Fiction

Chapter 17 - Pietà

When they met for lunch again neither of them mentioned Mohandas, instead they chatted happily about work and the other people there and Margery was again in a talkative mood.

It was clear that they weren't going back to work. The warm afternoon sun was streaming in to the restaurant and the blue harbour twinkled below them. This was going to be one of those multiple bottle lunches. In vino veritas?  Most other patrons had already finished their lunches and the place was almost theirs for the afternoon.

Bianca asked Isis, her VPA, to advise work, only to find that Isis had already done so and contacted Circe to rearrange both women's meetings and appointments.

Bianca was sure that Margery made her various stories up or at least elaborated outrageously. For example, who was this teacher who was manipulating or had manipulated her life?

So, when the third bottle arrived Bianca asked for more details about Margery's supposed seduction of her young priest.   

"Tell me more about your enslaved priest who is now a Bishop. Who is he?  Would I have heard of him?"

"I told you he's a sleeper. His identity's secret," Margery replied.

"You said that you'd had to use your Implements of the Inquisition, your recordings and a rape report, sooner that you wanted to," said Bianca. "Why?"

"Because the following day he proposed marriage. He'd had such a wonderful day that he decided that he couldn't live without me. He'd prayed all night and would go to his Bishop and confess all. Then seek to leave the priesthood. We could be married. Many men had done this and although they had usually left before their final vows, he was sure that he could get a dispensation." 

"My goodness, you must have been good at fourteen," replied Bianca dubiously.

"Of course, I refused him and said that I wanted to carry on as before. He said he couldn't do that. He was going to his Bishop even if I wouldn't marry him."

"He obviously, thought you were now eighteen, and an adult, and you were in love with him," said Bianca, finishing another glass herself and at last starting to buy into this part of the story.

"That was when I told him that there was the small matter of my real age."

"Was he upset?"

"Upset is an understatement. He was mortified. Initially he said that I must have bewitched him and he never wanted to see me again. I pointed out that there was the slightly worrying matter of the many recordings that I'd made of him having sex with a girl who he apparently knew to be thirteen years old. And then were the unusual practices that he'd come to enjoy during sex."

"What?  You're kidding!  How did you manage that?  Did you doctor your recordings?"

"No, I enchanted him. I'd had lessons from my teacher who was the greatest enchantress alive."

"How do you do that?"

Margery was very pleased at how this was going. She'd waited for the warm afternoon and the wine to do its magic this time and now was the perfect opportunity to mesmerise Bianca and capture her mind for the first time. Once she has achieved this once it becomes trivial to re-enchant her in future. All sorts of suggestions then become possible.

Just as some people attend a hypnotist to overcome an addiction such as smoking the reverse is all too easy. Implanting a physiological or psychological addiction can then be used to enslave the body and mind to the enchantresses will. Last time she'd been worried that she had lost Bianca's respect, after Bianca's revelations that she knew about Phillip. Yet now she was resting on her every word.

She would try again. She brought her hand-held screen into Bianca's field of vision then as if distracted, started rotating her ring. He voice dropped and became melodic.

"Nestling someone's head in your lap and using suitably hypnotic words is a wonderful way of enchanting someone. And it helps if you have a way of seducing their unconscious mind."

"You knew some way of making him vulnerable?"

Bianca's voice was mimicking hers. Excellent.

"I'd noticed a rather erotic painting in an oval frame by Pompeo Batoni in his room below a crucifix and a replica of a similarly beautiful painting by the Flemish master Lucas Cranach that he'd hung in the church." 

"For a person who's been brought up with images of the infant Jesus suckling with Mary it not only subconsciously recalls their infancy, in a Freudian way, but triggers all sorts of complex emotions in addition."

Margery brought the images up on her hand-held to show Bianca.

As Bianca looked at the paintings Margery seemed to be humming in an unusual way. Bianca was finding them very seductive. There was something so pleasant about a mother suckling a child. Bianca imagined herself with a baby. Margery seemed to be humming a lullaby and in the soft, warm, harbour breeze, redolent of the nearby blossom trees, Bianca was beginning to drift off, as if about to fall asleep. She caught herself just in time; shook her head; and grabbed the back of her neck firmly with her hand. She sat up straight and stretched her spine.

"If you mask off the Cranach below her face you can see that she's a young teen," Margery had been explaining.

"Yet she looks older in the Batoni, painted two centuries later, when girls were no longer married off at twelve," remarked Bianca recovering from her drowsiness.

"I must say that a lot of religious art is highly erotic, particularly during the Renaissance. Paintings depicting Mary Magdalene; Salome with the head of John the Baptist and even of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian come to mind. But there are thousands of examples you can still see in museums or in The Cloud. Repressed sexuality seems to have been bubbling not too far below the fabric of the Catholic Church, like magma below Vesuvius or Etna. I'm sure that it was one of the factors that led to the Protestant Revolution and it found its expression in their art, and, of course, in their taste for nasty tortures."  

"You seem to be something of a connoisseur," Margery responded, pronouncing the last word in the French manner. "Are you interested in torture?"

She was annoyed that Bianca had resisted her hypnotic suggestions. Bianca's rational brain was back in charge. But that had been close and they had all afternoon and it was very pleasant here with the comfortable restaurant open to the gardens. Bianca's initial resistance would soon be overcome.

"It's not my field. But I've always liked art museums," Bianca continued, now feeling wide awake again. She liked this topic of conversation: sexual motivation in art.

"Art galleries usually have a nice atmosphere and I like standing in front of a painting or sculpture and imagining what the artist was feeling when they conceived of and made a work. It's hard to find an artist who is not sexually, religiously or politically and/or financially motivated. The political ones are quickly dated and boring, even if you agree with them, and the purely financially motivated are artistically compromised."

"What motivated an artist to spend hours or days on that canvas or that sculpture, getting it to the point where they were happy to show it or sell it? How many did they rub out or paint over or reduce to scrap before they produced this one?" 

"Does this girl ever stop talking?" Margery was thinking as she tried to look interested. She finished off her glass and poured another, smiling all the while.

"When it comes to Renaissance religious art I have no belief in their God, so I can only guess at how the artists felt about praise or gratefulness or comfort in His imminence and in the light of his countenance, which, by the way, is a phrase from a priest's blessing that goes right back through early Judaism to Egyptian sun worship. But I am a sexual being and I do recognise eroticism," Bianca continued enthusiastically.

"And eroticism oozes from almost every Renaissance painting and sculpture. One hand on the paintbrush, the other you know where. Have a look at Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or his Pietà in St Peter's and put yourself in Michelangelo's mind when he first sketched them and then moved to fill in the detail of those almost naked bodies."

"And is that Mary, the mother, or Mary Magdalene, the mistress? St John says the mother was at the crucifixion, yet the original Synoptic Gospels written earlier, say it was the other Mary who some say was his mistress. Michelangelo famously had some fast talking to do when people noticed that the mother looks younger than the son," she went on.

This was getting nowhere. Margery decided to let her run. Sooner or later Bianca would talk herself to a standstill and then it would be time to start the enchantment again.

"So, I can see that your priest may well have had conflicted emotions when viewing them. Subconscious sexual arousal experienced by the faithful as religious awe?  I imagine he's not alone in that!"    

"Quite so," said Margery, petulantly, annoyed by Bianca's intellectual wanking.

"One hand on the paintbrush indeed," she thought.

It was time to restore the mood. She moved her hands to attract Bianca's attention to her ring again and continued, completely ignoring Bianca's attempt to steer the conversation to art or religion.

"After I'd enchanted him," she continued, "I suggested that he would like me to be a virgin like Mary in the Cranach. He would like to have known me when I was a child. We could go back there together. Imagine me back then when we played together." 

"Now I'm twelve and blossoming into a young woman. Mary in your Cranach is a beautiful thirteen. She already has a baby. She's sexually experienced. It would have been fun to fuck me when I was younger. I could pretend to be thirteen for him. It would be fun if I pretended to be thirteen, wouldn't it?"

Bianca could see that the young priest must have found this a very seductive idea while still hypnotised or 'enchanted' as Margery liked to call it.

"Then I ended his enchantment and asked him if he would like to fuck me while I pretended to be thirteen," Margery concluded. "That would be wonderful he confirmed. Needless to say, I was very convincing."

Again, she held the Cranach for Bianca to see and again she was pleased to see that Bianca was drawn to the young woman suckling her baby. As she looked Margery explained that she had adapted a song for her priest and she began to sing it in a kind of chant to the tune of Sixteen Going on Seventeen from The Sound of Music.

Bianca was finding her mind floating as Margery's voice got softer and softer.

Bianca's eyes were drooping again as she imagined a young Margery 'pretending' to be just thirteen in the embrace of her libidinous priest. Margery's voice seemed to be at the centre of her consciousness. She was describing in erotic detail how she felt in her priest's embrace; and his caresses; and his strong masculine body; fired with new lust.

Bianca continued looking at the screen framed by Margery's hands. The hand with the ring holding it towards her as Margery continued to rotate the ring on its projecting finger with the other. As she listened to Margery's recollections the young man's lips moved to the young woman's breasts and Bianca's thoughts were drawn to the image of the young Mary, or was it Margery, breastfeeding.

"You would like to have a baby to feed like that," Margery suggested to her and it was true. Margery's voice describing the wonderful sensations filled Bianca's consciousness. Bianca's enraptured gaze had followed the pretty ring on Margery's hand, observing in wonder as the hand moved to discreetly unbutton the centre of her blouse so that she could caress a nipple as she distractedly crooned, as if in totally innocent reverie.

Suddenly Bianca caught herself. This was disgraceful. She'd had too much wine. She was about to fall asleep in front of Margery again, who was obviously, a little drunk too, confessing her most intimate memories. She leapt up and excused herself to go to the toilet, where she slapped cold water on her face and drank several handfuls from the tap.

"But the historical Mary was neither a teenager nor a virgin," she declared, returning to her seat reinvigorated. "Some historians suggest that the historical Jesus had two older half-siblings. There's even a church in Nazareth that seems to give some credence to this. So, the term 'virgin' has been misinterpreted. It simply referred to Mary being a widow and new to Joseph."

Margery was furious. This was the second time Bianca had successfully resisted her ring's enchantment and it was becoming extremely frustrating.

"That's totally irrelevant to what the faithful believe. For them, what they believe is true is true, irregardless of the facts," she said angrily, almost shouting.

But Bianca was off on another tangent, recalling her visit to Avignon that for almost five centuries, until the French Revolution, was a Papal State and for over a century was the centre of Western Christendom until the reestablishment of Rome in the fifteenth century: 

"The Musée du Petit Palais there has a number of renaissance paintings and icons representing Mary breast-feeding the infant Jesus. These began to appear around the time of Pope Pius V, who in 1569 made the Rosary, and consequent veneration of Mary, central to Catholic worship, thus distinguishing Catholics from the Protestants during the wars of religion," Bianca explained.

"The doctrines of the Assumption and the Annunciation and the Immaculate Conception were also given new credence and are similarly represented in the art of the period. Such are the wondrous inventions of the human imagination."

At this point Bianca noticed that Margery was getting annoyed, presumably by her travel tales. She had to be more sensitive she told herself. Not everyone enjoyed her interests.

"But I can see how these very literal images of beautiful young women might engender complex emotions in a childless young man who believed them to be images of his God being breast-fed by the Virgin," she concluded in a conciliatory way.

This was not going at all well. This annoying girl kept diverting from Margery's erotic tale, which was intended to engage with Bianca's basic subconscious animal libido.