Red Room and Stars

One moment she had been in her relatively modern living room in France, and in a nostalgia-laden whimsy and semi-naked, trying on a pair of charcoal thigh-high stockings just for herself alone, much too young an item for her now, and then suddenly in the very next moment she was standing straight and very upright inside the close confines of a narrow and darkened laneway of some seemingly-medieval provincial township.

The laneway, appearing to rise very slightly upwards in little small twists and turns but not so sufficiently angled that any single complete blind corner was ever actually made, was something from out of the past though there were electric lights here and there along the way in it. Far off at the end of it, there appeared to be water, and wan lights. Underfoot there were cold, smooth cobblestones; underfoot beneath the thin layer of the nylon of her stockings...

She was still wearing what she had been wearing back in her living room. Which meant she was still semi-naked too. She had on her heavy-duty supported black satin bra, a silver-gray satin blouse -- unbuttoned -- and a pale blue N. Peal Burlington Arcade-bought two-ply cashmere scarf loosely around her neck with the ends flung back over her soft and fleshy curved shoulders. No panties, no skirt, nothing at all down there...

But she was too let's say, mature a woman now, well into her sixties in fact, and at the minimum, the heavy undergrowth of her genital hair down there betrayed with its many long thick strong and resilient, stubborn strands of silvery-gray individual hairs, her true years - she was realistically not any more the unequivocal sex symbol that once might have excited any theatrical audience even when she was fully clothed.

And which was, after all, what every traditional sex symbol does - whether clothed or unclothed - that is, present a surface vision that incites some kind of harmonic flame, some kind of erotic emotion and flame from out of a phantasm, an erotic image, and perhaps merely, just an idea...

The reality of the real person behind the image, was not always perfect like a picture, got old, was subject to all kinds of physical problems, illness, tiredness, material problems of life, even allergies to cosmetics!

Of course, the sex fantasy image or its stylistic erotic derivative idea as a principle never can die. It might get old temporarily but it never can die. A specific version of it may go out of favour for a while; but if it ever was solid as an erotic fantasy in the first place it will eventually always resurface again, or be re-invented, updated, renewed - morph into some completely new incarnation even in an almost alien new generation, but yet somehow still be sexually recognizable to the new vogue.

Generally, she was practical when it came to nakedness or sexuality. Over-exposure made you cold. Or too brutally visible. But now, neither the utter strangeness of the event, nor the night air, caused her to consider either the questions of warmth or modesty; it was the soft and lilting voices of Benedictines singing Gregorian Chant that caused her to unwrap the scarf from around her neck and re-wrap it around her waist to form a blue miniskirt effect. In fact the air itself was rather thick and somewhat warm, it apparently being a summer's evening here, wherever 'here' was...

A shadowy black robed figure slipped into the narrow lane from out of some passage or doorway about twenty feet further on ahead of her, hesitated for a second, and then began to walk briskly towards her.

In a few seconds she made out the figure of a tall monk, head close-shaven and with the hood of his cloak not brought up to cover his head or face.

As he came nearer she held up a hand and he stopped and looked up at her. "Excuse me," she asked, her slightly tenor-pitched voice, cultured and slightly nasally, possibly because of her prominent cheekbones. "Are you able to tell me the name of this place?" She pointed her index fingers down to indicate what she meant.

Her inquiry brought no verbal reply but a finger to the lips by the monk, and then a gesture that implied she was to follow him. He began walking briskly once again, inclining his head and face to her so that he captured her eyes with his. And she found herself agreeing to go along with wherever he was intending for them both to go. Because surely, she thought to herself, there was really afterall logically little or no other choice in the immediate moment, especially since the monk appeared to be confident of being able to lead her somewhere. Although where? She decided she would at least see... He did not feel threatening to her, she vaguely reflected to herself.

The sheer utter physical papability to her hands and feet and of all of her senses, of the entire setting and situation, never gave her a moment's cause to consider that any of it might have been a dream of some very lucid kind. She knew she could not possibly have simply suddenly fallen asleep just when she was adjusting her stockings and thinking about those old days -- or the heydays, as they were, really. She had just a second ago been thinking of the way she would have pulled on such provocative items 'back in the day...' Thinking of what she would have done now as an experienced adult, with such erotically provocative outfits and apparel -- if she were young once more!

And all of a sudden she was here. In a radically different place. Transported. Lost, in a sense.

The self-assured, confident sound of the chanting Benedictines was nothing to her if not comforting, she decided quietly to herself, under all of the circumstances. The singing voices seemed to be closer now, and the monk a little ahead of her stopped, and found a small door, which he opened with both of his hands. Standing on the threshold he signalled for her to enter with him, and she did not feel the need to decline. He had such a nice face, she thought.

She entered into a dark wood, floor-to-ceiling panelled room, almost completely empty except for two long red velvet-covered benches, one each on either side of the room, with their backs hard up against the walls. And even though she was still able to make out the chanting voices now coming softly through the thick walls, there was a certain quality of silence in this room. And of stillness, too. The slowly playing flames of two large white candles that burned away on their stands in two fairly distantly opposing corners were the only active counterpoints to rather profound stillness.

The young monk -- for she saw that he was indeed a rather young-looking monk -- sat on one of the red velvet seats. Taking his lead, she sat down herself in the other seat that was facing him.

The candle flames diminished and went out.

The muffled sound of the chanting monks faded away completely.

There was a faint odor of frankincense and myrrh in the air.

A pretty voice, a young woman's pretty voice, discarnate and out of the darkness sounded out a clear and distinct warning -- 'go back.' And the echo of the words repeated like something technological. And then a discarnate different voice, a man's voice... 'Perhaps you didn't realize...' She imagined there had been one of those angelic feminine faces -- the one with those fluttering snow white wings -- making an 'Oh!' with its mouth, and briefly suspended in the middle of midnight blue-black and empty space inside the room. But it was only an imagined thing.

The room absolutely burst into warm loud sound, and she realized she was listening to Groove Armada's pop hit 'Lightsonic,' with its strange discarnate voices beginning.

Shivers of fright and yet also delight flowed through her entire body.

Glints and glows of bluish, indigo, purple and mauve luminescence flashed out from the sleeves and folds of the monk's robe.

He rose from where he had been sitting and came towards her, kneeling down close in front of her. And then he spoke:

"What you are about to experience now you must never tell anyone. Not anyone living on this earth."

Leaving her with no time to think about anything, he took both of her hands in his and raised them up to her face so that she could see the wrinkles of her skin on the backs of her hands -- see them, and then suddenly next watch them, the wrinkles of age, as they rapidly smoothed out and disappeared entirely. She knew utterly that something strange and exciting was going on; she felt all the aches and weaknesses of age and suspect joints go and be replaced with a kind of vigorous strength, something almost akin to the idea of what it might have been like being transformed into one of those Marvel superheroes. She felt strong and young. Her breathing was clear and deep and powerful.

The man in front of her let go of her hands and dropped his hands into folds in his robe. And from where he produced a deeply crimson coloured leather bound bible which he placed onto the bare thighs of her naked lap.

"So," he quoted. "some who are first, shall be last..."

What on earth was going on, she thought to herself.

"The meaning of this," he tapped on the book's cover. "Is that at last some will arrive at a juncture where a better and more complete grasp of the subtlety and the complex richness of life is fully enabled to them, to their minds, and where the fragile and thin line between mature versus childish meanings, is appreciated."

Was this some kind of avant-garde, exotic, erotic, sex scene or game she had accidentally wandered into...? Maybe something some rich people do for excitement when they are bored or have lots of time on their hands... Rich people with nothing else to do... So have sex and do weird things...

But that couldn't be! She had been in her living room far far away only minutes ago. And now was suddenly here. In this strange scene or game.

The music was very powerful.

She addressed the monk: "Why me?"

He lifted up his face and looked directly into her eyes with a look that energized her in ways she had never felt before at all in the whole of her life.

"The true responsibility of intelligent carnality is very great, for the human being." Once again his palms fell to the surface of the small leather volume. "'For many there are who are called...'

"To have respect, and yet to discern also that which is genuinely false instead of what is only labeled, misdirected, misunderstood, or misrepresented, or slandered; these are the qualities that may lead a few to the narrow doorway, and through which even fewer can pass."

She looked intently at his face. Was this a demon, or an angel, a rich eccentric, a bizarre madman... There was something vaguely familiar about him and yet she was certain she had never seen or met the person before. Who was he? What was he...

His face wasn't beautiful in a typical way one might expect your classical angelic being to look. It was regular, and appeared to be symmetrical, although the nose had a slight raise in the middle -- certainly not perfect the way photographic male models were meant to look, for instance. But then again, she thought to herself, what appeared to be an imperfection did make everything less intimidating, did it not? The presence of something of a human weakness in the midst of what was in fact the actual perfection of the rest of the features... So yes, less intimidating. And yet too, she felt, there was a capacity there for some sort of flashing edginess to the eyes. Friendly eyes, to be sure, but something behind them.

Nothing she saw developed a fear inside her.... Rather the total opposite, really. She felt attracted to this individual; very attracted.

No sooner did the thought of the possibility of that kind of attraction enter her brain than an emotional surge of erotic feelings and a flush of suppressing, secret, embarrassment warmed through her.

It was almost like a team of horses hard against the bit, and she holding tight reins in her hands, but all of it ready to be let loose a little. Ever so little. The sheer thought of it sent another wave of something like a guilty knowingness through her.

What an appealing, pleasantly strong face, really, when she thought about it. Knowing, and yet not too solicitous. And behind the regular down-to-earth facial features there was always that intelligently overt acceptingness in those eyes, and the flickering hint of a smile that played on those ruby lips.

Still perplexed, she whispered, "how... is this possible?"

"Because..." he said slowly, opening his robe to display a surcingle around his muscled waist with a length of red silk rope attached at one side. He took the silk rope into his hands, drawing it away from his waist belt. "Everything is possible. You just don't know it yet."

He took hold of her hands again, at the wrists, and softly looped the silk rope around them. He looked up into her eyes once more, looking to see the reaction and the resistance.

"Nho-o-o!" She breathed out, her breath quickening. But he hadn't tightened the knot. He raised one finger and placed it to her lips.

"Oh but yes." He murmured.

She shook her head in a very small way. "No-o-oh..."

"Then we cannot go on for the moment. And must wait, it seems... For you to decide in favour of the inevitable..." He raised one very sarcastic eyebrow.

She had a professional sardonic half-smile of her own of course, that she could use whenever she wanted. So she inclined her head to one side and used that smile.

And he tightened the knot.

Oh well, she thought. Oh well. This is it.

But all she felt was a blush of shame for the desire to experience the addictively wicked human pleasures that she had not ever fully let loose of all of, not even by her thirties.

It was the blush of shame of an older, much more mature person, going for it all, at last.

All of her life she had played and been cast as the dominant female too. And now she was being tied up by a young boy, comparatively, to her age. At least compared to her actual age in years, and compared to his age in looks. But she knew, maybe this person only looked young.

There was carnality in the room, in the scene, in the power and intent of his self-assured hands. There were lengths and lengths more of that red silken rope produced from where, she didn't know.

He whispered into her ear, cajoled, even laughed at her demeaningly, it seemed. "You hurt yourself trying for what? Not to be fucked by this one or that?

"But I will have your knees hard up against your ears with you gagging for it!"

He was laughing at her!

Time passed, a few snatches of phrases in between her vain struggles to undo the ropes.

"Lord, how you waited and waited, for nothing to come... A sequence of twisted turns that can't be undone... But you'll hurt yourself trying..."

She knew at once she wasn't going to fight hard against it. The kind of freedom that was hard to maintain, the resistance to the sex force, the dirtiest sex force of nature at its most pleasurable and basest...

There was nothing majestic and holy about any of it, and yet everything majestic and holy as nothing else is quite so cherished by and secretly held majestic and holy to every carnal Man and Woman.

"Say to me loudly, 'take my cunthole.'"

He stood up to full height. "Because if you don't I'll leave you here to suffer."

"I can't say that!"

"But you want to. I know."

He was right too. He knew inside her mind. She was so wet now too. Her body had long gone far ahead of her head in its typical usual bad habit of false modesty and facade decorum. Her deepest inner mind was always just a seething pit of sexual monsters, hungry with unsatisfied appetite, longing... For something, very wicked.

Finally she gave up. "Take my cunthole." And she loved saying it too. And when his mouth went down on her British cuntlips and she could feel his nostrils breathing in the essence of her dirty warm soul from around the hairs of her pussy, she felt overjoyed, and limitless, merging into the eternal, and the ineffable. His tongue flicked and licked for a long time. I really want to piss, she thought to her self. And she mentally let herself go, but as soon as she thought she was going to let go, a few drops trickled out and at the same time he plunged his hardness into her wet mushy slippery slit and presently her vagina flexed inside her with extended powerful contortions and contractions that took her orgasm on and on to the point where she screamed. She heard herself screaming with delight. A kind of suffering agony of orgasmic pleasure and frenzy, not knowing when it would all stop, not wanting any of it to die down or to stop, pretending to fear whether it could ever be called back again, and the heights regained, exhalting in the knowledge that it would.

It was the frenzy that she feared most, that she was embarrassed about, and that she knew of course she had to go back to, to retrieve the pleasure. It was the only thing that absolutely was necessary. Shocking, disturbing, horrifying. Life was so complicated.

At what age had the stars in her wine begun to appear? Old wine in old skin become new again. It was a miracle, as Dom Perignon had reputedly exclaimed, originally. Only old wine develops those stars.

*

It was a fantasy she had had all her life. But as she stepped out into the narrow streets and lane-ways of Dorsoduro this time, this latest time on another one of her 'between-film or stage production,' vacations, a realization dawned on her that if anything like the fantasy she entertained in her head ever actually happened the way it played behind her closed eyes, the whole thing would be too confronting, too frightening, really.

And that was probably why this truly strange and magical place, so completely filled with unearthly beings, had revealed only one or two small things to her each time she came, so that by this time now, of having been already many many times along this exact same street, which was that always in shadows part right up at the end of Rio di S. Nicolo, and up the same poorly-lit rising narrow stretch of worn old and often wet paving stones, and having caught a glimpse once or twice, of an actual monk striding along up ahead -- although not on this night -- and many times before having seen that chalkpaint-faced street mime with his small clutch of colourful gas-filled balloons and his beckoning finger, it was no surprise that she could read a little Latin now, and when she allowed her eyes to follow where the mime's finger pointed up towards, she was able to understand that the raised lettering over the architrave read: "Chapel of the Mystical Transfiguration." And she was able to read and understand the writing without a single lift of her heartbeat. And it was only when she decided to try the door, afterall, that she noticed the back of her hand quite calmly.