Emmanuelle (22 page)

Mario looked at her and his gaze embarrassed her. She changed position on the leather sofa, showing her legs as she had said she knew how to do. She told herself that he had probably talked to her about making love with two men at once because he wanted to share her with his friend. “All right, then,” she thought, “I’ll learn!” She would have preferred to deal only with Mario, or, if there was no way to avoid Quentin, to have him limit himself to the role of spectator, whose importance Mario appraised so highly. But she was determined not to oppose his demands. Perhaps, she acknowledged, she even had an obscure desire to be possessed by Quentin also. And since Mario claimed that making love with two men was so enchanting . . .

“Have you at least made love with several women?” asked her hero.

She marveled once again at his being able to read her thoughts so easily. He must know, therefore, how much she desired him. She saw him look at her legs and it made her forget to answer.

He said in the special vibrant tone that his voice always assumed when he quoted poetry:

“‘I, so pure! My knees

Foresee the terrors of defenseless knees!’”

She was glad he was sensitive to the eloquence of her body. But he did not let himself be distracted from his curiosity so easily. He came back to his question: “I mean with several women at the same time?”

“Yes,” she said.

He seemed overjoyed. “Aha, you’re not so innocent!”

“Who said I was? I’ve never claimed any such thing.”

Suspecting her of virtue had become the worst insult she could imagine. If showing her legs was not enough to make Mario respect her, she would stand up on the sofa and take off all her clothes. The impulse was so strong that she raised herself on her knees. And if that demonstration did not convince him, she would masturbate in front of him! Her breasts were burning with ardor; perhaps it was also the brandy that had suddenly made her so daring. But he remained nonchalant. He seemed more avid for verbal eroticism than for action . . . “And how do you go about it when you exchange caresses with two girls at the same time?”

Emmanuelle felt impatient. To hasten the end of his inquisition she described scenes in which imagination played a greater part than reality. She had no desire to probe her memories in detail, and a bit of invention, she thought, even if it was naïve here and there, ought to please Mario more than historical accuracy.

He was not taken in. “All that seems like child’s play to me,” he interrupted amiably. “It’s time to grow up, my fair friend!”

Angered, she tried to deal her adversary a blow that would avenge her.

“And you,” she said, “do you go about it better with boys?”

When she realized that such an inopportune allusion might thwart her own aims, she bit her tongue, but it was already too late.

To her surprise, however, he did not seem to feel the slightest embarrassment. On the contrary, his voice was infused with good humor. “We’ll show you that, my dear!”

He said something to Quentin in English. Emmanuelle wondered in dismay if the two men were going to give her a demonstration on the spot.

6

The Sam-Lo

In the morning sow thy seed, and in the
evening withhold not thy hand.

—
Ecclesiastes
, 11:6

The tree of knowledge enveloped her in
its foliage, which was my arms.

—Henri de Montherlant,
Don Juan

The section of the city that Emmanuelle was now discovering bore little resemblance to the avenues lined with concrete buildings or villas shielded by the greenery of the gardens and the fiery glow of royal poincianas that she had known since her arrival in Bangkok. Was she dreaming, perhaps? The full moon gave the setting a pallor and an animated relief so well suited to the kind of ballet she was dancing that it seemed impossible for all that to be real. “Setting” was the right word, in its theatrical sense, with its evocations of false perspectives, platforms, cardboard walls, unstable assemblages and scaffoldings. Following Mario and followed by Quentin, she apprehensively placed one sharp-heeled shoe in front of the other on a footbridge made of a plank about thirty feet long and one foot wide, with each end resting on a support that rose from the still, greasy water of a canal that seemed to be primarily a sewer. Their weight bent it and made it rebound like a diving board. She had no doubt that sooner or later she would be thrown into the slime.

When they reached one support, they had to step sideways onto the next plank, which seemed even more rotten and shaky than the one they had just left. They had covered several hundred yards in this way, and there was no indication that their strange journey was about to end. The farther she went, the more Emmanuelle felt that she was leaving the known world forever. Even the air she breathed here had a different consistency and smell. The night was thick with such a total silence that she scarcely dared to breathe, much less to speak, as though for fear of committing a sacrilege. Finally she realized that this silence was actually composed of the shrill, even, uninterrupted chirping of crickets.

Half an hour earlier, she and her guides had left the log house in a narrow boat that, in answer to Mario’s call, a boatman had brought to the floating pier. They had glided along the
khlong
for a long time. Then, without her being able to determine whether Mario had decided at random or recognized a landmark, they had left the boat and begun following that wooden sidewalk perpendicular to the main canal and above a secondary one that was narrower and apparently quite shallow, since the light Thai canoes could not use it.

This canal was bordered on both sides by low huts, with walls of rusty sheet metal or blackened bamboo and roofs of palm branches, connected with the footbridge by precarious drawbridges made of worm-eaten beams or unsquared logs. The doors and windows were carefully barricaded, as though closed against a plague. “How can they breathe?” wondered Emmanuelle. The sampan-dwellers’ way of life made more sense to her: when she had passed their floating houses tied along the banks of the main canal, she had seen men, women, and children taking advantage of the rainless night, sleeping in the bow, under the stars, with their bodies pressed together, their mouths round and, sometimes, their eyes open. Why then should others lock themselves here in damp pits and shut out the slightest breath of air?

Her feeling of unreality grew more pronounced as time went by. It was incredible that their tightrope walk along this inhospitable street of stagnant water and dead wood could have gone on for so long without leading them anywhere. She was already dreading the acrobatics she would have to go through if she and her two escorts should happen to meet other nocturnal travelers coming toward them. She doubted that the problem would arise, however, because the realm into which her companions were taking her seemed too desolate to contain any living beings.

But a moment later a man emerged from one of the huts. Very tall, with a muscular torso the color of smoldering embers, wearing a piece of red cloth tied around his waist. He thoughtfully untied it, looking at the three foreigners who were walking toward him. When he was completely naked, he urinated into the water. Even in pictures, Emmanuelle had never seen a penis at rest that was as long as this one—as long in repose as Jean’s in erection. “It’s beautiful!” she thought. And the whole man was beautiful. When they came up to him, he stared at her from less than three feet away. She thought of only one thing—that penis. If it should rise . . . But the Thai remained as calm as marble. He looked at her half-bare breasts and his member did not move. They passed him and continued on their way.

A fork. The ghostly path branched out. Mario hesitated. He consulted Quentin and finally chose one of the branches. Emmanuelle was afraid it might not have been the right one, because they went on walking for a long time. But she did not dare complain. She had not said a word since they had left the boat. Suddenly a cry escaped from her. The wooden path had turned sharply and led into a kind of courtyard—she nearly thought it was a clearing because she had such a strong feeling of being lost in a jungle. Facing them was a fantastic figure, sixty feet high. She had seen it from a distance but had mistaken it for a tree. It was Genghis Khan—thick mustache, merciless eyes, hands grasping the daggers at his waist, bulging muscles softened by the moonlight. Emmanuelle’s heart pounded in disorder. No doubt of it, the sorcery was beginning. In a moment, grimacing Mongols would burst out of their lair and make her the victim of bloodthirsty magic rites. While her imagination, swifter than her reason, was building a world of phantasms, a nervous laugh showed that she had not lost her head completely. Leaning against the gigantic conqueror’s hip, looking like a miniature beside him, a ballerina in a tutu was smiling reservedly at the stars. Other figures of multicolored cardboard were piled up pell-mell, some standing, most lying on the ground.

“It gives you a strange feeling to run into those film advertisements in a place like this,” Emmanuelle said, to reassure herself with the sound of her own voice. “I wonder how they could have been brought here—is there any other way than along this incredible footbridge?” She had a slight suspicion that Mario might have inflicted a useless trial on her.

“No,” he said. He did not see fit to make any additional comments.

They crossed the storage area, passing between the great Khan’s legs, walked along a corrugated iron fence, and entered a little courtyard. Yellow light was filtering from a half-open door. Mario stopped on the threshold, called out, then went inside without waiting for an answer. Emmanuelle was feeling less and less calm. It was a hostile place, impregnated with an odor that was difficult to define—something like a mixture of dust, smoke, licorice, and tea. They went into a windowless room containing only a bench covered with a torn cretonne. A dirty curtain, dyed a hideous blue, was hung across its far end. Almost immediately, a hand pushed it aside and a woman appeared.

The sight of her relieved Emmanuelle a little. She was a very old Chinese woman—surely a hundred years old, thought Emmanuelle—whose perfectly oval face was so wrinkled that it looked like crêpe. Her skin color was like ancient ivory, almost orange. Her shiny white hair was carefully drawn back over her temples and tied in a bun. The slits of her eyes and lips were so thin that they could barely be discerned among the folds of her skin. Only when she began speaking in a cracked voice, uncovering black-lacquered teeth, was Emmanuelle able to determine with certainty where her mouth was. Her hands were hidden in the sleeves of her starched tunic, which seemed even whiter by contrast with the lustrous black silk of her broad trousers.

When she had finished a rather long speech, to which Mario appeared to pay no attention, the hostess made a low bow with an agility that was surprising, for she gave the outward impression that she was made of dry wood. Then she turned and plunged into the depths of the building. They followed her without a word. First they went through a totally dark room. Emmanuelle had a feeling that there were moving shadows in it. She was genuinely afraid. Next they entered a little room where she discovered with uneasiness that two old men, looking almost moldy, were lying naked on a varnished wooden platform. She blinked her eyes and had time to see their ribs outlined beneath their brown skin, spotted with white, and their dilated, dreamy pupils, which did not seem to see her. She also cast a quick glance at their wrinkled penises and dry testicles, but the group was already passing into another room, little different from the preceding one, except that it was unoccupied. The old Chinese woman stopped; this was where she had been taking them. She delivered another sermon, then vanished, as though through a trap door.

“What’s happening?” Emmanuelle asked anxiously. “What was she chattering about? And what are we doing in this sinister place? Everything here is disgusting!”

“That’s just an idea of yours,” said Mario. “It’s dilapidated, I’ll grant you that, but it’s well scrubbed.”

Another woman appeared, much younger than the first, but also much uglier. She was carrying, on a round tray, an alcohol lamp with a long chimney an inch thick—Emmanuelle had never seen such massive glass, even in a lens—tiny little round tin boxes, long steel needles like those used for knitting stockings, dried palm leaves cut into rectangles, and an instrument that Emmanuelle could not identify—a tube of brown, highly polished bamboo, about as long as an arm and as thick as a flute. At first sight, it seemed to be closed at both ends, but then she saw that one end had a hole in it no wider than a matchstick. Its whole length was inlaid with silver-gilt motifs. About a third of the way up from the closed end, a kind of flattened wooden polyhedron, the size of her fist, seemed to be balanced on top of the tube, attached to it at a narrow point of contact. It was so polished and smooth that the dancing flame of the lamp was reflected from its surface in changing colors. At its center was a cavity that had the diameter of a pearl, with a very small opening at the bottom.

Mario anticipated his pupil’s questions. “You’re looking at a pipe, my dear. Isn’t it a beautiful object?”