She got up in all the beauty and intensity of her nakedness and poured two glasses of wine. She lit two cigarettes and gave him one of them--the roles were reversed, she was now the mistress serving the slave, rewarding him for the pleasure he had given her.
"I'll get dressed and then I'll leave, but, first, I'd like to talk a little."
"There's nothing to talk about. That's all I wanted, and you were marvelous. I'm tired now and I have to go back to London tomorrow."
He lay down and closed his eyes. Maria didn't know if he was just pretending to sleep and she didn't care; she smoked a leisurely cigarette and slowly sipped her wine, with her face pressed against the window pane, looking out at the lake opposite and wishing that someone, on the other shore, could see her like this--naked, replete, satisfied, confident.
She got dressed and left without saying goodbye, and was not bothered whether she opened the door or he did, because she wasn't sure that she wanted to come back.
Terence heard the door close, waited to see if she would come back, saying that she had forgotten something, and only after a few minutes did he get up and light another cigarette.
The girl had style, he thought. She had withstood the whip well, although this was the oldest, the most common and the least severe of the punishments. For a moment, he sat remembering the first time he had experienced that mysterious relationship between two beings who want to be close, but can only be so by inflicting suffering.
Millions of couples out there practiced the art of sadomasochism every day, without even realizing it. They went to work, came back, complained about everything, insulted their wife or were insulted by her, felt wretched, but were, nonetheless, tightly bound to their own unhappiness, not realizing that all it would take was a single gesture, a final goodbye, to free them from that oppression. Terence had experienced this with his wife, a well-known English singer; he was tormented by jealousy, he made scenes, and spent whole days dosed up with painkillers, whole nights hopelessly drunk. She loved him and couldn't understand why he behaved like that; he loved her and couldn't understand his own behavior. It was as if the agony that the one inflicted on the other was necessary, fundamental to life.
One day, a musician--whom he had always thought of as very strange, because he seemed so normal in the midst of all those exotic people--left a book behind in the studio: Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Terence started leafing through it and, as he read, he began to understand himself better.
"The lovely woman took off her clothes and picked up a long, short-handled whip. 'You asked for it,' she said, 'so I'm going to whip you.' 'Oh, yes,' murmured her lover, 'please, I beg you.'"
His wife was on the other side of the glass screen, rehearsing. She had asked them to turn off the microphones that allowed the technicians to listen in to everything, and they had done so. Terence was thinking that perhaps she was making a date with the pianist, and he realized that she was driving him mad, but it was as if he was so accustomed to suffering now that he could not live without it.
"I'm going to whip you," said the naked woman in the book he was reading. "Oh, yes, please, I beg you."
He was a good-looking man, and a force to be reckoned with in the record company, why did he need to lead such a life?
Because he wanted to. He deserved to suffer because life had been so good to him, and he wasn't worthy of all these blessings--money, respect, fame. He felt that his career was leading him to a point where he would become dependent on success, and that frightened him, because he had seen a lot of people plummet from the heights.
He read the book. He started reading everything he could find about the mysterious union between pain and pleasure. His wife found the videos he was renting and the books he was hiding from her, and asked him what it was all about, was he sick? Terence said no, it was just research he was doing for a new cover. Then he said nonchalantly:
"Perhaps we should try it."
They did. They began very timidly, using the manuals they found in porn shops. Gradually, they developed new techniques, took their activities to dangerous limits, and yet they felt that their marriage was even stronger. They were accomplices in something hidden, forbidden, proscribed.
Their joint experience was transformed into art: they created new outfits--leather with metal studs. His wife went on stage wearing boots and a suspender belt and wielding a whip, and the audience went wild. Her new record shot to the top of the charts in England and went on to triumph in the rest of Europe. Terence was surprised how young people accepted his personal fantasies as perfectly natural, and the only explanation he could find was that it provided a means of expressing repressed violence in an intense but inoffensive manner.
The whip came to be the group's logo and was reproduced on T-shirts, fake tattoos, stickers and postcards. Terence's intellectual bent drove him to track down the origins of all this, so t
hat he could understand himself better.
These origins did not lie, as he had told Maria, with those penitents trying to drive away the Black Death. Ever since the Dark Ages, man has understood that suffering, if confronted without fear, is his passport to freedom.
Egypt, Rome and Persia all shared the notion that a man can save his country and his world by sacrificing himself. Whenever there was a great natural disaster in China, the emperor was punished, because he was the divinity's Earthly representative. In ancient Greece, the finest Spartan warriors were whipped once a year, from morning till night, in homage to the goddess Artemis, while the crowd urged them on, calling on them to withstand the pain with dignity, for it was preparing them for the world of war. At the end of the day, the priests would examine the wounds on the warriors' backs and use them to predict the city's future.
The priests of the desert, in an ancient, fourth-century Christian community that grew up around a monastery in Alexandria, used flagellation as a way of driving out demons or of proving the futility of the body in the spiritual search. The history of saints was full of similar examples--St. Rosa running through the garden, letting the thorns tear her skin, St. Domingos Loricatus whipping himself every night before sleeping, the martyrs who voluntarily offered themselves up to a slow death on the cross or being torn apart by wild animals. They all said that pain, once mastered, could lead to religious ecstasy.
Recent, unconfirmed studies indicated that a particular kind of fungus with hallucinogenic properties grew in the wounds and caused visions. The pleasure was so intense that the practice soon left the monasteries and convents and spread throughout the world.
In 1718, A Treatise on Self-flagellation was published, which showed how to achieve pleasure through pain, but without harming the body. At the end of that century, there were dozens of places in Europe where people were prepared to suffer in order to attain joy. There are records of kings and princesses who had their slaves whip them, until they found that another kind of pleasure--albeit more exhausting and less gratifying--was to be found not only in being whipped, but also in inflicting pain.
While he was smoking his cigarette, Terence took a certain pleasurable pride in knowing that most people would be unable to understand what he was thinking.
It was better to belong to an exclusive club to which only the chosen had access. He remembered again how the torment of marriage had been transformed into the miracle of marriage. His wife knew that he visited Geneva for this purpose and she didn't mind; on the contrary, in this sick world, she was glad that her husband got the reward he wanted after a hard week at work.
The girl who had just left the room had understood everything. He felt that his soul was very close to hers, although he wasn't yet ready to fall in love, for he loved his wife. But he liked to think that he was free and could dream of a new relationship.
All he had to do was to get her to attempt the next and most difficult stage: the transformation into Sacher-Masoch's "Venus in Furs," the Dominatrix, the Mistress, capable of humiliating and punishing without pity. If she passed the test, he was ready to open his heart and let her in.
From Maria's diary, when she was still drunk on vodka and pleasure: