Diary of an Innocent

by Tony Duvert

  Among the shopkeepers, there are two more who won’t always refuse to fool around. They work together under a boss who comes in but who doesn’t linger. One of them is shy, big-bottomed, very handsome, and is fourteen. The other is skinny, blondish, with a nice rascally face, and is two years older. Neither is very tall. The rascal can’t resist showing me his cock, which is long and pale, hard as an iron bar. He takes it out, puts it back in his pants, takes it out again, I act indifferent. He’s surprised that I’m not showing mine, makes fun of me, insinuates that mine is small. He’s proud of his little black book: contacts the world over, men and women, with a special section entitled Americans (there are twenty pages but only one name). When a potential correspondent comes into the stand, I imagine how my shopkeeper, as if it were nothing, must pull out his rod to have it appreciated. He asks if I wouldn’t like to suck it. Yes, if he pays me. He asks how much. I don’t consider my services expensive: ten francs. His work is considered worth even less, and I’d be surprised if he made that much in a day; but he claims he’s ready to pay such a price. No deal. This boy is too shameless, too thoughtless, and his rutting has a cool disdain that doesn’t attract me. Strange cock, from nothing at all to being stiff. The timid boy interests me more. I feel him up in front and behind. I’m not supposed to be queer. He moves away with embarrassment but good humor. Finally, he’s induced to take out his cock. We’re outside the stand, and it’s night. He presses himself against a corner of the builing and unbuttons while lowering his head toward his fly. I touch, and he says to wait; he’s not hard. He’s goes to hide against the other side of the corner, but, from time to time, peeks out to send us a veiled smile. His elbow is moving. He reappears and says hurry up. A souffle to eat right away, or it will fall. Quickly. I touch. Short cock, nice shape, large and solid-feeling in my hand. The rascal is enjoying this. The timid one, satisfied, buttons up again and, as we compliment him, acts like a bridesmaid being congratulated on her lovely pink bow.

  The other shopkeepers, big or little, don’t misbehave this way. In this austere city, my partners are like a trickle of pure spring water under a mountain of granite. Well, almost.

  The boy whose father the mason had hit him with his trowel. At first, I invite him over for an evening, without anything obscene on my mind. He wants to eat. I prepare a quick meal. There’s a thick steak. The boy accepts it, but shows me his hand, which is wounded. I hadn’t noticed; there are no bandages. I cut his steak. Carefully, I remove the fat and some small squares of meat. The youngster, susceptible to my attentions, doesn’t wait for me to finish and takes the caterpillar of yellow fat, streaming with juice, between two fingers, and crunches into it. Mmm! He’ll eat the meat, one way or another.

  After the meal, I’m sitting in front of him and he must consider me much too shy; he takes my cheeks in his hands and pats them with a sweet smile. Then, a bit later, we have sex. He puts a lot of enthusiasm into it. Despite his child’s size, he doesn’t mind being fucked. A pit into paradise. I’ll wake him up during the night to do it again. He takes my cock in his mouth and spits out the sperm. He fucks me blow for blow. His cock, ample and plump, has no hairs but is almost a man’s cock, with chubby balls to rub against my nose.

  He sleeps pressed against me and leaves at dawn. I see him again from time to time. Sometimes he’s dressed in clean clothes (he’s gone home), but often he’s in rags. I don’t tire of his face, his smile, of the few words he speaks. During that period, he’s the youngest of the boys that I’m fucking. His little curvaceous rear enchants me as much as his nice face. He’s wild, but his ways are never a burden. He’s slender and muscular, with the tenderness of a child, the breadth of a male, the nimble tautness of a boy. I can’t imagine a better lover. He’s afraid of the place where I live. He has the vice of certain good-for-nothings who get high by breathing glue solvents or rubber solution for tires. This is how the litde panhandlers slip into clouds more ethereal than those of alcohol. They rub the product between their palms and, with their two hands cupped as if holding a bird, they sniff the vapors. If they’re filthy, this rubbing leaves a large round pink spot circled by black on their palms, which denounces their vice; the more clever spread the glue on a folded rag instead. My lad, certain times, took so much of it that his breath would stink up the entire room. In his kisses, the odor of this solvent sickens me. When intoxicated, he is sleepy and in a silly mood. If not, he’s very loving and wakes up cheerfully in order to come.

  When I lick his ass, he sucks my cock, pulls at my thighs, puts his tongue in my hole; the strokes overexcite him and he wants to jump on top of me immediately and fuck me. After we’ve gotten together a few times, I fuck him hard, in a lot of different positions. Our nights are extremely intense, and yet they cause no fatigue. Following these pleasures, I feel as if I’ve slept marvelously, and my little one is as carefree and merry as if on the morning of a holiday. Both of us come numerous times, something that doesn’t happen to me with boys who are older—they don’t inspire me with as much interest, and they feel it less. Fucking, sucking, jerking off, every mix of members happens, but we prefer the anus. The boy smokes a little, eats lightly, drinks soda, washes well; he’s tactful when it comes to money and wouldn’t even steal a match.

  One cold evening, I find him covered with a white raincoat two times too big for him, very dirty and crumpled. Little fingers, little grinning muzzle sticking out of it. I think of certain photographs of brats in the United States during the Depression of 1929, or in Germany at the end of the war. But these miserable rags, sported not only by my boy but by the other good-for-nothings of the street, don’t have the same meaning here. No one is humiliated by them; you wear them with pride in your body. Tough and cheerful, these cheeky kids incarnate a childish freedom you don’t see otherwise; it’s the opposite of helplessness. Ragged, mischievous, rounded up by public services—their only torment—which imprisons them, delouses them, shaves their head and lets them go soon after (obviously a sign that their family has been unearthed), they owe their fluorishing to others’ lack of concern; to the fact that people don’t see children as children; to what they hate about being a child; to the fact that their future won’t be any worse than that of the poor kids who stubbornly stay in school. Their precarious state grieves me; but I won’t be blind to what it preserves in each of these little ones. There’s nothing I can do if in our civilization the worthiest destiny for a child, when everything is taken into account, is still this horror.

  They don’t seem horrified. Playing the role of stray cats, hanging out together, repeatedly getting into mischief, being impudent and self-centered seems to suit them. They’re almost never cold; they eat for next to nothing; they sleep in safety almost everywhere. They’re bursting with health, their flesh in bloom; and if they didn’t pilfer, they would hardly be bothered at all. Besides, practically no one ever goes after them; the police ignore them unless they’re following a specific order; they fear no one and their strolls through the good neighborhoods are more peaceable and playful than those of virtuous children in their freshly shined dog collars.

  Those whom I’m fond of are often together. I’ve taken the habit of having a supply of money in a form that can be distributed; during my shopping, I hold onto large coins and small bills and ask for change everywhere, harassing the magazine and cigarette sellers. The problem with my extravagances is that my appearances are irregular, in terms of place, day, time; I’m an enticing windfall but not at all to be relied upon. When I reappear after being away and don’t run into anyone, I get worried, sad again, think of each. Then we find one another. Despite their amiability, I have no illusion about the type of feelings they have for me, and I know very well that the impression of a friendship, of being liked, I’m experiencing isn’t reciprocal. Which pleases me all the more.

  They are familiar with what’s in my pocket, but some of them would rather rip out their tongue than ask me for a cent; others, less confident, harass me.

  Th
ey spend their money childishly, gnaw on crusts but stuff themselves with sweets, go to the movies in the poor neighborhoods, smoke black tobacco. Those who have families bring back something to their parents. This professional panhandling abounds; since it lets outside so many young imps, I don’t see any harm in it.

  They change their rags endlessly and are never behind the seasons. The little ones round up their gains and share them. There are gangs run by older ones; in exchange for their supposed protection—but really under threat of their strength—they get richer on the backs of the youngest. I don’t frequent these boys that copy our ways too much. The brats in my gang, on the other hand, are free from any political system, and I’ve encountered them only with teenagers infinitely more helpless, innocent or debilitated than them.

  My dissolute contacts disturbed me horribly at first. Then they became the best in my life, and I can hope for no universe better populated than by these scallywags with their high-pitched voices and fresh little bellies. Though obliging about caresses, they aren’t interested in them, and I don’t bother them with my vices. The few that are sensual make it understood, and in some corner away from things or at my place, I find out if they’re not wrong about themselves. It’s often the case; so I give up on their talents, because I’d be ashamed of embracing children less smitten with pleasure than I am.

  There is a small boy with fine features, ugly, cute, amusing, a cross between a mouse and a cat, too intelligent, daring. We make funny faces at each other and laugh at things that aren’t amusing; maybe we resemble each other. Our relationship is nonsexual, but that could easily change. One evening, I’m eating inside a restaurant, next to the window. My monkey appears on the sidewalk, alone, deeply unhappy. He notices me, his face lights up, so I leave my table and join him to give him a kiss and hand him his stipend. I no longer care about passersby. The waiter, with my plate balanced on one palm, is watching me through the window. But I dine expensively and I invariably interrupt my meals to dash out into the street, and I leave big tips, so people think I’m a generous nut, and the owners, despite the riffraff I attract to their outdoor tables, practically lie through their teeth in their efforts to be polite. In this way, I conceal my shocking generosities under a veil of being wasteful in general, just as I rewarded Pablos with presents while bombarding his family with them.

  All the brats show up. I don’t have enough of the right change, so I go back in and ask for it at the restaurant. I’m ashamed, on such evenings, to give less to children than I spend on myself. Apportionment. You mustn’t forget anyone, friends or those you don’t know. Obviously, I have my favorites. It doesn’t show much in the way I handle money, and if I spoil my ersatz brothers more, I don’t deprive the others. I’m painfully corrected of that before I can do it. It’s exasperating: the least coin you let go of sends a flight of birds beating down on you. When I examined the reasons for my uneasiness, my reluctance, it suddenly burst upon me, like the abscess I’d had in my groin. Once I was in tune with these outpourings, these swarms, I experienced an inexpressible well-being. But I’m not rich, and when I have nothing left, I become a shut-in, take to my bed, stop seeing anyone and live on bread and water. As a result of being gobbled up, I end up on a complete fast for three or four days in a row, near the end of my retreat, and it makes me feel good. Pure, unadulterated sleep, good body, sweet soul and new eyes. I love being alone, I love bread; I love the mirages of plenty and friendship. I leave and go back to all of it without suffering, relieved by having withdrawn to my cave, relieved about leaving it.

  My kid passes by the restaurant again. He’s smoking a butt. I make a sign at him that says no. He understands my joke, throws away the butt with a comical gesture, tramples it into the sidewalk as if he were rubbing a parquet floor, while sending his skinny-guy laughs my way. Above us, the window is open; I throw him some money for the show. Here’s to good deeds. But if I want him not to smoke butts, it would be better to offer him cigarettes; with budgets like his, you don’t buy what you can pick up from the ground.

  In the cafes where I go, my little chaps assume poses that could move stone, and they hold out their hands. The customers are arrogant, the foreigners refusing and the locals offering ten or twenty cents.

  Soliciting people strolling by, or tourists just standing there, is more profitable. You can bother them without risk, you’re less easy to chase away. With the difference in size, they don’t notice you much and they feel less hounded than when they’re seated in front of a beer and some foul-smelling flower pops up: a brat. Unmoving, unshakeable, with the right details to make you vomit: a voice, hands, eyes. Free. Dirty. And asking for a handout without caring for the inalienable rights that Commerce, Industry and Savings Plans have over your salary.

  I’m not forgetting that charity is an outmoded virtue; it’s social justice that’s needed. Happily, whereas the first may belong to the past, the second is for the future, and it’s something that dispenses both to us. Faced with these children who have no future, I pay no heed to their present and muse about interdependence: prisons, penitentiaries, orphanages; placement with altruistic bosses or couples that are sterile but right-thinking; using them for medical, psychiatric, pharmacological, judicial, pedagogical experiments; or any other means of rescue that costs a lot more than garbage collection. I’m learning to be indignant that there are poor children without handcuffs on their wrists, thermometers in their holes, ABCs in their pocket.

  Alas, in the world there is an abundance of big cities in which you must walk near the muck from which our well-being issues. The standard of living is low, so you go there on vacation—along with the hippies who—like us—are indignant about someone angling for their wallets. It’s outrageous that the poor, whose unemployment, scrimping, low salaries create our bargains—a providence for junky boy scouts and vacationing grocers—could exploit us under the pretext that they don’t like to work for so little. We’re working even so, aren’t we?

  My city is one of those in which the poor are the most cumbersome: they act as if they’re at home. Their city, their order, their lack of consideration, their freedom, their morals. Their sexuality, underpackaged to the retentions and investments of the middle class. Their mouths speaking and their eyes looking. All these children, less groomed than our grannies’ poodles. Certainly, schooling is a must: without incineration plants, this filth would be blown around everywhere. When it comes to the good neighborhoods, we find the philanthropists. Those who want only happiness for the human species, provided that it be they who create it and not them; those who venerate the people but see them only as livestock in need of training; those for whom the complex civilization of the masses is nothing but dire poverty, illness, slavery, sloth and illiteracy—as long as the Order of Bourgeois Industry, Western or Maoist, hasn’t forced upon it its refinements, geniuses, brand of dignity, progress, sweet talk. And I come to my final mental failing: if I remind myself that humanity already exists, instead of meditating on what it should be, I end up thinking that all its imperfections, suffering, make it less monstrous than the projects of its benefactors. Obscurantism, populism, anarchism, dema-goguism: these are the erring ways into which I’ve fallen as a result of my pederasty. Obviously, it’s my belly talking. But it’s time to go home, to think again about the Good and, especially, to no longer have to see those who are going to take advantage of it.

  The monkey from the restaurant, standing behind a forbidding customer, sticks out his little straight, pointed tongue with a burst of silent laughter; it isn’t a starchy child’s tongue, but one that wants to be thought of as a stiff one. Or else it’s saying: lousy corner, yikes, I’m outta here!

  Francesco hated panhandlers. It was part of his conservatism. He treated them like good-for-nothings and thieves, drove them away, insulted them. I insulted him, too; it wasn’t up to him to criticize “parasites.” A lad of ten or eleven comes up to us, holding a six-week-old dog in his arms. Obviously, for pulling in handouts; but peop
le don’t like dogs much better than kids. Francesco says that this one is very nice, we should give him something. I obey. Smiling, with a friendly, placid, resolute face, he was one suspect exception to Francesco’s hates. His dog had a pleasant disposition, licked our fingers, wagged its tail, threw out a brow puffy with amusement.

  Months later, I invite this child over. He’s not unfriendly, but his sense of propriety is impregnable. Completely naked, he’s like a miniature version of a perfectly built young man. Sticking out from his silky, prepubescent testicles is the kind of member you don’t have at his age. Looking, licking, sucking. I grab him and lift him up to the table. Put a strong light on it and admire it. He’s laughing, likes it, gets hard. I tell him to turn around, because I want to see his derriere. He doesn’t understand and complacently changes into a top spinning at high speed; I stop this bogeyman shaking my table and bring him back down. He doesn’t sleep with me; his mom is waiting for him, he says. He has the manner of a top of the class. He doesn’t even smoke. The little gang I like revolves around his virtues. He slips the end of his dick into my ass and gets used to it trembling gently there. This is his only activity. He doesn’t want to jerk off. They say he has a family, house. As soon as I’ve come, he goes to get dressed. I ask him to stay naked. He sits politely on the edge of the bed, as if paying a visit. With my finger I caress the front of his thighs and he begins to get hard, slowly. It’s as if at first his prick cocks an ear, from between the thighs that were hiding it; it lengthens, arching in small jerks that seem to follow the beating of his heart; then it rises, straightens, the head very swollen. I stop touching his thigh; the member gently retreats. I caress again; the ear pricks up, and everything begins again. This mechanics enchants me. During this time, the boy says, does nothing; he doesn’t even glance at his rising penis. He smiles. It’s as if a breeze were lifting his hair.