AMBASSADOR: An analogy is a signpost.
MINISTER: You have taken away all the signposts.
AMBASSADOR: But we have populated the city with analogies.
MINISTER: I should dearly like to know the reason why.
AMBASSADOR: For the sake of liberty, Minister.
MINISTER: What an exceedingly pretty notion!
AMBASSADOR: I certainly did not think that answer would satisfy you. What if I told you that we were engaged in uncovering the infinite potentiality of phenomena?
MINISTER: I would suggest you moved your operations to some other location.
(The Ambassador smiled and dissected a translucent sliver of sole.)
MINISTER: I began to perceive a short while ago that the Doctor intended utterly to disrupt any vestige of the social fabric of my country of which he himself was once one of the finest intellectual ornaments.
AMBASSADOR: You speak of him as if he were a piece of famille rose!
(The Minister ignored this gentle reprimand.)
MINISTER: I can only conclude he is motivated purely by malice.
AMBASSADOR: What, the mad scientist who brews up revengeful plagues in his test-tubes? Were his motives so simple, he would, by now, I assure you, have utterly destroyed everything.
(The Minister pushed back his plate. I could see he was about to speak direct from the heart.)
MINISTER: Yesterday the cathedral dissolved in a display of fireworks. I suppose the childish delight many showed when they saw the rockets, the catherine wheels and the vari-coloured stars and meteors affected me most of all, for the cathedral had been a masterpiece of sobriety. It was given the most vulgar funeral pyre that could possibly have been devised. Yet it had brooded over the city like the most conventual of stone angels for two hundred years. Time, the slavish time you despise, had been free enough to work in equal partnership with the architect; the masons took thirty years to build the cathedral and, with every year that passed, the invisible moulding of time deepened the moving beauty of its soaring lines. Time was implicit in its fabric. I am not a religious man myself and yet the cathedral stood for me as a kind of symbol of the spirit of the city.
It was an artifice –
AMBASSADOR: – and so we burned it down with feux d’artifice –
(The Minister ignored him.)
MINISTER: – and its grandeur, increasing year by year as it grew more massively into time itself, had been programmed into it by the cunning of the architects. It was an illusion of the sublime and yet its symmetry expressed the symmetry of the society which had produced it. The city and, by extension, the state, is an artifice of a similar kind. A societal structure –
(The Ambassador raised his beautiful eyebrows at these words and tapped his painted nail against his teeth as though in amused reproof of such jargon.)
MINISTER: (intransigently) A societal structure is the greatest of all the works of art that man can make. Like the greatest art, it is perfectly symmetric. It has the architectonic structure of music, a symmetry imposed upon it in order to resolve a play of tensions which would disrupt order but without which order is lifeless. In this serene and abstract harmony, everything moves with the solemnity of the absolutely predictable and –
(Here the young man interrupted him impatiently.)
AMBASSADOR: Go in fear of abstractions!
(Pettishly he consumed the last crumbs of fish and fell silent until the waiters had replaced the plates with, to my delight and astonishment, tournedos Rossini. The Ambassador brusquely dismissed an offering of pommes allumettes. When he spoke again, his voice had deepened in colour.)
AMBASSADOR: Our primary difference is a philosophical one, Minister. For us, the world exists only as a medium in which we execute our desires. Physically, the world itself, the actual world – the real world, if you like – is formed of malleable clay; its metaphysical structure is just as malleable.
MINISTER: Metaphysics are no concern of mine.
(The Ambassador’s hair abruptly emitted a fountain of blue lights and, suddenly Charlotte Corday, he pointed a dagger at the Minister.)
AMBASSADOR: Dr Hoffman will make metaphysics your business!
(The Minister cut his meat phlegmatically.)
MINISTER: I do not think so.
(The words fell from his mouth with so heavy a weight I was surprised they did not drop straight through the table. I was deeply impressed by his gravity. It quenched even the enthusiasm I had experienced at mining a black gem of truffle from my wedge of paté, for it was the first time I had experienced the power of an absolute negative. The Ambassador visibly responded to this change in tone. If he instantly ceased to look like an avenging angel, he also instantly became less epicene.)
AMBASSADOR: Please name your price. The Doctor would like to buy you.
MINISTER: No.
AMBASSADOR: Allow me to suggest a tentative figure… five provinces; four public transport systems; three ports; two metropolises and an entire civil administration.
MINISTER: No.
AMBASSADOR: The Doctor will go even higher, you know.
MINISTER: No!
(The Ambassador shrugged and we all continued to eat our delicious meat until it was gone and the salad came. We were drinking red wine. The skin of the Ambassador’s throat was so luminously delicate one could see the glowing shadow of the burgundy trickle down his gullet after he had taken a sip.)
AMBASSADOR: The Doctor’s campaign is still only in its preliminary stages and yet he has already made of this city a timeless place outside the world of reason.
MINISTER: All he has done is to find some means of bewitching the intelligence. He has only induced a radical suspension of disbelief. As in the early days of the cinema, all the citizens are jumping through the screen to lay their hands on the naked lady in the bathtub!
AMBASSADOR: And yet, in fact, their fingers touch flesh.
MINISTER: They believe they do. Yet all they touch is substantial shadow.
AMBASSADOR: And what a beautiful definition of flesh! You know I am only substantial shadow, Minister, but if you cut me, I bleed. Touch me; I palpitate!
(Certainly I had never seen a phantom who looked at that moment more shimmeringly unreal than the Ambassador, nor one who seemed to throb with more erotic promise. The Minister, however, laughed.)
MINISTER: Whether you are real or not, I know for sure that I am not inventing you.
AMBASSADOR: How is that?
MINISTER: I don’t have enough imagination.
(Now it was the Ambassador’s turn to laugh and then he paused and harked for a moment, as if listening to an invisible voice. It was a childish trick but remarkably effective.)
AMBASSADOR: The Doctor’s offer has just risen by four opera houses and the cities of Rome, Florence and Dresden before the fire. We will throw in John Sebastian Bach as your Kapellmeister, to clinch the bargain.
MINISTER: (dismissively) Come, now! We are well at work upon our counter measures!
AMBASSADOR: Yes, indeed. We have been watching the progress of your electronic harem with considerable interest.
(I had never thought of the Minister’s computer centre as an electronic harem. The simile struck me as admirable. But the Minister bit his lip.)
MINISTER: How?
(The Ambassador ignored this question.)
AMBASSADOR: You are in the process of tabulating every thing you can lay your hands on. In the sacred name of symmetry, you slide them into a series of straitjackets and label them with, oh, my God, what inexpressibly boring labels! Your mechanical prostitutes welcome their customers in an alien gibber wholly denied to the human tongue while you, you madame, work as an abortionist on the side. You murder the imagination in the womb, Minister.
MINISTER: Somebody must impose restraint. If I am an abortionist, your master is a forger. He has passed off upon us an entire currency of counterfeit phenomena.
AMBASSADOR: Do you regard the iconographic objects – or, shall we
say, symbolically functioning propositions – which we transmit to you as a malign armoury inimical to the human race, of which you take this city to be a microcosm?
(The Minister put his knife and fork together symmetrically on his empty plate and spoke with great precision.)
MINISTER: I do.
(The Ambassador leaned back in his chair and smiled the most seductive of smiles.)
AMBASSADOR: Then you are wrong. They are emanations only of the asymmetric, Minister, the asymmetric you deny. The doctor knows how to pierce appearances and to allow real forms to emerge into substantiality from the transparency of immanence. You cannot destroy our imagery; you may annihilate the appearances but the asymmetric essence can neither be created nor destroyed – only changed. And if you disintegrate the images with your lasers and your infra red rays, they only revert to their constituent parts and soon come together again in another form which you yourself have rendered even more arbitrary by your interference. The Doctor is about to reveal the entire truth of the cosmogony. Please wait patiently. It will not take much longer.
(They brought us fruit and cheese. The Ambassador cut himself a sliver of brie.)
AMBASSADOR: You do appreciate, Minister, that very soon death, in innumerable guises, will walk these teeming streets.
MINISTER: She does already.
(The Ambassador shrugged, as if to say: ‘You have seen nothing yet.’ He pulled off a sprig of grapes.)
AMBASSADOR: Are you prepared to capitulate?
MINISTER: What are your master’s terms?
AMBASSADOR: Absolute authority to establish a regime of total liberation.
(The Minister ground out his cigarette and cut a portion of Stilton. From the bowl of fruit, he selected a Cox’s Orange Pippin.)
MINISTER: I do not capitulate.
AMBASSADOR: Very well. Prepare yourself for a long, immense and deliberate derangement of the senses. I understand you have broken all the mirrors.
MINISTER: That was to stop them begetting images.
(The Ambassador produced a small mirror from his pocket and presented it to the Minister, so that he saw his own face. The Minister covered his eyes and screamed but almost at once regained his composure and went on paring the skin from his apple. The walls of the world did not cave in and the feline smile of the Ambassador did not waver. The meal concluded. The Ambassador refused coffee but, with a return of his original, de haut en bas manner, rose to bid us farewell. As he left the restaurant, all the flowers in every vase shed every single one of their petals. I switched off the tape recorder; now I must rely on my memory.)
I myself ordered coffee and the Minister took his habitual black tea, though this afternoon he tipped into his cup the contents of a balloon of brandy. He had me play over the recording of their conversation and then stayed sunk in thought for a while, lost inside a cloud of cigarette smoke.
‘If I were a religious man, Desiderio,’ he said at last, ‘I would say we had just survived an encounter with Mephistopheles.’
The Minister had always struck me as a deeply religious man.
‘Let me tell you a parable,’ he went on. ‘A man made a pact with the Devil. The condition was this: the man delivered up his soul as soon as Satan had assassinated God. “Nothing simpler,” said Satan and put a revolver to his own temple.’
‘Do you cast Dr Hoffman as God or Satan?’
The Minister smiled.
‘As my parable suggests, the roles are interchangeable,’ he replied. ‘Come. Let us go.’
But, for myself, I was bewildered, for certain timbres in the young man’s voice had reawakened all my last night’s dream and, as if his voice had struck those mysterious notes which are supposed to shatter glass, a fine tracery of cracks had all at once appeared in the surface of my indifference. The young man fascinated me. As the Minister signed the check, I saw the curious ambassador had left behind him on the chair he had occupied a handkerchief of the same exquisite lace as the fabric of his shirt. I picked it up. Along the hem, stitched in a flourish of silk so white it was virtually invisible, was the name I had only seen before in my dream, the name: ALBERTINA. The hieratic chant of the black swan rang again in my ears; I swayed as if I were about to faint.
The Minister slipped the head waiter a fat tip and lit a fresh cigarette as he led me by the arm into the equivocal afternoon, where the sunlight was already thickening.
‘Desiderio,’ he said. ‘How would you like to go on a little trip?’
2 The Mansion of Midnight
The Minister was clutching at straws but he clutched ferociously.
That very morning, as I tested the Ambassador’s letter in another part of the Bureau of Determination, the Minister’s computers had startled him by registering a significant analogy. They posited certain correspondences between the activities of the proprietor of a certain peep-show who had operated his business upon the pier at the seaside resort of S. throughout the summer and now showed signs of quartering himself there for the winter. It seemed a small enough clue to me; hardly worth the importance the Minister placed on it – and hardly enough to justify my new promotion. Nevertheless, promoted I was; between lunch and teatime, I became the Minister’s special agent and my mission was, if I could find him, to assassinate Dr Hoffman as inconspicuously as possible.
I was chosen for the mission because: (a) I was in my right mind; (b) I was dispensable and (c) the Minister’s computers decided my skill at crossword puzzles suggested a facility in the processes of analogical thought which might lead me to the Doctor where everyone else had failed. I think the Minister himself thought of me as a kind of ambulant computer. Even so, in spite of the encouraging voice with which he wished me farewell, I guessed it was something of a forlorn hope.
The computers constructed me an identity sufficiently foolproof to take me past the checkpoints of the Determination Police, for I was the most secret of agents. I was to pose as an Inspector of Veracity, first class. At the town of S., some sixty miles further up the coast, I was to make a special report on the mysterious affair of the Mayor, who had disappeared some time before. The inscrutable business of bureaucracy went on, war or no war, and my bureaucratic credentials were impeccable. I was issued with a small car, a complement of petrol coupons and a pocket arsenal of revolvers, etc. I packed a bag with a notebook or two and a shirt. I took with me no souvenirs or objects of sentimental value because I had none. Even though I did not know when, if ever, I would see it again I did not bother to say good-bye to my arid room. I left the city the next morning; as I passed the Bureau of Determination, I saw a slogan had appeared on the wall. It read: DR HOFFMAN PISSES LIGHTNING. I drove off through a gigantic storm. It was still before breakfast time but the sky was so black that an unnatural darkness filled the streets which today, as if on purpose to speed my departure, had reverted to the forms I had always known, streets without magic or surprise, streets as boring as only those of home can be.
I did not have much hope of returning to them; nor did I believe the city would survive very long after I had gone, not only because I had always obscurely felt I was one of the invisible struts of reason which had helped to prop it up for so long but because it seemed inevitable it would soon collapse. Yet I felt no nostalgia when, after I speeded up the interminable negotiations with the Police by the gift of several cartons of the Minister’s cigarettes, I took the road that led north. I suppose I hoped that, if the city fell, at least it would coffin the environment which bred my unappeasable boredom. There was nothing in the great heap of stucco, brick and stone behind me to which I felt the least attachment except the memory of a certain mysterious dream and that I took with me. And, if I felt a certain excitement as the miles wound away beneath me, it was because of that dream and the name, which seemed to shelter three magic entities, the glass woman, the black swan and the ambassador. The name was a clue which pointed to a living being beneath the conjuring tricks, for such tricks imply the presence of a conjurer. I was nourishing
an ambition – to rip away that ruffled shirt and find out whether the breasts of an authentic woman swelled beneath it; and if around her neck was a gold collar with the name ALBERTINA engraved upon it.
And then? I would fall on my knees in worship.