Butterfly (11 page)

A terrible hardness that I had never seen came into Kate's eyes, but instead of venting her rage on me, she turned on Marika. “Shameless hussy!” she let out in a voice trembling with fury. The next instant she fell upon the girl. Immobilized by the latter's weight, I looked on in helpless consternation as the black-gloved hand rose and descended in one swift, deadly movement; I heard the crack of the whip on Marika's naked back, heard her scream; I saw her face crumple in pain and felt the violent recoil of her body hurtling from my embrace.

Indignation broke through my shame; I completely forgot—to my later astonishment—my own state. “Stop that!” I shouted. Already the whip was rising for a second blow. I lurched and threw myself between the menacing arm and its victim. “What do you think you're doing!” I demanded, outraged.

Kate glared at me. “Get out of my way,” she hissed. Oblivious of my nakedness and all else, I moved forward without flinching to take the riding crop away from her. To my shock and disbelief, it darted out swift as a serpent and lashed me directly in the face. A searing pain blinded me; tears came to my eyes, I gritted my teeth to keep from crying.

My shock gave way to an unprecedented fury; never in my life had I encountered such wanton violence. All my love for Kate had flown without a trace; I saw only a dangerous animal ready to mutilate or kill. Without thinking I charged at her.

The riding crop caught me full in the chest, with such force that my body whirled and crashed to the floor. The pain nearly made me faint; I could hardly breathe—a rib had cracked, but I would know that only later. From what seemed a great distance away, I heard Marika screaming something in German and Kate retorting that she should worry not about my skin but her own.
Marika whimpered in terror. I was almost too weak to move; my head reeled and I felt nauseous. Summoning all my strength, I propped myself up. “Don't,” I gasped. “Don't hit her again . . . please.”

“How touching.” Kate turned and looked down at me with contempt. “She pleads for him; he pleads for her. A pretty pair of lovebirds!” Something in her voice, in her eyes—I knew not what cold scorn, malice, mockery—sickened me and made my gorge rise. I would have sprung at her again, but in my condition it was hopeless; it I had only suspected in the beginning how adroit she was with the whip and how brutal . . .

But my rage lasted only a few seconds; already it was ebbing. I felt more than anything stunned, and unreal as in a dream. For all my pain and outrage, I could not quite believe that the murderous fury before me was the woman I had loved and imagined I knew. Nor did it seem in character for the agile and spirited Marika to cower so helplessly and without resistance. I recalled her shocked face contorted with pain, and once more felt an overflowing tenderness.

“If you must beat someone,” I muttered through clenched teeth, “beat me. Do with me what you like, but leave her alone. It's not her fault.”

For a moment Kate looked as if she might take me at my word. But she checked her fury.

“Very well,” she said coldly. “Take her and go. All I ask is that you leave my house, both of you.” She said this in a matter-of-fact tone and turned to leave without another look at Marika or me.

“
Maîtresse
!"
Quick as a flash, Marika darted over and dropped at Kate's feet. The grace and splendor of her moving body took away my breath and made me momentarily forget my pain and my emotion. “Don't make me go away, Mistress. Anything but that!” As always, Marika spoke to Kate in German.

Kate looked down at her with distant curiosity. She spoke softly, half to herself. “You disobey me, you behave in a bestial fashion with that one there, and you still want to stay?” Using the tip of the riding crop to raise Marika's chin, she scrutinized the uplifted face as if for telltale signs; with pokes and taps, she turned the girl's head this way and that. “Do you realize what your punishment will have to be?”

Marika whimpered.

“I hate even to think of it,” Kate mused as if undecided, all the while letting the whip promenade lightly over the girl's face and shoulders. “All that lovely skin . . . it would be a pity, wouldn't it?”

Marika continued to whimper softly without answering, but she was trembling now.

“No, it's time you left,” Kate concluded. “You should consider yourself fortunate to escape. And with such a devoted paramour, too.” Kate negligently threw down the whip and made as if to leave.

“No!” Marika cried, shuffling forward on her knees. “Punish me!” she begged. “Beat me, do with me what you like, kill me even, but don't send me away—anything, but not that!” She looked up at Kate with pleading eyes. Then, blushing, she lowered her head once more and said almost in a whisper, “The slave thanks the Mistress . . . for her gracious correction.” She bent forward and picked up the whip; holding it with both hands, she brought it to her lips as if it were some holy relic, then presented it ceremoniously to Kate. When the latter did not take it immediately, she prompted softly, “Your slave begs for her punishment.”

Kate sighed, but I thought with more pleasure than resignation; she darted a glance at me before accepting the offering. Very deliberately, she touched the girl's left nipple with the small leather flap at the whip's terminal end. I heard Marika whimper
and saw a strange expression steal over her face. Her eyes were shut, her brows contracted as from intense concentration; her face glowed with a strange expression I knew not of fear or rapture. As the soft leather tip slowly grazed over her skin, her expression grew in intensity and her breathing became labored. A command from Kate brought her head and shoulders down to the floor; at the same time she raised her hips so that her posterior and sexual parts were obscenely exposed. When the whip's probing tip descended down the cleft of the buttocks, her whimpering took on an edge of hysteria and I felt that at any moment she would break out into sobs.

After what seemed a long time, Kate's arm suddenly flew up and in quick succession delivered two lashes. They were casual and apparently effortless, and certainly Kate did not put her strength behind them; nonetheless I could clearly see a dark red streak where one of the blows had landed, and this was matched by another on the side hidden from my view.

“Get up,” Kate ordered. “That's all for now. But be careful, because the next time . . .”

“There will be no next time,” Marika sobbed. Rising on her knees, she solemnly kissed the instrument of her torture once more before taking it from her mistress's hand. Her face was streaked with tears, as she murmured her gratitude and her protestations of obedience.

The scene had thrown me into the most complete disarray. I no longer knew what to think. What was this perverted game into which I had been drawn? What was Marika, what was Kate, and what was my love for the one and the other? Surely this depraved and savage virago could not be the same woman whom I would have chosen in all the world as the model of cultivated femininity? The two were as night and day—but then, what is night but a half-turn of the earth on its axis? What garden will not have its terrors in the dark of night? As for Kate's shadow side, I
remembered that I had suspected it, that indeed I had glimpsed it once.

But deeper than the shock of discovery was the horror of recognition. For the obscurities of my soul were drawn to the nocturnal side of Kate's personality like shadows to a black sun. My revulsion had given way to fascination; a longing slithered forth like some primeval monster emerging from the bowels of the earth to show its Medusa-like face. What had formerly seemed a private crack, an inner fissure, was now revealed to be a chasm that ran through the world at large and opened at my feet. Already teetering on the edge, I felt its irresistible pull and saw myself falling like the damned in medieval paintings that plunge without end into a fiery Hell. Yet my terror was shot through with a reckless joy; I was transported by the presentiment of another life—terrible, no doubt, but possessing dimensions wondrous and unknown.

32

There had been a time when Pinkerton was given to fervent prayer. Every evening he would kneel at the side of his bed and spend a quarter of an hour asking for God's blessing and forgiveness—for precisely what was unclear, as he was at an age when reason had not yet claimed supremacy over other impulses.

His father seldom beat him; his mother never. In fact, he could hardly remember her touching him in any way. But her displeasure would be in her face, in her voice, in her every movement. And the punishment she meted out was always the same: to kneel in a corner for a designated length of time and pray for forgiveness, which God alone, she declared, was qualified to grant. It was hard on the knees, and sometimes excruciating for
the bladder, but at the same time he would experience an intense emotion not unlike pleasure. Although he occasionally rebelled by thinking contrary thoughts, he mostly tried hard to pray sincerely, for he did truly believe that his soul's salvation depended upon it. Unbeknownst to him, however, he often indulged in a mixture of passionate repentence and voluptuous wallowing in his faults.

His mother, who never assailed him physically or screamed, inspired in him an unaccountable fear. She had a way of treading soundlessly and towering over him before he was aware of her approach, and though he learned to be quite vigilant, he could never be certain that she was not watching. The most terrible part of being punished was this unconfirmed feeling of being observed; each time, for the entire duration, he would feel her eyes upon his back, watching his every movement, reading his every thought. On occasion, when he could bear it no longer, he would turn to look, and more often than not his curiosity would collide with her flinty censorious eyes. Sometimes, though, she would not be there at all. And that for some reason was almost worse.

At fifteen he took to considering himself a freethinker and suppressed his bedtime prayers. But that did not change his punishment. When it ceased he could not have said; one day he noted with a certain wonder that he had not been formally punished for a long time. Did that mean he was now grown-up, he mused, or had his mother also ceased to believe? The feeling that her ubiquitous eyes were boring into his back, however, never quite faded.

33

(The Nagasaki ms.)

Before leaving the room, Kate to my dismay turned and addressed me once again. Her cold insistent gaze made me acutely conscious of my nakedness, and her words cut into me like the point of a thrusting rapier.

“Your behavior, sir, is simply beyond conceiving. Despite your want of faith, I still considered you an equal, a friend, and even extended an invitation to visit—I shudder to think where it might have led. But with your Caliban tastes, you preferred the company of the slave to the mistress. What can I say to you now? You've put yourself beyond the pale of civilized intercourse. Go and don't come back. I'm sorry I hurt you, but you should not have attacked me. I doubt that we'll meet again, but if we do, I shall not know you.”

There was nothing I could say to justify or defend myself. Crushed by shame and remorse, I wanted to sink into the floor, to disappear forever; but when Kate started toward the door, the thought that I should never see her again was so unbearable that I called out after her. My voice sounded pathetically weak. Kate paid no attention. Shaken and speechless, I listened to her boots click relentlessly down the wooden stairs.

34

In later life Pinkerton was subject to a recurring dream. In the dream his father would be alive again—not as if he had never died, but as if he had returned from a long trip or absence. The circumstances varied but the situation was always the same; hiding his initial surprise, Pinkerton would manifest a joy that often was genuine to an unexpected degree. But immediately thereafter anxiety would begin to gnaw at him, for would not his father criticize the way he had been managing the family affairs? With increasing anguish he would await the confrontation, all the while acting cheerfully in the hope that his errors and transgressions might yet go unnoticed. Then, invariably, came a moment when his father would expound his plans, sometimes in the presence of others, sometimes to him alone. At first Pinkerton would feel relieved that the anticipated criticism seemed not to be forthcoming, but then he would realize with mounting uneasiness that his father's intentions went against all his own and negated dispositions he had already made. As he listened, he would think of arguments, but at the end of the speech, when his father would sweep his eyes over his listeners in his characteristically self-satisfied manner, Pinkerton would be unable to utter a word, for by then his own world would have collapsed like a house of cards and speaking would only draw attention to the unsightly ruins and to his guilt. And this feeling of being reduced to mute, impotent acquiescence—which he knew well from experience—would linger on when he awakened, for the rest of the day and often beyond.

35

(The Nagasaki ms.)

With Marika's help I managed to dress and climb into the coach she hired for me, but I was half-dead when I got home. The doctor Lisa frantically sent for diagnosed a broken rib. He examined me with curiosity, but was discreet enough not to ask questions. Hiding behind my condition, I kept determinedly silent.

A high fever confined me to bed for well over a week. During this time the scenes in Marika's room came back to me over and over again; each event, each moment, was relived, ten, twenty, fifty times. Kate's imposing figure haunted me, waking and sleeping, especially her eyes, in which my ignominy was preserved like a beetle frozen in glass. Her eyes were the loveliest things in the universe, and I had irreparably sullied them with my baseness: the thought made me despair, and I would groan aloud in self-loathing. I wanted to die, for I had lost all hope of happiness and felt I could never again hold up my head to those dearest to me. Like a somnambulist who falls and awakens submerged in mire, I saw my skin covered with a shame that was thick and sticky and visible to all. It was unthinkable how I could have brought it upon myself, and yet I understood only too well, for all my remorse and despair did not expunge or reduce by one iota the lust that had fomented such folly and, alas, would drive me to greater madness still.