Chapter 11
Dino Carotti allowed one full minute, and then another, to tick by, aroused himself now by the thrashing sex.
Then, sure of his sated audience, he allowed his projector to whirr into action once more. Miraculously, the blowsy and obscene prostitutes took on once again their former grace. They swayed, once again, and undulated provocatively before their unseen clients. Finally the clients themselves were brought into focus, and the two women fell back, each coupled to her man, upon a couch. The bought and paid-for intercourse, the five-thousand lire fucks, were in progress.
It was the end of the sequence.
And now, the movie switched a sound-track. And slowly, mistily at first, but then clarifying itself out of the mist, the face and form of Elisabetta Stocchi came into focus.
She was singing. Softly, into that room, fell the molten honey of that incomparable voice-the lilting cadences of Italy's beloved coloratura. The notes were sure. The *one was full. The soaring rapturous flight of the treble could only have been achieved by Elisabetta.
Gently, the aria ceased and faded out. Around that face, another background seemed to swim hazily in, building up into focus. Finally it was established. Elisabetta Stocchi-seated across a desk from Rome's most renowned obstetricirn.
"This," announced Dino, "you should not miss. This I took from his own consulting rooms, during one of mi his afternoon sessions. He did four cases, that afternoon. I filmed them all-then I found the fourth one wasthis! Watch now-and listen."
Elisabetta was a woman-any ordinary woman-before her physician. But she was unmistakeably the same Elisabetta whose voice had thrilled audiences over the whole world. Her agitation was controlled-but it was obvious.
"I am desperate, Signor Minotti," came her voice, urgent and pleading, over the sound-track.
"And I, Elisabetta," replied the doctor, "am sympathetic."
And then she told of her anguish in desiring a childbut of her refusal to bear the child of her wealthy husband, Alessandro Stocchi.
"Stocchi!" she fumed, beating an imperious fist upon the gynaecologist's desk, "is a dolt! He has every attribute-of a peasant! For his money-for his money alone, I married Stocchi! For his money, I tell you-and for the position he could offer me, in the society of Milan...!"
"And is that position," asked the doctor, softly, "so unbearable, then?"
"Position?" fumed the singer. "The bell with position, now! I have all the position 1 want-it's I who give position to Stocchi, now!
"No-it's Ronaldo Garcia. You know him. The actor-some say he's Spanish. He's Tarzan. He's Beau Geste. He's every romantic, dashing cavalier since Fairbanks!"
"He loves me, this Garcia. I want a child. But-" and she hissed the final words-"it must be his child, I tell you!"
"Then sleep with the man, Etisabetto," said the doctor gendy.
"Oh, Signor Minotti," she sighed, hopelessly. "Do you think I haven't tried? A million rimes, that's all! But he's an idiot. He spurns me. He says he's afraid of me-that he's a Catholic! That it would be a mortal sin. Oh, he's an idiot! I don't love him-but oh, what a body he has! Like a superman!"
"Elisabetto," interposed the doctor, "do you rememher what George Bernard Shaw said once, long ago, to some woman? 'Suppose the child is born with my body and your brain?' Remember that?"
"I'm not interested in Shaw."
"Then try harder, Elisabetta-to sleep with Garcia."
"I've given up hope. That's why I'm here. Look, Signor-this artificial insemination one hears about. Can't you do something along those lines? Tell him you have a patient-and that you have selected Garcia to be the donor? Can't you do that for me?"
The doctor tapped with his pencil upon his blotting pad. "I see," he said finally. Then: "Strip, Elisabetta."
A nurse appeared on the screen and repeated, unobtrusively, the title-words of the film: "Pardon me... this way-if Madame pleases..."
The nurse led the fleshy, well-built operatic star behind a screen. Seeming to follow, the lens of Carotti was on hand, at once, to record the final, ruthlessly-intimate nakedness of the most beloved star of Italy's operatic stage. It revealed how her ample, globular breasts stood, proud and upright, even though deprived of their brassiere. The camera showed the star's nude, shaven cunt a mere slit with the two lips cleaving together to disappear into the V of her thighs. For what mysterious purpose had she needed to shave? Her statuesque thighs were revealed, tapering each from the upward thrust of her powerful torso. There she stood finally, naked, unashamed-breathtakingly lovely.
In came the gynaecologist again, this time in surgical dress, his hands encased in rubber gloves. He gave the girl the cursory, impersonal glance of doctor to patient.
"Lie down," he commanded. "There."
He advanced upon her, and ran gloved hands expertly over her bosoms, palpating them, and then letting his fingers travel over her mound of matt-smooth belly, observing the spontaneous reaction of her hardening nipples, her goose-pimpling skin. Raising her knees, he parted her thighs, and the rosy, naked slash of her cunt came into focus.
Into the opened vulva he inserted his probing fingers for the examination. He plunged two fingers inside the vagina, probed around, altered their angle of incidence. He felt, estimated, felt again, reading her insides with his fingertips like a blind person reads Braille. Finally he withdrew bis now-warmed fingers from their sweet, feminine tunnel, stripping them of the rubber gloves as he did so.
"Mmm-m-m," he said, profoundly. WI see. That'll be all, Elisabetta. You can get dressed now."
"You'll help?" she cried gratefully, as she swung to a sitting position.
"I'll help," he said. "I'll get Garcia here, this weekif I can. If I can do anything to persuade him, then you'll have his child."
A calendar indicated the time lapse of two day*.
A cleverly-angled shot revealed Elisabetta once more. She was completely naked, lying on a different table in a tiny partitioned cubicle. In the adjoining cubicle, on the other side of the partition, stood Rinaldo Garcia, slowly undressing and quite unaware of the other patient, so delectably naked and so unbelievably close to him.
With Rinaldo was Signor Minotti, softly, persuasively, reasoning with the actor.
"Go on," he was saying. "And-wear this condom. In a moment, through that door, will come the most beautiful nurse in all the hospitals of Rome. She works with me sometimes. She has prayed for this. She has begged it of me. She's stupid, perhaps-but you're her one great love. With her, it's all-consuming, all-pervading! And when have you, Rinaldo, turned away the attractions of a beautiful woman? AU I ask is that you wear this french letter. I know her parents very well. I wouldn't like her to be got with child."
Rinaldo had finally disrobed.
"You?" he asked, pointedly. "Do you remain, watching, while all this is going on?"
'I'll be-where I will be," said the gynaecologist.
The door opened, and as the naked girl, her titties jouncing, her buttocks swaying, minced into the room, the doctor disappeared through a curtain that hid the entrance to yet a third partition.
All three cubicles could now be seen.
In the centre one, Rinaldo was advancing with a huge erection upon the lush, nubile body of the blonde eighteen-year-old. In that instant, he became for her Tarzan and Barbarossa and Beau Geste and Zorro all merged into one. The nurse, wordlessly, awaited his onslaught, collapsing willingly upon the bed as Garcia pressed his powerful body to her lush, youthful, yielding curves.
In the adjoining partition, powerless to help herself, Elisabetta lay upon her couch, thighs parted and a-splay, feverish fingers busy in her gaping, lascivious cunt. The more the sounds of the frantic copulation came through the partition, the more furious became her own onslaught upon her own opened, spuming, raging cunt.
Meanwhile, in the third cubicle, Dr. Minotti himself, his penis erect and protruding through his gown, was masturbating himself unmercifully.
And as the mighty superman and his teenage partner collapsed in the sweet, consuming delight of their fuck. Dr. Minotti jerked savagely erect. He was coming, and he reached for a wide-mouthed wine-glass, into which he caught jet after jet of his violent ejaculation. Smiling, he placed the sperm-filled wineglass in a tiny oven heated to the exact temperature of the human body;
And, in her own booth, the soprano arrived at her own climax. Legs jerking spasmodically, she clamped her masturbating fingers upon her clitoris. She twitched. She jerked, bodily. She writhed and tormented herself in the agony of her, orgasm. And finally she fell back, spent and exhausted.
by some miracle of camera art, Dino had succeeded in dimming the lights on the screen, so that a deep sense of mystery suddenly pervaded the scene. Faintly Dr. Minotti could be seen entering the partitioned cubicle of Elisabetta. He approached her. And he parted her angered, inflamed labia, while she lay, unresisting, spent by the fury of her discharge.
The doctor produced, now, a test-tube-thick syringe. On the surface of an opaque glass tray stood the wineglass full of his own semen and another object-the wet, half-filled french letter that had been worn by Rinaldo.
The doctor took up his strange syringe, and, ignoring the french letter, whose hot contents were spilling on to the tray, he took up the wine-glass. Drawing up the entire contents of his own semen into the syringe, he lient to the cunt of the operatic star-and in one plunge of his thumb squirted the entire product of his own masturbation deep up the cervix of Elisabetta, who, beside herself with lust, received the entire load of bodywarm discharge deep within her vagina, high up into her sex-wet cervix, swooning with the delight at having received what she thought was the discharge of Rinaldo! As he left her, Carotti's relentless camera lingered upon the doctor's gloating face, contorted now in a hideous spasm that betrayed his perverse satisfaction over the monstrous substitution.
There was a pregnant silence.
Elisabetto's child had been born four months ago. And here, in the projection studio of Dino Carotti, was the evidence, naked and incontrovertibly true, that her child was that of her gynaecologist, and not that of her husband! Dino Carotti had dared to capture, not only her announced intention of cuckolding her husbandbut the double-cross that had been wrought upon her by her doctor as well!
"It's monstrous!" cried the baroness. "Dino! Swear you didn't fake the whole thing!"
Dino smiled. "The camera," he observed wryly, "docs not he."
"But, my God-Dino! Can it-can it possibly be true?"
"You saw what happened, didn't you?"
"But do you realise, man, that you have evidence right here that every gossip columnist the world over would give her right hand to possess?"
"I do not make movies to show to gossip columnists, Lillian. I make movies-mostly for my public. And sometimes, I make a movie or two for the amusement of my friends." He sent a glance around the floor of the projection studio.
"Tell me," said the baroness, excitedly. "Has anybody else seen this film?"
"One or two," replied Dino. "The film has its uses... You see-"
He indicated, delicately, the sea of bodies draped obscenely over the floor, dimly visible in the half-light that now flooded the room.
"Can't they-won't they talk ? Won't they tell others?"
"I hardly think so," said Dino evenly. "I never ask for secrecy. I expect it-that's all."
"But Elisabetta-she is my friend!"
"Well?" asked Dino. "Would you talk? Would you let on, to anybody else?"
"For heaven's sake-no. Why-one word of this, and the girl's career could be ruined for ever! Christ! The greatest gift to opera-the greatest single voice sincesince Caruso himself 1"
"Exactly," smiled Carotti. "Who'd harm so precious, so universal, a loved one? For that matter, who else but we know of the perversion of the Prime Minister's wife? And what of all the other intimacies I have revealed in this movie?"
Silence again fell, as, in reverie, the group did a mental playback of the unbelievably wicked documentary.
Then, one by one, or in couples, they struggled wearily to their feet, picked up their discarded garments, and moved off, thoughtfully, to their rooms.
Only the baroness remained, too stunned by what she had seen to move.
Dino crossed to where she sat, cross-legged, upon a cushion, her cunt gleaming blue and gaping through her sperm-flecked bush. He sank down beside her.
"I'm going to have you tonight, Lillian," he announced casually. "I'm going to have you tonight, for two reasons," he stated, as flatly as if he were telling somebody the time. "First, because even I can get randy, you know-"
He indicated his erected cock, trailing slime through his fly.
"And secondly?" asked the baroness, when he did not go on.
"Secondly," answered the Italian, "because tonight, you finally rid yourself of Heine Gorlitz. Personally, I think you've lost him-to Reggie, or to Leslie. But tonight, you lost him again. This time, to that girl you call Anaka-Lee. So come..."
"You, Dino," murmured the baroness, as she melted into his embrace, "are a genius. A photographic genius. And, I suspect, a psychiatric genius as well. But you are also-a shit I"
And she parted her generous thighs to bis silent, insistent hips.
And, as he entered her-she sighed...
That ecstatic first evening at the Carotti villa was something for which the baroness now allowed a respite. For in the aftermath of that evening had come the slow shock of new experience.
Not all, however, felt it to the same degree. The Kandis, stolid as two-thousand-year-old trunks in their own jungle forests were impermeable to the effect of what went on around them-Voracious in their appetities, they ranged apart from each other only to confirm, when they came together again, what they both knew-that only in each other lay perfect fulfilment.
Nor did Althea and Istvan suffer any scar. They had been content to enjoy the unfolding of a greater, and ever-richer, experience. For both of them, this had proved to be experience shared. In the long hours of the night, clasped sexlessly in the arms of each other, they would recount, with nothing but joy, the unfolding of each day's new delights.
But for Reginaldo and Leslie, for example, the buffettings of the baroness's party already spelt the beginning of the end. Each had perpetrated his first homosexual infidelity-their first since their love had begun for each other. The period of adjustment was upon them.
For Anaka-Lee, for Dr. McGarrity, and for the athletic German gymnast, something new had begun, as well. The Polynesian girl, all her lifetime spent in the seeking, had discovered at last her measure of satisfaction. That cervaical fucking! She gazed, starry-eyed, upon the German whenever they met.
For Shane McGarrity, ten years her companion during their wandering through Europe, the cessation of the appetites of his heretofore insatiable mistress had rolled away an enormous weight of pressure. And the doctor had begun to eye the powerfully-built Hildegarde with a new and ill-concealed light in his eye.
And Hildegarde, starved all her life for the admiration of a man she could really love, forced heretofore to be content with a lesbian for whom she was neither physically nor mentally suited, was not slow to accept this sudden and welcome show of masculine attention.
For Elaine too, her three years of intense devotion to Hildegarde seemed to be coming to an end. She had thrilled to the first piercing of her vagina by a solid, throbbing, blood-containing male prick. Whose it had been, she knew not. She knew just this-that it possessed the satisfying yielding of lustful masculinity, instead of the hard, unfeeling rubber of the dildoes she had formerly been accustomed to shove up her twat. And the latent fire in her smouldering eyes bespoke a seething desire to discover what man it had been who had thus infused a breath of new vitality into her heretofore passive, receptive cunt.
The baroness, perceiving what was taking place, metaphorically rubbed her hands with satisfaction.
She allowed one entire day for the effects to sink inby themselves. She took no further part in underlining anything for anybody who could not yet understand. Understanding would come.
She permitted a second day of naked, indolent dalliance at the side of the shimmering, blue-watered pool-a day devoted to the pleasure of intellectual conversation, to the sipping of tall, iced drinks, and to the luxury of frequent plunges into the soothing water.
Towards evening, she called Istvan and Althea. Istvan wore the briefest of shorts. Althea was entirely nudethe way she liked most to be, once her innate shyness, almost teenage modesty, had worn off.
"Tomorrow morning," she said. "Can we get rolling, early?"
"As soon as you wish, Madame," replied Istvan. "The bus is always ready." "At eight, say?"
"The destination?" countered Istvan. "Cannes," replied the baroness. "In one day?" asked Istvan. "Cannes is far from Rome."
"Where is half-way, then?" asked the baroness. "La Spezia?"
"Spezia will do," replied Istvan. "Eight hours, Althea?"
"Six-if we take lunch in the bus," she replied, equally confidently. "The road's very winding. It's not so much the distance as the slow travelling."
"Fine," said the baroness. "We leave, then, at eight?"