[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
turned her at last into the very puppet you see before you, pulled only by the
strings of lust. Come and see the very doll, the only surviving relic of the
shameless Oriental Venus herself.
The bewildering entertainment possessed almost a religious intensity
for, since there can be no spontaneity in a puppet drama, it always tends
towards the rapt intensity of ritual, and, at its conclusion, as the audience
stumbled from the darkened booth, it had almost suspended disbelief and was
more than half convinced, as the Professor assured them so eloquently, that
the bizarre figure who had dominated the stage was indeed the petrification of
a universal whore and had once been a woman in whom too much life had negated
life itself, whose kisses had withered like acids and whose embrace blasted
like lightning. But the Professor and his assistants immediately dismantled
the scenery and put away the dolls who were, after all, only mundane wood and,
next day, the play was played again.
This is the story of Lady Purple as performed by the Professor's puppets
to the delirious obbligato of the dumb girl's samisen and the audible click of
the limbs of the actors.
The Notorious Amours of Lady Purple
the Shameless Oriental Venus
When she was only a few days old, her mother wrapped her in a tattered
blanket and abandoned her on the door-step of a prosperous merchant and his
barren wife. These respectable bourgeois were to become the siren's first
dupes. They lavished upon her all the attentions which love and money could
devise and yet they reared a flower which, although perfumed, was carnivorous.
At the age of twelve, she seduced her foster father. Utterly besotted with
her, he trusted to her the key of the safe where he kept all his money and she
immediately robbed it of every farthing.
Packing his treasure in a laundry basket together with the clothes and
jewellery he had already given her, she then stabbed her first lover and his
wife, her foster mother, in their bellies with a knife used in the kitchen to
slice fish. Then she set fire to their house to cover the traces of her guilt.
She annihilated her own childhood in the blaze that destroyed her first home
and, springing like a corrupt phoenix from the pyre of her crime, she rose
again in the pleasure quarters, where she at once hired herself out to the
madame of the most imposing brothel.
In the pleasure quarters, life passed entirely in artificial day for the
bustling noon of those crowded alleys came at the time of drowsing midnight
for those who lived outside that inverted, sinister, abominable world which
functioned only to gratify the whims of the senses. Every rococo desire the
mind of man might, in its perverse ingenuity, devise found ample gratification
here, amongst the halls of mirrors, the flagellation parlours, the cabarets of
nature-defying copulations and the ambiguous soirees held by men-women and
female men. Flesh was the speciality of every house and it came piping hot,
served up with all the garnishes imaginable. The Professor's puppets dryly and
perfunctorily per-formed these tactical manoeuvres like toy soldiers in a mock
battle of carnality.
Page 34
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Along the streets, the women for sale, the mannequins of desire, were
displayed in wicker cages so that potential customers could saunter past
inspecting them at leisure. These exalted prostitutes sat motionless as idols.
Upon their real features had been painted symbolic abstractions of the various
aspects of allure and the fantastic elaboration of their dress hinted it
covered a different kind of skin. The cork heels of their shoes were so high
they could not walk but only totter and the sashes round their waists were of
brocade so stiff the movements of the arms were cramped and scant so they
presented attitudes of physical unease which, though powerfully moving,
derived partly, at least, from the deaf assistant's lack of manual dexterity,
for his apprenticeship had not as yet reached even the journeyman stage.
Therefore the gestures of these hetaerae were as stylised as if they had been
clockwork. Yet, however fortuitously, all worked out so well it seemed each
one was as absolutely circumscribed as a figure in rhetoric, reduced by the
rigorous discipline of her vocation to the nameless essence of the idea of
woman, a metaphysical abstraction of the female which could, on payment of a
specific fee, be instantly translated into an oblivion either sweet or
terrible, depending on the nature of her talents.
Lady Purple's talents verged on the unspeakable. Booted, in leather, she
became a mistress of the whip before her fifteenth birthday. Subsequently, she
graduated in the mysteries of the torture chamber, where she thoroughly
researched all manner of ingenious mechanical devices. She utilised a baroque
apparatus of funnel, humiliation, syringe, thumbscrew, contempt and spiritual
anguish; to her lovers, such severe usage was both bread and wine and a kiss
from her cruel mouth was the sacrament of suffering.
Soon she became successful enough to be able to maintain her own
establishment. When she was at the height of her fame, her slightest fancy
might cost a young man his patrimony and, as soon as she squeezed him dry of
fortune, hope and dreams, for she was quite remorseless, she abandoned him; or
else she might, perhaps, lock him up in her closet and force him to watch her
while she took for nothing to her usually incredibly expensive bed a beggar
encountered by chance on the street. She was no malleable, since frigid,
substance upon which desires might be executed; she was not a true prostitute
for she was the object on which men prostituted themselves. She, the sole
perpetrator of desire, proliferated malign fantasies all around her and used
her lovers as the canvas on which she executed boudoir masterpieces of
destruction. Skins melted in the electricity she generated.
Soon, either to be rid of them or, simply, for pleasure, she took to
murdering her lovers. From the leg of a politician she poisoned she cut out
the thighbone and took it to a craftsman who made it into a flute for her. She
persuaded succeeding lovers to play tunes for her on this instrument and, with
the supplest and most serpentine grace, she danced for them to its unearthly
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
