Gravity's Rainbow (41 page)

A voice from some cell too distant for us to locate intones: “I am blessed Metatron.
I am keeper of the Secret. I am guardian of the Throne. . . .” In here, the more disturbing
Whig excesses have been chiseled away or painted over. No point disturbing the inmates.
All is neutral tones, soft draperies, Impressionist prints on the walls. Only the
marble floor has been left, and under the bulbs it gleams like water. Old Pudding
must negotiate half a dozen offices or anterooms before reaching his destination.
It hasn’t yet been a fortnight, but there is already something of ritual to this,
of iteration. Each room will hold a single unpleasantness for him: a test he must
pass. He wonders if Pointsman hasn’t set these up too. Of course, of course he must . . .
how did the young bastard ever find out? Have I been talking in m’ sleep? Have they
been slipping in at night with their truth serums to—and just at the clear emergence
of the thought, here is his first test tonight. In the first room: a hypodermic outfit
has been left lying on a table. Very clear and shining, with the rest of the room
slightly out of focus. Yes mornings I felt terribly groggy, couldn’t wake, after dreaming—were
they dreams? I was talking. . . . But it’s all he remembers, talking while someone
else was there listening. . . . He is shivering with fear, and his face is whiter
than whitewash.

In the second antechamber is an empty red tin that held coffee. The brand name is
Savarin. He understands that it means to say “Severin.” Oh, the filthy, the mocking
scoundrel. . . . But these are not malignant puns against an intended sufferer so
much as a sympathetic magic, a repetition high and low of some prevailing form (as,
for instance, no sane demolition man at his evening dishwater will wash a spoon between
two cups, or even between a glass and a plate, for fear of the Trembler it implies . . .
because it’s a trembler-tongue he really holds, poised between its two fatal contacts,
in fingers aching with having been so suddenly reminded). . . . In the third, a file
drawer is left ajar, a stack of case histories partly visible, and an open copy of
Krafft-Ebing. In the fourth, a human skull. His excitement grows. In the fifth, a
Malacca cane. I’ve been in more wars for England than I can remember . . . haven’t
I paid enough? Risked it all for them, time after time. . . . Why must they torment
an old man? In the sixth chamber, hanging from the overhead, is a tattered tommy up
on White Sheet Ridge, field uniform burned in Maxim holes black-rimmed as the eyes
of Cléo de Mérode, his own left eye shot away, the corpse beginning to stink . . .
no . . . no! an overcoat, someone’s old coat that’s all, left on a hook in the wall . . .
but couldn’t he
smell
it? Now mustard gas comes washing in, into his brain with a fatal buzz as dreams
will when we don’t want them, or when we are suffocating. A machine-gun on the German
side sings
dum diddy da da
, an English weapon answers
dum dum
, and the night tightens coiling around his body, just before H-Hour. . . .

At the seventh cell, his knuckles feeble against the dark oak, he knocks. The lock,
remotely, electrically commanded, slams open with an edge of echo trailing. He enters,
and closes the door behind him. The cell is in semidarkness, with only a scented candle
burning back in a corner that seems miles away. She waits for him in a tall Adam chair,
white body and black uniform-of-the-night. He drops to his knees.

“Domina Nocturna . . . shining mother and last love . . . your servant Ernest Pudding,
reporting as ordered.”

In these war years, the focus of a woman’s face is her mouth. Lipstick, among these
tough and too often shallow girls, prevails like blood. Eyes have been left to weather
and to tears: these days, with so much death hidden in the sky, out under the sea,
among the blobs and smears of recco photographs, most women’s eyes are only functional.
But Pudding comes out of a different time, and Pointsman has considered this detail
too. The Brigadier’s lady has spent an hour at her vanity mirror with mascara, liner,
shadow, and pencil, lotions and rouges, brushes and tweezers, consulting from time
to time a looseleaf album filled with photographs of the reigning beauties of thirty
and forty years ago, so that her reign these nights may be authentic if not—it is
for her state of mind as well as his—legitimate. Her blonde hair is tucked and pinned
beneath a thick black wig. When she sits with her head down, forgetting the regal
posture, the hair comes forward, over her shoulders, below her breasts. She is naked
now, except for a long sable cape and black boots with court heels. Her only jewelry
is a silver ring with an artificial ruby not cut to facets but still in the original
boule, an arrogant gout of blood, extended now, waiting his kiss.

His clipped mustache bristles, trembling, across her fingers. She has filed her nails
to long points and polished them the same red as her ruby. Their ruby. In this light
the nails are almost black. “That’s enough. Get ready.”

She watches him undress, medals faintly jingling, starch shirt rattling. She wants
a cigarette desperately, but her instructions are not to smoke. She tries to keep
her hands still. “What are you thinking, Pudding?”

“Of the night we first met.” The mud stank. The Archies were chugging in the darkness.
His men, his poor sheep, had taken gas that morning. He was alone. Through the periscope,
underneath a star shell that hung in the sky, he saw her . . . and though he was hidden,
she saw Pudding. Her face was pale, she was dressed all in black, she stood in No-man’s
Land, the machine guns raked their patterns all around her, but she needed no protection.
“They knew you, Mistress. They were your own.”

“And so were you.”

“You called to me, you said, ‘I shall never leave you. You belong to me. We shall
be together, again and again, though it may be years between. And you will always
be at my service.’”

He is on his knees again, bare as a baby. His old man’s flesh creeps coarse-grained
in the light from the candle. Old scars and new welts group here and there over his
skin. His penis stands at present arms. She smiles. At her command, he crawls forward
to kiss her boots. He smells wax and leather, and can feel her toes flexing beneath
his tongue, through the black skin. From the corner of his eye, on a little table,
he can see the remains of her early evening meal, the edge of a plate, the tops of
two bottles, mineral water, French wine. . . .

“Time for pain now, Brigadier. You shall have twelve of the best, if your offering
tonight pleases me.”

Here is his worst moment. She has refused him before. His memories of the Salient
do not interest her. She doesn’t seem to care for mass slaughter as much as for myth,
and personal terror . . . but please . . . please let her accept. . . .

“At Badajoz,” whispering humbly, “during the war in Spain . . . a bandera of Franco’s
Legion advanced on the city, singing their regimental hymn. They sang of the bride
they had taken. It was you, Mistress: they-they were proclaiming you as their bride. . . .”

She’s silent for a bit, making him wait. At last, eyes holding his, she smiles, the
component of evil in it she has found he needs taking care of itself as usual: “Yes. . . .
Many of them did become my bridegrooms that day,” she whispers, flexing the bright
cane. There seems to be a winter wind in the room. Her image threatens to shake apart
into separate flakes of snow. He loves to listen to her speak, hers is the voice that
found him from the broken rooms of the Flemish villages, he knows, he can tell from
the accent, the girls who grew old in the Low Countries, whose voices went corrupted
from young to old, gay to indifferent, as that war drew out, season into ever more
bitter season. . . . “I took their brown Spanish bodies to mine. They were the color
of the dust, and the twilight, and of meats roasted to a perfect texture . . . most
of them were so very young. A summer day, a day of love: one of the most poignant
I ever knew. Thank you. You shall have your pain tonight.”

It’s a part of her routine she can enjoy, at least. Though she has never read any
classic British pornography, she does feel herself, sure as a fish, well in the local
mainstream. Six on the buttocks, six more across the nipples.
Whack
where’s that Gourd Surprise now? Eh? She likes the way the blood leaps to cross last
night’s welts. Often it’s all she can do to keep from moaning herself at each of his
grunts of pain, two voices in a dissonance which would be much less accidental than
it sounded. . . . Some nights she’s gagged him with a ceremonial sash, bound him with
a gold-tasseled fourragère or his own Sam Browne. But tonight he lies humped on the
floor at her feet, his withered ass elevated for the cane, bound by nothing but his
need for pain, for something real, something pure. They have taken him so far from
his simple nerves. They have stuffed paper illusions and military euphemisms between
him and this truth, this rare decency, this moment at her scrupulous feet . . . no
it’s not guilt here, not so much as amazement—that he could have listened to so many
years of ministers, scientists, doctors each with his specialized lies to tell, when
she was here all the time, sure in her ownership of his failing body, his true body:
undisguised by uniform, uncluttered by drugs to keep from him her communiqués of vertigo,
nausea and pain. . . . Above all, pain. The clearest poetry, the endearment of greatest
worth. . . .

He struggles to his knees to kiss the instrument. She stands over him now, legs astride,
pelvis cocked forward, fur cape held apart on her hips. He dares to gaze up at her
cunt, that fearful vortex. Her pubic hair has been dyed black for the occasion. He
sighs, and lets escape a small shameful groan.

“Ah . . . yes, I know.” She laughs. “Poor mortal Brigadier, I know. It is my last
mystery,” stroking with fingernails her labia, “you cannot ask a woman to reveal her
last mystery, now, can you?”

“Please . . .”

“No. Not tonight. Kneel here and take what I give you.”

Despite himself—already a reflex—he glances quickly over at the bottles on the table,
the plates, soiled with juices of meat, Hollandaise, bits of gristle and bone. . . .
Her shadow covers his face and upper torso, her leather boots creak softly as thigh
and abdominal muscles move, and then in a rush she begins to piss. He opens his mouth
to catch the stream, choking, trying to keep swallowing, feeling warm urine dribble
out the corners of his mouth and down his neck and shoulders, submerged in the hissing
storm. When she’s done he licks the last few drops from his lips. More cling, golden
clear, to the glossy hairs of her quim. Her face, looming between her bare breasts,
is smooth as steel.

She turns. “Hold up my fur.” He obeys. “Be careful. Don’t touch my skin.” Earlier
in this game she was nervous, constipated, wondering if this was anything like male
impotence. But thoughtful Pointsman, anticipating this, has been sending laxative
pills with her meals. Now her intestines whine softly, and she feels shit begin to
slide down and out. He kneels with his arms up holding the rich cape. A dark turd
appears out the crevice, out of the absolute darkness between her white buttocks.
He spreads his knees, awkwardly, until he can feel the leather of her boots. He leans
forward to surround the hot turd with his lips, sucking on it tenderly, licking along
its lower side . . . he is thinking, he’s sorry, he can’t help it, thinking of a Negro’s
penis, yes he knows it abrogates part of the conditions set, but it will not be denied,
the image of a brute African who will make him behave. . . . The stink of shit floods
his nose, gathering him, surrounding. It is the smell of Passchendaele, of the Salient.
Mixed with the mud, and the putrefaction of corpses, it was the sovereign smell of
their first meeting, and her emblem. The turd slides into his mouth, down to his gullet.
He gags, but bravely clamps his teeth shut. Bread that would only have floated in
porcelain waters somewhere, unseen, untasted—risen now and baked in the bitter intestinal
Oven to bread we know, bread that’s light as domestic comfort, secret as death in
bed . . . Spasms in his throat continue. The pain is terrible. With his tongue he
mashes shit against the roof of his mouth and begins to chew, thickly now, the only
sound in the room. . . .

There are two more turds, smaller ones, and when he has eaten these, residual shit
to lick out of her anus. He prays that she’ll let him drop the cape over himself,
to be allowed, in the silk-lined darkness, to stay a while longer with his submissive
tongue straining upward into her asshole. But she moves away. The fur evaporates from
his hands. She orders him to masturbate for her. She has watched Captain Blicero with
Gottfried, and has learned the proper style.

The Brigadier comes quickly. The rich smell of semen fills the room like smoke.

“Now go.” He wants to cry. But he has pleaded before, offered her—absurdly—his life.
Tears well and slide from his eyes. He can’t look into hers. “You have shit all over
your mouth now. Perhaps I’ll take a photograph of you like that. In case you ever
get tired of me.”

“No. No, I’m only tired of
that
,” jerking his head back out of D Wing to encompass the rest of “The White Visitation.”
“So bloody tired. . . .”

“Get dressed. Remember to wipe your mouth off. I’ll send for you when I want you again.”

Dismissed. Back in uniform, he closes the cell door and retraces his way in. The night
attendant is still asleep. Cold air hits Pudding like a blow. He sobs, bent, alone,
cheek resting a moment against the rough stone walls of the Palladian house. His regular
quarters have become a place of exile, and his real home is with the Mistress of the
Night, with her soft boots and hard foreign voice. He has nothing to look forward
to but a late-night cup of broth, routine papers to sign, a dose of penicillin that
Pointsman has ordered him to take, to combat the effects of
E. coli.
Perhaps, though, tomorrow night . . . perhaps then. He can’t see how he can hold
out much longer. But perhaps, in the hours just before dawn . . .