The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus

by Jeremy Reed

  Marciana placed her hand in Donatien's and felt the cold stones on his fingers. His hand had all the passive assurance of a basking reptile which had succeeded in eluding death for three centuries. He turned her hand over in his as a note of the brotherly affection he felt for a sister who was a compliant sex-slave. Their pubes came together in a complicitous dual affirmation of blood coursing through the Sade lineage.

  Any form of touch between the incestuous couple generated a vocabulary of impulsive desire. Each translated the other's need into telepathic discourse. Sitting in the concert they were engaging in virtual sex. Donatien's sense of aristocratic decorum had him give all his attention to the singer, but inwardly he was devising the libidinal geometries in which his sister's bottom was a website of potential whip-cuts.

  And Marciana reflected on how the togetherness she shared with her brother was a pact in which continuous desire was stronger than death. One overcame the other in a process of fluent displacement, and in this way they would never die. Donatien's alchemical knowledge of coitus in retro generated the serum necessary for uninterrupted life extension.

  Marciana looked across at Nicole's right face profile, and wondered if she too would never die, and if the formulaic capsules that sustained life at the Pleasure Château were subject to tolerance. Wouldn't they all disappear one day into a black hole, she reflected, or into a mansion in the sky where the archetypes continued to conduct obsessive fictions?

  When Raoul introduced a song called 'Zodiacal Angel', the theatre swam with gold light. Thousands of gold stars rained on to the stage. He had draped a full length star-embossed velvet gown over his gold lame shirt. Sound effects in the form of the sonic roar of a wind-tunnel served as an intro to the song. The stage changed from the gold of autumn chrysanthemums to a partial black-out as Raoul entered the song from the narrative point of La Coste being a flaming château in the stars presided over by a zodiacal angel. The ballad built slowly to heroic proportions, and the message contained by the lyrics was that of the indomitable power of the imagination to take heaven by storm. The defiant, invincible dynamic informing La Coste would hold a place as a light in the stars. Raoul sang of how `A burning blue diamond was the angel’s swimming pool.'

  The theatre was once again plunged into total darkness, with an intermittent flutter of gold sequins snowflaking onto the stage. There was a sustained pause before a violet spot returned to find Raoul kneeling in front of a heart-shaped elaborately gilded mirror, the frame decorated with cupids. As he sang a lament, 'Creases In The Soul', so he was playfully whipped with tall stemmed roses; the gloved flagellants striking him across the back and shoulders. The three girl flagellants wore nothing but gold angel's wings and white see-through panties. They had been body-sprayed gold, and at the end of the song ascended vertically from the boards through an opalescent dry-ice smoke-storm.

  Marciana reviewed the audience again, as Raoul waited for the applause to die down. To her extreme left she could make out a woman wearing ruby sequins, and seated beside her was a panda-eyed man whose irises were lensed silver. Marciana felt a disquieting shiver play the frets along her spine, as she made momentary eye contact with this visitor to La Coste. Marciana remembered the story of XZ's cult, and of how his alumni were identified by silver lenses, and felt apprehensive that her castle had been infiltrated by the alien sect who had placed their inimitable blueprint on the Pleasure Château.

  Marciana looked again, and this time the man was staring at her as though he had found her out. Their eyes had pacted in a way that suggested the alien knew her in terms of cosmic identity. Marciana felt she had been seen through, and that a read-out of her reincarnational history was included in the man's insightful knowledge. Marciana reaffirmed the pressure of her hand in her brother's, and tried to dissociate from the cause of her sudden fear. She experienced a sense of inner disequilibrium, as though a dependable pivot had shifted, and in doing so had caused the misregulation of her mood.

  Raoul was taking up with another new song, 'Death Rites', for which he was swathed in black marabou and feathers. The same pall-bearers who had carried Marciana into the theatre, now set about performing the last rites, and Donatien made it known to Leanda that the body they were carrying in the coffin had been dug up from a local graveyard. It had been made up, and dressed in jewels, and would later on feature as a gourmet course in the banquet.

  Raoul's lachrymose elegy was for the body of a youth committed through burial to the sea. This blue eyed, blond kid in the song had killed himself on a white beach, and prior to overdosing had covered himself in the star spangled cloak he had stolen from an exclusive store. It was a theme that could have come out of a novel by Jean Genet, and the singer executed it with characteristically heartfelt panache.

  Donatien made it known to Marciana that at dinner he was going to present Raoul with one of the emeralds that had belonged lo Petrarch's Laura, so impressed was he by the concert. He slipped his hand to the mould of Marciana's skirt over the curvature of her bottom, as though promising her renewed sodomitical ecstasy. Marciana felt her bottom pout in the sultry manners of a woman seeking caresses after an argument over dinner. Her bottom responded to Donatien's moods like a chameleon to the light. It could be flirtatious or occluded depending on how their chemistries interacted. Over the years her sphincter had become her sensitivity gauge, and the muscle had developed an autonomy that dictated her emotional and sexual needs.

  Raoul was already announcing that two more numbers would bring the private concert to a conclusion. Assistants came on and brushed up his make-up, retoning the foundation where sweat had made inroads into the white pancake, and redefining his lips with a pencil.

  Raoul lit into a penultimate song called 'Love In A Graveyard', the lyrics depicting the lives of sexual outlaws in the smoking ruins: 'Love in a graveyard, in smoking ruins/the redhead carnations/the exchanged assignations/in the ruins before dawn.' Marciana gave herself up to the singer's translation of emotion into crystallized lyrics. The graveyard scene was one that she had experienced with Donatien on innumerable autumn nights. She had regularly been committed to an open grave, and positioned on all fours, her only items of clothing a diamond choker and elbow-length black satin gloves, and roundly buggered on the carpet of sedimental leaves that had tumbled into the cavity. Her knees had lost support on the wet leaves, and her pivotal balance had been her brother's insurgent penis. Flashbacks scored holes in Marciana’s thinking, as Raoul emoted his lyrics to the coffined body on stage. It was the gravity of the sexual act with Donatien that never failed to impress her. The solemnity of the rites, and the apocalyptic implications of the act had Donatien treat sex as the highest form of mystic knowledge.

  At the end of the song Raoul kissed the corpse on the lips as a silent cortege of naked bodies followed the coffin into the wings. The singer temporarily exited from the stage, and was replaced in the immediate foreground by a number of actors dressed as portentous crows, who broodingly hopped about the space that had been occupied by the coffin.

  When Raoul came back on it was to announce a last song called 'Blood Roses'. With the stage littered ankle-deep in red roses, and with his pianist dressed in a rose-motifed jacket, the singer, with one arm raised towards the lights, and with his voice pitched to emotional overreach, conjured a pantheon of private heroes on his breath. He addressed Jean Genet and Garcia Lorca, and offered them blood roses for their homoerotic martyrdoms. And of the enfant terrible, and his brother in perversion, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine, he lyricized how 'I feel more than certain/your lives knew a moment/outside such long torment/when the fire in your wineglass/was a Spanish sunset.'

  The song compounded of romantic realism was a celebratory elegy for the great outsiders whose poetry resonated through the stormy decades as a constant to the anarchic principles of youth. Oscar Wilde made a brief appearance in the song, and so too did the tyrannical psychopaths, Nero and Caligula. The song ended with a storm of roses descending to the stage
, and the singer decamping to a standing ovation.

  By way of a single encore, Raoul performed a movingly stripped down version of 'If You Go Away', the song having become a torch leitmotif for loss and unrequited love. The singer balanced the opposites of fulfilment and emptiness that occur in Brel's reflective lyrics, and with gestural ambivalence held out one hand and then the other in the attempt to redress the balance. It was a consummate rendition of a song that stretches and contracts according to the singer's aspirations. Raoul gave it his all, and in doing so fed the lyrics with his own subjective biography. He became the song, touching its heart like a lover, and feeling into it as though his redemption depended on its outcome. He let the final phrase hang in suspension dots and bowed himself out of the lights. The pianist sustained the outro, before standing up to assimilate the thunderous applause.

  There was to be no coming back for a second encore, as Raoul was clearly spent. The audience stood up, and as was the custom at La Coste, those who wished went on stage and collected bunches of roses from the surfeit littering the boards. Couples were haloed by the intense light emitted by the immaculately involuted flowers. Some of the vermilion roses appeared to be glazed with tangerine on the undersides, so intense was the light they transmitted. The scene was like a flower festival, and Marciana looked up to see a dark-haired vamp carrying a rose in her teeth, while her lover tucked a number of luxurious crimson flowers in each of her violet suede thigh boots.

  But Marciana was anxious to leave the theatre. She wanted to avoid re-encountering the figure with silver eyes who she suspected was either XZ or one of his alumni. She dug her nails into Donatien's palm as a sign that she wanted to get out of the theatre, and the crowd immediately parted as brother and sister moved towards the exit with the indomitable power of demigods.

  Donatien threw a glance back and it was like fire running through fields scorched by drought. It was a gesture that proclaimed he was the castle of La Coste, and that he would live as long as it took the elements to erode the last granular speck of his château. His slaves trooped in tow, and the sound of their chains clattering through the castle's stone corridors was the last note that the audience heard of his savage presence.

  *

  Part III

  The Underworld

  The banqueting hall at La Coste was sunk into the castle's subterranean depths. It incorporated a performance area in its plan, and lit that night only by candles, and intermittently spaced cove-lights, it could have represented a setting from Donatien's life in the eighteenth century.

  The candlesticks for the central table comprised giant pumpkins, slit like human buttocks, and dressed in a variety of see-through panties. There were excessive rose and lily flower arrangements flourishing from open coffins. The hall simmered with the tension of undelivered storm.

  Beside each plate was placed a bottle of expensive perfume, chosen by Marciana to suit the individual guest. Each bottle was housed in a miniature black velvet coffin, with the Sade crest stamped on it in gold. There were cornucopias of fruit, the arrangements finished with edible stardust.

  In conformity with Sade's mystic cult of discipline, a jewel-studded cross had been erected in the performance area, and a group of slaves dressed in nothing but tiaras and stilettos were awaiting their turn on the cross. It had been rumoured that the Marquis would at some point in the proceedings, demonstrate the hue art of wielding a bullwhip. It was well known that few people had ever survived Donatien's ferocity, and still maintained a taste for discipline.

  A great fire had been lit in the hearth, and the logs roared under increasing consumption by flame. The conflagration was massive. It was as though the sun had been set to burn in the voluminous hearth. Naked bodybuilders, their skin glazed with oil, attended the fire.

  A strip of purple carpet had been laid across the flagstones, connecting with Donatien's seat at the table. A maid had been selected to brush the carpet as he walked, and there was a personal valet at hand, whose task it was to keep Donatien's make-up perfect. Should a cheek need a little more highlight, then the defect was instantly amended. Donatien as a person, demanded constant and assiduous attention. Any assumed fault in his person would be reflected in a violent mood-swing towards despotic behaviour. His attendants fussed his appearance to the point of compulsive obsession, Eyebrow pencils and eyeliners were kept at hand, should a flaw occur in Donatien's maquillage.

  On a five tiered wedding-cake stand, girls had been arranged in various erotic positions, and were there to be licked, should any of the guests feel inclined to do so in the course of the banquet. The girls wore white bridal head-dresses, long drop earrings, and were all uniformly dressed in white crotchless panties. They mostly sat with their legs wide open by way of provocation, or as additional titillation, petulantly sucked a thumb, or ran a tongue over an upper lip glossed with scarlet lipstick. The blonde prize on the top deck of the arrangement, was busy going through a variety of yogic postures, aimed at emphasising the elasticity of her legs, and the round curvature of her perfectly proportioned bottom. She wore a white see-through baby doll skirt over her crotchless panties, and had her eyes made up like a panda's.

  Marciana, leading a panther on a leash, to complement Nicole's leopard, took her brother's arm, prior to entering the hall, Marciana's dress was shockingly tight and transparent, and she wore nothing beneath it, but a black G-string. Donatien had retained the velvet and satin costume he had worn to the concert, and his air of indomitable hauteur stood out in eyes that were like frozen lakes.

  Raoul and the midget joined the party of guests who included Nicole and Leanda, and a cursory glance from Marciana told her that the silver-eyed man, who she suspected to be the redoubtable XZ, was also in the party standing at the entrance to the dining hall.

  As the Marquis, accompanied by his sister, entered the room, so a trumpeter, sporting angel's wings, took up his place on the stage to herald Donatien's entry.

  The girls positioned on the cake-stand, seeing the Marquis's entry, all presented their bottoms to his attention, and maintained that position until Donatien was seated. Their crotchless panties were split at the back, so that the arch and the abyss of the buttocks were on view to his eye.

  Donatien's seat dominated the table, and at the opposite end facing him, was not a head and torso, but a bottom, chosen as a focal point for its representing la qualité française. Working on a rota basis, a series of male and female buttocks would be presented to the Marquis throughout the course of the banquet.

  Nicole and Leanda took up places opposite each other; Marciana faced Raoul, and another twenty guests, including the midget and his companionable monkey, all occupied seats beneath the glowering candles. XZ, with his silver eyes, appeared to be everywhere, such was the fascination he asserted by his presence. Marciana noticed immediately that it was impossible to avoid him. She sensed his removal from backside fetishism, and felt resentful at his intrusion into the sodomitical rites at La Coste.

  Nina came into the room in a purple PVC dress, and delivered one of Donatien's prize bullwhips to him, so that he could cut at anyone who took his fancy. The whip had been tuned, the way a violinist prepares his instrument. It vibrated like a rattlesnake prepared to strike.

  Wines from the vineyards at La Coste were poured, and in the tenebrous light, the guests could feel the oppressive weight of the centuries as they crowded into the hall. The banquet had the air of a ritual conducted in the underworld.

  As the Marquis raised his glass to celebrate autumn in its permanence at La Coste, so the first of the oiled slaves was raised on to the cross. The figure presented to the diners was that of a Breton girl. Her whipper began by kissing and licking her bottom in reverence to its harmonic proportions, before he cut a red lateral across the white square. The stroke reverberated through the hall, and was rapidly followed by a second and a third. And almost concurrently, the rains resumed outside in a steady, levelling staccato downpour.

  The brief whipping over,
a still unidentified guest approached the cake-stand. Bowing to the Marquis as a gesture of respect, he extended a prehensile tongue and flickered it between the crotchless panties of a stormy-haired French belle, who had been busy rolling a black grape over her irritated pudenda. The guest retrieved the grape with his agile tongue, swallowed it and returned to his seat, leaving the girl in a state of raging torment. She scissored her legs wide, and by way of invitation to the hall, ran her five fingers over her cut, like a guitarist fitting a plectrum to taut strings.

  The blonde prize from Toulon, who commanded the top deck of the stand, began to roll on silk stockings with the finesse of a trained stripper. And after having secured the stocking tops to suspenders, she began easing the gossamer-fine silk back down her thighs, over a bended knee, and then sheer off twitching toes. She undressed her right leg, and then her left, and lay back, legs arched open, languorously awaiting the first of the guests who would claim her on the summit.

  As an afterthought to her stockings-strip, she took the dark rose from her bridal head dress, and placed it between her legs, as though a petalled mouth was exploring her white crotchless panties. As a first course, the guests were served quails, each with the head tucked under one wing. The course was preceded by a cocktail — two parts brandy, one part calvados, one part sweet vermouth, known at La Coste as a 'corpse reviver'.

  It was Donatien's nature to express a sense of bored disrelish with all food. As an inveterately jaded gourmet, his tastes were awakened rarely, and then only by a dish so extreme that he would savour it more as a curiosity, than as something contrived to bring him gustatory pleasure. Instead, he concentrated on the corpse reviver cocktails, imbibing each bittersweet drink with the reflection of a man tasting his infinitely extensible biography.