Secret Lolita: The Confessions of Victor X (13 page)

One day she told me: "When I hear people talking about men, I can't stand it any more, I go off to the kitchen…" "Why," I asked, puzzled. "To
comfort
myself of course with my finger (
per isfogarmi col ditellino
)." She also confessed that she felt the greatest carnal desire in the morning when she woke up. She liked to kiss my penis, on her own impulse, quite apart from fellatio: that was her way of showing how much she loved that organ. She never tired of watching my writhings with her sister. The two girls told me that when they went bathing in the sea they enjoyed mutual masturbation underwater with a little boy who was their friend.

I performed coitus
in ore vulvae
on the two girls (this was their favourite pleasure) and masturbation by hand and tongue - cunnilingus was nothing new to them. But, unfortunately, it was they who taught me something new: as soon as we were alone, they unbuttoned my trousers and took out my penis; they went on and on exclaiming with admiration how big and long it was, the younger one kissed it and then they started masturbating me with their fingers. Although I tried to hold out, they did it so quickly and speedily that they got me to ejaculation after half or a quarter of a minute. I had still never tried masturbation by hand myself and had never let others do it to me: I did not know what method, what movement of the fingers to use to get an orgasm this way. The sensation was something new - bitter and delightful: I found it better than intercourse. And yet I was frightened, since I believed that all sorts of illness would now immediately strike me down. During the same session the two girls also did fellatio to me, but gave me less pleasure. That same evening, alone in my bed, casting my mind back to the voluptuous scenes I had been taking part in, I could not help masturbating by myself. That was how the vice which was to be my bane began.

My blood was as heated as it had been during the first burst of precocious passion in my childhood. I could not stop going back to the little Neapolitan girls, and often too. Coitus
in ore vulvae
which they liked so much was not enough for me: I got them to have homosexual intercourse in front of me, made them have cunnilingus and offered only token resistance to their attempts to masturbate me by hand. After I put up a halfhearted struggle, they won and were exultant to see my sperm shooting far out. When I got home I would go over the fiery scenes I had just witnessed in my mind and could not stop myself masturbating again.

My sexual intoxication worsened from day to day: I soon got to know other 'honourable' families with little girls of ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen who were likewise virgins and as expert as the first two and, just like them, at our first conversation they offered to do '69' (
far il sessanta nove
) with me - they used a lot of other terms as well as that technical one. They told me about their homosexual lovemaking, erotic scenes they had watched &c. I never had vaginal intercourse with any of them.

There were also grown-up girls 'of good family', virgins with fiancés and whose mothers - I am sure to build up their little dowries - let strangers look at them naked; you were allowed only superficial touching, sometimes '69' but usually just cunnilingus or simple manual masturbation. With one of them you were only allowed coitus
inter femora
(between the thighs),
fare fra le coscie
. Some of these girls got married, after and before I left Naples, to civil servants, businessmen, young doctors. The bridegrooms might well have known nothing, for the parents took great care sometimes to keep the traffic secret. In any case Naples is a
camorra
city, nobody interferes in other people's affairs that are shady: quite the contrary - there is a most touching mutual aid in this sphere, sometimes just limited to keeping secrets in return for the same service. I was told among other things of a midwife who kept a huge assortment of prepubescent girls. I had no homosexual leanings and so I did not bother with male prostitution in Naples. One virgin of sixteen I was allowed to 'play' with (no intercourse naturally) had vaginal flatulence when she had an orgasm: it made the same noise as wind from the rectum and I was reminded of Martial's lines on the
fatui poppysmata cunni
(the cunt's fatuous whistles of applause). Is it the sudden violent contraction of a vagina full of air that causes this flatulence? I also got to know - but too late to make use of them myself - a strange family that was well known in Naples then. They were the Bal…i young ladies, several sisters of eleven to nineteen, rich orphans whose guardians (probably for gain) let them live as they liked; they were all madly sensual, received elegant gentlemen and went in for all kinds of sexual refinements with them. Even the youngest, who was eleven, was such a refined gourmet that she never let herself have her voluptuous thrills with the same man twice: she needed constant variety and change.

What about my fiancée? I was ashamed of my behaviour; I did not want to lie and I wrote seldom and coolly. This hurt her and she wrote back just as laconically and less often. But it was still agreed that we would marry as soon as I got back to Milan.

After being chaste for so long I had become - or had reverted to being - a debauchee, thanks to sheer bad luck, that accursed trip to Naples and the perverse twist that my sex life took there. The habit I had acquired of masturbating became more and more tyrannical. It was strengthened by frequenting little girls who knew how to vary this pleasure in a host of different ways. One refinement they taught me I had not found in books: they aroused me to orgasm and ejaculation by manipulating my nipples with their mouths. (The little girl of twelve who did this to me the first time with consummate skill had, she said, once seen a hermaphrodite and was very aroused by the very idea of hermaphroditism; she told me she often dreamt of it and had ejaculations.) I was very afraid I had become a masturbator and I wondered if I had any moral right to marry with such a vice.

Nevertheless I had read in popular medical books that intercourse is the supreme antidote to masturbation and I decided to try normal intercourse with a young woman to get rid of my new tendencies. A pretty dancer was found for me at San Carlo; she was about twenty. After the pungent pleasures I had just been wallowing in, normal intercourse seemed a little stale, almost insipid to me. But the saddest thing was that a few hours after intercourse, when I thought back to it, it was more thrilling in my imagination that it had been in reality and I could not help masturbating again as I went over all the details in my memory of the act I had performed. To my great despair the same thing happened several times afterwards.

But one day I had the joy of getting more out of normal intercourse than usual and not lapsing again into masturbation afterwards. The same thing happened two days later. I saw that as the beginning of my psychological cure and I began to dream again of the delights of my imminent marriage. But fate was hounding me. My dancing girl gave me a bad dose of gonorrhoea. The Naples doctors treated me probably wrongly, since chronic gonorrhoea followed the acute attack. All my dreams of happiness were shattered. I more or less kept putting off the marriage date; I got convalescent leave from the electrical company (I said that I had bronchitis) and found I could stay in Naples.

My fiancée could not get over her astonishment. After one delay after another she finally wrote to say that it was not hard to see in my behaviour a wish to break it off; if this inference was wrong, she asked me to reply 'categorically' and finally to say what date the marriage would take place and to fix the day irrevocably, for thanks to me she, my fiancée, was now beginning to be the laughing stock of her friends; so often she had had to announce to them that her marriage had been put back yet again. Alas, I could not fix any final date; I did not know when my gonorrhoea would go away. So I gave an evasive answer and consequently my fiancée wrote to say she was setting me free, returned my letters and asked me to let her have hers back. Everything was over. It was a terrible blow to me. My life was on the brink of collapse.

Shortly after, I left Naples. Despite my long absence, though not without difficulty, I managed to get my company job back. I really needed it, for I had spent everything I had saved in Naples. I was now a very different man from the man I had been when I left Milan. First of all, I was a hardened masturbator. About a year after I got back from Naples, when medical tests showed there was no trace of gonococca left in my urethral secretions, I took up sexual relations with women again, now that I was freed of my former panic about infection. I do not use sheaths, I think they interfere with pleasure, but I take other precautions (not enough, according to the doctors) and I look out for women who give you a reassuring appearance, 'clean tarts'. But there is never any foolproof guarantee in these cases: so I caught gonorrhoea once again. For some time I had a kept woman, but it did not last long: I find it hard to put up with a woman of that sort for any length of time, they are too off-putting morally for me. It is odd that if I have intercourse, it is not just for intercourse's sake… it does not satisfy me enough, it is so that I can masturbate afterwards, by stirring my imagination with a recall of my last coitus, which I can see in my mind's eye in the minutest detail. That is why I usually have intercourse in the daytime and thus masturbate the same night in bed. So coitus has become for me a sort of fetish or symbol for masturbation: it is just a way of arousing or stimulating the imagination, like reading pornography or looking at obscene pictures: it is worthless in itself. I really find it very agreeable only in retrospect, as an idea, not in reality. If I have more frequent intercourse, I have to have more frequent masturbation too, in the same proportion.

In any case I have developed two bad passions. Since my Naples experience when I let my eyes roam over so many naked children, I get extraordinarily aroused at the sight of little girls' sexual organs. So I have got into the habit of walking around working-class areas and looking out for little girls who show their vulvas when they lift their skirts and undo their drawers during urination or play. To get me excited, the girl has to be at least six or seven. The older she is, the more excited I get. When I am back home I think about what I have seen and masturbate. I have noticed during these walks around the city several gentleman whose postures give away the same hobby. Once I saw something that flabbergasted me and which I just cannot explain. I was standing on the pavement of a Milan street, not far from a group of four little working-class girls who were playing on a heap of sand; the two youngest must have been eight, the other two were ten and eleven. I had been spying on them for a long time without getting anywhere, for one often has to wait a long time to catch the movement which reveals the hidden parts and at the same time to avoid attracting the children's or passers-by's attention. But now a little girl who was picking up sand squatted down right opposite me and lifted up her skirt so that her whole belly and vulva were exposed. She did not look at me as she did so and I thought that she was being careless and thoughtless, which is quite uncommon in a child of that age. But the gesture was deliberate. A few minutes later the same little girl came back to the same spot with her three playmates and they all squatted opposite me, but this time they were looking at me and putting their fingers on their clitoris, they urinated together. Then they got up and went off laughing. What did this performance mean? Did the little girls realise what I was looking for and put on this show for my pleasure? Or could they have been making fun of me? Or could it have been some sort of defiance, a gesture of scorn for the pervert that they guessed I was with their precocious experience? Or could it have been that there was no deliberate eroticism hidden here: the children merely felt awkward at a stranger watching them playing and so to make him go away they did something uncalled-for, but as innocent to their thinking as sticking out their tongues?… I could not tell which was the right explanation, but this flashing vision had a strong effect on me and made me masturbate in my bedroom time and time again. It was one of the strongest sexual emotions of my life.

At around the same time I had another stirring experience of the same kind that was just as powerful. I was in the lavatory and through the shutters of this nook I could see what was happening in the flat opposite the other side of a narrow yard from the lavatory. I could see a balcony with a bedroom door opening onto it, wide open. In the bedroom were two working-class children, a little girl who could not have been more than three and a boy who was not more than two. I am telling the strict truth. The boy lifted up his shift, getting close to the girl and showing her his penis, which was rather large for his age and half erect. The girl looked at the organ for some time, as if she was willing to cooperate, then lifted her skirt and showed her vulva to the boy. She stood upright and squeezed the little boy's body tightly against her own and rubbed the penis against the vulva with all the movements of intercourse. This went on for three or four minutes, after which the girl took the boy by the hand and led him to a lavatory which also had a door onto the balcony. They shut themselves in it for rather a long time. I stayed in my look-out to see how it would end. The girl was the first to come out and left the door open. It opened in such a way that I could not see what the boy was doing there on his own. A few moments later a woman, doubtless their mother, came into the bedroom, made for the lavatory and pulled the little boy out, hitting him hard. Probably she caught him masturbating. If only because it was so unusual, this scene aroused me extraordinarily.

By spying on little girls to see their sexual organs I had the chance of observing a great deal about lower class children. I was able to note that when they think nobody is looking they often have less innocent fun than one might think. They often find it amusing to touch each other's sexual organs. Once I saw a little boy doing cunnilingus to a little girl: they were at most five to six. This took place between beached boats at a sea-port.