by Jeremy Reed
Marciana sat in a chair directly next to the fire, and felt her panties shiver across her bottom.
'Coming here is like home from home,' Leanda commented. 'It's only Raoul who had difficulty with the journey. I mean he belongs to another reality.'
'But I know he'll sing well,' Marciana affirmed.
'He'll love the place,' said Nicole, taking in the ceiling frescoes, and the black velvet drapes that waterfalled from orange walls.
'It's the perfect setting,' said Leanda. 'A torchy, gothic construct, in which he can excel.'
'There may be a real funeral also,' Marciana alluded. 'One of Donatien's relatives, an astronaut from the defunctive space-age is brain-damaged from his last return through the re-entry corridor. For years he's lived in virtual space, a hyper-real substitute for his interplanetary missions. Donatien has the idea that as his relative will die a virtual death, so sex after death may biologically resurrect him. It's one of my brother's hypotheses about deathlessness.'
'These things sound rather like our encounter with XZ,' said Wanda, 'the leader of a deathless cult who visited The Pleasure Château. He has the secrets to biogenetic engineering, and he and his android sect claim to have overcome the genetic inheritance of death.'
Leanda crossed her legs in a way that was like a provocative means of origami. The promise in what they concealed was to Marciana like the idea of a flower growing at the bottom of a lake.
The women sat and spoke of new combinations of neurotransmitters, DNA memory banks, and the whole cellular morphology required to create a new species. The need to redesign neuro-cellular chemistry was a theme of Donatien's, and one that similarly preoccupied Marciana. Organisms in all their complex structures had evolved and stabilized their forms over millions of years, and so too their own deconstructing mechanisms. Marciana was aware that Leanda and Nicole may also have been initiated into infinite life-extensions, and that four people presently at La Coste were faced with the possibility that they may never die.
Marciana talked of her brother's attachment to La Coste, and the blue Luberon mountains which formed a natural amphitheatre beneath windy clouds. Donatien had added new rooms to the château, she informed Leanda, and had also beautified the ground by planting olive and almond trees. The house had been an obsession of his for centuries, and each detail of change had to be approved by him.
'There are rooms that not even I have entered,' Marciana told Nicole, her eye attempting to telescope up the latter's silk skirt.
‘Donatien has forbidden me access to a suite of rooms in the castle's interior,' said Marciana, 'And each time I go in search them, they appear to be in infinite regression. A few weeks ago I felt compelled to undertake a new journey to try and locate the whereabouts of his secret domain, and I must have fallen asleep in the process, but continued sleepwalking, for at some stage Donatien slapped me awake. He led me back through passages I had never seen before. There were children who opened doors and looked out at me, and their blue eyes seemed frozen into permanent trance. It was impossible to know if they had just arrived, or if they had been there for ever.
‘Donatien tried to assure me that I had dreamt of the presence of children, and that what looked like a bottomless hole at the end of the corridor, was simply a nightmare phenomenon. I remember a creature that resembled a jackal snouting at my legs, and the animal wore a collar of sparkling blue stones.'
'It sounds like a journey to the underworld,' commented Leanda, as the midget performed a shoulder-stand on the table.
'You'll meet my brother later,' said Marciana. 'He plans to make a spectacular entrance in the theatre, just before Raoul comes on stage. I don't need to tell you his story. His biography has been made known, although the real Donatien seems always to have been excluded from the story, like the subject left out of a photograph. Only I truly know his story. Sometimes I find myself writing it all down, typing it all on to disc, but without the knowledge of how or when the confessions will ever reach the world. And paradoxically, I suppose he must have known a similar despair when he was writing his huge novels in prison.'
When a transvestite servant entered the room it was to serve a black wine from the La Coste vineyards. The wine had the fragrance of the violet petals in which it had been fermented.
'I have to warn you of certain aspects of my brother's behaviour that may disquiet you,' said Marciana, crossing her legs with the exaggerated slowness of a woman teasing an admirer's volatile sexual appetite.
‘Donatien can best be described as an interspecies time-traveller. Naturally, some of the old patriarchal hegemony into which he was born persists in his attitudes, but this has been tempered over the centuries by adoption of very modern ways. And because my brother remembers so much, he is constantly sad. His melancholy is lifted only by his enjoyment in the sexually perverse. You must be shocked at nothing.'
'I have stories that will shock him,' said the midget, disengaging from the monkey's licentious caresses. 'Stories that will bring the stones of this castle down.'
The midget slapped his thighs with gloved hands, his raucous laughter creating a mad happening in the room.
'My brother's aesthetic,' said Marciana, 'has become the substance of legend. One of the reasons he can never die is that he has grown to be a fiction. His life is continuously extensible through narrative. The mystery of Sade is not only in these stones, but on our breath.'
'I can understand that,' said Nicole. 'I once considered myself to be the guardian of an unrelatable secret. I thought I had buried it in my interior, but then I dreamt it, and on another night I spoke it out loud in my dream, and Leanda heard what my dream was saying. And that is how stories begin.'
Nicole was interrupted in her speech by Nina coming into the room in a slinky cocktail dress to announce that the concert would start in fifteen minutes. She poured herself over to Marciana, knelt down at the latter's feet, lifted her stockinged toes out of one of her stilettos, and placed a note in the left shoe. That done, she abruptly left the room.
They could all hear the rain starting up outside, its slow, melancholy elocution drawing increasing attention to itself. The rain was asking to be heard as it fell through the autumnal dark and the oaks that umbrellaed the château's austere watch over the surrounding countryside. It was a rain on the increase, and on the giant video screen monitoring the château's entrance, they could see the smoky columns running diagonal with a wind, a wind that shook the oaks like the props of a low-flying security helicopter.
Marciana marvelled at the indomitable seductiveness generated by Leanda's recrossing her silk-stockinged legs. The perennial sultriness of the femme fatale was natural to both these women, and engendered in Marciana a need to discover diva bodies as though she was encountering sex for the first time. She could feel the moistness spreading in her flimsy panties at the prospect of seeing Leanda step out of her skirt, or of Nicole's legs going up high over her head as she positioned herself for cunnilingus from a tongue grained by caviar.
When the party set out through subterranean corridors to the theatre, they were preceded by servants carrying lit torches. They were like a procession headed towards an amphitheatre for the spectacular revelation of mysteries. They walked past cages lit which memorabilia was framed. Marilyn Monroe's white panties were modelled by a mannequin constructed to the screen star's exact statistics. There was a sixties purple velvet suit worn by Mick Jagger and the Mr. Fish dress that he had sported on stage at the Hyde Park Festival in 1969. There were Guerlain lipstick tubes that had belonged to Bette Davis, Greta Garbo and Rita Hayworth. There were whips that Donatien had used in the 18th century, a pair of black brogues that had belonged to Oscar Wilde, manuscript pages from Huysmans's A Rebours, a military tunic that had belonged to Michael Jackson, and a great variety of historic celebrity ephemera.
The corridors were hung with heavy black and purple drapes, and there was a smell of autumnal dissolution pervading the whole building. One corridor was papered with python ski
n and monitors mounted on the walls showed footage from some of Raoul's legendary concerts. He could be seen dressed in a variety of sequined costumes bleeding his heart out on London and Paris stages. The voice resonant with emoted vibrato was blue-rinsing the audience with melancholy narratives of unrequited love.
In one of the theatre's dressing rooms, Marciana was prepared for her entry in an open coffin. Nina touched up her make-up, broadening the lower lip's lipstick line, and using a sparkling dusting powder, contributed a prismatic surface iridescence to Marciana's white foundation. She was laid in the coffin with its purple satin lining, and cut roses were heaped over her body. A lit torch was to be placed in her hand on the entrance to the theatre.
From inside a theatre in which Donatien had contrived so many ritualistic orgiastic fantasies, they could hear the voice of Ruth Etting singing 'Love Me Or Leave Me', as part of the selection of the concert torch songs.
The select invited audience, who had all arrived at the chateau in closed cars, were already assembled in the theatre. The funereal interior was lit by giant torches, and only a single blue spot was trained on the stage. The Steinway had been spray-canned with old stars and hearts, and looked like an exaggerated Las Vegas funeral artefact at which a mummified Liberace may still have been seated.
Nobody had yet seen Donatien, but it was known he would be last to enter on a black horse. The suspense was electric. There was the feeling that a storm was about to break, its spotlights powering through after circling the countryside all day with twitchy jabs of current.
At the ceremonial sound of a horn, Marciana was lifted by four transvestite pall bearers and carried into the theatre. Holding her torch vertical, she was carried towards one of the two thrones placed in front of the stage. These seats boasted the lettering DAF and MLM, being the initials for the first and middle names of brother and sister. Marciana entered to the sound of Shirley Bassey singing 'Diamonds Are For Ever', and coincidental with the song a blizzard of glitter enveloped the stage like a sparkling snowstorm. Marciana was lifted from the coffin's satin interior and placed on her gold-leaf throne. Roses were heaped at her feet, and arranging herself in the chair, she crossed her legs with the provocative notion that all the money invested in Wall Street was triangled into her crotch.
The music had changed to Gene Pitney's 'Backstage I'm Lonely', a song indicative of Raoul's predicament in waiting to come on. Most of the audience were dressed in fetish costumes, their clothes dripping with rhinestones and glitter, their make-up comprising heavy eyeliner and black lipsticks. Marciana looked across at a girl with poppy-red hair, who was wearing nothing below the waist except a pair of black silk panties matched with black suede thigh boots. The girl wore a cat-like mask, and Marciana was curious to know who she was amongst the distinguished guests invited from the aristocratic châteaux of the South.
Suddenly the whole select audience swung their heads round as the Marquis entered the theatre to a storm of dry ice smokily fogging the entrance. Donatien was visible through the haze in his electric orange jacket, and by the reddish glare of the torch he thrust into the haze. Marciana could see that he was fully masked, and intended to give nothing of himself away to the inquisitive eyes searching for his redoubtable presence. He sat polar vertical, all the dignity of his rank contracted into that inflexible posture. He wore the mystic inheritance of the Sade family with invincible pride.
His horse was led by an assemblage of naked slaves, boys and girls who had originally arrived at La Coste as penitents seek him entry to the castle. They all carried tracks from Donatien's whip, but were so compliant to their master, that they would have followed him into the back of a fire.
Donatien's sombrely majestic arrival coincided with the pianist coming out to seat himself ready for the singer's entrance. Dressed in a black velvet suit and a gold satin shirt he took his place at the piano and began extemporizing bars from the introductory number.
Marciana thrilled with the anticipation that Raoul was to perform a suite of new songs, written specifically to celebrate and elegize the Sadean mysteries. A mixing-desk copy of the recorded concert would be made into a CD, pressed exclusively for the House of Sade.
Without warning the singer ran on stage, his hands behind his head, and was met by instant rapturous applause. Simultaneous with his arrival under the blue spot, thousands of exotic butterflies were released into the audience. It was a lepidopteral apocalypse, the insects beating the air like ballistic flowers.
Raoul bowed to the applause, threw his head back, then forward again, his torso lit by a mauve-sequined jacket, and followed into a first song that he introduced as `Sadean Rites'. A slow, elegiac number punctuated by dramatically expressive vibrato, the lyrics evoked a scene in which masked men attended funeral rites by torchlight, and dishonoured the dead by their desacralizing necrophilia.
Marciana listened to the hook: 'Under the smoky, tenebrous torchlight/ I'll feed on your heart like a wolf/ I'm just a sailor whose earrings shine bright/ And they mirror the dead eyes of youth.'
When the song ended Raoul knelt in one of the open coffins on stage as a genuflectory gesture to the audience, and in response to rapturous applause threw a number of tall stemmed red roses into the audience. The Marquis got up from his throne, and in unprecedented fashion bowed in the direction of the exultant singer.
Torches were extinguished preparatory to Raoul's second number, a gothic torch song that involved the pianist switching to Hammond organ so as to evoke the funereal flavour of lyrics sung falsetto, and directed towards a black stained-glass window in which a gold angel glowered. The song exposed the singer's vulnerability as he stayed kneeling in a single red spotlight. The elegy which was called 'Black Hearted Blues' rose in a tremulous column from the singer's phrasing, and related the protagonist's inability to love, and his feeling of short-circuited emotions that inevitably turned love first into indifference, and then into contempt. It was a song ideally chosen for the audience, most of whom were incapable of experiencing love, either due to emotional vitiation induced by excesses, or through dulled sadomasochistic sensibilities. The song quavered into the spotlight's red cone, and seemed in its infinite ascension to rise towards a star. The sonorous overtones established by the Hammond organ provided a gothic overlay to a fragile theme in which the singer hung on to his breath like a spider to a resonant thread.
When the spotlight went dead, the song faded out on organ peals, and the theatre was dramatically immersed in deep night. Again, the applause was tempestuous, and this time Raoul lay prostrate in a crucifixional pose on the stage, arms outspread, and surrendered to a reception that broke over him like fast-running surf.
The torches were re-lit and an additional lighting-rig manoeuvred into place for a song the artist declared to be an expose of life in a gay harem.
That said, Raoul began by speaking the opening lines of ‘The Slave', a version he announced as having augmented with the inclusion of some of his own lyrics. The song was a particular favourite with both Marciana and Donatien, and through its story-line related the transsexual longings of an orgiastic slave to be transformed into a woman. Raoul kept the song's beginnings almost in the pitch of speech, before lifting it from a spoken matrix to the imploring search for death as sexual consummation.
'Drinks of life and drinks of death,' he sang, before taking up position in a cage, and pushing his microphone through the bars as a gesture of defiant liberty. Raoul crouched down with his head in his hands as he prayed to become a real woman. The purple-blue of his indented eyelids was created by spots, and as the song ended so one of the transsexual residents at La Coste danced across stage with all the luxurious abandon of a perfectly created woman. The song faded out with Raoul looking upwards into the lights, as though anticipating an angel's luminous arrival. And to enhance the feeling of ritual death and rebirth created by the song, three figures dressed as menacing crows ran on stage and began to attack the cage with their metallic beaks before being whipped off st
age by a scarlet angel.
Again Donatien rose and bowed, his manner suggesting how deeply he was moved by Raoul's interpretation of a song so ideally suited to a performance at La Coste.
There was a pause during which Raoul disappeared into the wings and returned having undergone a costume change. This time he returned to the stage dressed in a purple satin shirt, and tight black leather trousers. A silver glitter-tear had been painted on his left cheek. The lights had also turned purple, and the atmospherics were pooling for a new song called 'Night In The Burning Heart.'
The singer concentrated, listening for the pianist's cue, his whole body feeling into the latent power within him to sing from the heart. He waited like someone conjuring a flame into his throat, his make-up standing out under the lights. In his posture he represented a wounded diva surrounded by the symbols of love and death. He extended the pause for dramatic effect, feeding on audience suspension, and entered the song as the single light turned from purple to red. What he delivered was a ballad of tempestuous lament, as he cradled an effigial heart needled with pins in his cupped hands, and told the story of a tormented lover who sets fire to his own heart after having dug a grave for himself in a deep forest. When the song concluded, the singer stabbed a jewelled dagger from Donatien's private collection through a red heart, and set fire to it. Red and blue flames jumped into the air, and two naked attendants came on stage to extinguish the fire.
There was a pause in the concert, while the singer went off for another costume change, and when he returned he was dressed in a gold lamé shirt and black satin trousers. His trousers were tucked into gold boots and stardust had been sprayed into his gelled hair. A giant photographic portrait of Elvis at the time of his rhinestoned Las Vegas debacle served as a backdrop to the singer's moving cover of 'Heartbreak Hotel'.