It was dark here, and cold.
what was I doing here?
Why had I been purchased, and by men who, it seemed seldom bothered to purchase women, preferring, it seemed, to acquire them in other manners?
Why did they wish a girl here who was ignorant, or muchly so?
I did not want to be here.
I was supposedly beautiful. But of what use would be my beauty, if beauty it was, in this place, in the pits?
Too, I was supposedly quite vital, unusually so, it seemed, even for this world. My vitality, my sexuality, had, of course, been disparaged, belittled, denied, and starved on my own world. I had kept it concealed, hidden. I had even tried to be ashamed of it.How strange was my world, one on which one was expected to pretend to numbness and insensitivity, one on which one was conditioned to be ashamed of health. Women who had feelings such as mine for men were to be denounced with all the epithets available to the anesthetic, to the perverted, to the freaks and frustrates. Did we really constitute such dangers, I wondered, to the pervasiveness and mightiness of their eccentric conditioning programs? Was it not enough for them to exercise an almost perfect control over media and education? Did they fear a tiny whisper of truth so much? Was it truly so dangerous? Must all reflection, all inquiry, all thought be suppressed? Was it truly required that the “free marketplace of ideas” be closed, except in name? What a tiny, small thing were the genetic codes of an organism! One could scarcely detect the traces of such things with the most awesome instruments. What a frail straw was truth! So a blade of grass grew between the paving stones, one tiny, green blade of grass among the stones? Did they fear that so much? Grass is so beautiful. It did not seem to me that feelings such as mine were really so threatening to prescribed “movements.” Did it really make it so difficult for them to continue to present their particular interest as though it were the general interest? Surely I was not stopping them from doing that. Could they not even find little truths amusing, they so weak and tiny, lost among all the littering, massive lies? Who could fear them? They were so tiny, those little truths. But perhaps they were right. Perhaps even little truths are dangerous. A match may be seen from far off in the darkness. The tiniest of sparks might imperil a mountain of straw. So, too, perhaps even a modest truth, no stronger to eons of history, might undermine the myths of a world. Did the moons of Jupiter not shatter the crystalline spheres? Destroy telescopes then, for they might see the truth. They see too far, and too clearly. They look too deeply into reality. Did not a handful of fossils overturn a world? Let men then not examine the earth beneath their feet, for they might learn on what it is that they truly stand. How insidious the modest, recurrent elements of a healthy organism, the components of a natural biological development. How subtle, how insistent and quiet, and yet how tenacious a foe of promulgated perversions are the whims of nature,that she should choose to be so constituted. But nature cannot read. Thus she does not know what she is supposed to be. She is content to let others read her, if they dare. How odd if we should truly be the end of history, if our tiny grasp of things, our demands flung into the void, should be the finality of the universe. Are we, familiar with the rise and fall of empires, who have witnessed the building of the pyramids and walked the streets of Babylon and Nineveh, who have heard the tread of the legions and watched the armada set forth, to take our moment, our brief afternoon, to be the summit and meaning of eternity.
And so I was supposedly quite vital, unusually so, it seemed, even for this world. I was a palimpsest, with texts concealed beneath texts. On this world what had been written on me on my world, to obscure the underlying truths, had been scraped off, the dross scraped away to reveal the suspected, now-revealed, infinitely more precious message beneath.
How liberating it was for me to come to this world, where I might, at last, be myself, as I truly was!
To be sure, vitality is expected in a slave. In markets, we may even be tested for it. It is not only, you see, that a profound sexuality, an acute sexual sensitivity, an uncontrollable responsiveness, is permitted in a slave; it is required in her. It is one of the things for which we are purchased. We are slaves, you see. We are not free women.
But of what use would my vitality, if such it might be, be in this place?
I wanted to feel the arms of a guard upon me. I wanted to lie, moaning, in his arms. But instead I lay cold, and bound, in a net.
I twisted, and sobbed.
“There is someone there!” announced a voice, a woman’s voice, from somewhere to my right, in the darkness.
“Yes,” I said, startled.
I heard the creak of a chain, to the right.
“I knew something descended into the net,” she said. “I thought I heard it.”
I turned, as I could, in the net, toward the voice. “It was I,” I said.
“You are in the power of these brutes as well?” she asked.
I was silent. I did not know who was there in the darkness. I heard the chain creak once more.
“You are in the power of these creatures as well?” she asked.
“Totally,” I said.
“Are you chained?” she asked.
“I am bound,” I said, “hand and foot.”
“They bind us well, do they not?” she inquired.
“Yes!” I said.
“I am imprisoned,” she informed me.
That intelligence seemed strange to me, as it seemed her voice was quiet near me. To be sure, I could not see in the darkness.
“I am soon to be free!” she assured me.
I was not certain as to how to interpret this remark, issuing from the darkness, from this unknown source.
“How I despise these fools!” said the voice.
To such a remark, of course, I did not dare reply.
“How poorly they treat us!” she cried.
I did not dare respond.
“Have they treated you well?” she asked.
“I have been whipped,” I said. Indeed, I had been twice whipped.
“Poor thing!” she cried. “You must be of low caste!”
I was silent.
“They would not dare to whip me!” she announced.
I thought the speaker might profit from a whipping.
“You have an unusual accent,” she said, suddenly.
“I am from far away,” I said, evasively.
“Are you clothed?” she asked.
“Please!” I protested.
“The beasts!” she said.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“In the pits,” she said. “I think somewhere beneath the keep, somewhere beneath the fortress. I truly do not know. This place is a labyrinth!
“What ransom are they asking for you?” she asked, suddenly.
I was silent.
“It will not be as high as mine,” she informed me.
“You are from far off?’ she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you know in what city we are?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I was brought here, my features wrapped in my own veils!”
I decided I should not dare to speak further to her, even in what seemed to be our common predicament.
“How were you brought here?” she asked.
“My features, too, were obscured,” I said. Need she know that I had, in much of my journey, worn a slave hood?
I was becoming very uneasy with our conversation.
“None of these beasts have so much as glimpsed my features,” she averred.
I could make no such claim, of course. I was, and had been, public to men; I belonged to them; I was subject to their regard and whim; I had been exposed as frequently and routinely, and, I suppose, as naturally and as appropriately, as any other sort of domestic animal. Indeed, but I bit before, I had performed for men, before the dais, providing them not only a glimpse of my beauty, if beauty it was, but with an authentic, detailed, lengthy, provocative display of it, an exhibition designed to leave little to conjecture concerning at least the externals of whatever interest I might hold for them. It seemed I could have done little more unless I had stood chained on a sales platform, to be literally handled as the curved, tender little beast I was, or had perhaps been conducted behind the purple screen to be tested in a more intimate fashion. In such exhibitions, in such performances, movement, grace and rhythm are, of course, quite important. It is the moving, living, breathing, vital woman which is of interest. One must not only look beautiful, you see, but one must be beautiful.