I awoke. The sky was an intense blue, and the moon was already visible, attached like a thin hook to the roof of the world. I was still excited by the dream. I picked up my phone and called him.
"I was beginning to think you weren't going to call," he said, worried.
"I did what I felt like," was my nasty reply.
He told me he would arrive in fifteen minutes, and I should wait for him in bed.
I stripped and left my clothes on the floor of the closet. I took the contents of the box and put on the tight bodysuit, which clung to my back and pulled my skin, pinching it. The boots reached exactly to the middle of my thigh. I didn't really understand why he had also included flaming red lipstick, false eyelashes, and very bright rouge. I went into the bedroom to look at myself in the mirror, and when I saw my image, I had a start: here was my nth transformation, my nth prostration to the hidden, prohibited desires of someone who isn't me and doesn't love me. But this time would be different; I would exact a fitting recompense: his humiliation. Even if, in reality, we were both humiliated. He arrived slightly later than he told me he would. His excuse was that he had to invent some cock-and-bull story for his wife. His poor wife, I thought, but tonight he will be punished for his sins against her as well.
He found me on the bed, intently watching a bluebottle that was bashing against the light on the ceiling, producing an irritating noise. I was thinking that people bash convulsively against the world just like that stupid insect: they create noise and confusion, they buzz around things without ever managing to seize them completely; sometimes they mistake a trap for the object of their desire and get killed, rotting beneath the blue reflector inside the cage.
Fabrizio placed his overnight bag on the floor and remained motionless, observing me in silence. His eyes spoke eloquently, and the excitement beneath his trousers confirmed everything: I would have to torture him slowly, maliciously.
Then he said, "You've already raped my head; you've penetrated me. Now you must rape my body; you must penetrate my flesh with some part of you."
"Don't you feel that at this point master and slave can no longer be distinguished? I decide what I must do; you must only suffer. Come!" I shouted like a most capable dominatrix.
He headed toward the bed with long, hurried strides. Eyeing the whip and the dildo on the bedside table, I felt my blood boil and a frenzied excitement building within me. I wanted to know what kind of orgasm he would experience, and above all I wanted to see his blood.
Naked, he looked like a worm, virtually hairless, his skin bright and soft, his belly flabby and swollen, his sex unexpectedly stiff. I think that to inflict on him the same sweet violence as in the dream would have been too much; he merited a punishment that was harsh, stern, wicked. I made him stretch out on the floor, on his stomach. The expression on my face was cold and disdainful, aloof; had he seen it, his blood would have frozen in his veins. He turned around his pale, sweaty face, and I ground the heel of my boot into his back. His flesh was scourged to fulfill my vendetta. He screamed, but screamed softly; perhaps he wept. My mind was in such a confused state that it was impossible for me to distinguish the sounds and colors around me.
"Who are you?" I asked him with an icy tone.
A prolonged wheeze, then a broken voice: "Yours. I am your slave."
As he spoke, my heel descended along his spine and rested between his buttocks, pressing.
"No, Melissa… No," he said, panting loudly.
I wasn't capable of continuing, so I reached a hand toward the table, gathered the accessories, and placed them on the bed. I turned him over with a kick, forcing him to assume a supine position, and gave his chest the same treatment I had given his back.
"Turn over!" I ordered him again. He turned. I straddled one of his thighs and, without realizing, started gently rubbing my sex, restrained by the clinging bodysuit.
"Your cunt is sopping," he said with a sigh. "Let me lick it."
"No!" I shouted.
His voice snapped, but I managed to hear him as he told me to continue, to hurt him.
My excitement was growing, filling my soul and flowing anew from my sex, provoking a mysterious exaltation. I was subjugating him, and I was happy. Happy for me and happy for him. For him because it was what he wanted, one of his greatest desires. For me because it was a means of asserting my person, my body, my soul, my entire self over another person, swallowing him up completely. I was participating in a celebration of my self. Seizing the whip, I passed first the shaft and then the leather strips over his bottom, although without striking it. I gave him a light blow and felt his body shudder and contract. Above us the bluebottle kept on bashing against the light, and before me hung the curtain, pulled by the half-opened window to the point of ripping. A final violent lash to his tortured, reddened back, and then I grabbed the dildo. I had never held one, and I didn't like it. I coated the surface with the sticky gel, my fingers gauging the falsity of the thing, its utter lack of naturalness. It was very different from seeing Gianmaria and Germano slowly enter each other's bodies, doing it gently, tenderly, being inside a reality that was different but true, comforting. The present reality repulsed me: it was completely false, miserably hypocritical. He was hypocritical in relation to his life, his family, a worm who prostrated himself at the feet of a girl. The dildo entered with difficulty, and I felt it vibrate in my hand as if it had split something: his guts. As I was penetrating him, I repeated a series of phrases in my head, like a litany chanted during a rite.
This is for your ignorance: first thrust. This is for your feeble presumptuousness: second thrust. For your daughter who will never know she has a father like you; for your wife who lies next to you at night; for not including me, for not understanding me, for not grasping the fundamental essence of me, which is beauty. That true beauty which we all have, but you lack. I gave him countless thrusts, every one rough, sharp, lacerating. He was groaning beneath me, screaming, weeping at times. His orifice widened, and I saw it red with tension and blood.
"Can't you take it, you disgusting brute?" I sneered cruelly.
He screamed at the top of his voice; perhaps he experienced an orgasm. Then he said, "Enough, I beg you."
And I stopped as my eyes filled with tears. I left him on the bed, ravaged, destroyed, completely broken. I got dressed, and in the lobby I said good-bye to the concierge. I hadn't said good-bye to him, I hadn't looked at him, I just left, and that was it.
When I arrived home, I didn't look in the mirror. Before going to sleep, I gave myself a hundred brushstrokes. To see my face destroyed and my hair mussed would have hurt me, too much.
4 March 2002
The night was filled with horrific dreams. One in particular made me quake.
I was running through a dark barren forest chased by mysterious evil characters. Before my eyes rose a tower lit by the sun; it was just like Dante trying to reach the hill but failing because he was thwarted by three wild beasts. Except that I wasn't actually thwarted by three wild beasts, but rather by an arrogant angel and his devils and behind them an ogre with a bellyful of babies' bodies and farther on an androgynous monster followed by young sodomites. They were all foaming at the mouth, and someone was dragging himself laboriously, scraping his body along the parched earth. I was running, turning around constantly for fear that one of them might reach me; they were all screaming incoherent, unpronounceable phrases. At a certain point, I stopped paying attention to the obstacle before me and began shouting. Opening my eyes wide, I spotted the kind face of a man who, taking me by the hand, led me through dark secret paths to the foot of the high tower. He held up a finger and said, "Ascend the stairs and never turn around. At the top, you will halt and discover what you sought in vain in the forest."