by Jeremy Reed
Something of Donatien's innate despotism, inherited originally from the princes of Les Baux, and corrupted over the centuries by a progressively decadent lineage showed in the way he conducted a detached voyeurism of his sister's buttocks. He had objectified her bottom into an obsessive fetish to the exclusion of identifying it with any other part of her body. Donatien treated that sexual underworld with the familiarity of someone garaging a car underneath their Hollywood mansion.
Nina had placed a number of exclusive Sade condoms on the tray, mauve prophylactics monogrammed with the Sade crest of an eight-rayed gold star. Donatien liked the clingfilm fit of condoms and would compare their tactile qualities to that of wearing a rubber dress on his penis. He busied himself with lighting candles, checking the implant-screen on his wrist, and flexing his eye on the exact contour of gluteal tissue submissive to Nina's kneading fingertips. To enhance the charged atmospherics of the bedroom he remoted Scott Walker's Tilt into play and Walker's eloquent pain-suffused timbre flooded the room with the postmodern narrative buried in 'Farmer In The City'. Donatien stepped back into listening. Tilt with its emphasis on inevitable apocalypse, and with its suite of elegiac lyric pieces loaded to breaking point by the singer's mournfully pitched delivery was the music to which he and Marciana had turned in the last weeks preparatory to leaving La Coste. Walker's voice sealed the room with its baritone gravitas.
There was no escaping its vocal narrative, and Donatien felt the music rise on him like a lake flooded by autumn rains. The waste-landed nature of the material communicated to his nervous highways. The songs pursued a journey through experiential deeps to the stars. The urban, the political, the impacted industrial, the wounded romantic turned nomadic survivor, Donatien could hear all these aspects of technological living in Walker's music. Playing Tilt erected a psychological column in Donatien's peculiarly extended life. He loved the extravagantly operatic notes with which the singer coloured 'Patriot (A Single)', and the sparse acoustic minimalism of 'Rosary' on which Scott Walker brought the album to a tentative but poignantly definitive end.
Nina had in the meantime almost finished work on Marciana's buttocks, and her fingers dabbed with final calligraphic flourishes at the oiled skin. Donatien could be seen visibly sipping at the moment like savouring one of the flinty black wines from his vineyard. The smell of cow parsley was returning to him as an associative memory. The scent was interactive with his aroused sexual nerves. He could feel the contained ballistics of his orgasm building in him like a nuclear sun. He remembered again his tormented walks through the nearby woods and his fearing imminent arrest. He had known it so often the reality of being hunted across Europe to the terrifying conclusion of metal biting into his wrists. For all his aesthetic complexity Donatien nurtured a single love of the seasons and their elemental download. The rich tang of loaded vines, the explosive red of testicular tomatoes, leathery grey bean pods, the brilliant sunrise orange of courgette flowers, the bunchy pinks and reds of vineyard roses, the abundant nature in evidence on his seigniorial lands, all of this he would be sad to leave. He recollected the pleasure he had derived from walking over to one of his farms on a pink summer's evening to eat knotty potatoes lifted that day from the soil, and tasting as memory assured him of roses. He had returned home from these nights with his veins still buzzing after sex with the blond-haired youth who was employed on the land.
Donatien felt his world of accumulated experience surf into his genitals. His sex embodied all the seasons and its rigidity resembled in turn the château's walls. When he entered his sister he knew it would be to channel three centuries of sperm into her interior with the balletic finesse of a dance teacher.
Nina playfully slapped Marciana on her oiled bottom as a sign that the ritual massage was over. Donatien seceded his rights to fellatio and perfunctorily dismissed Nina from the room. He would take especial care of her he reminded himself. Nina would be endowed with a trust fund from his Swiss bank account, and given the enjoyment of one of his town houses.
Donatien found himself still unwilling to make a point of entry. He fizzed a drop or two of pink champagne on to Marciana's crack and continued to reflect on the narrative he had retrieved from so many nights.
'There'll be a time Marciana,' he said, 'when the whole human species will attempt to migrate from earth, but not into inner space. Instead, they'll go searching from planet to planet across the galaxy looking to set up biospheres and manufacture oxygen from carbon dioxide. None of these things are necessary in the Purple Room. We will have achieved the perfect transition. If I'm full of this accomplishment, then it's because you and I an indestructible.
‘The guests who left us today live with the knowledge of death in their cells. Whatever they do or wherever they go they can't be free of it. Death occupies most of our off-focus thoughts. Being without the inevitability of an end is the psychic equivalence of clean arteries. For us Marciana, orgasm is no longer associated with death. It's a pure valency; a ballistic energy which will resituate us in genetic change.
‘Tonight I can smell the earth rising on us. In precisely an hour a car will check into our underground carport to collect the Purple Princess for her journey to Paris. I entertained the idea of including her in our sex rites, but as you know her body has been frozen into a cryogenic frigidity ever since her lover died.'
Marciana found herself delighting in Donatien's indefinitely delayed approach to sex. The more he held back the greater the anticipation of her excitement, as she rotated her bottom in the quivering circular fashion of which he approved. Marciana could sense her brother's eyes resting on her buttocks with the interrogative search of a lunar buggy. Sex for her would be a way of concealing the inconsolable disgust she felt at the prospect of leaving her home. Over the centuries she had come to know the château stone by stone, in the way its composition was reflected in the building blocks of the universe. She had slept in every one of its thirty bedrooms, and performed and sung in the theatre.
Marciana recalled the hours she had spent practising striptease, in her brother's absence. To increase the thrill of it, she had stripped to a small local audience and had got off on tantalising the assembled with select glimpses of a bottom neatly divided by a sequinned g-string. She saw herself again coaxing off a seamed stocking in three sinuous movements, and hearing the disengaged metal-tipped suspender straps tinkle against her thighs.
'Will we still share such togetherness in the Purple Room?' Marciana asked. 'I'm afraid of inroads being made into our intimacy,' she continued. 'Couldn't we have another October here, and extend our stay to December?'
When Donatien answered it seemed to Marciana that his voice had come to her down the centuries.
'I've assured you,' he said, 'that we'll not only know all these things again, but that life at the Purple Room will be experienced on a more intense level. You needn't worry. We'll never be separated.'
Marciana sat up in the coffin and looked over at her brother's columnar erection. She wanted to receive him so deep that it would test her physical boundaries. For a moment she contemplated taking him into her mouth, but abandoned the idea. To do so she told herself would be like attempting to lick one of the château's towers.
Marciana knew that tonight Donatien would carry ritual to its extreme. Unusual for him, he resummoned Nina to the bedroom and had her roll on the purple condom. With the rubber tautly stretched to accommodate his massive proportions, Donatien's cock resembled a hybrid aubergine grown in Frankenstein's garden. Marciana itched to have her brother establish a groove which would distribute her on all fours across the bed. Her brother had taught her that without mysticism sex was simply a footnote to automatised repetition. Two million sodomies on he would have grown bored, he was in the habit of telling her, as he brought his historic expertise to issue with her sphincter.
Marciana ran a hand through her two-tone hair, and then extended the movement forward, slipping her fingers down the front triangle of her nude panties and bringing
the fingertips into contact with her crotch. She ached for moments of ecstatic self-gratification, and directly in line of her brother's vision kicked her legs over her head in a backwards somersault and began with sinuously choreographed friction to bring herself to convulsive orgasm. It was her way of demonstrating to her brother that she was ready for him to plot her to powerful cathartic release.
Marciana brought the wide fork of her open legs back over her head and flipped face downwards, resuming the bottom-up position which so appealed to her brother. The outline of her panties appeared inseparable from her skin, the seamless fabric windowing itself to her contours.
And this time he entered her, his sexual mastery contriving to have his impossible proportions find the neatest of fits in her bottom. When he pushed forward, asserting himself fraction by sensual fraction Marciana grooved towards the anticipation of ecstatic highs. Donatien tunnelled into her with Sadean authority, his focused energies transmitting themselves through her as continuous pleasure-waves. Marciana wriggled by way of rhythmic counterthrust, her body delighting in its constraint and periodically forcing back on the indomitable point on which she pivoted. The visions were beginning to swarm through her now like shooting stars burning across a summer sky. She saw her ancestry fast forwarded like faces coming at her rapidly from behind the windscreens of oncoming traffic, and brighter still she could apprehend a luminous purple light set into inner space and beginning to assume an intense glow. She knew the magic was at work in the sex she was experiencing, and that Donatien was showing her intimations of the Purple Room as a prelude to their going there.
Donatien had established a harmonic rhythm, and he took advantage of it to colour his direct thrusts with exploratory medleys of minor ones, drawing in the process a series of agonized cries from his sister. He could feel his orgasm cooking like lava. He too was experiencing pronounced floods of purple light as a manifestation of sex magic. Power sped through his nerves. He eased himself back and looked at the arched lift of the buttocks he was fucking. For a moment he imagined them covered in dark grey ivy, like the heart-shaped leaves which clung to the château's walls. The Sadean crest had been tattooed at the arch of the crack, and his eye retrieved these familiar details as he drove harder into his sister's rectum. It seemed to him that the entire room was turning purple. His sister was growing hoarsely demonstrative in her entreaties, as he saddled her with increased ferocity. Marciana's first chain of repeat orgasms had chased into a second and third series, and Donatien could feel the nuclear build of orgasm rising on his expertly sustained dynamic. The attack came from his abdomen, grew in his genitals and communicated excruciating pleasure to his frenulum. At first the pressure appeared resolutely expansive rather than rising, as though the orgasm had grown stuck like a lift between floors. The cyclonic throbbing caused him to cry out in anticipation of the massive crisis he was churning to conclusion. He would like to have lived with the orgasm in indefinite suspension, but the force motivating it was too powerful for his attempts at delay. He felt the volcanic source connect and burn in its indomitable rush. He attempted once again to hold back on it, but Marciana was pulling him into her centre like a black hole swallowing matter into an imploded event field. The orgasm was being sucked out of him in opalescent drops as a prelude to scorching ejaculation. He felt himself fight surrender for a last time as sensation surfed through his body, and the explosion was on him simultaneous with Marciana, their bodies caught in what seemed the timeless duration of detonative orgasm, his mind almost longing for cessation to spasm as he swam through dense purple light.
When eventually Donatien took himself back to his Louis Quinze chair, it was to pop the cork on a pink champagne from one of his vineyards. The wine frisked across his palate, the bubbles seething like surf running into a cave. He looked over at his sister who was reclining on an arrangement of mauve and black cushions, and for what he knew to be the last time at La Coste, took up his night theme to the consoling accompaniment of rain.
'All your personal belongings are safe in Switzerland, Marciana,' Donatien said, 'and our fortune is frozen on deposit there. We'll be back in time, but first of all we have to encounter the Purple Room. We will return from there as the leaders of a new species, and we will put confusion in the Human Genome Project by bringing back with us a number of the dead. Imagine it, when you are seen hand in hand with Judy Garland or Billie Holiday, leading both out on to the stage for a revival concert at our future home. I will have succeeded then in subverting even death. The reviled Marquis, hunted out of his skin over the centuries will have become the custodian of genetic longevity.'
Donatien let his words trail into silence, as the rain came on in sparkling flurries. He placed a bowl of late flowering roses picked from the vineyards, closer to his sister, and said: 'It's strange to think that the château will be in ruins tomorrow. We'll torch the place tonight and go. The virtual world will watch it burning on screen, but they'll never learn of our whereabouts.'
Marciana was spaced into post-coital haze, her doll's eyes still languorously preoccupied with the imagery generated by sex chemistry. She connected with her brother's voice, as she continued to negotiate euphoric pockets of chemical highs. The reality of leaving the château had still to register with Marciana, who so far had succeeded in blocking the idea of imminent flight from the security assured her by La Coste. She thought of Leanda and Nicole similarly housed in a virtual castle removed from the world, and of how their lives would continue long after La Coste remained a redoubtable ruin facing out over the valley.
The two of them heard a car changing gear as it gained speed on the wet road beneath them, and knew that the Purple Princess was going away from the château, headed to safety through the autumnally showery night. A second car would arrive within the hour for Nina.
Donatien, who knew that it would be like unlocking a secure ward, had decided to turn the château's retinue of detained freaks out into the fields. It would be his revenge on the Provencal countryside, on the rich British trashing indigenous customs and on a local populace who would have gladly burnt him.
Donatien rechecked his wrist implant, got a read out of neuronal data, and synchronised his biological findings with Marciana's. With the ingestion of two Cryoglitz 500 mg capsules each, Donatien was almost ready to perfect his schema for deathless cryonics. Once he had given orders for the château's closed wards to be cleared, then a button would activate fire bombs in the castle's subterranean depths. He knew that the conflagration would rage with unkillable rapidity and that the château would be blasted to an interiorless hecatomb.
Donatien insisted that Marciana should dress in a way appropriate to funeral rites. He himself selected a black YSL dress from the few of Marciana's clothes which had not been sent to Switzerland, and matched it with a black Chanel hat and veil. In the process of applying a black lipstick to Marciana with the accompanying cupid's bow, he made himself up similarly, contrasting black with white Shiseido powder foundation.
‘Nina's brother, Jacques, is at this very moment releasing the château's freaks,' Donatien volunteered. He went over and stood at the window and laughed in anticipation of the chaos which would ensue as a consequence of this act. 'Jacques will remain here to trigger the explosives, and will later join Nina,' Donatien added.
Marciana checked herself in the mirror and pencil-pointed a beauty spot on a left facial plane. She and her brother would leave La Coste in the stylised manner in which they had always lived. Their decadently patrician sensibilities would unite as they walked a last time through the rooms and corridors which were written into their respective destinies.
They visited the largely emptied library, the cobalt ceiling frescoed with images of Marciana's bottom derived from photographs taken by Helmut Newton. They entered guest rooms barely known to them other than for having used them for purposes of sex rites, before making their way into the main hall, and from there to the theatre.
Donatien and his sister stayed a long
time devoting themselves to memories of Raoul's concert on a stage littered with roses and featuring as a prop the coffin which Marciana had appropriated for her bedroom. It seemed right to them that their last sex at La Coste should have taken place in this receptacle. Every form of erotic extravaganza had occurred in the theatre, and Donatien found himself backtracking in memory to a time when naked slaves mounted on elephants had trooped in front of him and his sister, and the theatre had resounded with the vocal exotica of Yma Sumac coaxing a sustained high F.
They would let everything go, and then resituate their modified needs in another time, another place. Donatien mobiled to Jacques to let burn within ten minutes. A leopard-spotted Rolls Royce was ready to take Donatien and his sister to a lab in a sealed underground bunker from which they would derealise.
Donatien and his sister were ushered out to the car, the October rain crumpling on contact with the umbrella. Autumn with all its dead wet smells rose to meet them with its ferny tang. The chauffeur activated the CD drawer and Billie Holiday's voice structured the limo's interior with behind the beat reflective phrasing.
As the car got away, so they heard the conflagratory roar. Both threw their heads round simultaneously to see the château burning from the foundation up. Donatien smiled, secure in the knowledge that the place would burn, burn, BURN.
*
The End
About Jeremy Reed:
Jeremy Reed is a Jersey-born writer, poet and prose stylist. Reed has published 50 major works in 25 years. He has written more than two dozen books of poetry, 12 novels, and volumes of literary and music criticism. He has also published translations of Montale, Cocteau, Nasrallah, Adonis, Bogary and Hölderlin. His own work has been translated abroad in numerous editions and more than a dozen languages.
