The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (19 page)

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.