Sad Sister

by Florence Dugas

  2Did I really need to be so violent? I don’t know exactly what I wanted to punish. My own alterego, perhaps. Or perhaps I was counteracting my own taste for violence—what I civilize when I am with women, regardless of the treatment I require them to accept.

  Chapter III

  October, Continuation

  How had he met her? At the university, as with everyone. She was taking a course in eighteenth-century libertine literature in which each student had to make an oral presentation related to the topic. She had chosen to talk about homosexuality in the literature of the Enlightenment.

  “Good idea, Miss.”

  I can see him from here, trembling. She had been imprudent enough to speak only of men, guys affected with a “little defect.” So, there were only male homosexuals in Sodom? She was flunked without compunction and told she had to retake the exam the fall quarter. Apparently she had not wanted to.

  He had subsequently hired her to pose for him—it was a hobby for which he was not short of talent, not as a photographer (the camera produces ninety percent of the shot, and the rest is the fruit of chance), but as a director. To obtain the pose, the appropriate expressions, he used to tell stories. He would have you participate as if you were making a film, and then he would suddenly freeze a moment of the story. His goal, he had explained to me three times in different ways, was to rediscover the sensations he had felt as a child when he saw the posted photo stills taken from the movies then showing at the neighborhood cinema.

  He went to the movies very infrequently, but he would imagine, after looking at the stills, often taken at random, a whole frenzied, baroque scenario in which the photos would occur in a precise order, all for the sake of a telling a story, and a very troubling one at that. I say “baroque” and “frenzied” because he made me pose for him, too, and later showed me shots he took of Nathalie—apart from those we took together...

  I live in a large studio that probably was once a small two-room apartment. The entrance opens directly onto a minuscule kitchen, as is often seen in Paris. Then you pass a doorless foyer that becomes a big rectangle that a large bay window in the back, on the smallest side, lightens sufficiently.

  Of the two original rooms there exist only, in the ceiling, a beam covered over with plaster, and the moldings of leaves and fruit typical of 1920’s design. In the center of the ceiling of the first half are other moldings of leaves and a metal ring, the last trace of a former light fixture. The room is lit by several floodlights and halogen lamps.

  The bed is a 1920’s period copy, an example of the modern style at its most geometrical. Its head and foot are of equal height, and made of brass bars that used to be gold but are weathered (falsely, no doubt) by the years. On the bed is a comforter, black on one side and red on the other.

  I repainted all the walls white, diluting the color by ten percent with an orange-red tint that lent a vague peach light to the whole. On one side is a vast mirror rising to the ceiling; near the window, on the other side of the bed, a dresser, and a small bookcase.

  There isn’t much closet space. My single storage piece is a huge, authentic kneading machine, my sole luxury furnishing, transformed into a wardrobe.

  On the floor, hexagonal tiles, the color of burned bread, which I don’t take advantage of as much as I should.

  Does he love me? No doubt he does: if not, he would not beat me, would not offer me to others. Something in him takes pleasure in seeing a woman he loves fucked by someone else. On the other hand, he will not stand for her going to bed with someone of her own free will, with a stranger she has chosen. This is how he neither provokes nor dominates anything. Head games: perhaps he does not love me?

  One day he made a frightful scene because he had not been able to reach me for three days in a row—although he himself had once left me without news for three weeks. In fact, my absence was the result of the unhappy coincidence of a sick grandmother in a faraway suburb and a broken answering machine. Where had I been, and with whom? I was so pleased at feeling myself so loved—even if only through his egotism and jealousy—that instead of mentioning Grandma, I sealed myself in a silence full of insinuations and complicated idiocies.

  He punished me with the savagery and exactitude he devoted to staging his passions. Together we had bought a dressage whip, a long weapon of finely braided leather. He marked me from calf to shoulder like a zebu. The scars took nearly ten days to fade. Each day during this period, he showed up early in the morning, on a breath of wind, just to come in my mouth—the thing in the world I like the least when it’s an end in itself.1

  In fact he noticed very quickly that I cherished the idea of punishment. Typically, he got off on it at the same time as he tried to cure me of it.2

  “What crime are you guilty of?”

  The question, posed time and time again, had no answer. At the highest point of the pain, I sometimes had the strange impression of something already seen, already felt, that I could not put my finger on.

  “Perhaps,” he said to me one day when I mentioned this curious sensation, “perhaps I should beat you until it comes back to you. But I think it is up to you to make the effort, and you are not ready. Pain breaks through certain resistances—as do fatigue, or dreams, or the harassment of a mercenary shrink. But your resistances are still too strong: I would have to beat you for too long, and I want neither to kill nor mutilate you.”

  “Thanks, thanks very much!”

  “Don’t mention it. But I know you are running after a memory, an extinguished, burned-out memory. Something you feel guilty about—without being so, of course. Real culpability is anchored in innocence.”

  “It’s strange. I beat you, all the while knowing I am helping you to figure out, one day, that you no longer need nor want to be beaten. As for me, then, how will I be able to love you?”

  Pain and humiliation: a strange therapy...

  He arrives when I am getting out of the shower, jovial and charming. Completely nude, I press myself against him—my skin moist against the drops of rain on his leather jacket. Chills.

  He tells me not to get dressed.

  Puts me on all fours, on my elbows, my thighs slightly spread, in the middle of the room. The hardness of the tiles. I glance sideways in order to see myself in the big mirror. Grotesque and pitiful. My hanging breasts make me look like the she-wolf that suckled Rome.

  With ropes brought expressly for the purpose, he puts me in tight bondage: my arms tied to my knees, ankles tied to a radiator six feet farther off, and my head bound by another rope, which handcuffs my wrists to the foot of the bed and prevents me from standing. A purely decorative rope, pulled very tight, makes a double loop over my chest and back and pushes my breasts forward, making them look like hands extended through hemp bars.

  He allows me a brief glance in the mirror so I may appreciate myself as a trussed-up offering, the gift I have become. Then he blindfolds me.

  He gets behind me and smears my sex and anus with Vaseline, inside and outside. His gestures are medically precise and I feel nothing, no excitation. Nothing but absolute terror.

  After a series of little metallic clicks, the light of a flash goes off under the blindfold, and I hear the battle sounds of the camera being reloaded.

  I still have these photos of myself, and today I cannot look without inexpressible emotion at these images of an anonymous girl, a black blindfold over her eyes, her flesh creased with complicated knots, submissive to all expectations, her heart in her throat. The very picture of anguish.

  There I am, on all fours, my buttocks lifted up by the crouching position he makes me adopt. The ropes saw into my skin. I hear the door close. I call out. No answer. My voice seems strange to me, curiously broken.

  I wait for quite some time; my knees hurt a lot. The ropes are stretched tight and have no play in them. I can hardly breathe. I try to slide the blindfold from my eyes by rubbing my temple against my shoulder, but without success.

  The door again. The sound of
a footfall clacking against the tile, but it’s not his. The certainty that there are at least two people there.

  An enormous lump in my belly. Palms moist against the tile.

  Hands grip my hips; a cock plunges into me, rapid and rectilinear, and bumps roughly against the back wall of my vagina. I cannot help crying out.

  The light of a flash sliding under the blindfold. The man moves about in my cunt. Nearly as quickly, someone raises my head—the rope saws into the nape of my neck—and another cock forces my lips open.

  Nausea.

  Photo.

  I will not go into detail. He left me tied up like that all day. He only freed me once; without taking the blindfold from my eyes, he took me to pee, and tied me up just as tightly afterwards. He never stopped taking photographs, shooting in frames so tight I could not identify anybody later: could see just my buttocks, mouth, cunt, and hips, and the cocks of the guys who fucked me.

  He must have established a certain protocol for them: once installed, they were to ejaculate where they had first thrust. That day I drank more sperm than I have ever swallowed. I was sodomized often, too. Perhaps that was part of the rite. Some, more rarely, preferred my cunt—they were numerous enough, however, that I very quickly felt streams of jism running down my thighs.

  Who were they? J. P. showed me the photos two days later: beautiful, brilliant 5" × 7" prints, with the clear, frank colors of finely grained film. In all, twenty-three guys had fucked me that day. Some of them had big stomachs, with curly hair on comfortable pot bellies, or bulging muscles. There were few blonds. One of them had gray hair all over. Their cocks were of every shape and size. Four were attached to very flat, hairless stomachs, adolescents no doubt, all of whom had chosen my mouth. Others were curved like bananas or twisted like the stems of stock. Thin and grainy like sausage from Auvergne. Short and thick—fat crimson fruit with bursting shafts.

  In porno videos or magazines, you never see more than one model of dick, its size and thickness nearly unchanging, as if a standard were imposed upon scriptwriters and casting directors—somewhat like the hypertrophied, hyperrealistic breasts of the female stars of hard-core, those miraculous, plastic-surgery Barbies.

  Cocks of all colors, too. A man with very matte skin whose mauve-colored glans had just been intimate with my lips. An Asian with barely curly pubic hair. Three very dark blacks, all of whom fucked me up the ass.

  Several photos were taken just after they had pulled out, or between visits. A close-up of my face, quickly soaked with tears—all those bastards had bored deep into my mouth. A close-up of my ass, my anus open, gaping like the mouth of a carp, incredibly dilated. My sex yawning like an oyster renouncing the protection of its pearls. Teardrops of jism frozen by the camera, oozing from all my holes.

  There is an ecstasy in degradation—a forgetfulness of self in the gift of self. Those machinelike cocks fucking me without stopping; those hands pulling on my buttocks like retractors or raising my face; those fingers tensed on my loins and shoulders like hooks: all contributed to my hypnosis. I was no longer myself—just a sack for sperm, a lay saint thrilled to have been made a martyr. With a man you often end up asking what you are doing there—and why him rather than somebody else, and what is this ridiculous swaying of a hairy backside and a pale backside, and this fury to have an orgasm—to be done with him even more quickly. But at that moment, stuffed with cocks, swollen with jism, I achieved a complete detachment, an indifference to myself that was happiness itself. It was that afternoon (in thinking it through afterwards, for at the time I was only pure sensation) that I began to understand why I loved the whip, the crop, chains. In the immense pain of tortured flesh are united all of life’s little hurts: those you live with all the time, the hidden pains, burning memories, acknowledged defeats, choked-back tears, rejections. Disgust for life itself.

  “Where did you find them all?”

  “Oh, here and there. Passersby. A neighbor—I won’t tell you which one. Several kids hanging out in a bar, near the school, behind it. Two students—the Chinese guy. Manual laborers from a shipyard who came and called their friends afterwards. No, it was no trouble to find them. Much less difficult to persuade strangers than to propose the same thing to friends who know me.”

  “No refusals?”

  “Very few. One guy came up this far and then backed off at the last moment at the idea of mixing his sperm with the others’. At that moment, I must say, you were dripping with come. And another, who thought the whole story was only a pretext so I could fuck him at the same time.”

  Nearly all of them had come too fast for me to get into the groove: not a single real orgasm in a whole day’s orgy. But what I had was almost better than an orgasm: I quickly climbed to a sort of plateau of pleasure, and each new sensation kept me there. It was intense enough to make me forget my ragged vaginal walls, irritated by so many successive comings and goings, my throbbing elbows, my nearly bleeding knees.

  A stroke of luck, no doubt—none of these anonymous strangers off the street gave me any diseases. That was the only time that J. P. made me run so many risks—and took them on himself, too, for after having bathed, washed, and perfumed me, and done everything a master owes to his sweetest slave, he made love to me with extreme gentleness for a good part of the night. I lost my head enough to tell him I loved him, I loved him, I loved him, and to believe it when he said he loved me, too.

  Notes

  1I think she is lying (to herself). It sometimes happens that she will limit her contact with a man to this single fantasy, as in these scenes. In a car, just in front of her building, she is with a near-stranger, who can hardly believe his good fortune. She kisses him distractedly, but reaches for his cock immediately—quickly pulls it out of his pants, quickly sucks it—only because she wants to feel his sperm run into her mouth, and not lose a drop of it, and then kiss him again lightly, and go up to her place, alone, to go to bed with the taste of jism on her tongue. And another time, in a movie theater, with a guy she does not know sitting next to her—movements of knees, groping fingers, and very quickly the sound of his fly being unzipped and his cock in her mouth. The usher surprises them and shines her flashlight, but does not say anything, just watches her suck him; then extinguishes the light when, without a word, Florence gets up again, her lips shining, her mouth full. She leaves before the end of the movie—no doubt because she had nothing to say to the guy. In the hall the usher smiles at her. She is very pretty, so Florence smiles back at her, as if to dedicate the impromptu fellation to her.

  2She means no doubt to say: in the typical manner of a typical guy...

  Chapter IV

  November

  There were days when he would whip me for himself: several blows, just to mark me until the next time (and perhaps in a way to say to other lovers that he made me who I was, and that I was his).1 But on certain days he would beat me for me.

  I nearly always began by counting the blows; then I would lose track, lose everything at the terrible thought that today there would be no end, that I would die under the whip. Each crack of the lash trebled my fright until I would accept the idea that I was going to die, and that it would be very nice to die.

  My body would twist, my mouth cry out, imploring him, but my mind was already elsewhere, with a nearly religious resignation. Those feelings mixed with a fascination for my long-suffering body, for the immense pain that somehow grew and gained strength, that found a way to bloom. Eventually I understood that the pain I accepted was only a metaphor written on my skin for an older, lingering pain I had never agreed to bear.

  As I will explain later, I had to love Nathalie enough to confuse her with myself in order to watch her be tortured in turn. Thus I was the one being hurt, if only to understand what silent presences lay at the heart of the deluges of pain. One day the cry she emitted was so torn I had the fleeting impression she was reliving her birth, the pain of our entry into life, a pain she had always fled, until she was able to make peace w
ith herself only by refusing to live.

  He comes in and immediately introduces us: “Florence, this is Nathalie, who has agreed to give us two hours of her time; Nathalie, Florence, whom I’ve told you about.”

  We look at each other, judging each other, gauging each other. Is she prettier than I am? Yes, probably. Her gray-green eyes gleam in her face, nude of makeup. Her skin is very pale; her medium-length hair is curly and very blond. A pouting mouth; when she smiles, superb teeth. Very high cheekbones frame a small, straight nose that is quivering, gluttonous.

  She has a better body than I do, that’s for sure; at our request she takes off her clothes, and her bosom bursts forth from her demicup bra. She has sumptuous breasts—thirty-six or thirty-eight inches—that are extended like offerings, with a small, very round areola and a hard, clearly drawn nipple—a rare combination in a chest that large, where everything too often has the tendency to spread, to slide.2

  (Even now, on command, I can relive the feeling of her breasts brushing against my back as she kisses the nape of my neck or my ear. They slide like two light little fingers over my loins as she skims over my back with her lips, and finally mash against the crook of my knees as she buries her face and tongue between my open thighs...)

  She has a marvelously flat and muscular belly, with a very small waist—her breasts seem suspended like gardens over a void; her buttocks are very rounded, set high. She is maybe 5’6”, but she looks striking, now nude in the room filled with lights and cameras. So striking that very quickly I stop looking at her directly and only contemplate, with a curious emotion, her reflection in the mirror.

  “A little champagne, Nathalie?”

  He hands her a glass full of bubbles.

  Nathalie liked to drink. That was a constant until the end, and when I met her mother, it made sense.