‘When I was little, he used to give me rides on his back,’ she said. ‘How white his muzzle is growing!’
Wheezing and panting, the Great Dane followed us up a staircase and along a gallery but we left him outside a room in which a stained glass window dyed the valley outside purple and crimson and Ravel was playing on a very elaborate hi-fi set. A diminutive, dark-haired woman in a long, black dress lay on a couch with her face turned away from us. There, holding her hand, sat the Doctor himself, on a low, padded stool. I knew him at once though he was far older than the pictures I had seen, of course, even if he still wedged open one eye with a monocle just as his old professor had told me he did. There was a strong smell of incense in the room which did not quite conceal the smell of incipient putrefaction. When he let go the woman’s hand, it fell with a lifeless thud. The one discordant note in all this rich man’s sumptuous country estate was the embalmed corpse of his dead wife he kept on a bergère settee in this white-walled room. He was grey-faced and grey-haired and grey-eyed. He wore a handsomely tailored dark suit and his hands were exquisitely manicured. His quality, whatever it had been once, was now only quiet. There was no resemblance whatsoever between the old man and his daughter.
They used the standard language with one another. His first words were:
‘I go to the city tomorrow and arrive there yesterday.’
‘Yes, of course,’ replied Albertina. ‘Because the shadow of the flying bird never moves.’
They smiled. They appeared to understand one another perfectly.
Then he gave her the kisses due to a generalissimo.
They both laughed gently and I felt the hair rising on my scalp. In that room which hung in the castle like a bubble filled with quietude, faced with that strange family group, I felt the most appalling fear. Perhaps because I was in the presence of the disciplined power of the utterly irrational. He was so quiet, so grey, so calm and he had just said something entirely meaningless in a voice of perfect, restrained reason. All at once I realized how lonely we were here, far away in the mountains with only the wind for company, in the house of the man who made dreams come true.
He stroked the nocturnal hair of the corpse and whispered softly: ‘You see, my dear, she has come home, just as I told you she would. And now you must have a refreshing sleep while we must have our dinner.’
But a bell rang and first, it seemed, we must all dress up. Albertina showed me to a chaste, masculine room at the front of the house with a narrow bed and a black leather armchair, many ash trays and a magazine rack containing current numbers of Playboy, The New Yorker, Time and Newsweek. On the dressing-table were silver-backed brushes. I opened the door of a closet and found a bathroom where I took a steaming shower, assisted by great quantities of lemon soap. When I came out, wrapped in the white, towelling robe they had provided for me, I found a dinner jacket and everything to go with it laid out ready for me on the bed, down to silk socks and white linen handkerchief. When I was dressed, I felt in the pocket and found a gold cigarette lighter and matching case filled with Balkan Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes. I looked at myself in the oval, mahogany mirror. I had been transformed again. Time and travel had changed me almost beyond my own recognition. Now I was entirely Albertina in the male aspect. That is why I know I was beautiful when I was a young man. Because I know I looked like Albertina.
From my window, I could see the apple orchards, the crevasse and the road that led over the bare mountain to the military installation. Everything was perfectly calm and filled with the mushroomy, winey scents of autumn. Another bell rang and I went down the thickly carpeted staircase to the picture gallery where Albertina and her father were drinking very dry sherry. Dinner was served off an English eighteenth-century table in another of those chaste, restrained, white-walled rooms with a flower arrangement in the disappearing Japanese transcendental style on the sideboard and china, glass and cutlery so extraordinarily tasteful one was hardly aware of its presence. The meal was very simple and perfectly in tune with the season of the year – some kind of clear soup; a little trout; a saddle of hare, grilled; mushrooms; salad; fruit and cheese. The wines all matched. With the very strong black coffee there was a selection of recherché liqueurs and we all smoked probably priceless cigars. Still no servants appeared. All the courses had been sent up from subterranean kitchens in a small service elevator from which Albertina herself served us. There was no conversation during the meal but another stereo set hidden behind a white-enamelled grille was playing a Schubert song cycle, The Winter Journey.
‘Do you not feel,’ said the Doctor in his very soft but still crisp-edged voice, ‘that invisible presences have more reality than visible ones? They exert more influence upon us. They make us cry more easily.’
This was the only sentiment or expression of feeling he revealed during the time I knew him. As the silent meal went on, I began to sense in his quietness, his almost quiescence, his silence and slow movements, a willed concentration of thought that, if exploited, might indeed rule the world. He bemused me. He was stillness. He seemed to have refined himself almost to nothing. He was a grey ghost sitting in a striped coat at a very elegant table and yet he was also Prospero – though, ironically enough, one could not judge the Prospero effect in his own castle for he could not alter the constituents of the aromatic coffee we sipped by so much as an iota. Here, nothing could possibly be fantastic. That was the source of my bitter disappointment. I had wanted his house to be a palace dedicated only to wonder.
Even at the worldly level I was disappointed, for I could plainly see that, on everyday terms alone, he was very rich and I was very, very poor. As the very poor often do, I felt the rich could only justify their wealth by making a lavish and conspicuous display of it. My grill disgruntled me; I scorned his good taste. If I were as rich as he, why, I would barbecue peacocks nightly. Besides, good taste has always bored me a little and, in the enemy H.Q., I felt a little bored. It was then, to revive my flagging interest in my surroundings, that I consciously reminded myself I was a secret agent for the other side. They were not the enemy. I was.
The white evening dress of a Victorian romantic heroine rustled about Albertina’s feet and clung like frost to her amber breasts yet I wished she had worn the transvestite apparel of her father’s ambassador or had come to the table naked, with poppies in her hair, in the style she had adopted for dinner in the land of the centaurs. My disillusionment was profound. I was not in the domain of the marvellous at all. I had gone far beyond that and at last I had reached the power-house of the marvellous, where all its clanking, dull, stage machinery was kept. Even if it is the dream made flesh, the real, once it becomes real, can be no more than real. While I did not know her, I thought she was sublime; when I knew her, I loved her. But, even as I pared my dessert persimmon with the silver knife provided, I was already wondering whether the fleshly possession of Albertina would not be the greatest disillusionment of all.
The habit of sardonic contemplation is the hardest habit of all to break.
When we finished our coffee, the Doctor excused himself for he said he had some business in his study, which was housed in a tower, but he gave me another of his fine cigars and Albertina said, Would I not like to walk outside for a while and enjoy my cigar in the mild evening? So we went out into the park. I have forgotten what month it was but, by the scents, I guessed it must be October.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘This way.’
The face of the precipice opened before her but I knew it opened only because she had pressed an unmagical switch. Her abundant skirts swirling before us, she led me up a steep cleft in the rock, a secret passage to the rooftree of the mountain, which issued among the tumbled rocks where one of the transmitters turned like a transfigured mill wheel. But she turned her back on it and led me some little distance through the dishevelled boulders, under a faint half lemon slice of moon, both of us so elegant in evening dress we were ourselves like a poignant anachronism projected backward
s upon primeval wilderness. And then we came to a kind of circular amphitheatre hollowed out of the yellow rock and peopled with a silent multitude of immobile shapes in rows and columns and ranks, like the guardians of the place.
‘It was a cemetery,’ said Albertina. ‘The Indians made it, before the Europeans came. But they did not come here. Then the Indians died, most of them. So these are all that remains of the Indians.’
In the centre of this amphitheatre was an oblong tumulus containing, presumably, the bones of my dead ancestors and all the mute spectators who surrounded it were meant to scare away grave robbers, mountain lions, or mountain dogs, or any other thing that might disturb the sleepers in the earth. The Indians had shaped unglazed pottery into men on horseback armed with swords and women with bows, into dogs that snarled, and also urns, small houses and cooking implements as if to make a city for the earthen regiments, these crude, brown figures sadly chipped by time and the weather whose eyes were holes through which you could see that all were hollow within. We went down the stepped side of the hollow through these thickets of imitation men and her skirts drifted out behind her and her hair flowed down her bare, richly coloured shoulders as freely as the hair of a Druid priestess. She, formed of the colours of the rocks and the figurines, the darkness and the moonlight.
Love is the synthesis of dream and actuality; love is the only matrix of the unprecedented; love is the tree which buds lovers like roses. In white, vestal majesty, she spoke to me of love among the funerary ornaments on the naked mountain and then I, like an intrepid swimmer, flung myself into the angry breakers of her petticoats and put my mouth against the unshorn seal of love itself. And that was as close as I ever got to consummation. It took place in the graveyard of my forefathers.
Albertina seated herself on a rock that might have been an altar, once, and motioned me to sit beside her. We were the cynosure of the sightless eyes of a countless pottery audience.
‘The state of love is like the South in Hui Shih’s paradox: “The South has at once a limit and no limit.” Lu Teming made the following commentary on this paradox: “He spoke about the South but he was only taking it as an example. There is the mirror and the image but there is also the image of the image; two mirrors reflect each other and images may be multiplied without end.” Ours is a supreme encounter, Desiderio. We are two such disseminating mirrors.’
In the looking glasses of her eyes, I saw reflected my entire being whirl apart and reassemble itself innumerable times.
‘Love is a perpetual journey that does not go through space, an endless oscillating motion that remains unmoved. Love creates for itself a tension that disrupts every tense in time. Love has certain elements in common with eternal regression, since this exchange of reflections can neither be exhausted nor destroyed, but it is not a regression. It is a direct durationless, locationless progression towards an ultimate state of ecstatic annihilation.’
She lectured me and the grave ornaments with the most beautiful gravity and, if I felt my attention wandering, it was only because of the chill in the night air and the teasing presence in my pocket of the cigar the Doctor had given me that I felt would be rude to light up, now. And, besides, my nostrils were full of the musky odour of her skin. Then she put her hand on my wrist; her touch electrified me.
‘My father has discovered that the magnetic field formed by our reciprocal desire – yes, Desiderio, our desire – may be quite unique in its intensity. Such desire must be the strongest force in the world and, if it could be crystallized, would show itself as a deposit which is the definitive residuum of the most powerful inherited associations. And desire is also the source of the greatest source of radiant energy in the entire universe!’
Her intellectual grasp impressed me but I could have wished she was a little less earnest. She had inherited in full her father’s lack of humour. The peep-show proprietor had warned me of his lack of humour. Yet I found her most endearing when she was so serious. When I thought she was endearing, suddenly she looked exactly like the angel the nuns put on top of the convent Christmas tree. And yet she was very eloquent. Her eloquence moved me, as the music of Mozart and the wall-paintings of the Ancient Egyptians used to move me.
‘In theory, one can reduce everything to a series of ultimate simples. When my father perfects this theory, which he will do in perhaps three or four years time, he will name it Hoffman’s Principle of Unwrought Simplicity and once he fully understands its laws, he will reduce everything in the world to the non-created bases from which the world is built. And then he will take the world apart and make a new world.’
What? The grey man in the monocle who so hated humanity he could not bear to see a servant and reserved his affection for a wife who was safely dead? Yes. That grey man. Her black mane brushed my cheek and I touched her shoulders. The texture of her skin was like suède.
‘Because, you see, the world is built from these simples. Everything else in the world is only an irrelevant accessory of certain simples. These simples have a kind of reality that does not belong to anything else. The ultimate simplicity, Desiderio, is Love. That is to say, Desire, Desiderio. Which is generated by four legs in bed.’
Roused beyond endurance, I was naïve enough to take this as an invitation and I flung her backwards on the burial mound and dived straight into her beating, foaming skirts. But, though I managed to get high enough to kiss her simplicity, she fought me so skilfully I could do nothing else. Then she began to laugh.
‘Don’t you see it’s quite out of the question, at the moment?’ she said. ‘You have never yet made love to me because, all the time you have known me, I’ve been maintained in my various appearances only by the power of your desire.’
I was disconcerted to find my physicality thwarted by metaphysics. I struck her in the face with the heavy flat of my hand. Her cut lip bled a little but she did not flinch from the blow nor reprimand me afterwards.
‘Oh, Desiderio, soon! soon! When we go to the laboratory together, you will see me as I really am.’
I did not understand her at all. The segment of moon leaked out a thin, ugly, sepia-coloured light that crumbled everything around us to degenerate forms. I was troubled in mind and very uneasy for the magician’s castle was not the home of unreason at all but a school for some kind of to me incomprehensible logic and now she told me we must go back there, for her father was waiting to take me on a tour of the laboratories.
She took me up to his study high in a tower in a smoothly gliding elevator and she left me outside the door. She kissed me on the cheek and said with infinite promise: ‘Tonight. Later.’ She vanished inside the doors of the elevator, like a white bird, engulfed; I watched her go with I do not know what presentiment of ill-fortune. How could I know that, when I saw her next, I would have no option but to kill her?
I knocked. The Doctor greeted me. He had changed into a white coat for he was a scientist, but whatever clothes he wore he could not have been more impersonal than he had been at first. He was cold, grey, still and fathomless – not a man; the sea. I found I was afraid of him.
His study, his private work-room, his inner sanctum, his lair, his observatory, had windows from which he could check the movements of the transmitters, though he must have watched the stars, too, for there was an antique map of the heavens hanging on the wall. And now I think I must have imagined some, at least, of the decor I found in the room for it satisfied my imagination so fully I was half suspicious, even when I remembered how the peep-show proprietor had told me his former pupil had delved deeply into the Arabic and Oriental and medieval pseudo-sciences. It was half Rottwang’s laboratory in Lang’s Metropolis but it was also the cabinet of Dr Caligari and, more than either, as I remember it, very probably fallaciously, it was the laboratory of a dilettante aristocrat of the late seventeenth century who dabbled in natural philosophy and tried his hand at necromancy, for there were even martyrized shapes of pickled mandrake in bottles on the shelves and a mingled odour of amber and su
lphur filled the air.
The room was cluttered with curiosities – whales’ teeth, narwhals’ horns and skeletons of extinct creatures left higgledy-piggledy wherever they had happened to be put down, all thick with dust and most satisfactory cobwebs, and on the right of the great, black, locked cupboard that dominated the room were alembics, furnaces, Bunsen burners and various other instruments of chemistry as well as jars of preserved monsters and heaps of fossils in forms I would not have thought possible before I had seen less of the world. The shelves to the left of the cupboard bowed in the middle under the weight of the books they bore. Most of the books were very ancient; some were in Arabic and a great number in Chinese. The bulk of his library seemed to be devoted to rare treatises on various forms of divination, though there was no branch of human knowledge that was not represented. On a workbench lay a curious collection of optical toys, a thaumatrope, a Chinese pacing horse lamp and several others, all of types which worked on the principle of persistence of vision. These were all free from dust and seemed to be the objects of his most recent researches. I remembered he had lately been trying to replace the set of samples.
The Doctor laid his hand on the work-bench.
‘At this very bench, I, personally, assisted only by my daughter and my former professor whose fingers were not blind, collected, selected and graded all the complex phenomena in the universe before I could even begin to submit it to changes.’
I murmured my admiration in the back of my throat. He took a ring of keys from his pocket and unlocked the cupboard. The black door swung open to reveal three long shelves crammed with very thick files.
‘Here are the tabulated records of my researches.’