The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus (20 page)

Donatien had decided that his only means of presentation to XZ was to establish a meeting for the following day. He took himself across the theatre, and formally arranged with XZ that they should meet in the library at noon the next day. Donatien's offer was greeted with acquiescence by the expressionless android who sat with a glass of mineral water at hand. And for the first time in centuries Donatien experienced a feeling of disquiet at the possibility of someone possessing a superior psychic power to his own, and with it the pot
ential to raid his memory bank.

He returned to his conversation with Marciana, and explained to her that he hoped o
nce again to meet Laura at her interior, and to engage in a dialectic with her soul. He told Marciana that his penis was the instrument through which the eye of Shiva opened and disclosed a mystic all-seeing in the act of sex. He intended to extend his colloquies with the numinous Laura, and at the point of orgasm to see the heavens open. Donatien claimed that the visionary ladder could be ascended through tantric sensitisation, and that brother and sister would be married in heaven at a certain orgasmic pitch. Their art was to achieve a sustained resonance through which this ecstatic objective could be attained.

The condominium of bodies was beginning to form splinter-groups and some of the split-offs were being led by guides with torches through the labyrinthine corridors that connected with the bedrooms. But a central column of fuckers remained, and the redhead was the pivot on which they depended. She was attempting to engorge a triumvirate of cocks, as well as contriving to form an elastic entry-point for various anatomical fetishists who favoured the helix of the ear, and the warm repository of the armpits. The androgynous young man was sitting out from exhaustion and enjoying having his toes painted by one of the harem beauties. His fingers were being done in scarlet, an
d his toenails lacquered black.

Donatien surveyed the satell
iting orgy-groups with an increased sense of boredom. What he saw was the limitations imposed by physical apertures. There weren't sufficient entry-points in the body to satisfy the complex metaphysics of his anal fantasies. It was the opacity of bodies that had him want to whip them into the representation of distorted forms, or substances re-shaped by the whip. He felt outraged by the prospect that anybody should elude his whip hand. True illumination, he reflected, could only come about through the relation of whipper to whipped. If the initiate was receptive to realising vision through pain, he found himself advocating, then the person could be thrashed to their senses. He felt like flogging the entire company, and awakening them to the ecstatic pain attendant on algolagnia. He saw his whip as representing a short fuse to the collective mains.

Donatien relocated Laura
in his life. He owned the copy of Francesco Petrarch's edition of Virgil, in which the poet had written: 'She was taken from the light of day while I, alas, was in Verona, ignorant of this stroke of fate... Her most chaste and very beautiful body was laid to rest on the day of her death, April 6, 1348, at vespers.'

To Donatien Laura
represented a vision of the most immaterial, idealized, and diaphanous kind; a passion that found its one consummation in vision. For Donatien, as for Petrarch, Laura was a symbol for amorous meditation. The daughter of Audibert de Noves, she had married Hugues de Sade at the age of seventeen, and Donatien's research had led him to believe that Laura belonged to the circle of educated ladies who made up the 'Love Court' of Avignon.

As a prelude to his lovemaking with his sister, Donatien recalled again how Laura had come to him wrapped in black crepe, and with her blonde hair floating stormily free. She was the white lady of his dreams, and if at ti
mes he contemplated defacing her image by ripping off her black negligee, and imagining in the process her compact buttocks, then he suffered for the temptation. It was the tension contained by the erotic within the spiritual that heightened Donatien's pleasure in his incestuous relations with Marciana. It was Laura who he expected to find at Marciana interior.

Donatien sat in abstract contemplation of these things, his mind hooking at sacralized and desacraliz
ed images of Laura. He had come to think of her as the celebrated saint of the Sade legend, and of Marciana as the living manifestation of the ancestral cult. He had for a long time formulated the idea of marrying his sister, and he intended on the last and third night of his guests' sojourn at La Coste to announce news of the marriage. Donatien conceived of the union as bringing still another scandal to the Sade lineage; a prospect in which he delighted. He would have his bride dress in a sheath of dark ivy leaves, and her hair and veil would be decorated with black roses. He could see her in his mind, standing in the chapel, shivering in a transparent black gown, while castrati celebrated the profane union of brother and sister.

When he shifted from his reverie, Donatien noticed that Wanda and Nicole had gone over to sit with XZ, and that the three of them could be observed in philosophic discourse. The midget was lying face down at the foot of a quadruple sex act, licking a girl's leather
thigh boot. Three or four members of the harem were attempting to attract Donatien's interest by presenting their bottoms, and he motioned to them that they were to bend over, two on each side of a sumptuous armchair. Donatien received his whip from Nina, and cut into the bottoms of the two on his near side, surveyed his work by how the lacerations coloured, and then went round to the other side of the chair and administered the same brutal punishment to the other exposed flagellants. Again, he watched the blue and red horizontal cuts bump up to rich berry colours, went back to the other couple and delivered a repeat performance. He kept this up for another five minutes, and then returned to his chair. Donatien's obsessive concern with numbers reproduced itself in the literal cuts he inflicted on bottoms. He had counted every lash he had delivered over the centuries, and the total amounted to more than twelve million. An increasing discrimination over the quality of bottoms to be whipped had considerably curtailed his quota in recent years, and Donatien was now selective to a refined degree over the numbers he selected for disciplinary purposes. He had hopes of achieving a round thirty million successes before desisting from his mania, and was determined over the next days to indulge in some indiscriminate whipping, so as to increase his figures by another ten thousand.

Donatien regarded Marciana's bottom as too precious to whip in any serious manner, and several strokes were regarded as sufficient to stimulate his passion.
This minor defacement of her buttocks assuaged his instinct to desacralize beauty. Donatien thought of this act as similar to holding a thorny rose-stem, while inhaling the flower's scent. For him, it was the intoxicating marriage of pleasure and pain that fired his nerves to excess.

With the idea of increasing his total, Donatien took aim at the central body of orgiasts, running in to
wards it and wielding a rapid succession of whistling blows. The attack was sudden and without warning, and the Marquis resembled a dervish as he lived in the ecstatic dementia of the act. He seemed to have overtaken himself and to be the composite projection of his shadow as he slashed left and right and at the back and the front of the collapsing construct. Most positions were crumbling like meringue as Donatien ran in a circle round the still interlocked bodies professing his legendary status as a whipper. He was for a moment like a tiger spreading panic through a herd of feeding zebra. And as abruptly as he had begun, so he stopped.

Donatien walked back to his
chair like a somnambulist. His body was stiff, and he appeared to be in the process of returning to himself from a long way away. He threw his bullwhip on the floor for Nina to lovingly retrieve. She took care of the whip, and began to slowly massage Donatien's neck and shoulders as he regained his composure. He stared ahead of himself as though he had just navigated a re-entry corridor, and called for Marciana to come and sit on his lap.

Marciana wiggle
d across the theatre in her see-through second-skin dress, and playfully teased Donatien with the circular motion of positioning herself on his lap. He immediately came alive, and ran his hand the length of her thigh, while her black lipsticked mouth responded by kissing him deeply.

'We'll go out to the woo
ds tomorrow,' Marciana said. Just you and I. And we'll pick up acorns again, and you by looking at them will transform them to gold. You've always done that for me.

'Will you take me to the woodsman's hut in the oak grove? The place where you sat as a child a
nd listened to the autumn rains. We played there together. You and I heard the acorns and the chestnuts falling with the rain. I can still hear that sound every time it rains. I want you to re-live childhood with me. It all started then for us. We'd take those silk sheets into the hut and huddle under red cloak. Let's remember those things.'

Donatien looked away into the distance, and smiled. 'I can see it all,' he said. 'Nothing is forgotten. The smell of leaves and horses and leather. Your nipples were the size of hawthorn berries, and your skin tasted of blackcurrants. Do you remember how we wanted to run away and get married? An
d now we can realise that fantasy. We will be married in the chapel where Hugues de Sade is laid to rest. At the sight of our betrothal he will rise. We will take him back into our lives in the château.'

Marciana looked like she was dreaming with her eyes open. It was her way to enter into whatever world Donatien imagined. His Imagination was the bridge she used to span the rainbow. She would sit on his thoughts, as though she was
riding a horse across country.

'Yes, we'll be married,' she said, as though it was something she always knew would happen. She expressed no surprise at her brother's decision to marry, but acquiesced fully in his plans to unite their lives in the medieval chapel to the sound of an Aquitainian mass.

'I want you to place a ring on my finger in our old hut,' said Marciana, 'in memory of a childhood that has never died. I hope there will be jays and crows as witnesses of our undying love.'

'Our pact will be an eternal one,' said Donatien. 'Begun in your bottom, our m
arriage will end in the stars.'

'I can hear the rains now,' said Marciana, 'and they will continue through to our meeting in the woods tomorrow. I want to walk with my face up to the sky, and hav
e my body flashed by the rain.'

The romantic in Donatien could only be touched by his sister. He broke the head off a vermilion rose at hand and offered it to Marciana's lips. He broke off a second
one and placed it in her lap, and then a third and fourth were inserted one into each shoe. Marciana luxuriated in the gifts of lipstick-red roses, and expressed her felinity by purring as Donatien stroked her thighs.

'I want you to wear ivy leaves in your hair, tomorrow,' said Donatien. 'And for our marriage,
you will have a G-string made from the darkest ivy leaf cut from the château's walls. Nina will have it sewn on to a purple string, and in addition I wish you to have a purple ivy leaf tattooed on your crotch.'

Marciana rippled with
acquiescence at Donatien's suggestions. Her body went through the sinuous affirmations of a pond chiming with raindrops. She longed to be moulded to his body in eternity. No other man could hold out any interest for her, and like her brother she viewed the orgiasts with a degree of contempt for the limitations of their sexual pleasure. Their orgasms to her mind would short-circuit in frustrated nihilism. They would never know the march on the mystic interior that Donatien achieved with her in his sodomitical lovemaking.

Donatien continued to cover Marciana in red rose
s, spiking them in her hair, and crushing the petals into the palms of her hands. Both were conscious of XZ's inquisitive lenses focused on their withdrawal from the other orgiasts.

'This castle is the physical
shell of our bodies,' Donatien confided to Marciana. 'When we die, the walls and the roof will collapse. The vineyards will revert to dust and stone. The people here will be fucking in the middle of a wasteland.'

Marciana said noth
ing. She lived inside her brother’s impulses, and lived only for that. His assertions were her truths, and his body an extension of her own. She was looking forward to the hour in which they would retire to the master bedroom, and begin their way of fucking to know visionary truth.

The savagely whipped orgiasts had reassembled into nuclear force, and this time
the nymphomaniacal redhead was clinging to a man's back, while a duet of female lovers licked her clitoris. The young androgynous man had recovered enough of his sexual energies to be buggered by a member of the harem. He found himself replicating the ecstatic measures of orgasm that only thirty minutes ago he had been imparting to the redhead. He had switched roles from active to passive and was in the act of finding the one as pleasurable as the other. To Donatien it looked as though the young man had become the redhead, and was learning through the experience what it was like to be a woman.