Secret Lolita: The Confessions of Victor X (14 page)

The other bad passion which I acquired at that same inauspicious time is a sort of exhibitionism. My Naples dancing girl told me that one of her favourite pleasures was looking at gentlemen pissing in urinals. It must be remembered that in Italy urinals often stand in the open, so that passers-by can easily see the urinaters' penises. "At what age did you start doing that?" I asked her. "From childhood, of course,
da bambina
!" This drew my attention to something I had not noticed before, namely that when girls in Italy pass by someone using a urinal, they cast a curious look at them. This stirred my imagination. From then on, when I was relieving myself in a public urinal, I would position myself so that passing women could easily see my penis (which is very easy in Italy, given the way the urinals are built). I could see that a lot of girls were on the lookout for such sights and were eager to watch. Women who were getting on in years, however, usually paid no attention.

The most enthusiastic
voyeuses
are girls between twelve and fifteen. I have noticed that girls of this age are the most enthralled by the sight of certain monkeys' (especially baboons') penes in the zoo. There are some girls who stay close to the cage for hours and hours, now looking at the red appendage, now waiting for it to appear in all its glory. To get back to the urinals, I have noticed that little girls generally are more willing to stare if they are lower-class. The overwhelming majority of upper-class girls avert their eyes when they walk past a urinal. The girls of the lowest class, the most ragged, look at the male organ with emphatic cynicism, stop to get a better look, turn round and laugh and sometimes chat about it at the top of their voices. Working-class girls, but not rabble, wait for the right moment, cast furtive looks, glance more closely
when they think nobody is watching them
. Often they get up to tricks: after seeing your penis as they walk towards the urinal, they pass by, turn sharply in their tracks as if they had forgotten something and thus get a second look. Or else they stop dead a few steps from the urinal in front of a shop window and pretend to be admiring whatever is on show, while watching what really interests them out of the corner of one eye. Once I saw a girl of about twelve spend perhaps an hour standing in front of a poster advertising
La figlia di Jorio
by G. D'Annunzio, seeming to be wholly absorbed in reading the poster and really gorging her eyes on the succession of men's penes in the urinal nearby. The young
voyeuses
show their excitement mostly by unmistakable signs: I could see their eyes shine, their cheeks colour or go pale, their lips quiver. Their arousal must have been all the stronger for their seeing my penis erect with its glans laid bare.

Once a girl of about fourteen passed by a urinal I was using; she almost brushed against me but the angle stopped her seeing my penis; when she had passed the urinal, she turned around and could then see my manhood. It made such an impression on her that she could not hold back a cry. Her eyes looked wild, she clutched her chest at the heart with her left hand.

It is not hard to understand how much this new sport aroused me. When I got home I imagined the emotion on the children's faces and naturally it all ended with masturbation. I put myself, as it were, in the shoes of the girls I had been watching and imagined the thrills they must have felt when they saw my organ. Actually, when I saw them looking at another man and not at me I was just as stirred; I felt no need to take an active part in this comedy. All that interested me was the little girls' carnal response: whether I or somebody else provoked it was of no importance to me - I even preferred it to be someone else. My exhibitionism was done so warily that nobody could see it for what it was. I never operated outside urinals and I never lingered there too long.

All the Italian prostitutes I have had the chance to talk about it with have admitted to me that in their childhood and early youth the sight of men urinating was a deep source of enjoyment for them. One told me that at eighteen when she was a virgin, she often happened to look out of the window of her lodgings at the urinal down in the street and see the penes of the men urinating. She thought then, "God, how nice it must be to touch and handle that wet fish! (
Dio, come dev'essere buono il toccare ed il maneggiare quello pesce crude! Che cosa divina dev'essere il coricarsi con gli uomini!
- What a divine thing it must be to go to bed with men.)"

While we are discussing the fascinating effect on young girls' imagination of seeing a male organ, I remember another prostitute telling me the turbulent emotion she felt at ten or eleven when she saw her father's sexual organ. "I couldn't get that piece of meat out of my mind. (
Quel pezzo di carne no si rimuoveva dal mio spirito
)," she said. She said that she had been sexually
even more moved perhaps
the first time she saw her mother's pubic hair. She dreamt of it and each time it brought about nocturnal emissions. In childhood all these women had been interested in boys' sexual organs.

I happened to see for myself how interested little girls were in male organs. Not far from a little seaside resort in Italy I saw a man bathing in the sea, soaping his penis. A group of little girls between ten and twelve, staying a little way off, were keeping a close watch on him. Another time, also by the sea near Genoa, I saw a lad of fifteen to sixteen holding his erect penis in his hand. I think he was masturbating. Not far from him a little girl of thirteen to fourteen was stealthily creeping up on him between the rocks, trying to get a closer view and staring ardently at the young man's great priapus. The boy caught sight of me, rushed suddenly into the water and the girl went and hid behind the rocks. Once I was in Florence in the Niobe room in the Uffizi gallery. A little girl about eight and from the lower classes to judge by her clothes came into the room and went up to the statue of a Niobide lying on his back. Looking all around her first, thinking she was alone (she could not see me for I was standing behind a statue), she started to feel and stroke the statue's marble penis and then she kissed it. I moved, she caught sight of me and raced out of the room.

Another example of the penis' fascination for little girls: once I saw at the seaside near Genoa a working-class woman order her daughter of eleven or twelve to wash a child of two or three. The mother left her to do it on her own, but the little girl, instead of doing what she had been told, just let the palm of her hand pass up and down the child's body, each time pressing on the penis and scrotum, trying to make them come out and swell with this rhythmic movement. It went on for a long time; at first the little boy found it fun, then he started to cry, but nobody paid any attention, since other children being bathed drowned out his cries for help with the noise they were making.

All the prostitutes I have talked to admitted to me that they played sex games with boys from their earliest years. Playing doctors, for example, on the pretext of examining the patient they slid their hand down shirts and into trousers and touched their playmate's sexual organs. Or else they played mothers and fathers, a game which sometimes went rather far.

This is a story told to me by a Roman woman: at eight or nine she came to the Borghese park with a boy of the same age and found a well-hidden cranny with the express aim of achieving complete coitus; hitherto the children had gone no further than surface contact, but they had decided to have real coitus with penile penetration. "I wanted to (
ne avevo una voglia
)," said the Roman woman, "as if I were a proper woman." But for all their attempts they could do nothing. Although erect the penis would not go into the vagina. "And yet we went to a lot of trouble. We worked away for at least an hour,
una oretta, almeno
! We may not have succeeded, but we had a lot of pleasure all the same." A Milanese woman told me she still found it fun to think about her frolics between ten and thirteen with little boys of the same age. The pleasure came mainly from recalling their penes, "which were little but so dainty, hot, with such smooth skin and then so hard, as hard as iron. And when the boys' sperm came," she went on, "and the girls' secretions (
la sborratura delle ragazze
, from the verb
sborrare
, to make water, ejaculate), how astonished we were to see something white coming out of our bodies."

The usual method for sex between children was coitus
in ore vulvae
, "we rubbed -
se fregava
". Cunnilingus was not unknown. There were cases of children deflowering each other. The various stories women told me nearly always mentioned children having to leave town and look for a hiding place in gardens or woods around to carry out their sexual adventures. That goes to prove what I said, that country life encourages children's erotic play more than town life; in town hiding places are not always easy to find. A courtesan from Bologna told me that at fourteen, still a virgin, she had a 'fiancé'. They went for walks outside Bologna, lay down in the scrub and masturbated each other "
con furia
". "
E ce ne siamo dato, delle pugnette!
(We gave ourselves real handfuls)." Her fiancé did cunnilingus to her. But it was someone else who later deflowered her.

As I said, most girls from fourteen to seventeen or eighteen prefer coitus
in ore vulvae
to complete intercourse. Recently a Spanish woman has told me that she let her lover, of whom she was very fond, deflower her to please him. After that her lover refused to have intercourse
in ore vulvae
with her. As full intercourse was not enough for her and as she missed the old feelings, she had to turn to boyfriends of her own age or younger to get the old kind of coitus. So she was unfaithful to her lover, whom she still loved emotionally, even though he now gave her almost no sexual pleasure since he was adamant about having only normal coitus with her. It was only at eighteen that she started to appreciate normal intercourse. A woman who had gone in for prostitution from fifteen told me that she had her first sexual enjoyment, her first
unsimulated orgasm
, at twenty-three! Since then she had become very sensual.

An exquisite Neapolitan girl of seventeen, deflowered barely a few months before, beamed all over with the thrill of having had intercourse with me
in ore vulvae
and said, "
Non vale questo meglio di una chiavata?
Isn't that better than a fuck?" To soften the coarseness of the expression
chiavata
, she added with bashfully lowered eyes, "
come dicono i Napoletani
(as the Neapolitans say)." That reminded me of the phrase "you'd make me say
outre
(-uck)" in Daudet's
Tartarin
. When I asked for an explanation why she preferred it, she told me:

"
In una sola seduta ho fatto due volte. Ciò non mi succede mai chiavando. Quando si chiava, non ho fatto ancora nemmeno una volta, a dura pena comincio di riscaldarmi ed ecco, zick-zack, il benedetto signore ha già sborrato, l'ucellone è uscito fuor della gabbia, ed io rimango fritta. Dell'altro modo, al contrario, io sborro due o tre volte prima che l'altro abbia fatto.
(In one session I've come twice. That never happens to me fucking. When we fuck, I never come even once; I have trouble warming up and then the blessed man, one, two, has ejaculated, the big bird has left the cage and I'm stuck. The other way, quite the opposite, I ejaculate two or three times before my partner's come.)" The same girl told me that coitus
in ore vulvae
made her drunk (
mi inebbria
). Moreover, she said the same about looking at obscene photographs.

This reminds me of a Milanese tart telling me she was very fond of sex with Jews because they are slower to ejaculate than Christians, thanks to circumcision which toughens their glans and makes it less responsive to friction. "With a Christian," she said, "I often end up frustrated because he ejaculates before I can. In one session with a Jew I often ejaculate twice and my second time can come before my partner's, if I don't hold back the water to let the gate open at the same time as he does." Several women have told me that they deliberately hold back the moment of ejaculation in intercourse.

A Russian Jew told me of an episode which confirms this theory. He was a polytechnic student at Zurich and had a Russian friend who lived with a mistress. The girl was a student too, or pretended to be, and was likewise Russian. Early one morning the Jew went to his friend's place to see him. A woman's voice told the Jewish student to come in; he went in, could not find his friend anywhere, but found instead the mistress in her nightdress by the unmade bed. Instinctive modesty made the visitor step backwards, but the young woman kept him there and after a few minutes he was in bed with her. The Russian girl said her lover had just gone out and would not be back for some hours, then explained her behaviour. She said that she was always frustrated by intercourse with the Russian student because he ejaculated too quickly and finished copulation before his partner had her own orgasm and ejaculation. That morning he had aroused her greatly by intercourse: that was the usual pattern in any case. His quick coitus aggravated her venereal itch to its heights without satisfying her. So he had left her frustrated and in the throes of the most turbulent desires. Now she had been on the verge of masturbating - something she seldom resorted to because it gave her headaches - when she heard a man's voice and decided to abandon herself to the first man to come in. And she was pleased to see a Jew since she had observed that coitus with Jews took longer than with Christians. Like the Milanese woman whose words I have reported she claimed to get two ejaculations sometimes in one sexual act with a Jew.

While I am talking about peculiarities I have noticed among Italian courtesans, I will add too that
most
have assured me that they like homosexual intercourse better than intercourse with men. The older ones asserted that this preference was now much more widespread than it used to be. There are some that like little girls, a feminine leaning towards pederasty in the proper sense of the word.