the other, a human eye, had spurted from Granero's head with the same force as a bundle of innards from a belly. This coincidence, tied to death and to a sort of urinary liquefaction of the sky, first brought us back to Marcelle in a moment that was so brief and almost insubstantial, yet so uneasily vivid that I stepped forward like a sleepwalker as though about to touch her at eye level.
Needless to say, everything was promptly back to normal, though with blinding obsessions in the hour after Granero's death. Simone was in such a foul mood that she told Sir Edmond she wouldn't spend another day in Madrid; she was very anxious to see Seville because of its reputation as a city of pleasure.
Sir Edmond took a heady delight in satisfying the whims of 'the simplest and most angelic creature ever to walk the earth,' and so the next day he accompanied us to Seville, where we found an even more liquefying heat and light than in Madrid. A lavish abundance of flowers in the streets, geraniums and rose laurels, helped to put our senses on edge.
Simone walked about naked under a white dress that was flimsy enough to hint at the red garter-belt underneath, and, in certain positions, even at her beaver. Furthermore, everything in this city contributed to making her radiate such sensuality that when we passed through the torrid streets, I often saw the cocks stand up in trousers. Indeed, we virtually never stopped having sex. We avoided orgasms and we went sight-seeing, for this was the only way to keep from having my penis endlessly immersed in her fur. But we did take advantage of any opportunities when we were out. We would leave one convenient place with never any goal but to find another like it. An empty museum room, a stairway, a garden path lined with high bushes, an open church, deserted alleys in the evenings-we walked until we found the right place, and the instant we found it, I would open the girls' body by lifting one of her legs and shoving my cock to the bottom of her cunt in one swoop. A few moments later, I would pull my steaming member from its stable, and our promenade would continue almost aimlessly. Usually, Sir Edmond would follow at a distance in order to surprise us: he would turn purple, but he never came over. And if he jerked off, he would do it discreetly, not for caution's sake, of course, but because he never did anything unless standing isolated and almost utterly steady, with a dreadful muscular contraction.
'This is a very interesting place,' he said one day in regard to a church, 'it's the church of Don Juan.'
'So what?' replied Simone.
'Stay here with me,' Sir Edmond said to me. 'And you, Simone, you ought to go round this church all by yourself.'
'What an awful idea!'
Nevertheless, however awful the idea, it aroused her curiosity, and she went in by herself while we waited in the street.
Five minutes later, Simone reappeared at the threshold of the church. We were dumbstruck: not only was she guffawing her head off, but she couldn't speak or stop laughing, so that, partly by contagion, partly because of the intense light, I began laughing as hard as she, and so did Sir Edmond to a certain extent.
'Bloody girl,' he said. 'Can't you explain? By the bye, we're laughing right over the tomb of Don Juan!'
And laughing even harder, he pointed at a large church brass at our feet. It was the tomb of the church's founder, who, the guides claimed, was Don Juan: after repenting, he had himself buried under the doorstep so that the faithful would trudge over his corpse when entering or leaving their haunt.
But now our wild laughter burst out again tenfold. In our mirth, Simone had lightly pissed down her legs, and a tiny trickle of water had landed on the brass.
We noted a further effect of her accident: the thin dress, being wet, stuck to her body, and since the cloth was now fully transparent, Simone's attractive belly and thighs were revealed with particular lewdness, a dark patch between the red ribbons of her garter belt.
'All I can do is go into the church,' said Simone, a bit calmer, 'it'll dry.'
We burst into a large space, where Sir Edmond and I vainly looked for the comical sight that the girl had been unable to explain. The room was relatively cool, and the light came from windows, filtering through curtains of a bright red, transparent cretonne. The ceiling was of carved woodwork, the walls were plastered but encumbered with religious gewgaws more or less gilded. The entire back wall was covered from floor to rafters by an altar and a giant Baroque retable of gilded wood; the involved and contorted decorations conjured up India, with deep shadows and golden glows, and the whole altar at first seemed very mysterious and just right for sex. At either side of the entrance door hung two famous canvases by the painter Valdes Leal, pictures of decomposing corpses: interestingly, one of the eye sockets was being gnawed through by a rat. Yet in all these things, there was nothing funny to be found.
Quite the contrary: the whole place was sumptuous and sensuous, the play of shadows and light from the red curtains, the coolness and a strong pungent aroma of blossoming oleander, plus the dress sticking to Simone's beaver- everything was urging me to burst loose and bare that wet cunt on the floor, when I spied a pair of silk shoes at a confessional: the feet of a penitent female.
'I want to see them leave,' said Simone.
She sat down before me, not far from the confessional, and all I could do was caress her neck, the line of her hair, or her shoulders with my cock. And that put her so much on edge that she told me to tuck my penis away immediately or she would rub it till I shot my load.
I had to sit down and merely look at Simone's nakedness through the soaked cloth, at best in the open air, when she wanted to fan her wet thighs and she uncrossed them and lifted her dress.
'You'll see,' she said.
That was why I patiently waited for the key to the puzzle. After a rather long wait, a very beautiful young brunette stepped out of the confessional, her hands folded, her face pale and enraptured: with her head thrown back and her eyes white and vacant, she slowly eased across the room like an opera ghost. There was something so truly unexpected about the whole thing that I desperately squeezed my legs together to keep from laughing, when the door of the confessional opened: someone else emerged, this time a blond priest, very young, very handsome, with a long thin face and the pale eyes of a saint. His arms were crossed on his chest, and he remained on the threshhold of the booth, gazing at a fixed point on the ceiling as though a celestial apparition were about to help him levitate.
The priest thus moved in the same direction as the woman, and he would probably have vanished in turn without seeing anything if Simone, to my great surprise, had not brought him up sharply. Something unbelievable had occurred to her: she greeted the visionary courteously and said she wanted to confess.
The priest, still gliding in his ecstasy, indicated the confessional with a distant gesture and reentered his tabernacle, softly closing the door without a word.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Simone's Confession and Sir Edmond's Mass
One can readily imagine my stupor at watching Simone kneel down by the cabinet of the lugubrious confessor. While she confessed her sins, I waited, extremely anxious to see the outcome of such an unexpected action. I assumed this sordid creature was going to burst from his booth, pounce upon the impious girl, and flagellate her. I was even getting ready to knock the dreadful phantom down and treat him to a few kicks; but nothing of the sort happened: the booth remained closed, Simone spoke on and on through the tiny grilled window, and that was all.
I was exchanging sharply interrogative looks with Sir Edmond when things began to grow clear: Simone was slowly scratching her thigh, moving her legs apart; keeping one knee on the prayer stool, she shifted one foot to the floor, and she was exposing more and more of her legs over her stockings while still murmuring her confession. At times she even seemed to be jerking off.
I softly drew up at the side to try and see what was happening: Simone really was jerking off, the left part of her face was pressed against the grille near the priest's head, her limbs tensed, her thighs splayed, her fingers rummaging deep in the fur; I was able to touch her, I bared her cunt for an instant. At that moment, I distinctly heard her say:
'Father, I still have not confessed the worst sin of all.'
A few seconds of silence.
