Butterfly (17 page)

Would her strategy work? Judging from what Pinkerton wrote to me, I doubt it, though we won't know until he replies to B.’s letters or mine. I worry about the many weeks this will take, since she will be constantly waiting for a letter I have stupidly misled her into expecting.

December 17th.
Yesterday I did a strange thing. I drafted a letter to Butterfly, a letter that I imagined P. to have written—more correctly, a letter I'd have wished P. to write. I did it idly, as if daydreaming. The phrases were already there in my head; after I read B.’s letter, they started forming on their own. All I had to do was jot them down, and it was done in a trice, before I had quite taken in what I was doing. When I read the result, I felt ashamed and at the same time wildly excited.

A wave of euphoria came over me; I felt like laughing and talking to myself aloud. Suddenly I thought, Why shouldn't she read it? It contained no falsehoods, fostered no delusions; in fact the content was quite harmless, a gentle plea to be patient, no more. There was nothing P. might not have written, nothing
inconsistent with the facts: He was being kept very busy, and—this idea came to me in a flash—he had broken his right hand in a fall from a horse. Reluctant to let his secretary into the privacy of his correspondence with her, he had written instead to me. His hand, however, was taking too long to recover, and now he had recourse to his sister for typing more personal things. This, I thought, would not only account for his long silence but for any difference in style or tone from previous letters written in his own hand; even a sister would considerably inhibit expressions of affection, for instance.

I waited until the others had gone home, then produced my typed copy on the machine by picking out the keys one by one. The operation was slow and laborious and I made numerous mistakes, which I soon gave up trying to correct; it is in fact reasonable to assume that P.’s sister is no more expert than I at operating such a machine. The problem was the seal; in the end I affixed a seal that only resembled P.’s, banking on Butterfly's impatience to help her overlook this detail. I was in a feverish state by the time I held the finished handiwork in my hands.

I was too worked up last night to record what I had done, and I lay awake for a long time. There were moments when it seemed like a silly prank, and at other moments it seemed fraught with unnameable peril. I certainly felt uneasy, yet no matter how much I turned it over in my mind, I found no good practical reason for not going through with it. The letter would surely bring comfort to B. and make her easier for a time—that is, until P.’s real letter comes (and I still hope against hope that it will say something unexpected); and there is no way it can harm her, since it contains no promises of any sort.

Nonetheless I had some difficulty getting myself to deliver it this afternoon. I trembled as I approached her house and felt almost ill when I handed it to her, but my anguish was for naught. She was delighted to get it, and at my insistence read it
on the spot. I watched her peruse the page, her delicate features contracted from the effort of deciphering the alien script. I felt as if I were looking into a mirror to my soul, and my anguish turned into gratification as an inner light brightened her face like the sun shining through dark clouds. Her entire being seemed to dimple with new life; she was like a flower breathing in the dew. For that sight alone, I would have committed crimes less venial than my small deception.

We chatted for a little. When I left, I felt lighter than I had in days.

50

(The Nagasaki ms.)

For a long time I clung to the belief that if I had only imagined how things would turn out, I could have resisted Kate. But I no longer know. My pain was genuine, as was my despair, and yet . . . Can I be sure of not having perversely savored the pain? Did my very despair not threaten to spill over into a berserk holocaustal joy? If in defiling Butterfly I was trampling underfoot the dearest and best of all I had known, did that not feed my devotion to Kate and bind us tighter together in our unholy convenant? Did Abraham grieve to sacrifice Isaac, or rejoice?

Yet I would not have let Butterfly put that blade into herself, of that I remain persuaded. Although I could not easily have crossed Kate, who had become my life, I would have given up life itself before seeing Butterfly come to such a pass. Only I never imagined she might. I knew the strength of her love and could guess her suffering, but I also knew that everything in her character spoke against suicide: she was too strong for that, too solid and canny. Exquisite as she was, she was no hothouse graft
but more a wild flower whose beauty rises irrepressibly out of the earth, nurtured by the sun and rain. And not in the most despairing circumstances could I have imagined the woman I knew to abandon her child.

What I did not know, alas, was the depth of Kate's rancor, and how relentless would be her vengeance.

51

Butterfly's had been small and tight, rising from the backs of her thighs like little apples. Marika's, even though her muscles were as well-developed, were larger and softer. There was an air of sensuality about them that sometimes struck Pinkerton as obscene; at such times he saw in them the same wanton twist that often made Marika's features seem to drip with lust. Considering how little mobility these anatomical parts enjoyed, they were curiously expressive; indeed at moments they seemed to be just as expressive as her face. Or did that only come from concentrating so long on them?

“No!” Marika interrupted, possibly for the hundredth time; her exasperation carried a hint of amusement and perhaps of malice. “No, no, no! You will never serve her if you do not learn better.” Marika seldom referred to Kate by any term other than the third personal pronoun. “Your tongue is more strong than before, but still not enough strong. It must be able to go in and out like a finger and, how you say—
se tordre comme un serpent.
Eh?—yes, writhe like snake.” She twisted around, and an astonishing length of tongue flashed out all the way to the tip of her nose, which it tapped three times before making an incredible flourish worthy of circus billing. Her demonstrations amazed him each time and made him despair.

“Again, from the beginning! You do not put enough warmth in your lips. Love, love with the lips. Slowly. No! You do not love, I feel you do not love them. Think they are hers, believe it—I tell you, you must love them exactly as if they are hers. It is not enough to pretend. Look first. They must be beautiful to you, most beautiful in the world; they must make you want to die. Look at them, love with the eyes. Then you really see. Make your eyes drunk, your nose, lips . . . Adore . . . Now the hands, gently, yes. Feel it all with the hands—make them sensitive, very sensitive.
Oui, c'est ça . . .
a little more. Slow, yes . . . harder . . .Concentrate. A slave must learn to concentrate completely . . . so completely that nothing exist outside his mistress. Concentrate, make yourself part of your mistress; go inside her skin, go inside her bum, become one with it. That is what being slave means: you are nothing, you have no existence, you are just a part of the mistress, a part that is completely
insignifiant,
no more than a
composant
of the thing she wants served—her bum, her foot . . . maybe a finger, a hair. . . .”

One morning early in his apprenticeship, Pinkerton had been called to Kate's bedroom. Kate lay hidden among the bedclothes while Marika, straddling her legs, massaged her thighs and buttocks. From where he was ordered to kneel, he could see Marika's face and movements, but nothing of Kate. Pinkerton had been impressed by the way the girl put her entire body and mind into her movements, and even more by her look of intense concentration that bordered on rapture. With its heavily drooping eyelids and half-parted lips, her face wore the expression of a woman rocking astride a lover or transported by religious inspiration. Fascinated but also a little embarrassed, he had let his eyes sink, only to be sharply reprimanded: he was there to learn, and that meant giving his entire attention to each moment and gesture. Did he imagine that competence as a slave could be
gained without effort? Pity the fool given to such delusion! Not having reflected upon the difficulty of performing what he was there to observe, Pinkerton had taken the rebuke as another instance of the arbitrary fault-finding and needling that were apparently part of his initiation. But the subsequent sessions with Marika changed his understanding.

In the beginning, when Butterfly was still much on his mind, he would compare. It dismayed him to discover how shallow was his knowledge of Butterfly—what did he know of her heart's inner chambers or the treasury of her soul, he wondered, if he was uncertain about these outward regions where his pleasure had so often grazed and explored? For Butterfly, untrammeled by notions of shame, had offered her posterior as freely as any other bodily part, and his own avid attentions had never been shy; but their caresses, free as birds that seldom alight for long on a single branch, never obsessively dwelled but progressed contrapuntally, as it were, in a symphonic paean of love. At least this was how it seemed in Pinkerton's memory.

Those distant images, wistful and frail, dissolved all too easily, however, before the more substantial object of his daily devotions. Day after day, hour upon hour, its implacable cheeks were thrust at him to be nursed, rubbed, spoken to, fawned upon, and caressed with all the caresses his mortal parts could bestow; breathed, tasted, kneaded, contemplated, worshipped, adored. It became his companion, his mirror; his pillow, garden, shrine; his mentor and ward, his tormentor and mistress; his prison cell and his patch of sky. All this so intensely and for so long that in the end he needed no fleshly reminder to sense its solid presence and conjure up every detail: grafted to his mind, it had taken on a special reality all its own.

Then one day he noticed a subtle transparency in its surfaces and textures, and he could see darkly past it toward another, larger than life, that was starting to form in his interior vision.

52

(The Nagasaki ms.)

The terms of the contract, as Kate saw fit to implement them, wrapped around my life like powerful tentacles that untiringly probed and gripped every aspect and detail. Never for a moment was I allowed to forget that I now belonged to her, that I existed only as her thing.

Little of my time was spent in her company, but she made her presence felt in other ways. Ten minutes out of each hour I had to spend kneeling before her portrait; installed in my room upon her orders, the photograph served as my private altarpiece, my personal icon. This ritual and others were devised to keep my thoughts at all moments on a short leash; a number of them involved objects and relics, certain unmentionable, that stirred the senses and kept my excitation at a painful level. Stoked without respite and denied release, my passion mounted from day to day and sweltered unbearably as in an airtight kiln.

53

The photograph showed Kate in full face, with piercing eyes that looked straight out of the frame; her expression was serious, even stern, but a shadow of mockery played around the lips. By some inspiration or fluke, the photographer had caught a force of character that Kate seldom permitted to show; it lurked behind the exquisite features, a streak of steel in the finest fur. Catching
the eye and yet eluding it—like the flash of a sword sheathed before there has been time to look—this glint of cruelty gave her beauty an incisive edge that made it all the more thrilling.

54

(The Nagasaki ms.)

My daily visits, after the ritual
baise-pied,
began with a “confession.” For this, I knelt before a screen set up together with a system of mirrors to give Kate a full view of me without exposing her to my eyes. Any infraction of her orders—wilful or unwitting, physical or mental—had to be reported. On some days this lasted only a few minutes, on others it turned into lengthy inquisitions during which I would be beaten or subjected to other humiliating practices. I never tried to hide anything; in fact, I often experienced a peculiar satisfaction in revealing my innermost thoughts and feelings, some of which I had never dared acknowledge to myself. My only reticence came from a sense of embarrassment, caused partly by Marika's presence, which at first bothered me so much that I protested—with what baleful results one can imagine. No doubt I was also jealous of her, who though a fellow “slave” lorded it over me and enjoyed an intimacy with Kate that I hardly dared dream of. But I soon grew accustomed to Marika's position in the house, as I did to everything else.

At the end of my confession, Kate would mete out the punishment and issue her instructions for the day. I then offered my ritual expression of gratitude and would be granted a minute or two—never more—to kiss and caress her feet. This was the moment so ardently anticipated, toward which all my tormented desire was directed and for which I lived; for even though the
contract permitted free homage to her feet, I seldom had opportunity to exercise that right.

The rest of the visit was taken up by menial tasks which Marika assigned at her pleasure—even these were given a ritual cast—or by “training” of a more specific nature.

The hour and a half specified by the contract would be extended, occasionally and later regularly, by as much as fifteen hours. But I was never spared the long ride home, even when it meant riding back again almost immediately; the ride too was part of the ritual. My visits were all but pleasant or pleasurable in any ordinary sense, yet not once in my memory did I not secretly rejoice at being kept longer, even when I knew what torments awaited me or what degrading or tiring chores; and I seldom left the house without feeling braced and mysteriously exalted.

55

It was of black morocco, so slight and delicately wrought that it seemed more suited to a woman's finer frame. “Do you know what it is?” Kate asked.

He knew, and blushed scarlet because he had known instantly. Women in medieval times were said to have worn them, wives of crusaders, mistresses of kings; but he had never seen one, or even known for certain that they existed. The thought of wearing such a thing drew from him a soft involuntary moan of horror and something else. His cheeks aflame, he shook his head.