Of Willie there is little to be said. He seems to have been a loyal ministering angel right up to the last days, a humble shadow moving in the radiant twilight of this woman's mad dreams, always there to aid and abet her, and to dote on her pain-twisted body. There is no evidence that he was present at the crucifixion and I rather think he wasn't. I found no trace of him after the most extensive researches although I was able to locate the cobbler's shop where the two of them had indulged in their terrible lusts. It is no longer a cobbler's shop. The new tenant sells fish and chips.
There is little point in further elaboration. Gertrude's own narrative, although somewhat incoherent in form, is, if read sympathetically, straightforward enough. The years between have been lost. There is no reference to the journey to Spain or to the intervening years up until 1921, none anyway upon which we could hope to build a history. One last point worth mentioning before we present Gertrude's final narrative: pasted in the notebook were a number of cuttings from newspapers of Madrid and Barcelona. They were all in the form of society gossip: "Prince B was seen in the company of an unknown woman last night. It is hinted that she was Carmencita de las Lunas, the almost legendary queen of the underworld. She was heavily veiled…"
The Road to the Cross
— 1-
Thighs, mine, white, soft, and his tongue licking among the hair. "Suck it up!" I whispered, feeling wet now at the crotch and a trickle of sweat on my belly which still smarted from the cane. I thought I would burst open at the fourth stroke. His beard is soft and gentle and insinuating, like a cat, and I asked him again when it would happen and he said: "Soon now, little Carmen!" And I knew that he meant he was going to be Pain and that was why we had waited. And I could feel his head on my soft belly and his breathing between my thighs. Sometimes he stabbed his thumb into my cunt and my buttocks rose to meet the thrust. He was brutal then, as though he would like to ram his way into my entrails. "You're bleeding," he said, and I was. It was my period, and he smeared the blood on my belly and on my thighs, and, under the bedclothes, I had a breath of my own sweet-sickly smell and his male sweat. There is nothing about me he doesn't love! His little Carmen! It's funny how I am the only one who loves him. They say he is the hardest and cruelest of them all, like my father was! And his daughter, her sweat and pain is for nothing but his delight! Ah, Miguel! You alone will help me to die into ecstasy! My only love! My dark murderer! "Suck me now! I am tired! My flesh is so tired! Suck me all away!"
And Willie sneaked Prince B. into my bedchamber! I was actually rubbing myself in front of the mirror when he stepped from behind the curtains!
Carmencita! That is what he called me! I informed him that we had never formally been introduced. I had seen him, of course, about town and I had heard of his lust for me. Oh, he didn't hide that! A rope of pearls, diamond clips. M. le Comte de Z. came to see me. An emissary. His Royal Highness would gladly ruin himself! I should ask and it would be granted to me! "Ask the prince if he loves me enough to strike a knife to my heart!" The gentleman paled. He was certain the prince would sooner thrust a dagger in his own. "How very selfish of him!" I replied. "Ah, my Lady, you do him a grave injustice!"
"Justice, sire? Let him do justice to all the hot little bitches that surround him! Your sister, for example!" He would have struck me, so I struck him first, and then he couldn't strike back for he was a gentleman! "Get out of here, sir, and tell the prince, your master, that if he has anything to say to me he had better come himself. I want none of his dogs around here!"
Ha! How I laughed when he had gone, poor M. le Comte de Z.
My belly was very white in the mirror with its chevron of black hair at the mound and two thin red lines, cane-marks which had not yet disappeared. I bent slightly at the knees and inserted my finger gently into my cunt. And it was at that moment that Prince B. stepped forth from behind the curtains.
"Forgive me, Carmencita!" He went down on his knees before me.
"I do not know you, sir! No one has introduced us! How dare you hide in my bedroom!"
"Forgive me!"
I smiled to see him kneel there.
I wriggled my bare hips provocatively and sidled forward until my cunt was a foot from his face.
He looked up at me with his pale face.
"Kiss it!" I commanded.
He did so passionately. I forced him away.
"And now, get out!" I said.
"No, please! Carmencita, please!"
"How dare you, sir! Do you expect me to allow you to fuck me on the spot? Just because you've had the bad manners to break into my bedroom unannounced?"
My vulgarity pained him. This was not what he had expected of his Venus.
"Let me kiss your hand!" he implored.
"Sir, you have just kissed my cunt! Let us please avoid pathos! Stand up now!"
He stood up like a soldier springing to attention. I moved against him and put my arms 'round his neck. I looked into his eyes and brought his lips down against mine. He held me tightly in his arms, his hands impressing themselves in the soft flesh of my back.
"Do you love my body more than God?" I whispered.
"Yes! Oh yes, Carmencita!"
"You will obey me?"
"Anything, my darling!"
"Whip me, Prince!" I looked derisively into his eyes which registered shock and incomprehension. I pointed to a thin cane which lay on my bed. "Take it up and whip me!" I commanded. He moved over to the bed like a sleepwalker. "Test it!" I said. "Test it in the air as though you meant it!"
He did so with a mixture of fascination and horror in his eyes.
"Good."
I bent down in front of him, presenting the smooth cream of my buttocks. "Three strokes, Prince! Come, show me you're a man!"
He moved then and gave me three sharp cuts on the buttocks. Only the third was half-hearted. Immediately afterwards he broke the cane and threw himself apologetically on my buttocks, kissing the marks. "Oh, forgive me, Carmencita!"
I moved nimbly away from him.
"What a ninny you are, Prince! And you expect me to love you! Why, you don't want to be my master, you want to be my slave! Well then, my slave you shall be!"
I laughed at him.
"Come, I shall dress now and you will take me to a fine restaurant. Is that what you want?"
"Oh yes, Carmencita! Anything! Ask anything!"
"Perhaps I will, but meanwhile I shall dress!"
As his carriage brought me to my door, again he pleaded to be allowed to spend the night with me. "You want to make love to me?" He smothered my gloved hands with kisses. "Kill me first then, Prince, and make love to my body. My warm body will not resist you!"
He shook his head sadly, without comprehension.
"Then goodnight, Prince! When you come again, bring your knife with you!"
— 2-
In the darkness of my room I lie awake. My hands cup my breasts. My naked legs stretch far apart and the soft sheet falls against my mound. How many men muttering hoarsely in the night have worshipped there with their lips, with their hands, feasting their eyes, and been powerless to bring their own loins in sacred contact. No, my beautiful male! Give me it with your lips but do not do that.
I see my dead father and the women sprawling in the slums, white putty colored flesh quivering, animals, their big thighs stung into heat and hot fear by his rampant prick. And I lie alone and everything has receded into the familiar sound of my own breathing. I am left only with my awareness of it. And then, gradually, I come into another world, a close and confederate consciousness of my own softness and the sound of my breathing and nothing more, and there is nothing to which I am related. And now I come to know that it is my body which is soft, the thighs, my little belly, set and smooth as a watch glass on a fine watch, and that it is I and not my body which is aware. And now I am conscious of existing and being alone. And I cannot be conscious of myself as existing without at the same time being conscious of myself as existing alone and in relation to instants in time and points in space which hold themselves off from me and which escape me, for I have not the power to draw them back to myself out of my memory. And the room comes back with its dark corners, the open window, night sounds, and now I know myself to be wide awake and alone. I am in Spain, and the time is drawing near. In Spain everything is red and black and the color of a dancer's thighs as she twirls and snaps her heels as though shuffling her cunt for her male. Spanish women have splendid haunches and big rubbery teats. They grow fat quickly. They are sexually strong.