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.
I ride the pyrotechnic tiger
that eats nothing but fire
/> I burn away inexorably
until nothing is left but bare, rhetorical bone
that burns and burns and is not consumed
I burn in my white-hot, everlasting, asbestos flesh!
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.
I, the bane of bone!
I, the denuded skeleton comet!
I, volcanic enigma, phallic aspiration, unfallen Icarus!
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.
I am my own antithesis.
My loins rave. I unleash negation.
The burning arrows of negation.
Come!
Incinerate yourself with me!
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 m
idst 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.