The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus (12 page)

'Show me how your tears will bleed for me,' he said. And like a Daughter of the Precious Blood, Marciana walked towards an altar lit by torches. Photographs of contemporary singers were framed like icons against the altar's backcloth. An androgynous Elvis Presley, a martyred Billy Fury, a drugged and pouting Judy Garland, a leather-boaed Shirley Bassey, a saucer-eyed Dusty Springfield, and a histrionic, diva-like Marc Almond stared out of photographic portraits into the diffused candlelight.

Nina led Marciana to the altar. Her hands were placed in supports under the arms of an angel. Donatien called this prop the Angel of Mercy, for it appeared as though his victim, in the act of being flogged, was supplicating for a shelter that was never granted.

Nina slipped down Marciana's panties, placed them in an alter-dish and handed the sacrosanct offering to the Marquis. Donatien responded by kneeling for a long time at the opaque window of his sister's bottom. He knelt there for five minutes in the absolute silence of the theatre, then rose and motioned to Nina who handed him the finely tuned bullwhip.

'Prepare for your salvation,' Donatien warned his sister. 'In the name of the House of Sade you will meet your redemption through the whip.'

Donatien stood back and with an abrupt gesture unleashed it sizzling whipcrack on Marciana's bottom. The echo reverberated like thunder in the vaulted theatre and drew a stifled cry of shock from the victim.

With unflinching composure Donatien issued second and third cuts with a savagery that seemed inhuman.

At the first sight of bloody tears, the Marquis knelt, received a tall-stemmed red rose from Nina, who had removed it from an altar vase, and placing the crimson rose in his sister's crack, he began to pray.

His spiritual agitation was intense. He kissed the flower protruding from his sister's bottom, and called on the abyss within her to reveal its secrets.

That done he stood back from his sister, his eyes fixed on her bottom. She remained fastened to the angel, as though the two of them had found love on the edge of death.

Nina went forward, prayed briefly to the rose, extracted it, and with trained expertise began applying alleviants to the cuts inflicted on Marciana's bottom. This done, Nina took the bullwhip from Donatien's hand, and presented him with a glass of vintage cellared from the château's vineyards. The De Sade wine was the colour of a black tulip. Donatien tasted the sunlight, dust, sweat and flinty soil of his estate compounded into the grape. Autumn was permanently in his blood. Each time he performed sex rites he would smell dank leaves and rain teeming into yellow woods.

Donatien savoured in the taste of the wine the enormous melancholy arena of his heart. All the grief of the centuries had accumulated there, like thunder clouds piled above a graveyard The death he had never experienced through the centuries existed as an enigma in his cells, a potential that was still unrealised. It was with Marciana that he shared the secrets of his deathlessness. The cryonic longevity that invested both their lives was a scientific phenomenon that he had begun little by little to impart to his sister.

Marciana was escorted out of the theatre by Nina, and taken to her bedroom to be prepared for her brother's visit. Marciana was to be dressed in all the fetishistic accoutrements that appealed to her brother. She lay face down on the bed and felt Nina's fingerpads work a cocktail of aromatherapy oils into her skin, and very gently into the pouting
trompe-l’oeil
of her rosette. Nina spent a long time working on Marciana's bottom, polishing the curvature of the cheeks, and using an oiled brush on the depilated crack, traced painterly brushstrokes between the abyss and the vault in which it terminated. Marciana's bottom was treated with the reverence afforded a fetish. It represented godhead to the Marquis, and was an artefact that had several times undergone silicone lifts in the interests of acquiring the perfect shape for Donatien's pleasure.

Nina teased the crack with her tongue, and felt Marciana wriggle with excitement. Her job was to treat Marciana's bottom as a beautician would a model's face. Moisturizers were applied to the buttocks each night, and so were depilating creams. Foundations were matched to skin tones and blushers complemented the subtle artistry of bottom maquillage. Each night Nina applied an hour's massage and skin-care to Marciana's bottom. Marciana's panties were chosen to represent the colour palette of Donatien's moods. All of them were monogrammed with the Sadean insignia of an eight-pointed star. The penalty for anyone else daring to wear Marciana's panties was to be bullwhipped fifty times by the Marquis, a punishment that Nina had undergone in her initial weeks at the château.

Marciana's bottom, still manifesting evidence of Donatien's savage whipcuts, was sponged with a natural foundation. Its heart-shaped harmonic proportions rose to receive the periodic enquiry of Nina's tongue. The two inverted arcs simmered with expectant leisure. But Nina was forbidden to enter the rosette with her tongue, and so satisfied Marciana by teasing her with prehensile rimming.

Marciana's bottom was perfumed with dense, nocturnal
Must
, an aphrodisiac scent from Cartier that answered the pungent, autumnal notes that invested the château.

Nina put on a record of the French chanteuse Barbara, and the wavering notes of 'Amours Incestueuses' invaded the room, the song narrating the poignant story of condemned love between a middle-aged parent and a child of twenty. It was a song that they often listened to together as a prelude to the sodomitical incest that Marciana was to undergo.

The two women kissed, Nina's tongue rolling in circles round Marciana's palate, before pushing for her epiglottis. Nina aroused Marciana's nipples, touching them like a pianist hardly stroking the ivories, but rather suggesting a sonata by extra-sensory touch.

Marciana moaned, her body rippling like wind-chimes in an undulating breeze. Nina could bring her to the point of orgasm by this subtle play of energies, and a partly strangled cry escaped her lips, as Marciana sensed Nina's tongue-point stand on her left nipple with her breath tingling on the surface of the purple areola.

If Marciana hadn't been expecting her brother, she would have called for the bee and honey dip on her vulva. The game involved having her vulva coated in honey, and at a certain point of arousal Nina would release a bee from a glass receptacle, and Marciana would lie on the bed with her legs wide open in anticipation of the insect's inevitable attraction to her honeyed spot. The risk of her being stung on her clitoris as a result of the bee's irascible frustration at being unable to free itself from the glutinous honey was the tension that excited Marciana to convulsive orgasm.

Tonight, her request for the game was turned down. It was Nina's job to beautify Marciana's bottom, but to keep her erotic hunger tamed until Donatien was ready to begin his mastery of her bottom.

The castle was so oppressively silent, so cut off from world, that the two women were glad of the music. It was Donatien's authoritative decree that none of the château’s inhabitants should ever leave the fortress's wooded precincts. His abductees were frozen into a time-warp, a trance-state conditioning that held them secure within the castle's labyrinthine complex. And to Nina, who was the most recent of Donatien's captives, the château's complement of slaves resembled drugged noctambulists who only came alive at midnight. It seemed to her that it was only then that they achieved knowledge of their true identities, and with it a regressive awareness of the past.

Nina stood back and reviewed Marciana's bottom. Its shape had been regularly corrected by liposuction, the misappropriated fat removed with the help of cannula tubes. Marciana's restructured prosthetic buttocks were the result of injections with her own fat to create a solid silicone base to the muscle tone. The process was repeated every two to three years, so as to avoid silicone migration, and to ensure that the bottom she presented to Donatien conformed precisely to his demands.

While Marciana lay face down on the black satin counterpane, luxuriating in the massage she had just received, Nina busied herself with the other ritualistic preparations necessary for heightening Donatien's sense of illicit sex.

Nina attended to the massed profusion of red carnations that back-dropped the ornately carved black bed. Black altar candles had been lit around a page from
The 120 Days Of Sodom
, copied out in a script that employed gothic majuscules and unicals. Nina would have to operate a camcorder and film the event in close-up, so that no least detail of the sexual proceedings would be lost to the Marquis, whose archived footage proved resourceful to his obsessive need to validate and improve his particular method of sex.

Special condoms monogrammed with black roses or eight gold stars on a black latex background had been placed in a heart shaped dish beside the bed. Hints of lavender and frangipani dusted the air from a smoking incense cone.

Billie Holiday was singing 'I Cover The Waterfront' as though she had never conceived that there would be an audience for her work. To Marciana it sounded as though Billie was singing to herself in a hotel room, and so giving voice to a grief that had come to possess her over a lifetime, but which had only found register in the moment of its understated release. It was the naivety in Billie's voice, in contrast to her seasoned heart, that had it live for Marciana as an instrument of confessional pain. Her voice mixed spring and autumn in one timbral season, and Marciana picked up on its fragile pitch as a pivot on which to rest her sadness at being exiled from the world.

Marciana liked, in the deep night hours as she and Nina sat waiting for Donatien's visits, to tell Nina something of her brother's extraordinary life; and of how he had married Renée-Pelagie on May 17, 1763, at the church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine parish in Ville-l’
Évêque, already poxed, and bringing his venereal disease to the ceremony. Renée-Pelagie had proved singularly unattractive, and despite her family wealth, unrefined in her manners.

Marciana told Nina of how she had been separated from her mother at an early age, after Donatien had been caught trying to saddle her bottom, and how she had been disowned by her father the Comte de Sade, and sent to a reformatory. But no sooner had her brother moved with his bride to the apartment prepared for them on the second floor of the Hôtel de Montreuil on rue Neuve-du-Luxembourg, than he had called for her, and dishonoured the marriage sheets by making love to his sister in the bridal bed.

Marciana remembered too how she had visited Donatien at the Montreuil's château at Echauffour in Normandy, and how she had arrived late one night in the pouring rain, and had met Donatien at a prearranged spot under a large oak at midnight. Marciana told Nina of how she had worn nothing but a pair of red in, panties under her black greatcoat, and that Donatien had conducted her to an outhouse in which there was an old split mattress and hens bickering in the wadded straw. And there they had spent the night together, while the château slept, and the rain had sheeted its brilliant syntax across the surrounding woods. Donatien had ploughed her unremittingly, and his whip-marks had left her skin looking like a matelot's striped vest.

Marciana's memory was a constantly downloading source of Sadean anecdotes. She was able to remember the exact colognes her brother had worn on occasions important to both of them, and the colours of clothes he had chosen to match the big crises in his life. She had been the recording eye visually retrieving the detail that had accompanied the moment. She would tell Nina of Donatien's leg of mutton sleeve silk blouses, a modified style of shirt he still adopted on autumn nights at La Coste. She remembered jackets, coats and boots he had worn in his perverse libertine youth, the old Paris cowering at his feet like a dog surprised by authority.

It was the quiet hour, as the two women called it, the interlude between sex rites when the Marquis prepared himself to consummate incest. It was a space in which Nina too would speak of the life she had known before coming to the castle, and of how she had worked in a bar in Rousillon, a place Donatien had stopped off in on his journey back to the château. His limo had run out of fuel, and he had ostentatiously entered the completely empty bar in which Nina was waitressing, and their liaison had begun with this encounter.

Nina tirelessly repeated to Marciana the compulsion she had felt in Donatien's presence to humiliate herself before his disciplinarian command. He had ordered her to leave her job on the spot, and to come with him immediately to his château. Nina spoke of how Donatien had dog-collared her in the car, and that she hadn't protested for a moment at the leash to which she had found herself attached.

The two women would speak of Donatien's indomitable power, and also of the mystic aura surrounding his person. He had in the eighteenth century presided over numerous public flagellation cults: the Recollects of the rue du Bac, the Daughters of the Precious Blood, the Daughters of Cavalry, and the Grey Sisters from the parishes of Saint-Sulpice, Saint-Laurent, Sainte-Marguerite, La Madeleine and Saint-Germain l'Auxerroi. A galaxy of round bottoms had been bled in the street, and Donatien's spectatorial eye had recorded it all through the fast-tracking centuries. Marciana had never questioned her brother's untiring omnivorous preoccupation with bottoms, and had come to accept this fetish, not as an aspect of his psychology, but as the subjective thrust to his whole being. Presiding over the gluteal choreography of
coitus in retro
, Donatien had according to Marciana found his way to the paradisal city in her rectum.