Liberate Yourself (The Desires Unlocked Trilogy Part One) (6 page)

Afterwards Valentina sits in the dusky room, hugging her knees and revolving around and around on Theo’s desk chair. The art on the walls becomes a carousel of colour and energy. She thinks about the stranger in the garden, and wonders why she imagined he was Theo back again, in fact not gone at all.

She grasps the edge of the desk with one hand, stops spinning, her eyes alighting upon one of Theo’s newly acquired paintings, a copy of a Dutch Master. Another strange choice for him. It is a painting of a woman in a Dutch interior, black and white tiled floor and panelled walls. She is standing at an open window, holding a letter up to the light, her head turned away from the viewer as if she is aware of their prying gaze. She is like me, Valentina admits to herself; she is trying to hide
her feelings. No other lover has ever had such an effect upon her as Theo. To be able to make her come just at the thought of his touch.

Could she do it? Is it possible that she could welcome Theo’s parents into their apartment in the role of his girlfriend? The idea of it makes her chest tight with dread. She stands up suddenly, pushing the chair back from the desk so that it makes a hideous scraping sound on the marble floor. She is pathetic. All he wants is to call her his girlfriend. He is hardly asking her to marry him. It’s a normal enough request after living with someone for six months. Antonella calls herself someone’s new girlfriend almost every couple of weeks. Like Theo said to her earlier, it’s no big deal. And yet to Valentina it is. If she is Theo’s girlfriend, then she is his. She can’t let that happen, ever again, for Valentina belongs to no one.

SHE RECLINES ON HER BED LIKE AN ARTIST’S MODEL. SHE
is naked apart from her black stockings and lace garters. She puts her hand on the dip of her waist and trails her finger up the hill of her behind, down again and up the slope of the side of her chest. She is in profile like a valley landscape. She can sense him behind her, taking off his clothes. Gazing at her back. She doesn’t need to look to know that he is folding each item neatly, one by one, before putting them on the seat of the armchair. The Doctor is precise in every way, particularly in his lovemaking. She closes her eyes and imagines she is in a movie. No need to talk. All she needs to say is in her body.

A warm hand is placed upon her shoulder and she knows that the Doctor is ready. She turns around and he is facing her, glorious in his nakedness. She takes pleasure in really looking at him. Her husband has never allowed her to do this; since she became Belle, she wouldn’t want to. Always they undress in the dark, and she believes that she now
knows the Doctor’s body better than her own husband’s.

‘Are you sick, Belle?’ the Doctor asks her.

She nods.

‘Would you like me to make you feel better?’

She nods again.

The Doctor smiles and opens his big black bag. Belle moistens her dry lips with her tongue. What is he going to take out? She is a little frightened, although she knows in her heart the Doctor would never hurt her. Despite the fact that they never acknowledge it, Belle and the Doctor have moved in the same social circles for years. He calls her Belle, not Louise, and never hints that he might know her true identity, which of course he does. What other woman in Venice sports such a stylish black bob as Signora Louise Brzezinska?

The Doctor starts to take instruments out of his bag. Each one gleams hard, cold and metal.

‘Do you want me to make you better, Belle?’ he asks again.

She nods and the Doctor smiles at her benevolently. He picks up a severe-looking type of forceps and examines it before putting it back down again.

‘Well turn around now, like a good girl, and I will see what I can do for you.’

She turns her back to him again, the image of his medical instruments, shiny and bright, still in her head. He has never done it before, but maybe this time he will touch her with one of those things. The thought is frightening and thrilling at the same time.

She feels the silk band going around her eyes and being tied at the back of her head, gently and with respect. She looks into the black cloth and she can see nothing. Her breath quickens. Now she knows exactly what the Doctor wants to do, and yet each time he comes to visit her she cannot help this expectation that overwhelms her as soon as he places the blindfold over her eyes. Such a considerate man. He allows her to enter her fantasies as he enacts his own.

The Doctor gently pulls her back down on to the bed. He picks up her right ankle and moves her leg to the side. He pulls her garter off and slowly peels off her stocking. She feels it being wrapped around her ankle, binding it to the bedstead. It is not so tight that it will leave a mark, and yet it is tight enough to make her feel tension. He moves her other leg now, takes off the stocking and ties this foot to the other side of the bed. She is lying on her back, her legs wide open in a provocative V. He leaves her arms free. The Doctor likes her to dig her nails into his back. She wonders how he explains these marks to his wife, but maybe the reason he is here right now with her is because his wife never sees his naked body any more.

She hears the Doctor moving around the room. She knows he is looking at her exposed, wide open for him, and picking up his instruments one by one, thinking about it. She should be frightened, but she isn’t. Her arms are free and she can easily untie herself if she wants to. Yet she has no desire to pull off the blindfold or undo the stockings tied around her ankles.

She feels the Doctor’s weight as he gets on to the bed and leans over her.

‘I think I have just the thing to make you feel better,’ he whispers.

‘Please, Doctor,’ she says.

‘Where does it hurt?’ he asks.

She lifts her arm and places her hand on her belly.

‘Here, Doctor.’

He takes his time, and the anticipation makes her stomach clench. Will he touch her with one of his cold instruments? Eventually she feels his warm lips on her skin, and the tension is replaced by relief. He massages her belly with his hands.

‘Where else does it hurt, Belle?’

She brings her hand up to her breast, touches her nipple.

‘Here, Doctor.’

He lifts her hand away and begins to kiss her nipple very gently, fondling her other breast at the same time, and Belle feels herself melting beneath the healing hands of her doctor. She cannot see him through the blindfold and this makes the experience even more erotic for her. She is imagining a man doing this to her not just because he desires it, but because he loves her and wants to pleasure her. She knows the Doctor doesn’t love her, but that doesn’t matter now. He has become her dream man, the ultimate lover she hopes to find one day.

‘Where else does it hurt, Belle?’ the kind voice of the Doctor asks her.

She brings her hand down between her open legs.

‘Here, Doctor, it hurts so much right here.’

‘I’m going to make you all better now, Belle,’ the Doctor says.

He slowly kisses her all the way from the tip of her nipples, down the centre of her chest and stomach. He kisses across her pelvis until he comes to where her hand is placed. He picks up her hand, kisses it gently and removes it. Now he is kissing her below. Making her better, as he calls it. Such a lover this man is. She feels like congratulating his wife every time she sees her. The Doctor kisses her deeper and deeper, gently using his fingers to help him go further. Even though she is blindfolded, Belle still closes her eyes. She is tied to the bed, and yet she feels as free as a bird. A blackbird. She hears its song inside her head, and it trills with pleasure as the Doctor caresses her with his tongue.

In this moment of ecstasy I am all spirit, Belle thinks.

This spirit, this energy of who she is feels like fire in her blood. It fuels her as the Doctor brings her closer and closer to the edge. She imagines that another man is here with her making love. She doesn’t know him yet. He is a projection, but she feels he will come soon. This man who can do everything for her.

The Doctor pulls away from her.

‘How are you feeling now, Belle?’ he asks her.

‘A little better, but Doctor, I need you to make sure I don’t get sick again.’

‘Of course, my dear,’ the Doctor says politely. A second
later she feels him push inside her, and it makes her sigh with pleasure.

‘Is that better?’ he asks.

‘Oh yes,’ she breathes.

‘Good girl,’ he says, beginning to pick up rhythm. Now she knows that the Doctor is going into his own fantasy world. And she too is gone, far away from this room in Venice. She is in her special place, somewhere beyond the dimensions of the real world, in the heavens and at the bottom of the sea. At the same time she is in a small room, a tiny dark cupboard of desire. She locks the door, leaving her thoughts outside and letting her physical sensations take her beyond her body, so that she is right on the very edge, the tiny sliver of a fine line between calm and storm. She holds it for as long as she can, but it is only a matter of seconds before she succumbs to the Doctor’s relentless rhythm and she is climaxing. He doesn’t stop, not for a second, but keeps on as she cascades around him, thrusting into her deeper and deeper. She knows he is lost in the ending of his own private game, and she can feel him growing more urgent, hot, fast jabs. Although her legs are rigid, her feet bound to the bed, she raises her chest towards him and digs her nails into his back. He groans with pleasure and she pushes her fingers deeper into his flesh as he comes with a loud cry.

Belle stands by the open French window, the curtains fluttering inside and draping her naked body. She watches the Doctor
rowing briskly away, his black bag stowed beside him in the boat. He is all business once again. Who would have thought what the good doctor likes to get up to when he is not saving lives? She considers that maybe she is a kind of doctor as well. Helping her clients find release, and the satisfaction that they can’t seem to achieve in their marriages or relationships with other women. She compares herself to one of Venice’s most famous courtesans, Veronica Franco. She was a
cortigiana onesta
, an intellectual prostitute, admired by men not just for her erotic skills, but for her mind as well. Veronica Franco equated virtue with intellectual integrity. Belle would like to write poetry too. She tries to compose something in her head. Instinctively the words are Polish, not Italian, and the vista of the narrow canal in front of her is replaced by a fleeting image of the woods back home. Tall evergreen trees, stretching on and on, swaying in a soft breeze, whispering to her . . . re-creating these new sensations her body is feeling.

I am moving. The branches, the leaves that shade my heart begin to stir
.

During Veronica Franco’s time, in the sixteenth century, there was no shame attached to being a prostitute. So, Belle reasons, she is not being immoral. She is stimulating her clients’ imaginations and ultimately helping her men to treat their wives better. Isn’t it preferable that they come to her, a willing participant in the act of sex, rather than force themselves on reluctant wives and fiancées? This is what she is good at, so why not share herself if she so chooses? She wishes
that there was a man out there who could understand this. To love Belle you have to let her be free.

She turns to look at the bed, the sheets still crumpled from their game. The Doctor has left a generous pile of notes on the pillow. It is more than enough to cover the rent on her apartment for the next month. It is hard to believe that it is just over a year since her first astonishing encounter as Belle on the night of the costume party. For the few weeks after it happened she tried unsuccessfully to forget about it. Yet those sensations were there with her all the time. Imaginary fingers touching her, the feel of him within her grasp, making her on edge as if she had an itch she was unable to scratch. When she couldn’t remove the image of herself and the young man from her mind, she tried to relive it and bring it into the bedchamber with her husband. That was a disaster. Signor Brzezinski told her she looked depraved in her Egyptian outfit, and after he had stripped her of her finery and washed the make-up off her face, ignoring her tears of disappointment, she felt empty of any kind of desire. Of course it was what he called her apathy that seemed to give her cruel husband pleasure, and he had sex with her then, her passiveness driving him on so that it was clear he did not care whether she was enjoying herself or not. All those old emotions returned: her humiliation and her powerlessness, smothering the part of her she had unearthed the night she was an Egyptian. And so it was with a sort of desperation that she tentatively began her career as a prostitute. As soon as her husband left for business again, she disguised
herself as best she could and went exploring. The first few times she found clients around Ponte di Rialto, but as the weather turned colder, she soon realised that she would be more comfortable, and more respected, if she were to rent an apartment somewhere in the city, a good distance from her home ground.

How fast things have changed since then. Now she truly is living a double life: sometimes the demure Polish wife of Signor Brzezinski, at other times the exotic courtesan Belle, with her entourage of special clients. She knows that it isn’t an ideal life, and yet it is what she needs right now. She isn’t hurting anyone. Not even Signor Brzezinski if he finds out, for he cannot love her. So where is the badness in being Belle?

Since she is a prostitute out of choice, rather than need, Belle never sleeps with anyone she doesn’t want to. She has a golden rule about Blackshirts and refuses to have sex with them. She cannot abide Mussolini’s fascists, although her husband openly admires the dictator. There are other monsters as well who prowl the streets of Venice, and she is always very careful not to be tempted. She has heard of sick beasts who take pleasure from hurting prostitutes. She never wants to risk that.

She crosses her apartment, and goes into the front room, where she looks out of the window, turning her gaze towards the lagoon. There is a misty haze hanging over the green water, and an aureole glow behind it as the sun tries to break through. The overall effect is ethereal and dreamlike. She feels
as though she is living in a mystical city, a place of dreams and fantasies. Could she live this life in any place other than Venice? She doesn’t think so. This city, founded by Venus rising from the sea, lends itself to sexual intrigue. It is part of its history.