The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

by Angela Carter

  ‘Terror of a fire at sea! How the tars brutally trample each other down; they stab and murder their comrades in the mad tussle for the lifeboat but the lifeboat was the first to blaze. My tumultuous bowels vomit forth flaming wrack! And I did not forget to invite the sharks to dinner, oh, no. They have formed up around the ship, their dinner table; they wait for their meal to cook. They wait for the involuntary tributes of sea-boys’ sinewy limbs.

  ‘But when I opened my mouth to order the plat du jour, I found my grammar changed in my mouth. No longer active; passive.

  ‘He has tampered with my tongue. He has bridled it.

  ‘I always eschewed the Procrustean bed of circumstance until he pegged me out on it.’

  (Lafleur was seized with a fit of coughing but it only lasted a few moments.)

  ‘If I am indeed the Black Prometheus, now I must ask for other guests to dine. Come, every eagle in the world, to this most sumptuous repast, my liver.’

  (His chains clanged as he tried to throw himself backwards in an attitude of absolute abandonment but he did not have enough room for such exercises. His moaning again intensified to a scream and then diminished to a moan again.)

  ‘They have eaten me down to an immobile core. I, who was all movement. My I is weaker than its shadow used to be. I is my shadow. I am gripped by the convulsive panic of a mapless traveller in a virgin void. Now I must explore the other side of my moon, my dark region of enslavement.

  ‘I was the master of fire and now I am the slave of earth. Where is my old, invincible I! He stole it. He snatched it from the peg where I hung it beside the mulatto’s mattress. Now I am sure only of my slavery.

  ‘I do not know how to be a slave. Now I am an enigma to myself. I have become discontinuous.

  ‘I fear my lost shadow who lurks in every shadow. I, who perpetrated atrocities to render to the world incontrovertible proof that my glorious misanthropy overruled it, I – now I exist only as an atrocity about to be perpetrated on myself.

  ‘He let his slaves enslave me.’

  During the lengthy, wordless recitative of shuddering groans that followed, Lafleur said unexpectedly, in the voice of a scholarly connoisseur:

  ‘Not a bad imitation of Lautréamont.’

  But the Count, unheeding, sang out with delighted rapture:

  ‘I am enduring the keenest, most piercing pangs of anguish!’

  With that, he concluded his aria. The renewed silence was broken only by the sound of waves and the tread of the dancers above us, until Lafleur, with more insolence than solicitude, demanded:

  ‘Do you feel any pain?’

  The valet was undergoing some kind of sea change.

  The Count sighed.

  ‘I feel no pain. Only anguish. Unless anguish is the name of my pain. I wish I could learn to name my pain.’

  This was the first time I ever heard him, however obliquely, answer a question, though it was hard to tell whether, in his reply, he acknowledged the presence of the person who posed it or if he thought the question was a fortuitous externalization of the self-absorption which had already doubled or tripled the chains with which he was bound, until he could no longer breathe without our hearing them rattle. But, to my astonishment, Lafleur coughed again to clear his throat and, with a touch of pedantry, in a curiously gruff, affected voice, gave the following exposition.

  ‘Master and slave exist in the necessary tension of a twinned actuality, which is transmuted only by the process of becoming. A sage of Ancient China, the learned Chuang Tzu, dreamed he was a butterfly. When he woke up, he was hard put to it to tell whether a man had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly was still dreaming he was a man. If you looked at your situation objectively for a moment, my dear Count, you might find that the principal cause of your present discomfort is a version of Chuang Tzu’s dilemma. You could effectively evolve a persona from your predicament, if you tried.’

  But the Count was incapable of the humility of objectivity and took only a few hints to further his soliloquy from Lafleur.

  ‘Am I the slave of my aspirations or am I their master? All I know for certain is, I aspired to a continuous sublimity and my aspirations accentuate the abyss into which I have fallen. In the depths of this abyss, I find the black pimp.’

  But Lafleur continued to expand his theme.

  ‘You were a man in a cage with a monster. And you did not know if the monster was in your dream or you were the dream of the monster.’

  The Count clanged his chains with dreadful fury.

  ‘No! No! No!’

  But this triadic reiteration was addressed to the shadows, not to Lafleur, who commented with some asperity:

  ‘Now you believe yourself to be the dream of the black pimp, I suppose. That is the reverse of the truth.’

  But the Count did not hear him.

  ‘I toppled off my pyrotechnic tiger and, as I plunge downwards, endlessly as Lucifer, I ask myself: “What is the most miraculous event in the world?” And I answer myself: “I am going to fall into my own arms. They stretch out to me from the bottom of the pit.”

  ‘I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.’

  Lafleur gasped at that and so did I for I felt myself instantly negated. To my horror, I discovered I immediately grew thinner and less solid. I felt – how can I describe it? – that the darkness which surrounded us was creeping in at every pore to obliterate me. I saw the white glimmer of Lafleur’s face and held out my hands to him imploringly, beseeching him to go with me together into the oblivion to which the Count had consigned us, so that I should have some company there, in that cold night of non-being. But, before my senses failed me, there was a sudden, dreadful clamour on deck.

  The accordion sputtered a final, distracted, terrified chord. There were screams, thuds and an awful wailing, suddenly cut short, that the pig must have made when the pirates cut its throat, while a hundred tongues announced that chaos was come. Abruptly I fell out of the magic circle of the Count’s self-absorption; my dissolution was cut short. The end of our imprisonment had come. The ship had been attacked by pirates.

  They were swart, thick-set, yellowish men of low stature, equipped with immense swords and massive moustaches. They spoke a clicking, barking, impersonal language and never smiled though, when they decapitated the crew in a lengthy ritual by the light of flares on the deck, they laughed to see the heads roll and bounce. Once they knew we were murderers, they treated us with respect, cut off our chains with swift blows of their heavy swords, which were of incredible sharpness, and let us up on deck to watch the débâcle.

  No one was spared except ourselves. After all their heads were off, the torsos went into the sea, while the pirates set about improvising small fires to cure the heads, which they proposed to keep as souvenirs. The Count visibly grew fatter at the smell of blood. He watched the ghastly ballet of the execution with the relish of a customer at a cabaret. When he flung off his cloak and the pirates saw he still wore the uniform of the House of Anonymity in all its arrogant exoticism, they gasped with admiration and bowed deeply to him in a display of servility. Another reversal had re-established his continuity. He was in the ascendance again.

  But Lafleur lost all the crispness he had displayed in the cabin. He became wary and uneasy and stayed close beside me. Later, I learned he was very much afraid and almost about to reveal himself so that we might not die without knowing one another again, for the pirates were the mercenaries of Death itself.

  They sailed these angry waters, far from the land that spawned them, in a black ship with eyes painted on the bows and the stern fashioned into the shape of the tail of a black fish. The triangular sails were black and they flew a black flag. They were some mixed tribe of Kurds, Mongols or Malays but their saturnine visages hinted at an infernal origin and they worshipped a sword.

  As soon as the crew was dead, they set about stripping the cargo vessel and transferring its contents to their own boat. When they found the casks of rum in the f
orecastle, they greeted them with obscure grunts of glee but they did not broach them immediately. Instead they piled them as a votive offering around the altar of the sword they kept on the poop of the black ship. Now Lafleur and I clung to the Count like scared children for the pirates offered him instinctive reverence. When they saw our wrists were chafed from the manacles, they wrapped rags soaked in oil and spices round them and gave us for nothing a far more spacious cabin than the one the Count had hired – a wide room – with straw mats on the floor, mattresses for sleeping and a tasteful water-colour of a black cockerel, a little sea-stained, hanging on the wall. They brought us satisfying and delicious meals of rice, curried fish and pickles. The ship was frail and lightly built. I felt far closer to the sea than I had done before and hence far nearer to death, for the slightest breeze could tip it over and fling us and our hosts into the sea. But they were the most expert sailors.

  During his adventures in the East, the Count had picked up a smattering of many tongues and found some words and phrases he could share with the pirate leader, so he spent most of his time with this brooding, diminutive killer whose face was as unyieldingly severe as the object he worshipped, intent on learning some of their art of swordsmanship. He also learned our destination. We would cross the Atlantic in their mournful cockleshell, boarding whatever craft we passed, round the Cape of Good Hope, cross the Indian Ocean and any other ocean that lay in our path and eventually drop anchor in an island off the coast of China where they kept their booty, their temples, their forges and their womenfolk. A long, weary journey full of dangers lay before us and a landfall I was sure we should find replete with horrors. Now we were free, I was far more frightened than I had been in chains.

  The shrine on the deck consisted of a sword laid between two ebony rests. From a pole above it hung a number of garlands of heads, all smoked a dusky, tan colour and shrunk to the size of heads of monkeys by the process of curing. Every morning, after prayers, the pirate leader removed the black loincloth which was his only garb and bent over on the poop in front of the altar while each of his men filed past him in devout silence, kissed his exposed arse and emitted a sharp bark of adulation while slapping his buttocks briefly with the flat of their blades. Their fidelity to their lord was so great one could have thought each pirate was only an aspect of the leader, so that the many was the one. They were indistinguishable from one another. They were like those strings of paper figures, hand in identical hand, that children cut out of sheets of paper. After this display or refreshment of fidelity, they practised with their swords.

  These were heavy, double-bladed shafts of steel half the height of the pirates themselves, with handles constructed in such a way they had to be grasped with both hands. Though their use required great skill, it needed no finesse for the most telling stroke was a murderous, chopping blow that easily split a man in half. It was impossible to fence with such a sword. It was equally impossible to defend oneself except by attacking first. They were weapons which denied forethought, impulses of destruction made of steel. And the pirates themselves, so slight, so silent, so cruel, so two-dimensional, seemed to have subsumed their beings to their swords, as if the weapons were their souls or as if they had made a pact with their swords to express their spirit for them, for the flash of the sword seemed by far a more expressive language than the staccato monosyllables that came so grudgingly to their lips. Their exercises lasted for six hours a day. They transformed the decks into an arcade of flashing light, for the blades left gleaming tracks behind them that lingered in the air for a long time. After they had finished, they polished their swords for another hour and, as the sun went down, joined together to sing a tuneless hymn which might have been a requiem for the day they had killed with their swords. After that came a night of perfect silence.

  The pirates fed us and left us alone, for which I was heartily thankful. The ship was a black sea-bird, a marine raven. It skimmed over rather than cut through the waves and though there was only this thinnest of matchwood skins between us all and death, the sheer virtuosity of their seamanship maintained us in a position something like that of a ship navigated along a tightrope. Their seamanship was as amazing as their swordsmanship and, from the risks they took, seemed also to imply an intimate complicity with death. Lafleur and I, alone in our cabin, spent the days in quiet and foreboding. I discovered his hooded, luminous eyes watched me all the time with affection, even devotion, and I began to feel I had known him all my life and he was my only friend; but you could not have said this new warmth blossomed for now he took on an almost Trappist speechlessness and scarcely said more than ‘Good morning’ or ‘Good evening’ to me. I began to feel I would soon lose the use of my tongue. I counted the days by scratching a line with my fingernail on our cabin wall. On the twelfth monotonous day, it was the full moon and when they staved in the covers of the rum barrels, I realized they meant to release their pent-up inhibited passions in a debauch.

  They set about the initial processes of becoming drunk with the same glum diligence that characterized all their actions. It was a night of sweltering, ominous calm. A gibbous moon fired the phosphorescence in the waters so that the black ship rocked on a bed of cold, scintillating flame and they wreathed the sails so that the ship could look after itself for the rest of the night and most of the next day, if need be, for every single one proposed to drink himself to complete insensibility. Then they arranged themselves in ranks on the deck, cross-legged on round straw mats, as was their custom, facing the poop where their leader sat facing them under the shrine with his guest, the Count, beside him and the cask of rum before him. Each man held his cannikin ready and the leader, after barking a grace before drink, scooped out a ladleful of rum from the cask into the Count’s cannikin and then helped himself. The pirates went up one by one for their shares. The outlines were as distinct as those of Indonesian shadow puppets. They each wore a black loincloth and each carried at his side a sword in its scabbard. They twisted black sweatbands round their heads and none of them was taller than four and three-quarter feet, death’s weird hobgoblins. As he took hold of his spilling portion, each pirate took off his sword and put it down on a growing pile beside the leader, either in a gesture of trust or as a hygienic precaution intended to forestall the ravages they might wreak with their weapons when they had drunk enough.

  As the crew passed up its cans for its rations, Lafleur, gazing beside me through the window, softly tugged my sleeve.

  ‘Look!’ he said. ‘There is land against the sky.’

  Across the undulating plateau of bright water, far, far away, the shapes of a tropical forest flung up their fringed arms against the white sky. We had already travelled many hundreds of miles to the south; the distant landscape was as unfamiliar to me as that of another planet and yet it was land and the sight of it cheered my heart, although I would be denied the comfort of it.

  ‘The currents around here are deceitful and the tornadoes come swiftly, unheralded and treacherous,’ said Lafleur. ‘They have chosen a foolish time for a drinking bout.’

  ‘The demands of ritual are always stronger than those of reason,’ I replied. ‘When the full moon comes, they must get drunk even in the teeth of a hurricane.’

  ‘I wish they did not worship steel,’ he said.‘Steel is so inflexible.’

  It was delightful to talk to somebody again and to feel his goodwill beside me, although again his disguise was far too cunning and complete for me to penetrate.

  ‘Well, we can’t persuade the hurricane to smash the ship and let us live through it,’ I said.

  ‘No, indeed,’ said Lafleur. ‘But the hurricane is governed only by chance and chance at least is neutral. One can rely on the neutrality of chance. And when I look at the sky, I think I see a storm.’

  I, too, looked at the sky but saw only moonlight and the drifting banks of cloud. But as the pirates lined up for their second round, they were already grunting with savage mirth and poking one another, for they had only the m
ost primitive idea of fun. Their behaviour moved between only the two poles of melodrama and farce. As soon as they took off their frivolous armour, laid by their swords and had a drop or two of rum inside them, they frolicked with the mindlessness but not the innocence of infants. Even from our cabin, I could see the Count was growing disillusioned with them. He had admired their deathward turning darkness yet, after a third round, they stripped off their loincloths and, one and all, embarked on a farting contest. They made the radiant welkin ring with a battery of broken wind. Exposing to the moon the twin hemispheres of their lemon-coloured hinder cheeks, each banged away as loudly as he was able, amid a great deal of unharmonious laughter, and soon they began to set light to the gases they expelled with matches, so a blue flame hovered briefly above every backside.

  ‘The clouds are piling up,’ said Lafleur breathlessly and, indeed, the sky was growing sullen so that now the moonlight fell with a baleful glare the convives were too drunk to see.

  They fell to wrestling and horseplay, tripping one another over as they passed on an endless chain to receive the apparently inexhaustible rum and their leader, who took two or three drinks for each one the men received, often missed their cannikins altogether and upset the ladle on his creature’s head. This convulsed them with laughter. Someone untied the trophies from the shrine and they began to play a stumbling game of football with them. The Count sat quite still above them, brooding above these Breughel-like antics, his face set in lines of aristocratic distaste.

  ‘The moon has put on a halo,’ said Lafleur excitedly.

  When I looked up, I saw the angry moon was surrounded with a sulphurous aura and from its white mouth now belched vile, hot gusts. The pirates, however, were beyond knowing or caring. Some, as if felled, tumbled down where they stood and snored immediately. Others first puked weakly and staggered before they slumped to the deck. But most simply sank down and slept the deep sleep of the newly purified. The cries, laughter and bursts of drunken song slowly faded away. Though he had absorbed most, the leader was the last to go. He slithered slowly from an upright position, clasped the rum-tub to break his fall and then he and the tub together rolled along the poop for a while and lay still in a pool of spilled liquor. The Count rose up and seized the holy sword from its shrine with a gesture that implied their god was too good for them. He was as tall as a stork and as wild as the spirit of the storm, which now broke upon us in a sudden squall. Lightning danced along the blade and the rain struck the oblivious revellers with tropic fury while the Count hissed: ‘Scum!’ and spat upon the pirate leader. Stepping through the bodies and the puddles of vomit and excrement with fastidious distaste, he went to the stern of the ship and inexorably directed us into the eye of the whirlwind.