Hopelessly enmeshed in the flesh-rending embrace of the briars, he consoles himself with thoughts of what might have been: the legendary princess, his brave overcoming of all obstacles to arrive at her bedside and disenchant her with a magical kiss (he has a talent for it, women have often told him so), her soft expectancy and subsequent adoration of him, his fame and hers and the happiness that must naturally flow therefrom. Around him, the tinkling bones of those nameless brothers he’ll soon join speak to him of the vanity of all heroic pursuits and of the dreadful void that the illusions of immortality, so-called, cannot conceal. Well, of course, all life affirmations are grounded in willing self-delusion, masks, artifice, a blind eye cast toward the abyss, this is the very nature of heroism, he knows this, he doesn’t need the bones to tell him. Yet still, mad though it may be, he longs to write his name upon the heedless sky. Still (he slashes, a branch falls; it grows back, doubly forked; rearmed, he slashes again), he must strive. If he were now to reach her bedside and, with his bloody lips, free her from her living death, he would tell her that he did it for love – not for love of her alone, but for love of love, that the world not be emptied of it for want of valor. Would that disappoint her? No, she would understand, she was Beauty, after all, chosen as he was chosen, or as he’d thought he’d been (damn!), and so would know that his kiss, their love, their fated happiness, existed on a plane beyond their everyday regal lives, that theirs has been an emblematic ordeal and a redemption shared with the world. Yes, all right, but it wasn’t much of a kiss. What—?! I mean, it was hardly more than a little peck, I didn’t even feel it. It was like you really didn’t mean it. Oh, he sighs, slashing away bitterly, I guess my mind was elsewhere.
When she awakens, he is fondling her excitedly, his excitement exciting her (she pleases him!), his touches, too (and he her!), her body tingling with his feverish explorations. It’s better even than she imagined it. His delicate hands are everywhere, lightly scrambling up and down her body, it’s almost as though he has more than two of them, and he is lashing her with a soft woolly whip, now her thighs, now her face, now her breasts. She smells sweet fennel, balm, lavender, and mint, mixed with dust and less pleasant odors, and she recognizes the smell from her childhood: the rushes strewn with the aromatic herbs on the great hall floor, where she often played beneath the trestle tables while her elders ate. Whom she now hears above her, laughing uproariously. She opens her eyes and sees the monkey perched on her chest between her breasts, smirking at her under the miniature crown tied under his chin. He pinches one pink nipple in his bony little fingers, lifts it and shakes it like a bell, his lips splitting in a maniacal grin, and she feels the ripples all the way to the depths of her belly, where a dull insistent pain resides. Her mother and father and all their friends and all the knights and servants of the castle are gathered around, gazing down with greasy-faced delight upon this spectacle, hooting and laughing and slapping their thighs. They have been eating and drinking, many are eating and drinking still, chewing, spitting, guzzling, and the refuse from their feast is all about her. The monkey rises on all fours, turns his back, lifts his tail to display to her his waxen crimson bottom, and commences to lick and paw between her legs as though picking fleas or searching for something to eat. She feels a burning itch there which she wants desperately to scrub, but she can’t move a finger, it’s as though all but her intimate parts have been turned to stone. She is terrified and humiliated, but she is also strangely thrilled, not only by the monkey’s frolicsome two-handed rummaging, but also by the outrage being committed upon her here, the flaunting of proprieties, the breaking of royal taboos. It’s like something is being released, and it feels almost explosive. If only the monkey would stop tickling her and (though she doesn’t know what ‘it’ might be) get on with it! That seems to spring a new burst of laughter from her audience, but she is certain she did not speak aloud, cannot. She cannot even cry out as the monkey, losing his temper and snatching and digging at her furiously, slapping, clawing, biting, finally shoving a whole arm inside her, brings back, redoubled, the spindled pain. It’s almost as though he wants to break her open, get at what’s down deep inside! This is terrible! Why are they all laughing?! She’s hurting so—! Just then, thankfully, a familiar old crone wanders through, shoos the monkey away (the revelers are gone, vanished, her mother and father among them, as though they never were), melts her petrified limbs, restores her voice to her: Was that it? Has it happened? Has the spell been broken? she gasps, clutching her assaulted parts with both hands. The crone does not reply (they are in the servery now, or maybe the nursery), but instead, cackling softly, says: Calm down, my precious. Let me tell you a story.
Once upon a time, the fairy relates, there was a rather wild and headstrong little girl who, ignoring the warnings of her elders, climbed up to the top of a secret tower where an old woman was spinning, got pricked by a spindle, and fell asleep for a hundred years. What was her name? I don’t know, don’t interrupt. It was me, wasn’t it? No, Rose, this was someone else. Her name was Beauty, I think. Have I heard this story before? Hush, now! When her hundred years were up, she was awakened by a handsome young prince who loved her very much and visited her whenever he could get away from his wife, which was usually about once every fortnight. He was married—?! Of course he was. Didn’t I just tell you? I must have forgotten. But didn’t it make her very unhappy – I mean, after waiting all that time—? Yes, it did, but she understood that, being from the last century, she was probably a bit old-fashioned, while he was a modern prince with different ideas, and anyway she had no choice. When the prince’s wife, who was an ogress, found out about the affair, she waited until the prince had gone off hunting one day, and then she went over to Beauty’s house and ordered the clerk of the kitchen to strip off Beauty’s finery, which the wife naturally wanted for herself and without any nasty stains on it, thank you, then to slit her throat and roast her on a spit over the fire. Meanwhile, she prepared a rich garlic soup with spicy fish dumplings, fresh leeks broiled in butter and black pepper, cabbage stuffed with sausage and seasoned with vinegar, mustard, saffron, ginger, and herbs from the garden, fresh baked bread, and for dessert a blancmange flavored with anise. When her husband came back from hunting and saw what she had done, he was very upset of course, Beauty was a special favorite of his, having helped him make his name and all, but he was also very hungry and his wife, who was a wise ogress, had brought along a big jug of delicious young wine from the south to go with the feast she’d prepared, so in the end he settled down and enjoyed his meal, even if he did find the meat a bit tough, being more than a century old as it was. As the ogress had never been able to have any children of her own, she and the prince adopted Beauty’s little orphans and took them home with them and they all lived happily ever after. Rose is not amused by this story. It was nothing like that, she complains. What do you know about it, you silly creature? demands the fairy. It is not easy, keeping this going for a hundred years, and she does not appreciate her charge’s dismissive attitude. It just doesn’t sound right, Rose says. Real stories aren’t like that. Real princes aren’t.
Her prince has come. The real one. It is dark and she does not know where she is but she knows he has come and that it is he. She is filled with rejoicing, but also with trepidation. So much is at stake! She has known all along that her prince would come, but she has also known there would be no uncoming, forever after as much a threat as promised delight. What if he is not as she’s imagined him to be? She was safe inside this impenetrable castle, protected even from the demands of her own body, and now this alien being who paces at her bedside has broached those walls and will soon break through to her very core, if he has not already done so. All her childhood fears return: of the dark, of strange noises, of monsters and ghosts, of murderers, of being left alone, of her parents dying, of getting sick and dying herself, of the world dying. He clears his throat. Has he kissed her yet? She doesn’t remember, but she musters her courage and opens her eyes
to see who or what is there, terrified now that she will find a great hairy beast prowling beside her bed. But, no, it is he, a handsome young prince with manly brow and beard and flowing locks, tall and lean and strong. My prince, she whispers. You have come at last! Yes, well, he says with a grimace, wandering distractedly through the dimly lit room, draped in swags of gray dusty webs, which he swipes at irritably with his gauntleted hand. At a wooden chest, he picks up a bonehandled copper pitcher enameled with the family crest, thumps it, peers at its green bottom, sets it down again. He pokes through some wardrobe drawers, raising clouds of dust, finds some rings and necklaces and silver pennies, which he sorts through idly. Perhaps he takes some of these things, but not as a thief might: in effect, he possesses them. With one metallic finger he strokes a plump lute resting on a table: the dry strings snap and ping, their ancient tension released, but not hers. My prince? He turns his restless gaze upon her for a moment and then it seems to pierce right through her, as though focusing on something within or beyond her, chilling her to the marrow before it drifts away again, coming to rest on a chessboard with cracked and yellowed ivory pieces. He moves one of the figures, freeing it from its bonds of web, then, with a shrug, tips it over. It is a delicate, casual, yet studied gesture, and it terrifies her. In front of a round dust-grimed mirror on the wall, he stares at himself, stroking his beard. He is immaculately groomed and dressed, more elegant even than she had dreamt he would be. You are very beautiful, she murmurs timidly, but I thought you’d, I don’t know, show more outward signs of your terrible ordeal. Ordeal—? You know, the briars. He turns away from the mirror, peers at her warily with narrowed eyes. What briars? Didn’t you have to cut your way through a briar hedge outside? Maybe, he says stonily, I’m at the wrong castle.
He has, in his imagination (all that’s left him), slashed his way through the briars, scaled the castle wall, and reached her bedside. He had expected to be aroused by the mere sight of her, this legendary beauty both doelike and feral, and indeed, stripped naked by the briars, his flesh stinging still from the pricking of the thorns which he seems to be wound in now like a martyr’s shroud, he is aroused, but not by the grave creature who lies there before him, pale and motionless, wearing her ghostly beauty like an ancient ineradicable sorrow. His sense of vocation propels him forward and, pushed on by love and honor to complete this fabled adventure, he leans forward to kiss those soft coral lips, slightly parted, which have waited for him all these hundred years, that he might unbind her from her spell and so fulfil his own emblematic destiny. But he hesitates. What holds him back? Not this hollow rattle of old bones all about. Something more like compassion perhaps. What is happily ever after, after all, but a fall into the ordinary, into human weakness, gathering despair, a fall into death? His fate to be sure, whether he makes his name or not (what does it matter?), but it need not be hers. He imagines the delirium of their union, the celebrations and consequent flowering of the moribund kingdom, the offspring that would follow, the joys thereof, the pains, the Kingship, the Queenship, her obligations, his, the days following upon days, the exhaustion of the ‘inexhaustible fountain of their passion,’ the disappointments and frustrations and betrayals, the tedium, the doubts (was it really she after all? was it really he?), the disfigurements of time, the draining away of meaning and memory, the ensuing silences, the death of dreams; and, enrobed in pain, willfully nameless, yet in his own way striving still, he slips back into the briars’ embrace.
The fairy sits spinning in the tower, entangled in her storied strands, joining thread to thread, winding them into seductive skeins, awaiting the dreamer’s visit, her accusations, her demands. It has not been easy, trying to fill her limboed head through all this time, by some calendars as much as a century or more, so from time to time over the years (call them that), in order to rehearse her craft, re-spell the wound, she has returned here to the source. The scene, as they say, of the crime. Of course, given the child’s inability to put any two thoughts together in succession or to hold either of them between her ears longer than it takes to think them, the fairy might just as well tell the same story over and over again, and indeed she has repeated most of them, one time or another, it has been a long night. But, for her own sake more than her auditor’s, fearing to lose the thread and sink away herself into a sleep as deep as that she inhabits, thus gravely endangering them both, she has sought, even while holding fast to her main plot, to tell each variant as though it had never been told before, surprising even herself at times with her novelties. She has imagined, and for Rose described, a rich assortment of beauties and princes, obstacles, awakenings, and what-happened-nexts, weaving in a diverse collection of monsters, dragons, ogres, jests, rapes, riddles, murders, magic, maimings, dead bodies, and babies, just to watch the insatiable sleeper wince and gasp and twitch with fear and longing, wicked fairy that she is. She has rarely gone afield in her tales, wandering instead the tranced castle, using it some times as a theatrical contrivance, others as a kind of house of the dead, touring intimately its most secret recesses. Castle-bound as the dreamer is, the illusion of boundaries, above all that of the body, has been one of the fairy’s frequent themes, along with the contest between light and dark, the passions of jealousy and desire, cannibalism, seduction and adultery, and the vicissitudes of day-to-day life in the eternal city of the tale, the paradoxes thereof. That between gesture and language, for example. This she illustrated one day, when asked, But why does he have to kiss her, by describing in exhaustive detail every nuance of the sleeper’s expression as witnessed by the hovering prince, down to the subtle chiaroscuro of light as it grazed her brow at different angles and the movement of the fine hairs in her nostrils, a cartographical epic that might have gone on without lips meeting lips for the rest of the century, had not her capricious audience, screaming for release, retreated in spite to a passing nightmare about a prince who awoke her by sinking his teeth suddenly into her throat.
Though he no longer even wishes to reach her, to wake her, he continues, compelled by vocation, to slash away at his relentless adversary, whose deceptive flowers have given the object of this quest the only name he knows. Though she remains his true love, salvation and goal, the maker of his name, jewel at the core, and all that, he cannot help but resent her just a little for getting him into this mess, which is probably fatal. She is beautiful, true, perhaps the most beautiful creature in the world, or so they say, and, in his agony, he has consoled himself with thoughts about her, principally of an amorous nature, it being that sort of adventure, but he has also thought often about his life before he undertook this quest, its simple sensible joys, the freedom of it, the power he wielded, the fame and honor he enjoyed, even if all much less than her disenchantment might have provided, had he been the one chosen for it. He has imagined, having first imagined the eventual success of this enterprise, explaining to her, or trying to explain, his continuing attraction to that former life in order to suggest a distinction between his breaking of her spell and the happily-ever-after part, the latter to be negotiated separately, and, so doing, has grasped something of the true meaning of her name, for clearly, from her perspective, this hundred years’ wait has not prepared her to tolerate such a distinction. In short, at the least hint of his choosing other than the either of her either/or, she has seemed prepared (in his imagination) to scratch his eyes out. Which in turn has offered him an insight into a possible way out of here: could it be that, in struggling against the briars, he might in fact be struggling only against something in himself, and that therefore, if he could come to understand and accept the real terms of this quest, the briars might simply fade away? Or is that what all these other clattering heroes thought?
She has told her (the little dimwit has forgotten this, perhaps she will tell it again) about the prince who, trapped in the briars, was given three wishes and wasted them by first wishing himself in Beauty’s bedroom, which he found empty, then wishing to know where she was, and, on learning she was in the v
ery hedge he’d been trapped in, wishing himself back in the briars again, though the wishes weren’t completely wasted because at least now, on a clear day when their shouts carried, he had company in his suffering. The fairy recognizes that many of her stories, even when by her lights comic, have to do with suffering, often intolerable and unassuaged suffering, probably because she truly is a wicked fairy, but also because she is at heart (or would be if she had one) a practical old thing who wants to prepare her moony charge for more than a quick kiss and a wedding party, which means she is also a good fairy, such distinctions being somewhat blurred in the world she comes from. Thus, her tales have touched on infanticide and child abuse, abandonment, mutilation, mass murder and cruel executions, and, in spite of the subjects, not all endings have been happy. She has told her the story of the musicians at Beauty’s wedding feast who distracted the bride with their flutes and tambourines and kettledrums, while their dancing girls were off seducing the groom, thereby sending him to his nuptial bed with a dreadful social disease. She has told her (also forgotten) of a monstrously evil Sleeping Beauty and of the horrors unleashed upon the prince and all the kingdom when he awakened her, as well as of the hero under a beastly spell who ate Beauty immediately upon finding her so as to avoid returning to his dreary life as a workaday prince, adding a few diverting notes about his digestive processes just to stretch the tale out. But stories aren’t like that, the ill-tempered child will inevitably insist, and the fairy only cackles sourly at that and tells another. She will be up here soon. Now she’s found the way, she cannot help but keep coming back. But it always takes her a while to find it. Rose imagines this ancient spinning room in the tower to be an impossible distance away, through hidden corridors and up rickety stairwells, not realizing that it is, so to speak, just behind her left ear …
Briar Rose & Spanking the Maid Page 4