Return to the Chateau (8 page)

“That’s the one they’ll be giving out the most’ Anne-Marie said to her. “You can look at the other side. No, wait, I’ll show you the card Sir Stephen sent.”

She got up, opened the drawer of a writing desk, and handed O a thin card on which there appeared, in red ink in Sir Stephen’s hand, her name: O, and the following notations: “Bears irons. Branded. Very sensitive, well-trained mouth.” Below which, underlined: “Should be whipped.”

“Give me back the photograph,” Anne-Marie said. The same information was fully transcribed on the back of the photo. What it said was nothing more or less than what Sir Stephen had said in O’s presence, in less elegant terms, every time he had turned her over to someone else and even-he had never made any effort to conceal the fact from O-whenever he talked about her to his friends. O learned that two or three photographs of this kind for each girl at Roissy were in the loose-leaf album that anyone in the bar or restaurant could consult.

“That’s the picture Sir Stephen prefers,” Anne-Marie said. “That one and …” extracting another one from the assortment, “this one.” The second was a pose where O was kneeling, with her skirts hoisted up.

“What do you mean?” O exclaimed. “You mean Sir Stephen has seen them?”

“Yes, of course he has,” Anne-Marie said. “He saw them yesterday when he was here. He made out your card while he was here, too.”

“But when, yesterday?” O wanted to know, her face ashen, feeling the lump in her throat growing and the tears rising. “When? Why didn’t he see me?”

“Oh, he saw you,” Anne-Marie said. “I went into the library with him yesterday while you were there. You were with the Commander. You and he were the only ones in the room, but we weren’t going to interrupt him.”

Yesterday, yesterday afternoon in the library, O, on her knees, her blue and green dress hoisted up over her buttocks … She hadn’t moved when the door had opened: the Commander’s member had been in her mouth.

“Why are you crying, O?” Anne-Marie went on. “He found you very pretty. Stop crying, you little fool.”

But O could not stem the flow of tears.

“Why didn’t he call me? Did he leave right after that? What did he do? Why didn’t he say anything to me?” she lamented.

“Incredible!” Anne-Marie interrupted. “Now you’re making him accountable to you for what he does. I thought he had trained you better. The next time I see him I’ll make sure not to congratulate him on your excellent discipline. What you deserve is . .”

Anne-Marie broke off. Someone was knocking at her door. The person who came in was the one referred to as the Master of Roissy. Till now, he had scarcely paid any attention to O since her arrival, and had not touched her. But she was probably especially moving, or provocative, in her state of distress and disarray, sitting there pale and naked, her mouth open and trembling. As Anne-Marie ordered her back to her room to get dressed-it was almost three o’clock-he countermanded the order:

“No,” he said. “Tell her to wait for me outside in the hallway.”

In the depths of her distress, O was somewhat soothed by a circumstance where it seemed that nothing could be anything but unpleasant to her: the arrival of the pseudoGerman who had already, in Sir Stephen’s presence, possessed her a number of times. To be sure, there was nothing very pleasant about the man. He was a coarse, churlish fellow, who gave the impression of being greedy and supercilious. His language, as well as his hands, could well have been those of a truckdriver. But he said to O, in the bar where he was waiting and to which he had had her summoned, that he had been sent by Sir Stephen and asked her to have dinner with him. At the same time he handed her an envelope. O remembered, her heart skipping a beat, the envelope that she had found on the table in Sir Stephen’s living room the day after the first night she had spent there. She opened it. It was indeed a word from Sir Stephen, asking her to do her best to treat Carl in such a way as to induce him to pay a return visit to Roissy, as he had asked her in the course of their return trip to Paris from the Riviera to seduce him into following her into her compartment. And he thanked her. Carl clearly did not know the contents of the letter. Sir Stephen must have implied to him that the letter contained another message altogether.

When O put the piece of paper back into its envelope and raised her eyes to him, seated on one of the barstools (she was standing beside him), he said to her in that drawling, almost guttural voice, made even more halting by his lack of fluency in French and his thick German accent:

“So, you will be obedient?”

“Oh, yes,” said O. Yes, indeed she would be obedient! He would think it was for him. She didn’t care a damn about Carl, but she did care that Sir Stephen wanted to use her for his own purpose, in whatever way he desired, and no matter what that purpose may have been!

She looked at Carl almost tenderly. If she succeeded in making him want to come back-the reasons why Sir Stephen wanted to keep him in Paris, that at least was her impression of what he wanted, interested her not in the least-if she succeeded, perhaps Sir Stephen would reward her, perhaps he would come to Roissy. She gathered the rustling folds of her dress, smiled at the German, and preceded him into the restaurant. Whether it was her gentleness, which when she made an effort was truly delightful, or her smile, O had the pleasant surprise of seeing Carl’s cold, masklike features suddenly melt. During dinner he made a real effort to talk courteously to her. In half an hour she learned more about him than Sir Stephen had ever told her: she learned that he was Flemish, that he had business interests in the Belgian Congo, that he flew to Africa three or four times a year, that the mines brought in a great deal of money.

“What mines?” O said.

But he did not reply. He drank a lot, and his eyes were constantly fixed either on O’s lips or on her breasts, whose movement could be discerned beneath the lace and whose painted nipples were sometimes visible through the wide-stitched mesh.

In the office, where O had taken him so that he could get a room, he said:

“Kindly have some whiskey sent up, as well as some bread and hors d’oeuvres.”

After he had possessed her in the same manner the Syrian had possessed Noelle, the same way in fact that O had been taken in the presence of Sir Stephen, after he had made her caress him, and as he was raising his riding crop for the third time, he seized O’s hands, for she, in spite of herself, was trying to stop the descent of his arm. O read in his eyes a joy so violent that she knew then and there that she could expect no pity whatsoever from him (she had never expected any) but that also, and far more important, he would indeed come back.

It was rare for members of the Club or guests to come to the restaurant or bar accompanied by a woman, but it did happen. In fact, providing they were accompanied, women were not only allowed into the restaurant and bar at Roissy, but were also permitted to go. up to the rooms. The man who brought them was not asked to pay any supplement, aside from their drinks and their meals, and was not asked to give their names. The only difference, under these circumstances, between Roissy and an ordinary short-time hotel was that, at Roissy, you were obliged to take, at the same time as you took a room, a girl. In the large, overheated room, along one of whose walls was a series of ferns and giant phiodendrons which made the room smell faintly like a greenhouse, the women took off their overcoats, and sometimes the jackets of their suits. Their self-assurance, which perhaps concealed their uneasiness; their curiosity that they tried to disguise by their insolence; their smiles, which they tried to make haughty and contemptuous and which, in many cases, surely corresponded to real contempt, infuriated the girls and greatly amused the Roissy regulars, members or customers.

During the eight-day period that O was on duty in the restaurant, there were three women who came, on three different days. The third woman that O saw was a tall blonde who came in the company of a young man O had seen before at the bar. They sat down at one of the tables for which she was responsible, in a nook near the window. Almost immediately, one of the members of the Club named Michel joined them and made a sign for O to come over. Michel had slept with O once. When the man introduced him to the woman with him, O heard him add: “My wife.” She wore a wedding ring studded with little diamonds and a dark, almost black sapphire. Michel bowed, sat down, and, after the maitre d’ had taken their order, said to O, who was hovering close by:

“Bring the album for Madame.”

The young woman turned the pages of the album with a detached air, and would doubtless have flipped past the picture of O, pretending not to recognize her, when her husband said:

“Why, there’s the girl waiting on us. It looks just like her.”

The woman raised her eyes to O and, without the trace of a smile, said:

“Oh, do you really think so?”

“Turn the page,” Michel said.

“Did you read what was on the back?” her husband said.

The woman closed the album without replying. But when O, who had gone to fetch their first course, came back to the table, she saw her talking heatedly, and Michel laughing. Then they fell silent each time she approached, but not always quickly enough, since as she was bringing coffee she heard the husband saying emphatically:

“Come on, now, make up your mind!”

Michel added something that O was unable to catch, whereupon the woman shrugged her shoulders.

In the room, the woman did not undress; with her dry hands she gently stroked O, who had the feeling of being touched by the claws of some large bird, then she watched while O caressed her husband before giving herself to him. When they departed, leaving her naked, they had neither beaten her, nor mistreated her, nor insulted her. They had always talked to her courteously. And yet she had never felt more humiliated in her life.

“Those bitches!” was Noelle’s comment when O,

o whom Noelle had seen leave with the couple, finally responded to her persistent questions about what had happened, and the impression she had had of the whole affair, “those bitches are as much prostitutes as we are, you’d better believe it, otherwise they wouldn’t come here, but don’t they think they’re really something! If I had my way about it, I’d give them a slap or two they wouldn’t soon forget!”

This feeling about the women who came to Roissy as visitors was as constant as it was unanimous. Whereas Noelle, and, moreover, all the other girls, and O, if they did upon occasion feel pangs of envy with respect to the girls brought to Roissy by their lovers, it was solely because of the attention their lovers paid them and not out of any feelings of real jealousy or bitterness. During her first stay at Roissy the year before, O had not had the slightest suspicion what desires she had awakened around her-desires to speak to her, to help her, to find out who she was, to kiss her-among the girls who, upon her arrival, had undressed her, washed her, arranged her hair, made her up, put on her corset and dress, who every day thereafter had taken care of her and had so vainly tried to strike up a conversation with her when they thought no one was looking, but always in vain; all the more vainly because she had never made any attempt to answer them.

When it was O’s turn to perform what was referred to as “room service,” that is to visit, together with Noelle, the bedrooms in the main enclosure, to help the girls who were lodged there to wash and dress, O was so upset by this kind of multiple transfer, by this several-copy incarnation of what she herself had been and what these visits kept bringing back to her, that she always crossed the threshold of the red rooms in a state of fear and trembling. For they were all red. What upset her the most was that she was never able to pinpoint with any degree of certainty which of the rooms had been hers. The third? The tall poplar tree rustled in front of the window. The pale asters, which would last till the end of autumn, were barely in flower. Was it the twenty-second or twenty-third of September? At any rate, the autumnal equinox. But the fifth room also had a poplar tree and its accompanying asters. It was occupied by a slender but well-proportioned girl, all white against the scarlet hangings, shaking, bearing on her thighs for the first time the purple furrows of the crop. Her name was Claude. Her lover was a thin young man who was holding her, by the shoulders, back on the bed, the way Ren=E9 had held her, and watching with obvious pleasure and passion as she opened her sweet burning belly to a man O had never seen, beneath whose weight the girl was moaning. Noelle washed her. O made her up, laced up her corset, and helped her on with her dress. She had sweet budding breasts with pink nipples, and well-rounded knees. She was silent, and lost. She, and the girls like her who belonged to members of the Club, girls who were shared exclusively by the members themselves, who gave themselves up to these unknown men in silence and who, as soon as they were deemed ready and sufficiently well-trained, would leave Roissy wearing the iron ring on their finger, there in the outer world to be prostituted by their lover, for his pleasure and his pleasure alone, these girls were, to the other girls at Roissy who were prostituted within the confines of the enclosure or without, for money, for the pleasure and benefit of the members of the Club and not solely for one man who loved them, objects of curiosity and endless conjecture. Would they ever come back to Roissy? Would they, if indeed they did come back, be locked behind the gate of the main enclosure or, if it were only for a few days, released from the rule of silence and put into the community? There was one girl whose lover left her in the main enclosure for six months, then took her away never to return. But O found Jeanne, who had remained for a year in the community then had left, then had returned, that same Jeanne whom Ren=E9 had caressed in her presence and who had looked upon O with such envy and admiration. Beaten and chained like the other girls, the girls in the community were nonetheless free. Not free not to be beaten while they were there, but free to leave any time they so desired. But it was a fact that the very girls they treated most cruelly were the ones least likely to leave. Noelle stayed at Roissy for two months, then left and was gone for three months, returning after she had run out of money. But Yvonne and Julienne, who like O were flogged every day and, like O, as Noelle had predicted, often several times a day, Yvonne, Julienne, and O were as much prisoners of their own free will as were the girls of the main enclosure.=20