We walked up the stairs of Sacré-Coeur and surveyed the city that was nothing more than our fashionable accessory. We were perfectly happy that night, knowing that we shared one another’s insatiable taste for the bizarre. That night we inaugurated, acknowledged, our mutual hungers.
I suppose I was a concession her husband could make in order to keep her by his side. It was the dead of morning, and we were stumbling down the street, intoxicated from an evening at Les Bals Nègres. Josephine Baker had been dancing that night, and the magnificent sight of her body, her immaculate breasts and legs, ah, Josephine Baker’s legs… Watching her had fueled fantastic images of pleasure as she had moved wildly, mimicking, at times satirizing, the drama of the bed. It was all there, all of her to be seen, moving as though created to be desired.
As we tripped down a dimly lit street, we drank the remaining champagne of our last bottle. In the warm mist of the early summer dawn, an extraordinarily thin man stepped out from a dark doorway. His presence was abrupt and he stood in front of us, unmoving, his head cocked slightly to one side. She began to giggle at his appearance; I believe she laughed mostly out of fear. I could only make out his face when we got very close, an extremely bizarre visage that made me draw back for a moment. His prominent cheekbones created sunken hollows in his face, the effect heightened by the dreary gaslights of the alley. He wore all black, including a silk dress hat and opera cape, which she thought wildly funny, so dramatic a costume on a hot summer morning. His teeth and eyes shone in a peculiar way in the strange half-light.
She gasped when she got closer and looked into his unnerving face, and then, being drunk, she laughed and asked the man if he wouldn’t like some champagne, holding up the bottle. He held out his hand, but only to beckon her closer. His ominous figure alarmed me, but, being young and stupid, I rushed forward. My mistress held my arm and quieted me. She moved cautiously, leaning her ear to his mouth to hear what he had to say. I couldn’t help desiring her just then. Watching her neck tilt in that weird light, slightly terrorized, slightly mesmerized by the danger he presented. I wanted to possess her. I loved her so drunkenly that my thirst for her body could never really be quenched. I stared at her neck, at the lines of her collarbone, as she listened to what the stranger had to say.
He leaned in, his lips hovering dangerously near the nape of her neck. I almost yelled out. He began to whisper in her ear, and, as he spoke, I could see her become slowly breathless. Her back began to arch the way it did when I stroked her breasts. Her mouth fell open, and her lids half-closed over her eyes. It seemed as though the man were making love to her, but of course I could see that his hands were not touching her at all. I moved closer, moved by the tableau the man and my mistress formed in the grey morning light that was trying to get into that alley. And then I suddenly heard her beginning to making low moaning noises, her breasts falling out of the low-cut dress. And then quite suddenly she drew back, tossing her head back defiantly, and she began to laugh. It was inexplicable, whatever was occurring between her and this stranger, and there was a part of me that found a hollow solace in the fact that she had moved away from him. I also found that I was aroused in a way that was extraordinary. My feelings of desire were tinted with a bleakness, a sense of real danger that exceeded the games that she and I had indulged in at my flat.
She was moving towards me, beckoning me to come closer. I hesitated, still overwhelmed by a finishing sadness, a vague anxiety mingled with a potent desire to have her. Finally, I moved. The stranger leered in the background.
“He’s asked us to come with him. He wants to show us a very exclusive cabaret. It sounds absolutely perverted. We really must go!” She paused and then whispered breathlessly, “He says it’s called ‘L’Enfer’. Isn’t that superb! Come.” And she took my hand.
I meant to ask her who the man was, and how did she know we were not stepping into some sort of terrible trap, but when I saw her slip the man a number of francs it was clear she had decided against reason. Of course I could not leave her alone and so began to follow their dark shadows down the narrow alley.
Remembering the silhouette of her breast, and her tongue flicking over her full lips as he had whispered in her ear, I wanted to take her, I wanted to push her against one of the doorways, lift her sheer dress, and take her. I still had the pounding rhythm of Les Bals Nègres in my ears. I wanted to fuck her to the cadence of Josephine Baker’s feet. I wanted to rape her, gently, and then more and more forcefully. I could feel the familiar ache of desire, the pain she caused in my groin, but my mistress was already falling into the darkness of the alley, following her compelling stranger.
“What did he say to you, my love? What did he whisper in your ear?” I asked as I moved up behind her, holding her tightly around the waist. There was, perhaps, some ill-concealed jealousy creeping into my voice.
She said nothing but answered me with a devious smile that came when she was aroused, an expression that was made more corrupt by the lusterlessness, the obsolescence in her eyes.
After winding down a series of unfamiliar and narrow streets, we stopped in front of a nondescript door. Our “guide”, as I had come to think of him, knocked lightly, paused, and then rapped in loud and quick succession. I felt something extraordinary on the other side, but part of me hoped there was nothing, that our guide was nothing more than a petty crook who had taken her money. Part of my body was ready for the confusion of an unforeseen adventure, and another portion of my being wanted nothing more than to drag her away, get home to the creamy eiderdown, the cotton of our sheets.
The door slowly creaked open. Humid air coloured with various scents of smoke came out. I thought I smelled the pungent, sticky smell of opium. We were greeted by a man who who had the colouring of a Gypsy, but no trace of an accent. His French was impeccable. For some reason this unnerved me. He had green-yellow eyes and luxuriant black hair in curls to his shoulders. He was well dressed. The door closed behind us, and I turned, startled. Our guide had left us.
Her mouth turned up like sensual question marks as she observed the Gypsy man’s beautifully sculptured ass while he led us down a narrow corridor papered in dark-red velvet and lit with gaudy gilt candelabra. There seemed to be heat emanating from the walls and a muffled sound, not quite far away, vibrating them as if they were breathing and sweating like giant sheets of sex-blushed flesh. It was grotesque and nauseating. I felt the familiar tug of my cock, and was surprised at my arousal in this strange atmosphere. She was moving forward as if in another element beyond her. I watched carefully as she walked down the narrow hallway in front of me, her hand involuntarily caressing the red walls.
Quite suddenly we found ourselves in front of another door, and the vague music I thought I had recognized could be heard more clearly on the other side. The Gypsy swung open the door with ceremony and with a sweep of his arm motioned us inside. After she had handed over more money, of course.
What we beheld behind that door made us both gasp.
A gale of hot opium air and jazz exploded on our faces. There were beautiful young girls and young men. There were old men, bald and dying in the arms of prepubescent nymphs. Old whores danced with wealthy young students. But something else had made us gasp.
There were young boys and girls hanging hairless and well muscled, suspended from leather harnesses connected to the ceiling. There were four or five of them, and all the hanging men were naked, utterly exposed. Some hung from their arms and ankles, others from the centres of their torsos. I don’t know how many of them were suspended thus in the centre of what seemed to be a large underground theatre. Their bodies nearly receded into the vast subterranean darkness, a sea of swaying, glowing flesh in the pale-red light of this very queer theatre of sex. The force of the music was lost in the face of these beauties hung low enough to touch in any way in which the patrons of this select cabaret could wish.