The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

THE CASTLE OF COMMUNION by Bernard Noël

Translated by Paul Buck and Glenda George

WHO HAD BROUGHT me back? I felt I had rolled against sky before the final splash of light carried me through my door. Not so, I was lying on my bed. The new moon was smiling down at me. As our eyes met, she turned aside, picked up a goblet and held it out to me – and night immediately flowed back, recaptured me.

I went. The wave was strong, its crest carried me. I went towards an island that looked like a high table set on the sea. The wave set me down at its foot. I saw the cliff, then again the sky, unless it was the steep of the cliff like a vertical sky. I remember. I stretched out my arms and opened my hands. Something very soft trickled, drop by drop, along each finger. These are the remains, I thought, but, “the remains of what?” was the question that shook me awake.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Emma,” replied the young moon.

She turned away again, this time to look for something. I closed my eyes. When I reopened them, Emma had quietly returned to my side and her hand was already rubbing my shoulder with oil. Then I realized I was still naked. She too.

“Why are you naked?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

I drew her to me. She let it happen naturally. But the tenderness that touched me was less rousing than my sudden desire to speak to her.

“The difficulty,” I said. “The difficulty is in having no recollection, being ahead of one’s memory. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going…”

“Yes,” she nodded. “It’s the white shadow.”

“Why did you say that?”

“I don’t know.”

She looked at me closely, but there was nothing but abandonment in her eyes. Her warmth was slowly transferred to me. But I still wanted to speak, maybe to make up for all the time I had remained speechless. Yet as my lips half-opened, she cut me short.

“Sometimes,” she said, “I see words… then I say them.”

I was content just to watch her, before persevering with:

“The difficulty is to have done something, say, opened a door, then to realize that there was no door, and yet you’ve opened it…”

“You’re almost healed,” she said. “I love you.”

Slowly she withdrew from my arms, the tip of her breast brushing my shoulder as it passed. She straightened up on the bed, positioned herself facing me, sat back on her heels and looked at me. Suddenly she fell backwards, her two hands forming a crown for her sex, offering it to me. The pressure of her hands made her slit gape slightly.

“Come to me,” she said.

I obeyed, feeling the words I had not said return to my throat.

But Emma’s forthrightness was already rousing my flesh, the pleasure all at once driving me mad. She watched me with an upside-down smile that gave her appearance a dark side. I remember. I am on her and I lean forward. Slowly, I lean over further to butt against the tips of her breasts. She slides under me. Her skin, which is extremely smooth, feels good to my skin and hands. We are between two waters. I let her slide more quickly so as to seize her belly as it passes and bring my mouth to it. She swims desperately, but her every movement only increases the undulation of her sex against my lips. For a long time, a long time, this dance continues, before I climb back up along Emma and lie body to body. Then the night from within us escapes, scraping our teeth as it goes.

One morning, I feel renewed. I step outside and the whole village is at my door. They fête me, but silently – it is in the light on their faces. The leader steps forward to shake my hand. The others, nodding their heads, approve this gesture. I am no longer an outsider. Before long, each leaves for his work, but not before setting at my door an egg, a cheese or maybe some firewood. Emma and I tinker with these riches, and then we walk down towards the sea.

From then on I lived only for Emma. I loved her, in different ways – spread out in the water, spread out on the land and upright in the air. It seems we had no other activity than pleasure – or awaiting pleasure.

During that time I forgot the desert and the hereafter of a memory that I had intended to run through in my own. I was here, nowhere but here. That is to say, I was completely involved in Emma’s body. Now I search for words which might give me an illusion of that body, of her spontaneous alternation of sweetness and wildness. What else do I know? Simply that pleasure cannot be a memory. Yet, I remember. Sometimes my tongue slides out of my mouth to lick Emma’s absence. I remember: Emma seizes my sex and pushes it into her. Later, day has dawned. I watch. Emma has fallen on her back near the bottom of the bed. She sleeps, one leg thrown across me. Her fleece is tainted and wiry. Some sperm seeps from her slit, and the insides of her thighs are marked with large white patches. I sit up and slide my hand across the sticky flesh. The mucus covers my fingers and I notice a fine thread of blood. I push: it throbs, broadens, becomes deep and red. There is a sort of hiccup, and an overflow of spunk runs over the back of my hand. I observe it moving slowly down my wrist, and while it does so, something strange happens to me – something I would not know how to explain, for there is only the trickling and a voice in my head which says: life is transparent… life is transparent…

After that I know nothing more about the place, nor Emma, nor above all about myself. I fall. I feel happy. But naturally, before long, I want knowledge afresh, or rather, to recapture my knowledge. I row through time and secrete words.

Words? Always the same of course, but sex and its movement are always the same and yet always different. Speech too has its saliva. Words which speak, which do not speak, which are finally something other than memory, because before long they produce an image which is not recollection but the beginning of repetition. I remember. You are speaking to me. You are sitting on your heels like all the women out there. You have that haze of light on your face that I remember even more than your face. No, it is to my sex, erect before you, that, sitting naked, you are speaking, the sound of your expiration making each word edge dyingly through your teeth.

“My vainglory my gem my finger my felon my sharp-pointed my snub my walnut my planting my balk my burrower my gourmand my gowk my stopple my dart my pillar my filthiness my stealer my stake my regiment my thief my wretch my stock my kingling my pointel my postel my orphan my imp my hungered my lance my jewel my settle my spur my celerity my pile my tunneller my dotard my mole my falchion my cockrow my skinful my pipe my diviner my glaive my stiff my cockle my ravisher my spear my weathercock my sparkling my jack my arrowhead…”

I remember. Like a heartbeat in my ear. But perhaps it is only my tongue beating hard against my teeth’s cage. Sometimes I am so hollow that you come inside and the shadow cries out for mercy. Then I stretch out my hand and there is a little reddened gold because night is drawing in. The room is a hole in the stone: an open tomb. You are no longer speaking to me. Your halo has also reddened. If I lift my hand slightly I do not know whether I am seeing the sky or the sea.

I remember. We are naked, stretched out on the white sheet, both motionless, waiting for night’s arrival to erase the = sign we form with our bodies. I closed my eyes a long time ago. I see bygone days falling like leaves. The breeze from that falling turns my seven skins one by one. I see the cells shit into my blood, the air carry that filth up to my throat and throw it out. Then night falls.

“Sweet,” I say. “Sweet.”

You do not reply. You are dark. My hand moves, moves slowly towards you. It runs a little way down your side and then suddenly accelerates and scales your thigh. It marks time there, as if to be forgotten, before it slides towards your abdomen and knots its fingers in your fleece. Another halt. You breathe against my fingertips. You wait and I wait. One of your hands has moved towards me, secretly. I feel it coming. I avoid it by arching my back. “Be good,” you murmur. Your hand touches me, climbs calmly onto my belly, runs to my thigh, drops down and slips under the fold of my buttock. You are there like a shadow that I cannot see in the shadow but know is there lying in wait for me. Suddenly I think: I love you. Your hand starts to caress while mine crosses the curly bush, lets itself slide along the outer labia, then slowly extends each finger to cover your whole sex. Listen. Don’t move. Wait. I see a millipede at the base of my abdomen and its feet become the lashes of a huge red eye. Your hand is under my balls. Your hand holds the reins. Not yet. Don’t get hard yet. A bubble of silence swells around us. You explore my buttocks and I imagine that I too have a large mouth there. Beneath my hand, you tremble, and a pulse blooms at my fingertips in reply to your palpitations. “Emma, Emma, Emma,” I say very quickly, feeling a liquid oozing from your labia. Your index finger pierces me: I am a ring of flesh that I squeeze and ease to play on your finger. You arch against my hand pushing harder. Its pressure is enough to open you. You have a moist slit. I love you. I touch your clit, you moan, roll against me and our deranged hands lose themselves on all the flesh that comes their way. Passing near my face, mine brings me your odour and I want to take hold of the nape of your neck. I want to. But you bite my shoulder, then my throat. I search for your sex with all my fingers. You brush them aside, straighten up. I open my eyes to surprise you on the move, but see only the air in the room has turned milky and you are swimming backwards towards me. You float above me. You place your knees in the hollow of my armpits. You lean forward. You run your lips over my sex, then your tongue, then your half-open mouth. I have eyes in my crotch – eyes that would like to roll between your teeth. But when your lips gently encircle me, there is a great surging back through my whole body, as if the fact that my cock was stiffening was returning my sight back to its proper place. Your knees squeeze tightly and I part my eyelids only to see the mound, where the sweet valley gapes, coming down towards my face. And there is your odour. I open my mouth straightaway to drink up that odour. My tongue is stuck out. Yours slides along the huge vein. I swell. I knock against the roof of your mouth. It is me down there who fills your mouth. But more of me is here in my extended tongue which now pushes between your other lips. I am a bow and you the string. Now you suck the whole shaft and me, I lick, I nibble. You become earthy, humid and deep. I plough your entire furrow. I remember. Emma lets rip. Her mouth goes down, draws up – a loving bracelet that my member fills. At each movement to the base her nose batters between my balls and her breasts bang against my belly. I love. I love. The dear tongue of my mistress clings to the head of my cock and its sweet saliva oils my weapon. My nose, meanwhile, has pushed to the most hollow part of the furrow while my tongue dances around the stiff little clit. The anus contracts level with my eyes, then purses its lips and allows a glimpse of a fillet of pink flesh beyond the brown rim. I love. You love. We love. Emma pitches her hips, discharges a slightly bitter juice on my nose, rubs her cunt against my swollen lips in a swirling motion which corresponds exactly to the dancing of my mouth. The swirling increases. Hairs caress my entire face. I knock against the back of her throat at each slide of the bracelet to the base of the shaft. Her breasts beat my belly like two little heels. Each jerk by Emma deposits a moistness which spreads across my chest. I bathe my index finger in the hollow of her mound, smear it with the fragrant mixture of saliva and juice, then, while my tongue travels up the entire furrow, I suddenly thrust it into the pink whose corolla winks. There is a groan. Emma’s hands slide beneath my buttocks, part them, and her finger does the same to me. Her crotch is resting on my chest. We turn together. We write our love. Gravity accelerates in the empty sky. Down below the moment draws near. A ball of whiteness descends the inside of my marrow. My balls burn. A sudden surge of will impels me to unstick my mouth, withdraw my cock. Emma groans, complains. “Come! Come!” she cries. I throw her across the bed, sit astride her, cover her, stab her to the hilt. Silence. The light is on her face. We look at each other. We no longer have any skin between us. Same warmth, my sweet, same dance of flesh on our bones, same trembling among the branches. Life is so alive in my head that my eyes bulge. Silence… I love. You love. We love. Our breathing deepens, forms a rhythmic pattern, installs in our bellies the certainty of being together. Calm, calm. Light on the down of your cheek. You smile. You invite me. You spread your heartbeats through your entire belly so that the wall’s pulsations set my tool awry. I smile at you. I raise myself up. I draw my cock slowly out of you. I watch it emerge. Then, with a movement we would like to be inexorable, I thrust it into your consciousness, withdraw it, thrust it farther. You vibrate. You sweat. You sheathe me with long, long palpitations. I swell again. Contemplating it once more between our legs, I admire you for making this arm blossom at my base. This arm, this bone at whose root swings a double orange. You raise your sex to meet this machine. You gobble it up, you swallow it. I watch it being gulped down, exaltedly. You take hold of it, pumping with all your strength, squeezing, beating, but I manoeuvre away and with the same exaltation see my penis emerge inch by inch and uncover its head. But you refuse to let go of the engine and you push up your mound to pursue it. I remember. The hair roots were full of slaver. It was a flooded meadow beneath the water, and my penis pointing towards the source’s mouth was sticky and steaming. Then, I had the mad desire to plant myself in that greasy ground, to be plastered with it, to have its residue all over my body. I took Emma’s hands, plunged them one after the other into the source and used them as brushes to paint myself with its colours. I remember. I am your savage. I have just pinned you down. I dance. You cunt about before me and I pin you down again. “Go on, go on,” you say. “Fill my hole to the brim. Leave nothing there but the room you fill and the longing for you, my longing to be fucked by you.” I get stuck in. I plunge. I drive into you till I make your shoulders tremble. The bumping of my balls against your arse excites me further. I love you. I catch hold of your breasts. You thrust your pubis so hard against me that it hurts. You claw my back, my neck. You knot your legs around my waist. You contract your vagina till it becomes the jaw it dreams of being. You cling to my neck. Positioned on my hands and knees, I sway so you can mark time with our passion. I love you. Your jaw encircles me, and I do not know whether it is her or me beating in the flow of sweet saliva. You love me. You stream down. I say: “Suck me till your thirst is quenched.” And I say, or I think: “Odour of pleasure, I love you; fountain of time, I love you; source of the imaginary, I love you; hole of surpassment, I love you; crown of penises, I love you.” Your heels pommel my buttocks. You are the pendulum of a crazy clock. Your mouth enters my mouth so that our tongues fight between our teeth. I now support our career with only one hand. With the other I gather liquid flowing from your hole, then use it to smear our lips. Then I strike you with it, lash you with it. Enraged, you squeeze me harder and the pendulum swings even more wildly, and I cry: “Eat me!” And you: “Again. Further. Further.” I am only that red bone in your mouth. Above there is the long trail of a scream between your teeth. Below, your soft mouth contracts. Here you are tied my beauty, tied to my tree and ready for the great explosion. But the knot remains immobile and central while shooting along our limbs, and rolling to the depths of our communal memory we share the same cry.

The July night covered us again with its gentleness, and so as not to disturb it, the ocean’s surface barely rippled. Nothing was more urgent than youth and happiness, as far as life can go, for happiness renders youth tireless. Before long our bodies were feeling their way again. We knew that, contrary to the order of rhetoric, it is not a matter of exhausting the subject but of making it exhaustible.

One day, having climbed the cliff, we came across the place of our first meeting, and I asked Emma what significance the ceremony, in which I had been held worthy of her, held for the village people.

“It seems the festivity used to be held at the new moon preceding each solstice and each equinox. The custom only recommenced a few years back. But I had never heard of it till the old man came to ask my parents to prepare me for the ceremony. He said: the Lady has chosen her. The Lady wants her. I believe my parents were afraid. They agreed without a murmur. And you, well you do not displease them now. My father said: he could have eaten our hearts, but he’s a man.”

As I knew nothing of the ceremony’s end, I should have liked Emma to describe it to me.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Virgins only come here if they have been chosen as new moon. The old people say we must deflower the new moon.”

“But who chose you?”

“The Lady. I told you.”

“What lady?”

“The one from the island.”

I had never heard of this other island. I wanted to know where it was.

“Over there,” Emma motioned, pointing out to me a spot on the horizon just opposite the terrace. It looked two or three hours away by boat. A very tiny island.

“Have you ever been there?”

“No one has ever been there. It’s forbidden and people are afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“The Lady.”

“But who is this lady?”

“The one who arrived naked.”

In a flash I saw her again. The Beauty. The hair. The triangle. The walk.

“Why are people afraid?”

“The island is well-guarded. There are dogs, arabs, armed black men. Mariners say that anyone who lands there never returns.”

“Are you sure?”

“That’s what they say.”

“And the village accepts that? There are many men here.”

“The Lady’s rich. She buys everything the men catch in the sea. She brings us everything that comes from elsewhere. It’s enough not to meddle in her affairs. That is the order.”

“And what does she do?”

“She has a large castle in the middle of the island.”

“And before?”

“Before what?”

“Before the Lady ruled here?”

“I do not know. The Lady’s older than me. The village has always depended on the island.”

There was a shadow behind my eyes. I had not known it to begin with, but suddenly I realized I was not seeing Emma anymore. Like a blind man I stretched my hand towards her face, then my tongue towards her tongue. The shadow persisted. At that time, towards her, I was no more than the fool of my own folly.

That night I left our stone house and the white bed to go down to the inn and talk to the fishermen. They greeted me, teasing:

“Emma is beautiful, isn’t she?”

“And what a pleasure, young man, by the look of you!”

I bought drinks and their friendliness expanded with every bottle they emptied of the dark wine. At last, when I thought the moment was right, I asked:

“What’s that island you can see from the top of the cliff?”

The lightheadedness disappeared abruptly. The mariners looked at me then at each other, before one of the oldest finally decided to answer:

“It’s Countess Mona’s island. You pleased her, since she picked you out the other night.”

“Is it always she who chooses?”

“Yes. She presides over our festivals. She started them again, after all. Old Bastien, the one in charge, defended the tradition well but without the countess it was probable that our virgins would keep their holes stoppered till marriage.”

“And Mona? Is she from here?”

“The island belonged to her father, and her father’s father. But the old man did not care much about us. Mona looks after us better, though we must not go near the island.”

“You have never been there?”

“No. It is forbidden. There are dogs and black men. Sometimes when the wind is strong you hear those beasts from hell howling… After all it’s her home!”

“Does no one ever go there?”

“Friends of hers who arrive in their yachts from the other side of the sea.”

“And what if I went there, to her island?”

“She said it is better not to go.”

“She has spoken of me?”

“She said it’s better not to go.”

“At any rate, your countess would not eat me!”

“Who knows?” shrugged the old man.

While calling for drink to put an end to my interrogation, he gave me the half-condescending, half-pitying smile that old people sometimes have.

From then on I had but one idea – to see Mona again, to visit her island, her castle. Although I took great care not to show this desire, my assiduity with Emma abated. I kept silent in order to imagine and thus envisage, but who has faith in his own visions?

Frequently, in the afternoon, I escaped to the terrace. I had been able to obtain a telescope easily, but though it drew the island nearer, it did not show me anything. I succeeded in spotting a large white yacht, the castle not at all. The island was hilly enough to conceal it. In any case, did they not call anything the least bit bigger than the poky village houses a castle?

The map told me nothing either. No doubt the island was off the main route, or else so tiny that reduction to scale made it invisible.

I secretly prepared for my expedition, making a habit of borrowing Emma’s father’s boat. It had a shallow draught and I quickly familiarized myself with its handling. The weather was calm, my hopes high: what have I to fear from Beauty?