5 The Erotic Traveller

At first I thought the landslide must have been the Doctor’s work, but no logic of any kind, no matter how circuitous, could have justified that disaster. He could have gained no tactical advantages by destroying that forgotten place. Besides, his set of samples had perished completely and the peep-show was the greatest single weapon in his armoury; he would never have destroyed it. So the landslide could only be a simple assertion of the dominance of nature herself who, in the service only of the meaningless, reintegrated the city with chaos and then, her business done, casually abandoned it. It was an event of too massive arbitrariness for me to comprehend but, as the rain-washed light fell more and more wistfully on the gigantic tip of sandstone that killed my bearded lady, my reptilian friend, my shooting star and my blind philosopher, I became most deeply aware of mortality. Even the acrobats of desire could not put themselves together again after this dissolution. No phantom dared float above the desolation, though the water roared with as violent a display of energy as I have ever seen. A stranger would never have guessed that, at this same hour, the previous evening, the peak had been crowned with prim streets full of freaks and puritans. Light died on the rocks. I turned my back on a whole sub-universe that had been wiped out as if with a huge eraser and on the corpse of yet another of my selves, that of the peep-show proprietor’s nephew. I stumbled away over the rough fields, vanquished again, now beyond tears.

I was in altogether unknown country. After a while, I found a rough farmstead built of great blocks of windowless sandstone but they set a pack of lean, snarling dogs on me so I could not even beg a crust of bread there. Then a fat, white moon rose and I wandered down a rugged pathway with only my bleached shadow for company, two pale ghosts against a backdrop of mountains as sharply pointed and unnatural looking as those outlined by the brusque crayon of a child. I thought that if I wandered far enough, I would certainly reach Hoffman’s castle. I was sure I only had to put one foot before the other, indefatigably in the wrong direction, as the old man had told me, and my instinct would guide me there, although I did not know what I would do when I arrived except to look for Albertina. So I lurched on drearily, until I came to a defile through which ran a narrow road.

At the roadside grew a withered tree and a night-bird perched on one bare branch emitting a hoarse, rasping rattle, the antithesis of song. I looked along the road in both directions and all at once hope deserted me entirely for I did not know which was north and which was south. Suddenly I grew very, very weary. I heard, from far away, the shriek of a mountain lion and wondered indifferently if I might not be eaten during the night. The notion did not affect me one way or the other. I sat down under the tree and drew my hood up over my head for the high, thin air sang bitterly in my ears and made my temples throb. I watched the moon move across the white, cloudless sky and saw many unfamiliar stars. I sank into a mindless reverie. I was altogether drained of thought.

Presently I heard the clatter of wheels and hoofbeats echoing among the rocks. After some time, a light carriage, a trap of somewhat eighteenth-century design, appeared upon the road and I saw two persons shared the narrow seat, a tall, black-clad figure with a startling air of authority and a slender boy who held the reins. The hooves of the black horses struck sparks from the flinty track. The wheels revolved more slowly. The travellers halted.

‘If you are an Arabian, why do you not sleep?’ demanded the older man in the standard speech, which he spoke fluently, though with a slight foreign accent and a very formal intonation.

‘I fear my dreams,’ I replied and, looking up, met eyes as ghastly as burned-out coals set in a face so thinly fleshed the bones pushed sharply against the skin.

‘Then ride with us,’ he invited. I was willing to go anywhere so I climbed over the wheel into the space they made for me and we drove on through the moonlight in silence. My host’s profile was as craggy and arrogant as those of the mountains. He was in his late forties or early fifties. His face was ravaged with pride and bitterness. He wore a black cloak with many layers of capes on the shoulders and a top-hat from which trailers of black crepe depended at the back. He was ready for any funeral and he carried a cane tipped with a silver ball that looked as if it could kill. His diabolical elegance could not have existed without his terrible emaciation; he wore his dandyism in his very bones, as if it was a colour that had seeped out of his essential skeleton to dye his clothes, and he never made a single movement that was not a gaunt but riveting work of art.

I discovered this road must be the low road to the devastated city for soon it found the river, which had so entirely encroached on it I thought we could go no further. The frightened horses bucked and whickered but the driver whipped and cursed them so we went on, though the water swirled around their hocks. When I realized I would see the graveyard of the city again, I moaned involuntarily.

‘Music!’ muttered the older man. ‘Music!’

But I could not tell whether he meant the sound of my pain or that of the gushing swirl of the waters, which rang out like a carillon. When this road also vanished under the surface of the water, the driver urged the horses into the river itself. The carriages floated buoyantly and the horses began to swim. So we went down the river and drove on the moonlit flood over the very heart of the ruins, which were rapidly sinking under the tempestuous waves.

The driver exclaimed: ‘Oh! What an appalling tragedy!’

But my host cuffed him sharply and snapped:

‘Lafleur, do I have to warn you again against softness of heart? Do as I do; salute nature when she offers us another coup de théâtre!’

Then he took a flask from his pocket and fed me brandy.

‘Did you witness it? Did many die?’

‘The whole population of the town and also the members of a travelling fair.’

He sighed with gratification.

‘How I should have liked to have seen it! And gloried in the Wagnerian clamour of it all… the shrieks, the crash of rending stone. And little children dashed to smithereens by bounding boulders! What a spectacle!

‘You must know that I am a connoisseur of catastrophe, young man. I witnessed the eruption of Vesuvius when thousands were coffined alive in molten lava. I saw eyes burst and fat run out of roast crackling in Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Dresden. I dabbled my fingers in the blood beneath the guillotine during the Terror. I am a demon for a cataclysm.’

He flung down this speech as if it were a gauntlet but I was far too awestruck by his misanthropy to pick it up. At last we saw signs of a road again on the bank and soon the horses were once more galloping on dry land, by the light of too much indifferent moon.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked. He did not so much reply to my question as speak out of the depths of some unknowable reverie of his own.

‘The journey alone is real, not the landfall. I have no compass to guide me. I set my course by the fitfulness of fortune and perceive my random signposts only by the inextinguishable flame of my lusts.’

That silenced me. The wheels of the carriage wound the road on to an invisible spool and I began to feel the effect of a strange heaviness exerted on me, a perverse, negative fascination exercised by the gaunt aristocrat who sat beside me, though a shudder went through me when I saw his curiously pointed teeth for they were exactly the fangs with which tradition credits vampires. All the same, he drew me. His quality of being was more dense than that of any man I have ever met – always excepting the Minister, of course. Yet, apart from his mind, which was a bruising heavy-weight, I think what made him so attractive to me was his irony, which withered every word before he spoke it. Everything about him was excessive, yet he tempered his vulgarity – for he was excessively vulgar in every respect – with a black, tragic humour of which he was only occasionally conscious himself.

He was particularly extraordinary in this: he had a passionate conviction he was the only significant personage in the world. He was the emperor of inverted megalomaniacs but he had subjected his personality to a most rigorous discipline of stylization so that, when he struck postures as lurid as those of a bad actor, no matter how ludicrous they were, still they impelled admiration because of the abstract intensity of their unnaturalism. He had scarcely an element of realism and yet he was quite real. He could say nothing that was not grandiose. He claimed he lived only to negate the world.

‘It is not in the least unusual to assert that he who negates a proposition at the same time secretly affirms it – or, at least, affirms something. But, for myself, I deny to the last shred of my altogether memorable being that my magnificent denial means more than a simple “no”. Sometimes my meagre and derisive lips seem to me to have been formed by nature only to spit out the word “no”, as if it were the ultimate blasphemy. I should like to speak an ultimate blasphemy and then bask in the security of eternal damnation but, since there is no God, well, there is no damnation, either, unfortunately. And hence, alas, no final negation. I am the hideous antithesis in person and I swear to anyone who wants the word of a hereditary count of Lithuania for it that I am not in the least secretly benignly pregnant with any affirmation of any kind whatsoever.’

He paused to caress his valet, who, with the submissiveness of the born victim, turned to him a face as livid as putrefaction. After my first shock of horror, I saw this was not a real face but one quite covered up with white bandages. This pliant valet was almost extinguished by subservience. His very walk was a kind of ambulant cringe. He abased himself obsequiously at all times. He was only a tool of the Count’s will.

‘Is there nothing in the world you do not to some degree condemn?’ I asked the Count.

He was silent for a long time. I thought he had not heard me and repeated my question; I had not yet grown used to the utterly self-centred nature of his discourse. He only answered questions when he thought that he had posed them to himself. But when he eventually spoke, he did so without his customary disdain.

‘The death-defying double somersault of love.’

The valet made some kind of repressed exclamation at that, probably applause, and the Count sombrely rested his chin on the top of his cane, fixing his eyes only on the road before us. When I spoke a little of the war, I met such a blank wall of unresponsiveness I realized the Count knew nothing at all about it and the journey continued in the silence of the morgue, until, as we were descending to the plain, the Count spoke again.

‘I ride the whirlwind of my desires and I would give this whirlwind, which has driven me to all the four rounded corners of the globe, the emblematic form of a tiger, the most ferocious of beasts, whose pelt yet bears the marks of a flagellation which must have taken place before the dawn of time.’

It was impossible to converse with him for he had no interest in anyone but himself and he offered his companion only a series of monologues of varying lengths, which often apparently contradicted themselves but always, in a spiral-line fashion, remained true to his infernal egoism. I never heard another man use the word ‘I’, so often. But I sensed an exemplary quality in his desperate self-absorption. I had not met anyone who lived with such iron determination since I left the Minister. He reminded me of the Minister.

‘Yet I am always haunted by a pain I cannot feel. Isolated in my invulnerability, yet I am nostalgic for the homely sensation of pain…’

A bloody froth blew back in our faces from the mouths of the straining horses and yet we galloped on without sparing them until we reached a strange place, one of those flamboyant chapels built by the Jesuits in the fallacious expectation of mass conversions among the Indians and long since abandoned. The moon was dying but still fitfully illuminated the crumbling façade and the bushes which grew in the roofless interior, where a startled frog splashed out of the pool of rainwater in the font when we entered with the picnic basket, for the Count wanted to eat breakfast. As if from habit, he pissed on the altar while the valet set out the meal; the Count was always iconoclast, even when the icons were already cast down.

Out of the basket came a feast such as I had not eaten since that memorable luncheon with the Minister and Albertina. There was a can of truffled goose liver paté; glasses of game in aspic; a flock of cold roast pheasant; imported cheese whose savourous reek stung the nostrils; a side of smoked salmon from which the valet shaved curling strips; an exotic gravel of various caviars; an insulated box of salad and another filled with grapes and peaches, while an ice-chest contained a dozen bottles of Veuve Clicquot. There was china and sparkling glassware of the finest quality. The cutlery was of solid silver. The boy laid out an incomparable fête champêtre and we all fell to with a will. The Count ate very heartily; indeed, he ate with a blind voracity that demolished the spread so speedily the valet and I were hard put to it to seize enough to satisfy ourselves, although there was so much. When nothing was left but gnawed bones, dirty plates, peach stones, and empty bottles, the Count sighed, belched and grasped the valet. His mute’s hat tumbled to the ground.

‘Watch me! Watch me!’ he cried as though, in order to appreciate the effect of his own actions, he had to know that he was seen. But it was far too dark in the ruined church to see anything. I heard the grunts and whimpers of the valet and the amazing roars which accompanied the Count’s lengthy progress towards orgasm. The vault of heaven above us darkened and all the time frightful cries and atrocious blasphemies issued from the Count’s throat. He whinnied like a stallion; he cursed the womb that bore him; and finally the orgasm struck him like an epilepsy. Ecstasy seemed to annihilate the libertine and there was a silence broken only by the pathetic whimpering of the valet until, in the velvet and luminous darkness, the Count spoke, in a voice drained of all vigour.

‘I have devoted my life to the humiliation and exaltation of the flesh. I am an artist; my material is the flesh; my medium is destruction; and my inspiration is nature.’

Now the valet moved painfully about, gathering together the dishes, and it grew light enough to make out the Count’s shape as he lolled against the desecrated altar, his head bare. His hair, a coarse and uniform grey, hung down to his shoulders.

‘I am impregnable because I always exist in a state of dreadful tension. My crises render me utterly bestial and in that state I am infinitely superior to man, as the tiger, who preys on man if he has any sense, is superior. My anguish is the price of my exaltation.’

I began to wonder if the Count was one of the Doctor’s agents and then I thought, no! This man might be the Doctor himself, under an assumed identity! The suspicion made me quiver.

I can hardly describe to you the man’s appalling, cerebral lucidity. He was like a corpse animated only by a demonic intellectual will. When he had rested a little, we climbed back into the carriage and rolled off across the green, spacious countryside, under a vertiginous arc of sky which began to clear and sparkle. The mountains dwindled behind us. The dew glittered in the budding hedgerows. A lark rose, singing. It was a beautiful morning in early spring.

‘The universe itself is not a sufficiently capacious stage on which to mount the grand opera of my passions. From the cradle, I have been a blasphemous libertine, a blood-thirsty debauchee. I travel the world only to discover hitherto unknown methods of treating flesh. When I first left my native Lithuania, I went at once to China where I apprenticed myself to the Imperial executioner and learned by heart a twelve-tone scale of tortures as picturesque as they are vile. When my studies were complete, I tied my tutor to the trunk of a blossoming apricot tree so the rosy petals showered down upon his increasing mutilations as, with incredible delicacy and a very sharp knife, I carved out little oysters of his living flesh – the torture known as the “slicing”, the dreaded ling ch’ih. What a terrible sight he was to behold! The apricot tree wept tears of perfumed flowers over him; that was Nature’s pity, decorative but unhelpful.

‘Subsequently I visited the rest of Asia, where, among other infamies too numerous to mention, I amputated the scarcely perceptible breasts of all the occupants of a geisha house in the exquisitely bell-haunted city of Kyoto. Then I left my crest stamped in wax plugs in all the capacious anuses of the royal eunuchs of the court of Siam. Subsequently I visited Europe where, as a reward for my villainies, I was condemned to burn at the stake in Spain, to hang by the neck in England and to break upon the wheel in a singularly inhospitable France, where, sentenced to death in absentia by the judiciary of Provence, my body was executed in effigy in the town square of Aix.

‘I fled to North America, where I knew my barbarities would pass unnoticed, and in Quebec I hired my valet, Lafleur, whose interesting nose has quite caved in under the weight of a hereditary syphilis. Young as he is, his face has already been totally obliterated by the ghastly residue of past pleasures he never tasted personally. Together we travelled the various states. I gave certain evidence in the trials at Salem, Mass., which condemned eighteen perfectly innocent persons to death by pressing. I instigated a rebellion among the slaves on a plantation in Alabama which led to bloody and wholesale retribution; they were all tied to bales of cotton and ignited by ululating Klansmen. Then, in a perfumed bordello in New Orleans, I strangled with my legs a mulatto whore just as she coaxed the incense from my member with a mouth the shape, colour and texture of an overripe plum.

‘But after that, I became the object of the vengeance of her enraged pimp, a black of more than superhuman inhumanity, in whom I sense a twin. And that is why I must not let him catch up with me for I know too well what he would do to me if he did so. So Lafleur and I drove over the neck of the continent, through deserts that delighted me since they were far too atrociously barren to sustain life, through jungles altogether envenomed with hatred for the brown maggots of men who dare to try to live in that green, festering meat; and then across those rearing mountains that now lie behind us than which, even in the steppes of Central Asia, I have seen nothing more arid or inimical. Refreshed, we now travel towards the coast for I feel stirring within me a strange desire to return to the peaks where I was born and perhaps I shall try to die there. Unless, that is, the vengeful pimp ensnares me first. Which is a horror beyond thought.’

When noon came, he bought me beer and bread and cheese at an inn. He had not asked a single question of me or even seemed to ask himself what this stranger was doing in his company but I realized he regarded me as part of his entourage, now. I made a few tentative guesses as to what my role might be. Was I his observer, whose eyes, as they watched him, verified his actions? Did his narcissism demand a constant witness? Or had he other plans for me – would I, perhaps, figure among his amusements? The masked, unspeaking valet and I formed his little world. If one was his hireling victim, for what purpose was the other hired? But I wondered if his servant had more autonomy than he thought. Something in the texture of the valet’s presence hinted he was self-consciously the slave. Occasionally, when he whimpered, he seemed altogether too emphatically degraded. But perhaps he was not yet altogether inured to his position. What would I myself become when I, too, knew what my position was?

But though the Count had given me a very detailed autobiography, I still suspected he might really be the Doctor and so I knew I must travel with him, no matter what happened. And then again, he was so remarkable! He seemed to cast a shadow as solid as lead. We drove on through the afternoon until we came to a lonely crossroads where suddenly the Count announced:

‘I know it, I know it! We must turn right!’

The signpost which pointed north bore only, in faded blue paint, the legend: THIS WAY TO THE HOUSE OF ANONYMITY and a lonely path overgrown with grass and primroses stretched far away across the faintly burgeoning prairies. There was no sign of any building along its course. The sun had gone in and the sky was now a leaden grey. Because everywhere was so flat, this sky was swollen and inflated; it occupied so much more space in the world than the earth beneath it that the sky seemed to smother us under a transparent pillow. The day had not fulfilled the bright promise of the morning; the weather was full of foreboding. But Lafleur turned the horses to the north, though now they were so overdone they ran with sweat and rolled their eyes until the whites showed. The Count was very excited. He cried out and muttered to himself as we took the deserted track and now clouds began to pile heavily in the sky and a few drops of heavy rain spattered on our faces.

‘Faster! Faster!’

The horses strained their coal-black loins and neighed beneath Lafleur’s whip. Then, at the side of the road, we saw a scarecrow and although there was nothing in the bare field where it stood for it to protect, it carried a bow and arrow. There was no head inside the hat it wore, only a human skull, and the wind, laden with rain, flapped its ragged jacket miserably around its broomstick bones. Round its neck hung a tattered paper sign which read: I AM PERFECTLY EMPTY. I HAVE FORGOTTEN MY NAME. I AM PERFECT BUT YOU ARE ON THE RIGHT ROAD. CONTINUE.

The Count laughed aloud and we drove on until we came to a door set in a white wall. Here, the road stopped short. Lafleur climbed down and rapped upon the door. A grille opened and we saw a pair of eyes.

‘Who is it?’ asked a woman’s voice.

‘A hereditary count of Lithuania,’ Lafleur introduced his master.

‘Show us the colour of your money,’ said the voice and the Count gave Lafleur a thick roll of banknotes to show. The mere sight of it satisfied her; she nodded approvingly and said: ‘Your bill will be presented upon departure, sir.’

After some more minutes’ waiting, while the dismal rain sluiced down, the door opened inward with a heavy thunder of bars and chains and we drove into the courtyard. The door banged to behind us and the porteress, a fat woman with a puffed, pale face and haggard lips, came to help us down from the carriage. She wore a black dress and a white apron. She did not know how to smile. But she did not wear a mask. None of the servants were masked; their roles made them sufficiently anonymous.

The Count sharply dismissed his valet, who drove the carriage round to the stable. As I glanced after Lafleur, I saw, once he left his master, he sprang up again like a branch which has been tied back and is now released. His slight figure took on a sudden, sprightly decisiveness; then he was gone. So the Count and I stood in front of the House of Anonymity, whose door was always open to anyone with a fat enough wallet.

It was a massive, sprawling edifice in the Gothic style of the late nineteenth century, that poked innumerable turrets like so many upward groping tentacles towards the dull, cloudy sky and was all built in louring, red brick. Every window I could see was tightly shuttered. The porteress rang peremptorily for a maid and a woman who might have been her sister appeared and led us into the house, through a series of dark, gloomy corridors where our footsteps echoed on flags until we came to more formal, carpeted quarters and ascended a winding stair to a little dressing-room done up in moist red velvet, like the interior of a womb. She invited us to undress and while we did so, she took from a cupboard two pairs of black tights made in such a way that, once we put them on, our genitals remained exposed in their entirety, testicles and all. Then she offered us short waistcoats of a soft, suède-like substance which she assured us was the tanned skin of a young negro virgin. The Count began to murmur softly with anticipation and already his prick, which was of monstrous size, stood as resolutely aloft as an illustration of satyriasis in a medical dictionary. Then the maid handed us hood-like masks which went right over our heads, concealing them, and were attached by buttons to buttonholes in the collars of our waistcoats, so that our heads were changed into featureless, elongated, pinkish, rounded towers. The only indentations on these convex surfaces of pink cardboard were two slits, to look through. These masks or hoods completed our costumes, which were unaesthetic, priapic and totally obliterated our faces and our self-respect; the garb grossly emphasized our manhoods while utterly denying our humanity. And the costumes were of no time or place. Now we were ready. With our expressions hidden and the most undifferentiated parts of our anatomies exposed, she led us down another stair to a reception room where she bowed, smiled formally and opened the door for us.

‘Welcome to the Bestial Room,’ she said.

With that, she left us.

The insides of the windows had all been painted black, so even if you opened the black velvet curtains, nothing disturbed the artificial night inside them. The walls were covered with a figured brocade of such a slumbrous purple the Count murmured: ‘It is the very colour of the blood in a love suicide.’ Everywhere, clinging to the curtains, perched on the heavy gold frames of innumerable immense mirrors or crouched on the swags of a marble fireplace, were dozens of chattering monkeys smartly dressed like bellboys in bum-freezer jackets of braid-trimmed crimson plush. These monkeys were living candelabra; they clutched black candles in their paws, wedged in the coiled kinks of their tails or stuck in sockets in the metal circlets they all wore round their heads. When the hot wax dripped on to their fur or into their eyes, they squealed pitifully.

The furniture was also alive.

They had employed a taxidermist instead of an upholsterer and sent him a pride of lions with instructions to make a sofa out of each pair. At both ends of the sofas, flamboyantly gothic arm-rests, were the gigantically maned heads of these lions. Their rheumy, golden eyes seeped gum and their cavernous, red mouths hung sleepily ajar, gaping wider, now and then, in a sleepy yawn or to let out a low, rumbling growl. The serviceable armchairs were brown bears who squatted on their haunches with the melancholy of all the Russias in their liquid eyes. When a girl sat on his shaggy lap, the bear grunted, leaned back and spread her legs out wide apart with his blunt forepaws. The occasional tables ran about, yelping obsequiously; they were toadying hyenas and on their brindled backs were strapped silver trays containing glasses, decanters, bowls of salted nuts and dishes of stuffed olives. Other hyenas crouched in corners, their endless tongues lolling like sopping lengths of red flannel, balancing between their pricked ears a pot of carnivorous flowers or else jars of Japanese porcelain containing tasteful arrangements of bodiless hands. The dark, polished floorboards were scattered with vivid pelts of jaguars that stirred and grumbled underfoot; their hot breaths blasted the ankle as you stepped over them. In all the room, only the prostitutes, the wax mannequins of love, hardly seemed to be alive for they stood as still as statues. But they were the only beings kept in cages.

Though the bars of these cages were exceedingly stout and enamelled a glistening black, the shapes of the cages and the whimsical elaboration of the intricate wrought ironwork itself resembled those of the cages in which singing birds were housed in Victorian drawing rooms, though each container was some seven feet high in order to accommodate its inmate, who looked more than humanly tall because each cage was mounted on an ivied marble pedestal, three feet high. The doors of the cages were secured by very large padlocks and all the keys hung from a length of ribbon around the Madame’s neck, though she, too, sat so still you could not hear them jingle. And the candlelight danced on locked-up breasts, breasts as white as immortelles, the only flowers that blossomed in this zoological garden that stank vilely of the reek and echoed hideously with the cries of the wild beasts who furnished it.

Though the mirrors reflected the hangings, sofas, chairs, tables, candlesticks and every cageful of venereal statuary, they did not give the Count and me our blank, pink faces back to us because here we had no names.

The Madame sat beside the door behind an elaborate wrought iron cash register in the fin de siècle style one finds in suburban Parisian brasseries, on which she rang up each item her customers purchased. She was still a young woman and she was quite naked but for her necklace of keys and a cache-sexe made of sequined eyes; stockings of coarse black mesh; and a mask of supple, funereal black leather like the masks worn by old-fashioned executioners. This mask covered her entire face except for the drooping peony of her mouth and the area around it. She was naked because she was human and she did not have a reflection either. Her skin had the blurred sheen of a yellow metal which has been attacked by verdigris and sweated out a scarcely bearable stench of musk.

She spoke. I am ashamed to say I did not recognize her voice, although it stirred me.

‘My house is a refuge for those who can find no equilibrium between inside and outside, between mind and body or body and soul, vice versa, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.’

A hyena sprang up, eager to curry favour, and the Madame poured us each a glass of curaçao from the battery of beverages it carried. She rang up the price on her till and, glass in hand, we went to inspect the merchandise.

‘A meridional vigour arises within me,’ confided the Count. (Was I, then, to be his confidant?)

The costume the House forced upon us may have hidden his appearance but it also transfigured him. He stalked, erect, among this garden of artificial delights with a crazy, apocalyptic grandeur. He was so magnificently, preposterously obscene that the sofas bowed their heads to see him pass and the tables all ran up to lick his hands and fawn over him. As we approached each girl, the monkeys darted up to her cage and hung in furry clusters from the bars, holding out their candles so that all her subtly spurious charms were clearly visible and she extended her arms while opening and closing her eyes with every mannerism of the siren.

There were, perhaps, a dozen girls in the cages in the reception room and, posed inside, the girls towered above us like the goddesses of some forgotten theogeny locked up because they were too holy to be touched. Each was as circumscribed as a figure in rhetoric and you could not imagine they had names, for they had been reduced by the rigorous discipline of their vocation to the undifferentiated essence of the idea of the female. This ideational femaleness took amazingly different shapes though its nature was not that of Woman; when I examined them more closely, I saw that none of them were any longer, or might never have been, woman. All, without exception, passed beyond or did not enter the realm of simple humanity. They were sinister, abominable, inverted mutations, part clockwork, part vegetable and part brute.

Their hides were streaked, blotched and marbled and some trembled on the point of reverting completely to the beast. If beasts of prey had become furnishings, some of the sexual appliances of the establishment were about to become their victims. Perhaps that was why they kept them in cages. The dazed, soft-eyed head of a giraffe swayed on two feet of dappled neck above the furred, golden shoulders of one girl and another had the striped face of a zebra and a cropped, stiff, black mane bristling down her spine. But, if some were antlered like stags, others had the branches of trees sprouting out of their bland foreheads and showed us the clusters of roses growing in their armpits when they held out their hands to us. One leafy girl was grown all over with mistletoe but, where the bark was stripped away from her ribcage, you could see how the internal wheels articulating her went round. Another girl had many faces hinged one on top of the other so that her head opened out like a book, page by page, and on each page was printed a fresh expression of allure. All the figures presented a dream-like fusion of diverse states of being, blind, speechless beings from a nocturnal forest where trees had eyes and dragons rolled about on wheels. And one girl must have come straight from the whipping parlour for her back was a ravelled palimpsest of wound upon wound – she was neither animal nor vegetable nor technological; this torn and bleeding she was the most dramatic revelation of the nature of meat that I have ever seen.

A sweating, odoriferous heat filled the salon and all their thighs were opulent but I shivered as though they breathed out gusts of iced air, though I do not think that any of them breathed. The libidinous images all bared their sexual parts with a defiant absence of provocation that was not bred of innocence, for in their primitive simplicity the dozen orifices were shockingly made manifest, the ugly, undeniable, insatiable nether mouths of archaic and shameless, anonymous Aphrodite herself, the undifferentiated partner in the blind act who has many mouths, even if not one of them ever asks for a name. And I had come with orders to worship here, I, Desiderio, the desired one, to kneel down before the twelve hairy shrines of this universal church of lust in a uniform that made of me only a totem of carnality myself.

The Count now ostentatiously and continually increased his stature by such an effort of will I thought the swollen veins of his forehead would burst. His breast heaved like thunder. He seemed to graze the ceiling with the round tip of that bland, peachy, concupiscent hood, which turned his head itself into a monumental symbol of sexuality. He took on a ponderous and ecclesiastical gait, as if it were a kind of mitre that he wore – he, the Pope of the profane, officiating at an ultimate sacrament, the self-ordained, omnipotent, consecrated man-phallus itself; and when he snatched a candle from a monkey’s paw and used it to ignite the rosy plumage of a winged girl, I knew he was about to preach us a sermon and she was to be his text.

His eyes rolled in delirious agitation, as if they might start out of the holes in his mask. Striking the pose of a man possessed, he flung back his head and there issued from his thunderous mouth the following, agonized psalm in the intervals and cadences of plain-song, while the girls silently opened and closed their arms with the helpless, automatic reaction of so many sea anemones behind their black bars, and the furniture snuffled, howled and grunted, and the angel burned so quickly, with such a smoky flame, I realized she had only been a life-like construction of papier mâché on a wicker frame.

I am the zodiacal salamander man

because flesh is a constellation of flame

and I am universal flesh

I am an oxyacetylene pen

who scrawled all over the face of the sky

in my incendiary rage

segmented constellations fleshly novas.

I am the willed annihilation of the orgiastic moment in person, ladies.

I pricked up my ears at that. Could he be, not the Doctor, but that other mystery man, Mendoza, who had written on just such a theme before he annihilated himself in a manner unknown? Could Mendoza have reconstituted himself out of infinity – perhaps by running a film of his own explosion backwards, so that he hatched out of the inward-turning egg of an implosion without a stain upon him? But the Count did not allow me to ponder this sufficiently; he surged on down a remorseless torrent of metaphor.

At that, I thought immediately of Albertina, but he turned all the imagery of desire on its head and diabolically inverted its meanings, like a warlock saying the Pater Noster backwards. He bewildered me utterly. And he swept on like the landslide that devoured the set of samples.

So I came to the conclusion he was only lamenting his own frigidity. Then his voice dropped an octave as if he were about to intone a blessing.

The paper angel flickered and went out. Her ashes crumbled into a surprisingly small heap. The Madame rang up the price of a replacement on her till.

‘Yes,’ she said in the voice of a governess congratulating a child who has recited well. ‘There is no matter more grave than pleasure.’

The Count rattled the bars of the cage of the whipped girl.

‘Give me my striped tiger woman! Flagellated past the bone, she is bleeding fire, a cannibal feast.’

The Madame obligingly unlocked the door and the Count seized the meat voraciously. As he humped it towards the door on his back, like a porter, he snapped at me:

‘Select your harlot immediately! I must have a stimulus.’

I was in a quandary. None of the metamorphosed objects before me aroused the slightest desire in me. Even though they came in all the shapes of every imaginable warped desire, they seemed to me nothing but malicious satires upon eroticism and I felt the same mixture of laughter and revulsion that the Count’s ode had inspired in me. But I was his creature and so I must do whatever he wanted. The Madame rescued me. After she rang up the Count’s purchase, she stepped from her post and clasped her yellowish hand firmly round my wrist.

‘I shall come with you myself,’ she said and her fingers tightened so authoritatively I did not have much option but to go with her. Because I had never touched her before, nobody could have expected me to know her from her touch, although her touch was thrilling. Besides, we were in the House of Anonymity and had put away ourselves when we put on our masks.

The whole house had the close humidity of a groin and the blue smoke of the incense burning everywhere in faience bowls made it smell like an embalming shop. She led us up a formal staircase with carpets of black panther under foot but now we were out of the Bestial Room, the furs were safely dead. Light came from the glowing eyes of bronze birds with outspread wings hanging from the basalt vaulting over our heads and both these and also the eyes in her loincloth winked lasciviously now and then. She walked with a free, proud, sensual grace. She smelled like a rutting leopard. Her skin was almost green.

The heavy, mahogany door of our common bedroom was guarded on either side by jasper colossi, Babylonian monsters with curved, brooding beaks and feathered arms that brushed the faces of those who went inside with a menacing voluptuous caress.

‘We call this room the Sphere of Spheres,’ she said.

She ushered us into a circular chamber filled with a shifting medley of colours from a lamp with a stained glass shade that turned in a slow circle in the middle of the ceiling. The Count carried his victim to the bed as ceremoniously as if it were a sacrificial altar but I did not bother to watch him or even to look more closely at this place of consummated desires for the Madame had turned towards me and placed her finger on her incomparable lips. I remembered that mouth and that gesture perfectly. I gasped. I think I sobbed. She plucked away my mask and kissed me lightly on the lips. I saw her eyes through the clefts of her sheath of black leather; their incalculable depths were blurred with tears.

‘I am Albertina,’ she said.

She pulled off her head covering and her black hair fell down around her well-remembered face.

I do not know why she loved me at first sight, as I loved her, even though I first saw her in a dream. Yet we pursued one another across the barriers of time and space; we dared every vicissitude of fortune for a single kiss before we were torn apart again and we saw the events of the war in which we were enlisted on opposite sides only by the light of one another’s faces.

I took her in my arms. We were exactly the same height and the arches of our bosoms met with a sonorous clang. A terrible cry from the Count’s whore did not interrupt our first embrace. The earth turned on the pivot of her mouth. The sense of seraphic immanence which had afflicted me in the city was now fulfilled. Her arms clasped my neck and her belly pressed against my nakedness as if striving to transcend the mortal flaw that divided us and so effect a total, visceral mingling, binding us forever, so that the same blood would flow within us both and our nerves would knit and our skins melt and fuse in the force of the electricity we generated between us.

We moved towards the round bed that spun round like the world on an axis in the middle of the room. Here the Count crouched slavering over the ruins of his unfortunate prostitute who was now only a bleeding moan. We glanced at them with the indifference natural to lovers and I turned back the coverlet of dark fur to lay my Albertina down on sheets that bore stains as tragic and mysterious as those on a pavement after a nude had been thrown down from a balcony. I knelt above her and kissed her cool breasts. I sucked great mouthfuls of the cold water of her breasts, as though my thirst would never be slaked. The eyes on her single garment closed one by one.

At that very moment a hail of machine-gun fire crashed through the windows, tore through the velvet curtains and ploughed into the mattress beneath us.

The Count darted to the shattered window, yelling an invitation to further violence. An inrushing gale pattered a tattoo of fragmented glass against the cardboard hood he still wore. Fresh bullets spattered into the whipped woman, who danced and opened out beneath them. Albertina lay quite still and did not move at all. She let me drag her off the bed and bundle her safe out of range of the bullets, while she lay limp as a doll and all the time she wept very bitterly.

‘They’ve come for you,’ she said. ‘I can’t do anything about it. All hell has been let loose since we lost the set of samples.’

She clung to me and cried like a child.

Then came running footsteps outside the room and a pounding at the door.

‘The police!’ cried the porteress. ‘The police are looking for two murderers! There’s two murderers in bed with you!’

Albertina pushed me away and opened the door.

‘She’ll take you out the back door,’ she said through her tears. ‘Go, now.’

‘Tears?’ said the Count, sliding towards her. ‘Whorish tears?’

He unmasked himself in order to savourously lick her face but she was crying too much to notice.

‘I won’t leave you,’ I said and took her into my arms again.

‘No!’ she said. ‘That’s quite impossible.’

I felt I was stronger than anyone in the world.

‘How can your father’s daughter possibly say anything is impossible?’

I picked her up and carried her bodily into the passage but there she began to melt like a woman of snow. As I was holding her, she grew less and less. She dissolved. Still weeping, she dissipated into the air. I saw her. I felt her. I felt her weight diminish. I saw her, first, flicker a little; then waver continuously; then grow more and more indistinct, as if she herself were gradually erasing the pattern she made upon the air. Her eyes vanished last of all and the last tears that fell from them hung for a little while on the air after she had gone, like forgotten diamanté ear-drops. Then all that was left of this fragile bequest of tears was an evanescent trace of moisture on my shoulder. In the midst of my grief and bewilderment, bullets crashed round me from within the house and I heard the cruel voices of the Determination Police and heard their voices clang and rattle like sabres.

It had suddenly grown very cold.

The lights of their own electric torches glimmered on the leather coats of the police, for all the lights had gone out though terrified monkeys, their fur ablaze, flashed past like meteors. The candles they had dropped rolled underfoot, and here and there the hangings were already on fire. The Count picked up a fallen candle and lighted whatever curtains we passed with such rapidity it seemed the fire sprang from his fingers rather than from the flame. The porteress led us this way and that, threading us like a cunning needle through narrow, unused corridors, up unexpected spiral staircases, through echoing galleries full of instruments of torture and the apparatus of fetishism. We could hear the oceanic roaring of the lions for the furniture was running loose. Once we pushed past a lumbering chair; a howling pack of tables fled away from us down a hall of dark mirrors as we ourselves ran through – just in time, for, as we pushed past the bead curtain hanging over the outer doorway, bullets shivered the mirrors back to chips of unreflecting silvered glass. Albertina must somehow have let all the prostitutes out of their cages for, freed from the petrification of their profession once they were free of bars, the prostitutes, too, were trying to escape the police, who were the sworn enemies of objects so candidly unreal. We often glimpsed a leafed or feathered shape transfixed in the beam of a torch upon a staircase; it would let out a shuddering cry before disintegrating at the impact of an authentic bullet or it would collapse in a whispering rustle of waste paper or the bullets cracked open the carapace and all the springs and wheels sprang whizzing out.

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.