by Anna Chillon
“Some.” None as big as what I had with him now. The largest and most electrifying. I wondered how many secrets my father knew about him, if Dad knew who the woman hiding in the shade was and what was in the envelope.
“You’re not praying anymore?”
He pushed me.
“It's finished, there are only fifty Ave Maria’s, unfortunately.”
“What a pity.” Turning to look at the junction, he tried to hide the smile that escaped his lips and made me smile too, inside.
To reach the carpet shop we had to park near the Aurelian Walls in a paid parking area. We walked through the Appio Latino neighborhood, in my opinion one of the liveliest and most authentic neighbourhoods in the city and with every step I took I breathed an ancient history that somehow belonged to me as if I knew that I’d crossed that pavement several lives ago. I liked walking alongside this man, although the difference in height between us was remarkable and I was trying to walk on the pavement to appear a tiny bit taller. In ancient times he could’ve been a warrior or a gladiator trainer and it wouldn’t have seemed so unusual that he should have a young girl in his bed.
Perhaps once upon a time all of this had already happened. He had taken me to amuse himself after a day of war or business, and I, who did not know what it meant to be a possession, to be taken in this way, had been distraught. And history was repeated.
We entered a shop with no sign, that smelled of tea and fabric, a single room much bigger than it seemed from outside. There were piles of carpets displayed everywhere, arranged by size and type, laid on dark wooden pallets. Spot lights were directed at some and illuminated almost all the hanging tapestries on the walls, showing them as if they were real artworks.
“I'm looking for a carpet of about three meters by two, two and a half,” Vincent said to the shop owner, a little ashen man who was already rubbing his hands.
“Do you have any ideas of design, sir?”
“I would exclude that side of the exhibition,” he immediately made clear, referring to the thin ones with the typical, meticulous, Persian Narrative designs. “Otherwise I’ll leave it up to Giada, she’s the one that has to choose.”
Finally a bit of decision-making power for me as well.
I had already looked at a stack that seemed very interesting, so I pointed to it.
The little man smiled more. “Your daughter doesn’t care about the price.”
I frowned. “I'm not...” his daughter, I wanted to say.
“She’s not cautious. She’s hasty, she sees something she likes and wants it right away,” Vincent interrupted me brutally. “Today, however, I feel like making her happy.”
I looked at him. Was that what he wanted people to think? Father and daughter?
A spoilt daughter at that.
“Thanks pappy!” I used all the sarcasm possible.
We headed to the long carpet rugs I’d chosen, wool and silk, with large geometric patterns or nuances. The owner of the shop showed me them one by one, allowing me to feel the texture. After the first five I set my eyes on one of the black-blue shades, bright, with shiny, fluffy filaments.
“What about this, pappy?”
“I don’t think your mother will be happy with a black carpet.”
“Can I try it?” I literally jumped to the top, lying with my feet towards the two spectators and a third who came into the shop just then. I rolled over the mattress of carpets, not caring that the men could see right up my skirt. My nipples had hardened again, visible under the light cloth.
It wasn’t like me. What was I doing provoking him after promising not to?
I stopped and stretched out, my arms extended, blinded by the spotlight that almost made me weep.
Will he take me again? I thought. When? How can he think of anything else?
The little man coughed and settled his glasses on his nose.
“It's so soft!” I exclaimed, moving my arms and legs. “If I fell over on this I wouldn’t hurt my knee. And stains won’t show so much on a dark color.”
Vincent crossed his arms, I didn’t know if he was more amused or angry. “I would prefer a light colour.”
I leant up on my elbows. “Maybe you are right, Pappi.” After all, this one couldn’t get a red stain like the other one anymore... right?” I let off uncalled-for resentment... almost uncalled-for.
“No, Giada, it can’t happen again. Be reasonable” he added dryly.
The shopkeeper had started rubbing his hands again looking at me with greedy eyes but not money this time, but something dirtier. “We have carpet cleaning products. Can you tell me what the stain was?”
“No,” we answered in chorus.
“We’ve already dumped it,” continued my fake father.
Meanwhile, the last customer, a guy with a briefcase in one hand and a book of carpet samples in the other, had approached. “I know that rug well. Do you like it, Miss? Why don’t you have another roll and tell me how you find it?”
He looked at my legs uncovered almost to my panties. All three of them were.
I blushed a bit and lost all my lively sense of fun. I couldn’t stand the situation I’d got myself into any longer.
“Maybe another time.” Vincent took my arm and pulled me down. “Choose a light one and let's go.”
It had come to him suddenly, and he dragged me coarsely to my feet and also to safety. I turned my back on them hoping that the redness would flow out of my cheeks while I was trying to make a choice. Several times I stopped at a rug hanging on the wall with a pale green spiral drawing that enchanted me. The price on the ticket made me to go carry on looking, but in the end, he realized how much I liked it and bought it anyway.
When I got back in the car I was to say the least very grateful.
“Thank you, it's beautiful.”
“I knew you wanted it even though you pretended you didn’t.”
“You've been very generous... Pappi” taking the mickey out of him. “How long do I have to call you that for?”
“Let people think what they want to think, Giada. Don’t give them cause to discover things that are private that they can’t understand.”
“That's why you let them believe I’m your daughter? They may have guessed something’s going on anyway.”
“Despite your behavior, I don’t think so.”
“I don’t know what came over me,” I admitted. Zoe was the impulsive exhibitionist, not me. I was introverted, I hated attracting too much attention.
Vincent glanced at the rearview mirror. “Giada, I want you to do some things, to behave in a certain way when you're with me.”
“What kind of things?” I asked curiously.
“Simple things. For example, when we’re in the car, I’d like you to keep your legs apart and your arms at your sides if possible, for the whole time.”
“Why?”
“Because it would make me happy, that’s the only reason.”
“That is, it means you enjoy it...”
“That you are obedient. Knowing that you've decided to grant me access to your young and beautiful body at any time. Don’t you like to know that I want you?”
“Yes” very, very much, like crazy, especially if you ask in that way. “It all still feels so strange, as if I were dreaming.”
“It does, you’re right.”
I separated my knees a little, resting my hands on the edges of the seat. He watched me out of the corner of his eye, his hand slipping from the gear stick to my thigh, stroking it with the back of his hand, moving upwards a little, his fingers playing with the hem of the skirt, raising it just a bit and then he took his hand back. My little show in the shop had worked.
I turned to my side and stretched my hand over his leg. “Maybe instead of staying still I can do something that would give you more pleasure.”
Our lane was deserted and he slammed his foot down.
“Shit!” Only my belt saved me from slamming my face against the dashboard, blocking me har
d on the seat.
“I understand you've discovered a new toy that you can’t wait to use, but you'll have to be content with my rules and have patience,” he said.
I didn’t touch him again. I didn’t even have the courage to ask for an explanation; I let it go trying to stop sulking only because of the expensive gift that filled the boot of the car.
Once at home we put the carpet in its new position, it was much more striking than the previous one. I went up to change, and while I was removing my earrings, the door creaked open and Vincent came in.
“Don’t you knock?”
“Are you afraid I’ll catch you naked?” He replied. “It already happened.”
He approached, took my hand and placed it on his crotch, strained by his swollen penis.
“Forgive me. You are a sincere creature and I’m not used to this. I don’t want you to be afraid to touch me because of my behavior.” I lowered my eyes and he touched my cheek with the back of his hand, tucked a rebellious tuft behind my ear, erasing every trace of resentment. “I know I'm a bit abrupt sometimes, but you have to have patience, whatever I do or say you must stay your sweet self. Got it?”
“OK,” I murmured, feeling regret as he moved away from me. He went over to my notice board and studied it.
“Do you remember all the items that were attached to these price tags?”
“Of these ones on the board I do because they’re the most important. I can’t remember all of the ones in the albums.”
He picked up a tiny one between two fingers, eight fifty, white with blue writing in biro. “Is this important too?”
“This is a necklace that my Dad got me last year. Mum had gone to help Aunt Frida after the laser surgery on her eyes and he took me to the coast, letting me lose myself in the market stalls. We'd never been alone before and then, just the two of us.”
Vincent sat on the desk, keeping a foot on the floor. “Actually you've been alone together many times, when you were small and Adele was doing shifts as a waitress.”
“Really? He was home alone with me?”
“Aaron adores you. You're his little girl, his light, he would do anything to protect you from...” he paused and his eyes filled with guilt, he looked away, “from everything.”
I knew my Dad loved me, but I didn’t realize he adored me as much as Vincent described; yet if he’d told him, his dearest and most trusted friend it must’ve been true.
“I've always asked myself, why price tags?” He inquired, reading one by one. By now there was no longer any room on the board.
“I don’t know!” Was the answer I usually gave, but that time I felt I wanted to give a better answer. “I guess it’s because they give me the feeling that things remain perfect, as they were originally. At first, before I started collecting them, I didn’t even want to detach them from objects, or I took them off but very carefully, not to bend them and pull them off without breaking them. This, for example, was a dress I had bought for my first date. I went out with him with the cardboard hidden in my pocket, I was so unsure of my choice.”
“About the dress or the boy?”
“Of the dress... even though I then kept the dress and got rid of the boy.” I pulled that tag off the board, considering it a small loss. “Anyway, in time I ended up with too many and my mother threatened to throw them all out, so I had to put them all into some sort of order.”
He nodded. “As long as you still have the tag you can always take back the item you've bought and remedy the possible mistake. Is that why you keep them?”
“I think so... I'm often making mistakes.”
“Everyone is easily mistaken. What matters is to always carry on. In any case, these tags are here, you haven’t taken any of these back, you've made the right choices too.” He leaned forward slightly, lowering his tone. “You must’ve understood by now. Nothing can stay as it was originally.”
He pulled a piece of black cloth out of his pocket with the inscription “Aladdin” embroidered in white, and hung it with a pin at a corner of the wooden frame. It was the rug’s price tag, with the price attached to the back of six hundred and fifty euros. That was the price he’d paid for my virginity.
I stared at the tag with so many things running through my mind. We had never spent so long without taking the mickey out of each other, talking seriously as we’d been doing these last few days.
“Give me your hands, Giada. I want to show you something.” Vincent had picked up my blue scarf from the chair beside the bed, the one I’d used to tie my wrists too tightly that time.
Without thinking about it for a second, I put my wrists together. He put the cloth between them with stroking movements, wrapping one and then the other, wrapping them several times binding them together. I looked up at his concentrated face, and then down, towards his laborious hands. The agitation, that always crept up when I was next to him, suddenly came alive.
“See, in this way you don’t hurt yourself, but you can’t undo it on your own. Obviously you wouldn’t even be able to do it up on your own. It has to be tied by somebody else.”
I pretended that it was normal to let him tie me up, that it was just an innocent game. It's just a demonstration, I told myself.
“Are you sure I can’t get out of it?” I objected, trying to put to the test what he’d said: it was really a sturdy bond.
“Try it. You won’t succeed.”
“Wanna bet?”
“If you want.”
I went into the kitchen and took a professional knife from the cutlery tray while Vincent followed me supervising. It turned to out not be at all easy to grasp the long, sharp blade, I barely managed to make it touch the fabric as well as half of my arm.
“I would advise you not to cut your wrists.” Vincent pulled a more moderate, but equally sharp Swiss army knife out of his pocket. “You might do less damage with this... maybe.”
I’d heard somewhere that carrying a knife with a blade longer than four centimetres was a crime, unless you were hunting. Was Vincent hunting? What for?
We swapped weapons.
Though with the smaller knife I didn’t risk amputating my arm, the operation seemed equally complicated: avoiding pain was almost impossible. I gave up without trying.
“I don’t want to ruin the scarf just to prove that I can.”
“Oh, really?” He smiled skeptically.
“Yes, really. Untie me, I'm getting bored.” I was all but bored. Interested, tense, confused, in a state of insecurity and urgency, but certainly not bored.
“You're bored because something’s missing” He rolled his sleeves up to the elbows in a gesture that I would learn to fear and crave at the same time. He graciously sat on the stool beside the island. He waited a long time before he began to unravel the intricate sequence he had trapped me in. “What did you feel when you tied the knots too tightly?”
“I felt bad, what else could I feel?”
“Bad,” he reiterated, putting my arms behind my back. “Was it a mistake, or was it what you were trying to do?”
“Gah... do you really think I'm so stupid?”
He didn’t answer. He simply twisted the fabric over itself.
I squinted my eyes with suspicion. “What are you doing?”
“Just another little demonstration, there’s nothing to worry about,” said the spider to the fly.
The scarf was not so soft now. At the first knot one wrist was roughly squeezed against the other, I emitted a sound like a hiccup. The sensations from just before were multiplied.
I thought maybe he didn’t realize that he had tightened too much, that maybe he didn’t really know what he was doing, that it was basically just an experiment.
I tried to look over my shoulder, twisting to see what he was doing. He twisted and twisted the scarf that had become like a rope, pulling and jiggling without a shadow of hesitation and I was becoming more and more immobilized. This was something very different from the last time. With that scarf he wa
sn’t just tying my arms, but legs, mind and heart, with ties that were visible to the naked eye.
It was an unimaginable effect.
After completing his work, he looked at me with his arms folded.
“How does it feel?”
I wanted to speak, but I didn’t know how to answer. I blinked my lashes over and over, hoping to suddenly see the truth of what was happening and understand something. Of course, I opened my mouth to say a few syllables, but I just came out with a pant and with a dull cry I collapsed onto the top of the island.
“Good,” he said, moving away to pour a glass of water.
Had I answered without realizing?
Whatever movement I tried to make with my arms, my skin was pulled, pinched, but still without loosening the scarf by a millimetre. I couldn’t see, but I knew that my forearms must have become red and white striped, tightly squeezed.
“Do you feel pain now?” Vincent blissfully enjoyed the show, sipping his water. “It's not how you imagined it, is it?”
No, in fact it was something more.
I whispered something like “you're crazy” and “fuck you” while my heart galloped in my chest. Sitting on the next stool, Vincent pushed away the empty glass, leant his elbows on the island with his head in his hands, so that he was almost at the height of my face.
“You're free to let yourself go and do anything, baby. You can laugh, cry, wiggle, swear or fall to pieces. The rope will keep you together.”
Thank god, because I really was at risk of losing a piece of myself on the kitchen floor. Like an arm or my self-esteem, or some other small part like that.
A six Euro purchase had the power to hold all my weight, physically and mentally. It was surprising and could have appeared liberating. But I wasn’t free at all. My heart rate increased or decreased as Vincent approached or moved away, the feeling of power and vulnerability was almost infinite.
But what made me feel worse was the question that would bother me for a while: why had I let him do it? What was wrong with me?
I could’ve blamed my innocence, say I trusted a family friend and that I couldn’t have imagined that such clever and wicked eyes would conceal an un-controllable man, although the previous night ought to have been an example. The sad truth was that what I didn’t want was what I frequently went searching for. And then to discover that I didn’t know how to protect myself from the inevitable result.