It was at this point that she heard Mr. Stephen’s footsteps pacing up and down his room. She knew that he could see her; she could not see him. Once more she felt that she was indeed fortunate to be shown to people in this way continually, to be continually imprisoned in these gazes that surrounded her.
Young Natalie was sitting on the white carpet in the middle of the room, looking like a fly landing on a bowl of milk; O was standing in front of the large closet that doubled as a dressing table, looking at her own figure in a light-green antique mirror, from her head to her waist, which had ripples like ripples in a pond, and which looked like a nineteenth-century painting of a nude woman roaming around a dimly-lit boudoir, the Even though it was midsummer.
As Mr. Stephen pushed open the door to the room, she turned so violently that the iron ring between her legs scarfed up the bronze knob on the closet with a resounding crunch.
“Natalie,” said Mr. Stephen, “go downstairs and bring that white cardboard box that is in the sitting-room.”
When Natalie returned, she laid the case on the bed and opened it, took out its contents one by one, opened the wrapper, and handed it to Mr. Stephen. It was a number of masks, masks attached to helmets; these were designed with the obvious intention of covering the whole head completely, showing only the beak and chin – and of course the eyes. Kitty, owl, fox, lion, bull: all were animal masks, but made to the size of a human head, and all were made of real fur and feathers. The masks of animals with eyelashes (such as lions) are also decorated with eyelashes: the fur or feathers can be draped over the shoulders of the wearer. To make the mask fit snugly over the upper lip (where there are two holes for the nostrils) and tightly over the cheeks, it is simply adjusted with a small piece of string, which is hidden in an ornament that trails behind the mask. A frame made of cardboard between the mask’s outer shell and the lining allows the mask to remain stiff.
Standing in front of a large mirror, O tried on the masks one by one. The one that looked the most striking, and which she thought transformed her the most and looked the most natural, was an owl mask (there were two of these), because it was made of tan and teal leather, which blended perfectly with her skin tone; the fur stole covered her shoulders almost completely, trailing down her back, and in front to where her breasts were just beginning to rise. . Mr. Stephen instructed her to wipe off her lipstick, and when she took off her mask, he said to her.
“Well, you’re going to be the Commander’s owl. But O, I hope you’ll forgive me, this time you’re going to be led. Natalie, go look in the top upper drawer of my desk and you will find a chain and a pair of pliers.”
Natalie brought the chain and pliers, and Mr. Stephen used the pliers to open one of the links at the unterminated end of the chain, slipped it over the second link worn on O’s body, and then reclamped the open link. The chain looked very much like a chain used to keep a dog on a leash – in fact it used to be a leash for a dog – and was about four to five feet long, with a leather loop handle at the other end. After putting O’s mask back on, Mr. Stephen instructed Natalie to pull on the end of the chain and lead O around the room a bit. So Natalie led O, who was completely naked and wearing a mask on his head, around the room three times.
“I must admit,” commented Mr. Stephen, “that the Commander is right; all the hair must be shaved off.
But this can wait until tomorrow, and in the meantime, don’t take off the chain.”
That evening, in the company of Jacqueline, Natalie, René and Mr. Stephen, O went to dinner naked for the first time, her chains pulled back between her legs and around her waist past her hips. Nala served the food alone, and O avoided her gaze as best she could. She had arrived two hours earlier at the call of Mr. Stephen.
The next day, O went to the beauty parlor, and to the consternation and deep dismay of the beautician, in addition to the iron ring and the bruised whip marks on the lower back of her body, there were some brand-new bruises.O was there to shave off those pesky hairs, to be removed by a type of waxing, which consists of applying a wax to the hairs, and then when the wax has hardened, bringing them up and plucking them out at the same time as the wax is violently removed from their shells.
Although she repeatedly explained to the girl that this method of hair removal was no more painful than the strokes of a horsewhip, it was to no avail.
She tried to explain to her that even if it was not her destiny, at least she was happy. No matter how many times she repeated it to her, she could not make her believe her, nor could she calm her feelings of nausea and fear; the only result of O’s efforts to calm her was that the girl was no longer full of sympathy as she had been when she first met her, but she was now full of fear.
Finally she asked her to spread her legs as she would during sex and completed the process. After all this was done, despite O’s many words of thanks and an extremely generous tip, it was all to no avail – she still felt like she had been kicked out in the end, rather than leaving the place of her own free will.
Why should she care about such things? She knew in her heart that her pubic hair didn’t match the color of the fur on the mask, or the atmosphere of the Egyptian statues that it brought; and her broad shoulders, thin waist, and long legs demanded that her flesh should be polished to the point of perfection. Only the clefts between the labia of the goddesses of those primitive societies appeared to be more proud and open, with more elegant lines.
But had anyone ever seen rings on their labia? O recalled that the redhead she had met at Anne-Marie’s had said that her master only used the rings on her labia when he chained her to the foot of the bed, and that he wanted her to shave her body hair just to make her nudity more perfect, more impeccable, and O was afraid that this would upset Mr. Stephen, who had pulled her towards him by her pubic hair. However, she was wrong: Mr. Stephen thought she was even more attractive the way she was now.
He instructed her to put on the mask and wipe off all the lipstick from the top and bottom, so that her lips and labia showed an unusual pallor. Once that was done, he stroked her almost carefully, like a tamer approaching the beast he was trying to tame.
He had neither spoken to her of the place he was taking her to, the time of her departure, nor of the kind of people who would be the commander’s guests. But he was at her side all the afternoon. He slept beside her, and in the evening he ordered supper for both of them to be brought into the room.
They had left an hour before midnight in a Buick sedan, and O was wrapped in a huge mountain man’s cape, with wooden clogs on his feet. Natalie, dressed in black, held the chain from start to finish, the leather loop at the top of which was attached to a leather bracelet on her right wrist. Mr. Stephen drove.
The moon was nearly full, and shed great snow-like points of light over the road, illuminating the trees and houses in the village that flashed past the windows of the car, and everything else was hidden in an inky blackness. Here and there, at this late hour, there were groups of people gathered on the porches lining the street, and they could feel the curiosity of the people on the street about the tightly shuttered passing automobile (Mr. Stephen had not lowered the canopy).
The dogs were barking, the olive trees along the road were bathed in moonlight like a silver floating cloud hanging six feet above the ground, and the cypress trees looked like black fur. Nothing was real in this country, the night was unreal, and only the smells of yarrow leaves and mint leaves were real. The road continued to climb higher, but the layer of hot air still weighed heavily on the earth. o let the cape slip from her shoulders. She would not be seen, no one was in sight.
After another ten minutes, the car drove along a forest of green oaks to the top of a small hill, where Mr. Stephen slowed down in front of a long fence with a canopied gate that opened as soon as the car approached. After the gate closed behind them, he parked the car in a field and took the lead, getting out of the car and personally helping Natalie and O step out of the car, ordering O to leave her cape and clogs in the car.
He pushed open a large door, and what appeared before them was a Renaissance-style arcade, with cloisters on three sides, and a stone-paved courtyard on the fourth, where a dozen or more couples were dancing on the terrace, and a few ladies in low-cut gowns and men in white evening dresses were seated at small tables with lighted candles; a record player was placed in the corridor to the left, and a buffet-table had been set up on the right hand side of the corridor. The jukebox was placed in the corridor on the left, and a buffet table had been set up on the right hand side of the corridor.
Though the moonlight was as dim as candlelight, when it fell on O’s body, which was drawn forward by Natalie’s tiny black figure, those who had noticed her stopped dancing, and the men left their seats and rose. A boy at the jukebox felt as if something were happening, and as he turned he took a violent step backward, toweling the jukebox, and the music came to a sudden stop.O stopped, and Mr. Stephen stood motionless, two paces behind her, waiting.
The commander dispersed those gathered around O, summoning men to bring torches to inspect her more closely.
“Who is she?” They’re asking, “To whom does she belong?”
“It’s yours, if you like.” He replied. He led O and Natalie over to a corner of the terrace where there was a stone bench with seat cushions placed on it right next to the low wall.
O sat down, her back against the wall, her hands on her knees, and Natalie sat on the floor beside her left foot, still clutching the chain.O’s eyes searched for Mr. Stephen, and at first she didn’t find him, and then she did by feel, leaning on a chaise lounge in the other corner of the terrace.
He could see her, and that reassured her. The music resumed and the partners resumed dancing.
Dancing, one or two pairs would move to her side, as if by accident at first, and then one pair, no longer pretending, led by the woman, came boldly toward her. o stared at them from the holes under the feathers of her mask, her gaze dimmed a bit in the mask, and she opened her eyes as wide as the eyes of her costumed owl.
Her image was so peculiar that no one thought of asking her questions – questions would have been the logical thing to do – as if she were a real owl, unable to understand human language and mute.
From midnight to dawn, at about five o’clock, the morning sun showed in the eastern sky. As the moon moved into the western sky, people came up to her more frequently, some even touching her. Several times they formed a circle around her, and a few times they parted her knees and lifted the chain. They held up one of those Provencal candle holders that split into two forks at the top – she could feel the heat of the candle’s flame between her legs – to see in what way she was chained up.
One slightly inebriated American even laughed and grabbed her, but when he realized he was grabbing a piece of flesh impaled by that chain, he suddenly sobered up and lost his drunkenness.O saw a look of horror and contempt on his face, exactly the same as the one on the face of the girl who had been doing the waxing for her! He turned and fled.
Another very young girl, with her shoulders bare, a string of pearls around her neck, dressed in a long white dress of the kind young girls love to wear when they attend their first ball, with two tea-flavored roses around her waist and a pair of gold leather shoes on her feet. A boy sat her down beside O, on her right hand, then he took the girl’s hand and made her fondle O’s breasts, which quivered slightly under the touch of the cool little hands. This was followed by her pussy, the chain, the flesh hole that the chain had pierced.
The girl did all this in silence, as she was told, and when the boy said that he intended to do the same thing to her, she did not look frightened. But though they had used O so, though they had used her like a model, or treated her as an exhibit, no one had said anything to her. Was she made of stone, or wax, or a creature from another world, so that they thought it pointless to speak to her? Perhaps they were afraid to speak to her?
At daybreak, when all the dance partners had departed, Mr. Stephen and the Commander awoke Natalie, who was asleep at O’s feet, helped O to her feet, led her to the middle of the courtyard, unchained her, removed her mask, lowered her to the table, and took possession of her in turn.
In the compressed final chapter, O returns to Rosie, where she is abandoned by Mr. Stephen.
There is another ending to O’s story: in that ending, O learns that Mr. Stephen is going to leave her and says that she would rather die, which Mr. Stephen has no problem with.
(End of text)