from underneath!”
And what a tone of voice she said that in! At that instant I knew what it was to receive an order.
She spoke curtly and warmly as she continued.
“I know you'd rather fuck me than cornhole me. I'd rather have you cornhole me and hurt me while I'm beating off, but since you like to fuck, we'll fuck. I know better than you do why you don't want to take my cherry. It's because you never try to buy them from girls and you think that mine is for sale, so you don't want to steal it. Well, it isn't for sale. I'm going to tell mama this evening that I'm giving it away and that she'll see who's getting it soon enough because she'll have her mouth underneath when it happens.”
Shaking her head and hair, she smiled, and then she had an explosion of sincerity that revealed to me something I had never suspected.
“You think that she will be angry? You think that she will say no? Ha! She'll be only too happy, the cow! When I tell her that you are going to fuck me on top of her, that she'll have her mouth full of blood and come, she'll be beating herself off for fourteen hours at the very thought… Did I tell you that I loved her? Yes, I love her tongue, her finger, her body, and she excites me. And I told you that she wasn't a whore, didn't I? Well, she isn't. She's a slut!”
Mauricette's outburst surprised me much less than Charlotte's had before her. First of all it was a second changed viewpoint that I had unearthed. That is the trouble with memoires: they get monotonous. In a novel, this kind of repetition can never be excused, but in life it has to be accepted. As M. Ingres once said, “Bread and pencil are one and the same.” For a novelist, these words of a painter should be dogma. For those who write memories they should not. In the latter case, the pencil should never change life to conform to the interests of dramatics.
Secondly… But you have to know the two girls. There was to be found in them a series of contrasts that you wouldn't have the patience to listen to if I had it to write them down. At the age of fifteen, Ricette pranced through every word she spoke, while Charlotte, at twenty, was languor itself. The precocity of the younger girl left less room for surprises than the tired, passive, character of the sad Charlotte.
However, I don't think this is the place for me to keep a distraught silence in order to better deliver an exercise on the psychology of comparison and parallel.
I must get on with the story. I have digressed long enough already.
A young girl had come to offer me her virginity as if it had been gold or myrrh or incense.
Eternal misunderstanding. Young girls always overestimate the pleasure that we take in receiving such a gift; and young men rarely understand that if their virgins, through an error caused by innocence, think that their present is worth all the young men's love and that they are offering it to them with all their heart, then it is worth what they think it is and should be received accordingly.
I had proven to this girl that imprudence had separated us forever, and she had discovered a way to circumvent the difficulty. The method was as extravagant as a theorem in spatial geometry, but, at first sight, it was irrefutable. Irrefutable, that is, unless I brought into play the principles of chastity, something I could never again do except out of audacity, or rather out of ridicule. I therefore agreed with all the tender eagerness and thankfulness that one demonstrates through one's kisses in situations such as this.
The calm tone of the remarks I have made here are simply out of distraction (for this story excites me as little as if I were explaining to you how I finally learned Greek grammar)… In fact, I am becoming so distracted that I have now begun to start sentences without knowing how to finish them, something that never happened to me before. For the beauty of the example, I will not strike anything out.
To resume, you have probably forgotten by this time that we left Mauricette in a state bordering on delirium, a Mauricette changed into bacchante — disheveled, purple, convulsive, spitting out insults and obscenities against her mother that she wouldn't have dreamed of an hour ago.
My “yes” changed the current of her nervous system from one pole to another. Contrary to the ancient philosophy of which Renan speaks, and in which the sperm, once excited, mounts to the brain. Mauricette's desire now left her imagination and took possession of her flesh.
“I feel like, fucking,” she murmured. “I feel like fucking because you like to fuck and so that you can give me a taste for it. Did I really swallow your come? Is it true that I drank the come of a man for the first time and that it was yours? What's fucking after that? And don't be afraid of hurting me! When mama is fucking me I can't feel anything but her tongue unless I want to; but for you the more you hurt me and tear me the more I'll come.”
Suddenly, with her facility for metamorphosis, she raised her head and reminded me with a phrase of her real age.
“Do you want to come?”
“Sure; but not taking your virginity.”
“Yes. Why not take my virginity where I'm not a virgin!” She' laughed.
“What a kid you are! And what a laugh you have! Who is this? Not the same Ricette that has just been telling me stories of blood, sperm, incest, saphism, sadism…”
“Oh! And what else! Where did you get all those two-dollar words?”
“You're fourteen and a half? No. There are times when you're at least thirty-nine and others when you're about seven.”
“Mama too.”
This reply left me speechless. It was one of the truest and most extraordinary remarks I had ever heard. It seemed to me that Ricette was thinking, “You're more of a kid than I am if you don't know that that's true of all women no matter how old they are.” She might have thought it, but she would never say it, for young girls never want to believe that they're smarter than their lovers. Every excellence they attribute to their man they use as an excuse: who could resist being seduced by a person of so many perfections?
And, sure of the adornments they have given us in their own eyes, they cover us with qualities to our faces solely out of generosity.
Mauricette returned to her original idea. “You will have taken two cherries out of three, and I'd like to give you the third too, or rather the first… Anyway, the one I don't have any more… I mean the one I sold… The one in my behind… Do you understand?”
“You want to make it tight again with some alum water?”
“Oh, you dog!” she said laughing. “Don't think now that my cherry in front has been re-done. Cherries that have been fixed up aren't given away. They cost a lot of money.”
And she burst out laughing again at what she had just said. Then, rubbing her body against mine, she once again climbed to a point just between childishness and lasciviousness: two words that are practically synonyms.
“We'll play some more. Forget that you cornholed me a couple days ago. Forget it.”
“Can't remember a thing.”
“I'm just a kid again. Mama doesn't exist. I don't know anything, not even what a prick is. You're a satyr and you're going to rape me through the ass.”
“Rape you?”
“Don't you want to play? You just want to say no every time I try to do something with you? I use the word 'no' because I'm a whore. If I were a society girl I'd say 'shit.'“
“Listen, my dear little Ricette,” I replied laughing. “Don't go telling me now that you're a whore. I never understood better the young satyr that you are. You're as full of vice as an old magistrate. But, unfortunately, I'm incapable of raping a woman. Resistance freezes me instead of warming me up. To play at rape… if it's only a game, we'll do it… But it I fail you? I'd be despaired. I'll do it if you want…”
“But virgins who are being raped never resist! I'll just do like them. I'll cry into my arms and open my thighs.”
“But how will you know that I'm raping you?”
“How will I know it?” she repeated, gritting her teeth. “I've never been cornholed completely dry. You go ahead and do it and then ask me afterwards how I knew I was being raped. How do you think I could imagine I was losing my cherry back there?”
“All right, I'll do it if you want. But tell me again that you really want me to, that you'll like it. Otherwise, I swear to you, I won't be able to.”
