The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

by Angela Carter

  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.