Chapter 10
The ensuing silence lasted so long that I began wondering what precise pictures were haunting the other listeners. Mona's strange words came back to me and I tried to imagine what mechanisms the relation we had just heard could have set into motion in my companions. I suppose I was too green and not intuitive enough, or it may be that I had no imagination, but, up to this time, my pleasures had always took form in the field of the utmost materiality. The staging had always resorted to improvisation, and the spectacle was performed outside. Mona's words, suddenly, made me think of another form of theater, and to an entirely new category of erotic plays which, being enacted only inside my body, would set motion to a number of presences solely perceived on the intricated network of memory and imagination. I could not yet appraise fully either the mode or the processes, but I felt already very vivedly that my apprehension of the world was actually evolving. It seemed as if a sudden deepening of my own living substance was shaping and as if the internal bonds of my body receded in order to make room for a wider experimental field. Truly, everything happened as if the theater was reversed: the former stage was no more now than the wings of the new one and the new attendance exactly the opposite of the old one.
-What are you thinking about? Mona asked me.
-I have a feeling that the location of the spectacle is shifting.
She smiled and took me by the hand:
-You will have clearer ideas when you proceed to an extensive exploration of the castle. We endeavoured to recreate all that can happen inside... There one goes down from one story to another and so on, as one would go down aero is the whole of what may inhabit a body... We gathered there the largest possible amount of images and we hope that you too will incarnate your own pictures.
-I'll do it... but I need time and...
-What is already here will soon represent for you an ever-ready recollection... or even an habit, and you will be denied no material or human instrument. We will have at your disposal any imaginable thing though imagination endlessly removes its own boundaries further back if it be perpetually afforded the opportunity to realize what it is nurturing...
I felt the strange sensation of being no more isolated. I thought I had partaken of some kind of an assembly of libertines in the middle of which my aloofeness would multiply itself by being reflected by my companion's and victims' faces and now I sensed that I had very sincerely been admitted in a society the aims of which remained still somewhat mysterious but which I knew would provides me with a help that would turn me into a participant and not a guest.
-Let's go back to the roof where we met, Mona said, and our friends will join us while having our coffee and liqueurs.
All the assistants stood up and we entered two transparent cages which must have answered a mental order since they had appeared at the end of our open-air dining-room as soon as we had risen to our feet. 1 was standing between Mona and Aldine. Their magnificent bodies irradiated a presence the perception of which communicated to me an infinite thrilling pleasure. Their presence invaded my innermost self and I felt horny all over inside my body. It felt as if, I don't know how, I had made love with these presences and the wide surgess of pleasure which submerged me woke in me simultaneously an acute conscience of myself and of my female companions.
We sat down in deep brightly-colored armchairs under the beautiful bower. The perfume of the flowers streamed up to our nostrils and the sea was softly swelling as far as the eye could see. The silence seemed to be boiling amid this stillness crisscrossed by invincible impulses, presences and sun.
-I met Nora in Athens, but I had previously noticed her in Delphi. She was in quest of I don't know what ideal susceptible of warming up what she called the occidental vocation. She did need bnt the slightest ground to be admitted here, and we have founded this castle together... as soon as she came to understand -and so did I -that inner beauty does not realize itself only by dint of meditation.
1-I had dreamed, Nora explained, on the old amphitheaters. I used to shed (tears when I thought that so beautiful stones had seen athletes and Christians too bleeding to death, but to-day I think that it's a pity that there are no more Christians to be sacrified in our towns, on the days when the sun streams hard on their old stones... I was born in Thrace, in a family which still kept some apparent standing but which was loosing the remnants of its fortune in ideal but wholly unpractical ventures. My Slavic blood did not really agree with my Grecian blood and, though I spent whole nights gazing upon our beautifuls ruins or dreaming about our antique cults from which, undoubtedly, issued the antique tragedy, I did spend many others frigging my pussy under the moonlight. With a kind of rage I frigged my little fleshy button, though not knowing exactly what was its intended use nor why there was this queer mouth which cleft my crotch. I thought that this mouth was hungry but fingering the little button more or less appeased this craving and moreover it presented me with many pleasant sensations. But the sight of carrots plunged me in a queer state. I thought that this vegetable would be particularly suited to satisfy the hunger of my lower mouth in the same time allowing me to probe it, but I was still held back by some fears. My parents were good Christians and subsequently they had never explained me anything about "all those things", and my mother was happy not to overdo her mother's duty only by teaching me how to quench the periodic flow without explaining anything else to me since I did not really seemed very upset by this event. I was nearing fifteen when a cousin of mine, having recently lost her father, came to live with us. She was as dark as I was fair-haired, and she was ten years older than me. At once I conceived for her one of those passionate affections which quite often overcome young girls, and, following the usual description of this kind of pairing, we became best friends. One day, she came into my room when I was engrossed in the contemplation of a superb car rot which I had quite innocently brought up in my room, and she asked me if that was all I was provided for in order to satisfy myself. She laughed and I was ashamed though unaware of she meant.
-You would better trust me, she added.
-To trust you about what? I asked her.
-Don't you know?
-No!
-To teach you how to play with your little slit, she said laughingly.
-My lower mouth?
-Why, of course, your lower mouth!
I was abashed by her revelation, because I could not imagine that one could play with one's mouth, though I had already watched people kissing on this part of their body and they seemed to enjoy it immensely. At last I forced myself to ask questions and my cousin answered laughingly that these "things" would beter be experienced than explained.
And suddenly, she tucked up her dress and revealed to my astnoished eyes an exceedingly hairy sex; it was totally covered with brown curls amid which the pink slit yawned like the mouth of a cat.