Return to the Chateau (2 page)

=46ifty years old probably, an Englishman certainly. And what else? Nothing. But this silent, unilateral rapport between him and my companion, between him and me, reappeared out of the blue ten years later, in the middle of the night pierced by the light of my table lamp, and the hand on the paper brought him back to life -with a new meaning even quicker than reflection. Anne-Marie, I don’t know at all. One of my woman friends (whom I respect, and I am slow to respect) might well be Anne-Marie were it not for the fact that she is the epitome of purity and honor: I mean that Anne-Marie might have got from her her rigor and her resolve, her free and easy manner, and straightforward, unequivocal way in which she exercised her profession. To tell the truth, the professions in question (O’s and Anne-Marie’s, prostitute or procuress, to make things utterly clear) are outside my sphere of knowledge. A major writer outraged by the publication of O thought he saw in my story the memoirs of a courtesan-admitting by way of excuse that he had not read the book-but he was wrong on two scores: they are not memoirs, and I am not a courtesan, however delicate the expression may be. Let us say so as not to offend him that it was doubtless a matter of having missed my chosen calling. After the abbreviated cast of characters, as at the theater, is there any point in clarifying the places where the action occurs? They belong to everyone. The rue de Poitiers and the private room at La Perouse, the room in the whorehouse-hotel near the Bastille, with its mirror on the ceiling, the streets in the vicinity of St. Germain, the sundrenched quays of the ile St. Louis, the dry, whitened stones of the back country of Provence, and this Roissy-en-France glimpsed during a brief excursion one spring, scarcely more than a place-name on a map-of course nothing is made up, not anymore than the asters which I said earlier we would have occasion to mention again. Nor did I make up-steal, rather, for which I ask her belated pardon, but the theft was committed out of admiration-the Leonor Fini masks. I also, it would seem, stole a lady’s living room, for some unspeakable purpose: Sir Stephen’s living room, no less! She told me so herself, not realizing of course to whom she was speaking (one never knows to whom one is speaking). Never have I set foot in that lady’s house, never have I laid eyes on her living room. Nor had I ever seen (and did not even know it existed) the house hidden in a hollow where for years a girl whom I subsequently chanced to meet gave exhibitions for the man she loved-who watched her with the help of a one-way mirror and a microphone hidden in the wall-the same kind of exhibitions that Sir Stephen demanded from O: surrender to complete strangers, recruited by him, imposed by him. No, I did not copy her story: no, she did not model her own actions after the one I wrote. But once having taken into account the fair share played by the fantastic and fanciful, and by the endless repetition, in the assuagement of obsessions (the endless repetition of pleasures and brutality being as necessary as it is absurd and impossible to achieve) everything blends together faithfully, dreamed or experienced, everything unfolds as being commonly shared in the universe of a like madness-and if you manage to look at them squarely-horrors, wonders, dreams, and lies-everything there is conjuration and release.

Thus, everything seemed to be settled: September was just around the corner. In the middle of September O was to return to Roissy, taking Natalie with her, while Ren=E9, after his return from a trip to North Africa, would take Jacqueline-at least he intimated as much. How long Natalie would be kept there, and how long O, would doubtless depend, for O, on whatever decision Sir Stephen might make, and, for Natalie, on what masters, or master, fate would hold in store for her at Roissy. But in this calm of well-laid plans O felt uneasy, as though she had some foreboding of danger, as though fate was being tempted, about this selfsame certainty that everyone around her felt that things would come to pass just as they had planned. Natalie’s happiness was equalled only by her impatience, and there was, in that happiness, a fair measure of the na=EFvet=E9 and confidence that children display when they have been promised something by adults. It was not the sway that Sir Stephen held over her, and that O freely acknowledged, that might have awakened the slightest suspicion of doubt in Natalie: O’s submission was so absolute and so constantly immediate that Natalie was quite incapable of conceiving, so great was her admiration for O, that anyone might ever contradict or disagree with Sir Stephen, since O knelt down before him. No matter how happy O may have been, and precisely because she was happy, she was reluctant to believe it, not did she dare to temper Natalie’s impatience, or to dampen her joy. From time to time, though, when Natalie would begin humming or singing softly to herself, O would make her stop, in order to ward off fate. She was careful never to step on the cracks in the floor, never to spill any salt, cross knives, or walk under ladders. And what Natalie did not know, and O did not dare to tell her, was that, if she took such great pleasure in being whipped, it was-aside from the physical enjoyment she derived from it to some degree-because of the happiness she experienced at being surrendered to a will above and beyond her own-beyond this point she paid for it as it were in pain and humiliation-humiliation because she could not cry out and beg for mercy even as she was experiencing pleasure, thereby perhaps superstitiously guaranteeing that the flogging would not be cut short. Ah, to remain motionless so that time stops too! O loathed dawn and dusk, when everything shifts, when everything exchanges one shape for another, so sadly, so perfidiously. Didn’t the fact that Ren=E9 had given her to Sir Stephen, as well as her own ease at shifting from one to the other, make it just as likely that Sir Stephen might also change? Standing naked one day in front of her having punished her afterward, as though his very purpose in prostituting her had been to find a pretense to punish her. But the day after the ball he had not. Was it that the shame O felt in being taken by someone else in Sir Stephen’s presence might have appeared to him to represent sufficient redemption in itself? What she had so unflinchingly accepted when it had happened with Ren=E9 rather than with Sir Stephen, what she accepted unquestioningly when Sir Stephen was not there, had seemed to O loathsome with him present.

After that, two days went by without Sir Stephen seeing her. O wanted to send Natalie back to her room; Sir Stephen forbade her from doing so. Thus O waited until Natalie was asleep before she broke down and wept bitter tears, silently, without anyone awake to see her. It was only on the fourth day that Sir Stephen came into her room, as was his wont, as the afternoon was drawing to a close, took her and allowed himself to be caressed by her. When at last he moaned and in his pleasure cried out her name, chest of drawers, whose bronze statues were fake Chinese, with their pointed hats like the beach hats Natalie wore, O suddenly realized that there was something new about Sir Stephen’s attitude toward her. First of all, he required her to be constantly naked in her room. Even her bedroom slippers were henceforth forbidden, as were any necklaces and jewelry. It was nothing. If Sir Stephen, far from the ch=E2teau at Roissy, felt like instituting a rule that reminded him of Roissy, why should O be surprised? But there were other, more serious signs. To be sure, O fully expected the night of the ball, that Sir Stephen would turn her over to his host. To be sure, he himself-in Ren=E9’s presence, for instance, or in Anne-Marie’s, and certainly, more recently, in Natalie’s-had already possessed her in full daylight. But prior to that night he had never allowed himself to be present while she was being possessed by someone else, nor had he shared her with the person to whom he had offered her. Nor had Sir Stephen ever offered her to someone else without she saw herself saved. But when she whispered to him, stretched out full-length beside him, golden and dead on the white rug, when she asked him in a near whisper whether he loved her he did not say: “I love you, O’ but only: “Of course,” and laughed. But did he really?

“You will be at Roissy on September 15,” he had said.

“Without you?” O had said.

“Oh, I’ll be along in due time,” he had answered.

It was then near the end of August: the figs, the dark grapes in baskets, attracted wasps; the sun was less bright, and threw longer shadows at nightfall. O was alone in the big, dry house, with Natalie and Sir Stephen. Ren=E9 had gone away with Jacqueline.

Did O have to take to counting the days that separated her from September 15, as Natalie did-fourteen more, twelve more-or was that due date one to be feared? These days, so carefully counted, slipped by in silence. Natalie and O were locked as though it had been planned beforehand in a Gynaeceum from which they had no desire to be freed, where the only sound, so completely did the walls muffle the words and laughter, was O screaming whenever she was beaten. One Sunday evening, when the sky was overcast and a storm brewing, Sir Stephen sent word to O to dress and come downstairs. She had heard a car door slamming, and through the bathroom window, which looked out onto the courtyard, the sounds of voices. Then nothing more. Natalie had come racing upstairs to tell her that she had caught a glimpse of the visitors: there were three of them in all, one of whom must have been Malaysian, to judge by his complexion and pitch-black eyes: he was tall, thin, and handsome. They were not speaking French, or English; Natalie thought it must have been German. German or not, O did not understand a word they were saying. And what was she to make of Sir Stephen’s indifference? It wasn’t that he pretended not to look at her; on the contrary he laughed and no doubt exchanged witty remarks with his guests while they were using her, but so completely at ease and with such an obvious air of detachment that O felt she might well have preferred contempt, or at least a feeling of resentment on his part, to this sudden absence, as though even while he was with her she no longer existed for him. It was contempt, and a curious pity that she found even more intolerable, that O read in the eyes of the Malaysian, who had not touched her, as she freed herself from the hands of the other two men, dishevelled and out of breath, her skirt full of spots. They must have found her to their taste, since they came back alone the next day about eleven o’clock. This time Sir Stephen dispensed with ceremony and had them go right up to her room, where she was naked.

After they left, O broke down and began to sob.

“Why, O?” Sir Stephen wanted to know. But he knew very well why; and how could O blot out of her memory the feeling of despair she felt when she saw herself, in her own room, and in his presence, being treated in a way few whores were treated in the meanest brothels, and, worst of all, being treated by him as though he took her for one. He told her that she could not be the judge of where, how, and for whom she was to serve, as she could not be the judge of his feelings. Then he had her whipped, so cruelly that for a fleeting moment she was comforted by it. But there was no getting around the fact that, once her tears were dry and the searing pain had subsided, she found herself prey once again to the feeling that had terrified her: that some other reason than the pleasure he might derive from it-and did he indeed still derive any?-made him prostitute her, and that she was useful to him as some kind of not-so-legal tender: but to be tendered in exchange for what? A terrible, grotesque image crossed her mind: the calvary of Saint George. Yes, perhaps she was the lowest representation of that same calvary on her knees and supported by her elbows, straddled by unknown men. And if he had her beaten, it was no longer for any other reason than to improve her training. If that were true, then why was she complaining, why was she so surprised and upset? Still tied to the balustrade next to her bed where it would seem that Sir Stephen had decided to leave her, and where indeed he did leave her for nearly three hours, O heard his voice echoing in her memory that same voice that had made such a lasting and profound ‘effect upon her on that first evening when he had taken her, had slapped her, had lacerated her loins, when he had told her that he wanted to obtain, and would obtain, from her, by submission and pure obedience, what she thought she would grant only through love. Whose fault was it, other than her own, if all it took him was a whipping to make her automatically give herself to him? If she had to hold someone in abhorrence, wasn’t it wrong to blame anyone but herself? And if he was using her for some purpose other than’ his pleasure, what business was it of hers? “Ah, yes,” O said to herself, “I find myself disgusting. How can I have the gall to complain about being betrayed; haven’t I been warned a hundred times, a thousand; do I still not know why I was born?” But she was no longer certain, it was no longer clear in her own mind, whether she was disgusted with herself for being a slave-or because she wasn’t slavish enough. But it was neither one nor the other. She held herself in abhorrence because she was no longer loved. What had she done, what bad she failed to do, to deserve such a shift in Sir Stephen’s affections? You’re out of your mind, O, as though it had something to do with you, as though you had any say in the matter. The irons that lay heavy on her belly, the brand which had been seared into the flesh of her buttocks, were for her, had always been for her, marks of pride, because they proclaimed that the person who had imposed them upon her loved her enough to set her thus apart from all others. Would she now feel obliged to be ashamed of them or, if he no longer loved her, would they still remain as the proof that she still belonged to him? For it was apparent that he still wanted her to belong to him.

September 15 arrived; O, Natalie, and Sir Stephen were still there. But now it was Natalie’s turn to be in tears: her mother had sent for her, and she would have to go back to her boarding school at the end of the month. If O was to go to Roissy, she would go alone. Sir Stephen found O seated in her armchair, with the child on the floor beside her, her head buried in O’s lap, sobbing. O handed him the letter Natalie had received: Natalie would have to be leaving in two days.