The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus (26 page)

‘
But nothing was enough. I spent my time mentally refigurating complex sexual geometries, and always they involved the idea of breaking into a body from behind. Lucy introduced Mathilde to the company, who in turn brought Marsha to La Coste. As my needs grew more extreme, so I would stage orgies in the newly built theatre. I assembled a willing cast of seventeen participants and flexed a whip over their buttocks like someone flicking through a tie rack. I was never sure where all this would end, but I was compelled to follow my instincts. One afternoon I faced sixteen naked bottoms, and had the one youth omitted from the voluntary line-up whip me with a ferocity comparable to the force driven by my own arm. It was a revelation to me to realise that pain worked on the orgiasts like a drug. After the initial resistance to being flogged had been overcome, both male and female participants relaxed into a trance-like participation in the experience. Lucy began to speak in prophetic voices, and Paul and Marsha similarly broke through to paranormal thresholds. Lucy would sometimes astrally project and look down from the ceiling at the absent body I was sounding to breaking point. I too would be taken over by dangerous energies, and the more I surrendered to irrational impulses the greater the kicks I achieved.

‘
The theatre would be in darkness, and the place sealed off by locked doors from the rest of the château. I took to placing funeral wreaths round the waists of my youthful orgiasts. I painted their bottoms in loud primary colours so as to distinguish one from the other. A pink Lucy, a blue Jacques, a yellow Mathilde. I saw their bottoms as undiscovered planets on which I the first arrival was leaving traces of conquest. It never occurred to me that these young people had to go back to ordinary homes and account for where they had been and why they were acting strange to their parents. I saw these sexual rites as legitimate theatre. I was acting out something in myself which called for complicitous participants.

‘
I don't need to tell you of all people, the whole story. Autumn had deepened to winter and big fires blazed in the château's hearths. It seemed kinder at the time to protect my sexual cast from the cold, and a reality which they had begun to fear by keeping them in one of the castle's disused wings. I revelled in the secrecy of the act. We were hidden away as fugitives from an unpropitious century. I took to avoiding my wife for weeks on end, and busied myself writing plays about the secret community at La Coste. And at night I would walk sleepless through the château's corridors, and imagine I could hear somebody pounding on the main entrance gate. I would hear the same hollow blows resounding there night after night.

‘
Four days before Christmas, I encouraged the youths to return to their homes. I had looked after them well, and I provided each one of them with money to take to their families, as an offering from the Seigneur. I had anticipated no recriminations on their part, as no harm had been done. But as you know, things turned out otherwise. There were investigations, and I found myself having to answer criminal charges.’

'You told me once,' Marciana interrupted, 'that what sex meant to you then was a smell. The smell of wet c
ow parsley, was what you said.'

'You know me too well,' Donatien reflected. 'If I can account for first sensory stimulus as I experienced it as a child, then it was the smell of tired cow parsley flooding me on a dusty road in summer. If you understand me I was going somewhere by walking nowhere. And my first encounter with sex happened just like that. It was back of a wood shed after the sun had beaten me to spontaneous erection. I won't tell you with what sex I first arrived at orgasm. There are events so important to the individual that the
y should never be demystified.'

He stopped speaking, as though swallowed into a black hole, and poured another slug of Isle of Jura whiskey into his tumbler. The liquid stood up like an amber coloured paperweight. Marciana arched her silk-stockinged legs, and lay back on the bed. It seemed to her that the whole force of histo
ry bled from the bedroom walls.

'When in early January, 1775,' Donatien continued, 'a criminal investigation was begun in Lyons on the palpable evidence of children who claimed to have been mistreated in this house, so my destiny closed on me. I was thereafter to have a prison cell fitted to me like a snail wears its shell. In the mid-twentieth century I was to meet Jean Genet in a bar and see the same stone lines written on his face. I claimed to be a friend of Jacques Guerlain's and to be interested in buying manuscripts, but Genet wouldn't have any of it. He closed up, told me he despised literature, put up the collar of his leather jacket in anticipation of the cold and stormed out into the frosty
Paris night. He turned round once not to wave at me, but to present a fist at the window where I sat. The whole encounter was so ugly that for a long time the memory lived in me like a probe. Genet and I: two prisoners who were freed by imagination.'

Marciana watched her brother backtrack through virtual continents of accessible memory. The whiskey tumbler represented his point of stability. He teased his nether
lip with the rim and continued.

'I looked for slaves, Marciana,' he resumed, 'and discovered that they were angels. The more I subjugated the submissive, the more I realised that it was myself who I was breaking. I would stand in a hot sweat after presenting the whip to compliant buttocks, and the object I had punished would leave the room unchanged. That was the light for me. I realised then that the victor is always the victim. But the real turning point came for me in an apartment on
East 42nd Street. The girl was called Donna. I had hired her for corrective purposes, and because I liked her storm of red hair. Donna was no different to the thousands of girls I had disciplined over the centuries. The same mini-skirted, stereotyped appearance: the same calculating review of the client: the same vulnerability cased in a hard shell. I had seen all these girls as interchangeable: one with the other. The boys also.

‘But let me tell you
what happened during the two hours in which I had paid for Donna's services. It's of direct relevance to our state now, as we prepare to leave the château for the Purple Room.'

With one hand behind her back Marciana inched her dress zip ano
ther fraction over her bottom, knowing that at some point in her brother's narrative she would stand up and walk free of the sequinned sheath on extravagant spike heels.

'That afternoon I saw a transformation occur in Donna, for which nothing in life had ever prepared me. The apartment was as you would expect tacky. Red drapes in a clinical leather cell. Donna's bottom conformed to t
he proportions which have always been my ideal. As I made inroads into her flesh with a bullwhip I noticed that try as I did I could leave no mark on her skin. Even the most savage of cuts made no track, despite the severity of the flogging.

‘
What happened was that I found myself being humiliated by the inadequacy of my role. I knew that I was hitting somebody who wasn't there. In the process of trying to inflict pain I was alerting myself to the realisation that Donna inhabited an absent body. I was about to strike with renewed ferocity, when my arm froze in mid-movement. Donna had succeeded in effortlessly freeing herself from the complex knots with ,which I had roped her into bondage. I couldn't believe my eyes. It didn't seem possible to me that this was happening to the Marquis de Sade. Donna danced free across the room and shook her red hair out. But what I couldn't take about the whole unreal scenario, was the forgiving smile with which she confronted me.

‘
There wasn't anything I could say. I was so unnerved by the experience that I turned on my heel and walked out of the apartment and straight into the elevator. Outside in the street I found myself still shaking... And as I continued walking down the street I had the feeling that a hand had succeeded in turning me round to face the light of a spectacular pink sunset. That Marciana was what I called my first realisation. What it triggered in me was not so much the modification of my sexual habits, as a realisation of the capacity for good within evil.'

Donatien stopped talking. It seemed to Marc
iana that her brother had laser-cut his way through the centuries, deleting everything insignificant in the process, and had arrived at this point in time with the truth he had discovered on that New York day in 1976. Marciana knew that it was partly on the strength of this truth that Donatien had revised the neuronal formulae which permitted him to constantly resample the DNA which they shared as a prophylactic against genetic breakdown. She knew that they would never experience natural death, and that once relocated to the Purple Room, they would live as posthuman cosmonauts able to travel between life and death at will.

Marciana felt the need within herself to be totally consumed by her brother. She wanted the escape velocity of his orgasm to enter her with the impacted combustion with which together they would torch the château. Over the years the interior passage through which he entered her had become the navigable geography of an infinitely extensible tunnel. Marciana knew her brother as someone engaged on a journey to the centre of the underworld. She was that place, and she lived with the expectation of their two lives mee
ting at this physical juncture.

Donatien had switched off all the monitors in the room, even the maxi-screen fitted into the ceiling above the bed. Periodically he checked a small digital implant in his wrist, the watch-sized screen providing him with access to his private neur
onal database. It was to a read-out of his personal biology that Donatien turned, before once again giving his attention to his sister.

Marciana impercepti
bly inched the dress zip over her bottom. She was ready. She sat on the edge of the sumptuously purple bed, and narrowed her stockinged toes into leather points. She had chosen strappy silver sandals with six inch heels as the pivotal constructs to give lift to her bottom. She got up slowly from the bed, and stood in the constriction of her sequinned sheath like a flower forcing free of a tight bud. With forbidding detachment from the whole scene, Donatien mobiled for Nina to come into the room and assist Marciana in disengaging from her dress.

Nina came in wearing a pink sequinned choker and matching hot pants. She bowed low to the floor in homage to Donatien before working with inti
mately light fingers to free Marciana from her seam-splitting dress. Marciana stood with her figure windowed by a green see-through bra and nude-coloured see-through panties. She remained with her back to Donatien knowing that his whole concentrated attention would be focused on her bottom. Her purple silk suspender belt flared at the hips, the taut straps keeping two pencil-line seamed stockings resonating to the contours of her legs. Marciana conformed so fully to Donatien's deal of the body as aesthetic construct that at times she believed she had no autonomous existence of her own, and she was simply an image escaped from her brother's head. She remembered how he had told her over and over that the entrance to her bottom symbolised for him the blindside door in the château's left wing which he had always called the slave door, on account of its being used to bring rent boys into the château on autumn days.

After Nina had supplied Donatien with four night pills called Cryoglitz, she was required to read brother and sister a short erotic story, the theme having been set by Donatien. According to an established ritual Nina had to remove her hotpants, and read out her story while sitting on Donatien's lap. She made a customary elaborate display of removing the garment, and dressed in snugly fitting black silk panties arranged herself on the Marquis's protrusive crotch. She announced the title of her story as
‘Sinbad And Nicole', which strongly hinted at the autobiographical components buried in the narrative, and was prompted by Donatien to begin.

‘
Sinbad lived on a houseboat on the Seine. He was a man who claimed to have spent the first twenty of his thirty years at sea. In fact he had been born five miles North West of Ecuador on a cargo ship tramping into port one blustery equinoctial day. And even as a child he was renowned for the indomitable size of his penis. It was said that before Sinbad had his penis operated on he could swing it round his neck and have it hang there like a curious item of jewellery. It resembled a fleshy liana, and in his pubescent years Sinbad was in danger of waking up to find himself strangled by his torso-climbing penis. And if the length was a questionable asset, then the girth was prohibitively incomparable. By the age of seventeen Sinbad had built muscles from masturbation. Unable to find any orifice wide enough to accommodate his penis, he was reduced to the role of solitary onanist. He had rhinestones sit in the tissued walls of his cock, and tattoos frescoed on the head.

‘
Sinbad liked to walk around alleys leading to the river. His father, a retired sea captain had returned to the family house in Paris, and nightly he would entertain his son with stories of his maritime adventures on the high seas. Sinbad's mother being dead, his father had remarried, and had taken for his wife a sultry Parisian blonde called Nicole. Nicole in her tight skirts and with her mascara-blackened eyes exuded an air of smoky eroticism. Several times Sinbad had felt her eyes jump to his massively protuberant groin, and on one occasion going up the stairs behind her, she had turned round and looked at him in a way that was a clear invitation for him to join her in the bedroom.