Pierre Louys - The She-Devils

Therefore, I was just beginning to offer the young acrobat the compliments that were her due when Teresa interrupted us.

“Go into the bathroom, honey. Close the door, make yourself pretty, brush the hairs on your ass, and come back in when I call you.”

Lili obeyed with good grace. However, the ghost of a curious smile flitted across her face at the words, “Brush the hairs on your ass!” It seemed to me that she was saying to herself, “If I wanted to be bothered to answer that, I could be funnier than she.” But she knew another way to prove that she was not stupid: she said nothing at all.

When the door closed there was a silence. Teresa said nothing, and although I knew that she loved Lili at least maternally if not more, I would have been really naive if I thought she was waiting for me to compliment her on her daughter.

She looked into my eyes.

She let her hand creep across to my flank.

Her thigh to my thigh.

That was all. A minute had been all she had needed to obtain, without touching the desired article directly, the result she sought. More weary of mind than of body, I was slothful enough not to greet the instant success of her remote-control magnetism with a ringing oration. I don't like to submit myself as subject for thaumaturgical scenes; and besides I was beginning to know Teresa: I saw that she wanted more to excite me than to satisfy me.

“I refuse to say another word to you unless you get an erection!” she said unpityingly.”

“You see before you,” I smiled, “the young-man martyr the papers have been so full of lately.”

“Get a hard-on and wait! Do like me. When Lili licks me you'll see if I hold in or not.”

“Is it because of your religion, Madame? Is this staunch resolution the result of a vow?”

With a little growl she quieted me. “I'm getting a little tired of these jokes!” But it was only a threat, for she proceeded to tell me what she was now going to offer in the way of pleasures, what awaited my perseverance, and the role that Lili would play. I won't tell you now what they were, not in order to hide them, but because you will read them on the next page. Besides, Teresa gave me a resume that was a little long for a production of only one act.

I would have liked to have explained to her at this point that I had not had the good fortune to receive at birth a miraculous organ that never wore out, but one susceptible to one of the proofs of human weakness. But she wasn't listening. She cried, “Lili!”

“So!” said this one, seeing me as yet relaxed. “It hasn't begun yet. What are we going to do?”

“Three things. Come here to me. You can guess them by yourself.”

Teresa helped her a little, letting her, as if by accident, see the state of excitement she was in. Lili cried joyously, “Oh! Is all that for me?”

“And then? What haven't you had today, little fart?”

“A prick in the ass… But I hardly dare ask for that.”

“I think we might lend it to you, if you return it. And after that; what will you do for us?”

“The hand inside!”

Nimbly and more serpent-like than ever, Lili slid across her mother's body and stuck her face between her thighs. Her little head disappeared in the long black hair where my hand had several times lost its way. Teresa, always so supple, twisted the top half of her body towards me, resting on one shoulder, and held me tight.

She wanted to talk and I had to listen. She said the following things, murmuring them ardently but evenly, punctuating them with little smiles:

“Sssst! Listen. I'm calm now; you can believe me. There's my vice, and my happiness. I went into my bordello, picked the little whore I wanted. You can call her whore, like Charlotte. I'm the only one you can't call whore.

“And what a whore! She's not even my lesbian. She hasn't made me come, she's just licking the come that I made for you. Yesterday it was the same thing but with a different whore. I discharged in Charlotte's mouth for your prick! Your prick! Your prick! And you didn't even understand, you virgin!”

Very clever, that last word! She knew that I was not listening to her, that Lili had amused me and that I was still thinking of her; and with one word she caught once more at my straying attention, exasperating me for the third time with that word “virgin.” That done, she closed my mouth for me, redoubled the violence of her language, and began to tremble slightly between murmurs.

“There was never a mother who gave so much milk to her daughters as I have given come to mine. This one is ten years old and she's still sucking me. But not my teats. You can have my teats to warm your hands or caress your balls, or hold your prick. If there was any milk in them you could have that too, but not her. Look at her sacking! Like a kitten under the mother cat's stomach! She's only ten years old. How many more years do you think I'll be able to have her tongue in my ass? Charlotte has been sucking my come for twenty years now and she still hasn't been weaned.”

“Do you think there was ever a more infamous mother than you?” I whispered.

“Say that some more. That excites me. Makes me flow. The more you say that, the more Lili will have to drink.”

“Are you going to come, bitch?”

“No. She's licking what you left from before. I was flooded. She hasn't even finished yet! So, I'm so bad a mother as all that? Are you sure? There are so many others!”

“The other have at least the excuse of giving themselves to the vices of men; but the incestuous scenes that you've been showing me here…”

“I'm worse than a whore, I know.”

“A hundred times worse! You're frightening, you're so bad! You're worse than the whores, the lesbians, the procuresses, even the customers at the bordellos.”

Here, Lili raised her head and, without having heard anything of our whispers, said, “What's going on up here, mama? The more I suck the more flows out.”

“That's enough!” said Teresa, pulling herself together with an effort. “Do something else. Go rub some soap in your behind. Clean it out and come sit down underneath him.”

Heaven never gave me the temperament to be a spectator. Besides, Teresa had held me in a state of excitement for a long time and I was happy for that reason to be given a chance to work it off. I'll admit it even to those moralists whom I shall never hope to change and who will reproach me again for the following scene: I was happy to be given a chance to finish.

But, as she had once already, little miss Lili committed another outrage to all modesty when she came “to sit down beneath him” as her mother had said, so I made her change her position. Besides, I was getting tired of lying down.

Without overworking my imagination, I stood the girl on a stool next to the bed with her body leaning' forward. Unfortunately, in real stories like this one the positions are always more simple than in novels.

“Hold steady now!” said Teresa. “You look like a little violet vendor standing on her basket so she can be cornholed in the shithouse of a bistro.”

“And to look like a little princess, how do you have to be cornholed?” asked Lili.

However she behaved herself like a good child and became serious again at the proper time.

Turning her head to the side where her mother could not see her face, she looked at me over her shoulder with a kind expression in her eyes and a little barely pursed shape to her lips that seemed to say, “I can't say anything to you because mama is here.” I returned a glance which replied that we understood each other; but I incorporated the same mystery into it, for the smaller the little girl, the greater are her secrets.

Our silent dialogue was interrupted as quickly as it takes to tell it by Teresa who could no longer hide her excitement. She shot me a smile in which I thought I saw ferocity lurking just beneath the surface, a smile with the teeth rather more than with the lips. She said into my ear, “You can prostitute my daughter of ten and it's nothing! What makes me hot is to take your prick out of her and… Listen! Listen!”