battle, already the clocks have agreed to tell
us the same time once more and, already –’
The tape registered a roaring, splintering crash and after
that it was perfectly empty. It ran hissing on until the Doctor
switched the machine off.
‘Reason cannot produce the poetry disorder does,’ he
remarked without enthusiasm. ‘And he thinks I only operate
in the gaps between things and definitions! What scant
respect he shows for me!’
But I was silent for the resolute yet unhysterical timbre of
the Minister’s voice had brought back all kinds of dimly
remembered certitudes, certain forgotten harmonies that
had once moved me as deeply as I was capable of being
moved.
I found the paraphernalia of the Doctor’s science
disgusted me when I saw it face to face. And his cold eyes
perturbed me. I knew he could never be my master. I might
not want the Minister’s world but I did not want the Doctor’s
world either. All at once I was pitched on the horns of a
dilemma, for I was presented with two alternatives and it
seemed to me that the Doctor must be wrong for neither
alternative could possibly co-exist with the other. He might
know the nature of the inexhaustible plus but, all the same,
he was a totalitarian. And I was in this unhappy position – I,
of all men, had been given the casting vote between a
barren yet harmonious calm and a fertile yet cacophonous
tempest.
Well, you know the choice I made. Nothing in this city
quarrels with its name. The clocks all run on time, every
one. Time moves forward on the four wheels of the
dimensions just as it always did before the Doctor’s time.
When I finish this chapter, they will bring me a cup of hot
milk and a plate of lightly buttered digestive biscuits; when I
finish my life, they will bring me a winding sheet and take
me to a vault in the Cathedral. They have reconstructed the
Cathedral so well you would not believe it had ever been
demolished. I will never see her again. The shadows fall
immutably. In the square, the chestnut tree casts leaves of
autumn on my statue’s shoulders. The golden bowl is not
broken in this city. It is round as a cake and everyone may
have a slice of it, according to his need. A need is nothing
like a desire.
Old Desiderio asks young Desiderio: ‘And when he offered
you a night of perfect ecstasy in exchange for a lifetime’s
contentment, how could you possibly choose the latter?’
And young Desiderio answers: ‘I am too young to know
regret.’
But it was not as simple as that, of course. It is not even
as though I have been contented. Yet others have certainly
been contented. Nothing excessive, mind – always only a
gentle contentment. Yet, because of what I did, everybody is
relatively contented because they do not know how to name
their desires so the desires do not exist, in accordance with
the Minister’s theory. So I suppose that, all in all, I acted for
the common good. That is why they made a hero of me,
although I did not know at the time I acted for the common
good. Perhaps I acted only on impulse. Perhaps he did not
offer me a high enough price; after all, he only offered me
my heart’s desire.
Besides, he was a hypocrite.
He penned desire in a cage and said: ‘Look! I have
liberated desire!’ He was a hypocrite. So I, a hypocrite on a
less dramatic scale, I hypocritically killed him, did I?
But there I go again – running ahead of myself! See, I
have ruined all the suspense. I have quite spoiled my
climax. But why do you deserve a climax, anyway? I am only
trying to tell you exactly, as far as I can remember, what
actually happened. And you know very well already that it
was I who killed Dr Hoffman; you have read all about it in
the history books and know the very date far better than I
because I have forgotten it. But it must have been October
because the air smelled of mushrooms.
I would have hated him less if he had been less bored with
his inventions.
‘The source of eroto-energy is, of course, inexhaustible, as
my early colleague and co-researcher, Mendoza, surmised.’
He pointed through the window to the transmitter that
turned ceaselessly at the top of the cliff beside the house.
‘For the last five years those transmitters, powered by
simple, radiant energy, e.g. eroto-energy, have been
beaming upon the city the crude infrastructure of
(a) synthetically authentic phenomena;
(b) mutable combinations of synthetically authentic
phenomena; and have also been transmitting
(c) sufficient radiation to intensify a symbol until it
becomes an object according to the law of effective
evolving, or, if you prefer a rather more explicit term,
complex becoming.
‘By the liberation of the unconscious we shall, of course,
liberate man. And the naked man will walk in and out of
everybody’s senses.’
But he was one of those people it is impossible to imagine
without their clothes. He was taken by a fit of coughing
which he smothered in a spotless white handkerchief.
‘The positive is an involved correlative of the negative
and, once desire is endowed with synthetic form, it follows
inevitably that thought and object operate on the same
level. This is basic to –’
And this was the man whose daughter had told the
Minister to go in fear of abstractions! I interrupted him; I had
a question.
‘And whatever really happened to Mendoza?’
‘Mendoza?’
The Doctor took down a jar from a shelf. It contained a
human brain floating in formaldehyde.
‘This is all we managed to salvage. He was horribly
scarred. Whatever happened in his time-machine, it burned
him to the bone and also utterly disordered his mind. He
lingered on, raving, for five days before he died in the public
ward of a charitable hospital. Mendoza and I had not been
on speaking terms for years, of course. But I managed to
obtain his brain as I was most curious to see it. However,
whatever it had contained died five days before the rest of
him and the structure was no different from that of any
other brain.’
Somehow I found this recital exceedingly unnerving. He
replaced the jar and smiled as well as he was able.
‘Now let me take you down to visit the distilling plant and
the reality modifying machines. I’m sure you’ll find the
reality modifying machines perfectly fascinating; they
actually perform the preliminary stages in the synthesis of
phenomena.’
He might have been inviting me on a guided tour round a
chocolate factory. I wondered why his daughter loved him.
The Count had suited my notion of Prometheus far better
than the real Prometheus did; yet, now and then, the half-
derisive contempt I felt for this prim thief of fire was
touched with a horrid shudder when I remembered he was
triple-refined Mind in person and Matter was an optical toy
to him. But I could not understand why a man like him
should want to liberate man so much. I could not see how
he could have got that notion of liberation inside his skull. I
was sure he only wanted power.
Perhaps I killed him out of incomprehension.
We descended to the underground levels of the castle in
another businesslike electric elevator which took us a great
distance below the earth before it stopped. Here, where the
dungeons should have been, there were white-tiled corridors
soundlessly floored with black rubber and lit by strip lighting
far more brightly than day. All was technological whiteness
and silence. Presently he pressed a button which released
the catch on an impassive-looking metal door. We entered a
busy, deserted laboratory filled with the apparatus of a
distillery. The glass vats and tubes were bubbling with a
faintly luminous, milky, whitish substance.
‘We need not linger here but I thought you would like a
glimpse of it. This is merely the distilling plant. Here, the
secretions of fulfilled desire are processed to procure an
essence which has not yet pullulated into germinal form.
Even with an electron microscope it is impossible to detect
the slightest speck of root, seed or fundament in this, as it
were, biochemical metasoup and it is safe to say we have
cooked up for ourselves in our glass casseroles a pure,
uncreated essence of being.
 ‘Now, what do we do with our metasoup? Why, we
precipitate it. Come this way.’
The wall of the distilling plant opened to let us through
and closed again behind us.
‘Allow me to introduce,’ said Hoffman with a pale smile,
‘my reality modifying machines.’
The machines operated with only an occasional, internal,
twanging murmur; they could have been making electronic
music. They were six cylindrical drums of stainless steel
rotating on invisible axes with the same ceaseless, terrifying
serenity of the transmitters turning, now, perhaps a mile
above our heads, for we had penetrated very deeply into
the earth. The drums were as tall as a man and perhaps
three feet in circumference, with a shuttered viewing
window in each base. A ridged, plastic pipe emerged from
the white-tiled wall to disappear into a sealed aperture in
the top of each drum and the wires which led from them
appeared to feed into six glowing screens a confusion of
endlessly swelling and diminishing ectoplasmic shapes
formed around central nuclei of flashing lights. These
screens were something like TV screens and formed a bank
in the wall above complicated panels of switches on the
other side of the laboratory.
Though the room was brightly lit and obviously in use, the
only signs of the existence of a staff of technicians were a
water cooler, a number of tubular steel chairs and a table
containing a number of clipboards. It was a very sterile
place.
‘These machines were formulated on the model of
objective chance, taking “objective chance” as the definition
of the sum total of all the coincidences which control an
individual destiny. Just like the transmitters, they are
powered by eroto-energy so their action is further modified
by the Mendoza effect, that is, the temporal side-effect of
eroto-energy.
 ‘Inside the reality modifying machines, we precipitate
essence of being.’
He snapped open one of the viewing windows and I
glimpsed a whirling darkness shot through with brilliant
sparks, like the sky on a windy night. But he closed the
window again immediately.
‘During the precipitation process, the essence of being
spontaneously generates the germinal molecule of an
uncreated alternative. That is, the germinal molecule of
objectified desire.’
He paused to allow me to absorb this information. I would
have expected any other man to show a certain modest
pride as he exhibited devices that could utterly disrupt
human consciousness but Dr Hoffman displayed only a
faded weariness and a depressing ennui. He paused to take
a drink of water from the water-cooler, crumpled up his used
cardboard cup dispiritedly and sighed.
‘Inside the reality modifying machines, in the medium of
essential undifferentiation, these germinal molecules are
agitated until, according to certain innate determinative
tendencies, they form themselves into divergent sequences
which act as what I call “transformation groups”. Eventually
a multi-dimensional body is brought into being which
operates only upon an uncertainty principle. These bodies
appear on the screen… over there… expressed in a complex
notation of blips and bleeps. It requires extreme persistence
of vision to make sense of the code at this stage.
Nevertheless, those formless blobs are, as it were, the
embryos of palpable appearances. Once these
undifferentiated yet apprehendable ideas of objectified
desire reach a reciprocating object, the appearance is
organically restructured by the desires subsisting in latency
in the object itself. These desires must, of course, subsist,
since to desire is to be.’
 So that was the Doctor’s version of the cogito! I DESIRE
THEREFORE I EXIST. Yet he seemed to me a man without
desires.
‘In this way, a synthetically authentic phenomenon finally
takes shape. I used the capital city of this country as the
testing ground for my first experiments because the
unstable existential structure of its institutions could not
suppress the latent consciousness as effectively as a
structure with a firmer societal organization. I should have
had very little success in, for example, Peking – in spite of
the Chinese influence on my researches.
‘My wife,’ he added tangentially, ‘is a very brilliant
woman.’
I thought of the corpse upstairs and shuddered.
‘I chose the capital only because it was so well suited to
my experiments. I was rather put out when the times
produced the Minister and the Minister produced his
defences. I had thought there were no defences against the
unleashed unconscious. I had certainly not bargained for a
military campaign when I began transmission. I had not
seen myself as a warlord but I effectively evolved into one.’
From his significant pause, I realized he had made a joke
and laughed dutifully.
‘At once I hired mercenaries and, of necessity, an element
of attrition entered the deployment of my imagery since,
initially, I could to some extent control the evolution of the
phantoms by the use of the sets of samples and my blind
old professor, who once received a little training in
divination from my wife, could also suggest certain possible
mutations of events which usually, in fact, transpired.
However, I had always intended to phase myself out of
operations when I had clear evidence of the autonomous,
free-form, self-promulgation of concretized desires. But,
once the set of samples was accidentally destroyed, my
calculations went awry. Nebulous time arrived
instantaneously rather than in the course of a programmed
dissolution of time itself and I did not know if the
manifestations could, as it were, stand on their own two
feet. Or on whatever number of feet they decided to
possess.
‘But every day the aerial patrols spot more and more
growths of hitherto unimaginable flora and herds of
biologically dubious fauna inhabiting hitherto unformulated
territory. And, of course, Albertina’s detailed reports of the
tribe of a quite illusory African coast and the verifiable,
photographable activities of beasts with no reality status
whatsoever indicate the manifestations are functioning
perfectly adequately. Indeed, all have reified themselves to
such an extent that they seem to believe themselves quite
firmly rooted in the imaginary sub-stratum of time itself.’
Lecturing seemed to tire him. He took another drink of
water and dissolved two tablets into it before he swallowed
it. Yet he was the man who wanted to establish a
dictatorship of desire.
‘But the Cannibal Chief was real enough!’ I objected.
‘The Cannibal Chief was the triumphant creation of
nebulous time. He was brought into being only because of
the Count’s desire for self-destruction.’ He hid a yawn with a
desiccated hand.
‘But I know he was real enough because I killed him!’
‘What kind of proof is that?’ asked Hoffman with a chill
smile and all at once I felt a twinge of doubt for killing the
Chief was the only heroic action I performed in all my life
and I knew at the time it was out of character.
‘The existence of things is like a galloping horse,’ he went
on with that patronizing, Decembral smile of his. ‘There is
no movement through which they become modified, no time
when they are not changed. What I have achieved has been
accomplished only through certain loopholes in metaphysics
and I was able, as it were, to base a meta-technology upon
metaphysics only by the most scrupulous observance of and
adherence to the laws of empirical research. And I have
hardly begun, yet. Compared with what is to come, my work
so far has only been a period of inactivity, such as the
Ancient Chinese called: “the beginning of an anteriority to
the beginning”.’
I knew only that he had examined the world by the light of
the intellect alone and had seen a totally different
construction from that which the senses see by the light of
reason. And yet he moved with the feeble effort of a man
near death.
‘I think you have seen enough here,’ he said. ‘We will
move on to the desire generators.’
We left the ballet of incipient forms and the throbbing
drums and once again walked those white, endless corridors
that were the unprepossessing viscera of dream. I was
almost in possession of the secret now, and it did not seem
to me to be worth much. Was I condemned to perpetual
disillusionment? Were all the potential masters the world
held for me to be revealed as nothing but monsters or
charlatans or wraiths? Indeed, I knew from my own
experience that, once liberated, those desires it seemed to
me he cheapened as he talked of them were far greater
than their liberator and could shine more brightly than a
thousand suns and yet I did not think he knew what desire
was. At the end of the corridor was a pair of sliding doors
with Chinese characters painted on them.
‘My wife’s work,’ said Hoffman. ‘She is the poet of the
family. In rough translation, our motto reads: “There is
intercommunication of seed between male and female and
all things are produced.” It is exceedingly apt.’
I was totally unprepared for what I found inside those
doors.
The electricity of desire lit everything with chill,
bewitching fire and the entire structure was roofed and
walled with seamless looking-glass. The first technician I
had seen in the laboratories sat at a steel desk, nodding
over a pile of comic books. He was a beautiful
hermaphrodite in an evening dress of purple gauze with
silver sequins round his eyes.
‘I am a harmonious concatenation of male and female and
so the Doctor gave me sole charge of the generators,’ he
said in a voice like a sexual ’cello. ‘I was the most beautiful
transvestite in all Greenwich Village before the Doctor gave
me the post of intermediary. I represent the inherent
symmetry of divergent asymmetry.’
The Doctor caressed him affectionately on the shoulder.
But the intermediary was a cripple and had to roll himself
forward on a wheelchair to show us round the love pens.
They were housed in a curving, narrow room some
hundreds of yards long, an undulating tentacle extending
into the very core of the mountain. All along the mirrored
walls were three-tiered wire bunks. In the ceiling, above
each tier of bunks, were copper extractors of a funnel type
leading into an upper room where a good deal of invisible
machinery roared with a sound like rushing water but the
noise of the machinery was almost drowned by the moans,
grunts, screams, bellowings and choked mutterings that
rose from the occupants of those open coffins, for here were
a hundred of the best-matched lovers in the world, twined in
a hundred of the most fervent embraces passion could
devise.
They were all stark naked and very young. They came
from every race in the world, brown, black, white and
yellow, and were paired, as far as I could see, according to
colour differences. They formed a pictorial lexicon of all the
things a man and a woman might do together within the
confines of a bed of wire six feet long by three feet wide.
There was such a multitude of configurations of belly and
buttock, thigh and breast, nipple and navel, all in continual
motion, that I remembered the anatomy lessons of the
acrobats of desire and how the Count had spoken, with
uncharacteristic reverence, of the ‘death-defying double
somersault of love’.
I was awed and I was revolted.
‘They are paired in these mesh cubicles so that they can
all see one another – if they bother to look, of course, and
hear one another, if they can hear, that is; and so, if
necessary, receive a constant refreshment from visual and
audial stimuli,’ commented the irrepressibly efficient Doctor.
The rubber wheels of the hermaphrodite’s chair squeaked a
little on the mirrored floor as we walked slowly past the
hutches. The polished walls and floor reflected and
multiplied the visible propagation of eroto-energy as they
had done that stormy night in the orchid-coloured caravan,
when the Arab tumblers and I together must unwittingly
have invoked a landslide. Our footsteps clinked. The Doctor
tugged at the brown ringlets of a plump, dimpled, pink and
white English rosebud straining beneath a diminutive but
immensely tooled Mongolian; she did not even turn her
head for she was poised on the verge of a ripping shriek as
her apricot-skinned lover plunged down.
‘Look! They are so engrossed in their vital work they do
not even notice us!’
The hermaphrodite tittered sycophantically but she need
not have worked so hard at her disguise. I suspected her
already. I had seen her disguised far too often not to
recognize her disguises.
‘We feed them hormones intravenously,’ the Doctor
informed me.
‘Their plentiful secretions fall through the wire meshes
into the trays underneath each tier, or dynamic set, of
lovers and are gathered up three times a day by means of
large sponges, so that nothing whatsoever is lost. And the
energy they release – eroto-energy, the simplest yet most
powerful form of radiant energy in the entire universe – rises
up through these funnels into the generating chambers
overhead.’
And these were all the true acrobats of desire, whom the
Moroccans had only exemplified.
He sighed again and swallowed two aspirin, though there
was no water-cooler in this laboratory so he had to chew
them dry. The eyes of the hermaphrodite were the shape of
tears laid on their sides and had the very colour of the
tremendous clamour that rose from all those lovers caught
perpetually in the trap of one another’s arms, for there were
no locks or bars anywhere; they could have come and gone
as they pleased. Yet, petrified pilgrims, locked parallels,
icons of perpetual motion, they knew nothing but the
progress of their static journey towards willed, mutual
annihilation.
‘These lovers do not die,’ said Albertina. ‘They have
transcended mortality.’
‘After an indefinite period of dimensionless time,’
amplified the Doctor wearily, ‘they resolve into two basic
constituents – pure sex and pure energy. That is, fire and air.
It is a grand explosion. And,’ he added with, I think, a faint
wonder, ‘every single one of them volunteered.’
Beneath the purple bosom of her ball gown, I saw an
interior corsage of flame, her heart. We moved down the
lines of pens, we and our reflections, he, and she, and I,
until we came to the end of the line. It had taken us a
quarter of an hour, walking at a good pace. And here, at the
top of a tier, was an empty cubicle.
As soon as I saw it, I knew it was my marriage bed.
The time was ripe. My bride was waiting. We had her
father’s blessing.
‘I shall go to the city tomorrow,’ said the Doctor, ‘and,
since time will be altogether negated –’
 ‘– you will arrive yesterday,’ concluded Albertina. They
both laughed gently. And now I understood this gnomic
exchange perfectly. Our long-delayed but so greatly longed-
for conjunction would spurt such a charge of energy our
infinity would fill the world and, in this experiential void, the
Doctor would descend on the city and his liberation would
begin.
She wiped the silver from her eyes and the purple dress
dropped away from the goddess of the cornfields, more
savagely and triumphantly beautiful than any imagining, my
Platonic other, my necessary extinction, my dream made
flesh.
‘No!’ I cried. ‘No, Generalissimo! No!’
And I cried out so loudly I pierced even the willed oblivion
of the love slaves for, as I ran past towards the door, they
bucked and thrust less violently and one or two of them
even moved their eyes as far as they could without moving
their heads to watch me, such vacant eyes that slowly,
painfully cleared as the sweat on their limbs dried. The light
began to flicker a little, as though heralding a power failure.
An alarum bell shrilled. The Doctor had a gun and sent a
volley of bullets after me but my many reflections misled
him and the bullets bounced back off the walls and caused
great bloodshed among the woefully exposed practitioners
of desire. I rattled the steel doors but they must have locked
automatically when the alarum went off. So, weaponless,
desperate, half-blinded by tears, I turned to face my
adversaries.
The Doctor had leapt into the wheelchair to propel himself
more quickly down the long room, for he was slow on his
feet. He was showing some emotion at last. His face was
working and he gibbered with rage as he shook his useless,
empty revolver. But she – she was like an avenging angel,
because she truly loved me, and in her hand she held a
knife that flashed in the white, trembling, artificial light. And
all the naked lovers had abandoned their communion to
lament their dead and the dying on whose beautiful flesh
the bright blood blossomed.
I had seen nothing in the peep-show to warn me of the
grotesque dénouement of my great passion.
He came straight at me in his wheelchair, intending to run
me down, but I grasped the arms of the chair and
overturned it. He was as weightless as a doll. He went limply
sprawling and the revolver flew from his hand to spin over
the glass and crash against the wall while his head cracked
down at such an awkward angle I think his neck broke
instantly. A little blood trickled down his nose to meet the
flow that trickled upwards from the nose in the mirror and
then I was wrestling on top of his body with Albertina for the
knife.
We wrestled on her father’s flaccid corpse for possession
of the knife as passionately as if for the possession of each
other.
And then we slithered like wet fish over the mirrors but
still she would not let go of the knife though I clutched her
wrist too tightly for her to be able to kill me with it. She bit
me and tore my clothes and I bit her and pummelled her
with my fists. I pummelled her breasts until they were as
blue as her eyelids but she never let go and I savaged her
throat with my teeth as if I were a tiger and she were the
trophy I seized in the forests of the night. But she did not let
go for a long, long time, not until all her strength was gone.
At that, I killed her.
It is very hard for me to write this down. And I have
already told you how I killed the Doctor – that is,
unintentionally. Do you not already know I do not deserve to
be a hero? Why should I tell you how I killed Albertina? I
think I killed her to stop her killing me. I think that was the
case. I am almost sure it was the case. Almost certain.
 When her fingers slackened on the handle, I seized the
knife immediately and stabbed her below the left nipple. Or
perhaps it was in the belly. No, it was below the left nipple
for the fire vanished as the steel entered the flames but she
spoke to me before she died. She said: ‘I always knew one
only died of love.’ Then she fell back from the blade of the
knife. She must have hidden the knife in her purple dress
though I will never know why, of course. It was a common
kitchen knife, such as is used to chop meat fine enough for
hamburger and so on. Her flesh parted to let the knife out
and her eyes, though still the shape of horizontal tears,
were silent forever.
If the Doctor had been a real magician, the underground
laboratory, the castle, the whole edifice of stone and stained
glass and cloud and mist should have vanished. There
should have been a crash of thunder and a strong wind
would have blown away the levers and the machinery and
the books and the alembics and the pickled mandrakes and
the alligator skeletons; and I should have found myself
alone on the mountain side, under a waning moon, with only
the rags of dream in my hands. But no. The alarum bells
continued to ring and some of the surviving lovers, rudely
shaken from their embrace by the sound of gunfire, began
to clamber from their sleepless dormitory on shaky legs,
though they moved without sense or purpose, as if obeying
some obscure compulsion to come closer to the spectacle of
death, though none of them seemed to observe this
spectacle for they still seemed half-blinded. And the one
door remained remorselessly closed, while I was a mile
beneath the crust of the earth, locked in a white-tiled hall of
mirrors. Nevertheless, as I wiped the reeking blade on the
handkerchief they had provided for my breast pocket, I felt,
how can I put it? Yes; I felt the uneasy sense of perfect
freedom. Freedom, yes. I thought I was free of her, you see.
But there was no way out of the laboratory except the
sealed door and how could I be free of her as long as I
myself remained alive?
I knew the alarum bell must rouse something and my first
thought was, escape; my second, that escape was
impossible. Those of the milling lovers who were not
lamenting their dead or grieving over one another’s wounds
were as witless and uncertain on their feet as new born
colts. They knew only that they had been interrupted in the
middle of the most important work in the world but neither
how nor why and even those whose shattered faces
streamed with blood clasped their partners’ arms or legs
and begged them to lie down again while others, risen,
tottering, befogged by mirrors, kissed the glass cases that
seemed to hold such inviting lips. Yet few, if any, took any
notice of me with my knife or had even seen how cruelly I
had betrayed love itself. I hid myself among the wire
hutches until the metal doors slid open. The alarum ceased.
But no detachment of militia appeared, only a single,
white-clad representative of the hitherto invisible technical
staff, armed only with a syringe. And he did not even bother
to close the door behind him. Clearly the alarum had always
before only indicated some slight indisposition among the
lovers that could easily be righted with a shot or two of
extra hormones; perhaps they interpreted the flickering of
the lights as the sign of a hormonal deficiency. How could
anyone know the real nature of the disturbance? What riot
might the lovers make? Why should they call out the guard
to deal with a lowered vitality among the love slaves? Yet I
had been prepared for fifty hired rifles to level against me. I
wanted a heroic struggle. I wanted a heroic struggle to
justify my murder to myself. And all I did in the end was to
stab the harmless technician in the back of the neck as
easily as you please while he gaped open-mouthed at the
splintered wheelchair, the contorted savant and the dead
girl. Leaving my bag of three stiffening behind me, I walked
out into the corridor and pressed the button that closed the
door behind me.
 If you feel a certain sense of anti-climax, how do you think
I felt?
I still carried my knife. I noticed I had unconsciously
tucked that handkerchief stained with Albertina’s blood into
my breast pocket, where it looked just like a red rose.
But the lights were all going out and I knew the rest of the
castle, whoever that comprised, would soon all be roused.
First, I knew I must destroy the reality modifying machines;
this was clearly fixed in my mind as though to wreck them
would completely vindicate me – as, indeed, in the eyes of
history, it has. I ran down that ice warren of white, glittering
corridors, found the laboratory, went in, smashed the
dancing screens with the desk, dragged pipes and wires
from the walls and set fire to the papers with my gold
cigarette lighter. It was the work of moments. To complete
the job, I went into the distilling plant and smashed
everything I found there, though first I surprised another
technician and so I had to stab him, too. These depredations
set off no alarums for, by the structure of the Doctor’s
system, disturbances were impossible; but the lights were
flickering so badly now, I knew I had not much longer at
liberty in the castle and so would have to leave the
workroom in the tower unharmed. But I guessed the Doctor
only allowed his daughter to handle the most arcane secrets
and so it proved, for everything stopped immediately as
soon as he was dead, of course, and the love slaves
disbanded, for concretized desires could not survive without
their eroto-energy and… But I knew nothing of that. Those
are the dreary ends of the plot. Shall I tie them up or shall I
leave them unravelled? The history books tie them up far
better than I can for I was deep in the bowels of the earth,
was I not, with four notches on my knife. Oh, but I got out
easily enough even though the elevator was no longer
running. I found the emergency exit; it was beside the
elevator. It spiralled me dizzily up to the hall of the castle,
where the old dog still drowsed before the grey ashes of the
applewood fire.
When he smelled Albertina’s blood, he leapt at me with
the last reserves of his senile strength and I left the kitchen
knife in his throat. And so he was my last victim in the
Doctor’s castle.
In the beatific park, the birds now slept with peaceful
heads tucked beneath their wings and the deer slept like
statues of deer. One by one, the castle closed its coloured
eyes behind me, like a peacock slowly furling in its spread,
and its four attendant moons revolved more and more
slowly and were already perceptibly fading round the edges,
like the real moon towards the end of the night. And I, I was
still in my dinner jacket with a black tie round my neck and
a bloody buttonhole still stuck in my lapel as I fled across
the dew-moistened grass as if I were an uninvited guest
turned away from the door of a magnificent dinner party.
I started to run. The wooden bridge sounded off like
machine-gun fire under my running feet. I pulled up a dry
bush from the edge of the cliff and lit a bonfire on the bridge
with my gold cigarette lighter and I burned the bridge
behind me, so I could not have gone back to the castle even
if I wanted to. I only burned the bridge so that I would not be
able to return to her. It broke and fell blazing into the abyss;
the earth swallowed it.
But now the sky filled with a locust swarm of helicopters
all descending on to the roof of the dying castle and I
thought the military were roused at last but then I realized
they must have arrived according to a pre-scheduled plan
and had come to take the Doctor into the city.
I was the only man alive under the stars who knew the
Doctor was dead.
I was the only man alive who knew time had begun again.
The only road led to the air-strip and base so I did not
follow any path. Once again I took to the mountains. I
wandered among them for perhaps three days, hiding
among the rocks when I sighted a roving helicopter
overhead for they were buzzing all over the terrain like
angry flies and I wondered if the militia might inherit the
kingdom the Doctor had prepared for himself. On the third
day, quite by accident, I found an Indian farmstead. When I
spoke to them in the language of the river people, they took
me in, gave me thin barley porridge and let me sleep on the
common pallet. In return for my gold cigarette lighter they
allowed me to ride away on a scrawny, white, starveling
mare and the smallest son, in his baggy white drawers, with
the open sores on his legs, came with me until I was safely
on the track that took me winding down to the foothills
through those cruel, yellow clefts that seared my weary
brain with their infinite monotony. The helicopters monitored
the white, abandoned skies less and less often; after all, the
Doctor’s swarthy soldiers had only been mercenaries and
when their pay was not forthcoming, after they tried but
failed to make sense of the books, the instrument panels
and the generators, they would gut the castle and go off in
search of another war, for was there not always another war
to be had? And the technicians were only technicians… but I
knew nothing of this last phase of the war, its dying fall; I
only knew the helicopters came less frequently and then did
not come at all.
And there were no more transformations because
Albertina’s eyes were extinguished.
On I went, through the lifeless vegetation of winter, and I
thought myself free from all the clouds of attachment
because I was a traveller who had denied his proper
destination. I saw no colours anywhere around me. The food
I begged from cottagers had no savour of either sweetness
or rankness. I knew I was condemned to disillusionment in
perpetuity. My punishment had been my crime.
I returned slowly to the capital. I had neither reason nor
desire to do so. Only my inertia, dormant for so long, now
reasserted itself and carried me there by its own passive,
miserable, apathetic force. In this city I am, or have been, as
you know, a hero. I became one of the founders of the new
constitution – largely from the negative propulsion of my
own inertia for, once I was placed and honoured on my
plinth, I was not the man to climb down again, saying: ‘But I
am the wrong man!’ for I felt that, if what I had done had
turned out for the common good, I might as well reap what
benefits I could from it. The shrug is my gesture. The sneer
is my expression. If she was air and fire, I was earth and
water, that residue of motionless, inert matter that cannot,
by its very nature, become irradiated and may not aspire,
even if it tries. I am the check, the impulse of restraint. So I
effectively evolved into a politician, did I not? I, an old hero,
a crumbling statue in an abandoned square.
I returned slowly through the mists of winter. Time lay
more thickly about me than the mists. I was so unused to
moving through time that I felt like a man walking under
water. Time exerted great pressure on my blood vessels and
my eardrums, so that I suffered from terrible headaches,
weakness and nausea. Time clogged the hooves of my mare
until she lay down beneath me and died. Nebulous Time was
now time past; I crawled like a worm on its belly through the
clinging mud of common time and the bare trees showed
only the dreary shapes of an eternal November of the heart,
for now all changes would henceforth be, as they had been
before, absolutely predictable. And so I identified at last the
flavour of my daily bread; it was and would be that of regret.
Not, you understand, of remorse; only of regret, that
insatiable regret with which we acknowledge that the
impossible is, per se, impossible.
Well, I walked the heels out of my silk socks and the soles
off my patent leather pumps and I fell down to sleep and
rose to walk again until this filthy scarecrow in ragged
evening dress, his matted hair falling over his shoulders and
his gaunt jaw sprouting unkempt beard, his lapel still stuck
through with a blackened rose of stiffened blood – until I saw
before me, one moonlit dawn, the smoking ruins of a
familiar city.
But as I drew nearer, I saw the ruins were inhabited.
Old Desiderio lays down his pen. In a little while, they will
bring me my hot drink before they put me to bed and I am
glad of these small attentions for they are the comforts of
the old, although they are quite meaningless.
My head aches with writing. What a thick book my
memoirs make! What a fat book to coffin young Desiderio,
who was so thin and supple. My head aches. I close my
eyes.
Unbidden, she comes.
*A pastel-coloured joke, designed to produce a discreet
titter among freshmen. Desiderio.
*Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams. Desiderio.