Dolorosa Soror (3 page)

***

"Do you treat them all like that?"
He bites into his croissant, gulps a mouthful of coffee. "Like what?"
"Like you did me."
Because he has asked me to remain completely nude, and
because I am covered with purple marks from the strap, as much in front as in back, he hardly has a problem understanding what I mean.

"Oh, like that? No, of course not. Only on demand."
"But I didn't ask for anything!"
"But yes, Florence, but yes! Everything in you asked for it.

It's written on your skin, in your gestures. In your gray eyes, always on the edge of tears. In your kisses. It's the same with the sodomy and all the rest. I knew it the instant I saw you. Afterwards, our first caresses only confirmed my initial impression."

"What is written in my eyes?"
The other end of the croissant. Another gulp of coffee.

"You know."
He stops for an instant, seems to be searching for words—the old trick of those who are searching for nothing at all , but only want to stall long enough to emphasize one word, one sentence.

"You remember that old Freudian expression that we have in us a trace of the other sex? It's true, but not in the way people think. You can be completely straight and have in you a good dose of the opposite sex—but that doesn’t mean you’re a latent homosexual. More precisely, you're the homosexual counterpart of the other sex. It's my dyke side that loves your breasts, your sex, and your lips. And it's my guy side that loves your faggot side. Besides—"

"That's why you brought mc over there last night?"

"Among other reasons. I wanted you to know once and for all that it’s your little faggot ass I'm fucking."
"Do you have to be vulgar? You Imagine I had an orgasm in the parking garage?"

"Yes, and a pretty good one at that," he says simply, turning back to his decapitated croissant.

I blush.
"In fact," he continues, "you wanted that cock to be longer, and even thicker, and you arched your back in order not to lose a single inch."

"Stop! You're disgusting."
"What's disgusting?"
A beat.
"Does my guy side like guys or girls?" I ask, "Both, my darling!"

Then, suddenly serious, he says: "Do you want one?"
"One what?"
"A girl."
I shrug my shoulders but don't say no. Shortly thereafter
Nathalie enters into the dance.

Notes

1.I must say I sportingly foresaw that everything she felt for me was only a delusion, a trap set by her own guilty conscience, a way for her to keep from having to love herself. Yet I wanted her a slave, all the while repeating to herself that at any moment she could break such a feudal tie that only, after all, depended upon her. I wanted it to be her will to give herself to me, and not weakness, or what she called "love."

2. Did I really need to be so violent? I don't know exactly what I wanted to punish. My own alter ego, perhaps. Or perhaps I was counteracting my own taste for violence—what I civilize when I am with women, regardless of the treatment I require them to accept.

Chapter III

October, Continuation

How had he met her? At the university, as with everyone. She was taking a course in eighteenth-century libertine literature in which each student had to make an oral presentation related to the topic. She had chosen to talk about homosexuality in the literature of the Enlightenment. "

“Good idea, Miss."

I can see him from here, trembling. She had been imprudent enough to speak only of men, guys affected with a "little defect." So, there were only male homosexuals in Sodom? She was flunked without compunction and told she had to retake the exam the fall quarter. Apparently she had not wanted to.

He had subsequently hired her to pose for him—it was a hobby for which he was not short of talent, not as a photographer (the camera produces ninety percent of the shot, and the rest is the fruit of chance), but as a director. To obtain the pose, the appropriate expressions, he used to tell stories. He would have you participate as if you were making a film, and then he would suddenly freeze a moment of the story. His goal, he had explained to me three times in different ways, was to rediscover the sensations he had felt as a child when he saw the posted photo stills taken from the movies then showing at the neighborhood cinema.

He went to the movies very infrequently, but he would
i
magine, after looking at the stills, often taken at random, a , whole frenzied, baroque scenario in which the photos would occur in a precise order, all for the sake of a telling a story, and a very troubling one at that. I say "baroque” and “frenzied” because he made me pose for him, too and later showed me shots he took of Nathalie—apart from those we took together...

***



I live in a large studio that probably was once a small
two-room apartment. The entrance opens directly onto a minuscule kitchen, as is often seen in Paris. Then you pass a doorless foyer that becomes a big rectangle that a large bay window in the back, on the smallest side, lightens sufficiently.

Of the two original rooms there exist only, in the ceiling, a beam covered over with plaster, and the moldings of leaves and fruit typical of 1920's design. In the center of the ceiling of the first half are other moldings of leaves and a metal ring, the last trace of a former light fixture. The room is lit by several flood- lights and and halogen lamps.

The bed is a 1920's period copy, an example of the modern style at its most geometrical. Its head and foot mo of equal height, and made of brass bars that used to be gold but are weathered (falsely, no doubt) by the years. On the bed is a comforter, black on one side and red on the other.

I repainted all the walls white, diluting the color by ten percent with an orange-red tint that lent a vague peach light to the whole. On one side is a vast mirror rising lo the ceiling; near the window, on the other side of the bed, a dresser, and a small bookcase.

There isn't much closet space. My single storage piece is a huge, authentic kneading machine, my sole luxury furnishing, transformed into a wardrobe.

On the floor, hexagonal tiles, the color of burned bread, which I don't take advantage of as much as I should.

***

Does he love me? No doubt he does: if not, he would not beat me, would not offer me to others. Something in him takes pleasure in seeing a woman he loves fucked by someone else. On the other hand, he will not stand for her going to bed with someone of her own free will, with a stranger she has chosen. This is how he neither provokes nor dominates anything. Head games: perhaps he does not love me?

One day he made a frightful scene because he had not been able to reach me for three days in a row—although he himself had once left me without news for three weeks. In fact, my absence was the result of the unhappy coincidence of a sick grandmother in a faraway suburb and a broken answering machine. Where had I been, and with whom? I was so pleased at feeling myself so loved—even if only through his egotism and jealousy—that instead of mentioning Grandma, I sealed myself in a silence full of insinuations and complicated idiocies.

He punished me with the savagery and exactitude he devoted to staging his passions. Together we had bought a dressage whip, a long weapon of finely braided leather. He marked me from calf to shoulder like a zebu. The scars took nearly ten days to fade. Each day during this period, he showed up early in the morning, on a breath of wind, just to come in my mouth—the thing in the world I like the least when it's an end in itself.
¹

In fact he noticed very quickly that I cherished the idea of punishment. Typically, he got off on it at the same time as he tried to cure me of it.
²

"What crime are you guilty of?"

The question, posed time and time again, had no answer. At the highest point of the pain, I sometimes had the strange impression of something already seen, already felt, that I could not put my finger on.

"Perhaps," he said to me one day when I mentioned this curious sensation, "perhaps I should beat you until it comes back to you. But I think it is up to you to make the effort, and
you are not ready. Pain breaks through certain resistances—as do fatigue, or dreams, or the harassment of a mercenary shrink. But your resistances are still too strong: I would have to beat you for too long, and I want neither to kill nor to mutilate you.” "Thanks, thanks very much!"

"Don't mention it. But I know you running after a memory, an extinguished, burned-out memory, Something you feel guilty about—without being so, of course, Real culpability is anchored in innocence."

“It's strange. I beat you, all the while knowing I am helping you to figure out, one day, that you no longer need nor want to be beaten. As for me, then, how will I be able to love you?”

***

Pain and humiliation: a strange therapy...

He arrives when I am getting out of the shower, jovial and charming. Completely nude, I press myself against him—my skin moist against the drops of rain on his leather jacket, Chills.

He tells me not to get dressed.

Puts me on all fours, on my elbows, my thighs slightly spread, in the middle of the room. The hardness of the tiles, I glance sideways in order to see myself in the big mirror. Grotesque and pitiful. My hanging breasts make me look like the she-wolf that suckled Rome.

With ropes brought expressly for the purpose, he puts me in tight bondage: my arms tied to my knees, ankles tied to a radiator six feet farther off, and my head bound by another rope, which handcuffs my wrists to the foot of the bed and prevents me from standing. A purely decorative rope, pulled very tight, makes a double loop over my chest and back and pushes my breasts forward, making them look like hands extended through hemp bars.

He allows me a brief glance in the mirror so I may appreciate myself as a trussed-up offering, the gift I have become. Then he blindfolds me.

He gets behind me and smears my sex and anus with Vaseline, inside and outside. His gestures are medically precise and I feel nothing, no excitation. Nothing but absolute terror.

After a series of little metallic clicks, the light of a flash goes off under the blindfold, and I hear the battle sounds of the camera being reloaded.

I still have these photos of myself, and today I cannot look without inexpressible emotion at these images of an anonymous girl, a black blindfold over her eyes, her flesh creased with complicated knots, submissive to all expectations, her heart in her throat. The very picture of anguish.

There I am, on all fours, my buttocks lifted up by the crouching position he makes me adopt. The ropes saw into my skin. I hear the door close. I call out. No answer. My voice seems strange to me, curiously broken.

I wait for quite some time; my knees hurt a lot. The ropes are stretched tight and have no play in them. I can hardly breathe. I try to slide the blindfold from my eyes by rubbing my temple against my shoulder, but without success.

The door again. The sound of a footfall clacking against the tile, but it's not his. The certainty that there are at least two people there.

An enormous lump in my belly. Palms moist against the tile.
Hands grip my hips; a cock plunges into me, rapid and rectilinear, and bumps roughly against the back wall of my vagina. I cannot help crying out.

The light of a flash shining under the blindfold. The man moves about in my cunt. Nearly as quickly, someone raises my head—the rope saws into the nape of my neck—and another cock forces my lips open.

Nausea.
Photo.
I will not go into detail. He left me tied up like that all day.

He only freed me once; without taking the blindfold from my eyes, he took me to pee, and tied me up just as tightly afterwards.

He never stopped taking photographs, shooting in frames so tight I could not identify anybody later: could see just my buttocks, mouth, cunt, and hips, and the cocks of the guys who fucked me.

He must have established a certain protocol for them: once installed, they were to ejaculate where they had first thrust. That day I drank more sperm than I have ever swallowed, I was sodomized often, too. Perhaps that was part of the rite. Some, more rarely, preferred my cunt—they were numerous enough, however, that I very quickly felt streams of jism running down my thighs,

Who were they? J. P. showed me the photos two days later: beautiful, brilliant 5" x 7" prints, with the clear, frank colors of finely grained film. In all, twenty-three guys had fucked me that day. Some of them had big stomachs, with curly hair' on comfortable pot bellies, or bulging muscles, There were few blonds. One of them had gray hair all over. Their cocks were of every shape and size. Four were attached to very flat, hairless stomachs, adolescents no doubt, all of whom had chosen my mouth. Others were curved like bananas or twisted like the stems of stock. Thin and grainy like sausage from Auvorgne, Short and thick—fat crimson fruit with bursting shafts.

In porno videos or magazines, you never see more than one model of dick, its size and thickness nearly unchanging, as if a standard were imposed upon scriptwriters and casting directors—somewhat like the hypertrophied, hyper reallstlc breasts of the female stars of hard-core, those miraculous, plastic-surgery Barbies.

Cocks of all colors, too. A man with very matte skin whose mauve-colored glans had just been intimate with my lips. An Asian with barely curly pubic hair. Three very dark blacks, all of whom fucked me up the ass.

Several photos were taken just after they had pulled out, or between visits. A close-up of my face, quickly soaked with tears—all those bastards had bored deep into my mouth. A close-up of my ass, my anus open, gaping like the mouth of a carp, incredibly dilated. My sex yawning like an oyster renouncing the protection of its pearls. Teardrops of jism frozen by the camera, oozing from all my holes.

There is an ecstasy in degradation—a forgetfulness of self in the gift of self. Those machinelike cocks fucking me without stopping; those hands pulling on my buttocks like retractors or raising my face; those fingers tensed on my loins and shoulders like hooks: all contributed to my hypnosis. I was no longer myself—just a sack for sperm, a lay saint thrilled to have been made a martyr. With a man you often end up asking what you are doing there—and why him rather than somebody else, and what is this ridiculous swaying of a hairy backside and a pale backside, and this fury to have an orgasm—to be done with him even more quickly. But at that moment, stuffed with cocks, swollen with jism, I achieved a complete detachment, an indifference to myself that was happiness itself. It was that afternoon (in thinking it through afterwards, for at the time I was only pure sensation) that I began to understand why I loved the whip, the crop, chains. In the immense pain of tortured flesh are united all of life's little hurts: those you live with all the time, the hidden pains, burning memories, acknowledged defeats, choked-back tears, rejections. Disgust for life itself.

"Where did you find them all?"

"Oh, here and there. Passersby. A neighbor—I won't tell you which one. Several kids hanging out in a bar, near the school, behind it. Two students—the Chinese guy. Manual laborers from a shipyard who came and called their friends afterwards. No, it was no trouble to find them. Much less difficult to persuade strangers than to propose the same thing to friends who know me."

"No refusals?"

"Very few. One guy came up this far and then backed off at the last moment at the idea of mixing his sperm with the others'. At that moment, I must say, you were dripping with come. And
another, who thought the whole story was only a pretext so I could fuck him at the same time."

Nearly all of them had come too fast for me to get Into the groove: not a single real orgasm in a whole day of orgy. Hilt what I had was almost better than an orgasm: I quickly climbed to a sort of plateau of pleasure, and each new sensation kept me there. It was intense enough to make me forget my rilled vaginal walls, irritated by so many successive coining "i»d goings, my throbbing elbows, my nearly bleeding knees.

A stroke of luck, no doubt—none of the anonymous strangers off the street gave me any diseases. That was the only time that J. P. made me run so many risks—and look them on himself, too, for after having bathed, washed, and perfumed me, and done everything a master owes to his slave, he made love to me with extreme gentleness for a good part of the night. I lost my head enough to tell him 1 loved him, 1 loved him, I loved him, and to believe it when he said he loved me, too.