The Juliette Society(73)

Anna.

I’m here to find Anna.

I have to find Anna.

Just thinking it steels my determination to reach my goal, and I quicken my pace.

I’m so lost in my thoughts that I forget where I am and it takes the edge off the anxiety and the fear of walking alone in the dark, because although there’s not a soul in sight, it’s teeming with life I can hear. The way the sounds of nature fill the air when you’re walking through a forest, even if you can’t see the source. I don’t hear the sound of a forest, I hear the murmur of sex, the humming of fucking, the sounds of pleasure unbound. Laughter, shrieks, grunts and moans. The slap of skin on skin. And when I peer into the darkness, off the path, I think I can make out limbs entwined in branches, bodies bent over boughs, buttocks sprouting from bushes, figures rutting in the undergrowth. It feels like Eden before the Fall, when sex and nature were one, primal, carnal and wild. Temptation surrounds me.

Although it seems like I’m moving towards the house, I can’t be certain that’s where the path is actually leading because sometimes it doubles back on itself or slips into a series of sharp zig-zag turns. It doesn’t take long before I start to lose my orientation and I have no idea whether I’m going forward or backward, up or down. Yet I can always see the tall, thin ornamental tower of the villa, like a beacon or a lighthouse, to mark my way.

I feel like I’m walking through the opening montage of Citizen Kane; those famous first shots that begin so ominously with a No Trespassing sign hanging off a chain-link fence, then bleed into that long, slow vertical pan up across more fences, railings, gates and balustrades – each more ornate, more solid, more foreboding than the last – followed by a series of slow fades through the ruins of Xanadu, the monumental folly Kane built to celebrate his wealth, with his forbidding Gothic mansion dominating the background like a tombstone.

I think of those fences and gates as the barriers and constructs of my personality; the ones I erected all through childhood and adolescence to protect me from the world. I’m so wrapped up in my own life that I’d forgotten all those invisible fortifications were even there and, instead of protecting me, all they do is bar my way from looking inside of myself, from seeing who I really am. And now I realize I don’t want to walk through my entire life that way. I don’t want to end up like Charles Foster Kane: facing death, but still in denial of what drove him. A haunted man locked up in his haunted house, condemned to rot along with his estate.

This estate, the one I’m walking through, is as derelict as Kane’s, but the further I walk, the more whimsical and eccentric it gets. It’s a ruin designed to look like an antiquity, but built to bamboozle the archeologist who would one day stumble upon it. I’m walking past buildings just set back from the path that seem to tower above me as I approach, but when I get closer I see they’re built to a forced perspective and exist as nothing but skewed facades with flights of stairs that go nowhere. I pass a half-finished amphitheater that has seats and no stage and rows of columns bearing the faces of sprites and devils. Vast crumbling stone statues peek out over the treetops and from behind the undergrowth – of giants, gods, goddesses, nymphs, mythical creatures – all engaged in some form of sexual congress or exhibitionism. A giant turtle carrying a giant phallus on its back. A sphinx cupping its breasts as water spurts from the nipples. A colossus in battle armor holding his monumental engorged penis like a sword, ready to vanquish his foes.

I figure this place must have been built by some cash-rich financier with unlimited resources at his disposal as a monument to his outsized sexual imagination. Then, like Kane, he became impotent through age or dissatisfaction or putrefaction, and bequeathed his creation to Mother Nature, who embraced the stone deities as her own, swaddling the naked figures with mosses, vines, roots and weeds.

I feel the figures watching me, I hear the sound of sex in the trees and undergrowth and I hasten along the path, turning a corner, round a copse of trees, and coming upon a small tree-lined avenue with interlocking branches that form a canopy. It leads up to a large rock set into the hillside, carved into the face of an ogre – chubby and round, with a beard, small beady eyes and a mouth containing just a handful of small uneven teeth. It makes me think of the vagina dentata graffiti splashed on the wall outside the Fuck Factory. This is a vagina with teeth, eyes and pubic hair.

An inscription is carved around its upper lip, and stained in red like a tattoo:

AUDāCISSIMē PēDITE

The ogre’s mouth is open wide, as if it’s laughing or screaming, I can’t tell which. Or maybe just screaming with laughter at some private joke. The ogre is looking at me, laughing at me, as if it’s recognized someone who doesn’t belong. Part of me feels like I just want to run inside its mouth and hide, no matter what I might find in there, in the pitch black, just so I don’t have to meet its gaze any more. Because that’s where the path leads, into the mouth of the ogre. That’s where it ends. There’s nowhere else to go, other than turn back and retrace my steps, but I have no intention of doing that. I have to find Anna.