Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [202]
Gasperini’s men brought them, in boxes tied with red ribbon, one for each person in the room. They were unwrapped and held up and turned this way and that in the lamplight, glistening white replicas of horse-shoes, pigs, rosettes, shells, keys … A long-drawn aaah went round the table: Erasmus’s girl had extracted from her box – as all had known she would, since it was marked for her – a sugar penis, gleaming with crystals, heroically tumid, with a red tassel attached. Smiling, she held it up for all to see. And as she did so, the chanting began again, a single barking syllable now: ‘Up-up-up.’
She laid the dildo before Erasmus and leapt up in a single movement on to the table. Dishes, glasses, remnants of food were swept aside. She tossed her head and snapped her fingers at the hollow-eyed fiddlers, who went into the rhythm of a gavotte. She commenced a swaying dance in the centre of the table, removing her garments piece by piece and throwing them down among the spectators, petticoats, bustle, bodice, stockings. Naked, she was beautiful in the lamplight, her skin like warm pearl. She swooped for her gift, danced into a half-squatting position. Still to the stately rhythm of the music, she inserted it between her legs, pressing it slowly into herself with both hands, raising her face with an expression of simulated ecstasy, while the voices round her rose again, overlapping, indistinguishable, like the baying of dogs.
The woman rose and raised her arms to show the hands were empty and danced a few gyrating steps, keeping her knees close, working her thighs, rounding her mouth to make oohs of bliss. The crimson tassel hung down between her legs like some trailing tissue of blood. She kept to the centre of the table, stepping short, turning to avoid the hands that snatched, though more in jest than earnest, at the swinging cord.
She came to rest where she had begun, before Erasmus, and smiled down at him and swayed her hips, while the whole table loudly exhorted their new President to take it out-out-out, and he reached up and took the strip of velvet and drew on it and a roar went up at the expected sight of how wilted and eroded that proud prick was now, how it dangled grotesquely misshapen on its thread – in accordance with hallowed custom it had been made of powder sugar, designed for quick melting in the hot spice of the vagina.
Erasmus knew what was expected of him. He rose and swung the naked woman off the table and set a staggering course with her towards the door. Then he remembered the Cane, symbol of his office, and came back for it. On inspired impulse, he turned his lapse into triumph, raising the baton and making a sign of the cross with it in a gesture of blessing and farewell, adding that night – though without design – to the proud traditions of the Trionfi Club.
The girl led him down the candle-lit passage into a small room with a narrow bed. On this, with some laughter but no words, she lay down and waited for him. The melted sugar had leaked from her, he saw the shine of it on her thighs. Without words or touch of the mouth, they copulated briefly and violently. She clutched at him and made an angry cry and he felt the slight knifing of her nails. He was released in a series of groaning shudders and fell down beside her like a stone and slept at once.
He woke to a throbbing head and a feeling of utter desolation. There was a grey light in the room. The woman was gone. The tavern and the streets outside were silent and he judged it to be not long after dawn. There was a jug of water and a basin on the small table against the window. He washed his face and hands, drying himself with his handkerchief. The room looked out over the courtyard and the stables, half obscured in mist. Erasmus shivered a little in the chill air. A certain impulse of escape came to him. He would rouse the lad