Thongs

— 4-

I was wakened by exploring hands.

The lips fitted around my nipple like a vice and the small bead was sucked inwards and stretched. My thighs twitched and a controlling finger took me like a hook. Meat on a hook. The image stuck with me and I groaned and slid my belly against his.

We had sweated. The weather was cold, but unlike most rooms in Spain, the rooms of this villa were well heated.

"Fuck me, darling!" I whispered in the darkness. "Fuck me to death!"

His cock was in again, hard, greasy, his hot hair in mine.

A delicious hot sensation of well-being grew at my loins as his vibrating strokes increased. It seemed to be endless, the pushing and the sliding and the slime.

He muttered something as he came, quivering as the strength left him, and he fell asleep at once in my arms.

I lay awake in the darkness, wondering at the tender passion this gentle lover inspired in me. Was my life a mistake? Was it here in these doting arms that I was intended by nature to find fulfillment?

What if he made me pregnant with all this doting love? How could he help doing so?

We had not yet spoken of the pledge. Would he keep it? Certainly not if I was against it, if I asked him to take me away to safety and to love.

I almost convinced myself.

But how foolish of me! How could this passion last? What if I bore his child? Gradually the fire would turn to cinders and he would look about speculatively at other women. And then would I take a lover? Or more than one?

Futility. Life held nothing more for me than anticlimax, to be raised periodically to a high level of passion and then to sink once more, to the depths. My body suddenly sickened of this cloying love. Gradually, like a shadow in my blood, moved the absolute knowledge of the thongs.

Thongs.

Thongs.

Thongs.

What was the soft, docile beast lying at my side, simulating rape according to rite and instruction? Do this. Do that.

With no sting of the real.

With no butcher's red hands.

Imagine hands. Broad and thick. The nails clogged with blood. Of other victims.

Imagine a woman's white belly, its soft blotting-paper finish. The black cunt. And glimmering underneath, red, like a centipede. Soft lover, you forget history, and the claw.

I was staring up into darkness at the ceiling above. The man beside me no longer existed. He was void. A civilized creature.

Oh Miguel, after this sickly hell the gore and triumph of the cross!

Come! Live in the present. Many weeks till the cross. This man who sleeps at your side like a great tame brute, excite him, strike him to the quick, make him turn; perhaps yet he will have a readiness to do murder…

"My darling!" I whispered. "Wake up! Your Carmencita wants to speak to you!" I sensed his eyes flicker.

"Carmencita!"

"El toro…" I whispered.

In Spain, the man dies in agony in the form of the bull. The woman with her subtle changes of tone, the flirt, the repulser of advances, the one who piques, the one who controls and kills. It is all there in the bull ring, in the sun of the late afternoon. The romantic passion, the striving after the absolute, tends towards death. This is the passion of the decadent Spanish men, the lovers: sadness, ecstasy, tragedy.

"El toro…"

And this man beside me was a Spaniard. For all his youth he is old. He is tired. He wants to be mastered and tamed. He wants to be taught to accept death. Kill me now, quickly, you have flirted extravagantly with the cape when I was most wild, you have repulsed me with the horses and the pike to show me you are another with an alien brute strength. You have piqued me, offered to take control. And now with the shadow of the red cape when my head is hanging low and my nostrils drip saliva on the sand, you are declaring yourself my master and asking me humbly to accept defeat. Come, you are saying, I understand your passion, I will dispatch you quickly, like a lover…

But he is the bull.

And who is to be dispatched, he or myself?

"Carmencita!"

"Yes, little bull?"

"Nothing. Just Carmencita."

Communion. So?

I can love my murderer. I am certain of his intentions. I can trust him.

I slipped out from his arms before he became aware I was going.

"Carmencita!"

"I am going to bathe, darling. Will you bathe with me?"

"Of course!"

"Come then, put your hands on my hips and follow me in the dark. I know the way!"

We walked over the thick carpets to the door of my private bathroom. I turned on the light.

"Run the water," I said.

He bent down at once to the great black sunken bath and the water gushed in through the faucet.

We stepped in, one at either end, and locked our thighs. The water lapped up as far as my breasts which floated on top like water lilies.

"Passionate love is the fear of death, Prince! You want to sink out of existence under another's control."

He was stroking my left calf.

"You talk so much of death, Carmencita!"

"Our honeymoon ends in death, Prince."

"It is unbelievable!"

"It is certain."

He didn't reply.

"You'll break your word?"

"No."

"I shall be crucified, Prince, and tortured to death on the cross. I want death because I also fear it. To accept it in its most hideous form is to conquer it."

I smiled, pleased with myself.

"That is the contradiction of human existence, its negation is its affirmation and its affirmation is its negation."

"Let me kill you," he said quietly.

I stared at him.

"Would you, Prince? Would you?"

He paled.

I smiled.

"There is plenty of time, Prince. Soap my breasts and watch the bubbles break on my nipples!"

As he came over me with the soap, it occurred to me that if I knew such a man were capable of killing me, I might not find it necessary to leave him. Oh, foolish Prince…