can guess whether or not we kissed.
“My wedding night?” she said prettily. “Mine too.”
“You love me? I love you so much!”
“I love you with all my heart.”
“Are you going to hurt me?”
“Mauricette!”
“Tell me that you'll hurt me more than yesterday! More than yesterday! Rip away everything! Tear me! Make me bleed like a slit pig!” She probably would have continued in the same vein had the door not opened. Teresa appeared and, as if she had heard Mauricette's first sentence, said, “You're not getting all excited are you children? I'm not going to marry you until midnight.”
“Oh! Why!” cried Mauricette angrily. “You two must both be nothing but a couple of big kids if you don't know why!”
Since my education meant less to her than did Ricette's, it was the latter that she now addressed. “What? Think a minute. Don't you know that men can pull it out before they discharge better after they've had a piece already than they can the first time around? And do you think that taking your cherry will be like leaping through a paper hoop? Do you think that you'd still be a virgin after all the fingers that have been in you if I hadn't made you a leather cherry as well as a leather asshole?”
Ricette blushed, annoyed to have received a lesson in front of me; but Teresa hadn't yet finished.
“What will happen if I let you go at it alone? Either, after five minutes he'll come in your hair and it'll all be finished, or he'll be so shaken that he'll have forgotten to pull it out in time, and then…! Ah! Then! You'll have had it, girl! I'd cut off his balls, but it would be too late. You get me?”
It was the language of wisdom with a vocabulary which, though it was not that of a sermon, nevertheless had force and even a certain amount of eloquence. In crying out her “and then…! Ah! Then!” Teresa had no doubt been unaware that she was introducing a prosopia into her discourse, but it isn't necessary to know the terms of rhetoric by their names in order to, like Bourdaloue, press them into the service of persuasion.
Was it the apostrophe, the hypothesis, the exhortation, or the prosopia that carried the argument? I don't know. However, Ricette lowered her head and asked only, “Who will get the first shot if I can only have the second?”
“Come back in. We'll draw straws.”
That time rhetoric failed in its reply.
Mauricette was furious, and she sunk immediately into the worst excesses of the language.
“Ah! No! Now you're trying to screw me, all three of you! He's my lover! I found him! I'm the one who gave him a hard-on first! And then I was honest enough, stupid enough, to tell you about him, and for three days you've been wetting your pants under him, the lot' of you, and even this evening when he's supposed to take my cherry I have to be satisfied with what's left!”
And when Teresa smiled unemotionally, without seeming surprised, Mauricette, crazy with rage, made a terrible scene. The words she used surpassed anything I had heard yet. I never thought that a girl, even one trained to the profession of vice, could use words like that when addressing her own mother. She raved at random in a low, trembling voice, spouting out every outrage she knew, but without order, without reason, simply in the joy of hurting, in the disorder and incoherence in which they came to her mind. “Don't touch me! Shit on you! Shit on you! I'm getting out of this dump tonight! I shit on you, you dirty bitch! Dirty beast! Dirty fairy! Dirty slut! Dirty fucker! Dirty whore! You don't like to be called that, do you? Good! Whore! Whore! Whore! Whore! Whore! Whore! Whore! Whore! Whore! Whore! Whore! Whore! Whore! Whore! Whore! Whore! Whore! Daughter of a whore! Mother of whores! Whore licker! 'Whore smeller! I'm no whore like you! I'm a virgin! You let your whore of a mother sell your cherry, but I'm not a strumpet like you! I'm not going to let my cherry be sold, I'm going to give it away! Look! Look here, dirty trollop! Look, my fine bitch! You wanted a hundred louis for it, didn't you? Well, you're not even going to get a hundred sous! The only thing you're going to get is blood and come in your filthy trap!”
Standing, her thighs spread, her head bent forward, she opened the lips of her sex with both hands. Then she closed them again and spoke once more in the same heavy, hateful voice:
“Yes! I've had enough of showing my knockers in your bordello of cornholers! In your bordello of cocksuckers and whores who'll do anything! I've had enough of sitting down to dinner at your table and seeing you pull out a thread of come with your toothpick and laugh because you don't even know who it belongs to! I've had enough of sleeping in sheets where there isn't even a dry spot because a whole bordello has been coming there, the whoremongers, the pimps, the fairies, and the whores! I've had enough of finding shit on my face towel every time one of your lovers wipes his penis on it. Pig! Garbage! Manure! Bitch! Daughter of a slut! Cocksucker! Shit- for-mouth! Hot-piss seller! Behind licker! Turd-eater! Cunt-eater! Count on me! Count on me now, chippy feeler! Count on me to curl your cunt hairs and lipstick your asshole! I don't want any more of your tongue nor of your dirty teats rubbing against me! And I shit on you! I shit on you, mama!”
That last word, that “mama,” made me shiver. Mauricette started to come to me, but seeing the stunned way in which I had been listening to her, she stopped short and threw herself onto a bed, her face in the pillow.
AH during that terrible scene I had watched only Mauricette. But now when I raised my eyes and my hands towards Teresa to prevent her from killing her daughter, as I thought she was going, to, I saw before me a woman as calm as if she had just been directing a stage rehearsal. She was tapping the ends of the fingers of one hand into the palm of her other, as if to simulate a little bravo without making a sound, and she looked at me, surprised at the paleness of my face, and said, “Don't you understand what she wants?”
My God! What had I been thinking of? No, I hadn't gotten it, but her sentence was clear. I saw what she meant and I replied hurriedly, “No! No! Never in front of me!”
“Fine. Go away and leave us alone.”
“Not this evening, please. Not this evening.” Teresa sighed and, with a patience that was customary in her, said from within closed lips, “Ah! Lovers! All right. Stay here. But don't do anything. Promise?”
And I stayed in the room along with Mauricette.
There was a twenty minute intermission, then we returned and, not eagerly but not pouting either, daughter and mother embraced as if nothing had happened.
And, like a student at the Conservatory might make the leap suddenly from tragedy to comedy, Mauricette, as gay now as she had been furious, improvised a carnival pitch with an amazing facility of language.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, here you have the young savage announced outside our tent. We present her to you completely nude, after the custom of her country. This is the genuine article, nothing faked, nothing changed. Go ahead and touch her if you want. There is no padding in the thighs; the stomach is guaranteed, ladies, genuine virgin skin; there is a little horsehair between the buttocks but that is for ornamentation. You want to tap her teats, miss? Go ahead, it doesn't cost a sou. Pull her pubic hair. You can see that at no point are they glued on, neither on her cunt nor under her arms. This is the real, the inimitable, the celebrated Mauricette whose name you have read on our posters.
“This young female savage, ladies and gentlemen, is almost extraordinary creature. She makes love through her asshole… You say you do not understand, miss? When she has a man on top of her with an erection, she does not fuck like you. Instead, she turns gracefully over, takes his prick delicately in her hand, and guides it skillfully into her ass like all the women of her family, a fact that does not prevent her from coming better than you, miss, with your hairless little pussy! What are you making faces about? Be careful! When you laugh in front of the savage girl she becomes enraged and eats little girls beneath their tummies.”
Lili was dying of laughter. Even Charlotte was laughing. But Teresa was the happiest of the three. Evidently, the preceding scene had held no importance whatsoever for her. Mauricette, flushed by her success, continued her monologue:
“The savage girl that you see before your very eyes, ladies and gentlemen, carries her cherry between her legs. You cannot see this cherry because her body is so bent over by her habit of presenting her rear to lovers, but for the slight supplement of fifty centimes per person, we will show you this phenomenon at close range… Has everyone paid? Yes? We now have the pleasure and the honor of presenting the savage girl's cherry. Come closer, please. Don't be afraid. It's very red, but it isn't vicious. The young savage masturbates with all the ferocious
