Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories

by Angela Carter

  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 Bronte 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 t
o 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.

  Now, altogether I’ve been erased and substituted and played back so many times my memory is nothing but a palimpsest of possibilities and probabilities, there are some elements he cannot rid me of and these, interestingly enough, are not those of blood on an old man’s hair or his leather-clad minions closing in on me with mineral menace of eyes like stones; no. There is a hawk, drawing towards it in a still sky all the elements of which a complex world was once composed. And some man haunts the labyrinths inside my head and he was born without a mouth. And there are certain kinds of eyes, those eyes that, once seen, can never be forgotten.

  When I helplessly repeat, “I saw a hawk, I saw a hawk, I saw a hawk …” or, “They say I have my mother’s eyes”, the Count half flays me alive. His anger is a nervous reflex, like the crazy courage of a coward in arms against his own weakness; that still, in my extremity, I should persist in remembering reminds him of the possibility, which is appalling to him, that there might be a remedy for chaos.

  I need hardly tell you that we, the women of the Scarlet House, live in absolute isolation, although the planned interpenetration of all our experience gives us a vague but pervasive sense of closeness to one another. When on a pillow wet with tears, I live over again the fatal moment of capture, it might be your dread I feel, or yours, or yours—a different kind of dread than mine which, nevertheless, I experience as though it were my own and so I draw nearer to you all.

  Yet our lives have contracted to the limitations imposed upon us by the grisly machinery of the Count’s harem. We are not ourselves; we are his playing cards, a shifting chorus to the Count, to Madame Schreck, to the Fool and to the others I do not know but only see on the nights he plays the Tarot Game, hieratic figures like apparitions from a forgotten theogony who rise and fall at the random dictates of whim. “God is random,” says the Count who believes in the irresolute triumph of time over its own rectification, memory.

  We whisper among ourselves, of course, like toys might in the privacy of the toy cupboard after the little master is tucked up in bed for the night. Our whispers are soft, awed by the predicament in which we find ourselves. In the night-time darkness of our quarters, we cannot make out one another’s features. Our disembodied voices rustle like dead leaves and sometimes we stretch out our hands to touch one another, lightly, to lay a finger on one another’s mouths to assure ourselves a voice issues from that aperture. Like drifting cobwebs, the insubstantial caresses linger for a moment upon our skins. We manifest ourselves in a ghostly fashion for are we not already shadows? Phantoms of the dead, phantoms of the living, there is little to choose between two states of limbo.

  Nevertheless, I have certain precious mnemonics. A hawk; a man without a mouth; and eyes without a face. As long as I retain them in my memory, even if I forget any kind of context for them, then I can keep back something of myself from the Count’s dissolving philosophy. He may beat me as much as he pleases; I’m not afraid of encountering Death’s grisly skeleton in the gavotte of the arcana, and that’s something.

  (If you do find yourself partnering the skeleton, you vanish, of course.)

  The Fool never says a word but only screeches and babbles; he’s growing perfect, he’s quite forgotten how to speak. When the Count beats me and I scream, he says: “Now you’re talking! Who needs words?”

  We are his harem and also his finishing school. The curriculum is divided into three parts. First, we learn how to forget; second, we forget how to speak; third, we cease to exist.

  There are no mirror
s in the Scarlet House because mirrors propagate souls. A mirror shows you who you are and not one single one of us poor girls has the slightest notion of what that might have been. Yet, when the Count beats us, we feel pain and so we know we are still living, not yet quite annihilated, and the anguish that overcomes me when I remember I am no longer myself is quite real and persists all the time.

  Yet the fugue of our common memory is also a kind of consolation. Though I am not myself, sometimes, when we are forced to play at the Tarot Game, I and the rest of the minor arcana, I sense I may be, in some as yet formless and incoherent way, almost a legion of selves. When we lie in our sleeping quarters and touch one another to confirm that the ripped envelopes of our bodies are still there, even if the contents have all been misdirected, it is almost as though my body had been transformed into one of those many-limbed and many-headed effigies sculptured in Indian temples—no point, any longer, in trying to ascertain the original from my bewilderment. The more the Count scrambles the tapes, the more the harem becomes one single woman with a multiplicity of hands and eyes and no name, no past, no future—first, a being in a void; and, soon, a void itself.

  Chaos is like a vat of acid. Everything disintegrates.

  Nevertheless, I cling to my mnemonics like a drowning man to a spar. As time passes and wears me away, I meditate upon them more and more. I am beginning to reconcile myself completely to the fact that they may not contain any element at all of real memory. It was hard to bear, at first, but soon I understood how the hawk, the face without a mouth, the eyes without a face, are all the residue of the world I still carry with me that does not elude me and, if they are not precisely memories, then they may be, in some sense, like those odds and ends that all refugees carry with them, from which they refuse to be parted, although they’re quite insignificant—a spoon with a bent handle, say; or a tram ticket issued by a city that no longer exists. Small items, meaningless in themselves, and yet keys to an entire system of meanings, if only I can remember …