4 The Acrobats of Desire

‘If you’ve seen all you want, you can save me the candle,’ he said and I blew it out so that the only light was the serrated luminous disc cast upwards on to the ceiling by a small oil stove. I knelt gratefully beside the stove for I was shivering while he, muttering, began to potter about making a meal for me. I was surprised and touched by these unhandy preparations. He opened a cardboard box, his larder, and took out half a loaf and a heel of rat-trap cheese on a tin plate; then he poured cold coffee from a bottle into a chipped enamel saucepan and set it on top of the stove to warm.

‘I had a change of orders,’ he explained. ‘Got to look after you. Got to see you get there safe and sound. She came herself and told me.’

‘She?’

‘The she of she’s. His daughter.’

‘Albertina?’

I had never spoken the name aloud before.

‘You’re smart,’ he applauded. ‘Oh, you know the nature of plus all right’.

‘I can,’ I said, ‘put two and two together.’

‘Where’ve you been since you did for poor Mary Anne?’ But he leered and grimaced as he spoke so I knew he knew I knew he knew I had not, in fact, murdered the unfortunate girl but that, for some reason, I was now forced to pretend that I had. However, I was too tired to continue with such Byzantine perplexities.

‘Hiding,’ I said briefly.

‘They thought you’d most likely try to find me sooner or later, if you were still alive, that is.’

He tested the temperature of the coffee with his thumb.

‘Seeing,’ he added with a certain smugness, ‘that I’m your only clue.’

So he gave me back my quest but I could not think about it yet. I ate his food and let him wrap a blanket round me for I had taken a violent chill and, no matter how closely I hugged the stove, my teeth would not stop chattering.

‘You mustn’t get sick, you know,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a goodish long trip before we get there.’

‘I’m to go with you, am I?’

‘Oh, yes. I’m to give you a job as my assistant and also identification: to wit, my nephew. You’ll drive my little new old truck for me and put up the tent for me and oil the machines for me and so on, for I am getting on in years and not so active as I was.’

‘How long will it take to reach there?’

‘Oh, there’ll be ample time,’ he said. ‘He’s coped wonderfully with time, hasn’t he. Worried about your city, are you?’

‘Not particularly,’ I confessed.

‘He could probably use a smart young man like you in his organization.’

He gave me a mug of hot coffee and I warmed my hands on it.

‘But I do have my own orders, you know.’

My tongue tripped on the standard speech and, as I had become aware of positive happiness among the river people for the first time in my life, now I knew at last the flavour of true misery for I would never speak their musical tongue again. The old man cocked his head inquisitively and I waited for him to ask me where I had been hiding but he was attending only to what I said, not the manner in which I said it.

‘Licensed to kill?’ he queried.

‘What is your precise relationship to Dr Hoffman?’ I parried.

He motioned me to pass him the mug and took some bitter sips before he replied. When he did so, his voice had lost something of its querulous senescence, so that I wondered to what extent he covered an authentic role in the Doctor’s play with that of an embittered old sot.

‘I am not necessarily connected with him,’ he said. ‘There are no such things as necessary connections. Necessary connections are fabulous beasts. Like the unicorn. Nevertheless, since things occasionally do come together in various mutable combinations, you might say that the Doctor and I have made a random intersection. He remembered me in my blindness. I was blind and old and had half drunk myself to death. He remembered me and he saved me. He even made me the curator of his museum.’

There was a note of quiet pride in his voice that did not suit the rotting old hut in which we sat and bed of straw on which he slept so I knew he was of more importance than he seemed and the Minister’s computers had known what they were about when they put me on his trail.

‘His museum?’ I asked tentatively.

‘The sack… behind you. Look.’

The sack was immensely heavy and contained innumerable small boxes each marked on the lid with an indented device so that the old man in his blindness could inform himself of their contents by a single touch. Each one of these boxes contained, as I expected, the models, slides and pictures which went inside the machines and were there magnified by lenses almost to life-size. A universality of figures of men, women, beasts, drawing rooms, auto-da-fés and scenes of every conceivable type was contained in these boxes, none of which was bigger than my thumb. I spilled out a mass of variegated objects on my lap, each a wonder of miniaturization and some of scarcely credible complexity.

‘The set of samples,’ he explained. He was beginning to address me as if I were a lecture theatre. As I watched them, they seemed to wriggle and writhe over my knees with the force of the life they simulated but I knew it was only a trick of the vague light from the oil stove.

‘I am proud to say he was my pupil,’ said the peep-show proprietor. ‘If I feel a little resentment against him from time to time, when my bones ache with the travelling – well, it is only to be expected. I wasn’t even his John the Baptist, you know. I queried his doctoral thesis. I mocked his friend, Mendoza. Yet he trusts me with his set of samples.’

He leaned over and plucked out a handful of figures.

‘Look at them. Do they look like toys?’

‘Yes. Like toys.’

‘They are symbolic constituents of representations of the basic constituents of the universe. If they are properly arranged, all the possible situations in the world and every possible mutation of those situations can be represented.’

‘Like the Minister’s computer bank?’

‘Not in the least,’ he snapped. ‘By the correct use of these samples, it would be possible to negate the reality of the Minister of Determination. Ironically enough, your Minister seeks the same final analysis my former pupil made long ago. But then the Doctor transcended it.’

He held out a bouquet of ferocious images of desire in my direction. They seemed almost to leap from his hand, such was their synthetic energy.

‘The symbols serve as patterns or templates from which physical objects and real events may be evolved by the process he calls “effective evolving”. I go about the world like Santa with a sack and nobody knows it is filled up with changes.’

I poured myself more coffee for I needed to keep my wits about me. After all, he had once been a rationalist even if now he were a charlatan.

‘I am very confused,’ I said. ‘Give me at least a hint of his methodology.’

‘First theory of Phenomenal Dynamics,’ he said. ‘The universe has no fixed substratum of fixed substances and its only reality lies in its phenomena.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I comprehend that.’

‘Second theory of Phenomenal Dynamics: only change is invariable.’

This sounded more like an aphorism than a hypothesis to me but I held my peace.

‘Third theory of Phenomenal Dynamics: the difference between a symbol and an object is quantitative, not qualitative.’

Then he sighed and fell silent. I saw through a rent in the canvas wall that though it was still night inside the booth, the dawn began in violet outside; and then I fell asleep.

Now I was in hiding from both the police – for my picture with a WANTED sign was posted outside the town police station – and also from the river people. I passed myself off as the peep-show proprietor’s renegade nephew. My new identity was perfect in every detail. I tailored my hair and moustache to new shapes and threw away my Indian clothes, putting on instead some dark, sober garments which came with my new identity. I guessed that in the Minister’s reckoning I was listed dead, among the casualties of the war, and that was why Dr Hoffman was taking such pains over me but all I had to do was to hide in the shadows of the booth, polish the lenses of the machines, watch my master arrange each day’s fresh, disquieting spectacles and listen to the various accounts of his former pupil’s activities that he gave me in the evenings as we sat beside the stove after our business was done for the day.

I was not competent, then, to comment on any of the information I received and I am not competent to do so now, even though I have seen the laboratories themselves, the generators and even the inscrutable doctor himself, at work among them with the awful conviction of a demiurge. But from the notes I made at the time, I extracted the following unlikely hints as to the intellectual principles underpinning the Doctor’s manifestations.

His main principles were indeed as follows: everything it is possible to imagine can also exist. A vast encylopedia of mythological references supported this initial hypothesis – shamans of Oceania who sang rude blocks of wood ship-shape without the intervention of an axe; poets of medieval Ireland whose withering odes scalded their kings’ enemies with plagues of boils; and so on and so forth. At a very early point in his studies Hoffman had moved well out of the realm of pure science and resurrected all manner of antique pseudo-sciences, alchemy, geomancy and the empirical investigation of those essences the ancient Chinese claimed created phenomena through an interplay of elemental aspects of maleness and femaleness. And then there was the notion of passion.

In the pocket of my dark suit I found a scrap of paper with the following quotation from de Sade written on it in the most exquisite, feminine handwriting; though the message was undirected and unsigned, I knew it was meant for me and that it came from Albertina.

‘My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass; they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way.’

Yet I could see no personal significance in these words and finally decided they must refer to the machinery of the peep-show itself for I had even begun to believe that the manipulation of those numinous samples might indeed restructure events since, in a poetic and circuitous fashion, they had certainly helped to organize my disastrous night at the Mayor’s house.

But I was wistfully impressed by the grandiloquence of both de Sade and the girl who quoted him to me for I knew myself to be a man without much passion, even if I was a romantic. If I once again existed only in the vague hope I would one day see Albertina herself again, I could not imagine this desire might make me incandescent enough to glimpse her whereabouts by my own glow – let alone to utilize what my instructor in hyperphysics described to me as the ‘radiant energy’ which emanated from desire to blaze a path to her. A blind old man, playing with toys in a fairground, lost in a mazy web of memories of things he had not seen… it was a case of the blind leading the blind, for he could never have been a man who burned with passion himself, either! So when he spoke of Albertina as if she were lambent flame made flesh, his words rang curiously false, although I could remember my dream of the inextinguishable skeleton and wonder if she had visited him in a dream, too, for he could only see when he was asleep.

He had formed a loose attachment with the fairground people and so the old man, the carnival and I travelled on together. I found that the peep-show proprietor, anticipating my arrival, had rented a broken-down truck from the Armenian who operated the wheel of fortune. This was his new little old truck and I drove it for him as we moved with our new companions from place to place, part of a tumultuous cavalcade moving towards other towns along the winter roads. On the road I was as safe from the Indians as I had been from the police while I lived on the river. I was as safe from everything as I would have been in the Opera House, listening to The Marriage of Figaro, because the road was another kind of self-consistent river.

The travelling fair was its own world, which acknowledged no geographical location or temporal situation for everywhere we halted was exactly the same as where we had stopped last, once we had put up our booths and sideshows. Mexican comedians; intrepid equestriennes from Nebraska, Kansas or Ohio whose endless legs and scrubbed features were labelled ‘Made in U.S.A.’; Japanese dwarfs who wrestled together in arenas of mud; Norwegian motor-cyclists roaring vertically around portable walls of death; a team of dancing Albinos whose pallid gavottes were like those of the luminous undead; the bearded lady and the alligator man – these were my new neighbours, who shared nothing but the sullen glamour of their difference from the common world and clung defensively together to protect and perpetuate this difference. Natives of the fairground, they acknowledged no other nationality and could imagine no other home. A polyglot babel manned the sideshows, the rifle ranges and coconut shies, dive-bombers, helter-skelters and roundabouts on which, hieratic as knights in chess, the painted horses described perpetual circles as immune as those of the planets to the drab world of the here and now inhabited by those who came to gape at us. And if we transcended the commonplace, so we transcended language. Since we had few tongues in common, we mostly used a language of grunt, bark and gesture which is, perhaps, the common matrix of language. And as we rarely had anything more complicated to say to one another than how miry the roads were, we all got on well enough.

They were not in the least aware how extraordinary they were because they made their living out of the grotesque. Their bread was deformity. Their biographies, however tragic or bizarre, were all alike in singularity and many of them, like myself, were permanently in hiding from a real world which they understood so badly nobody knew how much it had changed since the war began. Sometimes I thought the whole savage and dissolute crew were nothing but the Doctor’s storm troops but they did not know anything at all about the Doctor. Nobody had heard his name. They only knew a little about themselves and this knowledge, in itself, was quite sufficient to create a microcosm with as gaudy, circumscribed, rotary and absurd a structure as a roundabout.

I often watched the roundabouts circulate upon their static journeys. ‘Nothing,’ said the peep-show proprietor, ‘is ever completed; it only changes.’ As he pleased, he altered the displays he had never seen, murmuring: ‘No hidden unity.’ The children of the fairground pressed their snot and filth-caked faces to the eyepieces and giggled at what they saw. Nothing was strange to those whose fathers rode the wall of death three times a day while their mothers elegantly defined gravity on a taut, single leg atop the white back of a pirouetting horse. And they seemed to see so little of their parents they might have been spontaneously generated by the evanescent paraphernalia of the passing show around them which, no sooner had it been set up, was dismantled, piled up in segments on erratic trucks and shifted in its entirety to some other new venue. The fairground was a moving toyshop, an ambulant raree-show coming to life in convulsive fits and starts whenever the procession stopped, regulated only by the implicit awareness of a lack of rules.

‘First will come Nebulous Time, a period of absolute mutability when only reflected rays and broken trajectories of an entirely hypothetical source of light fitfully reveal a continually shifting surface, like the surface of water, yet a water which is only a reflective skin and has neither depth nor volume. But you must never forget that the Doctor’s philosophy is not so much transcendental as incidental. It utilizes all the incidents that ripple the depthless surfaces of, you understand, the sensual world. When the sensual world unconditionally surrenders to the intermittency of mutability, man will be freed in perpetuity from the tyranny of a single present. And we will live on as many layers of consciousness as we can, all at the same time. After the Doctor liberates us, that is. Only after that.’

The toasting cheese sweated a few drops of grease on to the flame in the stove so that it flared and stank. I filled the glass he held out to me, watching as I did so the reflected flame splutter on the cracked lenses of his dark glasses. Sometimes he looked like an old, blind evangelist. As he grew more used to having once again an audience, he ordered his periods more and more succinctly and phrased his lecturettes with more resonance. He started to impress me not so much with the quality of his discourse as with the awed wonder with which he delivered it. He often combined prophetic fervour with sibylline obscurity. Since I always got up before him in the mornings, sometimes I caught sight of him waking up. It was always poignant to watch him open his sightless eyes and blink a little as if this time there might be a chance he would blink away the darkness forever.

Thrust as I was into such intimacy with the peep-show proprietor, I could not help beginning to feel affection for him and I found myself ministering to the needs of an occasionally incontinent, always foul-mannered old man with a generosity I would never have expected of myself, though he made few demands upon me and those were mostly upon my attention.

My tasks were simple and housewifely, for he did not allow me to meddle with the set of samples. I assembled our meals, swept out the booth, shook out our sleeping straw, dusted the machines and, behind a spare pair of discreet sunglasses, sat at the counter during his frequent absences in bars, for his drunkenness was real enough. Then I would make notes of the things he told me and try to tease out from them some notion of the practical means by which his former pupil performed his conjuring tricks, though this was a very difficult task for the essence of the Hoffman theory was the fluidity of its structure and, besides, I was constantly interrupted by visits from the roving packs of children and their elders also.

A clatter of scales announced the arrival of homo reptilis for a bleak chat and several of my cigarettes, a whiff of gunpowder and imported perfume, that of Mamie Buckskin the sharp-shooter, while a more fragile and tentative clearing of the throat told me Madame la Barbe was here. Madame la Barbe kept her chestnut moustache to neat, discreet, Vermeer proportions and it disguised an uncommonly maternal nature. She would bring me a brioche freshly baked in the oven she had installed in her French provincial caravan full of plants in pots, pet cats, over-upholstered sofas and framed photographs of kin. On the frames of those of her relatives who were deceased she hung rosettes of black ribbons.

I must admit that all my guests enchanted me and I, in turn, enchanted them for, here, I had the unique allure of the norm. I was exotic precisely to the extent of my mundanity. The peep-show proprietor’s nephew was a small businessman bankrupted by the catastrophe in the capital and all those freaks could not get enough of my accounts of the world of typewriters and telephones, flush toilets, tiled bathrooms, electric lights and mechanical appliances. They wondered at the masterpiece of sterility I remembered for them as if it were an earthly paradise from which they were barred forever. So I gave them an imitation of another reality while the peep-show proprietor offered me far stronger meat.

Proposition: Time is a serial composition of apparently indivisible instants.

Since the inception of the mode of consciousness we refer to as ‘the world’, man has always thought of time as in itself a movement forward, an onward flow leaving only a little debris behind it. Evanescence is the essence of time. And since temporality is the medium in which this mode of consciousness has itself been expressed, since time is, as it were, the canvas on which we ourselves are painted, the empirical investigation of the structure of time poses certain acute methodological problems. Could the Mona Lisa turn round, scratch her own background and then submit to a laboratory analysis the substance she found under her nail?

No, indeed!

Now this analogy, a striking one, implies that all phenomena are necessarily temporal in nature and roll forward en masse on wheels at the corners of the four-square block of space-time they occupy, shoulder to shoulder and bearing always at their backs the wall against which they all must meet that shooting-squad, mortality. Yet this model of the world does not make even so much as the formal acknowledgement of the synthesizable aspect of time as was made to space by the introduction of perspective into painting. In other words, we knew so little about the geometry of time – let alone its physical properties – that we could not even adequately simulate the physical form of so much as a single instant.

The introduction of cinematography enabled us to corral time past and thus retain it not merely in the memory – at best, a falsifying receptacle – but in the objective preservative of a roll of film. But, if past, present and future are the dimensions of time, they are notoriously fluid. There is no tension in the tenses and yet they are always tremulously about to coagulate. The present is a liquid jelly which settles into a quivering, passive mass, the past, as soon as – if not sooner than – we are aware of it as the present. Yet this mass was intangible and existed only conceptually until the arrival of the preservative, cinema.

The motion picture is usually regarded as only a kind of shadow play and few bother to probe the ontological paradoxes it presents. For it offers us nothing less than the present tense experience of time irrefutably past. So that the coil of film has, as it were, lassooed inert phenomena from which the present had departed, and when projected upon a screen, they are granted a temporary revivification.

My student, Mendoza, offered me some investigations along these lines to justify the many hours he spent each day in the neighbourhood fleapits gazing at the panorama of revived phenomena with glazed, visionary eyes. Once he remarked to me in conversation: ‘Lumière was not the father of the cinema; it was Sergeant Bertrand, the violator of graves.’

The images of cinematography, however, altogether lack autonomy. Locking in programmed patterns, they merely transpose time past into time present and cannot, by their nature, respond to the magnetic impulses of time future for the unachievable future which does not exist in any dimension, but nevertheless organizes phenomena towards its potential conclusions. The cinematographic model is one of cyclic recurrences alone, even if these recurrences are instigated voluntarily, by the hand of man viz. the projectionist, rather than the hand of fate. Though, in another sense, the action of time is actually visible in the tears, scratches and thumbprints on the substance of the film itself, these are caused only by the sly, corrosive touch of mortality and, since the print may be renewed at will, the flaws of ageing, if retained, increase the presence of the past only by a kind of forgery, as when a man punches artificial worm-holes into raw wood or smokes shadows of fresh paint with a candle to produce an apparently aged artefact.

Mendoza, however, claimed that if a thing were sufficiently artificial, it became absolutely equivalent to the genuine. His mind puffed out ideas like the dandelion seed-head his chevelure so much resembled but we did not take any of his ideas seriously, not one of us, not any of them. Yet Hoffman refined Mendoza’s initially crude hypotheses of fissile time and synthetic authenticity and wove them together to form another mode of consciousness altogether. But we did not know that. We were content to laugh at Mendoza. We laughed uproariously.

He dreamed of fissile time – of exploding the diatonic scale with its two notes, past and present, into a chromatic fanfare of every conceivable tense and many tenses at present inconceivable because there is no language to describe them. He produced sheet after sheet of mathematics in an exceedingly neurotic script to prove to me that time was amenable to the rigours of scientific analysis as any other notion; and, indeed, he convinced me, at least, that time was elastic for it always seemed to stretch out to eternity as I read them through!^*

His attitude to abstractions was this: abstractions only were true because, since they did not exist, they could be proved or disproved entirely at the whim of the investigator. How his wild eyes flashed as he spoke!

By the end of his sophomore year, Mendoza was the clown of the senior common room. We looked forward to his essays much as London clubmen look forward to their weekly Punch. How we chuckled richly over our port as I read aloud the choicest tidbits! His classmates mocked him, too. Only Hoffman, with his Teutonic lack of humour, listened to the outrageous Mendoza with a straight face. In time, he and Mendoza became almost inseparable, though they made a strangely ill-assorted couple and together gave an impression of vaudeville rather than the laboratory for Mendoza sported flowing hair, abundant neckties, herbaceous shirts and suits of black velvet while his gleaming, impassioned gaze seemed to warn one to weave a circle round him thrice before approaching him. As for Hoffman, he was a model of propriety, well starched and stiffly suited, one of his cold, blue eyes wedged open with a monocle. His handshake was moist and chill; his smile was alpine in its austerity and he always smelled of medicated soap. He was already unnaturally brilliant and even his teachers feared him. Mendoza was his only friend.

They worked together and they played together. Soon we began to hear the most disreputable stories of their exploits in the red light quarter. Now Mendoza had a streak of Moorish blood and read Arabic fluently. He followed up certain hints from obscure books and became more and more obsessed with the nature of time in relation to the sexual act. At length he devised a hilarious thesis concerning the fissile/tensile nature of the orgasm. He claimed that the actual discharge took place in neither past, present nor future but precipitated an exponential polychromatic fusion of all three, especially if impregnation were effected. He submitted to me an end of term paper titled, I recall: ‘The Fissile Potential of the Willed Annihilation of the Orgiastic Instant’. It described an experiment utilizing the talents of seven of the town’s most notorious whores and, if it proved nothing else, it showed that Mendoza was something of an athlete while his technical assistant, none other than our decorous Hoffman, possessed, against all appearances, quite remarkable sexual versatility.

Mendoza described his results as ‘the perpetration of a durationless state possibly synthesizing infinity’. He claimed their enthusiasm had set up such intense vibrations every clock in the establishment burst its case. He submitted to the university bills not only for the services of the prostitutes but also for those of the clock-repairer. So we dismissed Mendoza. When he learned he had been sent down, he broke into the laboratory and smeared faeces all over the blackboards. After that, we heard no more of him. But Hoffman, of course, kept in touch with him. Indeed, it was the beginning of the first great period of their research…

And so on and so on and so on.

As he grew used to my continual presence, he gave me such heady blends of theory and biography three or four times a week and various forgotten tricks of the lecturer came back to him. He often hunted for forgotten chalk to draw diagrams on a blackboard which existed only in a memory of the university and bunched his fingers in an invisible academic gown. I found these gestures unspeakably moving. I filled his glass and listened.

But none of these gobbets and scraps issuing from a mind blunted by age and misfortune made much sense to me. Sometimes a whole hour of discourse plashed down on me like rain and I would jot down from it only a single phrase that struck me. Perhaps: ‘Things cannot be exhausted’; or ‘In the imagination, nothing is past, nothing can be forgotten.’ Or: ‘Change is the only valid response to phenomena.’ I grew aware that Hoffman’s Phenomenal Dynamics involved a hypothetical dialectic between mutuality and transformation; the discovery of a certain formula which speeded up the processes of mutability; and that he had often spoken to his teacher of a ‘continuous improvisation of correlatives’. But, for the most part, I was utterly mystified. And I would toast a little cheese on top of the stove, to eat with bread and beer for our suppers, rumble vague, indeterminate sounds I hoped the old man would interpret as those of a quickened interest and brood upon the changes I myself had undergone.

‘Mutable combinations,’ he would say, swig beer and belch. Then, scooping up a handful of magic samples, he tossed them in the air as in the game of five-stones, letting them fall with such solemnity I was almost tempted to believe, with him, that the haphazard patterns they made as they fell at the blind dictation of chance were echoed in flesh in the beleaguered city which, he informed me with irritation, was still managing to hold out.

Now and then I asked a few questions, though these were mainly concerned with the facts of Hoffman rather than his conceptual framework.

‘Why did he and Mendoza quarrel?’

‘Over a woman,’ he said. ‘Or so Hoffman once told me, in a voice choked either with tears or with anger – I could not tell which for by then, of course, I was blind and reduced to nothing more than a cipher in his formulae.’

It was a long time before he told me that woman had been the mother of Albertina.

‘And what happened to Mendoza?’

‘In the end, he spattered himself over infinity in a chromatic arc, like a rainbow.’

Well, nobody would ever know, now, the cause of the fire that destroyed his itinerant time machine!

And then there were my other distractions.

Madame la Barbe was as reticent as a young girl. She raised the flap of the tent, deposited her gifts of cake, smoking pots of delicious coffee and now and then a savoury cassoulet on our counter and vanished with the most fleeting of smiles. Without her beard, she would have been a fat, aproned, hard-mouthed, grim-visaged French countrywoman who never stirred one half kilometre from her native ville. Bearded, she was immensely handsome, widely travelled and the loneliest woman in the world. She sat in her caravan and picked out sentimental songs on a parlour organ, crooning the wistful words of love and longing in a high-pitched, over-elocuted voice. Slowly, when she saw I found her neither risible nor disgusting, she started to confide in me.

She had only the one dream: to wake up one day in the town where she was born, in her bed of childhood, the geranium on the windowsill, the jug and basin on the wash-stand. And then die. I found her sympathetic. She exposed her difference to make her living and had done so for thirty years, yet each time the gawping peasants came into her booth as she posed for them in white satin and artificial orange blossom, the Bearded Bride felt all the pangs of defloration although, of course, she was a virgin. ‘Each time,’ she said in her prettily broken accent, ‘a fresh violation. One is penetrated by their eyes.’

The beard appeared with her breasts; she was thirteen. Never a pretty girl, always bulky and dowdy, she had hoped only to pass unnoticed. Perhaps a neighbouring tradesman in that grey, sedate town in the Loire valley where all the chairs wore antimacassars and even the shadows fell with propriety might marry her for her dot. Her father was a notary. The daughter took her first communion with a blue stubble of five o’clock shadow showing under the veil. The mother died of cancer and the father took to peculation. He was found out; he slit his throat with the common razor. It was an utterly commonplace tragedy. She started to live alone in the echoing, narrow house, hiding behind the shutters. She was fifteen. Soon there was nothing left to sell and the charity of the neighbours was exhausted. A circus came to town. Trembling, in mourning, muffled in veils, she visited the ringmaster and next day she was a working woman. She celebrated her sixteenth birthday at the carnival in Rio and had visited in the course of her career all the fabled cities of the world from Shanghai to Valparaiso, Tangiers to Tashkent.

It was not her beard that made her unique; it was the fact that, never, in all her life, had she known a single moment’s happiness.

‘This,’ she would say, touching the frilled leaves of one of her potted plants, ‘is my monstra deliciosa, my delicious monster.’

And her eyes would involuntarily stray to the little mirror on the wall. She had fixed one of her black mourning rosettes to its gilt frame. I visited her caravan with great circumspection and never without a small gift – a bunch of violets, candy, a French novel picked up in a second-hand bookstore. In return, she brewed me hot chocolate and played and sang for me.

‘Plaisirs d’amour ne durent plus qu’un moment…’

But she herself had known no pleasure at all. She was a perfect lady. She had the wistful charm of a flower pressed inside a perfectly enormous book. She always used to call me ‘Désiré’. It was always refreshingly boring to call on her, like calling on an aunt one had loved very much in childhood.

In the oracular limbo between sleeping and waking, my master once cried out: ‘Everything depends on persistence of vision.’ Did he refer to the peep-show alone or to the phantoms in the city? I took advantage of his blindness and his sleeps to go through the set of samples and, as far as I could, make a comprehensive catalogue of them, though this self-imposed inventory was complicated by the difficulty of ascertaining how many samples there were, since the numbers in the sack varied constantly and the work of classifying was almost impossible because they were never the same if you looked at them twice.

I lost the notebooks containing the rough, inadequate list in the earthquake which, according to Mendoza’s theory, was already organizing the events which preceded it with the formal rhetoric of tragedy. And, with reference to the landslide, I do not know if I would remember Madame la Barbe as so pitiful, Mamie Buckskin as so ferocious or my master with such affection if I did not know, with hindsight, how soon they were all going to die. However, I remember that, however much the symbolic content of the samples altered, they all came in one of three forms e.g.:

(a) wax models, often with clockwork mechanisms, as described;

(b) glass slides, as already described;

and:

(c) sets of still photographs which achieved the effect of movement by means of the technique of the flicker books of our childhood.

These sets usually consisted of six or seven different aspects of the same scene which might be, typically, a nursemaid mutilating a baby, toasting him over a nursery fire and then gobbling him up with every appearance of relish. As one moved from machine to machine watching the various panels of this narrative unfold each one another facet of the same action, one had the impression of viewing an event in, as it were, temporal depth. The photographs themselves had every appearance of authenticity. I was particularly struck by a series showing a young woman trampled to death by wild horses because the actress bore some resemblance to Dr Hoffman’s own daughter. There were also pictures of natural catastrophes such as the San Francisco earthquake, but I did not feel a shudder of anticipatory dread as I handled these; indeed, I even played through one set of theme and variations upon the subject of an earthquake through the machine, when my master was away drinking. And perhaps I should not have meddled with the machines, just as he warned me, at that… though Albertina told me her father always retreated in front of the boundaries of nature, so I do not think I had anything to do with the landslide, in reality.

From my investigations in the sack, I came to the conclusion that the models did indeed represent everything it was possible to believe by the means of either direct simulation or a symbolism derived from Freud. They were also, or so the peep-show proprietor believed, exceedingly numinous objects. He would never let me put them in the machines for him; he had even forbidden me to peek in the bag.

‘Just let me catch you poking in my sack,’ he remarked, ‘and I’ll cut your hands off.’

But I was too cunning to be caught.

Mamie Buckskin lived alone in a rifle range. Every morning she set up a row of whisky bottles along a nearby fence and shot the neck off each one. So she practised her art. She claimed she could shoot the tail-feathers off a pheasant in flight; she claimed she could shoot out the central heart of the five of hearts at twenty paces; she claimed she could shoot a specified apple from the bough of a specified tree at forty paces; and she often lit my cigarettes for me with a single, transverse bullet. Her rifles were fire-spitting extensions of her arms and her tongue also spat fire. She always dressed herself in fringed leather garments of the pioneers of the old West yet her abundant yellow hair was always curled and swept up in the monumental style of the saloon belle while a very feminine locket containing a picture of her dead, alcoholic mother always bounced between her lavish breasts. She was a paradox – a fully phallic female with the bosom of a nursing mother and a gun, death-dealing erectile tissue, perpetually at her thigh. She boasted a collection of more than fifty antique or historic rifles, pistols and revolvers, including specimens once owned by Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday and John Wesley Hardin. She spent three hours a day polishing them, oiling them and lovingly fingering each one. She was in love with guns. She was twenty-eight years old and as impervious as if shellacked.

Imprisoned in the far West for shooting the man who held the mortgage when he tried to take possession of her dying father’s farm, she easily seduced the gaoler, escaped and disposed of the sheriff’s posse by shooting them too. But she soon grew weary of a life of crime for she was an artist with her weapons; killing was only an effect of her virtuosity. A Winchester repeater was a Stradivarius to her and her world was composed only of targets. Sexually, she preferred women. At one time she had worked a double act in an American burlesque house, where, in the trappings of a cowboy hero, she shot every stitch of clothing off her beloved mistress, a fluffy exuberant blonde of Viennese extraction whom she had abducted from a convent. But this soubrette ran off with a conjurer and took up a fresh career in which she was sawn in half nightly. After that, Mamie, made only the more cynical by this brush with love, blazed away by herself.

She loved to travel and joined the fair only to see the world. Besides, if she ran her own sideshow, she could keep her hands on all the profits and, next to guns and the open road, she loved money. She took a great liking to me for she admired passivity in a man more than anything and she offered me a job as her straight man, to set up her targets and let her blast hats and oranges off my head on stage. But I told her my uncle could not manage without me. Her strident vigour was both exhilarating and exhausting. Now and then, when she could not entice an equestrienne into her fur-lined sleeping bag, she morosely made do with me and these nights were as if spent manning a very small dinghy on a very stormy sea. Her caravan contained nothing but racks of guns, targets and a tiny, inconspicuous afterthought of a cooking stove on which she occasionally cooked burning chili and the leaden biscuits she consumed with syrup and a slug of rye for breakfast. Yet, sometimes, in sleep, I surprised her brass features relaxed and then she looked once more the wistful, belligerent tomboy who stole her father’s Colt45 to roar away at rattlers but wept when she shot the family German shepherd dog in the paw, in error. And I occasionally caught her glancing at Madame la Barbe’s beard with a certain envy. Mamie, too, was a tragic woman.

I see them all haloed in the dark afterlight of accomplished tragedy, moving with the inexorability of the doomed towards a violent death.

In the fairground, it was a fact of nature that things were not what they seemed. Mamie once took me to watch the pretty riders servicing their horses in the privacy of the loosebox. We lay concealed in the hay as they conjugated the ultimate verb below us. The whinneys we heard could have come from the throats of either the stallions or their riders and the violence of their movements rocked the box so tempestuously back and forth that at every moment we threatened to fall from our perch. The swaying paraffin lamps which hung from the roof lent the lurid scene a dramatically expressionist chiaroscuro so intermittent I began to doubt some of the things I saw and I remembered how the peep-show proprietor had muttered in his sleep: ‘It all depends on persistence of vision.’ Meanwhile, my virile mistress, reeking already with sympathetic lust, pawed and clawed me so our position was all the more insecure and, in that resounding box of passion, I must admit I did indeed experience Mendoza’s durationless infinity. I should say I substantiated his theory for I have no idea how long the orgy lasted after we did indeed tumble into the morass of satin limbs and flailing hooves and, had there been a clock in the van, I am sure it would have exploded. I was also disturbed because the scene had certainly some resemblances to the sequence of photographs in the sack of samples showing a girl trampled by horses; yet it was teasingly different. Even so, I wondered how far I might have prefigured it. Though often, the whole fair seemed only another kind of set of samples, anyway.

Mamie broke a rib where a horse kicked her and went about in an unbecoming corselet of bandages for a while. Her eyes, grey as a rifle barrel, took on a curious expression of surmise when she saw me, as though I had revealed unsuspected talents during the evening, and finally she astonished me by offering to teach me how to improve my draw.

I discovered the peep-show proprietor was in the habit of performing some kind of divination by means of the samples though I never found out what it was, precisely, he divined or forecast; nor how he did it; nor – for that matter – why. Certainly he got no previous information about the landslide from his investigations, or he would have run away. But he would sometimes thrust blindly into the neck of the sack and pull out the first boxes he touched. He would read the braille inscriptions sometimes with a worried frown, sometimes with shrill squeaks of glee.

‘To express a desire authentically,’ he told me, ‘is to satisfy it categorically.’

I puzzled over this gnomic utterance for a long time. Did he merely mean what he said – which was patently nonsense? Or was he referring to Mendoza’s other theory, that if a thing were artificial enough, it became genuine?

I touched his shoulder lightly to wake him for his morning tea and in his sleep he exhorted: ‘Objectify your desires!’

This seemed somehow very important but I was not at all sure why.

The third of my friends, the Alligator Man, gave me the simplest pleasure. He was a Creole and sometimes played the mouth organ and sang to me rough, dark melodies in a uniquely savorous French. Born in a Louisiana swamp, his affliction was genetic; he owed it to an unhappy interlocking of the genes of his picturesquely fey mother, who rocked all day on the porch in a white nightdress while her home went to rack and ruin, and his picturesquely crazy father, who spent his time building an ark on the bayou, for he believed the second Flood was imminent. The Alligator Man spent his childhood up to his neck in another part of the same bayou because he found his own company more stimulating than that of his family and so lolled all day among the weeds under the drifting ghosts of Spanish moss, playing his harmonica and doing nobody any harm. When he was twelve, his father sold him to a travelling showman for the price of fourteen pounds of nails and that was the last he saw of his parents, who did not even bother to wave him good-bye. He spent the rest of his life similarly immersed up to the neck in a glass water tank where he lay somnolently as a log, staring at those who came to stare at him with an unblinking malice.

For a man who had spent most of his life under water, he had a remarkable knowledge of the world and, of all the fairground people, he was the only one with some inkling of the war or the way in which it was conducted. He and his tank had spent three months in a Gallery of Monsters in the slums of the capital when the hostilities were beginning and he had grasped to a surprising extent what was going on, though he was as bored by mutability as any immutable stone must be. In his tank he had learned patience, cunning and duplicity. He had trained himself in the spiritual discipline of absolute apathy.

‘The freak,’ he said, ‘is the norm.’

He was fond of the peep-show and sometimes came out of his tank, leaving a watery trail behind him, to visit us, moving from machine to machine, his flat feet sonorously slapping the ground with the sound of flaccid applause. The scales covered his entire face and body except for a small patch of infantine softness, pale peach in colour, above his genitals, which were perfectly normal. He could not bear the sunlight and had shivering fits if he were out of the water for more than two or three hours. As far as I could tell, he suffered from no human feelings whatsoever but I grew very fond of him for he had refined his subjectivity until he believed in absolutely nothing. He taught me to play the harmonica and finally gave me his very own spare one. I think it was the first gift he had made in his entire life. Though I was very pleased to receive it, I was sorry to see the Alligator Man’s inflexible misanthropy soften a little.

So, with one thing and another, life passed pleasantly enough and I was never bored. The travelling fair tacked back and forth across the uplands, now teasingly taking me high into the foothills and then withdrawing far back, almost into the plain. But, in his sleep, the peep-show proprietor murmured: ‘The way South lies along the Northern road’ and I knew I must leave myself in his hands and dare not hurry things, even when I realized the tentative beginnings of spring were already here.

As I drove our ramshackle truck along the rutted roads, I saw the fresh young grass disturbing the drifts of last year’s leaves and Madame la Barbe shyly gave us little bunches of fragile snowdrops which she crept out to gather in the concealing dusk. It was now six months since I left the capital and I still had no means of communicating with the Minister. I tried to telephone his private number from time to time but all the lines were defunct. Yet I felt a vague stirring in my blood which was almost the prickings of incipient action, as if I, too, were awakening with the spring and now the cavalcade turned incontrovertibly towards the spires of the mountains and the road began to climb all the time. We were to provide the Easter fair at the highest city in the country, a place where eagles were said to nest in the steeples. Our wheels consumed the pocked asphalt.

‘Nebulous Time,’ said the peep-show proprietor with a certain anticipatory excitement, ‘will be succeeded by synthetic time.’

However, he did not elaborate on the statement.

At our last stop before a destination that would be a terminus for all my companions, had they but known it, we were joined by a team of Moroccan acrobats. There were nine of them and a musician, yet somehow they all packed themselves neatly into a slickly vulgar motorized trailer in the latest American style, sprayed the luscious pink of plastic orchids yet ornamented with various Islamic talismans such as black-inked prints of hands to keep away the Evil Eye. They spoke with others infrequently and then in a French more dislocated even than the Alligator Man’s but my French had grown very supple during my conversations with Madame la Barbe and I managed to gain their confidence sufficiently for them to let me watch them as they rehearsed their extraordinary performance, though talking to them was like gossiping with hyenas, for they had a slippery viciousness of manner. I was a little afraid of them, even though I thought they were wonderful.

All nine were the same height and shared a similar, almost female sinuosity of spine and marked development of the pectorals. In the daytime, they wore sharp, flared trousers and bright shirts painted with flowers and palm trees, styles more suited to Las Vegas or the Florida beach resorts than to the arid, yellow peaks through which our road now took us; for their stunning gyrations they donned costumes which might have been designed by Cocteau… or Caligula – brief tunics made of a network of gold crescents with a central projection between the horns, so their amber skin looked netted with hooked freckles and they did not look clothed at all, only extravagantly naked. A larger half moon hung from the left ear of each of them and they painted their eyes thickly with kohl and curled their hair so tightly their heads looked like bunches of black grapes. They gilded their finger and toenails and rouged their lips a blackish red. When they were dressed, they negated physicality; they looked entirely artificial.

To enter their circular arena was to step directly into the realm of the marvellous. To the weird music of a flute played by a veiled child, they created all the images that the human body could possibly make – an abstract, geometrical dissection of flesh that left me breathless.

When I told the peep-show proprietor about them, he cursed his blindness.

‘The acrobats of desire have come!’ he said. ‘Nebulous Time is almost upon us!’

But they had never even heard the name, Hoffman, although four times a day they transcended their own bodies and made of themselves plastic anagrams. I suspected an arrangement of mirrors. I inspected their arena and found nothing but sawdust in which ashed half moon glittered here and there. Their act went something like this.

A clumsy spotlight focused on their minuscule sawdust ring. The flute wailed a phrase. A faint tintinnabulation of their metallic shifts heralded their coming. They entered one by one. First they formed a simple pyramid – three, three, two and one; then they reversed themselves and formed the pyramid upside down – one on his hands, whose feet supported two, and so on. Their figures flowered into one another so choreographically it was impossible to see how they extricated or complicated themselves. They did not give out an odour of sweat; no effortful grunt escaped any of them. For perhaps thirty minutes they went through the staple repertory of all acrobats anywhere, though with incomparable grace and skill. And then Mohammed, the leader, took his head from his neck and they began to juggle with that until, one by one, all their heads came off and went into play, so that a fountain of heads rose and fell in the arena. Yet this was only the beginning.

After that, limb by limb, they dismembered themselves. Hands, feet, forearms, thighs and ultimately torsos went into a diagrammatic multi-man whose constituents were those of them all. At times, the juggled elements composed an image like those of the many-handed Kuan-Yin of the Four Cardinal Points and the Thousand Arms whose multiplication of limbs and attributes signified flashing action and infinite vigour to the ancient Chinese; but this Arab image was continually in motion, a visual synthesis of the curves and surfaces along which any single body always moved suddenly happening all at once.

And then, the pièce de résistance, they began to juggle with their own eyes. The severed heads and arms and feet and navels began to juggle with eighteen fringed, unblinking eyes.

I would repeat to myself as I watched them the peep-show proprietor’s maxim: ‘It all depends on persistence of vision’, because, of course, I could not entirely suspend my disbelief, although I might lay it aside for a while. I knew there was more to it than met the eye although, in the finale, so many eyes met and greeted one’s own! Such a harmonious concatenation of segments of man, studded with incomplete moons and brown pupils!

And then this demonstration of juxtaposition and transposition was over. Each torso took from the common heap its due apparatus back again and, composed again as nine complete Moroccans, they took their bows.

I went to watch them whenever I could and I haunted their tent. But I never managed to discover their secret.

The chill brilliance of early spring struck a dazzle of mica from the sandstone enfilades of the mountains. They were appallingly barren, for the scanty soil could support only those plants that love dry, arid places, spiny cacti and low-growing, warped, daisy-like things with stems wiry enough to cut your fingers. The gloomy road took us to a gloomy destination for the city, which functioned only as a trading post, was as sullen as the perpendicular perspectives around us. We crossed an enormous bridge above a mighty river in the bleakest of valleys and saw the town perched, itself like an eagle, on a precipitous outcrop of rock above the rushing torrent. This town was full of malevolent saints. Shut in on themselves in their isolation, they were an inbred mixture of Carpathian Poles and mountain French whose forefathers had fled to Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries due to persecutions of the scrupulous sects of the reformed religion to which they belonged. There had been both Calvinists and Jansenites among them and the town itself had finally evolved such a rigorous blend of the more mortifying aspects of both that I was astonished they allowed a carnival there at all, for they usually entertained themselves only with hymns of the simplest melodic structure. But the high, rarefied air had caused some singular mutations of their practices. After the fast of Lent, when they drank only water and ate only beans, they spent the whole of Good Friday without stirring from shuttered houses in which they brooded on the inherent evil of all mankind, and then devoted Easter Week itself to exposing themselves to the temptations of the flesh. Which the fair was judged to represent well enough. My cynical friend, the Alligator Man, was delighted to find himself defined as a siren and took to preening himself lasciviously in his tank. To some degree we all became more voluptuous, in self-justification.

But the townsfolk were kindness itself to us and brought us all small presents of wine and cake. I soon realized their charity sprang from pity. They thought we were all hopelessly damned.

The peep-show proprietor industriously changed his samples daily. They were all the most outrageous tableaux of blasphemy and eroticism, Christ performing innumerable obscenities upon Mary Magdalene, St John and His Mother; and, in this holy city, I was fucked in the anus, against my will (as far, that is, as I was conscious of my desires), by all nine of the Moroccan acrobats, one after the other.

Those who had caravans parked them in a paddock near the market square usually used for grazing goats and drying linen; the booths were set up in the square itself. After we closed up for the night, the old man, who had drunk a gift of dandelion wine with his supper, nodded off to sleep by the stove and I slipped out to watch the Arabs’ last performance. The day had lowered with incipient storm and now violent winds whipped about the square, blowing the posters and bunting in all directions. It was so cold that only the intense puritanism of the inhabitants kept them out enjoying themselves. In the acrobats’ tent, the sober clothes of the customers ringed the spangled contortionists in solid shadow and their massed conviction that they watched the devil’s work weighed the air with disapproval. The white faces, arranged on the darkness in concentric circles around the ring, were inexpressive as teeth in a maw although the Arabs pelted them with a confetti of fingers and gilded finger nails and when the last atom of flesh was retrieved from the sawdust and slotted back into place, the audience heaved a great, convulsive sigh that billowed the canvas, a sigh of gratification that not one of them had succumbed to delight.

They filed out in silence.

Mohammed and his tinkling brethren rubbed themselves briskly with huckaback towels and invited me to take coffee with them in their mobile home, an unexpected gesture of hospitality I attributed to an appreciation of the enthusiasm I had often expressed for their work. The storm had already risen to a tempest and we sprinted to their van through sheets of rain. Lightning flashed and all nine, in their Heliogabalian finery, flared briefly like magnesium, reflecting a glare so harsh and violent it wounded the retina. And then the rain obscured them again.

A coke stove filled the van with choking warmth. Inside, the van was as soft and excessive as a whore’s bed for they slept three apiece on three divans piled with satin cushions in lingerie tones and these filled up most of the interior. The smell of sweat, liniment and spent semen was almost overpowering. There were no windows and one could not see the walls for they were covered with mirrors and photographs which captured them all in every segmented attitude so that, now stripped of their tunics down to briefs of iridescent elastic, arranged upon their beds, they and their reflected or pictured parts – here, a bubbled head, there a shoulder, elsewhere a knee – seemed to continue, in a subtly enervated fashion, the climax of their act.

Had I not known all along it was all done with mirrors? I had never seen so many mirrors since the war began.

Mohammed brewed Turkish coffee in a brass pot on the stove and they made room for me on a pink cushion decorated with a mauve, appliquéd nude. The musician took off his yashmak and crouched down on a strip of white bearskin laid on what of the floor there was. He was a boy of six or seven, quite black, perhaps an Ethiopian; he was a eunuch. He seemed to go in almighty fear of his protectors. He lay in an attitude of utter submission. They suggested I would be more comfortable without my shirt and most comfortable of all without my suit but I insisted on retaining my trousers. After that, they jabbered to themselves in Arabic for a while and I leafed through some of the many body-building magazines that littered the beds until Mohammed served us each a syrupy thimbleful of his concoction.

We sipped. There was silence and soon I became a little uncomfortable. I realized I was there for a reason and I could hardly believe my intuition as to what that reason was. Out of sheer nervousness, I found myself complimenting them again on their virtuosity.

‘We are,’ said Mohammed, with a faint undertone of menace, ‘capable of virtually anything.’

So I could not say I was not warned. The coke rattled in the stove and the wind buffeted the sides of the van. With a slithering movement, the castrated black boy took his flute from the pile of his discarded veils. He sat down crosslegged on a couch and began to trace on the air an angular, tritonic tune which repeated itself over and over again like a wordless incantation.

The mirrors reflected not only sections of the Arabs; they reflected those reflections, too, so the men were infinitely repeated everywhere I looked and now eighteen and sometimes twenty-seven and, at one time, thirty-six brilliant eyes were fixed on me with an intensity which varied according to the distance between the images of the eyes and their originals. I was surrounded by eyes. I was Saint Sebastian stuck through with the visible barbed beams from brown, translucent eyes which spun a web of fine, shining threads on the air like strands of candified sugar. Once again, they juggled with their hypnotic eyes and used their palpable eye strings to bind me in invisible bonds. I was trapped. I could not move. I was filled with impotent rage as the wave of eyes broke over me.

The pain was terrible. I was most intimately ravaged I do not know how many times. I wept, bled, slobbered and pleaded but nothing would appease a rapacity as remorseless and indifferent as the storm which raged outside and now reached a nightmarish hurricane. They stretched me on my face on a counterpane of pale orange artificial silk and took it in turns to pin down my arms and legs. I ceased to count my penetrations but I think each one buggered me at least twice. They were inexhaustible fountains of desire and I soon ceased to be conscious of my body, only of the sensation of an arsenal of swords piercing sequentially that most private and unmentionable of apertures. But I was so far outside myself they might just as well have cut me up and juggled with me and, for all I know, they did. They gave me the most comprehensive anatomy lesson a man ever suffered, in which I learned every possible modulation of the male apparatus and some I would have thought impossible.

And then, as if obeying an inaudible whistle, they stopped. The wind and the rain still beat down but the acrobats were done with their display though they showed no signs of satiation or weariness, only of conclusion. It was as if they had only been going through a gymnastic exercise and now they once again towelled themselves, searched for their discarded briefs and drew them again over the pistons of their loins with the most offensive insouciance. A blubbered wreck, I lay on the coverlet and I think that I was calling for my mother, though it was probably Albertina. After a time, Mohammed came, fed me more coffee and, I think, a little arak and held me in a fairly warm and comforting embrace, murmuring to me in his vile French that I had been initiated – though into what I had no idea. The liquor stung my throat and slowly brought me back to my senses.

Mohammed dressed me and then, after a murmured consultation with his colleagues, dug about in a drawer concealed in the lower part of one of the divans. The many coruscating surfaces and the reflections of men were still at last. The men themselves lay on their sides propped on one elbow, with a childlike brightness in their faces as if their innocence had been, somehow, refreshed. I felt a nervous agitation. I longed to be gone but did not dare move until they ordered me for fear of unleashing a fresh assault. Mohammed turned to me holding something coyly concealed behind his back. His g-string throbbed like a sling full of live fish.

‘C’est pour toi,’ he said. ‘Un petit cadeau.’

He pressed into my hands a little purse of coloured, cut and ornamented leather such as they sell to tourists in Port Said. It was decorated with the picture of an Egyptian king listening to his musicians and the sight almost made me weep, to think of Ancient Egypt preserved in the gelid amber of the time it had sustained for all of two thousand years. Then Mohammed drew me gently from the bed and wrapped me in one of those great, dark, hooded, enveloping, desert Arab cloaks to protect me, he told me, from the weather. And after that he put me outside the door, sent me into the teeth of the whirlwind. It hurt me dreadfully to walk.

The air was full of blown tiles, chimneypots, washing poles and dustbins. The wind had seized the town by the throat and particularly tormented the flimsy tents of the carnival, tossing them about this way and that. The rain came in black, wind-swept palls and the river below the city was fearfully swollen, a concourse of angry waters. I walked up the road, away from the inhabited places, as rapidly as the storm and my pain would let me. I had a great need to leave humanity behind for a while.

I stumbled over a scrubby field or two and discovered a narrow lane which took me out on to a cliff overhanging the river. Now I had to crawl, for fear the wind would blow me into the gorge. The path took me down on to the face of the cliff itself and when I saw the mouth of a small cave, I instantly clambered into it, drew my Bedouin coverall snugly about me and tried, as best I could, to compose myself a little, though I was in the grip of a terrible reactive shock. Presently I remembered I still clutched the purse Mohammed had given me and I opened it. It contained twenty-seven eyes, brown as ale and shaped like oblate spheroids. I thought he must have plucked these spare eyes off the mirrors. I was a little light-headed and, I remember, must have spent most of that tempestuous day playing a solitary but elaborate game of marbles with those objects, rolling them across the sandy floor of the cave and laughing with childlike pleasure when they bounced off one another. About noon, I remember, I heard a tremendous, roaring crash and part of my roof came down, swallowing up half a dozen of my toys, which irritated me. But I paid no further attention to the world outside until, one way and another, all the marbles were gone, lost in ratholes or crevices or rolled into the dry undergrowth at the mouth of the cave where I did not have the patience to retrieve them.

When the last one disappeared, I found I was recovered. I felt light-headed and still severely wounded but I discovered I was very hungry and thought my master, if he was sober, probably needed me. Besides, the storm had spent its fury and the rain ceased almost altogether. So I came out of my cave to find that most of the track that had taken me to it was obliterated. I scrambled hand over hand up the cliff while the river gnashed teeth of foam in the ravine below and all manner of refuse drifted past.

I saw there had been a total realignment of the landscape during my oblivion. Everything had a blasted look and the wind still bit and whipped me as I anxiously made my way back to the town, as if tormenting me for being still alive. And I found the town was there no longer.

The town had vanished from the face of the earth, leaving behind it only its sandstone corpse as its own gravestone. The crag on which it had perched was now as bald of habitations as an egg and, smoking in the midst of the turbid river, lay a mound of yellow rubble through which, here and there, poked a steeple or a weather-cock. The bridge began at its other end and then stopped in mid-air. A jutting, truncated thrust of masonry hung over the valley, endlessly about to fall, and all signs of the bridge on this side were gone forever because the town had been plucked from its foundations in the earth and tossed carelessly into the ravenous water. Bathed in the grey, dying light of the afternoon, the ruins were already indistinguishable from the rest of the tumbled rocks in that hellish valley, through which the hungry waters roared. When I looked at the river more closely, I saw it was full of corpses, plentiful and insignificant as driftwood. Saints and damned had died together and only a few ravens of the peaks drifted above the desolation on the wild currents of the air, uttering inconsolable cries. Nothing human moved.

The catastrophe was too immense for me to take in at once. I sank down on a stone and buried my head in my hands.