by Patricio
(08/04/04)
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Chapter 9
The pictures of her cunt she sends him become more extravagant. She tugs and pulls her labia into strange formations -- deformations -- and he sends her one-word emails in reply.
Suffer, he writes.
Lovely, he writes.
Pain, he writes.
She gets drunk one night with a friend and almost tells her about the Englishman. Then, maybe it's the hangover talking, but the next day she becomes obsessed with the idea that she'll have to move away, that he's too dangerous for her, that she has to stop communicating with him or something terrible will happen.
Come away with me, he writes, the day after she stops sending him pictures of her cunt, just for one night.
It's the first time that he sends her a violet, an actual flower. Even that seems dangerous to her. She'll neglect it, she'll forget to water it and it'll die and then, and then, symbolically...
Come away with me, he writes again, please.
She plays the Norah Jones album. Come away with me, sings the music. She patrols her rooms in the night. She has stopped chaining herself to the rings and hooks he has built into her home, but it doesn't help. She is chained to him, invisibly, more powerfully than by mere physical accoutrements.
She re-pots the violet in a bigger container, writes to him that she can never, never come away with him, imagines herself lost in a deep dark forest, tries to unsend the email, but it's too late.
She goes to work the next day and can't concentrate on anything.
When she leaves the office, late, he's standing across the road, under an awning to shelter from the rain, holding another plant in both his hands. He's never waited there for her before. She goes across to him, regardless of the shower damping down her violet hair. A car's horn blares as she walks carelessly amidst traffic. "When?" she asks before he can speak. "When shall I come away with you?"
She wears only a black dress that ends just above her knees. No shoes, no jewelry, no underwear, no overnight bag. He collects her at 4 p.m. on Saturday. He is, unexpectedly, driving a small blue van with the name of a building firm badly painted out along the side. "In the back," he says. She crawls on to a mattress. When the door's shut, he pulls her arms behind her, and handcuffs her. He takes the silk tie from around his neck, and blindfolds her.
She lies on the mattress in the back of the van, blind and cuffed, and he drives her a long somewhere, telling her the story of a woman called Violet, and how a mafia man became secretly obsessed with her, and employed an Englishman to soften her up with sado-masochistic dreams before finally kidnapping and enslaving her.
"Please," she says, but he just keeps on telling her the story as he drives. The mafia man does terrible, terrible things to Violet, in the story.
They've arrived. Wherever it is. No traffic, a bumpy road for the last mile or so, a chorus of cicadas. "Here, talk to your friend," he says. Something against her ear. He's insisted on this: that she make arrangements to call someone, for her own supposed safety. Now what is she to say? Sandy, I think he is going to sell me to another man. "Hi, how're you doin'?"
He makes her half-crawl out of the van while she's talking. Earth beneath her feet. The smell of pines. "Yeh, everything's fine, we're just gonna' catch a movie..."
He guides her, his hand on her left arm, over a stony path. She finishes her pleasantries and he hangs up for her. He kisses her cheek. "You're very brave," he says.
"Please," she says.
There are three wooden steps up. Boards for her feet. A door opens. Carpet. Please care for me. Please...
He pushes her down onto a bed, face up, her arms uncomfortably beneath her. It seems to be a large bed: he makes her dress ride up her body, exposing her cunt, so that he can spread her legs and tie her ankles to the bed's corners. Then something whirrs. It's just a vibrator. He touches her with it: "And so Violet became excited for the Englishman," he says, his free hand caressing her body through her black dress, his vibrator at her cunt, "because she knew that if she experienced a certain number of orgasms for him he would keep her for himself, and not trade her to the vicious mafioso. Oh, but if only he would tell her how many orgasms she had to have, to be kept safe in his clutches..."
She comes to orgasm for him. She comes bound; she comes naked and free. She comes on all fours, mewing like a cat. She sees shadows and feet through the blindfold and she comes, masturbating for him, licking his thighs, as he lightly whips her back.
She wakes in the night, naked and stiff-limbed on the floor beside the bed, her wrists cuffed behind her back again. He hauls her to her knees by her hair and makes her mouth go to his cock. Then he hauls her up on to the bed, brutally, one hand on her thigh and the other at her cunt. He licks and sucks her while he lifts her mouth off him, and his free left hand slaps her buttocks in turn, harder and harder, until she comes for him.
It's later, she's slept again, sprawled on him, and she wakes to his voice saying, "Violet, your cunt must touch every inch of me." She struggles and turns and makes her cunt begin to rub against his right arm, and then his shoulder, and she kisses what flesh of his she randomly finds beneath her mouth and in a few moments he's holding her head over his crotch and coming, for once, in her, saying "Violet. Violet. Violet."
Something that frightens her in herself wants him to finish the night by discarding her, leaving her here -- twisted on the floor again -- bound, naked, used.
Instead he makes her blindfold more secure, then takes her right hand in his left and leads her, allowing her to walk, to the bathroom. He washes her, inch by inch. He's singing to her, singing nonsense songs, "Violet's thigh, Violet's thigh, Violet's knee, tremble for me, Violet's hands, understand..."
When she's clean and dry he takes her to the bedroom and ties her, spreadeagled, face up, to the bed. He unblindfolds her. He's clothed. He squats astride her belly, with a violet candle in his right hand. He teases her nipples, neck and face with the candle until she begins to cry. Then he finally reaches to the bedside table and lights the candle. With his free left hand he lifts her head by her hair so she has to watch. Just above her right nipple, at five minutes to the hour on her breast, he drips a letter A, in wax, holding the candle quite close so it really burns. Then, just to the left of her left nipple, at five minutes past the hour on her breast, he drips a V.
She's pissed herself with fear and pain but he doesn't say anything, just unties her, and leads her to the bathroom, and washes her cunt, and kisses her face. "Violet," he says. "Time to go home."
She's drained, totally drained. She lies on her bed, at home, staring up at the mirror he fitted above her bed. A woman in a black dress.
The doorbell rings.
She finds the image of herself in the glass, her hair all over the place, her eyes glazed, her skirt hiked up her thighs, surprisingly beautiful.
The doorbell rings insistently. On a Sunday? When she's told everyone she'll be away?
It's maybe an hour later, waking from a doze, when she remembers the bell, and goes out to the porch. There's a brown-paper parcel. TO VIOLET in clumsy block capitals. His self-parody of the brutal man.
Her hands tremble as, back inside, she opens the package. White, a nightdress. Cotton. It has a design photographed on it. At crotch level, there's one of her pictures of her cunt, parted and inviting, clitoris emerging, printed in violet ink. At breast level, it shows only the outline of nipples very like her own and, in violet ink, the initials A and V in the places where his drips of candle wax inscribed them on her real breasts.
She kneels on the floor, in the hallway, in her black dress, clutching the white cotton. It's as if she's bowing to some god somewhere. Or bent, weeping for herself, and what she's become. Or dreaming, fearing what might happen next. What he will next do to her. Whatever she resolves. Violet. Violet.
