The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

by Angela Carter

  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.