Thirty hours had passed since the preceding scene. Teresa and her girls had spent the night in a suburb at a relative's house, a woman who was also partially whore herself and who, for that reason, was the more impressed with them. However, I already knew that after a fairly long and heated discussion in which all four of them took part that Teresa had capitulated to Mauricette. I even knew the terms of the surrender. As Mauricette had foreseen, Teresa had finally cried, “I'd rather suck than sell your cherry, my child! I'd rather open my mouth beneath it than have to offer my hand at one side. And it won't prevent a thing, your adventure. I'll just glue it up again. You give the real one and later we'll sell the false. That way everyone will be happy.”
This sort of gift is the kind that generally proves expensive to the receiver. All moralists are in agreement on this point: when a young man lets a mother give him the cherry which sue had hoped to sell, he owes a pretty good present to the girl, a gift of equal importance to the mother, and thanks to God.
If the girl has two sisters it's even more amusing and even more expensive. Good luck, tripled like that, is enough to ruin a student inside of six weeks.
But, although many young men whose tiny fortunes have thus been dissipated retain the bitter feeling of haying been duped, there are just as many who are quite willing to squander their largess freely on those uncalculating courtesans who give everything, risk everything, seem to await nothing from us, but on the other hand spend on us some new tenderness every day. Ah! The tact with which they often receive that which they have not expected; the way in which they sometimes increase their gratitude as if to turn ours away; the manner in which they modify only their surprise in the face of our gifts; the supreme sensibility which I sometimes wonder if they really owe us.
The appointment had been fixed, not at my place now, but at Teresa's, where the installation of her goods had just been completed. I crossed the stair landing to her door at ten o'clock in the evening.
Mother and daughters all received me completely nude, a fact which surprised me less than it embarrassed me.
Can you think of a more pitiful situation than that of a young man shut into a room with four women to each of whom he has said, “I love you” and whom, therefore, he cannot greet with a respectful and distant deference for the very reason that by their nudity they have invited more personal attentions?
When I had kissed all four of them, adding on the side a few pats and caresses such as Christian morality disapproves of but of the type which nude women generally greet rather warmly, Teresa took Mauricette by the shoulders and before both the assemblage and any other question asked me, “Did this kid really suck your prick without puking? Did you really come in her mouth? And she really swallowed it? She could never do it before, you must be a magician.”
“No. As a matter of fact, it was easier with her than with your highness, madame.”
Mauricette was thrilled by this response, and Teresa, hands on hips, still good-naturedly, spoke again.
“So! Is that the kind of answer I should get? I who have sucked three thousand men in my time?”
“But not that one,” said Lili. “You're the only one in the family who doesn't know what his come tastes like. Even Ricette knows! Even she's sucked him before you have! That's terrific!”
“And you want to take this child's cherry!” continued Teresa.
“Some child!” said Lili. “If I had as many hairs on my cunt as she has between her buttocks…”
“Shut up! White of a bidet! Losing a cherry is a serious thing. Look at Charlotte. See if she feels like laughing.”
And Charlotte, who had been barely able to keep back her tears before, had thrown herself on the sofa and was crying her head off. I took the opportunity to rejoin her and say a few affectionate words. She was so pitiful… But Teresa interrupted me.
“Let her alone! You don't know Charlotte. When she has finished crying she'll feel like beating off, and when she's finished coming, she'll feel like crying again. It's like that around here from morning to night. I sometimes think she discharges tears and cries out come. But wait! Wait! There! What did I tell you?”
And, as a matter of fact, Charlotte was wiping her eyes dry with her left hand while her right was already busy between her legs. As her mother spoke she opened her eyes, saw ours fixed on her, and said, getting up, “Oh! If you're all going to watch me…”
She slid her hand into a dresser drawer and took out two dildoes which she then inserted, one after the other, into front and back. Then, lying once more on the sofa, but with her thighs spread far apart this time, she started the work of her finger again and said with a sad smile, “Is it more interesting now?”
We left her alone. Teresa again took Mauricette by the shoulders and arranged and straightened her hair as if she were offering her to some new customer. Then she repeated:
“You want to take this fourteen year-old's cherry!”
“Yes. We swore it between us, she and I. We have dispensation from the archbishop.”
“But what will you agree to swear to between you and I, if I give her to you?”
“I don't know, what?”
“You won't give this kid a kid, will you? She discharges like a dike breaking, you know, and that always takes easily. So watch yourself. I'll have my face right between and if you give her so much as a drop of come, you'll get something else from me.”
“Don't do that. I'll be good.”
“So where will you wind up at?”
“Ah, decisions…”
“My mouth? It's a good time.”
“Ah!” cried Mauricette. “I knew it! It's because your prick will be all red with my blood! That's what she wants! I told him you wouldn't want to lose a drop! That you'd stick your tongue in it! That you'd wind up with your mouth full of blood and come!”
“Huh? Do you think she's really old enough to lose her cherry?” said Teresa simply.
“Oh! Yes, yes, I'm old enough!” repeated the girl. “Mama, let me say something to him just for him alone.”
To be sure that she was speaking in secret, Mauricette took me into another room and closed the door. You 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 refinements of young cannibal women; she puts mustard on the end of her finger when she's beating herself off and then… Oh! Madame! You think that her cherry is blushing out of shame? No, it is only onanism that makes it red like that. Please do not touch the cherry, miss. You will make it all hot. Look closely, ladies and gentlemen, but please do not touch. And now listen, everyone, as the program of the evening will be announced.
“At the end of the show you will see the solemn taking of Mauricette's cherry before the honorable assemblage. The young savage will present herself dog fashion… That shocks you miss? Young ladies who like to be cornholed think very highly of this position. She will therefore present herself dog fashion over her mother's face and between two excited sisters, who will, in their turn, sob, finger themselves, kiss, cry… And that is nothing, ladies and gentlemen. We will begin the program with another complete number, a completely new performance that the celebrated Mauricette perfected only yesterday and that she will give before the public for the first time this evening!”
“She'll suck?” cried Lili, clapping her hands. “Oh! For Ricette that's even more wonderful than losing her cherry!”
“Yes, ladies and gentlemen, our advertisement told the truth. For the first time publicly the young savage girl will suck a man. And what is more, instead of letting him come in mid-air, she will permit him to discharge in her mouth; and instead of spitting out the come like you do (a vicious habit, miss), the celebrated Mauricette will swallow everything while licking her lips with a gracious smile! We thank you for your attention.”
“There is a girl born into a circus family,” said Teresa proudly.
No doubt. But she was also the only one of the three who had had enough formal education to be able to give to her pitch the proper amount of buffoonery.
Quickly, Ricette whispered something in my ear. I replied, “Yes, if you wish.” Then, out loud, spontaneously, in front of her sisters and I, she made a sort of public apology.
“A few minutes ago I was nasty to you, mama. I ask your forgiveness and to show I mean it, I want him to fuck you the first.”
“Me?” said Teresa.
“Yes. You on top of me, as later we'll do it the other way around. And then he can finish in my mouth, so that I'll have both your come and his at the some time.”
“What a love, this kid of mine!” cried Teresa, clasping her in her arms. “See!” she said to me. “Don't I know her better than you?”