The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

by Angela Carter

  We ran from the cabin to crouch at his side, like his dogs, for his protection, for now again we saw him in his tempestuous element. The tempest seemed his tool; he used this tool to destroy the black ship and its sailors.

  The very air turned to fire. The topmast, an incandescent spoke, snapped and crashed; storm-born luminescence danced upon every surface and the rain and driving waves lashed us and soaked us until we were half-drowned before we sank. Lafleur and I clung to one another while the ship tilted this way and that, tossing its freight of sleeping swine hither and thither, flinging them senseless into the boiling sea or crushing them beneath its disintegrating timbers. The black sails unfurled and flew away on the wings of the storm; he flourished the sword like a wand or a baton, for he conducted the tempest as though it was a symphony orchestra and again we heard his dishevelled laughter, louder than the winds and waters put together. The currents and the wind were driving us nearer and nearer land in the random flares of the lightning. We saw the giant palms threshing and bowing double as if in homage to the Count. Yet we could see nothing clearly for our motion was too uncertain and soon the ship broke up in a succession of shivering concussions and all who sailed in it were flung into the water.

  Yet not a single one of the sodden pirates flickered so much as an eyelid while the sea engorged them and we, the living, were washed up on a white beach which the wind moulded into fresh dunes at every moment, together with a great quantity of black driftwood and yellow corpses.

  Yes, we were saved – Lafleur, the Count and I; though we were little more than skins swollen with salt water and our ears were still as full of the hurricane as if shells were clapped to them, blotting out all other sounds. But the great-grandfather of all breakers tossed me negligently on the spar to which I clung almost to the margin of the forest and Lafleur followed me on a lesser wave, holding on to the rudder. I stumbled down the beach and dragged him up the sand, out of harm’s way, and then a lightning flash showed me the Count walking out of the water as simply as if he had been bathing, in his eyes a strange glow of satisfaction and, in his hand, still the mighty blade.

  We followed him a little way into the forest and there Lafleur and I made ourselves a kind of nest in the undergrowth and slept as soon as our battered heads touched the grassy pillow, but the Count sat up awake all night, keeping some kind of vigil with his sword. He was still kneeling among the brushwood when we woke. The playful monkeys were pelting us with leaves, twigs and coconuts. The sun was high in the sky. The mysterious susurration of the tropic forest trembled sweetly in my ears after the clamour of the oceans. The air was soft and perfumed.

  The storm was over and a miraculous peace filled the vaulted, imperial groves of palms. A web of lianas let a translucent green light down upon us three, ill-assorted babes in the wood and it was already so hot that steam was rising in puffs from our drenched clothing and the now filthy bandaging Lafleur obstinately refused to take off his face. It was marvellous to feel the solid ground beneath my feet again, even if I was not at all sure to which continent the ground belonged. I thought it must be my own far American South but the Count opted hopefully for savage Africa while Lafleur observed remotely that we had not the least notion where we really were but had probably been blown willy-nilly on to the coast of some distant island. When we went down to the beach to wash ourselves, we soon saw the inhabitants were black and so felt certain we were in Africa.

  The tide, in receding, had left corpses strewn with shells all along the endless, white beach and the glistening purity of the sand emphasized the surpassing ebony of the inhabitants who, clad in long robes of coloured cottons and necklaces of dried beans, diligently searched among the debris for its trove of swords. They were men and women of great size and dignity, accompanied by laughing children of extraordinary charm, and when they saw us, they lowed gently among themselves like a congregation of wise cattle. Our garments smoked. We stood still and allowed them to approach us. They did so slowly, some trailing the pirates’ swords unhandily behind them. Their faces and chests were whorled and cicatrized with tribal marks, knife cuts discoloured because white clay had been rubbed into them. As we waited, more and more of them came out of the margin of the jungle, walking with such grace they might all have been carrying huge pots on their heads, while their naked children danced round them like marionettes carved out of coal. When he saw their colour, the Count began to shiver as if he had caught a fever in the sea but I knew he shivered out of fear. But these solid, moving shadows showed no fear of us though soon they formed a great ring about us, hemming us in on all sides, and we knew we had been captured.

  Then we heard the sound of crude but martial music and a jaunty detachment of Amazons marched out of the forest. These women were elderly and steatopygous. They were the shapes of ripe pears bursting with juice and their wrinkled dugs swung loosely back and forth, inside and outside the silver breastplates they wore but, all the same, they were a splendid sight, some with scarlet cloaks and loose white breeches made of swathes of cloth tucked up between the legs, others with cloaks of chocolate brown and dark blue breeches, all with metal helmets crowned with decorations of black horsehair. Their officers, chosen, it would seem, as much for the size of their bottoms as anything, marched beside them playing long-stemmed, brass trumpets and little hand drums and these female soldiers were aggressively armed with duck-guns, blunderbusses, muskets and razor-like knives, a museum of ancient weapons. They easily made us understand by signs we were under arrest again and took us, heavily if quaintly guarded, down the green path to a clearing where their village lay, while the black host fell in behind us with the same decorum that marked all they did.

  The village was a seemly place of roomy huts made of dried mud and we were taken into a neat, clean house and offered a breakfast of some kind of pounded grain mixed with minced pork, served on fronds of palm. Lafleur and I ate heartily but the Count, unmanned again, a quaking skeleton, ate nothing. He cowered deep under the quilts they had given us to rest on, repeating over and over again: NEMESIS COMES. But they were far too polite to even raise their eyebrows when they saw him. Indeed, the only discordant notes in all this sober, harmonious decency were the low stools on which we were invited to sit and the low tables off which we ate, for they were ingeniously fashioned out of bones which, from their shapes, could only have been human. But these bones were dressed up so prettily that at first one hardly realized they were bones at all for they had been painted dark red and then adorned with tessellations of gummed shells and feathers.

  They took away our ragged, filthy clothes with polite exclamations of distaste and Lafleur hid himself in a corner with a touching, virginal modesty until they brought us some of their lengths of cotton printed in blacks, indigos and crimsons so that we could cover ourselves. We made ourselves togas after the Roman fashion and then Lafleur and I sat at the door of our hut in the sunshine, trying to chat wordlessly with the little children who stared at us with huge, solemn eyes. The children fingered Lafleur’s bandages curiously because they thought the covering was a kind of upper face and he laughed with them with such affecting motherliness I ought to have suspected… but I suspected nothing! Shape-shifting was so much hocus-pocus to me. So the morning whiled away peacefully enough with never a hint of dread though we saw the women were busily tending huge cauldrons which hung over fires in the open air and, when the sun stood directly overhead, the captain of the female soldiers came to us and informed us that now we must go and pay our respects to the village chief whose grand ceremonial hut lay a little way out of the village. So we straightened our togas and combed our fingers through our hairs. But the Count would not come of his own free will so the captain had to poke him with the butt of her musket until he crept reluctantly out to join us.

  Oh, what a bedraggled demiurge he was! His black tights were all tattered and torn, so a fringe of toe peeped out at the foot of each, and his prick hung out of the aperture as limp and woebegone as a deflated balloon. He
limped like an eagle with a broken wing. Poor, yellow tiger! And yet he had ridden out his tempest in triumph the previous night and even as we walked through the village, he took on, as if he summoned up all his flagging courage to do so, a few shreds of enigmatic charisma, enough to fling back his head proudly, as if, perhaps, invigorated by the high, brazen clamour of the trumpets which accompanied us.

  The path climbed steeply through the vaulted architraves of the palms which sprang straight up to the sky in soaring, prodigious, bluish-greyish columns towards the tasselled parasols of emerald feathers which formed the capitals of this vegetable cathedral. A muted solemnity governed the tread of our guards. They changed their music to a more mournful key and played what was almost a lament and when we came to a waterfall, everyone fell on their faces to worship it. Beyond this waterfall was a cave in a rock face, with its entrance curtained in the printed cotton that covered us. The soldiers prostrated themselves again so we knew this was where the chief lived and also that his people held him in religious awe. The Count had turned pale as if all the blood had been drained from his body but still he held his ground with something of his old, defiant spirit. The brass and the kettledrums fell silent but we could hear the liquid music of the waterfall and the crackling of the wood that burned under a great pot outside the cave.

  When I looked behind me, I saw the entire village had followed us, and in the arborescent silence we were the only men left standing up for everyone else crouched with their faces deep in grass or flat on earth. The presence of a hundred silent people filled the green twilight with a sacral quietude that made me uneasy. And then a sensuous parade of the chief’s wives and concubines came from the cave without drawing the curtains apart so we could not see what lay beyond them. Intensely black and perfectly naked, these women wore plumes of ostrich in their hair and arranged themselves around the entrance to the cave in a frame of submissive adoration. Many bore the bleeding marks of gigantic bites in their breasts and buttocks. Some had a nipple missing, most were minus one or several toes and fingers. One girl had a ruby set in the socket in place of a lost eyeball and some wore false teeth carved in strange shapes out of the tusks of elephants. Yet all had been beautiful and their various disfigurements lent them an exquisite pathos. After them came a number of eunuchs and then the royal castrater, the royal barber and several other barbarous officials, until the whole court was displayed before us, lined up before the cave as if they were posing for a group photograph.

  The drums now began to play again, a dismal throbbing like the palpitation of a dying heart. The tribe lay still on their faces but two of the royal wives crawled forward and at last drew back the curtains as the drums rolled and the trumpets suddenly whined. And we saw him. The chief.

  He sat on a throne of bones on a dais of bones which, as we watched, rolled ponderously forward on four wheels made of skulls, wheels that crushed the hands of half a dozen concubines before it came to a halt. Seated, he was six and a half feet high. He was far, far blacker than the blackest night. He was a very sacred and very monstrous idol.

  On his head he wore a ceremonial wig consisting of three thick fringes arranged in concentric rings. That next to the skin of his head was brown; the middle one was crimson; and the outside fringe was of bright gold, like a diadem. Through this arresting chevelure was wound a chain of mixed carbuncles and round his neck, virtually clothing the upper part of his body, were a great many golden chains with pendants, charms and skulls of babies dangling from them. His face was brilliantly painted with four discs on either cheek, each one rimmed with white and coloured inside yellow, green, blue and red. A brown, white-rimmed eye was painted on his forehead between and above his own eyes. He carried the thigh-bone of a giant for a sceptre, painted scarlet and once again decorated with inlay and feathers. He wore the pelt of a tiger wrapped round his middle and the root-like toes which protruded from his sandals were stuck with rings containing gems of amazing size and peerless water, as were his hands, which were so heavily be-ringed they looked as if they were mailed with jewels. His appalling face suggested more than Aztec horrors and, now the curtain was open, I could see that the cave behind him was an arcade of human skeletons.

  ‘Welcome to the regions of the noble children of the sun!’ he said in a cavernous voice that sank to thrilling depths, while the drums pounded on and on. But he did not speak to Lafleur and me; he addressed himself only to the Count.

  ‘You are my only destination,’ replied the Count. ‘You altered my compass so that it would point only to you, my hypocritical shadow, my double, my brother.’

  Then I saw this dreadful chieftain was indeed the black pimp who was now about to avenge his lover’s murder, for such was the Count’s desire he should be and do so. The chieftain rose from his throne, stepped from his dais on to a footstool of grovelling concubines and took the Count into the warmest, most passionate embrace. But he concluded it by striking the Count such a heavy blow that he reeled out of the great black arms and fell to the ground. The chief set one foot on the Count’s chest in the attitude of a successful hunter and spoke, it seemed, to the sky above us, which showed in patches of azure electricity through the vivid fronds of the palms.

  ‘The customs of my country are as barbarous as the propriety with which they are executed. For example, not one of those delightful children who seem, each one, to have stepped straight off the pen of Jean-Jacques Rousseau but has not, since he put forth his first milk teeth, dined daily off a grilled rump, or roasted shoulder, a stew, a fricassée, or else a hash of human meat. To this usually most abhorred of comestibles they owe the brightness of their eyes, the strength of their limbs, the marvellous gloss of health on their skins, their longevity and a virility as great as it is discreetly practised, since this diet is certain to triple the libidinal capacities, as my wives and concubines can willingly testify. But we have learned to let circumspection sharpen our pleasures and we conduct the most loathsome profligacy with no public show of indecency at all.

  ‘How do I rule my little kingdom? With absolute severity. Only if a king is utterly ruthless, only if he hardens his heart to the temper of the most intransigent metal, will he maintain his rule. I am a ruler both secular and divine. I hedge about my whims, which I term my “laws”, with an awesome incomprehensibility of superstitious fears. The least rebellious thought rising weed-like in my subjects’ hearts is instantly transmitted to me by my espionage system of telepaths whose minds are magic mirrors and reflect not only faces but thoughts. Those incipient rebels and their entire families are condemned for the most fleeting wish alone for we do not give them time to act. They are forthwith shipped directly to the army catering staff and boiled down to nourishing soups which contribute towards the excellent, indeed, prolific physique of my army while my punishments extend even towards that insubstantial part of themselves, their souls, for I encourage a belief in the soul in order to terrify them better. The least rebellious inclination rising weed-like condemns the subject and his seed to damnation for three generations. So it behoves them to tend their gardens well and only let the lilies of obedience grow there!’

  The Count now rose painfully to his feet but the chieftain instantly kicked him back into a kneeling position and the Count knelt at his feet for the rest of the interview.

  ‘Why, you may ask, have I built my army out of women since they are often held to be the gentler sex? Gentlemen, if you rid your hearts of prejudice and examine the bases of the traditional notions of the figure of the female, you will find you have founded them all on the remote figure you thought you glimpsed, once, in your earliest childhood, bending over you with an offering of warm, sugared milk, crooning a soft lullaby while, by her haloed presence, she kept away the snakes that writhed beneath the bed. Tear this notion of the mother from your hearts. Vengeful as nature herself, she loves her children only in order to devour them better and if she herself rips her own veils of self-deceit, Mother perceives in herself untold abysses of cruelty as subtle
as it is refined. Not one of my callipygian soldiery but has not earned her rank by devouring alive, first gnawing limb from limb and sucking the marrow from its bones, her first-born child. So she earns her colours. To a woman, they are absolutely ruthless. They have passed far beyond all human feeling.’

  The army, as one woman, lifted its head and smiled to hear this tribute so I guessed they were still capable of responding to flattery.

  ‘And, since my early researches soon showed me that the extent of a woman’s feelings was directly related to her capacity for feeling during the sexual act, I and my surgeons take the precaution of brutally excising the clitoris of every girl child born to the tribe as soon as she reaches puberty. And also those of my wives and concubines who have been brought from other tribes where this practice is not observed. Therefore I am proud to say that not a single one of my harem or, indeed, any of the tribe of more than Roman mothers you see before you, has ever experienced the most fleeting ecstasy, or even the slightest pleasure, while in my arms or in the arms of any of my subjects. So our womenfolk are entirely cold and respond only to cruelty and abuse.’