Return to the Chateau (7 page)

“Luck?” said Anne-Marie. “Chance? There are ways of replacing these, O,” was the reply to O’s query on the matter.

=46rom her answer, O came to the conclusion that Anne-Marie, who was a doctor, had secretly operated on the girls at Roissy. You never saw on any of their faces that anxious or worried look that, with other women, revealed that she was late with her period.

“Oh, it’s nothing at all, really,” Noelle said to her one day, “and afterward you never think or worry about it again. But I can’t explain exactly what it is. They put me to sleep.”

But O conjectured that it was less the fact of being under anesthesia that kept her from telling more than that she had been strictly forbidden to talk about the operation.

As far as venereal disease was concerned, the matter was not so simple: the precautions they used included pills you let dissolve internally, prophylactics, and douches. The worst source of contagion was the mouth. The liquid lipstick that had been applied to her upon her arrival helped to prevent chafing and cracking, and thus to reduce the danger. And, too, Anne-Marie examined the girls daily. And if contagion did occur, they treated or, if it became necessary, isolated the girl-there were rooms directly above Anne-Marie’s quarters-until she was cured.

These restrictions, and this care, did not apply to girls who were brought to Roissy by their lovers: they were strictly on their own, and what is more they never entered the main enclosure. As for the others, who or what determined how each girl was to be utilized within the confines of the restricted area and how she was to be used outside, O was never really able to figure out. There was, however, a clearly established routine for the girls when they were in uniform: so many days serving in the restaurant for lunch, so many days on duty there for dinner; similarly, when they were in their formal gowns, so many afternoons and so many evenings per week on duty in the bar. Nonetheless, since both the restaurant and the bar were open to visitors and Club members alike, there was nothing to prevent the latter from choosing a girl and taking her back behind the gates of the enclosure. As for the rest of their routine, it seemed to be a matter of ca price: for example, when the valet had come to ask for two girls for the bar, the fact that Noelle and O had been chosen rather than Monique or Madeleine.

When O entered the bar for the first time, following close on the heels of Noelle, she was struck by its resemblance to the library they had just left: it was the same size room with the same kind of woodwork and the same easy chairs. The pretty little redhead who was shaved and bore the same kind of irons as O, and whom O had once whipped at Anne-Marie’s, an experience from which she had derived, after her initial hesitations, a pleasure that had surprised her, was seated on a bar stool. She was dressed in gray satin and was laughing and clearly enjoying herself with two men. As soon as she saw O she jumped off her stool, came over and kissed O, and taking her around the waist led her back over to the men with whom she had been sitting.

“I’d like you to meet O,” she said. “Do you mind if she joins us? You won’t find anyone any better.”

So saying, she kissed the tip of one of O’s breasts through the black lacework covering it.

“They won’t tell me their names,” she said. “But they look nice, don’t they?”

Nice was hardly the term, thought O. In fact it was absurd as applied to them. They looked both embarrassed and vulgar, and their third drink had failed to provide them with any degree of self-assurance. As O reached for her drink on the bar, her arm grazed the knee of the man on her right. He put his hand on her arching bracelet and asked why they all wore iron bracelets.

“As if they didn’t know!” Yvonne exclaimed. “Never mind, we’ll explain it to them during dinner. Come on, let’s sit down.”

Then, glancing at the man who had asked the question about the bracelets, who was getting down off his barstool, Yvonne said to O, as she herself made a point of doing the same to the other man:

“Quickly, O, touch him with your hand. Then let him try and tell you he doesn’t like you.”

In the restaurant, they took a table for four. The three men who had earlier taken Noelle in the library were dining together at a neighboring table. As for Noelle, she had left the bar five minutes after O had joined Yvonne, going out the door that led to the bedrooms, followed by a rather corpulent, Middle-Eastern looking type.

=46rank came into the restaurant just as they were finishing dinner. Neither O nor Yvonne had ordered an after-dinner drink, but they were waiting patiently for the men to finish their cognac. Frank made a discreet sign to O, then went over and sat down by himself at a table by the window. But O, who was seated in such a way that she had a good view of him, from a slight angle, noticed that as soon as the girl who was scheduled to wait on him approached his table he had slipped his hand into the slit in her skirt. In the restaurant or bar, this was the only liberty allowed, and even then on condition it was done discreetly.

=46inally, the time came when Yvonne said:

“Shall we go upstairs?”

One of the hotel waiters showed them to two adjoining, but noncommunicating, rooms; he indicated where the telephone was, the bell for service, then shut the door behind him as he left.

O, without even being asked, removed her mantilla and went over to her customer to offer him her breasts. He was seated on a chair. The three-sided mirror which graced one of the walls of every room reflected him, and O, standing between his legs and leaning over in order to make it easier for him, was nonetheless slightly astonished to find how natural it was for her to offer her breasts to this unknown man. Since that morning, four different men had, as Anne-Marie put it, entered her body: Sir Stephen, the driver, Frank, and Jos=E9. This man would be the fifth, which would bring her even with Monique. But this one would pay her. He told her to get undressed, and when he saw her encorseted, he stopped her. Her irons (about which Yvonne had not said a word, whereas she had offered, gratuitously, long after either of the men had thought of querying her further about the wrist bracelets: “Our bracelets are so that we can be tied up whenever anyone wants to whip us”) made a profound impression on him, as did the double opening which was offered to him when he held her by her hams sprawled back on the edge of the bed. No sooner had he emerged from her than he said:

“If you’re really good, I’ll give you a fat tip.”

She got down on her knees.

He left before she was dressed, leaving a handful of banknotes on the mantel of the fireplace: about a third as much as O earned in a month in the photo studio on the rue Royale. She washed herself, put on her dress, and went back downstairs, after having neatly folded the banknotes and stuffed them into her cleavage.

The truth of the matter was that she was mistaken when she figured she would end up with the same body count as Monique at the end of the day. As soon as she went into the bar, another customer picked her and took her back up to one of the rooms, where he possessed her, making her total for the day not five but six.

In the dark, chained to the hook above her bed-as she had been in her room the previous year, in that room now occupied by someone else, she had no idea who-in the dark and unable to sleep, O asked herself for the hundredth time why, whether or not she derived any pleasure from it, someone, no matter whom, from the fact that he penetrated her,’ or simply opened her with his hand, beat her or only made her strip naked, had the power to make her submit to his will.

On the other side of the partition, which was only as long as the width of the bed and the night tables and no thicker than a screen, she heard Noelle stirring, and realized that she too was unable to fall asleep. She called to her. Did Noelle feel as subjugated, as submissive as she? Did she feel as mastered, as servile as O did the minute someone touched her? Noelle was indignant. Submissive? Servile? She did what had to be done, and that was the long and the short of it. And mastered? Why mastered? O was indeed a very complicated young lady. Noelle found it flattering to see men stiffening in her presence, because of her; she found it amusing to open her legs or her mouth to them.

“Even to that Syrian, or whatever he was, you went with tonight?” said O.

“What Syrian?” Noelle wanted to know.

“That dark man with the frizzy hair, the big potbellied man you went upstairs with right after we got to the bar.” And as she said it she thought to herself, So that’s how it is; after awhile you can’t even remember. But she did remember.

“Oh, him!” said Noelle. “You should have seen him naked. A big fat pig.”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” O said.

“But you’re wrong’ Noelle protested. “What difference does it make? He tongued me for at least half an hour, but what he really wanted was to take me from the rear. With me on all fours, of course. He pays very well, you know”

O had also been paid very well. The money was right there, in the drawer of one of the night tables.

“Noelle,” O said, “tell me honestly, when they whip you, do you really enjoy it?”

“A little; but the truth is they only whip me a little.”

O almost said: “You’re lucky,” then she realized that it had nothing whatever to do with luck. She was about to ask Noelle why it was they never whipped her more than “a little,” and what she thought of chains, and her opinion on the valets… But Noelle turned over in her bed and whimpered:

“Oh, I’m so tired I can’t keep my eyes open another minute. For goodness’ sake, O, stop fretting and thinking so much, and go to sleep?’

So O bit her tongue and said no more.

In the morning, at ten o’clock, a valet came to undo the chains. After the bath, the morning ablutions, and Anne-Marie’s medical inspection, the girls-unless they were on duty in the rooms of the main enclosure, in which case they had to immediately don their uniforms-were free to get dressed or not, until it was time to go down either to the restaurant or bar, if it was their turn to serve there, or to the refectory if it was not. But those who went to the refectory did not get dressed. Why should they, since they were supposed to be naked while there? There was a room on the floor where they could go for breakfast. The doors to the girls’ bedrooms remained open, and they were allowed to visit one another freely. Only O, Yvonne, and the third girl, Julienne, who were branded and wore irons, were summoned in the morning to be whipped. The whipping was administered to each of them in turn on the stairway landing of their floor. The balustrade was used as the whipping post, over which, after they had been tied, they were made to lean. The whipping was never severe enough to mark them, but long and hard enough to make them scream, beg for mercy, and sometimes cry. The first morning that O, after she was untied, returned to her room and collapsed on her bed, still moaning from the burning pain in her loins, Noelle took her in her arms to comfort her. Her kindness and solicitous concern were, however, tinged with contempt. Why had she ever agreed to be pierced in the first place, or allowed those rings to be inserted in her nether lips? O confessed quite candidly that she was happy she had consented to the rings, and that her lover whipped her every day.

“So you’re used to it,” Noelle said. “Then don’t go around complaining. You’d probably miss it if they stopped.”

“Maybe I would,” said O. “And I’m not complaining. But don’t say I’m used to it. No, I’ll never get used to it . .”

“In that case,” Noelle said, “you’re going to really have something to complain about, because the days will be few and far between when they only whip you once here. When they see a girl like you, men know right away that you’re made to be flogged. They sense it. And if they don’t, the brand and the rings give it away. Not to mention that it will be on your card.”

“On my card,” said O. “What card? What are you talking about?”

“You don’t have your card yet, but don’t worry, when you get it that information will be on it.”

Questioned about the card three days later when O was invited to lunch in her apartment, Anne-Marie had no hesitation about explaining what it was.

“I’m waiting for your photos,” she said. “We’ll transcribe on the back the information from the card that Sir Stephen sent me about you. I don’t mean your vital statistics, your description, age, and all that, but your special characteristics, your profession, and so forth … Oh, it’s brief enough; it will all fit on a couple of lines, and I know just what it will say.”

The photographs of O had been taken. one morning in a studio just like the one where O had once worked, which was set up under the eaves of the right wing of the building. O had been made up the way she used to make up the models, in that not-so-distant past that, nonetheless, seemed further removed from her than her earliest childhood. She had been photographed in her uniform, in her long yellow dress; she had been photographed with her dress tucked up in front and behind; she had been photographed naked, from in front, from behind in profile; standing, lying down, half sprawling backward on a table with her legs spread wide; bent over with her buttocks sticking out; kneeling down with her hands tied. Were they going to keep all the poses?

“Yes,” Anne-Marie told her. “They put them in your file. They make prints of the best ones and give them to the customers.”

When Anne-Marie showed them to her two days later she was thunderstruck. Not that they were not all lovely; there wasn’t a single one that could not have been used in those clandestine photo magazines they sell under the counter at all the Paris kiosks. But the only one that O felt she honestly recognized herself in was a photograph taken of her full-face, standing stark naked, leaning against the edge of a table, with her hands behind her, behind her buttocks actually, with her legs slightly spread so that the irons were clearly visible between her thighs, and her lower lips as clearly defined as was her slightly parted mouth. She was staring straight ahead, as though lost in her own thoughts. She obviously was not alone in especially remarking that shot.