Secret Lolita: The Confessions of Victor X (12 page)

However hard I racked my brains, I could find no solution. But time was passing and I was beginning to get used to abstinence. Once repressed, the erotic instinct did not get worse; it quietened down, which never ceased to amaze me. The medical books I had read made me think that my absolute chastity could have the worst possible consequence for me: nothing happened and my physical health seemed to be getting better. Likewise, my mental energy seemed to be rekindled and I was starting to get really involved in art and study. After reading certain things, seeing certain pictures, ballet &c., temptations would come over me, but I did not know how to follow up my flesh's rebellion and so my desires calmed down little by little. I still did not masturbate, but I had nocturnal emissions which gave me relief and which I found enjoyable. I was becoming more and more interested in industry, in the uses of electricity and was taking various technical courses.

About a year after I had come to Milan, my father informed me that my uncle had gone broke and that his factory was closed, so that our plans for the future crumbled. I wrote and told my father that I still wanted to stay in Italy to become an engineer and I went back to work with zest. I prepared for the
licenza ginnasiale
and
licenza liceale
(matriculation) and when I thus had the right to go to university, I moved to Turin, where I took university courses in the faculty of mathematical and physical sciences. Then I went back to Milan to take practical courses in industrial physics and chemistry. At twenty-seven I was an engineer. I got a good job in a big electrical firm and saw no personal reason for going back to Russia. In any case, my father made the occasional trip to Milan from time to time to see me: he was happy to see that my life had settled down in an intelligent path and attributed this to the healthy influence of western Europe's hardworking atmosphere, so unlike the morbid unbalanced atmosphere among the intellectuals of wretched Russia.

I lived in absolute chastity from twenty to thirty-two. At first I found abstinence a burden; afterwards I got used to it and thought no more of women. But I found life all the more interesting because I had a profession and plenty to read, as well as educated, intelligent people to talk to, of whom there were plenty in Milan. My health was now quite good; I still had a weak chest and was highly strung, but I was no longer threatened by tuberculosis, as the doctors had been saying when I was leaving Russia. My nocturnal emissions came less often: to begin with they happened once a week, then once a fortnight, finally towards the age of thirty once every three weeks or a month. They always happened with dreams of a woman's sexual organs; usually I dreamt I was about to have intercourse and that I had premature ejaculation; sometimes, however, I managed in my dream to finish the act properly and the ejaculation came at the end. When that happened I had a deeper satisfaction. Sometimes I would wake up before the ejaculation and try to go back to sleep to prolong the voluptuous dream, which did not always work. But in that case I was bound to have an ejaculation the next night and it always came with sensual images. If I read something erotic I would have these emissions between the normal intervals. Contrary to what I read in books, my own experience tells me that one's sex instinct becomes overexcited the more it is satisfied and that it quietens down and dies the less attention one pays to its demands. This seems odd to me, but I am certain that is how it works. The more often one has intercourse, the more one wants to have it again; my relationship with Nadya proved that only too well; only after several exhausting sexual acts at short intervals did I get the most pungent, acute desire and the harder it was for me to quench it. The heated imagination is no longer satisfied by ordinary coitus: you look for all sorts of refinements and perversions. I am no exception to this rule and all the men I have spoken to have told me they feel the same. When you have eaten well, your appetite goes away. On the contrary, the more voluptuous intercourse was, the quicker the desire for yet more sexual satisfaction awakens - after which desire flags for just a few moments only to flare up again with greater strength.

Animals are not supposed to undergo this. What a power, then man's imagination has in his sex life! It really is an aphrodisiac poison. There is no proportion between the intensity of the itch that comes from full spermatic vessels (any more than from the resulting desires) and, on the other hand, the infinitely greater violence of arousal and desire provoked by sensual images. There is a regrettable and
far too intimate connection
between the separate neuro-cerebral functions, which for the sake of our psychological balance would be far more differentiated and more apart from each other, if only our organization were nearer perfection. Yet another inconsistency in man's make-up!

The brain's prodigiously complicated mechanism is partially distracted from its proper functions and intervenes in the organs' interaction: they could well do without such frequent interference which only causes trouble, just like governments which intervene at the drop of a hat in individual relationships and thus merely upset the tenor of social life. The imagination is virtually abusing its powers when it brings itself to bear on sexual functioning: it is going beyond its proper, biologically useful purpose. Really, what is there to be gained from having a violent desire for venereal enjoyment when all the available sperm has been spent and one feels worn out? And yet that is something quite normal; otherwise one would never overdo it.

Because I have observed the immense part played by the imagination in the libido's development I feel entitled to my own opinions about
geschlechtliche Aufklärung
(sexual enlightenment). I know I am uttering a frightful heresy, a paradox which clashes with almost all my contemporaries' opinions; I am rebelling against all scientific authority, but I find it hard to believe that
geschlechtliche Aufklärung
is the best way to save children from precocious eroticism. In actual fact I have noticed that children's sexual instincts are often awoken by purely mental triggers. It was a scientific book that first aroused my genital desires and I know of a lot of analogous cases. Many a child would be spending his or her time playing with dolls or ninepins, instead of wearing himself out with libidinous desires, if only no one had explained to him 'how babies are made'; take for example the girl you mention in one of your books who masturbated in a way through erotic dreams from the age of twelve, after a married woman had explained to her that 'the lover urinates in his mistress'. In a child's system eroticism can stay in a dormant, latent state for a long time. Sexual revelations set off this inert mechanism, give free rein to the imagination and sexual activity quickly develops. I have prepubescent eroticism mainly in mind, since it is almost impossible to hold back the libido's growth by ignorance after puberty - though I have my doubts, since I have seen boys kept sexually ignorant in some countries, staying chaste for a long time, whereas in other countries like France and Italy they know everything very early and likewise go in early for sexual excesses. But it is a complex topic and I shall not dwell on it. It must not be forgotten that pictures and ideas that may leave an adult unmoved erotically (anatomical and physiological concepts) can arouse a child violently. Look in any public library that lets in children and you can see the state of the pages in encyclopaedias that deal with sex. It is not love of knowledge that makes children read them with such enthusiasm.

I have also learnt from experience that an active imagination is the only thing that makes abstinence hard. If the imagination can be sidetracked from sex somehow or other, it is easy to repress purely physical arousal. That is why abstinence is much easier for a virgin male than for someone who already knows women: the latter has images in his memory which are too
alive
and too
sharp
. Nowhere does the first step count so much as in sexual activity, which is extraordinarily saturated with psychological elements in the human race.

My eleven years of chastity were the happiest or, rather, the least unhappy of my life. I was of course missing something and I could have been happy perhaps, only if I had been married (happily married, of course). I was anxious to get married, not so much to meet my bodily needs without risk or bother, but to find an outlet for my emotional needs. But I never found the chance. Finally, at thirty-one I met a young Italian lady of twenty-seven who suited me, whom I liked and who liked me too. Soon we got engaged. But for financial reasons we did not press on with marriage and then unhappy events came along and spoilt the happiness I had hoped for.

I was sent to Naples by my firm's management with some colleagues to look into the planned installation of an electrical factory and plans for harnessing hydraulic power from the mountains around. I made my first visit there - the most pleasure-loving city of all Europe, not forgetting Munich, Paris and Berlin. One thing Naples is noted for is an enormous traffic in little boys and girls, and openly too: if you buy something in a shop the shopkeeper who may look quite respectable will offer to show you a little girl of twelve, ten or eight. Pimps accost strangers in the street offering them the same goods or even little boys. Families who are not badly off and who have some standing - petty shopkeepers, clerks, tailors, cobblers &c. - also traffic in their prepubescent girls. For the reasonable price of twenty, thirty, forty francs you are just allowed to
have fun
or to
play
with them. If you want to deflower one, that costs more - hundreds or a thousand francs, depending on the family's social status. At the right price you can sometimes find this pleasure even in families that seem to be quite 'comme il faut'. You admire an elegant lady at the theatre surrounded by her family in her box. The person next to you in the stalls notices your enthusiasm and tells you that the lady is yours at quite a moderate price and offers to help by introducing you. The Neapolitans are a very practical lot indeed: they make money every way they can except by working: work is a source of income that does not appeal to them. The big San Carlo theatre has a large ballet which operates independently of the opera. Several hundred children of both sexes form part of the ballet and it is just a great centre for prostitution.

Two or three days after I arrived in Naples, someone latched onto me in Carlo square and insisted on showing me 'really interesting' things. "I won't cheat you," he told me, "I am a perfect gentleman,
io sono galantuomo
, I'll show you things you wouldn't see anywhere else. You will be able to boast that you did not waste your time in Naples; you'll have something to talk to your friends about. I'll take you to a very decent family,
una famiglia onestissima
, well-off people,
gente dabbene veramente
; they have two little girls you can see and touch naked - but not sleep with unless you have a special arrangement with the parents. They're girls of fifteen and eleven, as pretty as a picture and the price is very reasonable, forty francs. You don't want to? All right then, thirty-five: thirty and a tip for me."

I was overcome by what was partly an observer's curiosity about local morals; something in these sensual surroundings spurred me on carnally, too, and I let myself be tempted, to my misfortune.

We went to see those practical parents in their flat. On the doorplate was "So-and-so, lawyer". To judge by the flat and the furnishings, they were well-off, if not good, people. Everything had an air of ease. The mother came out to 'demonstrate', raised the price and said the pimp had got it wrong and then called the little girls. Their brazen looks showed me they were anything but new to the game. That quietened my conscience a little. To calm it I told myself, "I'm not corrupting anyone. If I can be accused of encouraging trafficking in under-age girls, it's no more than accusing any man who pays a prostitute of encouraging the social evil of prostitution. I couldn't alter those little girls' fate without raising a big public outcry and who can tell if that would have a happy outcome for them; who can tell what the result would be for me, particularly in a town like Naples where the authorities are often hand-in-glove with criminals, where the police clearly connive with traffickers in human flesh? So let's have a moment of pleasure which does no one any harm anyway! It's not up to me to redeem the Babylon of Italy."

I was left alone with the two girls. They really were fifteen and eleven, of a pretty Napolitan sort: big black eyes, fine regular features, their faces a pretty olive tint. Their bodies were perfect, their sexual organs charming, 'fresh as a daisy'. The elder had only very little pubic hair, the younger had exactly two hairs, though rather long ones. Both were virgins, but their erotic experience was wide-ranging. They told me that they mainly saw Englishmen. By the way I observed that the English were the mainstay of child prostitution in Naples, as the Italians were not rich enough for this costly debauchery. Now German customers are behind the rapid expansion of pederasty in particular: little Italian boys have a great reputation in Germany and the Krupp affair was an advertisement for them.

The two little girls were both as expert as each other: they told me all sorts of things about pederasty and lesbianism in this city - they went in for the latter with each other and with girl friends. They had watched specially arranged copulations - among others a woman having intercourse with a dog, a man with a duck whose throat he cut during the act (that was an Englishman too),
pyramid
coitus which combined several people. They had posed for obscene photographs &c. They were very sensual but, oddly enough, the younger one was even more so than her sister: she had violent orgasms and looked like someone in their death-throes and secreted copiously. She adored obscene talk, photographs and reading and used her erotic talents enthusiastically. When I came to the house her face beamed with joy and I remember the deeply heartbroken, unhappy look she took on when one day, to save money, I said I would made do with just the elder girl. When I came out of the bedroom after a session with the elder girl, I saw the younger girl sitting on a chair by the door listening, her face sallow with vexation, trembling all over with frustration. She was overjoyed the next time when it was her turn to be asked for: she started dancing.