"Different ways to suit different moods." An amused shrug. "And to suit my own tastes. But there are general guidelines. She's Italian, so I say olive, Mediterranean complexion. Dark. But not too dark, what they used to call 'dusky'. And young, twenty? Twenty-two? Sometimes I try twenty-four, but that's too old, or eighteen – but that's too early. No, it's got to be twenty. And as the narrative is set in the early Seventies, that makes her only in her late forties now, right? And she's got black hair, long black hair, thick and curled loose around her face and shoulders, sometimes to her waist, yes, that's my favourite one. An ebony tent of hair to her waist so her face, shoulders and nipples peep through a fine veil of it. Bardot lips, bee-stung lips, thick, almost Negroid, in a woman-child pout, like a Euro-movie. Bardot's sullen sensuality, and something else, something demure, innocent, even in debauchery. A face to launch dreams. Turned-up nose and huge, deep, limpid brown eyes, eyes that make you stand and deliver with just a glance. Delicately formed, doll-like, but with large full breasts, nipples the colour of copper coins and twice as large as fifty-pence pieces..."
"But of course, that's all your fictions. There's no way you can even tell the author's genuine gender. Is there nothing in the style of the writing that gives clues? Isn't the way a man writes porn different to the way a woman writes it?"
"I've thought about that. Certainly there are differences. I've read and studied a lot. Men write harder, they emphasise arousal, even the nipples and the clitoris become massively erect, described like the penis. Women write softer, more fluid. But even that's a double-blind because it relates to the audience they write for, they deliberately cater to the fixations of their readers. And male fantasies and female fantasies are not the same – despite what they say."
"How does it all begin...?"
–- 0 –-
"Angelina's father, Sergio Badini, is as ruthlessly ambitious in Business as he is strict and authoritarian at home. He comes from poverty, back street petty crime, black markets, the slums, until he's briefly imprisoned during the final chaotic days of World War II. It's here he meets, and comes under the influence of Ennio Cavellino, who's jailed for Fascist political offences. Cavellino's in an old established family, aristocracy clear back to Genoese Merchant Princes. Yet they strike up a bond that remains today.
Immediately following the war – on a loan from Cavellino, Badini buys his first legitimate business, a general store in Verona. He works hard, using his black market skills and contacts, expanding clear through the Italian ricostruzione of the Fifties until, with two shops, he's able to exploit the 'age of the common man', switching format to ride the Supermercato (Supermarket) boom until he owns a string of them clear across North-East Italy. While the aristocracy – already in decline, is being taxed to near extinction by successive left-of-centre Governments. Cavellino hence has social prestige and title, but no cash. Badini has commercial success, but hungers for respectability. The imbalance is corrected by an arrangement – Angelina. It could be that simple, a contract of mutual advantage to both parties, the text isn't too specific.
In 'Dolci E Perverse' she writes "Cavellino is older, much older, slightly corpulent, bewhiskered, but always elegantly and expensively tailored, precise and immaculate in manners. Always more the indulgent uncle than the Lover. And he's always there, as far back as I can remember – there at Parties with my Mother, I sit on his knee as a child. He's there on outings and picnics. He's always part of the extended family, buying me presents and clothes. It's natural for me to have no modesty before him, to sunbathe fashionably topless during long languorous Julys spent in our villa garden, the shading cypress trees and the summer-house overlooking the curve of Lake Garda, and as I mature I'm flattered by his interest in my body, although it's a warm, safe, feeling. He calls me his 'Toy', his 'Little Property', and I feel protected, enclosed by his possessiveness. I strive to gain his approval.
When my family applies gentle encouragement it seems natural we should marry, and that the roles should remain pretty much as they've always been. I've been brought up to respect the wishes of those I care for. My loyalties are simply transferred to my husband. I'm content to surrender all questions of freedom to his proprietorial and paternalistic authority. Our marriage is unconsummated. Ennio is impotent, unable to sustain erection, so I stay chaste. But he loves me to be naked for him, to dress provocatively – at his instigation, around the house, I might wear just frilly red garter-belt and pale mauve stockings, or outside I'll wear sheer blouses, no underwear, so my nipples are clearly outlined (everything he wishes me to wear draws attention to them) and skin-hugging slacks, or short short micro-skirts. Sometimes I feel self-conscious, but he enjoys other men's covetous glances, and through his approval, I gain my reward. It stays that way, until the American hitch-hiker..."
The story seems straightforward, but there are hints, suggestions, of other factors. The 'arranged' marriage, the 'transfer of ownership', seem to be the payback of a debt. The final repayment on the original loan that funded Badini's first commercial venture? The arrangement must have been explicit, with a contract rider, a pact of some kind. A 'deliver unto me your firstborn.' There's a kind of moral queasiness about that which I find unsettling. Of course, at any point – if she'd found the arrangements not to her taste, she was well able to back out. The option was always there for her. This is not the Seventeenth Century. This is not the Third World. This is the age of Feminism and the Gender Revolution. But I feel that – to a degree Angelina was guided, if not quite conditioned or pre-programmed. In many ways a strong self-willed person, she yet writes of having taken pride in playing the role of 'property' from the beginning, while in maturity she is content to accept the material and economic benefits of accepting the part, almost, of an item of trade. So how binding an arrangement can this be? How deeply rooted?
I imagine the two men isolated together in that prison cell, from vastly different social classes, but they've become comrades in some bizarre crusade. Martyrs for Fascism. Cavellino and Badini must have expected execution at any moment, and the imminence of death concentrates the mind, produces an intimacy, a bonding, like no other. I believe the social experiment begins here, with that trading of confidences, that hatching of impossible dreams and yearned-for futures that must have occurred in that bleak cell. The combination of Aristocracy with Capitalism must have seemed irresistible. Even the mode of sexuality subsequently employed suggests this. And all of the events that are to happen must have flowed from that moment. All – that is, until her actions cause the rules to be adjusted..."
–- 0 –-
Mike's flat consists of the upper storey of a gently decaying Regency house set back slightly from the road, fenced off by an overgrown garden, shaded in by tall unruly trees. The walls of his room are black. An angle-poise lamp illuminates the computer in one corner, green digital numbers read out from a DVD in another, beneath a silk-screen poster by Peter Blake. He ignores the CD, but places a vinyl album on the music-centre turntable instead, cues up the stylus, and Roland Kirk's 'Volunteered Slavery' pulses and dances from the wall-mounted speakers.
"I still break out in a cold sweat when I think of what I make her do to me" he says, in a voice pitched just above the jazz saxophone. Mike, the Thin White Duke of the Manchester Lit-scene, hacking out translations, ghosting biographies for Rock Stars and Sports Personalities, living through various other dubious and vicarious enterprises. "I see her all the time now. She sucks on her forefinger, playfully, in a highly suggestive manner, one so lascivious it could be prosecuted under some obscenity law. She's tactile, she touches things, tiny secret touches, she does it compulsively, chair-backs, surfaces... people. People. She sticks her tongue out at me cheekily, but as the tongue protrudes between her lips it suggests a fleeting ghost of the clitoris in the vagina. She licks her lips like they do on the TV commercials, her throat moving up and down like she's swallowing. And I imagine she might be swallowing something of mine. For me she is the feminine mystique, the Belle De Jour..."
"But her being inaccessible, near-mythic, has got to be a part of that attraction?"
"But is that a good or a bad thing?" He shrugs expressively. Passes an A4 ring-plan folder across to him. This is 'Dolci E Perverse'. He opens it at random, reads the small tight handwriting and the areas of typescript, skipping and skimming the narrative.
This section – detailing Angelina's first submission, is written in the first person... "...motoring through the lower slopes of the Alps, descending through lines of trees that spoke past the windshield and curve back, domiciles set like fossils in the valleys, swinging past us on the end of long gradients and steep beaten-earth driveways. Dust hangs on the air, the air hangs heavy with imminent thunder, but the engine swallows sound like we're travelling underwater, amputated, disconnected from what we're seeing...
...and we pick up this American student, College kid, shoulder-length auburn hair, hitch-hiking on a year's sabbatical to 'do' Europe... young, bronzed, vibrantly athletic, just a few years my senior, relaxed in the way that Americans are relaxed, flirtatious in that unconscious intimacy that American can achieve within moments of meeting. I'm wearing an expensive blouse so sheer my nipples must be clearly visible, I'm conscious of the weight and the movement of my breasts beneath the thin material. Shy of his obvious interest, but also flattered by it... a stop at a Ristoranté for lunch, drinking red wine as clear as blood, they're deep in conversation – in English, from which I'm excluded, recognising a word here or there, but unable to piece them together, so I drink more wine, its warm blur softening the words into smooth reassuring consistencies...
