Alexander Trocchi
Thongs
Introduction
On a cold morning in February 1922, some Gypsies moving across country between Madrid and Escorial came upon the naked body of a woman. In this fact alone there is nothing remarkable. Spain, perhaps more than any other country in the world, is the land of passion and of death. And in Spain death is cheap, from that glittering death in the bull ring to the quick thrust of the stiletto in a narrow street in a Barcelona slum. No, this death would have called for no further comment had it not been for one striking fact. The naked woman had been crucified.
Thus the Gypsies saw her first from a long way off, struck like a scarecrow against the pale horizon, and as there was in that arid part of the country no crop to be protected, they approached to find out what it was.
The body was covered with thin red lacerations as though before death the woman had been whipped mercilessly with fine rods. Across the belly on a fine silver chain was slung a small metal plate which bore the inscription: Carmencita de las Lunas, por amor.
For love…
The Gypsies set the cross with the corpse still nailed to it on the back of a donkey and took it to the nearest village. There they were arrested and thrown into the local jail to await judgment. The magistrate set them at liberty without hesitation when he arrived and directed that the body should be buried at once in unconsecrated ground.
This was done. And if it had not been for a chance find of mine in a Madrid bookshop three years later, the amazing story of this woman's violent and passionate life might have been buried with her bleeding corpse.
It was early spring in the year 1925 when I arrived in Madrid. I had gone there not only for the bullfights but also to look at the Prado, which I had not seen before. In a little street near the museum I came upon a bookshop and spent half an hour browsing amongst the old books. In a dusty pile of books in one corner I came upon the personal notebook of Gertrude Gault, alias Carmencita de las Lunas. It was an old notebook with stiff covers which in one way or another had been subjected to damp; the writing was faded and in places the ink had run. I would not have given it a second glance had it not been for the fact that it was written in English.
On the flyleaf was a quotation in Spanish, which I subsequently traced to St. John of the Cross. It read:
"He taught me a science most delectable, I gave to him, reserving nothing; there I promised him to be his bride…"
There followed in a small neat hand perhaps the most amazing story I have ever read, a story which began in a Glasgow slum and ended in a crucifixion on an arid hillside in Spain, or rather, just before the crucifixion, for it was only upon making discreet enquiries towards the end of 1925 that I found that this woman's personal Calvary had actually taken place, and found moreover that certain influential people in Spain still made annual pilgrimages to the unconsecrated grave.
It is my considered opinion that she not only consented to but demanded this terrible act; that according to their own lights her executioners acted with all sense of propriety. It was her own deep sense of destiny that drove Gertrude to become Carmencita.
To give some sense of order to the narrative, it is necessary for the present editor to return to a street battle which took place in the notorious Gorbals district in Glasgow in 1916 during the First World War. Few of the Gorbals men fought for their country. They were involved in their own bloody battles. In recreating the battle scene with which this tale begins, I have had recourse not only to the notes of Gertude Gault herself but also to eyewitness accounts collected by me between 1926 and 1930 during which years the razor still ruled the Gorbals.
It is of no small psychological interest to know that the father of Gertrude Gault was the human wolf known to all Glasgow as the Razor King and that one of her earliest adult impressions was of the mortal battle fought between this man and his own son, Johnnie, Gertrude's brother, in a Gorbals street. Who knows? Perhaps only such a brutal tribe of men could have produced a woman with such an infinite longing to be a victim.
The rest of the narrative is written almost entirely by the protagonist herself, and for that reason it is truly Carmencita's book. The editorial work I dedicate with reverence to her agony.
Nineteen-Sixteen
The red disc of sun seemed to be suspended at no great height above the roofs in a thin, whitish-yellow atmosphere. No heat came from it. It was more like the sun on a primitive stage-set, a Chinese lantern, perfectly circular, and with no density. It was sill early and the city would have been silent had it not been for an occasional milk cart, its bottles clinking in their metal-strutted boxes, some early tramcars, and the gradually increasing clamor of the church bells.
It was a Sunday morning in January and the winter-blackened trees on Glasgow Green and in other parks of the city were gaunt and lifeless. There was as yet no sign that in a few weeks, a month at most, the sap would begin to stir in them again. In the early morning frost their trunks had the hard glint of cast iron.
With the disappearance of the January snow, the city had assumed its accustomed grayness, and now under the pale yellow sky and the heatless lens of sun, the streets of tenements on either side of the turgid, scum-laden river were almost deserted. Their heavy emptiness, caused in part by the time of the year, the earliness of the hour, and the fact that it was the morning after the Saturday night before, was accentuated by the preponderance of gray stone, quarried locally, which went to their building. More than all other towns in the country, those on the West coast of Scotland are gray, and Glasgow, the rambling metropolis of shipyards, engineering works, mining and construction companies, and endless factories, whose million inhabitants are often cut off for months on end from direct contact with the sun, is more than any other the gray city.
At the beginning there were more women than men in the group, unkempt, hatless women with bare pink legs in broken shoes, the upper part of their tired, sun-starved bodies wrapped in black or gray shawls. Occasionally, one of the women broke away from the group, shambling off down Rose Street towards her flat. But as time passed, the group became larger and signs of life began to appear at the windows of the rooms which gave on to the street. The shrill coarse voice of a slum woman cried down from a window above their heads. Someone answered her. The woman at the window remained there, her flat red suspicious face craning out from the window above her flaccid breasts like some grotesque figurehead. She clutched a towel at her breasts in a thin red hand. Her mouth was open and even after she had been answered she hung there, waiting.
They were all waiting. Most of them were incredulous. But a mute hunger for violence, common to each of them, held them together, reinforcing, animating the rumor.
The men joined them, singly or in groups, coming slowly out of the closes which lined both sides of the street. The same caps, the same white scarves, the same boots. There were now more than fifty people in the crowd and the excitement was growing. They were all talking at once. The woman with the flat red face yelled something to another woman who leaned out over a windowsill at the other side of the street. The other woman cocked her head, blinked, and answered with a burst of braying laughter. The crowd shifted and turned, looking up and down the street and up at the faces which looked down on them from above.
And now it was clear that the young man in the blue serge suit, a white scarf at his throat like the other men, was the main point of interest for the crowd. He was leaning with his back against the wall below a street-level window. His hands were thrust deep in his trouser pockets and he answered questions quickly and incisively as they were put to him. He looked very young, with sleek black hair and a thick powerful body which caused the too-tight blue suit to have a corrugated appearance. His face was sullen, the lips thick and sensual, and his small gray eyes suspicious. Although the crowd made no move to interfere with him, he had the look of an animal at bay, his shoulders rounded against the wall and his heavy hands clenched in his pockets causing his trousers to bulge at the thighs. A half-smoked cigarette, unlit, hung from the corner of his mouth. He answered questions quickly but impatiently, without moving his cigarette. He seemed to be interested in those at the fringes of the crowd rather than in those close to him, or perhaps in something beyond the fringes, for as the men appeared from time to time, sidling from the closes along the street, his eyes narrowed and he watched them guardedly.