a scene such as that one. The words she had just spoken seemed to me among the saddest I had ever heard, and yet Charlotte had spoken them with a real fervor.
She finally went into the bathroom, lay down on the ceramic-tiled floor, the top part of he body supported by a single elbow, her head thrown back, her mouth open, and began to masturbate frenziedly. She didn't seem to feel the cold of the tile floor.
The more she fingered the more avid she became to vilify herself. I used to have the words she uttered at this time written down, but I've just ripped up the page. I don't even have the courage to re-read it to the end. There are two things my reader will never know: the words that Charlotte spoke on this occasion and the haste with which I am finishing this chapter.
Scenes taken from life are much more difficult to relate than those invented by the author because the logic inherent in life is less clear and less easily seen than the logic of a tale. Do you think that the culminating point of this narration ought to be the act which I just witnessed? I don't. And I don't know if I will be able to properly explain why.
First of all I was there for a quarter of an hour and the things I imagine are generally more interesting than reality. Besides that, I can justly say that the most infamous role of the performance, Teresa's, was played with a prodigious feminine address. I consider it undescribable, probably only because my faculties for expression are limited.
Teresa had a remarkable body, as I've already said several times. She was the daughter of two acrobats, as you will learn, and she handled herself exactly like a gymnast rehearsing an exercise with her partner. And all this time she looked at me the calm expression of one performing a classic among exercises; a classic that seemed to her more natural than to my troubled mind…
Five minutes later I was alone.
VIII
I slept soundly for nine hours and awoke with irresistible desire to… Finish the sentence if you are young or if you ever have been.
Excesses of love lend more to the sexual drive than do long periods of inactivity and arc much easier to take up once more on the next day than several weeks after. Everyone know? that. You can see, therefore, why I was in top form that morning. As the patriarch who was loved by Ruth said, it was a “triumphant'' morning; but triumphant though it was, I scarcely found it agreeable, for I still had this irresistible desire to… Do you understand? I think that if you have been following this story page by page through the seven preceding chapters you can guess what I did at the time during which the eighth opens.
Bathed, shaved, combed, and dressed in little more time than it takes to tell, I hurried towards the rooms of one of my closest girlfriends in the Latin Quarter. Fortunately, she was alone, and since she was dressed only in a slip, it took her less time to undress than it took me to slip off my tie. The more beautiful breasts a girl has, the more her slip weighs her down.
However, she was alarmed at my nervous state.
“What's wrong? What do you want? What's the matter with you?”
“My pretty little Margot, I want to make love.”
“Me too… and maybe if we know the right people in the government we might sleep together a while.”
“And… listen! I want to make love from the front, my little Margot! From the front!”
“From the front? For God's sake, I hope so!”
“Through here, you see? Through here. You get me? Not from back there.”
“You're nutty as a squirrel cage,” said Margot with a bewildered expression.
She was reassured little by little as her embrace calmed me, gave me the relief I sought like the glass of cool, fresh water that slakes the thirst alcohol has left. Still haunted by my recent adventure, I felt my head. I couldn't believe that this time at last… but simple little Margot wasn't mistaken. I doubt that she has ever known since a pleasure equal to the one that was ours that morning.
That evening I returned to my apartment alone. I had a few things to write.
However, just when I had gotten undressed, there was a loud knock oh the door. I opened it: it was, to my surprise, Teresa, dressed in a pink dressing gown with a flower in her hair.
I was still in a bad mood from what I had seen the previous night, and I took her by the arm and drew her into my room.
“So, it's you!” I cried. “Good! Now you can listen to the words I wouldn't speak to Charlotte. You're the one who's lowest of all sluts! The worst of whores! The…”
She burst out laughing and, taking the tone that a woman of thirty-six can take when speaking to a young man of twenty, she said, “I might as well have saved myself the trouble of providing you with all those adventures last night for all the thanks I get, eh? You've cornholed my three daughters and their mother; we gave ourselves in relays so that you could shoot your wad seven times in an evening, and the next day when you see me what do I get? You start calling me whore and…”
“That's because…”
“I'm not as nutty as Charlotte. I don't finger myself in front of your dick and I don't have to be called whore to make me come.”
“But…”
“And besides, I know that I'm a whore, by the cunt, the ass, and the mouth! And besides, I don't give a damn! And besides…”
There was not the slightest doubt in my mind that the words that Teresa caught on the end of her tongue were, “And besides, as far as I'm concerned, I shit on you!” There was no question about it. Therefore, the only thing that her silence could mean was that she didn't want me to put her out. I took the offensive again.
“What's this passion you four have for bring cornholed? Was it you who trained those girls to act like that? Did you give them the taste for that sort of thing?”
“What about me? Who gave it to me? Why didn't you ask that? You forget that I didn't invent women with two holes in their bodies. And I didn't give them the power to make love through both, either. You forget that before I was a mother, my child, I was a daughter.”
She laughed. She was standing all this time, one hand on her hip, and with her robe and the flower in her dark hair she looked like a woman playing Carmen on the stage.
“Whose daughter?” I asked, seated near her. No reply. She smiled and looked at me for a few moments, chewing a lock of her hair that had drifted down out of place. I couldn't tell what she was thinking about, but young men are all too disposed to think that every woman that comes along wants to sleep with them. Even when the woman happens to knock on their door at midnight, however, their plans are not always so simple. I repeated, “Daughter of whom?”
“Prick! If I say daughter of a whore will you be happy?”
“Yes.” I thought that that might make her talk.
However she continued to stare at me fixedly with the same slightly troubled smile. Then she decided.
“I was born into a family of Italian acrobats in which there were already four women: my mother and three younger sisters.
“Don't worry. They were all partially whores and very pretty. Even so, they were more lesbian than anything else. I never saw four little bitches go avid to lick each other's asses than my mother and my three aunts. Whenever they had an hour free they were always lying around naked giving it to each other, this one eating another's pussy, that one drinking it up like a polecat, the other letting it gush out so strongly that they always had a swamp in their sheets somewhere.
“As for men… I suppose you want to know why they didn't fuck? I never saw either my mother or her sisters fucking and I still don't know how I came into the world. They weren't whores like I am, but still there would be a man around from time to time. No fucking, though. Since the circus was their living, they could scarcely afford to
