The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus (28 page)

Here Nina stopped abruptly, for Donatien signalled that the great night was advancing and that he required to be alone with his sister for what were to be their last hours at La Coste. Nina got up from Donatien's lap, provocatively bent over in her silk panties, and proceeded to struggle into her sequined hotpants. When she had left the room, after being significantly praised for her story, Donatien resumed his monologue, taking up again with th
emes which pressed for release.

'I've never told you Marciana,' he said, breaking the sexually charged silence, 'of meetings I had with Bill Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Leonard Cohen in the 1960's. Two are dead now and one is in a
Zen Buddhist monastery in California. There are so many people I have denied this formula. They have all gone away into a world of communication breakdown. What you and I are about to discover is that we can freely travel between life and death without being constrained by either state.

‘
I mention Burroughs, Ginsberg and Cohen because at the time of my meeting them they were revolutionaries: prototypes of what they took to be a new species. Burroughs' obsession with drugs and all manner of weird mind-sets, Ginsberg's belief in poetry as a means of social revolution, and Cohen's conviction that song was a way of reaching and changing everyone kicked into my own beliefs at the time. If I was to blame Marciana, it was for keeping you a prisoner in this house. I should have taken you with me on my travels.

‘
What I'm telling you tonight is no different from any other night. It's part of our story, but not everyone's story. Burroughs would drink himself sober and in the process discover truth. Cohen would break off a song in mid-composition to spend the afternoon fucking a groupie, and then pull the lyric tight as though he'd never suffered the interruption.

‘
If I've grown to be a philosopher, Marciana, it's because suffering has given me profound insights into truth. What you find out when you hit an impossible low is that the absolute bottom has a reflective surface.'

Each new sentence shaped by her brother's extraordinary repertoire of experience was a hit to Marciana's chemistry. She flipped on to her stomach, head supported by a red heart-shaped cushion and manoeuvred so that her cosmetically lifted bottom was fully presented to her brother's viewing. In her transparent panties Marciana knew she was the event horizon across which Donatien's nerves played. They had conducted this game with studied deliberation again and again. Marciana knew how at a certain point in his narrative her brother would stop speaking, get up from his chair and begin the sexual ritual which would culminate in the prolonged fucking of her bottom. For Marciana the experience was like being entered by indomitable legend. She cushioned her head in the knowledge that the journey to her interior would soon begin all over again, and that her brother's sensory adeptness would transform her into a voice orchestrating pleasure with elastic octaves. Marciana imparted a ripple to her bottom, a circular shiver transmitted to the tissue, which she extended to a full undulation. It was Donatien who had taught her how to walk from the hips and so display the full provocative range of her buttocks. He had made of that erogenous zone an arena in which his cock grooved lik
e the rhythms on a dance floor.

‘
The night is by its context, sodomitical,' resumed Donatien. 'How else explain the dark. I've stood in underground car-parks at dawn, and I've fucked boys in tunnels underneath Paris and Venice. And we're married in what I have come to call the night side of sex, Marciana.'

Donatien's voice lapsed into fade out, and again Marciana grew conscious of the castrati lifting an aria to full falsetto pitch. This time she expected Donatien to call for Nina to oil her bottom preparatory to sex, but once again her expectations were put on hold. Instead she rotated her hips like a belly dancer, the movement being traced out in ripples through her buttocks. Marciana was growing aware that her brother was reluctant to close down his discourse with the night. It was clear to her that he wanted to leave La Coste with the night in his veins. She tried to reassure herself that together they would know these things again, and she held to that thought now, as he achieved the tinkling pact complicitous bet
ween whiskey bottle and glass.

‘
I have decided to have the château torched tomorrow,' Donatien volunteered. 'The underworld prisoners will be released into the open countryside, and the Purple Princess taken by car to a friend's home outside Paris. She will be looked after there in her life of perpetual mourning. When we return Marciana it will be to a different location. I have in mind a small castle in the Alps, where we will continue with our genetically altered lives. We will live as a concealed Web cult; the guardians of genetic longevity.

‘
Can you imagine Marciana what it's like to forgive everyone? To do so is to reverse the course of justice. I who was always innocent of the crimes of which I was accused, am placed in the position of condoning the injustice done to me. You could say it was in my destiny to learn the meaning of this bitterly unresolved equation. It was part of my night journey, this one big night in which I've thought and fucked and celebrated loss as gain.'

Marciana was conscious of the autumn rain falling outside. Its molecular distillation alerted her to the hundreds of autumns she had known at La Coste, the red leaves tumbling into a yellow residue which smelled of damp basements and oppressively foggy days. The shower had come on while her brother had been talking, its brilliant glissand
o tracking along the night sky.

'What we have in our possession, Marciana,' Donatien took up, this time in an animated voice tone, 'and never forget it, is the key to genetic indestructibility. I personally have identified genes that have the capacity to make a cell last indefinitely by repairing damage. Life I discovered centuries ago is dependent on the quality of your cell repair capability. Most human beings die of the by-products of environmental damage. You and I are immune to the latter process. That I've linked cell repair to neuronal activity has led by complex routes to my discovering the secrets of zone travel between life and death without loss of individual identity. We'll be the same people always, Marciana. Our i
mplants have made us immortal.'

Marciana heard her brother shift in his chair to pr
ess a button for Nina to enter.

Nina came into the bedroom in her pink sequinned hotpants, carrying a number of ritual items on an oval-shaped silver tray. Uncorking an aquamarine flask of essential oils, she began working the quintessentially compounded mix into Marciana's pliantly responsive buttocks. Nina's fingers danced like a pianist's over the convex planes of skin. Each time she tickled a runnel of oil into the crack dividing the two buttocks, so Marciana wriggled in an unrestrained spasm of pleasure. She would arch herself up from the coffin in which she was lying, and remain locked in a state of orgasm before sinking face down on the black cushions which lined the coffin. Nina was forbidden by Donatien to enter his sister, and so the latter's torment was heightened by the peripheral mapping out of her erogenous zones which Nina accomplished with such
provocative expertise.

Donatien got up abruptly from his deep velvet chair and flexed a whip against the wall, the cut reverberating with angry feedback. Tonight he intended to spare Marciana the savage whipping to which she had grown accustomed. He wanted her buttocks to be unmarked as he entered her sphincter and began his journey through the mysteries disclosed by her accommodating passage. His first cut was followed by a second and a third, and the fury established by this practice triggered a characteristic nervous tremor above his left eye. Donatien always grew spectatorially aroused by the sight of Marciana's transparent panties pulled down over her bottom and clinging on tight elas
tics to the tops of her thighs.

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 t
own 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 becau
se you and I an indestructible.

‘The guests who left u
s 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.