Secret Lolita: The Confessions of Victor X (10 page)

For the whole of this period, between thirteen and twenty, my sexual life was very active. When I got back from the holidays I have been describing, we moved house yet again and I did not see little Sara any more. But I took up sex again with any schoolgirls that were willing and sometimes I had intercourse with servant girls if they were young and pretty. During the long holidays we spent in the country, I had a whole harem as it were at my service. Lastly I could always find ladies prepared to 'enlighten' me sexually. I still had success with my old method of feigning innocence and complete naivety. I could see that this was an almost infallible way of 'warming' the ladies up and giving them libidinous ideas. It is amazing how they enjoy giving instruction in that subject. Every woman wants to be the first initiator. But at the same time these ladies were somewhat ashamed of what they were doing, to judge by the fact that they all said they were doing it for my own good, 'to keep me away from onanism and bad women'- a hypocrisy that did not wash with me. My experience leads me to believe that a predilection for prepubescent children or adolescents is as common among women as it is among men.

For me feigning innocence was not just a surer way of getting what I wanted: it was also a source of special pleasure. In fact I felt and still feel intense voluptuous pleasure when I hear a woman or particularly a girl talking about sex. In effect one senses as they talk that they are erotically aroused and that a shudder is running through their genitals. While women were telling me about coitus for example, I could imagine that their clitoris must be erect and their vulva beginning to secrete mucous. Furthermore women talk about such things in a different way from men: they hardly ever use the proper words. They usually resort to circumlocutions, euphemisms, metaphors which cannot help having a quaint, pictorial, suggestive character and are much more exciting to the mind than precise technical terms. Youngs girls in particular have no technical - scientific or vulgar - erotic vocabulary, or if they do, dare not use it. They have to make imaginative efforts to describe things neatly: they invent similes, suggest striking images, get uneasy and blush. All that is very arousing. Every woman has her own way of putting things, thus using
new
images; and novelty in sensations, images and even words plays an essential part in sharpening one's sexual sensations. Monotonous pornographic books stop exciting one after a few pages; like experiences cannot be told in like terms.

For me and doubtless all highly strung people the imagination is the most important factor in sexual pleasure. I can get no enjoyment unless I can imagine the woman's enjoyment. I would find it impossible to have sex with a woman who is asleep or unconscious. Just the thought of a woman having sexual sensations is enough to give me a thrill - even though it might not lead to ejaculation. But the thought of the male's enjoyment is something I do not care about: men's erotic feelings evoke no sympathy in me at all.

Spiritualistic ideas, or if you prefer prejudices, make sexual thrills sharper and more diverse. This is what Huysmans meant when he was talking about Rops' art, even though he was exaggerating
grosso modo
, maintaining that deep and great sensual pleasure is impossible without the
devil
; Renan was pointing out the same thing with exquisite finesse when he glorified Christianity as the creator of more subtle voluptuous erotic pleasures than those of antiquity. This is something forgotten by many writers who lash out at Christianity in the name of triumphant eroticism and the
rights of the flesh
. In sex purely physical titillation is nothing or almost nothing compared with psychological excitement and mental itch or pruritus; it is Christianity, really, which has given rise to the psychological side of sexual enjoyment by opening up a vast field to the sexual imagination. I think that civilized man's sexual pleasure gets all its value and attractions from the imagination: otherwise the sexual act is no more and no less pleasant than defecation or, at most, drinking and eating for people who are not gourmets.

Female reticence is an aphrodisiac to men, only, however, when it lets itself be overcome by the same female's sensuality. When I am in bed with a respectable woman what excites me most is the idea of something paradoxical and implausible happening: here is a woman who thinks showing certain parts of her body is something terrible, she hides them from everyone, especially from men, she thinks they are shameful, she does not dare put a name to them… and yet this same woman is now showing them to a man and the very man she ought to be most reluctant to show them to, for this is the man she loves, that is the man who most intimidates and bothers her and who watches her with the least cool and most lascivious eye. And this man is not just looking at her parts, he is touching them, handling them, exciting them with his touch: he's not just using his hands to touch them, but a part of his body which is equally shameful from the woman's point of view, a part which normally she fears to name, let alone see or touch, and which she
ought
never to think about (according to convention at least) and the contact is not just superficial: the man is inserting his most shameful part into the woman's most shameful part… and this violation of modesty is all the more thrilling for being temporary. An hour ago or after the woman was or will be dressed, will carefully hide almost all the bodily parts and will blush if she even hears the name of the thing that has given her so much pleasure. How much less sexual pleasure there would be were it not for the apparently absurd convention of female modesty!

For similar reasons a woman's sexual secretions are a great symbolic or fetish-like stimulus to the imagination. Nothing excites me so much as seeing, touching or just thinking of vulvo-vaginal mucous. That is because it is the visible, tangible sign of a woman's sensuality and voluptuousness. Female sexual organs' erection is hardly visible: but on the other hand sexual liquid gives us an obvious, substantial proof that a woman is erotically aroused, that she has
des sens
, as the French say, that she is an earthy being like ourselves or, if she is an angel, then she is an angel that sometimes falls. I use all the strength of my imagination to put myself in the woman's sexual organs: I imagine the enjoyment she is getting and this multiplies my own direct pleasure tenfold or a hundredfold. More than just sensual elements are at work here: we are dealing with moral (or if you like, immoral), ethical, emotional and intellectual factors.

Thus throughout those seven years from thirteen to twenty I had sexual satisfaction frequently. For various outside reasons there were however periods of abstinence, during which I had nocturnal emissions, at the rate of one or two a week. When there was no outside stimulus my genital urges would calm down and gradually become dormant; I felt my head was freer, my intellectual and physical energy greater. But after any chance stimulus - encountering a poem, book or picture, female nudity, talking to any lady who felt like 'enlightening' me sexually etc. - my passions would awake again and I went back to the same exhausting pleasures. I did not feel happy. On one hand my constant failures at school were humiliating and deeply discouraging for me, despite the kindness with which my parents put up with them. On the other hand nothing around me interested me apart from women and when I was not having erotic experience I was bored to tears. I no longer went in for physical exercise: in the country I hunted and rode only seldom. As they grew up my schoolfellows led a more and more intellectual life. Most were passionately interested in politics, read clandestine revolutionary literature, joined secret socialist societies and took up communism, anarchism and terror as religions. They read serious books: Spencer, Mill, Buckle, Renan, Louis Blanc, Taine, Marx, Lassalle, Laveleye, Proudhon, Darwin, Häckel, Sumner Maine, Morgan, Engels, Tarde, F.-A. Lange, Büchner, Letourneau etc. (These were boys of fifteen to twenty.) But it was enough for me just to know the names of the authors they were reading; when I tried to read these books I fell asleep after a few pages. My friends had endless discussions on moral, philosophical and social questions (but not on religion, for they were all atheists and materialists)… These discussions went over my head like water off a duck's back: I took no part in them.

Novels interested me more, but if they were too serious they too bored me. My two habitual states were either straight erotic arousal or melancholy prostration accompanied by dreams that were likewise erotic. If I set to work again for school with any energy, that happened during intervals of sexual abstinence, but they did not last, as I have pointed out, for long. I never masturbated: I was horrified by the very idea and was not even sure how to do it. I was so afraid of accidentally masturbating that I never put my hands on my sexual organs. But I was remorseful about being sexually active far too often. What made my mental depression worse was the fact that I often had to lie to my parents to hide my escapades. Lying cost me more and more effort as I grew older. As a child I was never thought a liar, I was even thought to be exceptionally truthful and yet, as long as I was a child, I lied without the slightest inner embarrassment when I needed to cover up my peccadilloes. Real love of truth and revulsion against lies came only with age. How wrong it is to assume that children are naturally truthful. How unlikely it seems that there exist very young children who are 'incapable of lying'. One might as well say that there exist children who are
incapable
of making wrong judgements about their actions. Unfortunately these misguided ideas are still very widespread even in educated circles.

In the long period I am discussing my erotic experiences were not particularly noteworthy. They were much of the same kind that I have described hitherto. They were made easy because Russian morals were so liberal; it meant that boys and girls enjoy complete independence, visit one another when no one else is there, go for walks alone as often as they want, come home any hour of the day etc. We had as full a freedom of movement as any adult; some of us used it for politics, others like me to make love. I never went to prostitutes as most of my schoolfriends did. I was afraid of venereal diseases and the whores I came across in the street seemed off-putting to me. Willing schoolgirls and 'respectable' ladies were good enough for me. One of the latter, a friend of my mother, learnt from my hypocritical lips one day that I did not know the difference between the sexes; she withdrew from her husband's study, where we were alone, to the bedroom next door and told me not to come in until she called. After a few minutes she did call me and I saw her lying on the bed stark naked. She let me gaze on her like that for a while, then she told me to undress and lie down next to her, and she 'taught' me the sexual act. She was not, however, taking any risks; there was nobody in the house and her husband could not have got home then. I had several opportunities for having sex with that lady.

The longest and most interesting liaison I had was between sixteen and seventeen with a girl who was just a few months older than me. She was in the final class of grammar school but was already engaged to a student who was then in prison.

He was a member of the socialist-revolutionary party and had been some months in preliminary detention awaiting trial. The charges against him were not very grave and as the pleas in Russian political trials are often a pure formality and comedy - the accused is sentenced in advance by the authorities and the members of the military tribunal are only rubber stamps - it was known
in advance
that this young man would be sentenced to eight or ten years' exile in Siberia without forced labour (
na poselenie
, for settlement). The girl was determined to follow him and marry him. She too had terrorist ideas which she tried to convert me to. I often went to see her and pretended to be interested in these ideas, which left me quite cold: I was really attracted by her erotically. I did not declare my feelings to her, firstly because I have always been shy, secondly because she was betrothed to someone else. But it was she who broke the ice in a rather unusual way.

At the time there was a book translated from the English which was very much in vogue with young Russian school students. I might note in passing that it is still in vogue today, for Russian intellectuals are very faithful to their bookish predilections (they still read Buckle's work as if it had been written yesterday) and are capable of enthusing over the most clashing opinions simultaneously: Marx and Nietzsche, Bebel and Weininger, Tolstoy and Bernard Shaw - not because they are very broad-minded, but because their ideas are short on clarity, because the Russian mind has a chaotic make-up and also because they idolise all intellectual celebrities and authorities. Just as religious people can always find a way of reconciling the most contradictory scriptures, so Russians end up by attributing the same opinions (their own) to celebrated men whose opinions could not be more divergent. For instance they interpret Nietzsche in a revolutionary communist and social democratic sense! But we must move on. The book in question was called, I think,
Elements of Social Science: Misery, Prostitution, Celibacy
. The anonymous author claimed to be a doctor of medicine. In Russia he was believed to be a son of the famous Robert Owen. This book argued ideas about sex and recommended that young people of both sexes should begin sexual intercourse early and practise contraception ('neo-malthusianism') to avoid pregnancy. There were formulas for contraceptives: using a sponge etc. This book was forbidden in Russia but a Russian text had been published abroad and it circulated underground everywhere; most schoolboys and schoolgirls had read it, sometimes when they were only thirteen or fourteen, and often took its advice. I had read this book long before I saw it on Nadya's table (we will call the nihilist's fiancée Nadya).

This young lady lived with an aunt but had her own room which she let only her own friends enter. Her aunt and other relatives never came there. Of course she went out and came back whenever she wanted. Many Russian schoolgirls enjoy the same freedom in the family. Nadya asked me if I had read this book. I replied that I had, but added that it was a long time ago and that I should be glad to read it again. She then lent it to me. When I brought it back she started a conversation about the ideas in it. She told me that reason and science were against sexual abstinence, then she let me know that she had had sex with her fiancé before his arrest and had taken precautions against conception and that forced abstinence was now harming her; she was having erotic dreams with nocturnal emissions (sic) and they made her very tired.