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ItalianoThe story of o
Part 8
| The Story of O By Pauline R#age -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- .::Page Eight::. So Ren# had phoned Sir Stephen, and not her. Back home, after having taken off her clothes, and having had lunch in her dressing gown, she still had plenty of time to freshen her make-up and rearrange her hair, and to get dressed to go to the studio, where she was due at three o'clock. The telephone did not ring; Ren# did not call her. Why? What had Sir Stephen told him? How had they talked about her? She remembered the words they both had used in her presence, their casual remarks concerning the advantages of her body with respect to the demands of theirs. Perhaps it was merely that she was not used to this kind of vocabulary in English, but the only French equivalents she could find seemed utterly base and contemptible to her. It was true that she had been passed from hand to hand as often as were the prostitutes in the brothels, so why should they treat her otherwise? "I love you, I love you, Ren#," she repeated, softly calling to him in the solitude of her room, "" love you, do whatever you want with me, but don't leave me, for God's sake, don't leave me." Who pities those who wait? They are easily recognized: by their gentleness, by their falsely attentive looks - attentive, yes, but to something other than what they are looking at - by their absent-mindedness. For three long hours, in the studio where a short, plump red-haired model whom O did not know and who was modeling hats for her, O was that absent-minded person, withdrawn into herself by her desire for the minutes to hasten by, and by her own anxiety. Over a blouse and petticoat of red silk she had put on a plaid skirt and a short suede jacket. The bright red of her blouse beneath her partly opened jacket made her already pale face seem even paler, and the little red-haired model told her that she looked like a femme fatale. "Fatal for whom?" O said to herself. Two years earlier, before she had met and fallen in love with Ren#, she would have sworn: "Fatal for Sir Stephen", and have added: "and he'll know it too." But her love for Ren# and Ren#'s love for her had stripped her of all her weapons, and instead of providing her with any new proof of her power, had stripped her of those she had previously possessed. Once she had been indifferent and fickle, someone who enjoyed tempting, by a word or gesture, the boys who were in love with her, but without giving them anything, then giving herself impulsively, for no reason, once and only once, as a reward, but also to inflame then even more and render a passion she did not share even more cruel. She was sure that they loved her. One of them had tried to commit suicide; when he had been released from the hospital where they had taken him, she had gone to his place, had stripped naked, and forbidding him to touch her, had lain down on his couch. Pale with pain and passion, he had stared at her silently for two hours, petrified by the promise he had made. She had never wanted to see him again. It wasn't that she took lightly the desire she aroused. She understood it, or thought she understood, all the more so because she herself felt a similar desire (or so she thought) for her girl friends, or for young strangers, girls she encountered by chance. Some of them yielded to her, and she would take them to some discreet hotel with its narrow hallways and paper-thin walls, while others, horrified, spurned her. But what she took - or mistook - to be desire was actually nothing more than the thirst for conquest, and neither her tough-guy exterior nor the fact that she had had several lovers - if you could call them lovers - nor her hardness, nor even her courage was of any help to her when she had met Ren#. In the space of a week she learned fear, but certainty; anguish, but happiness. Ren# threw himself at her like a pirate at his prisoner, and she reveled in her captivity, feeling on her wrists, her ankles, feeling on all her members and in the secret depths of her heart and body, bonds less visible than the finest strands of hair, more powerful than the cables the Lilliputians used to tie up Gulliver, bonds her lover loosened or tightened with a glance. She was no longer free? Yes! Thank God, she was no longer free. But she was light, a nymph on clouds, a fish in water, lost in happiness. Lost because these fine strands of hair, these cables which Ren# held, without exception in his hand, were the only network through which the current of life any longer flowed into her. This was true to such a degree that when Ren# relaxed his grip upon her - or when she imagined he had - when he seemed distracted, when he left her in a mood which she took to be indifference of let some time go by without seeing her or replying to her letters and she assumed that he no longer cared to see her and was on the verge of ceasing to love her, then everything was choked and smothered within her. The grass turned black, day was no longer day nor night any longer night, but both merely infernal machines which alternately provided, as part of her torture, periods of light and darkness. Cool water made her nauseous. She felt as though she were a statue of ashes - bitter, useless, damned - like the salt statues of Gomorrah. For she was guilty. Those who love God, and by Him are abandoned in the dark of night, are guilty because they are abandoned. They cast back into their memories, searching for their sins. She looked back, hunting for hers. All she found were insignificant acts of kindness or self-indulgence, which were not so much acts as an innate part of her personality, such as arousing the desires of men other than Ren#, men she noticed only to the extent that the love Ren# gave her, the certainty of belonging to Ren#, made her happy and filled her cup of happiness to overflowing, and insofar as her total submission to Ren# rendered her vulnerable, irresponsible, and all her trifling acts - but what acts? For all she had to reproach herself with were thoughts and fleeting temptations. Yet, he was certain that she was guilty and, without really wanting to, Ren# was punishing her for a sin he knew nothing about (since it remained completely internal), although Sir Stephen had immediately detected it: her wantonness. O was happy that Ren# had had her whipped and had prostituted her, because her impassioned submission would furnish her lover with the proof that she belonged to him, but also because the pain and shame of the lash, and the outrage inflicted upon her by those who compelled her to pleasure when they took her, and at the same time delighted in their own without paying the slightest heed to hers, seemed to her the very redemption of her sins. There had been embraces she had found foul, hands that had been an intolerable insult on her breasts, mouths which had sucked on her lips and tongues like so many soft, vile leeches, and tongues and sexes, viscous beasts which, caressing themselves at her closed mouth, at the double furrow before and behind, which she had squeezed tight with all her might, had stiffened her with disgust and kept her stiffened so long that it was all the whip could do to unbend her, but she had finally yielded to the blows and opened, with disgust and abominable servility. And what if, in spite of that, Sir Stephen was right? What if she actually enjoyed her debasement? In that case, the baser she was, the more merciful was Ren# to consent to make O the instrument of his pleasure. As a child, O had read a Biblical text in red letters on the white wall of a room in Wales where she had lived for two months, a text such as the Protestants often inscribe in their houses: IT IS A FEARFUL THING TO FALL INTO THE HANDS OF THE LIVING GOD No, O told herself now, that isn't true. What is fearful is to be cast out at the hands of the living God. Every time Ren# postponed, or was late to, a rendezvous with her, as he had done today - for six o'clock had come and gone, as had six-thirty - O was prey to a dual feeling of madness and despair, but for nothing. Madness was nothing, despair for nothing, nothing was true. Ren# would arrive, he would be there, nothing was changed, he loved her but had been held up by a staff meeting or some extra work, he had not had time to let her know; in a flash, O emerged from her airless chamber, and yet each of these attacks of terror would leave behind, somewhere deep inside her, a dull premonition, a warning of woe: for there were also times when Ren# neglected to let her know when the reason for the delay was a game of golf or a hand of bridge, or perhaps another face, for he loved O but he was free, sure of her and fickle, so fickle. Would a day of death and ashes not come, a day in the long string of other days which would give the nod to madness, a day when the gas chamber would reopen? Oh, let the miracle continue, let me still be touched by grace, Ren# don't leave me! Each day, O did not look, nor did she care to look, any further than the next day and the day after; nor, each week, any further than the following week. And for her every night with Ren# was a night which would last forever. Ren# finally arrived at seven, so happy to see her again that he kissed her in front of the electrician who was repairing a floodlight, in front of the short, red-haired model who was just coming out of the dressing room, and in front of Jacqueline, whom on one expected, who had come in suddenly on the heels of the other model. "What a lovely sight," Jacqueline said to O. "I was just passing. I wanted to ask you for the last shots of me you took, but I gather this isn't the right moment. I'll be on my way." "Mademoiselle, please don't go," Ren# called after her, without letting go of O, whom he was holding around the waist, "please don't go!" O introduced them: Jacqueline, Ren#; Ren#, Jacqueline. Piqued, the red-haired model had gone back into her dressing room, the electrician was pretending to be busy. O was looking at Jacqueline and could feel Ren#'s eyes following her gaze. Jacqueline was wearing a ski outfit, the kind that only movie stars who never go skiing wear. Her black sweater accentuated her small, widely spaced breasts, her tight-fitting ski pants did the same for her long, winter-sports-girl legs. Everything about her looked like snow: the bluish sheen of her gray sealskin jacket was snow in the shade; the hoar-frost reflection of her hair and eyelashes, snow in sunlight. She had on lipstick whose deep red shaded almost to purple, and when she smiled and lifted her eyes till they were fixed on O, O said to herself that no would could resist the desire to drink of that green and moving water beneath the silvery lashes, to rip off her sweater to lay his hands on the fairly small breasts. There, you see: no sooner had Ren# returned than, completely reassured by his presence, she recovered her taste for others and for herself, her zest for life. They left together, all thee of them. On the rue Royale the snow, which had been falling in large flakes for two hours, fell now in eddies of thin little flakes for two hours, fell now in eddies of thin little white flies which stung the face. The rock salt scattered on the sidewalk crunched beneath their feet and melted the snow, and O felt the icy breath it emitted rising along her legs and fastened on her naked thighs. O had a fairly clear idea of what she was looking for in the young women she pursued. It wasn't that she wanted to give the impression she was vying with men, nor that she was trying to compensate by her manifest masculinity for a female inferiority which she in no wise felt. It's true that when she was twenty she had caught herself courting the prettiest of her girl friends by doffing her beret, by standing aside to let her pass, and by offering a hand to help her out of a taxi. In the same vein, she would not tolerate not paying whenever they had tea together in some pastry shop. She would kiss her hand and, if she had a chance, her mouth, if possible in the street. But these were so many affectations she paraded for the sake of scandal, displayed much more from childishness than from conviction. On the other hand, her penchant for the sweetness of sweetly made-up lips yielding beneath her own, for the porcelain or pearly sparkle of eyes half-closed in the half-light of couches at five in the afternoon, when the curtains are drawn and the lamp on the fireplace mantel lighted, for the voices that say: "Again, oh, please, again...," for the marine odor clinging to her fingers: this was a real, deeply-rooted taste. And she also enjoyed the pursuit just as much. Probably not for the pursuit itself, however amusing or fascinating it might be, but for the complete sense of freedom she experienced in the act of hunting. She, and she alone, set the rules and directed the proceedings (something she never did with men, or only in a most oblique manner). She initiated the discussions and set the rendezvous, the kisses came from her too, so much so that she preferred not to have someone kiss her first, and since she had first had lovers she almost never allowed the girl whom she was caressing to return her caresses. As much as she was in a hurry to behold her girlfriend naked, she was equally quick to find excuses why she herself should not undress. She often looked for excuses to avoid it, saying that she was cold, that it was the wrong time of the month for her. And, what is more, rare was the woman in whom she failed to detect some element of beauty. She remembered that, just out of the lyc#e, she had tried to seduce an ugly, disagreeable, constantly ill-natured little girl for the sole reason that she had a wild mop of blonde hair which, by its unevenly cut curls, created a forest of light and shade over a skin that, while lusterless, had a texture which was soft, smooth, and totally flat. But the little girl had repelled her advances, and if one day pleasure had ever lighted up the ungrateful wench's face, it had not been because of O. For O passionately loved to see faces enveloped in that mist which makes them so young and smooth, a timeless youth that does not restore childhood but enlarges the lips, widens the eyes the way make-up does, and renders the iris sparkling and clear. In this, admiration played a larger part than pride, for it was not her handiwork which moved her: at Roissy she had experienced the same uncomfortable feeling in the presence of the transfigured face of a girl possessed by a stranger. The nakedness and surrender of the bodies overwhelmed her, and she had the feeling that her girlfriends, when they simply agreed to display themselves naked in a locked room, were giving her a gift which she could never repay in kind. For the nakedness of vacations, in the sun and on the beaches, made no impression on her - not simply because it was public but because, being public and not absolute, she was to some extent protected from it. The beauty of other women, which with unfailing generosity she was inclined to find superior to her own, nevertheless reassured her concerning her own beauty, in which she saw, whenever she unexpectedly caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror, a kind of reflection of theirs. The power she acknowledged that her girlfriends had over her was at the same time a guarantee of her own power over men. And what she asked of women (and never returned, or ever so little), she was happy and found it quite natural that men should be eager and impatient to ask of her. Thus was she constantly and simultaneously the accomplice of both men and women, having, as it were, her cake and eating it too. There were times when the game was not all that easy. That O was in love with Jacqueline, no more and no less than she had been in love with many others, and assuming that the term "in love" (which was saying a great deal) was the proper one, there could be no doubt. But why did she conceal it so? When the buds burst open on the poplar tree along the quays, and daylight, lingering longer, gave lovers time to sit for a while in the gardens after work, she thought she had at last found the courage to face Jacqueline. In winter, Jacqueline had seemed too triumphant to her beneath her cool furs, too iridescent, untouchable, inaccessible. And Jacqueline knew it. Spring put her back into suits, flat-heeled shoes, sweaters. With her short Dutch bob, she finally resembled those fresh school girls whom O, as a lyc#e student herself, used to grab by the wrists and drag silently into an empty cloakroom and push back against the hanging coats. The coats would tumble from the hangars. Then O would burst out laughing. They used to wear uniform blouses of raw cotton, with their initials embroidered in red cotton on their breast pockets. Three years later, three kilometers away, Jacqueline had worn the same blouses in another lyc#e. It was by chance that O learned that one day when Jacqueline was modeling some high-fashion dresses and said with a sigh that, really, if only they had had as pretty dresses at school, they would have been much happier there. Or if they had been allowed to wear the jumper they gave you, without anything on underneath. "What do you mean, without anything on?" O said. "Without a dress, naturally," Jacqueline replied. To which O began to blush. She could not get used to being naked beneath her dress, and any equivocal remark seemed to her to be an allusion to her condition. It did no good to keep on repeating to herself that one is always naked beneath one's clothes. No, she felt as naked as that woman from Verona who went out to offer herself to the chief of the besieging army in order to free her city: naked beneath a coat, which only needed to be opened a crack. It also seemed to her that, like the Italian, her nakedness was meant to redeem something. But what? Since Jacqueline was sure of herself, she had nothing to redeem; she had no need to be reassured, all she needed was a mirror. O looked at her humbly, thinking that the only flowers one could offer her were magnolias, because their waxen whiteness is sometimes infused with a pink glow. As winter waned, the pale tan that gilded Jacqueline's skin vanished with the memory of the snow. Soon, only camellias would do. But O was afraid of making a fool of herself with these melodramatic flowers. On day she brought a big bouquet of blue hyacinths, whose odor is overwhelming, like that of tuberoses: oily, cloying, clinging, exactly the odor camellias ought to have but don't. Jacqueline buried her Mongolian nose in the warm, stiff-stemmed flowers, her small nose and pink lips, for she had been wearing a pink lipstick for the past two weeks, and not red any longer. "Are they for me?" she said, the way women do who are used to receiving gifts. Then she thanked O and asked her if Ren# were coming for her. Yes, he was coming, O said. He's coming, she repeated to herself, and it will be for him that Jacqueline will lift her icy, liquid eyes for a second, those eyes which never look at anyone squarely, as she stands there falsely motionless, falsely silent. No on would need to tech her anything: neither to remain silent nor now to keep her hands unclenched at her sides, nor indeed how to arch her head half back. O was dying to seize a handful of that too blonde hair at the nape of the neck, and pull her docile head all the way back, to run at least her finger over the line of her eyebrows. But Ren# would want to do it too. She was fully aware why she, once so daring and bold, had become so shy, why she had wanted Jacqueline for two months without betraying it by the least word or gesture, and giving herself lame excuses to explain her timidity. It was not true that Jacqueline was intangible. The obstacle was not in Jacqueline, it lay deep within O herself, its roots deeper than anything she had ever before encountered. It was because Ren# was leaving her free, and because she loathed her freedom. Her freedom was worse than any chains. Her freedom was separating her from Ren#. She could have taken Jacqueline by the shoulders any number of times and without saying a word, pinned her against the wall with her two hands, the way a butterfly is impaled; Jacqueline would not have moved, and probably not even done so much as smile. But O was henceforth like those wild animals which have been taken captive and either serve as decoys for the hunter or, leaping forward only at the hunter's command, head off the game for him. It was she who sometimes leaned back against a wall, pale and trembling, stubbornly impaled by her silence, bound there by her silence, so happy to remain silent. She was waiting for more than permission, since she already had permission. She was waiting for an order. It came to her not from Ren#, but from Sir Stephen. As the months went by since the day Ren# had given her to Sir Stephen, O was terrified to note the growing importance Sir Stephen was assuming in her lover's eyes. Moreover, she realized at the same time that, in this matter, she was perhaps mistaken, imagining a progression in the fact or the feeling where actually the only progression had been in the acknowledgment of this fact or the admission of this feeling. Be that as it may, she had been quick to note that Ren# chose to spend with her those nights, and only those nights, following those she had spent with Sir Stephen (Sir Stephen keeping her the whole night only when Ren# was away from Paris). She also noticed that when Ren# remained for one of those evenings at Sir Stephen's he would never touch O except to make her more readily available or an easier offering to Sir Stephen, if she happened to be struggling. It was extremely rare for him to stay, and he never did unless at Sir Stephen's express request. Whenever he did, he remained fully dressed, as he had done the first time, keeping quiet, lighting one cigarette after another, adding wood to the fire, serving Sir Stephen something to drink - but not drinking himself. O felt that he was watching her the way a lion trainer watches the animal he trained, careful to see that it performs with complete obedience and thus does honor to him, but even more the way a prince's bodyguard or a bandit's second-in-command keeps an eye on the prostitute he has gone down to fetch in the street. The proof that he was indeed yielding to the role of servant or acolyte resided in the fact that he watched Sir Stephen's face more closely than he did hers - and beneath his gaze O felt herself stripped of the very voluptuousness in which her features were immersed: for this sensual pleasure Ren# paid obeisance, expressed admiration and even gratitude to Sir Stephen, who had engendered it, pleased that he had deigned to take pleasure in something he had given him. Continue |