Burning Your Boats

by Angela Carter

  The Count sits in a hall hung with embroideries depicting all the hierarchy of hell, a place, he claims, not unlike the Scarlet House. Soon, everywhere will be like the Scarlet House. Chaos is coming, says the Count, and giggles; the Count ends all his letters ‘yours entropically’ and signs them with the peacock’s quill dipped in the blood of a human sacrifice. Why did you come to these abandoned regions, my dear, surely you’d heard rumours that I and my fabulous retinue had already installed ourselves in the ruins, preparing chaos with the aid of a Tarot pack?

  But I had no notion who the Count was when his bodyguard captured me. They stood around me as I writhed on the ground and they showed their fangs at me; they all file their canines to a point, it is a sign of machismo among them. They wore jackets of black leather brightly studded with cabbalistic patterns; tall boots; snug leggings of black leather; and slick black helmets that fitted closely over the head and over the mouth, too, leaving only their pale eyes visible. Their eyes glittered like pebbles in a brook. They were armed with hand-guns and their belts bristled with knives. Each carried a coil of rope. A silence so perfect that it might never have been broken resumed itself after the hawk fell.

  They hauled me off at the end of the rope they tied to the back of one of their motorcycles and made me run, tumble, bounce behind them on my way to the Scarlet House, though I must admit they drove quite slowly, so I was not much injured. The Scarlet House was built of white concrete and looked to me very much like a hospital, a large terminal ward. A few days in bed there, and the gravel rash, the grazes and bruises healed.

  I remember everything perfectly. I know the ruins exist; at nights, I can hear the foxes barking in New Bond Street. That sound confirms the existence of the ruins though, of course, I can see nothing from the windows.

  Meanwhile, in this blind place, the Count consults maps of the stars with the aid of his adviser, whose general efficiency is hindered by the epileptic fits with which he is afflicted. Though at the best of times his wits are out of order; he drools, too. His star-spangled robes are dabbled with spittle and spilled food and other randomly spattered bodily effluvia, for he’s quite shameless in his odd little lusts and pleasures and the Count lets him indulge them all. He’s the licensed fool and may even pull out his prick and play with it at mealtimes, and woe betide you if you flinch from one of his random displays of slobbering affection, for that’s a sure sign you aren’t in tune with chaos. But I’m not sure if he’s a fool all the time; sometimes his eyes focus on me with the assessing glint of a used-car dealer. Then I am afraid he may be wondering what I can remember.

  When he’s been a good fool and made the Count chuckle, the Count tells Madame Schreck to give him access to one of the youngest of the girls. There are girls as young as twelve or thirteen and Fool likes his women just out of the shell. The Fool takes his present down to the dungeons. We won’t see her again.

  But was she not almost as good as dead the moment she set foot inside the Scarlet House? The moment of capture had sealed her fate.

  As for myself, I am sure I was captured by the bikers, in the ruins. I am perfectly confident that is how I came to the Scarlet House. Yet the Count assures me, with equal, if not superior confidence, that I am mistaken, so that I am not sure which of us to believe.

  The Count is dedicated to the obliteration of memory.

  Memory, says the Count, is the main difference between man and the beasts; the beasts were born to live but man was born to remember. Out of his memory, he made abstract patterns of significant forms. Memory is the grid of meaning we impose on the random and bewildering flux of the world. Memory is the line we pay out behind us as we travel through time – it is the clue, like Ariadne’s, which means we do not lose our way. Memory is the lasso with which we capture the past and haul it from chaos towards us in nicely ordered sequences, like those of baroque keyboard music. The Count grimaces when he says that because he hates music even more that he hates mathematics but he loves to listen to screaming. ‘The entropic rhetoric of the scream’, he calls it. Madame Schreck screeches for him sometimes at night, to augment his pleasure if we girls have screamed ourselves hoarse and cannot make any more noise.

  Memory, origin of narrative; memory, barrier against oblivion; memory, repository of my being, those delicate filaments of myself I weave, in time into a spider’s web to catch as much world in it as I can. In the midst of my self-spun web, there I can sit, in the serenity of my self-possession. Or so I would, if I could.

  Because my memory is undergoing a sea-change. Though I am certain I remember, I am no longer sure what it is I remember nor, indeed, the reason why I should remember it.

  Everyday, the Count attempts to erase the tapes from my memory. He has perfected a complex system of forgetting. Although I passionately assert how I was seized by the bikers in the ruins of New Bond Street, I know this assertion is no more than my last, paltry line of defence against the obliterations of the Count. He has already implanted in me a set of pseudo-memories, all of which sometimes play in my head together, throwing me into a dreadful confusion so that, though I remember everything, I have no means of ascertaining the actuality of those memories, which all return to me with shimmering vividness and a sense of lived and quantified experience. All of them.

  Dear god, all of them.

  Remembering is the first stage of absolute forgetfulness, says the occult Count, who goes by contraries. So I have been precipitated into a fugue of all the memories of all the women in the Scarlet House, where I live, now. This is his harem. We are left in the cruel care of Madame Schreck, who eats small birds such as fig-peckers and thrushes; she puts a whole one, spit-grilled, into her huge, red mouth as lusciously as if it were a liqueur chocolate and then she spits the bones out like the skin and pips of a grape. And she’s got other, extravagant tastes as well; she likes to gorge upon the unborn young of rabbits. She acquires the foetuses from laboratories; she has them cooked for her in a cream sauce enriched with the addition of the yolk of an egg. She’s a messy eater, she spills sauce on her bare belly and one of us must lick it off for her. She throws open her legs and shows us her hole; the way down and out, she says.

  The count comes personally to the Scarlet House to give us our lessons. He always brings with him a brace of pigs on silken leashes which we girls must caress. The Count believes the pig is the prime example of perfected evolution, the multivorous beast that lives in shit, most entropic of substances, and consumes its own farrow, if it gets half the chance.

  Like time, says the Count; like time.

  Time, which is the enemy of memory.

  The past is very much like the future.

  I descended at dusk from a train on which I had been the only passenger in a dank, chill compartment lit only by one greenish, meagre gas mantle; its pair, on the other side of a mirror so scratched and defaced I could not see my own reflection in it, was broken. A mess of sandwich wrappings and orange peel littered the grimy floor. It had been a gloomy journey, across a fen shrouded in mist of autumn, an unpeopled landscape, flat, waterlogged, dotted here and there with pollarded willows with their melancholy look of men whose arms have been lopped off or mutilated women with whips upon their heads. I descended from the train at that lonely halt as night was falling; a man with a seamed, shuttered face came to take my ticket and, without a single word, humped my little tin trunk for me out of the ramshackle, wooden station to a shabby carriage in the lane outside, a shabby carriage with, between its shafts, a starveling pony whose ribs poked out under its drab, glossless coat. On the driving seat sat a thin, dark man in black livery who, to my shocked horror, I perceived possessed no mouth at all. I started back; but the station master grabbed my hand and all but forced me into the carriage, then slammed the door on me.

  As the poor beast began painfully to drag the carriage forward, I glimpsed the last of the world in which, until that aghast moment, I’d spent twenty-two years of girlhood; into the darkness before me I took the grinning
face of the station master, pressed in farewell at the smeared window, transformed by a sudden rush of malevolent glee to a mask of pure evil.

  I knew I must try to escape and tussled weakly with the door but it was locked fast. The inexorable carriage, lurching, ponderous, took me into the deepening shadows of the night, which seemed to be moving across the fen to engulf me. I lay back upon the leather seat and gave way to helpless tears.

  At last we entered a dark courtyard virtually enclosed by tall, black trees; the gates shut immediately after we were inside. When the pony halted, the macabre coachman came to let me out. He reached for my hand to help me down with a certain courtesy and I had no choice but to touch him. His flesh felt as dank as the wet, night air of the fens which surrounded us.

  Yet when I brought myself to look at his ghastly face in order to thank him, I saw his eyes speak though he had no mouth nor none of the necessary appendages of lips, teeth and tongue with which to do so, his grave eyes, the colour of the inside of the ocean, told me I was a young girl much to be pitied and, in luminous depths, I perceived the most dreadful intimation of my fate. At the door of the rambling, brick-built, red-tiled place, half farmhouse, half country mansion and now, had I but known it, wholly dedicated to the Count’s experiments, Madame Schreck waited to greet me in the scarlet splendour of her satin dress that laid open to the view of her breasts and the unimaginable wound of her sex – Madame Schreck, whom I would learn to fear far more than death itself, since death is finite.

  Now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation.

  Yet this version of my capture, in which despair settles slowly like a fall of grey snow upon the landscape through which I travelled towards the moment when hope vanished, sometimes seems to me to have altogether too literary a flavour – too much of a nineteenth-century quality, with its railway trains, its advertisment in the personal column of The Times for a governess that drew me, like a Brontë heroine, on a spool of fate over the bleak flat-lands. There’s the inky, over-written smell of pseudo-memory about the gas lights and the mute coachman, though my skin still shudders from the remembered touch of his skin and I will never be able to forget his eyes.

  But the Count, the Morpholytic Kid who presides over the death of forms, assures me that now the process of forgetting is well under way so that I can remember both the past and the future with equal facility, since both are illusory. I’ve made up a past out of some novelette once read on a train, perhaps; and I’ve guessed at a future. For there are no foxes in New Bond Street. Nor will they frolic in New Bond Street until the cards fall in such a way that the foxes will bound out, barking, from beneath them. Time past and time future combine to distort my memory.

  But I have one memory I sometimes think must be the most authentic, since it is by far the most ghastly.

  My beloved father has a straight back and an erect gait in spite of the seventy summers that have turned his hair to a spume of white foam. We sit at a round tea-table with a red plush cover in our pleasant apartment, the windows open on to a balcony where a little breeze stirs the heavy heads of my fine show of geraniums, white, salmon pink and scarlet, all banked together, exuding a delicious, spicy odour.

  How I loved that room . . . the slippery horsehair sofa with the paisley shawl thrown over it and the piles of cushions my mother had embroidered with all manner of brightly coloured butterflies and flowers; the rosewood cabinet filled with china shepherdesses and bird-catchers, all covered with a fine bloom of dust – I’m not the best of housekeepers; there is a stain on the Persian carpet which marks the spot where I spilled a bowl of hot chocolate when I was six years old. There is a china bowl filled with pot pourri on the mantlepiece.

  My mother used to make pot pourri every summer; she would bring back the flowers from our house in the country. Now she is dead but she still presides over our tea-table; there on the wall she smiles at us from a bird’s-eye maple frame, a tinted photograph taken shortly after she and my father were married. She’s still very young, not much older than I am now; she wears a wide straw hat decorated with pink ribbon and a bunch of daisies. Its brim gently shades her eyes, of which the long lashes are so dark they look like the fringed centres of anemones. Her eyes are a mysterious, darkish green.

  They say I have her eyes.

  Some women can take their eyes out, says the Count; he is always particularly angry if when he is engaged in erasing the tapes of memory, I begin – as I sometimes, quite helplessly, do – to repeat, over and over again, as if one tape were stuck: ‘They say I have my mother’s eyes, they say I have my mother’s eyes.’ Then he beats me with a knotted whip until my shoulders bleed; when visiting his women, he never forgets a whip. Then he hands me over to Madame Schreck for a spell in the sensory deprivation unit, I must crawl into the oblivion of her hole for a while.

  My father and I sit under my mother’s photograph in an old-fashioned room in which everything is loved because it is familiar. Twenty-two years of my life have unfurled in this room like a slow, quiet fan. I pour tea for my father from a silver pot with a spout like the neck of a swan. The cups have narrow stems and are made of fine, white porcelain with scrolls of faded gold around the rims. My own cup cracked under its weight of years long ago; I remember how my father carefully riveted it together again, until it was as good as new. There is a glass saucer containing a sliced lemon on the table, its sharp, clean scent refreshes this sultry July afternoon. The light falls in regular parallelograms through our slatted blinds so we know we are in control of the weather. In the park outside, a few birds cheep the exhausted songs of high summer.

  The staccato click of bootheels. The peremptory barrage of gloved fists on the panels of the door. When the old man reaches for the revolver he always wears in the holster under his armpit, they gun him down. His white hair floods with blood as red as the painted house of Madame Schreck, who is waiting for me in the subterranean torture-chamber deep at the heart of the maze of my brain, the Minotaur with the head of a woman and the orifice of a sow.

  My father tumbles across the tea-table. Cups, saucers fly apart in shards as he crashes down. His fingers grasp at the empty air to catch one last, lost handful of world between them before it slips away from him for ever.

  Then they seized me, stripped me, raped me on the silk birds of the Persian carpet under my mother’s picture, threw a coat over me, thrust a gun in my back and forced me down the echoing staircase to the armoured car waiting outside. I had been a virgin. I was in great pain.

  Madame Schreck, in a smart uniform of drab olive, with sheer black stockings and those six-inch heels of hers that stab the linoleum as she walks, took my particulars at the mahogany desk. When I refused to tell her where my brother was, she made me lie down on the camp-bed in the corner of the room, under a propaganda poster of the Count riding upon a winged snake and, with judicious impassivity, she applied the lighted end of her cigarette to the interior membrane of my labia minor. Through the open window, I remember, I saw a hawk immobile at the central node of the blue sky of the midsummer. From his spread wings dropped a silence that stunned me more than the pain she inflicted.

  An orderly took me to the Scarlet House, a block-house with red-painted doors. He had almost to carry me because I could scarcely walk. There was no mouth in his face. No mouth. His eyes were feral, wild, scarcely human.

  ‘Aha!’ says the Count in a great good humour; ‘Your memory is playing tricks on you!’

  He himself, such is his magnanimity, received me in a vast, echoing hall hung with extravagant tapestries. I retain only the most confused recollections of its exterior but I know the inside perfectly well, now. It is a maze of cells like the inside of a brain. He took away my old coat that was still bundled around my shoulders and dropped it into an incinerator. Then he showed me the sacrificial knife, which is made of black obsidian, and said to me: ‘As of the present moment you inhabit the world no longer since the least impulse of my will can cause you
to disappear from it.’

  But his methods are more subtle than the knife. Dedicated as he is to the dissolution of forms, he intends to erode my sense of being by equipping me with a multiplicity of beings, so that I confound myself with my own profusion of pasts, presents and futures.

  I am eroding, I am wearing away. I am being stroked as smooth as stone is by the hands of the sea; the elements that went to make up my uniqueness fall apart as he erases the tapes of my memory and makes his own substitutions. For, if my first capture incorporates within it ruins that do not yet exist and my second capture resonates with too many echoes of books I might have read, then my third and by far my most moving capture might only recapitulate a Middle-European nightmare, an episode from Prague or Vienna seen in a movie, perhaps, or told me by a complete stranger during the exposed privacy of a long train journey. For sometimes I cannot believe I’ve suffered so much.

  If only I could remember everything perfectly, just as it happened, then loaded with the ambivalent burden of my past, I should be free.

  But in this brothel where memory’s the prostitute there is no such thing as freedom; all is governed by the fall of the cards. Madame Schreck, of course, is the High Priestess or Female Pope. The Count has given her a blue robe to wear over that terrible red dress that reminds us all, every time we see it, of the irresoluble and animal part of ourselves we all hold in common, since we are women. She is the paradigm of sexuality. At her hairy hole we all pay homage as if it were the mouth of an oracular cave.

  When we play the Tarot Game, Madame Schreck sits on a small throne. They bring down the Count’s special book, the book in black ink on purple paper that he keeps hanging from a twisted beam in his private apartments; they open it up and spread it out on her open lap, to mimic her sex, which is also a forbidden book.

  The Tarot Game is like those games of chess that medieval princes performed on the black and white marble chequered floors of their palaces, using men for pieces. They’d dress one team in black and one team in white; the knights would be mounted on suitably caparisoned chargers who sometimes unloaded a freight of dung as they stepped delicately sideways, to prove the game was real. The bishops would be properly mitred; the pawns, no doubt, dressed as common militia. The Count plays the Game of Tarot with a major arcana of fourteen of his retinue. If Madame Schreck adopts the emblems of the Papess to the manner born, the Fool remains himself, of course. They mask themselves and perform random dances to sounds not unlike screaming that the Count extorts from an electronic synthesiser. He reads the patterns the hallucinated pack make at random and so he invokes chaos. He has methodology. He is a scientist, in his way.