The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (34 page)

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.

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.