“That evening the Duchessa announced to the Duke she would go with me into town; and the Duke yawned as he had done so many times before and said how nice it was of me to entertain Her Grace during the evening; but he, alas, was addicted to his after-supper nap. They excused themselves and I went to wait for Catherine in the conservatory.
“In a quarter of an hour, she came down in a brown traveling cloak. Minutes later we hurried along the narrow street, passing that same door where I first had Guido. Soon we reached the graveyard.
“Pietro opened the door, saw I was with someone, shut it to a crack, and demanded what I wanted as though I were a stranger. I begged him to let us in, explaining that it was all right. A moment later, Guido squeezed out. For minutes of inane conversation I tried to explain my companion’s presence by innuendo: the grave digger stubbornly refused to acknowledge he knew me. At last I bluntly announced that Catherine wanted to take part in his sport. I reached between his legs and seized him in his wool pants: ‘How would you like to have this fine lady down beneath the table sucking that great sausage of yours while you gnaw the delicacies you’ve shoveled up. Here, I heard you joking with the boy about the pretty thing so untimely taken by a fall from her horse.’
“Guido finally appeared to understand.
“He laughed, nodded, pushed open the door.
“Catherine caught her breath. ‘. . . But I know the girl!’
“I confess, I was shocked.
“ ‘It’s the young wife of our cousin’s groom; she fell riding and hit her head.’
“Guido looked concerned all over again.
“ ‘Does that bother you?’ I asked.
“Catherine shook her head, perhaps too quickly. ‘No . . .’ The hood fell from her loose hair.
“In the corner, Pietro, shirtless, twisted his quite respectable cock between the buttons of his pants, as though it were a handkerchief, pawing his dirty feet on one another. From marks on the corpse’s belly, I guessed that Guido had let his son start already, seeing I had arrived late. Now Guido led the lady to the table with one hand, while pulling his shirt from his belt with the other. He thumbed apart his wooden fly buttons, gazed on the body a moment, then bent to the neck.
“Nothing, however, could induce Pietro to join the older laborer, now that this strange lady had joined. The Duchessa coaxed him. His father called him with descriptions of the delights awaiting the two of them. I even went to entertain him. He pushed my hand away when I reached; pushed my face away when I bent.
“What had made the boy grunt, moan, and gasp before, he now repulsed.
“We abandoned him shortly; and the Duchessa was a sway of brown hair against Guido’s flexed thigh, pale fingers on dark wool. I watched the grave digger and my lady-live toil below and above my lady-dead. Finally Catherine stood to watch. Guido tried to push her back down, but she became amorous, kissing his arms and back: where her lips left, her tongue remained. Guido’s teeth tore the cold mouth.
“ ‘Kiss me that way,’ Catherine whispered. ‘Me, me! Ah, now! What do you want of the corpse?’ She tried to slip between Guido and his gelid mistress. He shoved her. But she only tried harder. I could see, by his jerky movement, anger building, though he tried to contain himself. To appease him, I dropped on my knees to pleasure him as my habit was. But my lady-live seized him from my mouth. ‘In me . . . In me . . . !’ she pleaded. I was kneeling on her cloak. She wore beneath it the most translucent of shifts, which she had now bunched to her belly. She worried his brown shaft in her chestnut hair, tried to insert it in her wet slot. He twisted to the side long enough for her to gain half its length. Inflamed by part measure she thrust herself in his way in earnest. Guido held her face from his sight by the flat of his hand while he gnawed the breast beneath. ‘No! no . . . you must give your lips and teeth to—’
“I saw, past their legs, pietro move to the fireplace. For a moment the fire behind darkened him to a demon. He snatched the gleaming cleaver from the mantel, and hurled himself at the Duchessa and his father. He yanked Catherine’s hair back, brought the cleaver down—
“I cried out and leaped to pull him off. He got a second blow.
“All three were on the floor.
“I pulled Pietro back by the shoulders. There was blood on Catherine’s forehead—but though her eyes were closed, she was breathing. I realized, even as Pietro struck a third time, then flung the weapon clattering to the wall, he’d hit with the flat of the blade!
“ ‘Now, Papa! Now she’ll be still, like the other ones, like the beautiful other ones, Papa!’
“Guido had already gone down on her. Pietro gnawed her shoulder and pushed his fingers into her cunt. ‘Oh, you get your big dick in there, Papa! Fuck her, fuck her and then let me fuck her!’ Father and son, faces pressed together, bit her belly. When Guido rose, Pietro clawed into her like a nervous weasel. She bled. I rose to stop him, but Guido halted me.
“While she was still as the corpse on the table, she attracted them. They invited me to take her. I did. Their excitement excited me. As well, I realized that while I covered her lacerated body, it was harder for them to wound her further—though, as I toiled in her, they nipped at her feet and ankles, or shoved their fingers in alongside my prick. Between us, we entered her nine, ten times. But though she kept them stiff, neither Guido nor Pietro could empty himself into her. Only I filled her cavity. Then father and son got their heads between her legs and I drew their final juices. Several times I heard Guido restrain the boy: ‘No, no, go in her gently. We have all night, and the beauty on the table still to go . . .’
“We rested a while.
“Once I opened my eyes to see Guido, in the firelight, kneeling to lick the blood from the face of his sleeping son. Toward dawn, I felt Guido rousing me with a boot, and Pietro kicking at me with his bare foot. ‘Come to the table . . .’
“Later, when Guido was buttoning his fly, and Pietro had gone to the wall to pee, I helped the Duchessa up. She was barely able to walk. Guido held the door silently for us. The cool air revived her a little as we walked along the road. It was growing light.
“ ‘Are you . . .?’ I ventured inanely.
“She looked at me with bruised and scabbed face. ‘Go away . . .’ she said. ‘Go away from this town.’
“ ‘But—’
“Her expression was suddenly recognizable through the injury. I started at it and tried not to show my start.
“I said, ‘You shouldn’t have—’
“She stopped me: ‘My husband is looking for me. I shall take him to the cemetery and he will have those two monsters arrested. They will be tried for their abominations and hung.’
“ ‘But—’
“ ‘My husband is looking for me, Jonathan,’ she said. ‘Do you hear the horses . . . ?’
“There were horses.
“ ‘Those can’t be the Duke’s . . .’
“ ‘Don’t you think I told him where I was going? If I was not back before dawn, he was to send men out to look for me. Go away. Or I shall tell them your part in this and you will be arrested too.’
“I turned and fled into the bushes at the side of the road as the hooves clattered on the turning. There was no time to warn Guido and Pietro. I hid in the woods all day. Finally I got up courage to return to the cemetery in the late afternoon. The shack was a smoking scab at the graveyard’s edge. Distraught and angry townsmen clumped together, muttering about ‘the beast and his half-witted bastard,’ and their audacity to abduct the Duchessa herself. How fortunate, they declared, that she had escaped with her honor, yet was able to expose their atrocities to her husband who had arrived to save her, in time. No, she was upset, and the doctors said she must stay indoors several weeks; no one was to see her.
“I left the town; shortly afterwards, the country.
“As I drifted east, I pondered on all this. Soon I was in countries where life meant much less than in Europe. The particularities by which coming and killing could link up surp
assed all I had heretofore experienced. But still I pondered Catherine’s actions. During those periods which all of us who live this particular life must endure, when I lose all taste for women, she exemplifies that fantasy the bourgeois misogynist has predicated to justify his own inadequacy. But at other times, when concourse with my own sex revolts me, I see her more generously, and I realize that the actions of all of us were webbed by circumstance, bound by whatever forces move a Duke and Duchess, a grave digger and his son, a wanderer in an alien land.
“She was generous enough to let me escape an easy hanging.
“I return little enough by letting her escape my censure.
“Toward the end of two years’ wanderings I stayed a double month in India, most of it in the house of Geana Liana, a woman not twenty-one, but in whose palatial establishment, inherited from a doting ‘uncle,’ acts were committed hourly by Indians and Europeans alike, night and day, that would make the deeds of the grave diggers, were they lights in the sky, fade—to take an image from Sappho—as the moon blinds out the near stars. Those talents I had begun to develop with the Count were brought to fruition there: I ministered deeds, envisioned more arduous ones, participated in many; often I helped the participants recuperate.
“Geana herself, as I drank Turkish coffee and ate candied fruit on the balcony and she painted at my portrait, asked, ‘Jon? What do you want to do?’ Eyes winged with kohl, she smiled behind her veil. ‘You are a doctor who cannot heal anyone. You say you have studied the ways of different cultures, yet you are amazed at everything you see. Do you paint?’
“ ‘I draw a little—’ I had actually had a job as a medical illustrator for one term.
“ ‘Tomorrow I will loan you paints and brushes. And you will paint a mural on the wall of the West Chamber with the white jade columns.’
“I painted the wall. Three grisailles, later glazed: two men, a man and a woman, and two women made their loves on swirled sheets. Beneath the triptych was a panel as long as the three together, of ties, underwear, loafers, high heel shoes, slips, brassieres. She found it amusing.”
The captain’s teeth were yellow in the candlelight. “I know Geana Liana’s house near Bombay. I bought two blond children from her seven years ago.”
“Yes, she sells children.”
“And I know the paintings. She keeps them well cleaned.”
“She does?”
The captain nodded.
“Suetonius describes the wall mural of the Capri pleasure palace of the Emperor Tiberius. It was reputedly destroyed when the palace fell. Later, it was rumored to have survived in the Vatican collection of forbidden art. But there was a mural in her hall that much better suited the description than the one in Rome . . . You say she honors my paintings?”
The captain nodded. “You say she was not twenty-one when you knew her. When I bought Kirsten and Gunner from her, she was over forty. And your paintings were honored.”
Proctor nodded, smiling.
“So I became a painter. And also a writer. When I struck out for home, I had all my adventures in a trunk full of notebooks. I wrote a novel. For a decade after its publication, it was moderately popular. The book, which I published at twenty-six, recounted the wanderings of a young man in search of himself across our extravagant world. I reached this country with my sheaf of manuscripts, and had no trouble selling it. All of what I’ve told you is in it. But how transformed! The Count is an effete old man who sits sadly in cafes, ogling pretty girls. Olaf and Tossi are there—his black and blond bodyguards, as I describe them. And the peasant girl crying in the empty rooms of the Zurich hotel where the Count’s last party was held before his disappearance has become someone kissed in the shadow by a strange, dark man who would not say his name. Guido and Pietro—the upright grave digger and his son who befriended the hero? Catherine and her Duke? Oh, they are there: the benevolent aristocrats who aid him because they sense some spark of vision to be nurtured. Why does the Duchessa send him away, after a mysterious night walking among the graves? She feels attracted to him, but loves the duke too deeply to hurt him with jealousy. Even Geana Liana—oh, I allowed hints of exotic intrigues to move about her as she helps the hero to his artistic burgeonings—in my story he paints her portrait, I believe—but the hints are misted with the Eastern Unknown.
“Oh, I lied and lied in that book!
“It was popular with both critics and readers. As I said, for a decade after its publication I enjoyed a certain literary celebrity. People awaited my next novel. Thank God, there was none! I know now that Geana was right and that I am a painter. I know that these chimeras I render guard a truth, the proof of which is—and it is terribly sad that in the twentieth century, hedging into the twenty-first, this is still so valid a test—so few people will buy them.”
He glanced at one of the smaller paintings: on a Confederate flag, spread across a table, were two bronze plates. A white man’s testicles and penis lay on one; a black man’s on the other.
“Money from the book’s continued sales has kept me frugally happy since.” Once more Proctor closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall. “So you have seen Geana recently—”
“Tell me more about Catherine.”
“Yes . . .” Proctor whispered. “Yes. I love her, you know . . .”
“But why is she here? When did she leave Italy to return to this country, this town, where the barkeepers keep such strange creatures in their cellars.”
Proctor’s eyebrows went up. “Ah . . . that is the ultimate flattery. She came, after the Duke had died, because I was here. Even—she told me—the old cemetery in that little town was closed.”
“What details . . . ?”
“They are private, and not for this book. Because they entail love—you frown, because I can love the woman I described to you? Yes, I suppose she is evil. But this must be an evil story. And in that this part of the tale concerns the form of love, it has little place in the rest of the narrative. It is only natural that she should have been as fascinated by me as I by her. Lean close to me, Capain, so I can whisper this part secretly to you, so that the spirits that hover and pry and try to overhear, will catch nothing of this section. You ask about the poor thing Nazi keeps in his basement. That mad hunchback was once her lover, as was I. Now lean closer . . .”
White and black, the two heads came close to one another. The story progresses in a low voice. The candle flame deviled the images about the walls.
FOUR
HOMUNCULI
Oh, this is admirable! Here I ha’ stolen one of Doctor Faustus’ conjuring books, and i’ faith I mean to search some circles for my own use. Now will I make all the maidens in our parish dance at my pleasure, stark naked before me; and so by that means I shall see more than e’er I felt or saw before.
—Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
Gunner pulled the blanket from his shoulder, because it had moved enough to wake him. And calloused fingers ploughed his hair, locked behind his neck. “Suck it . . .” in a bear’s growl, roughed with sleep.
His face came up against harsh cloth that stank, crisp hair, and a cock slippery with mucus. Grunts; legs locked him. He grabbed the buttocks that lifted into his face.
Someone nuzzled between his legs; his legs opened.
“Right, boy! Suck it!”
Grappled ass; pulled him over. He lay on a hairy belly, his own dick in the bald man’s face. Fingers probed his. His palms identified their acts in the dark. Somebody worked Bull’s pants down further: Gunner heard the rush of cloth on skin. Hairy legs rose about his ears. He let the cock slip and nosed balls. Bull pushed him further. Dry hair cut at his tongue. Then tongue tip found the soft home. His face wedged in hot muscle. Bull squirmed on Gunner’s flexing face. Hands again: he came up, again, to nose a boy’s crotch. Dick, thick as Bull’s, but inches shorter: Benny held Gunner’s face, hunched and arched, hunched and arched. Gunner, freed, is distracted a moment by a breast brushing his cheek. Grasped at (she, gasping
beside him in the dark), opened his mouth to, but it left. He went down for ass again, found it full of cock. He licked the pulsing entrance, balls in both hands. Bull: arched at the fucking thrust, pulled Gunner by the hair to finger his iron in the boy’s throat. Benny (arrived with the tall, white-haired Proctor, Proctor who rose and fell now, his slimy great crank plunging through Gunner’s fist into his sister’s drooling crack), moved away in the dark. And Gunner was yanked around, and someone grabbed his hands, tongued, prodded, licked. Then, pulled the boy down, his lips opening under: tongue and prod, and suck. Another body wriggled on top of them. Crushed in the interleave, Gunner felt cock thrust in his face, and gathered himself about it, holding by the wet hairs. The body on top floundered, the rigid muscles hardened. Then, in the give, Gunner slipped out. He crawled across bodies. His hand hit a shoulder he knew. He moved his hand up the hot, wet neck to rough hair.
The captain halted long enough to raise his face. Thick lips opened over Gunner’s. The captain filled the boy’s mouth with his tongue. And raised further to unstick Kim, who moaned till something moved to fill her. Gunner felt his master’s hand press his face down the sweating belly. The familiar cock plugged his throat, flavored with unfamiliar juice. A chuckle shook the belly above him. Gunner worked his mouth around the shaft. One cock was snatched from his face, another thrust in: it swelled, heated, and bellied his cheeks with bitter syrup. The captain’s fingertips were like pebbles on the back of his skull. And the captain’s laughter was like (suede . . . ? maroon . . . ?)