Dolorosa Soror (9 page)

Notes

1. It's as Pascal says—Love cannot be written, whereas one can infinitely describe an erotic situation, to the point of trying the reader's patience. That morning, with her fingers or mouth buried in Nathalie, her fingers skimming over her flesh, Florence did not want to describe anything in detail. The evidence of a total love, body and soul.

Chapter X

Early January

" J. P.? Can you be free tomorrow night?"

"Tomorrow, no. The day after, if you want."

"Okay. Can you come over at around seven o'clock? Nathalie will be here. With a surprise. We're going to take a lot of photos, but I'll bring the camera and all the materials. Okay?"

I hung up. I never spend a lot of time on the telephone. I don't like not seeing people's faces.

I spent the next day searching for a hood in boutiques specializing in clothing of that sort; I had an idea of what it should look like but wasn't sure, exactly. It wasn't easy: too much mock leather, too many spangles. I finally found what I was looking for in a sex shop off of Place Blanche. A leather hood—made of calfskin, the salesman specified—that completely covered the head, and attached in back with three straps. Not an executioner's mask, but his victim's. The placement of the eyes and nose were marked, as if for a mask, by an appropriate indenture, but there was only a hole for the mouth—a hole as round as a scream. Once inside, she would be only a blind cry.

Then I gave in to an old fantasy, and bought a twelve-inch dildo made of an indeterminate substance that looked like the skin of a peach. It attached at the waist with a belt; there were
two strings that passed between the thighs and retied just above the small of the back.

That leaves free access to my body, I thought.

The salesman gave me a discount for the two items because I didn't have enough cash on me, and I didn't want to pay by check, only to receive God knows what sort of "promotional" material in the mail.

***

I put everything on the bed: the hood; the chains, both big and small; the pair of handcuffs; the whip, crop, and dildo.

I carefully set up all the photographic material we would use: the lights and projectors, two umbrellas, and two tripods with the cameras already in place. They were loaded with a very sensitive, high-speed black-and-white film that would keep the exposure time relatively short and thus allow for a certain spontaneity. I preferred at the last minute to change the lenses already in place to a very practical 28-135 that would allow us to vary the perspective without seeming to. We would gain in manageability what we would lose in lighting.

I put the heat up as high as it would go and pulled the double curtains.

I took a shower, made myself up very carefully, and per- fumed myself with Guerlain's L'Heure Bleu.

My stomach was in knots—as if I were a virgin and this were my big night.
J. P. arrived first, as planned. With one look, he understood. "It's for real tonight, Flo?" "I hate it when you call me Flo," I said. My voice was completely unrecognizable. He shrugged his shoulders and checked the cameras. "It's pointless to leave a UV filter on the lenses," he complained.

Pointless, indeed.

Nathalie arrived at around eight o'clock in the evening. She was wearing, as I had asked, a long blue dress—nearly a sheath—made of cashmere, buttoned in front from top to bot- tom, which I had given her a little while before then.

"I'm not wearing anything underneath," she said after she took off her coat.

I kissed her. She looked at the bed encumbered with instruments. She laughed, crazy girl.

"Are you going to hurt me very badly tonight, Flo?"
"I hate it when you call me Flo," I repeated.
J. P. popped the cork of a bottle of champagne, and we
toasted each other agreeably, all the while talking of this and that, and of the good luck we wished each other for the new year. I saw Nathalie occasionally glance at the bed and the threatening objects placed there.

She got up and seized the dildo. "How does this go on?" she asked. "Undress," I said.
"You do it," she replied.

One by one, I undid the buttons of her dress.1 She really didn't have on anything underneath.

In passing, I noted she had carefully shaved and plucked her mound; she was as hairless as a baby's cheek. I leaned over and kissed her lightly.

In my turn, I made myself naked.

"It goes on like this," I said, attaching the artificial penis to my hips. Now that it bobbed in its harness, it seemed ridiculously large. More like a satyr's phallus than a real cock. I am not very tall, and I had the bizarre, incongruous impression that I was attached to the end of this oddity, and not the reverse.

I patiently joined all the rings of her body with the little chains I had bought: her ears to her nose, her nose to her breasts, her breasts to her cunt.

Then we draped her with jewelry: earrings and necklaces, oversized, chunky bracelets, and ankle chains.

I put a finger in the furrow of her sex and kissed her. I played
for several instants with the ring that pierced her clitoris. She was soaked. She murmured:

"Is it going to hurt a lot?"
"Of course it's going to hurt a lot, idiot."
"So much the better. I love you."
She returned my kiss with renewed passion, with fire.
J. P. handcuffed her from behind. I got a chair and attached
a good sized, rather short chain to a ring in the ceiling.
"Lift your arms," I told her.
She had to raise herself a bit on tiptoe. I attached the handcuffs to the chain hanging from the ceiling.

She looks strange like that: nude, elongated by the chain. Her hands are like imprisoned birds in the handcuffs.

I walk around her, the oversized sex attached to my waist. I caress her slowly, delicately—lengthily. I have to get on tiptoe to kiss or lick her ear or neck.

Our reflection in the mirror is not without dubious interest.

J. P., who from the beginning has been as discreet as possible ("You've organized this, I am only a tool," he tells me in a flash of clarity) finishes the first roll of film, reloads the camera, and has Nathalie drink another glass of champagne.

He remains completely dressed, but his feet are bare.

The wine runs from her lips to her neck and breasts, sparkles against her cunt.

I rub the synthetic penis against her buttocks as if it were real. I place it between her thighs. She groans.

"Take me," she murmurs.
I shake my head.
I look at J. P. He has returned to his camera. I know he
already sees nothing except for the shots he imagines as he experiments with the zoom, without pushing on the button.

I insert the dildo into Nathalie's cunt, but just a little—a third of its length, maybe. She groans again and tries to bend
over, in spite of her uncomfortable position, so I can penetrate her completely.

I pull out of her, go to the bed, and pick up the whip.

In the mirror, J. P., his finger poised on the camera. The instant is frozen.

I caress Nathalie with the hard strap. She looks me in the eye.
"Tell me you love me," she says.
"I love you," I echo. "I love you."

Everything that follows belongs to the history of cataclysms.

I don't try to whip her methodically. I beat her in front and back, sparing her nothing, then suddenly hitting her very hard. She twists around, and the tip of the lash that has just torn into her shoulders bites into her breasts with its next blow. The little chains and jewels clatter. I hear the ceaseless clicks of the cameras.

Little by little the marks of the blows are superimposed over the network of metal holding her. It is as if she is covered with an irregular pattern of brown and purple traces.

The whip strikes the nipple of her right breast and half tears the ring from its hole in the flesh. It bleeds abundantly.

Sometimes I enchain the blows very quickly, without giving her body time to immobilize itself, and the whip strikes haphazardly. Sometimes I spy in the mirror the moment when her blond body stops twisting at the end of its chain, and I return to purposeful blows on her breasts, thighs, or back. An alternatingly baroque and classical syntax.

I did not count, but I must have hit her at least fifty times with all my strength. Nathalie held on until the thirtieth blow, then cried out or groaned with each one that followed. I had already heard her scream, of course, but she would do so very rarely, as if ,taken by surprise, when her mistreated flesh
protested briefly. But that night I wanted her to be nothing but nerves on fire, lacerated flesh. Passion itself. Crucified. I throw the whip to the floor.

She twists about for several instants at the end of the chain.

I go to her, kiss her, pull on the small chains and rings to wrest from her new cries.

I stand on tiptoe and undo the handcuffs.
She slides to her knees as if in slow motion.
I pull her to me and kiss her all over. Her skin is burning.

At the tip of her breast, her blood tastes of earth and iron.
I take her by the hair and put her on all fours, then get
behind her and push into her cunt, doggy-style.
I hear only the successive clicks of the cameras.
I don't manage to get the enormous dildo all the way in. I
fuck her more violently than a brute animal—like the hermaphrodite rapist I am. She screams with each thrust, as she had earlier at the whip's blows.

I pull out from her cunt. I adjust the synthetic organ between her buttocks and sodomize her as she has never been— as if I were impaling her, as if I wanted to pierce her to the heart and come out through her mouth.

As deeply as I can go. She screams again, so monstrous is the tearing of her anus; no matter that she is used to it.

I want to chase from her ass the memory of the cocks buried there.

With each thrust of my loins, the base of the dildo pushes against my sex, nearly painfully.

I want to ejaculate. Knowing I cannot makes me even more savage.

I want to be taken as I am taking Nathalie—harder, even. I turn toward J. P. "Come here, please." He shakes his head. "Beat me."
Again he refuses and continues to take photographs,
imperturbable.
Nathalie rests her forehead against her bound hands, her
loins raised high, offering herself totally to the dildo's thrusts.
I pull the cock out of her ass and put it in her vagina again, this time for several strokes back and forth. Then I sodomize
her again, as if to kill her.

Time stood still.
Fucked like that, did she come?
She did not stop crying.
I don't know how to describe the pleasure I felt. Nor how
to qualify the pleasure she felt.

I pull out of her, her ass so round, so delicate; striped with love, gaping like an open door. A bloody foam is coming out of it.

"Get on your feet," I say, helping her to stand.
I reattach her to the chain from the ceiling as before.
I go to the bed and pick up the long crop.
From the first blow, she screams. She yells with each
impact, as if each blow plunges her into a horror without end.
I beat her maybe twenty times. The swellings made by the crop, nearly all straight, are superimposed upon by the more irregular, confused lines of the whip. The skin has broken in a dozen places. On the final blows, she bends her knees, suspended by all her weight from the chain attached to the handcuffs. Her imprisoned hands are open and begging, as if
she were trying to fly away.

I am lost.

The mirror throws back to me the image of a disheveled reveler, outside of herself, the horrible dildo dangling.

J. P. does not stop taking photographs. I almost believe he is hiding himself discreetly behind the cameras in order not to take part in my delirium.

I throw down the crop.

I glue myself to Nathalie's body, bring her back to consciousness, cover her with kisses. She turns her hps to mine. Under her tears, her makeup is slowly disintegrating.

God, she is beautiful like that!
Passion. Suffering. Death and resurrection.
When there is no longer any reason, there is no reason to stop.

I am on my knees, between her legs. I spread her thighs, slide my tongue over her sex, and drink for a long time. With my mouth, I pull on the little chain connecting her clitoris to her breasts. She emits a sort of hiccup of suffering.

My fingers push inside her more. Her vagina sucks them up and she comes, bleeding.

The big artificial cock beats between my thighs as if a part
of me.

I turn towards J. P.
"Take her," I say.
"No," he says, his eye still riveted to the camera. "Please."

"No," he repeats. His mind seems made up. On tiptoe, I undo the hook and unlock the handcuffs. If I had not supported her, she would have fallen to the floor like a rag doll.

Gently I help her to her knees. She tumbles forward on her shackled hands. Her cunt, breasts, back, buttocks, and thighs are no more than a mass of purple streaks, meandering swellings, illegible.

I get rid of my artificial cock, throwing it to the ground as I have everything else.

I take the hood from the bed. I go to Nathalie, pulling her up and placing her back on her knees.

Steadily I undo the chains from her ears, nose, and breasts, letting them fall with all their weight to her cunt.

I put on the hood, which is difficult because her mass of
blond hair, its curls wet with sweat, keeps slipping free of the slick leather.

She is nothing more than an indistinct form, without a face, without eyes, just a mouth. She pants loudly because she is suffocating, and because she thought it was all over with and is afraid again.

I stand her up, reattach her to the ceiling.

Again I caress her. I have the singular sensation, as I draw my hand over the swellings, that they are a countryside of vales and dells and shadows on her skin, so beautiful and clear.

I take the razor J. P. gave me and open it.
²

Steadily, with maniacal precision, without pushing down, I slice open the welts on her body, one by one. The violet blood boiling under the raised skin flows in little rivers down her chest, back, buttocks, and legs.

Sometimes I stop for a few instants and finger myself. I am on the brink of coming, so I wait for an instant until my breathing calms before beginning to torture her again.

Each time the burning of the razor recalls her to life, she groans strangely, like an animal and, with a sort of convulsion, throws several drops of blood to the light-colored floor.

I am standing completely pressed against her. I drink in her warmth, rub against her unstitched skin, inundate myself with blood. I kiss her on the neck and put the blade there.

"Tut, tut," whispers J. P. from behind his lens.

I believe he thought I was going to kill her. I believe we all thought so: Nathalie did, and I did, too. I believe I was going to cut her throat. To feel against me the blood beating crazily in her jugular vein.

In the room is a bizarre odor: the very odor of fear, a nauseating perfume, fascinating, that I inhale for the first time. I stop my hand and slowly come back to myself.

Nathalie hangs inert at the end of the chain.