The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (26 page)

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.