Against the Day (171 page)

“Wrong sod, I’m afraid,” Cyprian
would only mumble, with what might, in a person more vain, pass for
selfdeprecation. Most who met him found it difficult to reconcile his appetite
for sexual abasement—its specific carnality— with what had to be
termed a religious surrender of the self. Then Yashmeen entered the picture,
had a look, and understood in a pulsebeat, in the simple elegant turn of a
wrist, what she was looking at.

The hope it ignited was
unexpected—almost, in her life at the moment, unaffordable. But hadn’t
she just been out in the Riviera casinos willing to risk far more against
longer odds? Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected
salvation in codes and governments, ever more

willing to settle for suburban
narratives and diminished payoffs—what were the chances of finding anyone
else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it? And
Cyprian, of all people. Dear Cyprian.

Then something also began to happen that
was very odd indeed. For years Yashmeen had been the one obliged to put up with
passions directed at her by others, settling for moments of amusement,
preferring like a spectator at a conjuring performance not to know too much
about how it worked. Heaven knew she had tried to be a good sport. But sooner
or later she would run out of patience. A certain exasperated sigh and another
brokenhearted amateur was left to flounder in the erotic swamp. But now, for
the first time, with Cyprian’s return, something was different, as if with his
miraculous resurrection something had also been restored to her, though she
resisted naming it.

Men had never provided much
challenge—all her memorable successes were with women. Having learned
how, with little difficulty, to command the desires of London shopgirl and
haughty Girtonian alike, Yashmeen was agreeably surprised now to find the same
approach working with Cyprian, only more so. The gentle makebelieve of
princesses and maidservants and so forth was deepened, extended into realms of
real power, real pain. He seemed not held back by the caveats she had come to
sense ever in effect, retarding the souls of British womanhood—willing to
transgress perhaps any limit she might devise. It was more than the usual history
of flogging one expected from British schoolboys of all ages. It was almost an
indifference to self, in which desire was directed at passing beyond the
conditions of the self—at first she thought, as other women on the face
of it might, well then it’s only selfhatred isn’t it, perhaps a class
thing—but no, that
wasn’t
it. Cyprian took altogether too much
pleasure in what she obliged him to do.
“ ‘
Hate’?
no—I don’t know what this is,” he protested, peering in dismay at his
naked form in her mirror, “except that it’s yours
. . . .
” With such smoothly presentable curves, this could have
been narcissism—but that wasn’t quite it either. His gaze was not for the
mirror, but for her. At first she thought to cover the mirror when they were
together, and learned that it made no difference. His eyes remained adoringly
lifted to Yashmeen alone, except for the times when she commanded him to direct
them elsewhere.

   
“No,”
he whispered.

   
“Are
you saying no to me? I shall give you such a thrashing—”

   
“I
shan’t let you do that,” in the same whisper.

She adjusted the line of her
shoulders, a gesture she had learned particularly aroused him. “Right. I
believe I shall have that defiant bottom. Now, Cyprian.”

“No,”
even as his small sleeklygloved hands moved languorously to the fastenings of
his trousers, and he turned and slowly undid them, and lowered them for her,
looking back over his shoulder.

He
thought he knew being aflame. But this was sustained explosion, reaching now
and then a quite unendurable
brísance.
Yet he endured it, not so much
because it was her will as, unbelievably, what had become her need. How could
he disappoint her need? It seemed too ridiculous, though the evidence lay
everywhere. She was behaving like a lovesmitten girl. She brought Cyprian
armloads of flowers and extravagant underlinen. She praised him outside his
hearing, at what some might have found excessive length. He had only to be
minutes late for a rendezvous to find her anxiously trembling, moments away
from tears. No formal cruelties she might then devise for his penance would
quite cancel his memory of her undissembled need, as if he really had surprised
her in a vulnerable moment.

“I have lived under this curse so
long,” he confessed to her, in the breathless, nearly tearful tone he soon
found himself slipping into, the equivalent in discourse of sinking to her
feet, in a quest for certainty beneath them, “who’d’ve imagined anyone would
see into it, to meet its terms so exactly
.
. .
so honorably
. . .
Colonel
Khäutsch was cruel, at least for as long as he was erect, Theign was content to
have power and be obeyed, those were desires I could understand, but, but. . .”

“Before this is done with,” she
informed him, “if it ever is, you will no longer imagine, you will believe.”
Amused at the melodrama in her own voice but herself half believing what she’d
said, her great eyes shining so. Cruelly, but that was the least of it. Except
for a holidaygoer at Wigan once, whose words might have been partially obscured
by a strange friedpotato sandwich, it was probably the most romantic
declaration anyone had yet made him.

He kept on trying to understand. One
could look out over London, from the top of the Earl’s Court Wheel at twilight,
one by one as the lights came on and the drapes were drawn. It was going on
behind every other window one could see, common as stars in the sky, the
reversals of power, wives over husbands, pupils over masters, troopers over
generals, wogs over whites, the old expected order of things all on its head, a
revolution in the terms of desire, and yet, at Yashmeen’s feet, that seemed
only the outskirts—the obvious or sacramental form of the thing
. . . .

“Don’t get too spiritual about this,”
she cautioned, though it was meant perhaps more for herself, and her own
outlandish hopes on the subject. “You know it’s your body that loves this,”
stroking him untenderly, “not only

parts of your body traditional to
such matters but slowly, as your education proceeds, you may be certain, with
every square inch of it, every hair, whether left in place or painfully
removed, every starved nerve
. . . .

“This again.” She nicked at it with a
scarlet fingernail, and he drew a sharp breath not altogether in pain. “You are
thinking about a man. Tell me.”

“Yes.” He would not insist on
“love”—but what else could one feel just at this moment? “Men, actually.”

   
“Yes.
Not
one particular
man?”

He was silent for a while. “No. A
generic shadow—with a substantial physique I suppose
. . . .
That doesn’t mean—” he turned
to her, borne on a wave of undisguised tenderness.

“Don’t for a moment imagine that I
shall crop my hair and put on a dildo for you, Cyprian.”

“I wouldn’t dream of asking. Of
begging.” As if he could not quite resist, he added, “Of course if there were
any changes
I
might make, hair, you
know, wardrobe, maquillage sort of thing that
you’d
find
more appealing—”

She laughed, pretending to examine
him by the candlelight.
“ ‘
Of
course.’ You’re nearly my height, your bones are fine and your features
delicate enough, but the brain behind them is filled with little, I fear,
beyond the usual boy’s delusions about the charms of womankind. As you are, you
cannot rival the least
clairvoyante
of my friends.”

   
“And
as I might be?”

   
“Am I
your tutoress? Come here, then.”

Late at night
they would lie together watching lights,
moving and still, reflected in the canals.

“What was there for you to doubt?”
she whispered. “I have loved women, as you have loved men—”

   
“Perhaps
not ‘loved’—”

“—and what of it? We can do
whatever we can imagine. Are we not the world to come? Rules of proper conduct
are for the dying, not for us.”

   
“Not
for you, anyway. You’re much braver than I.”

   
“We
will be as brave as we must.”

It was midApril
, Carnevale had been over for weeks,
and Lent was coming to a close, skies too drawn and pallid to weep for the fate
of the cyclic Christ, the city having slowly regained a maskless condition,
with a strange

dull shine on the paving of the Piazza, less a reflection of
the sky than a soft

glow from regions below. But the silent communion of masks
was not quite

done here.

On one of the outer islands in the
Lagoon, which had belonged to the Spongiatosta family for centuries, over an
hour away even by motor craft, stood a slowly drowning palazzo. Here at
midnight between Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday began the secret
counterCarnevale known as Carnesalve, not a farewell but an enthusiastic
welcome to flesh in all its promise. As object of desire, as food, as temple,
as gateway to conditions beyond immediate knowledge.

With no interference from authority,
church or civic, all this bounded world here succumbed to a masked imperative,
all hold on verbatim identities loosening until lost altogether in the
delirium. Eventually, after a day or two, there would emerge the certainty that
there had always existed separately a world in which masks were the real,
everyday faces, faces with their own rules of expression, which knew and
understand one another—a secret life of Masks. It was not quite the same
as during Carnevale, when civilians were allowed to pretend to be members of
the Maskworld, to borrow some of that hieratic distance, that deeper intimacy
with the unexpressed dreams of Masks. At Carnevale, masks had suggested a
privileged indifference to the world of flesh, which one was after all bidding
farewell to. But here at Carnesalve, as in espionage, or some revolutionary
project, the Mask’s desire was to be invisible, un threatening, transparent yet
mercilessly deceptive, as beneath its dark authority danger ruled and all was
transgressed.

Cyprian rode over with the Prince and
Princess in their steam launch, embarking in the twilight from the landing at
Ca’ Spongiatosta. For half an hour or so, as the moon rose and took over the
sky, Cyprian had the disoriented sense that they had ascended, high above the
Lagoon, the sky a smudged wilderness of illuminated smoke, colors everywhere
more brilliant than expected, and from the perilous altitude he thought he saw
far below merchant ships getting up steam, produceboats on the way back out to
Torcello and Malamocco, vaporetti and gondolas
.
. . .

They could hear the gathering for
miles across the water. “It must have been like this a hundred years ago,” the
Prince observed, “off San Servolo, with all the lunatics screaming.” The light
ahead was a soiled electrical yellow, glaring off the water, intensifying as
they approached. They pulled up to an ancient stone quay, the doomed palazzo
swaying above them. Servants with torches, dressed in black tonight as Doge ~
Gradengio’s cutthroat squad the Signori di Notte, escorted them inside.

·
    
·
    
·

Near midnight
, Cyprian, all decked out in a black
taffeta ball toilette borrowed from the Principessa, an abbreviated mask of
black leather over his eyes, his waist drawn in to an impossibly slender
circumference, his small painted face framed by Signor Fabrizio’s reimagining
of Yashmeen’s hair, curled, powdered, sculpted, woven with seed pearls and
Parma violets, was making a devastating highheeled entrance down marble stairs
and into the sea of masks and flesh below. Reef, up in one of the loggie, just
about to light up a cheroot, stood gaping instead, not sure at first who it
was, finding himself with an erection which now threatened to demolish the
trousers of the Pierrot costume Yashmeen had insisted he wear. With some idea
of getting a closer look, he wandered down into the general commotion, through
which a small dance orchestra was just audible.

“Well howdy there, cowpoke.” It was
Cyprian all right, his voice soft and amused, sent upward into a register
suitable for dalliance, standing so close that Reef could smell his perfume,
something floral, elusive, nightblooming
. .
. .
Without delay the youth, out for mischief tonight, had reached his
tiny gloved hand boldly to stroke first Reef’s nipples, also by now grown
painfully rigid, and then, no this could not be happening, Reef’s penis, which,
far from shrinking from the brazen assault, now continued to exhibit a mind of
its own, Cyprian, his eyes hypnotically fixed on Reef’s, was about to say more
when his playful hand was suddenly grasped and pulled away.