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So this is the shoe story, the foot story. If the shoe fits, wear it, as the prince said to Cinderella -- but more of Cinderella later. Forget about romance and think sex.
Of all fetish objects sexy shoes are among the oldest and probably most common. They taper the toes. They arch the instep. They lift the calves. They tilt the fanny and bow the back and oil the hips and sashay the gait. Their leathery, animal scents and textures evoke the jungle blood sports braided in our genes.
There you are, a strange mosaic of images -- jungle blood sports
braided in your genes.
Shoes make the foot look shorter and more precious, and yet add the formidableness of extra height, and often a sort of stiletto menace. A sexy shoe is a masterpiece of concealment and disclosure and so defines the dynamic of lust itself.
This is all from Esquire magazine -- and as I said, forget about romance, think stiletto
menace.
I've been in charge of the shoe story for as far back as anybody
can remember. You get people like the Master of the Queen's Stables,
Master of the Mirrors, Post Master, Guardian of the Lungs and
Heart-well, I'm Guardian of the Foot (and by implication, the
Shoe).
I feel that I should acknowledge the sexist nature of the language
here-everybody seems to be a master of some kind or other, don't
they? Well, those are their titles from way back, and I am at
a bit of a loss what to do about it. 'Guardian' is a nice word,
I think, and I'm glad I fall into that category. The other night
on television (I should warn you that I rather like these modern
inventions) I saw a man who writes novels talking about books
and writers in general, and the only writers he talked about were
men. I thought that was pretty daring, in this day and age, and
I must say I would never do that. But he's a man who offended
some people so much with one of his books that they have sworn
to kill him, so I daresay getting up the noses of a bunch of feminists
is small beer to him. Maybe he is challenging them to come after
him, I can't say. I have heard he does his best work under pressure.
People often do.
Angels write in blue ink, in a lovely kind of copperplate that
flows like the sea on a Japanese beach. Sometimes people remark
that the nuns must have taught us how to write, but it's the other
way round-it was we who taught the nuns to do it, and they passed
it on to all the children in their care. One of my brothers, if
you could call him that, is actually in charge of fountain pens,
and that's a very big thing which also takes in cigars. Yes, in
case you're wondering, he was appointed guardian to Sigmund Freud-a
hell of a job, what with one thing and another.
If Petra knew I was telling you this story she would kill me (well,
that's really nothing but a figure of speech; it is not possible
for Petra to kill me because of the nature of my existence, but
she would be furious and would make life very difficult). She
has the vilest temper of anyone I know, and that's saying something.
I have seen her beat a child around the face with a shoe -- a
red stiletto. I said this was the shoe story. I have seen her
order another woman to tie a child to a chair and apply hot coals
to its bare feet to teach the child to walk quietly. That's just
a couple of things. If you thought this was a pretty story, think
again. I issued a kind of warning when I said Massacre of the
Innocents and drew your attention to Catherine de' Medici -- incredible woman. Petra proudly claimed to be related to Catherine,
and expressed great interest in her so-called ancestor.
There's a book Petra had, a small book with a red cover that she
pinched from the library one night at King's College right under
the nose of the Master. Under my nose as well, but of course it
isn't my affair if she takes other people's property. It's a book
about the massacre on Saint Bartholomew's Day, and she enjoyed it so much she used to read it to people, particularly
children, at dinner. She was carried away with the fact that the
first modern ballet, Le Ballet Comique de la Reine, was staged
in Paris on the eve of the massacre, and was written for the occasion
by Catherine de' Medici. A light would come into Petra's eyes
and she would read out terrible details about the massacre. I
used to wonder that her audience didn't realise she was mad, but
they accepted everything she said, everything she did. I daresay
she is a kind of witch, a fascinating, mesmerising, charismatic
witch-woman.
Thirteen little girls with long golden hair, black dresses, black
stockings and red shoes sat up to the table, damask napkins tucked
under their chins, and while they drank their soup from thick
white bowls Petra read to them from the red book. She embellished
the text, inventing her own narratives from slender and horrible
details, and encouraged the children to illustrate the stories
in their drawing books, and to act out sequences in costume. Petra
had no particular political or religious line to promote with
the stories; her motive in telling them was to thrill and terrify
and horrify the little girls, and to reinforce the notion that
life outside the walls of their home was very ugly and dangerous.
The stories were, in a sense, cautionary tales. And it was not
at all clear that these things happened far away and long ago.
The massacre on Saint Bartholomew's Day might have been just down
the road, just last week, for all the children knew. Although
Petra had a grip on time such as I have not, she found it useful
to confuse and blur the past-present-future in the minds of the
girls.
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Copyright © Carmel Bird 1998. All rights reserved.