by Don Boyd
My mother, correspondingly, had a quiet, perceptive intelligence. When my breasts began to grow, I noticed that they were not as big as many of the other cheerleaders that I had been hanging out with before and after the big football games. I loved the exuberance, the discipline, even the superficial glamour of it all; and the fun. Mom used her own adolescent sexual experiences as the vehicle for gentle explanations of the glories and pitfalls of burgeoning sexuality. She took me though these in detail and we were able to obliterate any unnecessary neuroses I had been starting to harbour about my body size.
Of course, there were mishaps along the way. A cycling accident which resulted in a scar on my knee. Tragic? Life threatening? Traumatic? Hardly. The death of my paternal grandfather, aged eighty-three, gave me a moody few months but he left me with so many wonderful funny stories about his Russian Orthodox upbringing in Manchuria. They continue to serve as a spiritual legacy whenever I need to smile. Eccentric stories about farting priests, adulterous rabbis and an alcoholic carpenter who killed himself swigging a bottle of methylated spirits one dark night, when the power had failed him in his makeshift workshop at the bottom of the garden, and he mistook the poison for his tipple of sloe gin!
Perhaps the most significant familial influence on me, and certainly a relationship my therapist dwelt on for months, was my love for my Uncle Ian. He came to live with us when I was eight. He had squandered his fortune and, as I learnt later from Mom who was his favourite sister, like my grandfather’s carpenter friend, Uncle Ian was an alcoholic. Of course, I didn’t pick up on this until much later on and I adored him on sight. I was only eight years old. Like granddad, he used to tell me some very funny ‘naughty’ stories which later in adolescence fuelled the curiosity that I developed in people’s peculiarities. He also involved me in his own secret – the stash of ‘sherry’, (whisky probably) which he used to hide in my bedroom. Finally, Mom threw him out – he used to become belligerent and vent his alcoholic paranoia on her. She didn’t want her cosy life disturbed. For all I know he became a tramp. When he died of cirrhosis of the liver, I shut myself up in my room for a week and refused to go to his funeral. I was so angry with my mother. But she explained it all to me so sensitively that I had to forgive her. Marie Christine, my supervisor, said that it was my ‘love affair’ as she called it, with Uncle Ian, which had almost certainly led onto my need to ‘help’ or ‘nurse’ people. To make them better. I had always thought that it was more to do with my father’s academic work in theoretical anthropology.
And here I am, hanging myself with the noose of my professional expertise, my over-educated sophistication. Apart from the trauma of Uncle Ian, my childhood had been full of Dr Seuss, the Wizard of Oz, of the Muppets and Mary Poppins, too. And when I ventured into the darker areas of the Brothers Grimm and anything approaching the Nightmares on Elm Street, Dungeons and Dragons or the ghosts and ghouls of forbidden fruit in Hollywood horror movies, I did so in the certain knowledge that my parents would provide me with balancing and revelatory wisdom which diminished their potential conditioning influences. Even the horrors and shame of the Vietnam War, which had defined their youth, were given their historical context.
But every action has a reaction. Every experience created a psychological corollary. In therapy I have always methodically allowed my mind to inspect the latent power of minor trauma. Those moments we discount as harmless or irrelevant. The history of psychology is crammed full of a deluge of evidence supporting the existence of those sneaky, unfathomable, undetectable cerebral poison darts which appear as mysteriously as a lethal cancer cell and are just as deadly. I had a friend who tried to warn me about the impact, for instance, of indulging ‘dangerous’ arts forms. I found his fatuous ideas about the potential dangers of subconscious conditioning so annoying, so glib and yet I had to take his ideas seriously enough to refute them intelligently. He approved of censorship, and advocated some sort of code which would steer us away from the risks of mental pollution, as he called it. His silly, neo-fascistic theories about the impact of subversive art served to consolidate my own sense of proportion in that respect.
But now that I am on the brink of quite willingly experiencing what can only become a major trauma, where has this self-control and philosophical perspective disappeared? Whence does my newfound latent hunger for perverse and dangerous self-abuse spring? Surely not from those relatively superficial studies I made at college on the machinations of the Marquis de Sade? Surely not triggered by the studious fascination I indulged in the philosophies of Wittgenstein? Or those nightmare visions of Dante evoked by William Blake? The Circles of Hell.
Until now, I have exercised supreme self-control and maintained a balanced perspective whenever confronted by anything extreme or unnatural. But I am beginning to feel a bit like poor Laura now. For example, I absolutely adore the short stories of Alberto Moravia. They often centre around the behaviour of a strong, fascinating woman in a simple familiar setting. They are always reminders of the quirkiness of human behaviour and they always have an ironic and witty warning about bourgeois smugness. Maybe I am just a simple bourgeois slut who is finally receiving her share of payback to balance a lifetime of stifling and excruciating complacency? Or maybe I am manifesting the same instincts which led Eve out of Paradise and into the clutches of Beelzebub? John Milton would not approve of my alacrity and he would have cast me on the side of Satan in all those battles for the soul of his brand of puritanical Christianity. What a case study for a psychiatrist he would have made. He was blind, of course.
Blind.
Chapter Seventeen
Margot woke up, thinking that she had been having an erotic dream, but when she felt the tension of the cord which tightly secured her wrists and feet to the brass railings at both ends of the top of Xavier’s raised sleeping area, she realised she was beginning to live a form of reality which would have been as perverted as the wildest of her clients’ fantasies. Fantasies she had only indulged before from the comfort of her studio. The silk scarf covering her eyes smelt faintly of an expensive French perfume. Her legs were spread out and her ankles were tied to opposite ends of the mattress at the end of the platform. She could hear the frogs mingling their croaks with the distant voice of an opera singer, practising a Donizetti aria. Regnava al silenzio. The apparition in the lake.
“Xavier?”
Silence! She raised her voice above the initial whisper.
“Xavier!?”
Louder and firmer, with a hint of frustration. Still no response. A baritone had joined the soprano. A duet. She pulled at the cords, trying to loosen them; they were very tight.
Her vagina was pulsating. Almost a dull throb. Xavier had stroked her pudenda so softly: “Imagine what I am going to do with you when I return.” He kissed her lips and passed his hand and fingers very gently, almost like a butterfly’s kiss, over her long, dark nipples, which were rigidly erect, before climbing down from the platform. His valedictory gesture was a treat that Margot hadn’t experienced since childhood: he read her a poem. He had a beautiful, soft, mellow reading style. Somehow, he managed to prevent what could have been a pretentious and laughable farce, transforming it into a beautiful, soporific interlude. Margot’s vagina was like a torrent of spring. The last sound he made had come from the double locks of his beautiful ancient oak door – from the outside.
When was he going to return? Would he ever return? It didn’t seem to matter. Margot was in an ‘altered state’. Within three minutes she had an explosive, sensation-full orgasm and all her fantasies before and after it had been exotic and extravagant; worthy of the worst and best indulgences of a second-rate European art movie: Tristan naked on the mast of the boat in The Wreck of the Hesperus, watched by Isolde in the guise of a Carthusian nun; Héloise raped by the Sabine women in a modern porno movie; Joan of Arc with a giant penis; Freud and Mahler making love to each other to the strains of Albinoni; Don Giovanni in Hell surrounded by a score of masturbating lipstick dykes; and Xav
ier as St. George – slaying the Minotaur in a Dali-like landscape. Paintings, literature, music, poetry, religious iconography. She effortlessly conjured a plethora of fantastical sexual stereotypes and experiences while she waited for his return.
And then she had another seismic orgasm, gasping with pleasure as her body shuddered with sensual excitement. Freud called this kind of vaginal orgasm ‘mature’ and the clitoral one immature. Margot had never quite understood this descriptive distinction until now. Her mind was occupied with the dawning realisation that her theories about Xavier’s intentions towards her that afternoon might have been totally wrong; her pleasures had been his objective, not his own.
When she had arrived, he had set up his ancient Italian 16mm movie projector on a table close to the French windows which led to the garden area. He rolled down a large, cleverly-hidden white movie screen which rested against the back wall of his kitchen area. “My computer screen is much too small.”
He had then pre-laced into the projector’s grey spools a black and white film made by a ‘celebrated’ Canadian animator. Called Pas de Deux, it was an exquisite, abstracted ballet enacted by two very beautiful dancers in sensual white body-stockings against a black backdrop. The minimalist soundtrack was as seductive and repetitive as a brilliant John Adams tone poem. The cinematography was manipulated so that multiple images of each carefully-choreographed physical movement seemed to have been repeated by a spirit or ghost. Against a simple abstract background on an empty stage two dancers enacted the traditional rituals of a conventionally staged pas de deux – simple and sexually-charged balletic lovemaking. After the film was over, Margot and Xavier talked about it and then he had asked her what she would most like to do with him. All her earlier suspicions had been obliterated by his charm and the gentle, relaxed atmosphere which he had so subtly engineered for her.
“What about those Dungeons and Dragons?”
She bleated this out like an over-excited child. He smiled.
“I didn’t want you to think that I was always some sort of kinky pervert. I feel that you are open to all kinds of experiences with me. I love that and want to take advantage of my ability to surprise you.”
“I want to indulge all my fantasies!” she said, with a coquettish smile. Xavier had devised the simplest of plans, which had left her for hours, tied naked to the mattress on his sleeping arena. Alone and blinded, like the poor hero of Milton’s Samson Agonistes, one of Margot’s favourite poems.
As she lay there hours later, the first vestiges of panic crept into her disoriented mind. Had she covered all her tracks? Before his improvised ritual had started, Margot had rung her answering machine at home. She left another message for Archie, explaining that she wanted to ensure that he knew she would be out for dinner and would sleep in her studio another night, but she would see him at the funeral – she would walk there with Elvira. She wondered if Archie might think that she seemed to be unusually concerned that he should know every movement. Margot had always guarded her need for time off ‘for bad behaviour’. He teased her about this but respected her need for independence as he, too, enjoyed time on his own.
Margot wriggled her feet around. Tight. The blindfold was comfortable to wear but she was beginning to hate the dark. Shutting her eyes made no difference, blue and red blobs, yellow contortions. But finally a black void. What if Xavier intended to leave her there indefinitely? The sound of his key in the oak door finally obliterated this far-fetched anxiety!
“Margot?”
His beautiful voice and the sensuous memories of her two orgasms replaced any extraneous practicalities. Her body still tingled. She was still moist, and immediately she was drawn straight back into her sensual trance by his voice – an altered state so persuasive and irresistible.
Music: the smoky, high-pitched, mournful voice of Nina Simone singing Solitude:
“…In my solitude you taught me with memories which never die…”
Margot laughed. “Thank you, Xavier. Very funny.”
He was soon above her, but fully clothed. He made sure that she could feel his jeans against her legs. He then peeled a banana and a cucumber, allowed her to feel them, to taste them, to smell them and then using them inside her, together on occasions, gently with the banana, hard with the peeled cucumber, brought her to orgasm, twice. Then, feeding the banana to her lips, he slowly unbuttoned his jeans and thrust his hard, drizzling cock deep into her cunt. She moaned and screamed, with almost unbearable pleasure. He came twice without interruption, driving his hips deep into her vagina. His semen was warm and soft, his climaxes prolonged. She exploded again and again. Afterwards, he kissed her lips gently and removed three of the cords, cutting them free with a small, sharp knife. The fourth, now separated from the railing he had used to restrict her, he quite deliberately left on her right wrist. Margot lay there, wondering what he was going to do next. She would have allowed him to do anything.
But when the blindfold had gone, and Xavier had turned on a small, pink neon light which glowed over her naked body, she realised the horrifying significance of the remaining cord bracelet: it was a replica of the one which Tilly had worn in the recreation of the Waterhouse painting of St Eulalia. She tried unsuccessfully to loosen the knot. Any vestige of the spectacular and sensational sexuality which had overwhelmed her for hours, vanished within a millisecond.
Without saying another word, Margot climbed down into the well of his strange apartment and dressed in the locked bathroom, alone. While she sat on the toilet seat, trying to work out how she was going to deal with him, she fingered Xavier’s seemingly innocent gesture: the remaining cord bracelet. Perhaps this was just a coincidence? A cord bracelet is a cord bracelet, but all her anxieties had returned. She was trembling. Nina Simone continued from the apartment.
“I sit in my chair. No one could be so sad… I sit and I stare… I know that I’ll know that I will soon go mad… in my solitude… dear Lord above, send me back my love…”
When Margot emerged from the bathroom, Xavier was sitting on a bench in the kitchen. There were two glasses of wine on the table. She sat on the bench on the opposite side of the table from him as he pushed a glass gently over to her. There was an interrogatory air about his smile, which she ignored.
“I feel a bit like a zebra or a gazelle in the veldt, who knows that a beautiful and powerful lion is watching her every move, luxuriating in the prospect of a sumptuous meal, and waiting for the inevitable moment when he is going to spring into action and devour her.”
“A lion indeed! Now that we have established a modus operandi for lots of games, why don’t we give each other the name of an animal as our means of secret communication? And we can use the animal’s Spanish name. I can be el Leon and you could be la Gacela, the gazelle!”
He smiled.
Margot’s blood ran cold. Paolo’s abusive Spanish teacher had used exactly the same game. There could not be two men who use exactly the same, and unique, teaching technique. Could Xavier and Guy be one and the same man? Her stomach churned. She felt sick. She deliberately forced out an innocuous reply. “La Gacela it is, then.”
Paolo was the leopard. Un leopardo. She wanted to leave as soon as she could without implying any change in her enthusiasm for their new relationship. Almost without thinking, and with the need to see if she could engage him in a subtle element of amateur detection, she asked him a question which could have given away to Xavier her newest and most deadly secret.
“O quizás un leopardo?”
She realised that she may have made a stupid, precipitous mistake. The seductively chilled red wine had gone straight to her head, which now reeled with her discoveries. Xavier laughed.
“My animals and birds are my secrets.”
He hadn’t noticed anything. He had absolutely no reason to imagine that Margot had made any connection about his nicknames, or would have known about them. Margot pushed it further.
“It’s Paolo’s funeral tomorrow. Did you know Paolo Lor
ca well?”
“Yes, I did. Rather well. The ex-pat community is somewhat incestuous in Barcelona, isn’t it? As it happens, I have been teaching him Catalan here. He was brought up in Scotland.”
Margot had to repress the screams now echoing throughout the darkest chambers of her mind. Could this man, that she had just allowed to tie her up and use her body in any way he chose, the man who had just provided her with sexual ecstasies on a level that she had never imagined, could he be the same man who had seduced and raped Paolo when he was a child? Had he also officiated at Tilly’s horrifying and fatal re-enactment of the death of St. Eulalia? Was that Tilly and Paolo’s secret? Perhaps it was Paolo’s renewed friendship with Xavier that Tilly had been hiding from her.
Margot tried to stay calm. She was determined to deflate Xavier’s presumptuous smugness and hide her immediate sensation of revulsion and self-disgust. He had clearly noticed a change in her mood.
“Are you coming?” she asked.
“I am not sure that I can. I would like to.”
She hesitated, trying to find a question which would reiterate what she had learnt, and confirm what she suspected.
“Did you know Tilly?”
“I met her once or twice. She was stunning.”
