The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus (2 page)

Leanda had entertained so many freaks at the château. She had converted a large basement into a dungeon, specifically for this purpose. The walls were cobalt and the ceiling and floor, black leather. There were dog collars, handcuffs and chains for those who entertained these fetishes. All manner of anomalies had filed in and out of her underworld chamber. Transsexuals, hermaphrodites, toefuckers, nibblers of caviar off genitals, disciplinarians, all those whose bodies were the catalyst to a complex release of sexual energies. Dressed in a severe black suit, and with her face masked, Leanda had presided ov
er a confessional. She had video-recorded an archive of sexual admissions. She had removed an elbow-length satin glove and allowed extreme initiates the right to kiss her hand. There was an Argentinian ambassador with a retracted penis which had to be coaxed out of an enveloping clitoris, who had visited the château one November night, and confessed to her secrets which seemed to flow out of an underground river. His words were heavy like coffins floating on black waters. What he had told Leanda that night had induced in her the need to be alone for a month. She had left the château precipitately at dawn, the car headlights stroking the drive with white sticks. She had taken off for the mountains and read Hölderlin there, the diamond clarity of light helping crystallize her thoughts into constructive images. For a whole week she had used ideas as building blocks. She would have sworn that she handled the tangibility of her thoughts. She ordered them into a mosaic of architectural blueprints for the construction of a new complex. The bacilli which had entered her blood-stream were exorcised. She undertook meditation on a blue cube, and on her return consulted a hypnotherapist to assist with de-intensifying the knowledge imparted to her by the hermaphrodite ambassador. Wanda was conscious of how there are confessions so terrible that they belong to a book worse than the grimoire, and are the lore of piss drinkers, coprophiliacs, the weird that go beyond S&M conventions and enter into the restructuring of anatomy by pain. This man had buried his secret like a black seed beneath his tongue, and implanted it into her consciousness as scalding venom. Even now, modifications of his truth invaded her sleepless hours, and alerted a terror so acute that only immediate recourse to sleeping tablets could erase that knowledge. Leanda would at such times dive straight into the dark pool that sleep offered. There was respite down there among defused images, old patterns buried in the sand, ruins inhabited by the blue eyed octopus.

The car was eating up the road. They were on the outskirts of the city. Suburbs defaced by the anonymous years flashed up and dipped behind the car. A green van was off
-loading, a woman dressed in a sari was recruiting her three children from a road ditch. Only a week before Leanda was sure she had seen a military youth marching on the city. They looked like gay clones. Dressed in black leather uniforms, pink caps and biker boots, earrings glinting in the sun, they were involved in an organised march. Leanda wondered if there had been a war which had passed unannounced. Was insurrection no longer in the hands of armies, but with gender minorities? Had the gay youth been preparing for combat rather than peace? She tried to imagine pink armies looting towns, a queen with drop earrings commandeering the château. The remains of a carnival were strewn across the precinct. Bunting, pennants, paper lanterns, junk food cartons, dead carnations. The car sped through the debris. Leanda sat back with abandon, taking in what looked like the props of a deconstructed film set. This drive into the city was her little drug. It wasn't that she needed to be there, it was more that she expected the marvellous to happen on her arrival. Would the chemist have prepared a formula for her on the lines of the cult drug that Nicole had described? Would she find clothes in colours that occupied her imagination, and which couturists never seemed to use? There was always something unfulfilled in her life, some distinction missing which belonged to the gap between inner and outer realities. The books she was looking for had never been written, her psychic needs didn't belong to life as she experienced it.

She had the chauffeur cruise the red light distric
t next to the port. The lights were starting to come on, a yellow rectangle high up, an orange one down below. A black transvestite hooker was in a doorway. Dressed in a beret, a blond wig, and a short leather skirt, she was looking to right and left not for sex, as Leanda surmised, but for a meeting that would shift her dimension to somewhere else. Leanda ordered the car to turn round at the top of the street, and come back. She wanted a second look at the transvestite. And the latter, knowing she was being watched, stepped back into her heels, angling her body from different planes towards the spectator. Leanda could see that she was wearing green earrings and a matching necklace. She had the chauffeur stop the car and reverse to the doorway. The face that met hers through the window was gashed with red lipstick. The rhinoplastic alteration given to features which had once been masculine was sufficient to suggest a new category of art — the re-creation of gender. Leanda knew that she would pay for this hooker to come back for dinner at the château. Nicole might do something bizarre with her, like force her to strip slowly to a reading of Anne Radcliffe's
The Castle Of Udolpho
, interspersed with songs by Juliette Greco. They had their favourites.
Deshabillez Moi
and
Dans Ton Lit
were lyrics that never ceased to evoke the atmospherics of the sultry chanteuse slipping out of a black dress. Transvestites were a serious distraction in Leanda's solitary world. They had to be interesting as well as physically perverse. This one was worth the risk. A black male body had adopted white feminine looks. It was the sort of anomaly suited to life at the château. Dinner would be followed by relaxation in one of the house's deep chambers. Leanda most often favoured the room decorated with frescoes modelled on those which De Sade had in his bedroom at La Coste. Piecing together information about De Sade's interiors at the infamous château, Leanda had attempted to recreate something of its 18th century gothic terror. In one corner of the room a gutted piano had red geraniums escaping across its lid. Seasonal flowers had been planted inside it. Seraphim in the process of being buggered by black angels were contorted across walls and ceiling. The one table was a polished coffin. A buried stereo system had strains of ambient music open up occasional harmony clusters. Admission to the room was by a prayer found in De Sade's private papers, and Leanda had set herself to pursue the latter, buying at great expense whatever she could purchase of his Personal belongings. His whips and instruments of correction had eluded her, but she compensated by having made for the dungeon items in accordance with those he described in his novels. The room was conducive to letting go secrets. Something within Leanda still remained insatiably curious about sex.

The transvestite was called Betty. She was uneasy at first about the idea of going to a house out of town. She began negotiating sums to compensate for danger and inconvenience. She'd be away from work for an evening. Time was money. People had hired her for a week at a cost of five thousand dollars. She wasn't that expensive. She would come to an arrangement. A thousand dollars for five hours. We were having her cheap. She got into the car, and arranged her long legs. Leanda could see that she was trying to create a distraction from her nervousness. She was like so many of her kind, hooked on the money, but resentful of the ways in which she earned it. Leanda wasn't sure of Betty's sexual orientation. Out of drag she may have been straight. Betty may have been a man who lived with a girl, and who simply undertook this role as a lucrative form of income, although there must have been something within her that sided with the psychologically extreme.

Leanda spoke minimally about the château. Betty appeared to have had an education, for she professed an interest in books. She had read Burroughs and Genet. She was surprised to find that her tentative enquiries into the form of sex required of her were repulsed. She wanted to know if it was to be A or O. Leanda expressed disdain at this presumption. 'It's not my way,' she told Betty, 'to engage in things so basic, that they're being done all over the world at this moment.'

Betty withdrew into her corner of the car. She was curious, but the need for money kept her silent. She looked out at the landscape as though she was seeing it for the first time, warehouses on the city's fringe were giving way to trees and the kinetic displacement of fields. Her familiar geography was a diminishing parallax as the car pursued its accelerating trajectory into the countryside. Poplars flashed up, cows resembled tree stumps lying
on their sides in a meadow. A field of rape seed punched a yellow square at the eye, a Van Gogh implosion settling in mid-brain. The road was deserted. Leanda's chauffeur remained impeccably non-committal, screened off behind his glass partition. Betty took out a nail-file and brushed up her nails. She seemed temporarily cut off from speech. Leanda had observed this sort of resentment so often. It often conformed to a pattern. The initial confirmation of a deal was followed by a hostile silence to be succeeded by a partial thaw. Betty was giving nothing away. Leanda knew she would have expected payment in advance, but didn't dare offend by demanding money. The September night was dropping early. Orange and red fires underlit a stormy sky. Leanda felt confident she had captured the right person. The extraordinary dish prepared as the main course for dinner would be enhanced by Betty's savouring it.

Leanda always felt comforte
d when she knew the safety of the château's walls were within easy reach. She cradled herself deep in the headrest, and blanked out Betty's presence. Oak trees and farms were thrown fluently over their shoulders. What they appeared to be approaching they were in the process of leaving behind. The Bentley kept in third and they were there, tyres scrunching the impacted gravel. Lights were on in the house, and a maid dressed in an ankle length scarlet coat, with shiny boots, came out and opened the car door for Leanda.

Betty was led up black steps and conducted through an entrance hall. It wasn't like anywhere else she had visited. The atmosphere was particular, and a sense of expectancy charged the silence. For Betty it was like walking into a novel. She was about to enter the first chapter and then proceed to the interior. She had been back with clients to all manner of places, but rarely had their tastes shocked or excited. She had known one man who had
made montages out of his lovers’ bodies, the original photographic image being deconstructed to a series of violently juxtaposed anamorphs. These assemblages had been mounted on the walls. A bright pink refrigerator had stood central to the room. The man had claimed that his soul was inside. He wanted to live by no other dictate than his sexual needs. Incidents like that were not uncommon to Betty. The people who picked up transvestites were usually obsessive and often so deeply fetishistic that their world had been narrowed to the realisation of this thrill. But she couldn't figure out Leanda's intentions. Every prostitute gets used at some time as a sympathetic ear. The client's lonely, it's not sex he wants, but human contact. Betty had sat and listened to so many psychological dilemmas. She had heard people out and been paid for listening. She began to think that Leanda may have intended a video shoot, and that she was required to act out a perverse role. There was a limit to what you can do with someone, she had told herself that in every feasible situation, but the château carried with it the presentiment of potential horror — dungeons, sealed rooms, corridors that may have continued to the centre of the earth.

Betty was shown into a drawing room, and told that dinner would be served soon. A fire had been lit, and a resinous crackle of flame jumped from the logs. The room was predominantly green, the chairs and sofa covered in velvet, and prints by De Chirico, Ernst and
Giacometti afforded an imaginative space to the closed dimensions. There were books heaped on a table, and Betty noticed that one of the chairs had legs which terminated in stilettos. There were bottles of spirits on a black lacquered table.

Betty sat down and touched up her face, a nervous reflex she had developed to offset stress. Whatever the demands made on her at the château, its inhabitants were clearly aesthetes with a perverse set of values. There was a red suede shoe mounted in a hand, placed on the table nearest her. When Betty who was curious, moved over to examine the object, she noticed that a magnifying lens had been inserted into the shoe, and through it she could see a black spider twitching its antennae. The thing was hairy; a trickle of yellow juice exuded from its mandibles.

Betty poured herself a drink, the large scotch hitting her system immediately. She needed alcohol to eliminate sharp edges. She sat there waiting, cursing herself for having accepted the price. Even if she left abruptly now, there was the problem of transport. She had no way of getting back to the city. Each time she looked round the room she discovered some new curiosity. There was a small erotic sculpture on a glass shelf. A woman with her skirt at her ankles was placed over the lap of another, her bottom presented to the correcting hand about to make contact with her cheeks. There was a clue here, but Betty hardly considered she would have been hired to give something commonplace like discipline. She had been paid at times to serve as an ashtray, a repository for excrement, a duct for olive oil, a whole range of peculiarities which had in time become normalised by repeat experience. She had grown unshockable. She had learnt that sexual fetishes were interminable. They were often not connected with the body. They were the directives aimed at depersonalised parabodies. They lived as obsessions which connected with fantasies. They were everything and nothing.