Chapter 10
The baroness had cut her guests off too abruptly. They sat around, morosely, their excited passions curbed now, for none wished to afford their aristocratic hostess the displeasure of disobedience.
Deliberately tantalising, she had literally forced her guests into the application of self-control. Cunts collapsed, inwardly flaccid, and dripping love-fluids down the inside flesh of sculpted thighs. Penises drooped, the unsatisfied cocks subsiding into slackness over a still-tight sac of balls.
But the baroness knew what she was about.
She knew, for example, that Dino Carotti, like every true libertine, had bis secret and especial vice, his peculiar perversion. With one-like Felicity-it might be a penchant for the whip. With another-like Anaka-Leeit might be nymphomania. Or the perversion of homosexuality-overt, as it was with Reginaldo Baretti and Leslie Haines, or covert, as it was with Heine Gorlitz. There might be the exhibitionism of Theophilus and Berenice Kandi, or the devout lesbianism of Elaine and Hildegarde-or even the absorbing capacity for adjustment to new experience that was the mark of Istvan and Althea.
With Dino Carotti the deviation lay in the making of odd, offbeat movies-and the delight with which he would exhibit them. Nothing gave him greater pleasure. Some of his finest work, it was said, had been captured on eight and sixteen-millimetre film, every metre of which had been privately developed and printed. And every reel lay in his villa-too torrid, any of it, for public exhibition.
It was for a showing of some of these movies that the baroness was angling. And, after dinner that evening, she put the proposition to him straight.
"Dino?" she asked, naively, "a performance this evening, perhaps?"
"The movies, you mean?"
"What else? So many have not yet seen your work. And I-when last did I view it?"
"But gladly, Lillian. Come on, then, everybody-into the studio."
He rose and escorted his guests to a huge, glassed-in porch which ran, like some great gallery, along one entire side of his villa-his private projection studio.
There were no seats. Instead, there were enormous pulled cushions, mattresses, deep-piled carpets scattered over the polished parquet floor.
Running the curtains together over the glassed-in walk he said: "Get comfortable, everybody. There aren't any seats-but you'll find the cushions very comfortable. The screen, you see, is purposely slanted up there. You see it best if you get supine-if you stretch full out."
He pressed a button, and a silver-glassed screen slid down at an acute angle from the far ceiling.
Another button plunged the room into darkness.
A third-and a gentle whirring started up at the back of the long hall. Within moments, a searching light probed out and upwards toward the white of the screen and a whirling jumble of letters of the alphabet spun dizzily around, diminishing finally in speed to a full stop, to spell out the title:
"This Way... If Madame Pleases!"
The first sequence was an innocent shot of two pleasantly-clad Roman girls, in brilliant sunshine, at a ticket window. It might have been any box-office. Money passed over the counter, in exchange for two tickets.
A panned shot, next, showed that the box-office was one for a public swimming bath. A woman attendant mouthed the words: "This way... if madame pleases!"
Weirdly, the words became suddenly audible.
They were spoken in Dino's voice, into a microphone beside the projector. They contrived to lend, now, the actual dimension of sound to what was otherwise merely a silent movie. The party of guests nestled down expectantly, as they followed the swaying rumps of the two girls on the screen overhead.
The attendant showed them into a vast, open, changingbooth, and gasps went up from those on the floor at the sudden acreage of feminine nudity revealed by the camera. There were women of every shape, of every age, and at every stage of undress in that change-room. Some stood stark naked. Some were still fully clad. More than half of them were at every conceivable stage of disrobing.
Dino's lens would wander up the massive thighs of some fifty-year-old, following tantalisingly the rise of an underslip up a pair of ageing, puckered thighs, buttocks and wrinkled belly-and then, without ever seeming to leave the subject, would discover some pair of perfectlyformed teenage breasts, sliding free of a brassiere. He would start a shot at the black tangle of some matronly pubis-and dissolve the scene out as the camera left the unformed, undeveloped torso of some girl, not yet nine years old. Long shots of naked breasts would suddenly funnel into the roundness of one single belly over which could be discerned the underglobe of one single, perfect tit, shot from some incredible angle From that one breast, the lens would reach out until a concerted movement, yards further down the room, revealed the majesty of ten pairs of splendid buttocks as their owners bent forward, in synchronised unison, to slide shoes under a long, wall-length seat.
One moment, the concentration would be all on cunthair, and the diversity of growth of this hair over the public mounds of forty different women. The next moment, the gaping slash of a single cunt would be exposed, all red and shining and oiled, as the camera panned to the uncrossing of one single pair of legs in the act of pulling off a stocking. The next moment after that, it would be breasts, pair upon pair of breasts, teasing, tantalising, exciting and wonderful, every pair different in size and shape, weaving round and round in a carrousel of mammary bounty...
And all the time, Dino was delivering a running commentary.
"What you are looking at now," came his soft-timbred voice over the loudspeakers, "is my idea of what must be the ambition of every Peeping Tom in the world to behold. I shot this whole series cooped up in a shower cubicle in a public bath right here in Rome. I used about six different lenses-as you'll see. Everything from closeup to full zoom, and telephoto, too, sometimes. It wasn't easy-but it gave me one hell of a kick. If I'd been found in that shower-cubicle I'd have been put away for about ten years. But it was worth it. This is the very essence of voyeurism. To my way of thinking, every Peeping Tom in the world would give his right arm to watch what I've got down on film, on this very reel. You know the types. They're on the record in newspaper reports all the time. Standing on chairs to peek over hotel fanlights, hanging out of apartment blocks, to see into windows across the street, taking every chance of getting a stray glimpse of some woman undressing, or actually stark naked, if they can manage such good luck. The funny thing is, they're always disappointed-never satisfied. Each naked body they see is disappointing. Too fat. Too thin. Too much like the last one they sawtoo reminiscent of the familiarity of a wife. And they go on looking, looking, all their lives. Well, people, here I've tried to capture it all-all on one film. I had a friend at this swimming-bath. With his help I got into that cubicle-and this is the result. I filmed it, because I believe there is a bit of the Peeping Tom in every one of us. After all, who could pass an open bathroom door in any hotel, if there was a naked woman in the bath. Even if she was seventy-everybody would stop for a look. ..And who doesn't know the shock of looking out of a bedroom window, and right into another one just across the street, where some dolly's getting dressed or undressed. We're all Peeping Toms-to some degree. And that's why I went after this bit."
The camera lingered on a colossal pair of tits. They filled the entire screen, obscenely large-elephantine in their gigantic moulding. Dino's voice dropped into the room, softly: "You are now observing, friends, tits the like of which nobody has ever seen before. This shot wasn't taken at the baths. This one, I got on a ship going through the
Red Sea, once. They belonged to a Chinese dolly-and she was so unbelievably ugly that I could never have brought myself to photograph her face. I could see she had interesting tits, though, no matter what she woreand one day I persuaded her in my cabin to strip. She was hardly twenty-five, and these enormous watermelons you are seeing right now belonged to her. How she carried the solid weight of the things is what surprises me-but I suppose she knew nothing else. What can one woman know of the weight of some other woman's tits? And she'd had them since they began to bud on herso to her it must have been natural. But I'll swear no brassiere made could have contained all that flesh. Even if there was such a bra it would have had to have shoulder straps of steel-or rope, at least. Anyhow, this that you're seeing is the absolute most-so I cut this sequence in, right here, in this film."
His voice trailed off, and the camera panned up and down the dressing room once more, offering a teasing glimpse of some torso seen before, and finally, again, those incredible Chinese bosoms.
Monumental, swollen to the contours of some Rabelaisian exaggeration, they occupied the whole area of the screen. And the camera, merciless, captured them from above, from below, from each side.
What had been screened so far would have been enough to excite every viewer in that room. What helped matters considerably, however, was the sexy silkiness of Dino's voice, delivering the spontaneous commentary as the movie unrolled. Hands stole into hands, blouses were tweaked open, and hands fumbled for hot, randy breasts. Smaller, ringed hands fumbled at buttoned, zipped flies, and fingers darted in to pluck warm, throbbing pricks from their hairy, scrotal beds.
"And now," came the voice of Carotti once more, "This Way... If Madame Pleases."
The great mammaries faded out of focus, and the scene swiftly shifted to the consulting room of a prominent corsetiere in Naples. She was seated at her desk, her back to the camera, evidently at the end of a discussion with a client who was blotted out from view by the nearness of the woman's back to the camera. Slowly the camera inched round to take in the client's face. As it came into view, everybody gasped. The woman client was none other than the wife of the Prime Minister of Italy!
Dino, hearing the astonished intake of breath, chuckled into the microphone.
"All achieved," he announced mischievously, "with the full collaboration of the Signora-but not a sequence of what you will see known to Her Excellency. I was behind a window-curtain, you see-and the lens projected through several apertures cut into the material of the curtain. Now watch this-"
Signora Albanese, the corsetiere, stood up. As she moved round the desk, the wife of the Prime Minister was already disrobing. She went calmly about her task of stripping, oblivious to the probing lens of the camera.
First came her blouse. Then, mincingly, as if she were some young girl instead of a matron in her fifties, she shucked off her skirt. Signora. Albanese helped her client to wriggle her slip up and over her head. Her Excellency stood, stripped now, to her brassiere and girdle. At the sight of the woman's panties, awry and untidy, wrinkled about her thighs, the incongruity of the sight of the First Lady of Italy in so homely a predicament sparked off a spontaneous roar of laughter. Femininely, she patted their ruffles straight. Then she removed them. Still facing that devastating camera, she tucked the fingers of each hand into the elastic waistband of her girdle, and inched this down over her wriggling hips.
This was strip-tease at its most blatant, and the star was none other than Her Excellency herself I
Divested of her expensive clothing, she had become just what she was-a fat, fashion-conscious, pampered old woman.
With her girdle dragging over the mass of her hips, the black triangle of her cunt-hair came into shocking view. As the girdle was slid downwards, one knee lifted up into freedom, and, as Her Excellency swung the leg slightly outwards, her labia parted and the fleshy gash of her cunt was suddenly exposed. Next, with hands expertly feeling at her back for the catches of her bra, that garment came off, too-and the sleek, full, but pendulous and ageing breasts of the Prime Minister's wife plunged down her spare-tired belly.
A second gasp of shocked discovery burst from every throat. For those matronly breasts were marked, beyond all possibility of doubt, with the crisscrossing lacerations of the whip!
The great woman then turned slowly to one siderevealing her back, over which lay great, livid weals, criss-crossing cruelly over her fair skin, carved deep into the flesh of buttocks, of hip, and of shoulders.
"Christ!" swore Felicity, then. Her teeth were chattering and clenched in the wrack of her sexual amusement. "Whoever flogged Her Excellency like that, certainly knew what he was doing!"
"HushI" breathed Theophilus Kandi, close to her. He reached out a hand to where he thought Felicity's mouth was, to stifle her. But he missed, and Felicity groaned: "Ah, sweet mother of Christ-but Yd pay a fucking fortune to the man who'd thrash me like that!"
As Felicity groaned in her paroxysms of lust, so others were groaning, as well
"Well, fancy that!"
"So-what do you know about that, bey?"
"The old bitch-for Christ's sakes! Nothing but another flagellant!"
"Well-it certainly takes all sorts..."
Sex was now rampant in that room as further sequences showed Her Excellency being fitted, and clothed once more, over superb new foundation garments.
The moment of lese majeste had passed.
But the aftermath of sexual discovery was upon them all. Hands groped everywhere, clutching flesh-none knew whose prick she held, whose tits he was fondling, whose belly be was caressing, into whose cunt his fingers were sliding.
Istvan felt complete nudity at his side, and ran his hands over a torso, expecting it to be that of Elaine. Electrified at the discovery, he reached the crotch, only to encounter a jutting, quivering length of prick. Probably that of Reggie or Leslie, he thought, since the thigh was so smooth and devoid of hair. The length of it was warm and silky under its coating of fluid, and as Istvan withdrew his hand he felt another clutching palm slide down that penis, lovingly stroking its contours. Istvan fumbled around him until he felt naked flesh once more. It was the thigh of some woman-and he followed it up until his fingers disappeared deliriously into a hot receptive cunt that avidly reacted to his caresses.
The tempo of the film-had now sped up. Scenes were shorter, more stark, more urgent. If there was sexual urgency among the viewers, it was more than matched by what was being screened.
A well-known duchess was now descending from her opulent car outside a popular Sauna bath frequented by the elite of Rome.
Subtly ignoring the strip-tease of her disrobing-undre*sing sequences had been screened, plentifully, by this stage -the camera picked up the socialite dowager, again, this time sweating with a dozen more of Rome's society hostesses, revealed in all their plump and ebullient nudity. The skin on their rotund flesh gleamed wetly. Their natural actions appeared ludicrous before the pitiless eye of the camera. One would tweak an itching nipple. One would scratch beneath a tit. One would raise an arse-cheek from the stone seat, in the obvious action of releasing a fart.
Hilarious as it was, however, nobody was in any mood for laughter. It was lewd, provocative sex-and they gloated over the nudity of women whose proud names were a byword throughout Europe, scratching, feeling, sweating in the steam room-totally unaware of the searing truth of Carotti's wicked lens.
The duchess passed into an adjoining room. She was lying, now, gross and supine, upon a massage table in the centre of a white, aseptic private room. Hands were pummelling at that aristocratic flesh. Over her fat tits they stroked, and down her belly, and into and out of her hairy, untidy, and unlovely crotch. Over and over she was turned. Her knees went up, and the great slit of her twat, gross-lipped, hung-exposed in its entirety.
The masseuse left the room. The beaten, pummeled, spent and weary duchess was seen rolling wearily over on to her back. From a position no further, it seemed, than the foot of the massage table, so cleverly did the telephoto lens function, there came into focus once more the incredible sexiness of the parting of two massive, overfleshed thighs, dimpled with fat.
And then the duchess's fingers were at her cunt, and as naturally as would any woman in the world, imagining herself secure in complete privacy, and having the urge to do so-she began a delicious orgy of fingerfucking. All her fingers were in play, each a master of its masturbatory task. The whole disgusting sequence sent a shudder through every woman who, watching, knew herself to have been guilty of just such a sexual lapse, not once, but many times.
Suddenly the fat duchess went rigid as her orgasm came. Her fingers were electric at her twat, hairy and fat and obscenely dripping with spunk. In the might of her coming, she snatched with both hands at her cunt, rending it open now with all her fingers, ramming her fungertips into it, and through it, and deep down into her aching-hot vagina, and the turgid lips of that cunt seemed to puff up and clasp themselves around those fingers.
At the obscene sight, body unashamedly coupled with body. Massive, -excited, dripping penis probed into slushy, hot, excited cunt. Mouths clamped over naked, bobbing nipples. Hands felt feverishly up thighs, encountered other thighs in the agony of copulation, stroked balls and prick and cunt-whatever was available. A prick would slip out of one cunt and lewdly strive in the darkness to find another. A cunt would be savagely unscrewed off some penis, to go, silent but twitchinglipped, about its search for some other rod upon which to impale itself. A half-dozen times Anaka-Lee came her full load, and cared not whether she found her relief upon a finger, a penis, or a tongue. Theophilus and
Bernice, though accustomed to take their sex together, had lost each other entirely in the crawling melee of man and womanflesh.
And now, in quick sequences, the camera was peering into women's public lavatories, into a public bath-house on Paris's Left Bank, into women's fitting-rooms in Rome's big department stores, into the barracks of a women's regiment on the outskirts of Bari, into two or three rooms in several notorious Naples brothels. It was sex, rampant and gone mad-an obscene orgy.
"What you are about to see," continued Carotti, "is the most rare-I think the most exquisite shot I have ever taken. I ask your full attention. If you like, 111 stop the film a moment..."
"Ah, for the sake of sweet fuck itself, stop it, Dino!" came the demented voice of Anaka-Lee, impaled on a penis whose incredible length had penetrated, it seemed, right through her cervix and into her very womb. "Ah, Christ-this I gotta have. This one, please God, and please Carotti, I have to have, full and forever, and as long as ever it can fucking well last! Stop it now, while this goes on-please!" Her voice throbbed with passion.
Anaka-Lee's insane screams had spoken for all of them. Dino stopped the film.
The whores in the brothel froze into sudden immobility, clumsy and gauche, deprived of the illusion of movement that had heretofore given grace and a kind of beauty to their undulations.
Below Dino's projection stand, hips ground into hips as the fornicating mob strove for release.