[p. 65r]
[1179] avoiding, I did it and avoided it all unsuspecting that one day, much later, I would have to go back over all these acts and omissions, dimmed and mellowed by age, and drag them into the eudemonist[⁁]ic slop.
[1180] But I must say that with Lousse my health got no worse, or scarcely.
[1181] By which I mean that what was already wrong with me got worse and worse, little by little, as was only to be expected.
[1182] But there was kindled no new seat of suffering or infection, except of course those arising from the spread of existing plethoras and deficiencies.
[1183] But I may very well be wrong.
[1184] For of the disorders to come, as for example the loss of the toes of my left foot, no, I am wrong, of my right foot, who can say exactly when,[₰] oh uninvited! the abhorrent [⁁]on my helpless clay the fatal seeds were sown.
[1185] So all I can say, and I do my best to say no more, is that during my stay with Lousse no more new symptoms appeared, of a pathological nature, I mean nothing new ror strange, nothing I could not have foreseen if I could have, nothing at all comparable to the sudden loss of half my toes.
[1186] For that is something I could never have foreseen and the meaning of which I have never fathomed, I mean its connectxion with my other discomforts, from my ignorance of medical matters, I suppose.
[1187] For all things run togtethe5r, in the body's long madness, I feel it.
[1188] But it is useless to drag out this chapter of my.... [⁁]my, how shall I say, my existence, for it has no sense, to my mind.
[1189] It is an udder a dug at which I tug in vain, it yields nothing but wind and spatter.
[1190] So I will confine myself to the following brief additional remarks, and the first of which is this, that Lousse was a woman of an extraordinary flatness, physically speaking of course, to such a point that I am still wondering this evening, in the comparative silence of my last abode, if she was not a man rather or at least androgynous [⁁]an androgyne.
[1191] She had a somewhat hairy face, or Iam I imagining it, in the interests of the narrative.?
[1192] The poor woman, I saw her so little, so little looked at her.
[1193] And was not her voice suspiciously deep.
[1194] So she appears to me today.
[1195] Don't be tormenting
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[1195] yourself, Molloy, man or woman, what does it matter?
[1196] But I cannot help asking myself the following question.
[1197] Could a woman have stopped me as I swept towards mother?
[1198] Probably.
[1199] Better still, was such an encounter possible, I mean between me and a woman?
[1200] Now men, I have rubbed up against a few men in my time, but women?
[1201] Oh well, I may as well confess it now, yes, I once rubbed up against one.
[1202] I don't mean my mother, I did more than rub up against her.
[1203] And if you don't mind we'll leave my mother out of all this.
[1204] But another who might have been my mother, and even I think my grandmother, if chance had not willed otherwise.
[1205] Listen to him now talking about chance.
[1206] It was she made me acquainted with love.
[1207] She went by the peaceful name of Ruth I think, but I can't say for certain.
[1208] Perhaps the name was Edith.
[1209] She had a hole between her ldegs, oh not the bunghole I had always imagined, but a slit, and in this I put, or rather she put, my so-called virile member in, not without difficulty, and I toiled and moiled until I came let fly[⁁] discharged or gave up trying or was begged by her to stop.
[1210] A balls of a mug's game in my opinion and tiring on top of that, in the long run.
[1211] But I lent myself to it with a good enough grace, knowing it was love, for she had told me so.
[1212] She bent over the couch, because of her rheumatism, and in I got in [⁁]went from behind.
[1213] It was the only position she could bear, because of her lumbago.
[1214] It seemed alright [⁁]all right to me, for I had seen dogs, and I was astonished when she confided that you could go about it differently.
[1215] I wonder what she meaant exactly.
[1216] Perhaps after all she put me in her rectum.
[1217] A matter of complete indifference to me, I needen't tell you.
[1218] But is it true love, in the rectum?
[1219] That's what gets [⁁]bothers me down sometimes.
[1220] Have I never known love, after all.?
[1221] She too was an eminently flat woman and she moved with short stiff steps, leaning on an ebony stick.
[1222] Perhaps she too was a man, one more yet another of them..
[1223] But in that case surely our testicles would have collided, while we writhed.
[1224] Perhaps she held hers tight in her hand,
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[1224] on purpose to avoid it.
[1225] She favoured voluminous tempestuous shifts and petticoats and stomachers and other undergarments whose names I forget.
[1226] They welled up all frothing and swishing and then, congress achieved, broke over us in slow cascades.
[1227] Anddall I could see was her taut yellow nape which every now and then I set my teeth in, forgetting I had none, such is the power of instinct.
[1228] We met in a rubbish dump, unlike any other, and yet they are all alike, rubbish dumps.
[1229] I don't know what she was doing there.
[1230] I was limply poking about among [⁁]in the garbage saying probably, for at that age I must still have been capable of general ideas, This is life.
[1231] She had no time to lose, I had nothing to lose, I would have made love with a goat, to know quid sit Amor [⁁]what love was.
[1232] She had a dainty flat, no, not dainty, it made you want to lie down in a cornder and never get up again.
[1233] I liked it.
[1234] It was full of dainty furniture, umnder our desperate strokes the couch moved forward on its castors, the whole place fell about our ears, it was pandemonium.
[1235] Our commerce was not without tenderness, with trembling hands she cut my toe-nails and I rubbed her rump with wintergreen[⁁]cream.
[1236] This idyll was of short duration.
[1237] Poor Edith, I hastened her end perhaps.
[1238] Anyway it was she who started it, in the rubbish dump, when she laid her hand upupon my fly.
[1239] More precisely, I was bent double over a heap of muck, in the hope of finding something to disgust me for ever with eating, when she, undertaking me from behind, thrust her stick between my legs and began to titillate my privates.
[1240] She gave me money after each session, to me who would have consented to know love, and probe it to the bottom, without charge.
[1241] But she was an idealist.
[1242] I would have preferered it seems to me an orifice less arid and roomy, that would have given me a higher opinion of love it seems to me.
[1243] However.
[1244] Twixt finger and thumb 'tis [₰] heaven in comparison.
[1245] But love is no doubt above such base contingencies.
[1246] And not when you are comfortable, but when your frantic member casts about for a rubbing-place, and the unction of a little mucous membrane,
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[1246] and meeting with none does not beat a [⁁]in retreat, but retains its tumefaction xxx, it is then no doubt that true love comes to pass, and wings away, high above the tight fit and the loose.
[1247] And when you add a little pedicure and massage, having nothing to do with the instant of bliss strictly speaking, then I feel that no further doubt is justified, in this connectxion.
[1248] The other thing that worries [⁁]bothers me, in this connectxion, is the indifference with which I learnt of her death, one black night I was worming my way to [⁁]crawling towards her, an indifference softened indeed by the pain of lsosing a source of revenue.
[1249] She died taking a warm tub, as her custom was before receiving me.
[1250] It limbered her up.
[1251] When I think she might have delayed it until she was expired in my arms!
[1252] The tub overturned and the dirty water spilt all over the floor and even down to [⁁]on top of the lodger below, who gave the alarm.
[1253] Well I never [⁁]well, I didn't think I knew this story so well.
[1254] She must have been a woman after all, if she hadn't been it would have got around, in the neighbourhood.
[1255] It is true they were extraordinarily reserved, in my part of the world, about everything connected with sexual matters.
[1256] But things have perhaps changed since my time.
[1257] And it is quite possible that the fact of having found a man when they should have found a woman was immediately repressed and forgotten, by the few unfortunate enough to know it about it.
[1258] AndAs it is quite possible that everybody knew about it, and spoke about it, with the sole exception of myself.
[1259] But there is one thing that torments me, when I delve into all this, and that is to know whether all my life has been devoid of love or whether I really met with it, in Ruth.
[1260] What do I do know for certain is that I never sought to repeat the experience, having I suppose the intuition that it had been unique and perfect, of its kind, achieved and inimitable, and that it behoved me to preserve its memory, pure of all pastiche, in my heart, even if it meant my resorting from time to time to the alleged joys of so-called self-abuse.
[1261] Don't talk to me about the chambermaid,
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[1261] I should never have talked about mentioned her, she was long before, I was sick, perhaps there was no chambermaid, ever, in my life.
[1262] Molloy, or life without a chambermaid.
[1263] All of which goes to demonstrate that the fact of having met Lousse and even frequented her, in a way, proved nothing as to her sex.
[1264] And I am quite willing to go on thinking of her as an old woman, widowed and withered, and of Ruth as another, for she too used to speak of her defunct husband and of his inability to satisfy her insatiable [⁁]legitimate longings. cravings.
[1265] And there are days, like this evening, when my memory confuses them and I am tempted to think of them as one and the same old hag, flattened and crazed by life.
[1266] And God forgive me, to tell you the horrible truth, my mother's image sometimes merges in mingles with theirs, which is literally unendurable, like being crucified, I don't know why and I don't want to.
[1267] But I left Lousse at last, one warm airless night, without saying goodbye, as I might at least have done, and without her trying to hold me back, except perhaps by spells.
[1268] But she must have seen me go, get up, take my crutches and go away, springing on them through the air.
[1269] And she must have seen the wicket close behind me, for it closed by itself, with the help of a spring, and known me gone, for ever.
[1270] For she knew the way I had of going to the wicket and peeping out, and [⁁]then quickly drawing back.
[1271] And she did not try to and hold me back but she went and sat down on her dog's grave, perhaps, which was mine too in a way, and which by the way she had not sown with grass, as I had thought, but with all kinds of little [⁁]many-coloured flowers of many colours and herbacieous plants, seledcted I imagine in such a way I imagine that when some went out others litu up,. I fancy.
[1272] I left her my byi bicycle which I had tqaken a dislike to, suspecting it to be the vehicle of some malignant agency and perhaps the cause of my recent misfortunes.
[1273] But all the same I would have taken it with me if I had known where it was and that it was in running condition [⁁]order.
[1274] But I did not.
[1275] And I was afraid, if I