INVISIBLE CELLS Pt.1

Chapter 9. Constantinople

The sisters’ rapid progression through history, to the C18th, was how the story had been passed to them. Later, they reflected on how crucial the C18th was for questioning divine right. Between them there was always a theoretical as well as narrative interest in the unfolding of the alleged past, which, alleged or not, was inevitably their past.

In their libidinous memory, they knew, before his travels, Isaac Rousseau had little interest in bellies. The height of his erotic interest was the flat, black hairs which grew on Suzanne Bernard's forearms. For these he would have died. At another erotic layer he loved her boyish clothes which, like Katya, he was allowed to admire when invited to a secret rendezvous.

Acquaintances of Isaac would not have seen these traces of degeneracy, these little peccadillos, instead, they would have seen a citizen of Geneva, a freeman, but one desperately and so, comically, cultivating the skills and arts of a courtier: a Castiglione. He knew, better than most, how to finesse the feet in a quadrille and, regularly, practised his sword-play. Isaac was, also, a new man, a man of science, understanding, as he did, the micro-engineering of time-pieces. The trouble was, there was something slightly preposterous about this way of life in early C18th Geneva. For this reason, Isaac took refuge in romantic literature and his undoubted skills, denied expression as an amateur life style, had to be put to a professional use. Isaac was ripe for higher things.

He arrived in Constantinople full of intentions; he would be the most devious of Assassins, the greatest anti-hero in unwritten history. Still vivid in his memory was his marriage to Suzanne and their nights of love together. Suzanne, it was, who had introduced him to Scaramouche and Katya and the quest. Many nights, before he left, they had gathered together, a small band of conspirators, and imagined how free everything would be once the image of woman was made whole. Isaac was determined to succeed.

He stayed in Constantinople for six years. Six years of procrastination.

On his first day in the Seraglio he passed by the Pavilion of the Holy Mantle. Standing outside, brandishing mirror-bright sabres were Ahmed III's black eunuch guards. There were six of them, they were huge and all their senses were concentrated on their duties. They were Sony Liston bears and he was no Mohammed. Isaac’s resolve, romantic in origins, floated away at the sight of the hard, black flesh and dark unblinking stares. Each night, before sleep, he told himself that tomorrow he would get down to working out how to bring it all off, how to enter the Pavilion and steal its rumoured treasure. Instead, day by day, like the Templars before him, Isaac found himself seduced by the softness of the Orient.

The Templars' image of woman was, until they went East, shaped by an Aryan Virgin Mary, this could not sustain them against the sensuality they encountered. Isaac’s ideal form, before the quest, was no deeper than the scant, pussy fur on Suzanne's forearms. This was insufficient defence against the perfumes, the colours, the tastes, the undulating smoothness of the early C18th Seraglio. For one thing, Isaac was surrounded by the cult of tulipomania. In Constantinople, the tulip symbolised the head of the penis and Turkish women dedicated their lives to its flowering.

Tulip festivals were held at full moon in the Spring; they were fertility ceremonies. Some of the most beautiful rooms in the world, like the Baghdad Kiosque, had thousands of vases of tulips displayed in them, all illuminated by tiny lamps of coloured glass and accompanied by choirs of brightly coloured singing birds in glinting, golden cages. Isaac’s vanity was unable to resist these symbolic overtures. On many evenings he found himself wandering hand in hand with a flirtatious woman beside the Sweet Waters of Asia, a favourite spot for lovers. He would carry a soft, intricately patterned rug, spread it out beneath a plane tree and let delicate fingers pull back the foreskin to expose the head of the tulip, before introducing it into damp, Turkish places.

On many of these warm, Turkish nights Isaac was inclined to believe that, in some way which he did not understand, he had achieved the object of the quest. The head of the tulip resembled the head of the snake and the women of the Seraglio seemed to enjoy a sexual freedom he would not have imagined possible in repressive Geneva. However, these thoughts were delusions, as Isaac was forced to face when an event took place in the Seraglio bearing the imprint of Marduk's teeth. The sultan Ahmed, restless, had tired of his entire Harem; he wanted to make a new start. He had grown careless in his confinement of the women to the harem. His harem numbered over two hundred women, seven year old children to fifty year old grandmothers. Ahmed ordered his guard, the black eunuchs, whose responsibilities covered the harem as well as the holy relics in the Pavilion of the Holy Mantle, to put each of his wives into the black sacks, used to deliver a rich compost for tulips, and to tie the openings. This, in itself was not lethal, as the sacking allowed the women to breathe. The sacks were loaded onto a boat and some miles off the Bosporus, in the Black Sea, Ahmed ordered the wriggling cargo to be tossed overboard. The women put up less of a fight than cats in similar circumstances. Faced with this, Isaac, who had become attached to several of these women, no longer could hide behind the confusion of his senses. Brought down slowly to the rocky sea bottom, he decided to end his mission, which was a mission only in name and not in deed, and, in some state of depression he returned to Geneva and a fresher, clearer climate.

Suzanne and their son Francois tried to welcome Isaac, but it was difficult for everyone. Suzanne had lost contact with Katya. She never, now, dressed as a man. Her youthful rebellion had been overtaken by motherhood and the problem of making ends meet. Through the years of separation the thought that her Isaac would return a knight energised her. At least, she had a man prepared to risk everything to do the nobler thing. Isaac’s miserable return left her disappointed, deflated. He had reached Constantinople but that was the extent of the adventure. He had seen nothing of the Scythian. In fact, he was very reluctant to give Suzanne any details of his six years away. The most exciting thing she could find to say about these years was that Isaac had been appointed watchmaker to the Seraglio, a professional rather than chivalrous accolade.

The gloss removed from their lives, Isaac and Suzanne, from time to time, consoled each other. Out of this gloomy rapport was born Jean Jacques Rousseau, the most radical thinker in C18th Europe, but at a cost, the death of Suzanne from puerperal sepsis.

Chapter 10. Venice

Jackie believed the modern world began in Europe during the C17th and C18th and that magic gradually receded. Its place was taken by analytical theory. The great icons of Marduk, Tiamat and the breadmaker had been magnets for contradictory feelings and incoherent thought. The forces of civilisation and barbarism, the rule of law and freedom, found expression in the rituals and ceremonies surrounding the bringing together or the keeping apart of the two halves of the golden image of a woman's body. In comparison and for example, the life of the echinoid, the broken skull of a soldier called Glaucus, the black bags sinking in the Black Sea, the death of Suzanne by puerperal fever found no celebration in these alignments or their prevention. Possibly, a walker and teacher in Galilee had given some expression to these unnoticed moments of existence, but he was not always of the world, his head being full of paradise, and, anyway, everyone said he was on their side. The promised second coming certainly was called for, if only to clarify. Jilly preferred the iconography to the theory but she listened to the latter.

Before the theory though, Jean Jacques Rousseau's youth was dedicated to achieving what Isaac had failed to. As the modern world gradually distanced itself from the Ancient World, Jean Jacques' quest was virtually the last of its kind. Later, by 1749, at the age of 37, Rousseau gave himself to the theoretical enterprise, giving up the life of ancient adventure. The point of theory was to understand analytically and precisely what was only garbled in myth and legend. Jackie said this was when, in their history, that action gave way to thought, and when, also, thought became act in its own right.

"Francois, Jean Jacques, you must do this for your dear dead mother, my Suzanne. All the years I wasted apart from her, if only we knew what is to happen."

Isaac would keep his two sons awake all night, filling them with his remorse for having failed the expectations of female desire. These stories deeply intruded into Jean Jacques. Often the two lads would have no sleep at all. Tired and disturbed they would be alarmed to hear a swallow twittering as they realised they had helped Isaac through another night of insomnia and guilt.

"My brave boys will do better than their father, they have their mother's vivacity in them. One of you will go to Venice, a very fine city I've heard, and one of you to Constantinople, a city that can sap your strength, but I can warn you about that."

"To which city will I go father?" Francois asked.

"Venice for you my son, if only because, your brother, Jean Jacques, has more of a Turkish, Armenian look to him, he will blend in better in Constantinople."

"And is she very lovely?" Jean Jacques wanted to know.

"I have never seen her, but according to Scaramouche, well, Paul Gautier as I know him to be, a man may go blind just looking at her. I told Paul, I am training you for the quest, and that the Rousseau family will still change the world."

"What did he say?" The boys hoped he had been impressed, but they were sure they could do it, after all their father had paved the way.

"Oh! he has grown despondent, he has lost his old sparkle, I don't think he believes it possible anymore. He thinks freedom is dead and the authorities will be in power until the last trump. One of these days I will find myself quarrelling with him."

As it happened, Francois was the one to go to Constantinople. Once there he fared worse than Isaac. Isaac had feared the black eunuchs but Francois fell victim to the white eunuchs and eventually and excruciatingly became one. White eunuchs, unlike black, kept their penises intact, although their testicles were crushed. The black eunuchs were guards, particularly of the harem, whereas the whites performed administrative, educative functions and wielded considerable power. In many ways the whites kept alive the scholarly heritage of old Byzantium. They ran a school for slave-pages, stealing young, handsome boys and introducing them into homosexual and intellectual practices. They modelled themselves and their community on Plato's Republic. The young, gullible Francois was captured loitering at the Sublime Porte, the entrance to the Seraglio. He was never allowed to leave the Seraglio and Isaac and Jean Jacques never discovered what became of him. He grew to like his life there, and on one occasion was allowed into the Pavilion of the Holy Mantle where not only did he see relics of the Prophet but also glimpsed the original belly dancer and paradigm of Turkish woman hood. In later life he lost his sight.

Compared with Francois, Jean Jacques was trained for his role. Without great conviction in the custom, but at Paul Gautier's request, the remnants of the Assassins took charge of Jean Jacques' education. They sent him to Turin to learn the basics of the Catholic faith, which they thought would be useful for a posting in Venice. Certainly, they had to dislodge from his mind Calvinism, which was no attitude for a deviant and subversive. They provided him both with homosexual and heterosexual experience, Arab boys in Turin and Madame de Warens at Chambery. To Madame de Warens was given the task of imparting the graces of being a gentleman. Stealing was also on the curriculum, Rousseau learning to steal from various houses where he worked as a servant. When they thought him ready they procured him a place as secretary to the newly appointed French ambassador in Venice, the Comte de Montaignu, the year was 1743. The preparation had been long and thorough but this, without their really understanding it, was habitual with the Assassins. They were ever hatching plots and preparing for a new order of reality, never arriving, never enjoying it.

Venice was to be his triumph. Jean Jacques, not a meticulous man, planned everything in detail. At night, during Carnival, cloaked and masked, he set out, pulse racing. His companions were a group a local bandits led by a man called Vitali, and a Marseillaise, a Captain Olivet, who had a merchant ship standing by. The proposed raid was modelled on Dandolo's. Rousseau made observations, by telescope, of the San Marco horses. He was convinced he had identified the bronze in which Dandolo, all those centuries before, had hidden his half of the breadmaker, his half the loaf. He thought he could detect the very plate which sealed the treasure in the stomach: a replacement hoof was clearly visible. Farce ensued though.

The conspirators, in various attempts to ride the beast, some clinging to its legs, some around its neck, others precariously balanced on ladders, annoyed the cloaked and observing Rousseau with the noise they made. Rousseau suspected several of them were worse for drink. Laughter and hammering resounded around the square, alerting the brutish Slovenian guards, employed by the Doges to protect their antiquities. When it came to a stand-up fight Vitali's paunchy bandits were no match for the guard. Standing in the shadows, seeing all was lost, Jean Jacques decided to escape, leaving some bruised roughnecks and a gondola full of tools to the mystified Venetian authorities.

The authorities made no sense of the episode. Apart from the Assassins, knowledge of the content of the San Marco horses had died with the unnamed merchant. At his death, the horses were still stored in the Arsenal. A blood clot in his brain had wiped out his pre-Kantian flirtation with beauty. The boxes in the gondola, containing tools, were stamped with the name of Olivet's vessel and, pending investigation, an embargo was placed on the ship. So far from being implicated in whatever had gone on, and no one seemed to have the least idea what it might have been, Rousseau, in his official position as secretary to the French ambassador, made representations on Olivet's behalf and secured the ship's release. The repeated failures of the Rousseaus bred a desire for retribution in the Assassins; they began to talk about "the sins of the father". It was this aspect of the history which the sisters were the most inclined to accept, just because, if it was true, it fed a need, which they shared with many of their contemporaries; the need to feel afraid.

Chapter 11. Zulietta

How did Jean Jacques describe her?

"... a dazzlingly beautiful young woman ... coquettishly dressed and very nimble... A brunette of twenty years at the most, as charming as she was lively... Her large, black Oriental eyes darted shafts of fire into my heart... Do not attempt to imagine the charms and graces of this bewitching girl... The young virgins of the cloister are not so fresh, the beauties of the harem are not so lively, the houris of paradise are not so piquant."

One night in 1744, her gondola drew up alongside Olivet's ship and like a whirlwind she came on board. At dinner she was all over Rousseau. He had been invited by Olivet to discuss the lifting of the embargo. Jean Jacques could not understand her familiarity.

"My dear Bremond, Oh! Madonna, how long is it since I saw you? Bremond, you do still love me, just a little bit, don't you?"

Rousseau had no idea why she had addressed him as "Bremond", but the intimacy of their body contact and her restless fingering of his torso forced others at the dining table to restrain his amorous responses.

Prised apart, she gave him a sideways glance, mumbling into her oysters, "You still love me then. Bremond! Cover up that bulge with your napkin! In public! It is disgusting!" She was laughing, "You know oysters are wasted on you!"

Rousseau whispered, "Who are you? You seem to know me, but my name is not Bremond. I am Jean Jacques Rousseau. I'm secretary to the French ambassador. I think you must have mistaken me."

"I have not mistaken you Bremond, if you are not Bremond you are like him. It is Bremond's looks I love. I desire small, dark, handsome men, with little, black curls. Visit me? You would like to? Ask Olivet where I live. Ask him my name."
As quickly as she had come, she left. With three or four bounds she was out of the cabin and disembarked, leaving Rousseau pressing Olivet for information about her. It was obvious she had come only for him.

Her name was Zulietta. She had an apartment in Venice. It was rumoured she numbered Casanova among her previous lovers.

Several days later, Rousseau, in a state of indecision, stood at the door of her apartment. As soon as she let him in she produced two pistols, one of them she loaded. She switched them from hand to hand behind her back, then she placed the pistols in Rousseau's hands. She guided his arms until he stood facing her, the two pistols pressed up against her temples. To this point no words were exchanged.

"Whichever you feel like, left or right, pull, it's fifty fifty."

"You mean the trigger, you must be mad." He tried to lower the pistols, but she would not let him, commanding him by her tight grip and the fierce concentration of her eyes.

"Go on. I'm not asking you to pull both of them, only one, there's a good chance you won't hurt me. I thought you had courage, the Bremond I knew would have been able to change the world."

"This is madness! There is no point to this."

Zulietta lowered her head, the pistols still either side of it. Slowly, she looked up. "Bremond, if there is no point why has that little sausage in your breeches gone as hard as these pistols." She looked from one to the other. "Let us play this game differently."

She took the pistols from his hands. He felt relief, his mind in turmoil and his heart racing. "I know what you prefer, Bremond, I know you, you'll find I know you. On your knees!

Without understanding why, he obeyed, his streak of fierce independence suspended. Suddenly, what was happening was the reason for his being in Venice, more important than either his posting to the ambassador or the freeing of chaos from the stomach of a horse. Never before had his innermost desire been so blatantly possible.

Zulietta lowered the pistols to his temples. Rousseau knew instantly this was his game.

"You shall still have the choice, only, this way round, I perform the action. Dare you! Left or right, now don't get confused, it is my left and my right, which shall I fire, the one in my left hand or the one in my right? You tell me."

Rousseau kept his eyes shut tightly, his cheeks were bright red, his pursed lips shaped a smile. Five minutes passed, neither of them spoke. They remained motionless. His state of arousal increased continuously, building like an operatic aria. He chose. "Left!” he did not know what he wished, this was the excitement. Zulietta had no hesitation. Her left hand pulled the trigger. Nothing. He was still alive. She span round and round, brandishing the pistol of her right hand above her head, and just as Jean Jacques settled into the new silence of resolution, she fired it off, bringing down chunks of plaster from the ceiling, then she went down after him. He was gorged with blood.

They fell about laughing, Zulietta keeping him in her mouth. Jean Jacques felt crazy. Zulietta, on the other hand, knew precisely what she was about. When she was satisfied with the effect she had wrought, she undid one of the rose coloured bows which ornamented her lingerie and tied it tightly round the head of his penis. She sat back to admire her work. They were both on the floor, it was amusing.

"After all that, you deserve a drink." She fetched a carafe of red, Italian wine and two glasses. She still had complete control over him. She proceeded to tell him one erotic story after another, plying him with drink the whole time. Then, she tied him up, tightening the pink bow as she did so. When he started to complain that he needed to make water she left him. His agony lasted for almost two hours. He would have peed straight onto the floor if he had been able to, but the bow prevented any release. When she returned she had him promising her anything.

She released him from the ropes with which she had tied him to the furniture and led him to a urinal, then she untied the pink bow. She stood behind him bringing her hands round his thighs to manipulate him. In this state he gushed golden piss endlessly. This peeing hurt, but it was a great relief. With her constant attention he began to harden again. She tossed him hard, pushing the barrel of the pistol up his ass as she did so. When, at last, he jerked off it resembled a hanging. Gobbets of semen and blood dripped over everything. Rousseau fainted, collapsing into a cold, vomiting heap. The outcome delighted Zulietta, she flung herself about in a wild dance. As Rousseau regained consciousness she stood above and astride him, even more dishabille than before, he looked up at her and noticed she had only one nipple. Looking down she saw the horror on his face.

"Symmetry is there for those who seek order, I am an outcast. You should go and study mathematics and natural philosophy and give up the monstrous. You and your father! We do not excuse failure." She placed a bare foot on his stomach and pressed down on his bladder.

Continued at FAMILY