It surprised me even more that no matter what they did with their cocks and though I did nothing with mine, from the depths of my soul I approved of the way they did it and not some other way, and that they did it with one another and without initiating women into the business. And perhaps the reason I don’t do it is not because I’m not hot-blooded, impulsive, or implacably manly enough, but rather, in harmony with the dictates of my spirit, I am a woman because of my horrible mother. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I first saw — and even later it took my breath away, made me tremble helplessly with excitement — one man finally grasp another man’s cock, saw the two of them elegantly thrust their hips forward with their cocks sticking out of their hands, saw them lean on each other’s shoulders and, each staring attentively at the other’s cock and both of them rubbing against each other’s thighs and legs, almost coolly, seeking a common rhythm, bring each other off.
They would start slowly, but their sperm quickly spouted up.
With the men I would have loved, I’d have loved to do it too.
It happened that one of them, before the spouting started or bubbled up onto his hand, would duck down to take it into his mouth, caress it with his tongue, suck and swallow the lilac ugliness rearing before him with its purplish head. To eat it, devour it, retching deep down into the back of his throat; sometimes they spat out the sperm. Others, excited by mutual desire, would fall to the filthy ground already fouled by others — they didn’t care where they fell — and mutually took into their mouths the other’s cock. Two silent pieces of flesh. Writhing on each other’s body like epileptics. Heaving, gagging, hurrying and gasping for air. The last moment before the end of the world. They weren’t bothered if they rolled around in other men’s excrement. To save myself I pretended to be disgusted, and that’s how I became disgusted. But with my countenance gazing into the darkness, I approved. They kissed into the other’s mouth the other man’s sperm.
I nearly fainted but I approved.
Or what about the naked tribal warriors in the darkest thickets, with their clothes fastened to their waists or strapped to their legs, arching their butts upward, opening their star-patterned sphincters, free of humiliation, abjection, or servility, falling on their knees and letting themselves be pounded; reaching back very adroitly with tentacle-like arms to grasp the pounding body by its thighs or hairy ass lest it slip out, and even giving little counterthrusts, slyly, helpfully, until the other man, whose name they don’t know, withholding his screams, quickly and forcefully ejaculates into them.
There were those who pulled it out before their climax, wanting to see the gushing geyser sprinkle into the darkness, into something that could not be seen, into nothingness.
There may be people whom even shit won’t stop from screwing a stranger’s ass, because for them it’s nothing more than a bit of swallowing that nobody keeps track of or judges morally; anyway, I still wouldn’t want this to be my life.
With such loathsomeness in it.
All right, I watched it, I saw it, though I don’t know why I had to; I’ve done it, that’s all I know, I’m leaving. True, I went back the next day, couldn’t stay away. And again I stayed until dawn.
And not only that, but also my own sentimental self, longing for brotherhood, would not let go of me; that was my problem, being buffeted by these different intertwined selves that I could not separate. Because of my birth I wound up in a world where in certain cases yes might mean no or no could mean yes. Yet I simply couldn’t imagine or accept about myself that I might have anything to do with these repugnant characters and what I saw them do. I wished myself back in the time when I knew nothing of this. There must be some people fortunate enough to go through life without ever being aware of this world. And if this is the way things are in the end, and I’m too craven to admit that I’m just like these people and have been looking in vain for the real world behind the appearances, now that I’ve found it and see that every other kind of life is but a gross illusion of this ungainly reality, then I must opt for the bridge.
But if my desire is to grasp a cock, anybody’s I can, then why on earth should I kill myself, I asked, rattling and panting with carnal desire and self-hatred.
I would have preferred, with the same effort, to laugh at myself for being so ridiculous.
How ridiculous and ignoble, and willing to sink even lower.
I had no place where I could get away from tormenting doubt. I knew no one with whom I could share any of this. I could just as easily have taken it into my mouth, mutely, anyone’s, so that when the hot sperm was ejected from the depth of his body I could feel at least once what I’d be like as the other man. But I didn’t have enough power of imagination to think this thought through to the end. Even though I stated clearly why I would not want to do it. I did not want to be the way I was, as defined by my natural qualities.
Only God could see things correctly, if there was a God and if he could see. But the no stayed stronger in me.
Whether I reject or approve and adopt a life like that, I can’t endure it for long.
I had to get to that point from here.
Out of the darkness and onto the lit-up bridge. Let the cold of the water swallow me forever, and let no one ever find me either, being a person of such miserable birth. I cursed my mother, whom I did not know, of whom I barely had memories, who left me for a large, bony, pale, blond Frenchwoman. And because my father didn’t notice any signs of this in my mother’s behavior and because he did not keep her from leaving, I cursed him too, a man stupid enough to want to fuck a woman like that. But he was taken away one ordinary early summer morning, in unknown circumstances and for unfathomable reasons, maybe killed by mistake, so my curse could not settle on him as I wanted it to. I was the accursed one. Because I did remember what this dead man’s reproductive organ was like, how it rested on his testicles, I had the brains to remember a thing like that, what his belly was like and his pubic hair when the water rained down on him from the showerhead.
I remember the hair on his body, long and black, how it clung to the deep brown skin of that marvelous body; yes, I remember that very precisely.