“The first series of seven went quickly; the second slowly; the third seemed as if it would never end. The thing that hurt me the most was the fact that we were doing all this in a private room at a restaurant and they didn't even have a sofa. I was three hours, prick in ass, on the floor or on a table. You can see why I began to get a little tired.
“But finally I won the bet, and Fernande won it too… I filled it right to the brim and… oh! I'll say it until you cry out! That's what I did when I was fifteen! I got myself cornholed twenty-one times in a row and after that I filled a champagne glass with come and I gave it to a woman to drink… What else do I have to tell you for you to admit that I'm a slut?”
She fell back on the bed weak and exhausted, as if she had just relived her story. I thought that she had finished talking and was going to quiet down at last, so I replied in a low voice, “Nothing. Be quiet now and go to sleep. I'm going to stretch out myself…”
She suddenly arose, leaning on one elbow, and began talking again, but so calmly that I let her go on. I never suspected what I was to hear.
“Do you know Mr. W- who is (she gave me his title) at Aix? The year before last, when I was eighteen, he took me for the first time one June evening. I could see that he was the vicious type, and he had a huge dog with him, so I proposed to him to suck the dog.”
“Charlotte!”
“Dog's come tastes terrible and it's very tiring to suck them because they never finish coming, the poor beasts. But I was used to it. And when you're a whore a mutt is less disgusting than a magistrate. Unfortunately though, this guy had never seen his dog sucked by a woman and it excited him so much that for fifteen Sundays in a row, until the end of September…”
She interrupted herself, with a sigh, turning her head as if she had just lost her breath.
“Excuse me… Listen… You'll never guess… He had a house in the country with a barnyard… He used to give all his servants the Sunday off… even the gardener, and he brought me… I was there alone with him… always naked with my hair loose down my back, it was in the summer… To do what? Make love? Oh, no! Not with a whore! It amused him tremendously every Sunday to see an eighteen year old girl drinking the come of all his animals.
“He had a carpenter make him a kind of small wooden stable or corral like those they use to hold cows and mares when they're breeding them. But instead of putting the female in it, he would put the males into it, and when the stallion or bull was tied up, I would get underneath them… I didn't have a big enough mouth for the horses, but with my hands and my tongue…”
She saw me grow pale and, obeying that quirk of her character that made her rise around the word “whore” and its connotations from the plaintive to the exalted, she began to grow more excited from sentence to sentence.
“You know, I drank the come of horses, donkeys, bulls, dogs, even pigs. The fourth Sunday he gave me a bowl with the come of a donkey in it and asked me what it was. I knew easily. I know the different kinds of come better than the different kinds of wine. I've emptied more balls than bottles in my life.
“And it's nothing at all to do that sort of thing. Even the horse is easy as long as you swallow right. All you do is stick your head underneath, do you follow me? Put it between his chest and his parts so that you get his milk on your palate and not down your throat. That way you don't strangle on it. I swallowed everything like that. Believe me, I wasn't thirsty afterwards.”
“For God's sake, shut up! This is worse than anything you've said!”
“Oh, no. The wont of all is the goat! I'm brave when I'm fingering myself, but what stuff…! I had to get rid of it, spit it out! When my lover, I mean my customer, saw that I couldn't stand it like that, he still wanted his goat to do something, so he had me sucking his donkey, his bull, his dog, and his dogs for four or five Sundays and then he had the goat mount me… He put me on all fours in the garden, completely nude… You still don't want to call me a slut? But I came, you hear? I came all the time the goat was fucking me.
“And after that I drank the goat's come the last few Sundays. Listen to me… Look at me… I drank the goat's come five times! So to pay me for it he bought me a monkey, and the monkey cornholed me too and I drank its come just like I would a man's. You wouldn't believe the things I did between the twentieth of August and the end of September!
“That's when he got tired of making me suck the male animals and decided to have me eat out the females. He had three: another goat, a heifer, and a female ass, and I ate them out on my knees. Then he screwed them himself, saying that he would rather come in an animal than to give his wad to a whore like me, but that I could look for it in their cunts… or in their asses when he cornholed them.”'
“You're delirious! You're mad! You're making all this up!”
“On my mother's head. I swear to you that it's true! You want proof? Do it in front of me and I'll tell you in advance how it is. You don't know anything, you. How would I know how it all goes if I hadn't done it myself five Sundays in a row? In an animal's cunt, the come goes in deeply, you have to fish it out with your finger. But in their asses, it comes out by itself and you can just lick it off!”
“Charlotte, I can't take any more! That's enough! Don't say any more, for God's sake! Go to sleep! Lie down! Calm yourself! I don't know what to say to you… You're crazy, you're pretty, you love me, you don't ever fuck… You love me and yet you'd do more to disgust me than you'd ever do to attract someone…”
“You'll never put your mouth against mine again?”
“No.”
“Tell me that I'm a slut.”
“No. You're too beautiful. Go ahead and roll your beauty in filth, it will still be your beauty.”
“Tell me that I'm a slut just the same.”
“You're a poor unfortunate girl! I don't believe all this stuff you've been saying, and I've scarcely even heard it! You can only make me feel two things towards you: desire, despite what you say, and pity, a great deal of pity.”
Two things? I felt rather three. The weakest was desire; the strongest what I hadn't mentioned. Don't think it was disgust. I pitied Charlotte so much that I could cover the rest of her life, her unknown life, with this cloak. My strongest feeling and instinct was to go to sleep.
The tremendous upsetting emotions that are left in residue when our most tragic moments wash away exact a heavy toll from our minds, our hearts, our memories. I think that Shakespeare was the only man who ever used the word “sleepy” after a terrible scene. It was the supreme, the only apt word. And I felt like sleeping. To sleep without ever dreaming, to roll even my most intimate and subconscious thought? away in sleep. To sleep like a dead man.
“I'll do anything. I defy you to find something I won't do with you, for you, under you. Order me; you'll see how I'll obey you.”
She was trembling from head to foot, but her craze was none the less frightening to me because she was no longer mysterious. And what struck me the most was that Charlotte became more and more beautiful the wilder became her delirium.
Very seriously, with an expression I might even call tragic, and holding her face away from mine to show that she wasn't even worthy of a kiss, she ceased for the moment to imagine all the things that I wouldn't ask her to do or to tell me everything that she would do and (I've already mentioned the logical instinct of those persons with essentially simple souls) she recovered her spirit on a basis of reality.
“You cornhole me,” she said, “and you've been doing it for my pleasure, but it's also my trade. I'm nothing but a girl who earns her living with her asshole. What is a slut if I'm not one? I'm twenty years old, I come to your rooms without ever knowing you, strip myself, finger myself, spread my thighs, and say, 'Cornhole me!' And you cornhole me three times like the whore that I am! And the more you do it the more I love you!”
She fell against me with her mouth open against my shoulder and said in a plaintive voice:
“I beg you… You see, I'm not touching myself and yet I'm going to come… But while you're getting a hard-on in my ass, tell me… tell me… what you're going to do later in my mouth. Please! Tell me when you discharge… Call me slut! I… I-And I'll say… Yes, oh, yes!”
Then, as if even that idea wouldn't do in her present state, she shouted, almost crying:
