Thursday, June 14, 2012
Minor
Keys No. 5
A tiny
character (in every sense of the word) that next catches my eye in Azimuth is the girl who works in the
brothel that the rather staid and portly librarian, Kamil, visits. Nothing much
is said about her, even in inference – save that she appears conditioned by the
culture of prostitution so that she has no moral perspective on its practices.
Here’s a snippet from her short visitation to Azimuth’s pages.
The young girl stood before him,
-You wish Madame Aidah to entertain you? He shook his head, asked her to
bring him iced water and mopped his brow. He would have liked to throw off his
cloak such was the heat in the room. She brought it, -You want another lady?
Young? Older? Connoisseur? Her accent was from further to the east.
-I would like to speak with the mistress.
-She not for sale.
-I do not wish to buy her ... her
services. I need to talk with her. The girl stared at him unmoving, -Go!
She turned perplexed as though she felt she had misunderstood his request. Time
passed.
Reading it now brings home to me (oft
discussed in my blogs about writing that precede the current run, is that the
idea of the girl may well have been planted in my mind by a film I saw some
twenty to thirty years ago, Pretty Baby
by Louis Malle. If I remember it clearly, the film was controversial because of
the depiction of a girl in a brothel. Whether the similarity ends there is for
others to decide. In Azimuth she appears to wait on tables
and run errands. There is no information regarding what else she might do.
I understand (now I interrogate my
imagination) that she’s pre or early teenage. She is the daughter of a
prostitute who once worked for Baligha, the Mistress of the House of Senses,
who had to take her as a ward owing to the following circumstances. Her mother,
a slip of a young thing herself, failed to take the precautions of that time
demanded by Baligha of all her courtesans, either before sex or after with one
partner. She had become obsessed with a
young noble who marked her out for his sole ministrations. She was narrow
hipped and frail, so much so that despite medical help she died in the last
hourse of pregnancy and the child had to be cut from her body by the distraught
and guilty Baligha. As a baby, toddler and young child she was mothered by all
the prostitutes. They followed a code laid down by their Mistress that the girl
should not be witness to any unseemly act though it was impossible to stay her
curiosity about the work that they all did. By the time we meet her in Azimuth, she is on the cusp between
innocence and experience. But what happened to her later, after Kamil had
constructed his Tales of the Magus?
In effect Baligha groomed her to manage the
brothel while inculcating in her a sense of obstinate pride in her virginity.
By the time Baligha gave up her ownership of that lucrative business, the girl
was in her twenties and was protected by her own guard of loyal, honest
swordsmen. Her fame spread across the empire and it was natural that young men
fell for the allure of her virginity and beauty in this place of famed and
highly skilled sex goddesses. Curiously, she never married nor lost her
maidenhead but, when she retired and passed on the business to another, a
little like herself, wrote an autobiography of her times with frank and quite
explicit details of the desires of men and how women might satisfy them without
ever losing their dignity and sacred sense of their bodies.
A single poem survives from her writing:
O callous phallus you prey in red the maidenhead
But know that tenderness in ingress helps virgins burgeon
(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle
books at Amazon)
All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me
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