Russell Hoban - The Bat Tattoo

‘You got it. I come from M. Delarue. Here is ID, also message.’ He pulled out a wallet and showed me a driver’s licence which identified him as Jean-Louis Galantière.

‘Nice name,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘It goes.’

The note from M. Delarue confirmed that my visitor was who he said he was and would give me a cheque for twenty thousand pounds as soon as he received the figures from me. Ten thousand of this was a down payment on a new commission: a crash-dummy mastiff for which he was again offering twenty thousand pounds. The mastiff was to have the usual fully functional parts and was to be made to the same scale as the male and female dummies.

‘OK?’ said Jean-Louis, looking at his watch. ‘We are burning daylight, pardner.’

‘You like John Wayne?’

‘In my book he is Number One. With him no one takes liberties. You give me merchandise, I give you money, I am out of here, yes?’ He opened the Louis Vuitton and let loose a powerful aroma of dirty socks. ‘My cover,’ he explained. ‘The douanier looks not too close.’

‘Are you sure you’ll get through Customs all right?’

‘No problem. I am as one invisible.’

‘You’re a whole lot of invisible,’ I said.

‘Rest you tranquil — it goes.’

I removed the batteries from the figures and put them in a small bag which I gave Jean-Louis with the written operating instructions. ‘What an équipement ,’ he said when he saw the male figure.

‘Life is short but Art is long,’ I replied.

He wrapped each figure separately in dirty socks, put them into hidden side compartments in the Louis Vuitton and closed it. He gave me the cheque and we shook hands. ‘ Au revoir ,’ he said.

‘ Au revoir . Would you like something before you go? One for the road?’

‘Have you perhaps the Jack Daniel’s? A small one only.’

I fetched the bottle and two glasses, and poured us both large ones, confident that M. Delarue could afford the taxi’s waiting time. ‘ Santé ,’ said Jean-Louis as we clinked glasses.

‘Here’s looking at you,’ I returned. ‘Are you just a courier or do you do other work for M. Delarue?’

‘I am his chauffeur.’

‘What sort of a man is M. Delarue?’

‘Rich,’ he answered, then made a gesture of zipping his lips, after which he raised an admonitory index finger.

‘Right, no more questions about him. What did you do before you became his chauffeur?’

‘Time.’

‘Ah.’ I was going to ask him what he did the time for but thought better of it, so we drank companionably but without conversation from then on until he left, and thus ended the first transaction with my new patron.

The next morning a fax arrived in which M. Delarue said that he was delighted, his satisfaction was greater than expected; the action of the figures together with the sound produced an experience without parallel. He was lost in admiration and looked forward with eager anticipation to the mastiff.

It’s astonishing, really, how quickly the strange becomes the usual. Whoever and whatever M. Delarue was, he was willing and able to pay handsomely for his playthings and I now settled into the role of providing him with the wooden objects of his desire. As I began my mastiff research I wondered what the end of all this would be. In the meantime, craftsmanship and the moral obligation to do the job right took over. As well as something else which I’ve already touched on: these wooden erotica excited me; not only erotically but — dare I use the word? — artistically. Working with wood felt good; it put new heart into me. I was beginning to feel like an artist, beginning to wonder what I might carve when I finished with M. Delarue’s commissions.

I looked at mastiffs in books, I talked to mastiff breeders on the telephone, I went to Watford to photograph a dog called Longmoor’s Dark Dandy and paid his owner fifty pounds. Remarking my interest in the animal’s private parts, he smiled knowingly and asked for twenty-five pounds more, which I paid with a cryptic smile. Although he obviously had theories, I very much doubted that he could imagine what my research was for.

On my return I bought more wood, made my clay model, just a little hyperbolised, went to the lime, thoroughly enjoyed the carving, and ended up with a crash-dummy mastiff that could confidently collide with the best society.

As before, Dieter Scharf supplied the pelvic motor. ‘It didn’t take us long to get down on all fours, did it,’ he said.

Although no sound had been requested I looped a tape of Maria Callas singing ‘E strano! E strano! ’ and the aria that follows in Act One of La Traviata, ‘Ah, forse e lui che l’anima …’, ‘Ah, perhaps he is the one …’ The finishing touch on my crash-dummy creatures was always the yellow-and-black-quartered discs; these came to have an almost mystical quality for me, particularly when they were in motion.

Jean-Louis and I did the business as before, and Bonzo was received as enthusiastically as the first figures had been. ‘The animal is all that one could wish,’ wrote M. Delarue, ‘and the music — what a touch!’ The cheque Jean-Louis had given me brought the total up to fifty-five thousand pounds, fifteen thousand of which was a down payment on the next commission. ‘It is my hope,’ he wrote, ‘that your earnings from these commissions will gain for you a little non-commercial time in which to follow your art wherever it leads.’

My art! Although I was beginning to feel like an artist I hadn’t been thinking of what I did as art but perhaps a rethink was in order. This was a time when unmade beds and used condoms were fetching high prices, and certainly my crash-dummies were no less — maybe even more — art than those.

M. Delarue’s next request was for a crash-dummy gorilla with the usual specs. Feeling that he might have underpaid me on the first two commissions, he was offering thirty thousand pounds, confident that my work, as always, would exceed expectations. That would bring the total up to seventy thousand pounds for my art. Maybe with a capital A: my Art. A crash-dummy gorilla, OK. Having done the others, I found no reason to draw the line at this one. But what did he want from me besides his crash-dummy bonking menagerie? What was he expecting me to do with this time that his money was buying for me?

Never mind, I said to myself, just make a good gorilla. I decided not to visit the Regent’s Park Zoo. When I last went there, some years ago, there was a female gorilla licking her urine off the floor. Was that her way, I wondered, of saying, ‘Is it I or is it not I?’ I had National Geographics , I had a video of David Attenborough whispering his narration while chewing vegetation and hanging out with a silverback and his troupe; and I had my own idea of gorilla-in-itself, a creature likely to be the dominant member in any relationship. I rigorously maintained my standards and eventually achieved a wooden gorilla with whom a wooden woman might crash any party of the appropriate scale with complete assurance.

I thought of my gorilla woodenly dreaming of African mountains while doing what I’d been paid to make him do. I gave Jean-Louis a tape to take with him for the gorilla-and-partner soundtrack:: Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor . I couldn’t find a recording by Marie-Claire Alain on that wonderful organ in Flensborg, Sweden that sounds as if it was made from the salt-encrusted timbers of Noah’s Ark so I went with Albert Schweitzer at the Parish Church in Gunsbach, Alsace. On reflection I was pleased with that choice; I thought Schweitzer and the gorilla would get on well together.