Emmanuelle (23 page)

“A pipe?” she asked, laughing. “It doesn’t look like one. Where do you put the tobacco? In that ridiculous little hole? It must not take long to finish smoking it.”

“You don’t put tobacco in it. It holds a little ball of opium. And you only take one puff, then you fill the bowl again. You’ll see how it works when you’ve tried it for yourself.”

“You’re not going to make me smoke opium, are you?”

“Why not? I want you to know what that game—or that art—consists of, because you mustn’t be ignorant of anything.”

“And what if I . . . take a liking to it?”

“What harm would there be in that?” he laughed. “But don’t worry; I haven’t brought you here to convert you to opium. It will only be a prelude.”

“And what will happen afterward?”

“You’ll find out when the time comes. Don’t be impatient,
cara
. The ceremony of opium requires perfect composure of soul.”

“If I like it, can I come back?”

“Certainly,” said Mario. Her questions seemed to amuse him. He looked at her with indulgence, almost tenderness.

“I thought it was illegal to smoke opium,” she said.

“It is. And so is making love outside of marriage.”

“What would we do if the police came here?”

“We’d go to jail.” He pursed his lips and added, “But not without first having tried to bribe the policemen by negotiating your charms.”

She smiled skeptically and teased him. “Since I’m married, I’m negotiable only at the cost of another crime.”

“With God’s help, you and the representatives of the law would commit that crime.” He uncovered one of her shoulders and an entire breast; then, holding this breast in his hand, he asked, “Wouldn’t you?”

Her face expressed doubt, but also happiness, because she was glad for him to undress and touch her.

“You wouldn’t be willing to render that service for all three of us?” he said, scandalized.

She reassured him: “Yes, I would. And you know it . . .” Then, hesitantly, “And . . . how many policemen usually make those raids?”

“Oh, no more than twenty.”

She laughed again.

The servant had put down her tray in the middle of the platform. Mario let go of Emmanuelle’s breast, which she left uncovered, put his arm around her waist, and drew her forward.

“Lie down here,” he said.

“Lie down? Is it clean? It doesn’t look very well padded!”

“Why should the establishment go to the expense of buying a mattress when opium smoke is enough to round all angles and make the hardest surface luxuriously soft? Besides, don’t complain; wood is easier to keep clean than a mattress. Let that thought soothe your anxieties.”

She sat down with repugnance on the extreme edge of the varnished platform while her two companions stretched out on either side of her, so that the three of them formed a circle around the lamp. After a few moments she overcame her disgust and followed their example by lying down and leaning on one elbow, with her head resting on her hand. She could not take her eyes off the oblong flame that was rising, without flickering, inside the thick, glass chimney. A kind of fascination emanated from it.

The Chinese woman knelt at the foot of the platform and opened one of the little boxes. It was filled with a dark, opaque substance that had the consistency of thick honey. With the point of one of the long needles, she took out a drop of it the size of a grain of wheat, held it above the lamp for an instant, rolled it on one of the pieces of fibrous leaf that she was holding in her other hand, and exposed it to the flame again. The scorched drop crackled, swelled to twice its size, took on beautiful glints and became so pure and shiny that the nearby objects were reflected in it, adorned with flames; it was oozing life.

“It’s beautiful,” murmured Emmanuelle.

She now felt that this sight alone was worth having come there. “I’ll never get tired of looking at that little ball,” she thought. “It’s like a precious stone trying to say something. But no stone is that beautiful.”

Twenty policemen, she remembered. That was a lot . . . But, to save Mario from jail, she knew she would do it.

She felt a pang of regret when the officiating priestess, who had finally given the drop of opium the shape of a little translucent cylinder, exactly proportioned to the bowl of the pipe, put it into the cavity with a deft movement and drew out the needle that had pierced it. Without wasting any time, she turned the bowl upside down over the lamp, almost touching the hot chimney. She held the stem of the pipe toward Mario; he put his lips to it and breathed in. The flame rose, charring the amber pearl. He drew the mysterious smoke into his mouth in what seemed to Emmanuelle an endless puff.

“Now it’s your turn,” he said. “Don’t let the smoke come out your nose, don’t choke, don’t cough, breathe in slowly and steadily.”

“I’ll never be able to do it!”

“It doesn’t matter; it’s only to amuse you.”

The woman prepared another pipe; again the brown sun blazed at the end of the magic wand, tumefying and panting as though from desire. Emmanuelle saw it as an image of her sex, calling with its swollen lips to the ram of fire that would traverse it, leaving it bruised, burned, and sated. It was pleasant, she thought, to feel her vulva becoming more moist as the iridescent drop expanded with pleasure above the flame. She liked that rite; it was as if she were preparing herself publicly, ceremoniously, to make love. She held her bare breast in the cup of her hand; she was happy. Only one thing was lacking in the scene to make it perfect: the attendant should have been a young, docile beauty with an innocent face and an offered body; Mario, Quentin, and Emmanuelle would slowly undress her by degrees, and play with her, together or in turn, each according to his tastes and to the extreme limit of his pleasure. What a pity that Mario had not provided for that! Emmanuelle nearly reproached him for it, but did not dare to do so. For a moment, however, she had such a strong desire for a girl’s legs to be mingled with her own, and to have a girl’s sex into which she could put her fingers, that the Chinese woman looked almost beautiful to her.

When the pipe was handed to her, she let the opium burn without breathing it in, so that there was no draft and the woman had to pierce the toffee-colored pearl again with her steel needle. At her second attempt, she succeeded in absorbing a thin puff. She laughed heartily.

“I like the taste,” she said, “and I like the smell even more. It’s a little like caramel. But it grates on your throat.”

“You’d better drink some tea.”

Mario gave an order to the servant, who stood up and soon returned with some very small funnel-shaped cups without handles, an earthenware teapot no larger than the cups, and a samovar of boiling water. The tiny teapot was filled to the brim with green tea. She carefully poured a jet of steaming water into it and immediately emptied its contents into a cup. The liquid had already taken on the color of copper. A penetrating fragrance arose from it, more like jasmine than tea. Emmanuelle burned her tongue and uttered a cry of pain.

“You must draw in air between your lips as you drink, to cool your tea,” said Mario. “Or, more precisely, to be able to drink it hot without burning yourself. Like this.”

He made a gargling sound.

“What terribly bad manners!” Emmanuelle said indignantly.

“In China, it’s polite.”

It was now Quentin who was smoking the pipe. He did not succeed as well as Mario.

“I want to try it again,” Emmanuelle said impatiently, excited by the novelty of the experience. “I’m sure I’ll have fantastic sensations this time. What will I dream about?”

“Nothing at all. In the first place, opium doesn’t make you dream, it makes you lucid and frees you of all bodily miseries and mental fetters. Secondly, before you could feel any effect at all, you’d have to smoke several pipes.”

“Then I will!”

“You’ll have one more and that’s all. If you went beyond that tonight, the only pleasure you’d get from it would be to have me hold your head while your stomach churned.”

She was not too grieved by his prohibition, because her second pipe gave her a fit of coughing and did not taste as good to her as the first. As for Mario and Quentin, they both declined even a second experience.

“Are you afraid of becoming addicted?” she said mockingly.

“My dear,” retorted Mario, “I’m going to tell you a very grave secret. Taken in excess, opium deprives its smokers of a large part of their male ardor. And, as you know, we haven’t come here for the pleasures of the mind, but for those of the flesh.”

“Ah, yes!” said Emmanuelle, with a new surge of uneasiness. She felt that this shabby setting was rather badly suited to the games of love, now that her desire had passed. And she wondered what role she was to play in it.

“You remember asking me how we went about it with boys, don’t you? Well, the good lady who reigns over this clandestine opium den, with the majesty that you’ve seen, also raises comely young lads for the diversion of her clientele. We’re going to ask her to present an assortment of them to us.”

He said a few words to the servant. She hurried away and reappeared a few moments later with the wrinkled Chinese woman, who politely made her bows. Mario spoke to her briefly. She bowed again, then uttered a shrill yelp. The ugly girl who had prepared the pipes promptly stepped forward.

“The dowager speaks only Chinese—and an obscure dialect, at that,” explained Mario. “She called the other woman to act as her interpreter.”

“And what language do you speak to them in?”

“Thai.”

He addressed their hostesses again. The conversation followed the complicated circuit and underwent the metamorphoses imposed on it by the situation. After a few minutes of this exchange, he reported: “She’s answered my request by offering me something else. That’s within the rules of the game.”

“What did she propose?”

“Girls, of course. I made an appropriate remonstrance. Then she suggested showing us some salacious films.”

“Well, why not?”

“We didn’t come here for so little. She also offered to present a living spectacle—two maidens tenderly making love before our eyes. That’s nothing that would interest you, is it, Emmanuelle?”

She contented herself with a pout that he could interpret as he wished.

He resumed his negotiations, then reported to them: “I told her we wanted some boys between twelve and fifteen years old, endowed with nimble tongues, classic buttocks, unfailing endurance, robust members, and rich sap.”

Emmanuelle covered her breast. The old woman was looking at her insistently; she spoke again, in that rasping tone that gave Emmanuelle a shock each time she heard it. The servant translated and Mario replied with a single word.

“What did she say?” asked Emmanuelle.

“She wanted to know if the boys were for me or for you.”

“And . . . what did you answer?”

“I said they were for all of us.”

Emmanuelle felt as if the walls were turning a little. Was it the opium? No, Mario had said . . .

The old woman began droning again. She seemed to be as long-winded as Jeremiah; she bowed repeatedly and ended on a piercing note, raising her arms to heaven.

“I’m afraid things aren’t going to work out,” said Mario, even before the interpreter had opened her mouth. And a little later he confirmed it: “This old lunatic stubbornly persists in claiming that she has no boys available tonight. Some noble foreigners have allegedly ransacked her breeding-stock. Surely she simply wants us to pay her more.”

He started the discussion again. She made more gesticulations of despair. He held firm. Finally, however, he announced: “She won’t budge an inch. We’ll have to seek our fortune elsewhere.”

He conferred with Quentin for a long while.

“He insists on staying here,” he informed Emmanuelle. “He says he’s sure he’ll eventually get what he wants. I doubt it, but that’s his affair. I suggest that we leave him here and resume our stroll. What do you think?”

She was willing to go. The atmosphere of that place was becoming oppressive. Nevertheless, she felt an unexpected pang, almost a twinge of remorse, at the thought of leaving Quentin. “What’s the matter with me?” she rebuked herself. “I regarded him as an intruder, a nuisance, when he came. I spent the evening being annoyed at his presence, except when I forgot all about it! We didn’t say more than a dozen words to each other the whole time. And now I feel all stirred up and weak about him! That’s too much! I must be losing my mind” . . . Even so, her heart was heavy when they left him there.

They walked past the blank-eyed skeletons.

“Those two don’t appeal to you?” she asked Mario caustically.

She was still resentful of the two men for their insistence on procuring boys for themselves. Couldn’t they be satisfied with her, just for one night? Or, if they really didn’t like women, why did they both pretend to be so interested in her? And that idiot Marie-Anne, how could she be so featherbrained as to put her under the tutelage of homosexuals? When she got her hands on her again, she would make her swallow her pigtails!

“Why is Quentin so fascinated with boys?” she attacked. “It wasn’t very nice of him to desert us like that.”