Part 9 (2/2)

197 'What you wanted me to do.'She looked at him, feeling that she needed him desperately.

'I didn't force you or oblige you to do anything, nor did I hear you say ”yellow”; I had only the power you gave me. There was no obligation, no blackmail on my part, only your will; you may have been the slave and I the master, but my only power was to push you in the direction of your own freedom.'

Handcuffs. Leather thongs around her ankles. A gag. Humiliation that was more intense and more potent than any pain. And yet - he was quite right - the feeling was one of total freedom. Maria felt full of energy and vigour and was surprised to see that the man beside her was utterly exhausted.

'Did you come?'

'No,' he said. 'The master is here to drive the slave on. The pleasure of the slave is the joy of the master.'

None of this made sense, because it wasn't the way it was in stories, it wasn't the way it was in real life. But here in this fantasy world, she was full of light, while he seemed opaque, drained.

'You can leave whenever you want,' Terence said.

'I don't want to leave, I want to understand.'

'There's nothing to understand.'

She got up in all the beauty and intensity of her nakedness and poured two gla.s.ses of wine. She lit two cigarettes and gave him one of them - the roles were reversed, she was now the mistress serving the slave, rewarding him for the pleasure he had given her.

198 'I'll get dressed and then I'll leave, but, first, I'd like to talk a little.'

'There's nothing to talk about. That's all I wanted, and you were marvellous. I'm tired now and I have to go back to London tomorrow.'

He lay down and closed his eyes. Maria didn't know if he was just pretending to sleep and she didn't care; she smoked a leisurely cigarette and slowly sipped her wine, with her face pressed against the window pane, looking out at the lake opposite and wis.h.i.+ng that someone, on the other sh.o.r.e, could see her like this - naked, replete, satisfied, confident. She got dressed and left without saying goodbye, and was not bothered whether she opened the door or he did, because she wasn't sure that she wanted to come back.Terence heard the door close, waited to see if she would come back, saying that she had forgotten something, and only after a few minutes did he get up and light another cigarette.

The girl had style, he thought. She had withstood the whip well, although this was the oldest, the most common and the least severe of the punishments. For a moment, he sat remembering the first time he had experienced that mysterious relations.h.i.+p between two beings who want to be close, but can only be so by inflicting suffering.

Millions of couples out there practised the art of sadomasochism every day, without even realising it. They Went to work, came back, complained about everything, 199 insulted their wife or were insulted by her, felt wretched, but were, nonetheless, tightly bound to their own unhappiness, not realising that all it would take was a single gesture, a final goodbye, to free them from that oppression.

Terence had experienced this with his wife, a well-known English singer; he was tormented by jealousy, he made scenes, and spent whole days dosed up with painkillers, whole nights hopelessly drunk.

She loved him and couldn't understand why he behaved like that; he loved her and couldn't understand his own behaviour. It was as if the agony that the one inflicted on the other was necessary, fundamental to life.

One day, a musician - whom he had always thought of as very strange, because he seemed so normal in the midst of all those exotic people - left a book behind in the studio: Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Terence started leafing through it and, as he read, he began to understand himself better.

'The lovely woman took off her clothes and picked up a long, short-handled whip. ”You asked for it,” she said, ”so I'm going to whip you.” ”Oh, yes,” murmured her lover, ”please, I beg you.”'

His wife was on the other side of the gla.s.s screen, rehearsing. She had asked them to turn off the microphones that allowed the technicians to listen in to everything, and they had done so. Terence was thinking that perhaps she was making a date with the pianist, and he realised that she was driving him mad, but it was as if he was so accustomed to suffering now that he could not live without it.200 I'm going to whip you,' said the naked woman in the book he was reading. 'Oh, yes, 'please, I beg you.'

He was a good-looking man, and a force to be reckoned with in the record company, why did he need to lead such a life?

Because he wanted to. He deserved to suffer because life had been so good to him, and he wasn't worthy of all these blessings - money, respect, fame.

He felt that his career was leading him to a point where he would become dependent on success, and that frightened him, because he had seen a lot of people plummet from the heights.

He read the book. He started reading everything he could find about the mysterious union between pain and pleasure.

His wife found the videos he was renting and the books he was hiding from her, and asked him what it was all about, was he sick? Terence said no, it was just research he was doing for a new cover. Then he said nonchalantly: 'Perhaps we should try it.'

They did. They began very timidly, using the manuals they found in p.o.r.n shops.

Gradually, they developed new techniques, took their activities to dangerous limits, and yet they felt that their marriage was even stronger. They were accomplices in something hidden, forbidden, proscribed. Their joint experience was transformed into art: they created new outfits - leather with metal studs. His wife went on stage wearing boots and a suspender belt and Wlelding a whip, and the audience went wild. Her new record shot to the top of the charts in England and went on triumph in the rest of Europe. Terence was surprised 201 how young people accepted his personal fantasies as perfectly natural, and the only explanation he could find was that it provided a means of expressing repressed violence in an intense but inoffensive manner.

The whip came to be the group's logo and was reproduced on T-s.h.i.+rts, fake tattoos, stickers and postcards. Terence's intellectual bent drove him to track down the origins of all this, so that he could understand himself better.

These origins did not lie, as he had told Maria, with those penitents trying to drive away the Black Death. Ever since the Dark Ages, man has understood that suffering, if confronted without fear, is his pa.s.sport to freedom.

Egypt, Rome and Persia all shared the notion that a mancan save his country and his world by sacrificing himself. Whenever there was a great natural disaster in China, the emperor was punished, because he was the divinity's Earthly representative. In ancient Greece, the finest Spartan warriors were whipped once a year, from morning till night, in homage to the G.o.ddess Artemis, while the crowd urged them on, calling on them to withstand the pain with dignity, for it was preparing them for the world of war. At the end of the day, the priests would examine the wounds on the warriors' backs and use them to predict the citys future.

The priests of the desert, in an ancient, fourth-century Christian community that grew up around a monastery in Alexandria, used flagellation as a way of driving oUt 202 demons or of proving the futility of the body in the spiritual search. The history of saints was full of similar examples St Rosa running through the garden, letting the thorns tear her skin, St Domingos Loricatus whipping himself every night before sleeping, the martyrs who voluntarily offered themselves up to a slow death on the cross or being torn apart by wild animals. They all said that pain, once mastered, could lead to religious ecstasy.

Recent, unconfirmed studies indicated that a particular kind of fungus with hallucinogenic properties grew in the wounds and caused visions. The pleasure was so intense that the practice soon left the monasteries and convents and spread throughout the world.

In 1718, A Treatise on Self-flagellation was published, which showed how to achieve pleasure through pain, but without harming the body. At the end of that century, there were dozens of places in Europe where people were prepared to suffer in order to attain joy.

There are records of kings and princesses who had their slaves whip them, until they found that another kind of pleasure - albeit more exhausting and less gratifying - was to be found not only in being whipped, but also in inflicting pain.

While he was smoking his cigarette, Terence took a certain Pleasurable pride in knowing that most people would be unable to understand what he was thinking.

It was better to belong to an exclusive club to which the chosen had access. He remembered again how the sacrament of marriage had been transformed into the miracle 203of marriage. His wife knew that he visited Geneva for this purpose and she didn't mind; on the contrary, in this sick world, she was glad that her husband got the reward he wanted after a hard week at work.

The girl who had just left the room had understood everything. He felt that his soul was very close to hers, although he wasn't yet ready to fall in love, for he loved his wife. But he liked to think that he was free and could dream of a new relations.h.i.+p.

All he had to do was to get her to attempt the next and most difficult stage: the transformation into SacherMasoch's 'Venus in Furs', the Dominatrix, the Mistress, capable of humiliating and punis.h.i.+ng without pity. If she pa.s.sed the test, he was ready to open his heart and let her in.

From Maria's diary, when she was still drunk on vodka and pleasure: When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself.

When I experienced humiliation and total submission, I was free. I don't know if it was all a dream, or if it only happens once. I know that I can perfectly well live without it, but I would like to do it again, to repeat the experience, to go still further.

I was a bit frightened by the pain, but it wasn't as bad as the humiliation, and it was just a pretext. When I had my first o.r.g.a.s.m in many months, despite 204 all the many men I've been with and the many different things they've done with my body, I felt - is this possible?

- closer to G.o.d. I remembered what he said about how the flagellants, in offering up their pain for the salvation of humanity, found pleasure. I didn't want to save humanity, or him or me; I was just there.

The art of s.e.x is the art of controlled abandon.

A 205 I I It wasn't theatre this time, they were in a real train station, at Maria's request, because she liked the pizza you could buy there. There was nothing wrong with being a bit wayward sometimes. Ralf ought to have come to see her the day before, when she was still a woman in search of love, an open fire, wine and desire. But life had chosen otherwise, and today she had got through the whole day without once havingto make herself concentrate on the sounds around her or on the present moment, simply because she hadn't thought about Ralf; she had discovered other more interesting things to think about.

What was she to do with this man beside her, who was eating a pizza he probably didn't like and who was just pa.s.sing the time until the moment came for them to go to his house? When he had come into the club and offered her a drink, she had thought of telling him that she wasn't interested any more and that he should find someone else; on the other hand, she had an enormous need to talk to s/meone about the previous night.

She had tried talking to one or two of the other prosties Wno served the 'special clients', but none of them tell her anything, because Maria was bright, she lea rned quickly and had become the great threat in the 207 Copacabana. Of all the men she knew, Ralf Hart was the only one who would understand, because Milan considered him too to be a 'special client'. But he looked at her with eyes alight with love, and that made things difficult; it was best to say nothing.

'What do you know about pain, suffering and pleasure?'

She had once again failed to keep her thoughts to herself. Ralf stopped eating his pizza.

'Everything. And it doesn't interest me in the least.'

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