The Image (9 page)

“Good,” I said. “Follow me.”

Once in the bedroom I sat down in a chair and looked at her. She was standing near the bed, wearing a pleated skirt and a white blouse.

Then, I gave the order:

“Get undressed!”

She only hesitated for a second. She knelt in front of me on the sheepskin rug and began to take her clothes off, one by one, according to the ritual. Her underclothes were exactly like her protégée's. She, too, wore no panties.

When she was completely naked she spread her knees apart and raised her arms above her head.

I let her stay in this position for several minutes.

“Look at me!”

She lifted her eyes to me again.

“You like being on your knees?”

She said “Yes” by a nod of her head, and then murmured:

“I am yours... You can do what ever you want with me...”

“That's good,” I said. “Go and lie down on the bed.” She lay down on her back across the rumpled sheets.

“Open your legs!... Hands behind your back!... Mouth open!...”

Without a word, she obeyed.

I got up, took off my clothes, and half lay on top of her body. I put a hand under the back of her neck to hold her.

“You've never been beaten?”

She shook her head, her eyes melting in anguish.

“Well then, that makes me the first one.”

I slapped her, to the right, to the left, once, twice. I looked at her for a long time and then I told her she was beautiful.

My hand traveled down her belly and I thrust my thumb directly into her cunt. It was as wet as possible...

I kissed her, caressing her all the while.

Then I raised myself on one elbow and slapped her again, much harder, five or six times.

“Say ‘I love you',” I commanded.

She repeated:

“I love you,” adding that she was my slave and I could beat her to death if it would amuse me.

I caressed her breasts, then her cunt, at greater length and with more precision. Afterward I made her lick my fingers.

When I penetrated her for good she began to cry out, calling me by my first name and repeating over and over that she loved me...

Who is Jean de Berg?

This question gives me the chance to have some fun at guessing games. First of all, I doubt a man could be responsible for this volume. It sides far too often with the women's point of view.

And yet it is usually the men who introduce their mistresses to the joys of being chained and whipped, tortured and humiliated... But they know not what they do.

They think, in their naïve way, that they are gratifying their pride, or their lust for power, or simply acting out of some innate superiority. To compound this misconception, we intellectual females practically hand them their motives on a silver platter: insisting that woman is free, that she is man's equal, and that she doesn't intend to let herself be pushed around any longer.

As though that had anything to do with it!

A man in love, if he has any perception at all, soon realizes his error: he is the master, so it seems, but only if his lady friend permits it! The need to interchange the roles of slave and master for the sake of the relationship is never more clearly demonstrated than in the course of an affair. Never is the complicity between victim and executioner more essential. Even chained, down on her knees, begging for mercy, it is the woman, finally, who is in command.

She knows this only too well. Her power increases directly in proportion to her apparent self abasement. But with a single look, she can call a halt to everything, make it crumble into dust.

Once this is clearly understood by both parties, at the cost of a mutual reappraisal, the game can go on. But its meaning will have changed: the all powerful slave, dragging herself along the ground at her master's heels, is now really the god. The man is only her priest, living in fear and trembling of her displeasure. His sole function is to perform the various ceremonies that center around the sacred object. If he falls from grace, everything is lost.

All this helps to account for the hierarchy of postures to be found in this story, the rituals, the churchlike setting, the fetishism attached to certain objects. The photographs, then, described in great detail, are really nothing more than religious pictures, steps along the way of a new road to the cross.

Like all love stories, this one is about two people. But, in the beginning one of them is divided in half: one part offering up itself, the other inflicting punishment. Are these not the two faces of our peculiar sex which gives itself to others, yet is conscious only of itself?

Yes, men are foolish to expect us to revere them, when, in the end, they amount to almost nothing. Woman, like man himself, can only worship at the shrine of that abused body, now loved and now reviled, subjected to every humiliation, but which is, after all, her own. The man, in this particular affair, stays in one piece: he is the true worshipper, aspiring in vain to become one with his god.

The woman, on the contrary, although just as much of a new worshipper and possessed of that same anxious regard (for herself) is also the divine object, violated, endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn, whose only joy, achieved through a subtle interplay of images, lies in contemplation of herself.

It was to be small and perfectly round: a cigarette burn on the chest, right where the heart is. To avoid confusion with any accidental scar it would be signed with my three initials. They would be indelible, part of the flesh, marks of my desire.

Marks of my desire ... the desire for my mark.

I wanted to make that desire manifest and asked Sebastian to make me a promise in writing, thus giving it a certain solemnity, the dignity of an irrevocable act.

A few days before the date set for the ceremony, I had taken Sebastian to a tattoo artist whose shop near the Place Pigalle has two railings in front of it, a kind of chute designed to channel the line of clients to a turnstile that lets them enter the waiting room one by one.

This day, however, there is no line and the waiting room is empty. It is a January afternoon, gray, cold, and there are slippery ice patches on the narrow little street. On a platform in a comer of the room, the tattoo artist is putting the finishing touches on a complicated pattern on a young man's forearm. We have only a moment to glance at the sample patterns for garish tattoos displayed on the walls. Then it is our turn. The tattoo artist looks at Sebastian and says: "What can I do for you?" I reply: "Three letters on his chest." I give him a small sheet of white paper on which I have drawn those letters, in the intended size and style, simple, without flourishes. Sebastian unbuttons his shirt, bares his chest. I point: "Here," indicating the place of the heart. The tattoo artist gets irritated and says to me: "Why don't you let him talk – he's big enough to know what he wants!" Sebastian smiles and we pretend not to have heard. First, the specialist draws the three letters on the skin with a grease crayon. He has to redo the B which looks too thick, almost illegible. But after he has put away his tools, the job done, and with a piece of cotton erases the last traces of the crayon that had thickened the line, the letters appear clean, straight, taut, delicate, just as I wanted them to be. The operation has only taken a few minutes. He looks at me and says: "You'll be paying me for this, right?" I say "Right," and give him the modest sum he charges.

And that's it.

Outside, scattered snowflakes are falling. In the café where we stop to have a hot drink, Sebastian asks me: "Are you pleased?"

Stretching the opening in his carelessly buttoned shirt, I take a look at those little black characters on the fair skin. Yes, I am pleased.

Sebastian looks at me with a smile, leaning sideways against the window. The wind-driven snowflakes, denser now, strike the window and stick to it. Outside, passersby turn up their collars.

Outside, it will be cold.

While necessary, the inscription by itself is nothing. Come to think of it, it could be an abbreviation for some motto, or the sign of some mysterious sect, the result of a bet or a Saturday night brainstorm when, roaming the streets in good spirits with idle companions, one suddenly halts in front of a tattoo artist's paint-daubed shop, takes one's place in line, moves, little by little, toward the clicking turnstile – or whatever else.

The scar would give these elusive letters a more solid meaning.

Reciprocal signatures, double marks.

And while these initials are indeed mine, they haven't been drawn by me: for Sebastian's body to know that it belongs to me, I have to bum in my own imprint. A delightful prospect...

For it to be as round as a medal, as decorative as a piece of jewelry, I have to succeed in making it at the first try; no fudging, no mistakes.

At first, my aim is very poor (lack of practice, I suppose).

When I extinguish the first cigarette, barely lit, in the privacy of my home, it bends and slides across the ashtray leaving a vile trace of asks. So, that one was too long. I take a pair of scissors and cut the next one shorter. Still not good enough. At each new try, the cut-off portions grow longer. At last I achieve a satisfactory result. My research does not end there. I also establish what the original length of that cigarette has to be for it to have, after I have been smoking it without haste, the desired length at the moment of its final extinction. It has to burn slowly, but not too slowly to fit into a predetermined time frame: four minutes and thirty seconds, the duration of the final phrases of the death of Isolde; the last measures of Wagner's opera would govern our movements and gestures.

These meticulous calculations excite me very much.

There is also the matter of masks. . . That will come later.

***

It was not the empty room with the cold floor and the great dull mirrors where the martyrdom of Sebastian had taken place.

Instead, it was one of those vast bourgeois apartments in a building of opulent stone with an austere facade. built around the turn of the century, where the ring of the doorbell fades away to the end of dark corridors; where, beyond the doorstep, the sound of one's feet is muffled by thick carpeting that extends throughout, under Oriental rugs; Chinese carpets in the sheltered salon where the noises of the street scarcely penetrate, muffled by heavy drapes with regular folds. The furniture and the knicknacks have been there forever, in their final place: leather armchairs, a carved ebony cabinet, a table from the Far East, ivories, travel souvenirs...

Season after season returned in a predictable, periodic fashion in the great annulated vase on the grand piano, between the sheet music and the little clock: armfuls of autumn heather, then oak branches with turning leaves, then branches of apple blossoms.

Sometimes, common prosaic objects lay forgotten, littering the rosewood table. But that was rare.

It was in this immutable setting, where nothing ever was supposed to move, that I wanted to establish the decor of my own theater by means of respectful alterations, without upsetting anything.

Most of these consisted of moving one table and some seats and cushions in order to arrange the space differently, closing certain doors while leaving others just a little ajar, adjusting the lighting, having a fire in the fireplace...

As I arrive at her house on that day around six o'clock, F., my longtime accomplice, has just finished arranging the logs in the fireplace of the room known as the "red salon." Françoise, the first guest, rings the doorbell a few minutes later, and I let her in.

We have now decided to have a prelude to our ceremonies in which some slight young man serves us as a chambermaid and transforms into a moment of mild sweetness what otherwise would be merely a banal chore: bathing, putting on make-up, dressing.

Tonight, Denis is to give us these perfumed finishing touches. He is twenty years old, maybe a year to two older. He says he is an architecture student and I have no reason not to believe him.

The slight young man has to know well how to undo shoe buckles, unhook skirts and brassieres, test the bathwater, spread foamy creams on our skin, delicately, like wet caresses, use washcloths, put back without mistakes the flasks and combs on the little table by the washbasin, and wait, standing or curled up at the foot of the bed, to see whether one or the other of my woman friends (or both of them) feel like, between their embraces, using his mouth, his hands, his penis. He has to know how to wait patiently even when, one's head lost among the fresh sheets and flounced pillowcases, one momentarily forgets his existence.

But these kittenish games don't really interest me; I never join in except for a few passing caresses when I run into the boy in the hallway as he is busy running from the bedroom to the bathroom and back again. (He is, nevertheless, quite charming.) In any case, I am too anxious about what is to come, too preoccupied with transforming what is still only the "blue salon" into a sanctuary.

Finally, the young man has to know how to let himself be thanked upon completion of his task, to avoid complaints (as he won't be taking part in the ceremony) and to leave quietly, at ten minutes to eight, before the arrival of the Black at eight o'clock.

If everything runs smoothly, Sebastian will ring the doorbell at eight thirty and Marie at a quarter to nine. We have to avoid encounters on the staircase, that gray area which is no longer the outside world but not yet the world of ceremony, an area where any spoken exchanges could only be awkward (and superfluous, in any case). At all costs we must avoid premature encounters revealing the identities of the women, my accomplices, my acolytes whom I want to remain mysterious until the moment when Sebastian will have received the brand of his mistress. Why, otherwise, masks?

The Black is punctual and, as always, dressed in a very studied fashion. Taking his cue from the color of his skin, he dresses in shades of chestnut brown ranging all the way to a monochrome pale beige, never quite getting to pure white. I say: "My, but you're elegant!" and he responds with a "Thank you." His exquisite attire is gratuitous and won't get him anything but our compliments: he know that, too.