“I sent the chauffeur back,” said Mr. Stephen; “will you drive, René? I think the easiest way is to go straight to my house.”
Beyond the Omagh junction, there was a view of the bare shadows of the trees behind the palace, and of the dry, white-glowing Place de la Concorde, over which heavy clouds had gathered, but it had not yet snowed. At that moment, O heard a “click” and then felt the hot air rise from under his legs: Mr. Stephen had switched on the heater in the car.
René started down the right bank of the Seine, then turned at Port Royal and drove up the left bank: between the stone fences on both banks the water looked frozen and black as stone, and O remembered that iron ore was of that same black color. One of her best friends when she was fifteen had worn a ring of iron ore with a small cluster of diamonds. Her girlfriend had been thirty years old at the time, but O had fallen in love with her.
O wished for a pair of those necklaces made of black stone, without diamonds, simple in shape, perhaps a collar tight around the neck. However, she would like to exchange this black stone collar, the black stone in her dream, for the collar they gave her? No, they didn’t give her that collar. In O’s world of fantasy, a scene from that past life came back to her, the ugly room Marianne had taken her to, which faced the Tebegau Road, and O remembered how Marianne had undone her two big, schoolboy braids – her braids, not Marianne’s – how she had undressed her, laid her on the big iron bed, and how beautiful Marianne had looked when she had caressed her, and how she had discovered that that human eyes could really be as bright as stars-her eyes looked like twinkling blue stars.
René pulled over.O didn’t recognize the side street, only that it was a cross street connecting University Drive and Lily Drive.
Mr. Stephen’s residence was at the end of the courtyard, occupying one side of that old private house, and all the rooms were lined up one after the other, the innermost being the largest and the most comfortable-looking, and furnished with dark English mahogany, over a pale yellow and gray covering.
“I do not ask you to look after the fireplace,” said Mr. Stephen to O. “but this sofa is for you; please sit down, and René will go and make coffee. If I have the honor to ask you to listen to what I must say to you below, I shall be obliged.”
The large, light-colored, damask silk sofa rested to the right of the fireplace and washed out against the window that looked out over the garden and courtyard.O took off her leather coat and laid it on the back of the sofa, only to find, as she turned around, that Mr. Stephen, his lover and host, was standing there waiting for her to formally accept Mr. Stephen’s invitation. She placed her purse next to her leather coat and then unbuttoned her gloves.
How long would it be before she could learn to lift her skirts with imperceptible movements, so as to be able to draw no attention to herself, so as to forget that she was naked beneath her coat, so as to forget her subservient position? No, she could not do that in any case. At last she gave up this pointless effort.
Mr. Stephen was at the moment fiddling with the burning wood in the fireplace, when René suddenly stepped behind the sofa, seized O by the throat and hair with both hands, and pressed her head against the back of the sofa and kissed her on the lips, a kiss so deep and so long that she held her breath, and felt nothing but something melting and burning in her body.
He loosened it a little, just to say to her that he loved her, and followed it up with another long kiss. o’s hands were unconsciously making a gesture of forgetfulness, palms upward, and spreading themselves silently over her black dress, which had blossomed like the petals of a flower, when M. Stéphane came up. When she finally ended her passionate kiss with René and opened her eyes, she saw the gray, fearless gaze of the Englishman.
O felt stupefied and wretched, for she was still in the throes of delight, but nevertheless she saw at once that he adored her, and that he desired her greatly. Who could resist her half-open, half-closed, moist, plump lips, or her neck, which looked whiter and whiter against the black collar of her valet’s jacket, or her large, bright, persistent, honest eyes?
Mr. Stephen, however, did little more than glide his fingers lightly over her brow, and afterwards put them to her lips, as he went to the other side of the fireplace, and sat down facing O. By this time René had seated himself in one of the armchairs, and Mr. Stephen began to speak.
“I don’t suppose René has ever talked to you about his family,” he said, “but you may know that his mother was once married to an Englishman before she married his father, and that this Englishman had a son, and I am that son, and that it was she who brought me up, until she left my father, and So René and I are not quite relatives, but we are brothers in a sense. René loves you, I have no doubt of that, and even if he did not tell me I would know it, and even if he made no gesture, one only has to look into his eyes as he gazes at you, and it would all be clear.”
“I also know that you’re one of those girls who stayed at Rosie’s, and I think you’ll go back there.
In principle, the ring you wear has given me the right to do to you everything I mean to do, as all those men who know what it means have the right. But that is quite enough; we expect much more from you than that. I say ‘we,’ because, as you see, René said nothing: he rather let me speak for both of us.”
“If we are brothers, then I am the elder brother, and I am ten years older than he. Our relations are absolutely free, and we have always had the agreement that everything that belongs to me belongs at the same time to him, and everything that belongs to him all belongs to me. Do you agree to take part in this?”
“I beseech you to do so, and ask you to swear to it, for passive obedience, alone, is not enough, and I know that we can trust you. Until you give your answer, you will remain, as in the past, with only one master, a more formidable one. I assure you that I am a more terrible master than all those men to whom you have given yourself in Rossi, for I will be present every day. Moreover, I am particularly fond of certain ways and rituals…” (He said this last phrase in English.) Mr. Stephen’s calm, confident voice vibrated in an absolute silence, even the popping sound of the fire burning wood in the fireplace.O froze on the couch like a butterfly pinned with steel needles, made of words and sight that penetrated her body and heaved her naked body against the warm silk mesh, unable to move a muscle.
She was no longer master of her breasts, arms and neck. She knew it perfectly well: by those mannerisms and rituals he obviously meant the possession of her long, slender legs, her long, slender legs that had parted without her realizing it.
The two men were sitting there, facing her, and René was smoking, but before lighting his cigarette he lit one of the middle of the several lamps covered with black shades, which sucked away the smoke and wafted a cool night air through the air already clarified by the burning wood.
“Are you going to give me an answer here, or do you want to know more?” Mr. Stephen asked.
“If you agree,” said René, “I will explain Mr. Stephen’s hobbies to you alone.”
“It’s a request.” Mr. Stephen corrected him.
O was thinking that the hardest thing wasn’t that she’d given her consent; she knew full well that neither of them had even for a second doubted that she’d say no, and she herself hadn’t even thought she’d say no. There was nothing more difficult than getting the words out of her mouth, her lips burning, a dryness in her mouth, not a drop of saliva, the twin agonies of fear and desire tightening her throat, her hands, which had just regained their senses, becoming cold and wet.
How she wanted to close her eyes, but she couldn’t, two pairs of eyes were staring directly into hers, the kind of eyes she couldn’t avoid and wasn’t going to. They drew her back to situations that had been left behind in her thoughts for a long time or perhaps remembered to be lost, to things that had happened in Rossi, for René had given her nothing but caresses since she had returned home from there.
The ring, the symbol of her affiliation with anyone who knew the secret, had not made any difference in her life: perhaps it was because she had never met anyone who knew the secret; perhaps it was because those who knew the secret were keeping quiet. The only person who had ever made her suspicious was Jacklyn (but if Jacklyn had been to Rosie, why didn’t she wear such a ring? Besides, even if Jacklyn knew the secret, what could she do about O?) .
In order to answer, she should at least be able to move, but at the moment she could not move of her own free will – a single command from them would have brought her to her feet at once, but this time they did not demand from her blind obedience, or silent submission to their commands, they demanded from her a pre-recognition of those commands, a declaration of slavery by her own mouth and the handing over of herself into their hands, and that was the promise they wished to obtain from her. It was to condemn herself to slavery with her own mouth, to put herself into their hands, and this was the promise they wished to obtain from her. She remembered that she had never said anything to René other than “I love you” and “I am yours”. It seemed that the words they wanted her to say and agree to today were asking her to say specifically what she had so far only acquiesced to.
She finally made herself straighten up, as if the words she was about to say would choke her, and she undid one of the uppermost hooks of her leotard until all her cleavage was exposed, and then she fought her way to her feet, her hands and knees trembling.
“I am yours,” she said at last, facing René, “and whatever you ask of me, I do.”
“No” he interrupted her, “it’s ours. Repeat what I said: I belong to you both, and I will do whatever you both tell me to do.”
Monsieur Stephen’s again sharp gray eyes gazed at her without moving, and René gazed at her without moving, and O felt herself lost in René’s gaze, and she simply repeated verbatim what he had told her to say, as she had done in French class, and she changed the sentence all into the first person.
“You grant to Mr. Stephen and to me the following rights…” These include: the right to dispose of her body in any place and in any way we choose; the right to keep her in chains; the right to whip her like a slave or a prisoner for the slightest offense or just for their pleasure; the right to ignore her pleas and sobs when she cries out; and the right to be silent about her pleas and sobs when she cries out. right to pay no attention to her pleas and sobs when she cries.
“I believe,” said René, “that at this moment Mr. Stephen intends that I shall be the one to give a brief account of his request, and that both you and I agree with it.”
O listened intently to her lover’s speech, and all those things he had said to her in Rossi came back to her:
They were almost the same words. Still, she listened to him, all the while feeling that none of it was real, like a dream, as if she were not herself, or perhaps she did not exist at all. It was a dream, or rather, a nightmare, the prison-like facility, the wide dinner robes, the men in masks: all of it took her away from her own life, arriving at the phantasmagoria of not knowing how long it was all going to last.
There, in Rosie, she felt the kind of sensation you only feel at night, lost in the kind of dream you had experienced, and now that dream was beginning all over again: it did exist, and it did come to an end; and you hoped that it would, because you weren’t sure that you could stand it; and you hoped that it would go on, and so you were going to know the end of things. Well, the end is here, and the end comes where she least expects it (or no longer expects it at all), in the way she least expects it (assuming, she says to herself, that this is indeed the end, and that there won’t be another ending hidden behind it, much less one that comes after this one).
Now this ending awakens her from her memories and brings her back to reality. Moreover, the reality of this closed circle, this private world, suddenly wanted to destroy all the habits and circumstances of her daily life, both outside and inside her body. This reality, no longer satisfied with signs and symbols – the bare buttocks, the open corset, the iron ring – demands realization.
One thing that was true was that René had never whipped her himself, and there was only one difference between the two of them before he had taken her to Rossi and after he had come home with her, and that was that he now used her buttocks and mouth in the same way that he had used her womb before (and which he still continued to use). She would never be able to figure out if one of those routine floggings she had received in Rossi had been carried out by him (if there was any chance of that, it was because sometimes she was blindfolded or sometimes the man who had flogged her wore a mask), but she was deeply skeptical about it.
He had always been able to derive great pleasure from the bondage of her body and its complete and utter subjugation, from her hopeless struggles, from the sight of her sobbing, and she had no doubt of this, for she thought that it would be impossible for him to do anything at all himself, for he was by no means dispersed from his duties by it. It appeared that he had agreed to do it in O’s stead–he half reclined in a deep armchair, comfortably crossed his legs, and said to her, in a most refined and tender voice, that he felt great pleasure in being able to put herself at the disposal of Mr. Stephen’s will and desires, or, rather, in her being able to give herself up to the disposal of Mr. Stephen’s will and desires.
Whenever Mr. Stephen wanted to invite her to spend a night or an hour with him at his house; whenever he wanted her to accompany him to some place outside Paris or somewhere in Paris; whenever he invited her to go with him to a restaurant or to a show, he would call her directly and send a car to pick her up-unless René himself picked her up. Today, right now, it was her turn to speak.
Did she agree to the above agreement? But surprisingly she could not say a word. The answer they asked her to give at this moment meant that she would agree to give herself completely, and that she would agree in advance to everything that might happen in the future. She was quite sure that she had meant to say “yes” to everything that was going to happen, but her flesh would say “no,” at least in the matter of enduring the whipping. As for the rest of the matter, she had to admit, in all fairness, that the look in Mr. Stephen’s eyes aroused in her a feeling of anxiety and excitement, a feeling of nervous trembling at the prospect of temptation.
She was trembling like a leaf in the wind, and perhaps because she was trembling, she was aware that she was even more impatient than Mr. Stephen for that moment, for the moment when he would put his hands, perhaps his lips, upon her, and perhaps it was up to her to hasten it.
No matter how rich in courage she had been, and how raging her desires had been, as she was about to make her final reply, she suddenly felt all her strength leave her at once, and she slipped from the sofa and fell to the floor, her dress spreading out around her like a balloon. In the silence, Mr. Stephen’s hollow voice rang out, and he commented, “She’s scared.
His words were not addressed to her, but to René. o had the feeling that M. Stephen was forcing himself not to take any action against her, and that he was already beginning to regret the repression he had put upon himself. Yet at last she avoided his gaze, and kept her eyes fixed on René, for she was afraid that René might see the way in which she looked at M. Stephen, and take that look as a betrayal of him. Yet it was by no means a betrayal, for if they had allowed her to choose between the two desires of being subordinate to M. Stephen and to René, she would not have hesitated to say that the only reason why she had yielded to the former was that René had allowed her to do so, and that, in a manner of speaking, she thought that he was ordering her to do so. Nonetheless, a hint of hesitation hid in her mind; she wondered if René would be angry with her for accepting Mr. Stephen so quickly and easily.
Even the slightest sign from him would have removed her hesitation at once, but he gave no sign at all, but only demanded a reply again, for the third time. So she said vaguely:
“Whatever you two want to do, I agree,” said she, dropping her eyes and staring intently at her hands spread out between her knees, and stammered out a question, “I want to know if I’m going to be whipped.”
There was a long silence, during which she repented twenty times that she had asked the question. Then she heard Mr. Stephen say with a flourish:
“It’s going to be regular and constant.”
Then O heard the sound of matches being struck and glasses clinking: the two men had probably each added another glass of whisky. René just accepted her decision, and René didn’t say a word.
“Even if I agreed now,” she said, “even if I agreed now, I still couldn’t stand this.”
“All we ask of you is to take it, and if you cry or moan, as we agreed beforehand, that is useless.” Mr. Stephen continued.
“Oh, please have mercy on me, don’t!” O said, as Mr. Stephen rose to his feet, and René stood up, stooping and grasping both her shoulders.
“Give us your answer,” he said, “do you agree?”
At last she gave her consent. René gently assisted her up from the floor, and then he sat down on the large sofa and made her kneel beside him facing it, her outstretched arms, upper body, and head reclining against it. She closed her eyes, and a vision she had seen several years before flashed through her mind: it was a curious painting of a woman kneeling in front of an armchair, in exactly the same position as she was in now. The floor was made of square tiles, in one corner of the room a dog was playing with a child, the woman’s skirts were lifted up, and not far behind her a standing man was waving a bunch of whips ready to whip her, all of them dressed in sixteenth-century costume. The title of that painting used to make her cringe: domestic law.
One of René’s hands gripped both of her wrists like an iron vice, while with the other he lifted her skirt so high she could feel the fine cotton lining brushing against her neck. He stroked her hips gently, as if to get Mr. Stephen’s attention, so that he could admire the two tiny indentations that graced her, and the softness between her legs. Then he pressed this hand against her waist, making her hips stand out even more, and ordered her to spread her knees a little further apart.
She obeyed without a word, and René’s boast of her body, Monsieur Stephen’s reaction to it, and the rudeness of the men’s phrases, suddenly overpowered her so strongly and unexpectedly with shame that the little desire she had entertained to be possessed by Monsieur Stephen became extinct, and she began to look forward to the whipping as a kind of relief, as if pain and cries alone could be a reason for as if pain and cries were the only justification for herself.
However, Mr. Stephen’s hand simply opened her buttocks and then entered, withdrew, entered again through the anus, and stroked her until she could no longer hold back her moans, her moans signifying that she was conquered, destroyed, and utterly humiliated.
“I’ll leave you with Mr. Stephen,” said René, “in that position, and he’ll release you when he thinks fit.”
In Rosie there were countless times when she had remained in this position, on her knees, giving herself up to one or all, but there her hands had always been locked together by bracelets, when she was a happy prisoner, and every thing was imposed upon her, and nothing was done with her consent. Here, however, it was her own free will that kept her in this half-naked state, and a simple gesture was all that was necessary to make her stand up, or to cover her up. Is it possible to say that her promise, which binds her as tightly as a leather collar and chains, is merely a commonplace promise?
Whatever humiliations she may have suffered, or rather, because of those humiliations she suffered, because of her complete taming, because of her opening herself up in that submissive way, and thus gaining the respect of the people, is there not a certain element of pleasure in that?
When René left, Mr. Stephen kept him at the front door, and O waited there so solitary and motionless that the waiting gave her a sense of loneliness and betrayal of her flesh that she had never felt before. The grayish-yellow silk surface of the sofa was smooth against her face, and through her nylon stockings she felt the woolen carpet beneath her knees, and on the side of her left leg she could feel the heat emanating from the fireplace, where the three logs which Mr. Stephen had added to it were crackling, and on the chest of drawers an antique clock walked quietly, and beyond that there was silence.
O listened carefully, thinking: how absurd was her position at the moment in such a civilized and elegant room. Through the shutters she could hear the weary din of Paris after midnight, and in the next daytime, in the morning, would she recognize the sofa cushion on which she had pressed her cheek? Would she come to this sitting-room in the daytime hereafter? Would she still be treated in the same way here?
It was obvious that Mr. Stephen was in no hurry to return, and O, who had waited so obediently countless times in Rosie for those strangers to come and get their pleasure, now felt something clogging in her chest when she thought that in a minute or ten minutes, he would be touching her flesh with his hands as well, and yet things weren’t going exactly as she thought they would.
She heard him open the door and cross the room. With his back to the fire, he stood there observing O for a while, then in a voice that was close to a whisper, he told her to get up and resume her seat on the couch. It was so unexpected that she felt a cause for embarrassment, but did as he said.
He courteously brought her a glass of whiskey and a cigarette, both of which she refused. She noticed then that he was wearing a yukata, a very old-fashioned gray rag yukata — the same color as his gray hair — and that his hands were long, thin, and dry, with flat nails clipped short and unusually pale. When their eyes met, O’s face flushed: these were indeed the same hands that had gripped her body, the same hands she feared and wanted at the moment. But he did not come closer to her.
“I’d like you to take off all your clothes.” He said, “But just unbutton your jacket first, no need to stand up.”
O unhooked those huge gold coat hooks and pulled off this tight jacket, which she then placed at the other end of the couch, where her coat, gloves, and purse were already sitting.
“Now stroke your own nipples, gently,” Mr. Stephen went on, “and you must use a darker color of rouge; they are too light.”
Leaning full length against the back of the couch, O stroked her nipples with her fingers, feeling them quickly harden and stiffen as she covered them with the palm of her hand.
“Oh, no!” Mr. Stephen said.
She retracted her hands and leaned back against the back of the couch again: her breasts looked heavy in relation to such a slim torso, and the curve of her bulge was very elegant, her neck resting against the back of the couch, her hands resting on either side of her thighs. Why hadn’t Mr. Stephen bent down and pressed his lips to hers? Why didn’t his hands reach for those nipples that he watched them harden? Although she sat there motionless, she could still feel her nipples quivering with her breath.
He came over and sat on the arm of the couch, but didn’t touch her; he was smoking. Suddenly, his hand moved–O would never know if it was intentional–so that some of the still-hot ashes fell between her breasts. She had the feeling that he wanted to humiliate her, with his scorn, with his silence, with an attitude of detachment. And yet just a short time ago he had desired her, he still did at this moment, and she could see it in the tautness of the bathrobe made of soft fabric. So let him take her, let him hurt her as much as he wanted!
O hated herself for her own desires and loathed Mr. Stephen for the self-control he displayed. She wanted him to love her, and yes, that was the truth: she did want to see him enraged by his own impulses, the impulses, that is, the impulses to touch her lips, the impulses to penetrate her body, and, if necessary, even the impulses to ravish her, without intending to see him in this calm and self-centered way.
In Rosie, she didn’t care in the slightest about the feelings of the people who used her body: they were nothing more than tools for her lover to take pleasure from her, and what she did made her the kind of person he wanted her to be, as smooth and easy and gentle as stone. Their hands were his hands, and their commands were his commands.
But here everything becomes very different, and René transfers her to M. Stephen, making it quite clear that he wants to share her with him, and does not want anything more from her, nor does he want to derive pleasure from the practice of handing her over to someone else, but rather to share with M. Stephen what he loves most.
No doubt it was like sharing a trip, a yacht, or a horse in days gone by, when they were both young. At this moment, that sharing meant much more to René’s relationship with Mr. Stephen than it did to his relationship with her. What the two of them would later look for in her would simply be the imprint the other had left on her, the imprint of the other’s behavior.
Only a few moments before, when she had knelt half naked before René, and M. Stephen had spread her legs with his hands, René had carefully explained to him why O’s buttocks were easily accessible, and why he had been pleased with this preparation: for it had suddenly occurred to him that M. Stephen would be able to make use of this most beloved of all his orifices, as he intended to do, on a continual basis. He even went so far as to say that, if Mr. Stephen was pleased, he intended to give it to him alone for his exclusive use.
“Why not, I’m happy to oblige.” Mr. Stephen said, but then he made a point of declaring that, as good as these engagements were, he might borrow O for a time.
“O is yours,” replied René, “and O will be gladly borrowed by you.” So saying, he leaned over to her and kissed her hand.
When O thought that René had been able to partially abandon her, the idea was like a bolt from the blue to O. She took it as an indication that her lover was more concerned with Mr. Stephen than with her. Though he had repeatedly told her that the reason he loved her was that she whom he had made into an object, the absolute openness of her to him, the absolute freedom with which he disposed of her, the freedom to dispose of her as one would dispose of a piece of furniture at will, the freedom to both keep and moreover give the same thing as one could have of one’s own. But she realized she hadn’t entirely believed him.
She saw another mark of René’s devotion or respect for Mr. Stephen, and that was, that René had once been so eager to see her body pressed or whipped by others, that whenever he saw her mouth moaning or crying, and her eyes closed with tears of agony, his glance had always been so imploring, and had always burned with undiminished gratitude; and now he had gone away from her, and had proved to Mr. Stephen, after showing her everything, as he had proved to a horse by breaking its mouth, that it was young enough; and that she was as young as a horse can be, and as young as a horse can be. and now he was going away from her, and that after having shown Mr. Stephen all that she was, after having proved to Mr. Stephen that she was beautiful enough in the same way that one breaks open a horse’s mouth and proves to a man that it is young enough, or rather after having proved to him that she was fit enough for his needs, and after having been obliged to him to take her in, with no fear of leaving her.
No matter how offensive and insulting all this he did, O remained in love with René. She considered herself fortunate in possessing sufficient importance in his mind to make him wish to derive pleasure from offending her, as the pious believers thank God for making them humble.
But in Mr. Stephen she found a will like ice and iron, a will that would not be shaken by desire. No matter how chaste and tame she was, she remained absolutely worthless in the scales of this will.
At least up to the present time, why else would she feel so afraid? Neither the whip on Rosie’s servant’s belt nor the chains that had been placed upon her seemed to her to be more terrifying than the calmness with which Mr. Stephen gazed at her breasts but controlled himself not to touch them. She felt that her tiny shoulders and slim frame looked especially vulnerable under the gaze of this all-consuming and calmly deep gaze. She shuddered involuntarily and felt herself practically suffocating.
It was useless to expect to soften Mr. Stephen with such vulnerability, and she knew very well in her heart that the opposite was true: the tenderness and obedience she offered him could bring both caresses and injuries, both lips and nails. She remembered that Mr. Stephen had gently rubbed her nipples with the tip of the middle finger of his right hand, which was holding a cigarette, and that the nipples had obediently hardened, which for Mr. Stephen was a game, or just the beginning of a game, and nothing more. Or perhaps the action could be seen as a test, in the way one would test a machine to see if it was working properly, of which O was certain.
Mr. Stephen sat unmoving on the arm of the chair and let her take her skirt off, O’s damp fingers made the buttons slippery, and as a result it took her two tries to undo the black sand petticoat inside her skirt.
After she had completely undressed her entire body, her high-heeled leather shoes and black nylon stockings rolled only to her knees accentuated the elegant lines of her calves and the snowy complexion of her thighs. At that point, Mr. Stephen stood up, took her waist in one hand, and pushed her toward the couch, where he had her on her knees, with her back against the couch, pressing her shoulders rather than her waist firmly against the couch, and then spread her legs slightly apart, with her hands resting on her ankles, and her stomach exposed, above her upturned breasts, and her throat tilted back.
She didn’t dare look at Mr. Stephen’s face, but she saw his hands undoing his belt. She remained on her knees as he straddled O. He grabbed the back of her neck and plunged into her mouth, and it appeared that it wasn’t the caress of her lips he sought, but the depths of her throat.
He had been at it for a long time, and O felt the suffocating flesh swelling and hardening, its slow and repeated hammering making her eyes water. In order to enter her more thoroughly, Mr. Stephen simply knelt on the couch, both knees right on either side of her cheeks, and for a moment his hips sat on her breasts.
She felt her womb burning, that useless cursed womb burning inside her body. Though Mr. Stephen appeared pleasant and reveled in her body for a long time, he did not allow himself to reach a climax of pleasure, but withdrew from her in silence and reared up without closing his bathrobe.
“You are cheap, O,” he said to her, “you love René, but you are lecherous. Can’t René see that you covet and desire all the men who want you? Doesn’t he realize that sending you to Rossi or giving you to someone else provides you with just the excuse you need to hide your sluttiness?”
“I love René.” O replied.
“You love René, but you desire me more than anyone else.” Mr. Stephen went on.
Yes, it was true, Good did desire him. But even if René had known this, what difference would things have made? All she could do was to remain silent, to lower her eyes, and to look straight into Mr. Stephen’s eyes would be to confess to it.
Mr. Stephen then bowed and grabbed her shoulders, causing her to lie down on the carpet. She lay there on her back with her legs curled up as Mr. Stephen sat on the couch she had just leaned on, grabbed her right knee, and pulled her toward him. Since she was face-first into the fireplace, the firelight from the fireplace shone on the well-curled groin and buttocks. Mr. Stephen didn’t let go, but suddenly ordered her to touch herself, forbidding her to keep her legs together.O was stunned, then began to obediently reach out with her right hand, and her fingers touched the burning clitoris that was already protruding from her pubic hair, just where the delicate labia of her lower body met.
But her hand retracted again and she mumbled, “I can’t.”
It was true that she could not do so, and the only time in her life that she had ever caressed herself in secret had been in the warm, dark bed at home, when she was alone and asleep, but she had never tried to reach an orgasm in that way. Later she would sometimes have an orgasm in her sleep, and then wake up disappointed, because it was always nerve-wracking and fleeting.
Mr. Stephen gazed at her without moving. Unable to bear it, she muttered again and again, “I can’t,” and closed her eyes.
An unforgettable event came to her mind, which to this day makes her feel the same intense nausea as it did then, the first time she had seen it done, when she was fifteen years old, and it was the figure of Marianne, deep in a leather chair in a hotel room: Marianne had one leg over the arm of the chair, her head over the other arm, and she was caressing herself in front of O. She was moaning and groaning. She was caressing herself in front of O and moaning. Marianne also mentioned that one day she was caressing herself like this in her office, thinking she was alone, when suddenly her boss came in and saw her doing it.
O see Marianne’s office, an empty room with light green walls and a faint light filtering in through the dusty north window, where there was only an easy chair for visitors, placed across the desk.
“You slipped away quickly?” O asked her.
“No,” Marianne replied, “he asked me to start over, this time he locked the door, he made me take off my panties and push the chair to the window.”
O thought at the time that Marianne was very courageous and she admired and feared her greatly. At the time she steadfastly refused to fondle herself in front of Marianne and swore she would never do it in front of anyone.
Marianne laughed in disbelief and said:
“We’ll see, when your lover begs you to do it.”
René had never asked her to do it, and if he had, would she have obeyed? Yes, of course she would, but she was terribly frightened at the thought that the same disgust she had felt in Marianne’s presence would come into René’s eyes; it was absurd. And as it was Mr. Stephen’s request, things seemed even more absurd. She didn’t care if Mr. Stephen felt sick about it, but no, she just couldn’t do it. So she murmured for the third time, “I can’t.”
Though her voice was as low as a whisper, he heard her, and he stopped paying attention to her and simply stood up, closing the hem of his yukata around him and ordering O to stand up.
“Is this your obedience?” He said.
He grabbed both her wrists with his left hand and slapped her left and right with his right. She swayed and would have fallen to the ground if he hadn’t held on to her.
“Kneel down and listen,” he said, “I have to say this, it seems that René’s training of you is far from what is required.”
“I always obey René.” She mumbled.
“You are mixing love and obedience. You have to obey me without having to love me, and I don’t have to love you.”
Hearing these words, O felt a strange and indefinable storm of loathing and defiance rise in her breast, and she silently denied in the depths of her mind every word she had heard, her own promises of obedience and acceptance of slavery, the promises she herself had already made, her own desires, the nudity of her flesh, the perspiration of her sweat, the trembling of her limbs, and the surrounding of her eyes the black halo.
She struggled and clenched her teeth angrily as he made her, as René had once mentioned he was about to do, crouch down, support herself on the floor with her skeletal elbows, her head between her two arms, her hips cocked, and forced himself into her from behind.
The first time she didn’t scream. He entered once more, this time more violently, causing her to scream. Her screams were as much from pain as they were from defiance, and it seemed that he knew that perfectly well in his heart. She also knew that he was happy that he had made her scream, because it meant that she had been conquered by him.
When he was done, he helped her to her feet, and before releasing her, he said to her that what he had shot into her would turn to blood, slowly seeping out of those wounds that he had added to her body, wounds that would burn her all the way through, with the only exception being when her buttocks were made available to him. He would have to enforce this in his own way.
René had given him the right to use her in this particular way, and he had no doubt intended to exercise that right to the full, and she had better have no illusions about it. He reminded her that she had agreed to be René’s slave, and that she was therefore his slave, but it seemed as if she did not quite know — or did not consciously realize — what her commitment entailed. By the time she figured that out, it was too late to run away.
While listening to him, O said to herself mentally: I’m afraid it’s too late for him to escape his infatuation with her. She was not going to be tamed by him any time soon, and by the time she was tamed, he would have learned how to love her. There was one exception to her inner rebellion and the timid refusal she dared to show, and one exception only: she wished to make a shy image of herself in Mr. Stephen’s mind, as she had made for René, and wanted him to feel something more for her than a mere desire for her.
It was not because she was in love with him, but because she knew in her heart that René loved M. Stephen with the same passion that a boy loves his elder brother, and she thought that he was ready to do all he could to satisfy M. Stephen by devoting her to any of his whims, if necessary. She had an intuition, which could never be mistaken, that René would take after Mr. Stephen, and would seek to learn his ways, and that if Mr. Stephen showed that he despised her, René would be hurt by it.
No matter how much he loved her, he would be hurt by it in a way he had never been hurt, never even dreamed of being hurt, in a way that the opinion of those men in Rosyth could hardly give him. This was because in Rosyth he was master to her, and after he had given her to those men, their opinion of her was derived from his own. Here he was no longer master; on the contrary, Mr. Stephen was René’s master. René herself does not fully realize this; in other words, René worships him, tries to catch up with him at every turn, wants to compete with him.
That was the reason he was going to share everything with him, and that was the reason he gave him O: it was clear that she had been given to him unreservedly. René might continue to love her as long as Mr. Stephen thought her worthy and loved her. It was only then that everything became clear: M. Stephen would be her master, whatever René might think of him, he would be her only master, and her relation to him would be that of master and slave in the exact sense of the word. She must expect no mercy from him; but could she not expect a little feeling of love from him?
Sitting lazily and idly in the big easy chair by the fireplace, Mr. Stephen left O standing there so naked, waiting for his next order, and she waited in silence. Then he finally stood up and told her to follow him. At this point O was still naked except for her heels and black stockings, and she followed him up a flight of stairs and into a tiny bedroom. It was small enough to fit a bed in one corner, a dresser in the other, and a chair placed between the bed and the window. The small room was connected to a slightly larger room that was Mr. Stephen’s, and there was a shared washroom between the two rooms.
O washed and dried herself first — her woolen hat was pink with light flowers — then took off her heels and stockings and crawled under the cold covers. The curtains were open, and it was a dark night outside.
Before closing the door connecting the two rooms, Mr. Stephen went over to O, who was already lying on the bed, and kissed the tips of her fingers, a gesture he had done once before, when he had kissed the iron ring on her hand as she had risen from the high stool at the bar and saluted her. So much so that he had entered her body with his hand and his prick, ravishing her mouth and ass one by one, and ultimately would merely touch her fingertips with his lips.
O sobbed and stayed asleep until dawn.