Tropic of Capricorn

by Henry Miller

  It was wonderful while it lasted, but it didn’t last long. A month later the Niessens moved to another city, and I never saw Lola again. But I hung her sporran over the bed and I prayed to it every night. And whenever I began the Czerny stuff I would get an erection, thinking of Lola lying in the grass, thinking of her long black hair, the bun at the nape of her neck, the groans she vented and the juice that poured out of her. Playing the piano was just one long vicarious fuck for me. I had to wait another two years before I would get my end in again, as they say, and then it wasn’t so good because I got a beautiful dose with it, and besides it wasn’t in the grass and it wasn’t summer, and there was no heat in it but just a cold mechanical fuck for a buck in a dirty little hotel room, the bastard trying to pretend she was coming and not coming any more than Christmas was coming. And maybe it wasn’t her that gave me the clap, but her pal in the next room who was lying up with my friend Simmons. It was like this – I had finished so quick with my mechanical fuck that I thought I’d go in and see how it was going with my friend Simmons. Lo and behold, they were still at it, and they were going strong. She was a Czech, his girl, and a bit sappy; she hadn’t been at it very long, apparently, and she used to forget herself and enjoy the act. Watching her hand it out, I decided to wait and have a go at her myself. And so I did. And before the week was out I had a discharge, and after that I figured it would be blueballs or rocks in the groin.

  Another year or so and I was giving lessons myself, and as luck would have it, the mother of the girl I’m teaching is a slut, a tramp and a trollop if ever there was one. She was living with a nigger, as I later found out. Seems she couldn’t get a prick big enough to satisfy her. Anyway, every time I started to go home she’d hold me up at the door and rub it up against me. I was afraid of starting in with her because rumour had it that she was full of syph, but what the hell are you going to do when a hot bitch like that plasters her cunt up against you and slips her tongue halfway down your throat. I used to fuck her standing up in the vestibule, which wasn’t so difficult because she was light and I could hold her in my hand like a doll. And like that I’m holding her one night when suddenly I hear a key being fitted into the lock, and she hears it too and she’s frightened stiff. There’s nowhere to go. Fortunately there’s a portiere hanging at the doorway and I hide behind that. Then I heard her black buck kissing her and saying how are yer, honey? and she’s saying how she had been waiting up for him and better come right upstairs because she can’t wait and so on. And when the stairs stop squeaking I gently open the door and sally out, and then by God I have a real fright because if that black buck ever finds out I’ll have my throat slit and no mistake about it. And so I stop giving lessons at that joint, but soon the daughter is after me – just turning sixteen – and won’t I come and give her lessons at a friend’s house? We begin the Czerny exercises all over again, sparks and everything. It’s the first smell of fresh cunt I’ve had, and it’s wonderful, like new-mown hay. We fuck our way through one lesson after another and in between lessons we do a little extra fucking. And then one day it’s the sad story – she’s knocked up and what to do about it? I have to get a Jewboy to help me out, and he wants twenty-five bucks for the job and I’ve never seen twenty-five bucks in my life. Besides, she’s under age. Besides, she might have blood-poisoning. I give him five bucks on account and beat it to the Adirondacks for a couple of weeks. In the Adirondacks I meet a schoolteacher who’s dying to take lessons. More velocity exercises, more condoms. and conundrums. Every time I touched the piano I seemed to shake a cunt loose.

  If there was a party I had to bring the fucking music roll along; to me it was just like wrapping my penis in a handkerchief and slinging it under my arm. In vacation time, at a farmhouse or an inn, where there was always a surplus of cunt, the music had an extraordinary effect. Vacation time was a period I looked forward to the whole year, not because of the cunts so much as because it meant no work. Once out of harness I became a clown. I was so chock-full of energy that I wanted to jump out of my skin. I remember one summer in the Catskills meeting a girl named Francie. She was beautiful and lascivious, with strong Scotch teats and a row of white even teeth that was dazzling. It began in the river where we were swimming. We were holding on to the boat and one of her boobies had slipped out of bounds. I slipped the other one out for her and then I undid the shoulder straps. She ducked under the boat coyly and I followed and as she was coming up for air I wriggled the bloody bathing suit off her and there she was floating like a mermaid with her big strong teats bobbing up and down like bloated corks. I wriggled out of my tights and we began playing like dolphins under the side of the boat. In a little while her girl friend came along in a canoe. She was a rather hefty girl a sort of strawberry blonde with agate-coloured eyes and full of freckles. She was rather shocked to find us in the raw, but we soon tumbled her out of the canoe and stripped her. And then the three of us began to play tag under the water, but it was hard to get anywhere with them because they were slippery as eels. After we had had enough of it we ran to a little bath-house which was standing in the field like an abandoned sentry box. We had brought our clothes along and we were going to get dressed, the three of us, in this little box. It was frightfully hot and sultry and the clouds were gathering for a storm. Agnes – that was Francie’s friend – was in a hurry to get dressed. She was beginning to be ashamed of herself standing there naked in front of us. Francie, on the other hand seemed to be perfectly at ease. She was sitting on the bench with her legs crossed and smoking a cigarette. Anyway, just as Agnes was pulling on her chemise there came a flash of lightning and a terrifying clap of thunder right on the heels of it. Agnes screamed and dropped her chemise. There came another flash in a few seconds and again a peal of thunder, dangerously close. The air got blue all around us and the flies began to bite and we felt nervous and itchy and a bit panicky too. Especially Agnes who was afraid of the lightning and even more afraid of being found dead and three of us stark naked. She wanted to get her things on and run for the house, she said. And just as she got that off her chest the rain came down, in bucketsful. We thought it would stop in a few minutes and so we stood there naked looking out at the steaming river through the partly opened door. It seemed to be raining rocks and the lightning kept playing around us incessantly. We were all thoroughly frightened now and in a quandary as to what to do. Agnes was wringing her hands and praying out loud; she looked like a George Grosz idiot, one of those lopsided bitches with a rosary around the neck and yellow jaundice to boot. I thought she was going to faint on us or something. Suddenly I got the bright idea of doing a war-dance in the rain – to distract them. Just as I jump out to commence my shindig a streak of lightning flashes and splits open a tree not far off. I’m so damned scared that I lose my wits. Always when I’m frightened I laugh. So I laughed a wild, blood-curdling laugh which made the girls scream. When I heard them scream, I don’t know why, but I thought of the velocity exercises and with that I felt that I was standing in the void and it was blue all around and the rain was beating a hot-and-cold tattoo on my tender flesh. All my sensations had gathered on the surface of the skin and underneath the outermost layer of skin I was empty, light as a feather, lighter than air or smoke or talcum or magnesium or any goddamned thing you want. Suddenly I was a Chippewa and it was the key of sassafras again and I didn’t give a fuck whether the girls were screaming or fainting or shitting in their pants, which they were minus anyway. Looking at crazy Agnes with the rosary around her neck and her big bread-basket blue with fright I got the notion to do a sacrilegious dance, with one hand cupping my balls and the other hand thumbing my nose at the thunder and lightning. The rain was hot and cold and the grass seemed full of dragonflies. I hopped about like a kangaroo and I yelled at the top of my lungs – “O Father, you wormy old son of a bitch, pull in that fucking lightning or Agnes won’t believe in you any more! Do you hear me, you old prick up there, stop the shenanigans … you’re driving Agnes nutty. Hey you, are
you deaf, you old futzer?” And with a continuous rattle of this defiant nonsense on my lips I danced around the bath-house leaping and bounding like a gazelle and using the most frightful oaths I could summon. When the lightning cracked I jumped higher and when the thunder clapped I roared like a lion and then I did a handspring and then I rolled in the grass like a cub and I chewed the grass and spit it out for them and I pounded my chest like a gorilla and all the time I could see the Czerny exercises resting on the piano, the white page full of sharps and flats, and the fucking idiot, think I to myself, imagining that that’s the way to learn how to manipulate the well-tempered clavichord. And suddenly I thought that Czerny might be in heaven by now and looking down on me and so I spat at him high as I could spit and when the thunder rolled again I yelled with all my might – “You bastard, Czerny, you up there, may the lightning twist your balls off … may you swallow your own crooked tail and strangle yourself … do you hear me, you crazy prick?”

  But in spite of all my good efforts Agnes was getting more delirious. She was a dumb Irish Catholic and she had never heard God spoken to that way before. Suddenly, while I was dancing about in the rear of the bath-house she bolted for the river. I heard Francie scream – “Bring her back, she’ll drown herself! Bring her back!” I started after her, the rain still coming down like pitchforks, and yelling to her to come back, but she ran on blindly as though possessed of the devil, and when she got to the water’s edge she dove straight in and made for the boat. I swam after her and as we got to the side of the boat, which I was afraid she would capsize, I got hold of her round the waist with my one hand and I started to talk to her calmly and soothingly, as though I were talking to a child. “Go away from me,” she said, “you’re an atheist!” Jesus, you could have knocked me over with a feather, so astonished I was to hear that. So that was it? All that hysteria because I was insulting the Lord Almighty. I felt like batting her one in the eye to bring her to her senses. But we were out over our heads and I had a fear that she would do some mad thing like pulling the boat over our heads if I didn’t handle her right. So I pretended that I was terribly sorry and I said I didn’t mean a word of it, that I had been scared to death, and so on and so forth, and as I talked to her gently, soothingly, I slipped my hand down from her waist and I gently stroked her ass. That was what she wanted all right. She was talking to me blubberingly about what a good Catholic she was and how she had tried not to sin, and maybe she was so wrapped up in what she was saying that she didn’t know what I was doing, but just the same when I got my hand in her crotch and said all the beautiful things I could think of, about God, about love, about going to church and confessing and all that crap, she must have felt something because I had a good three fingers inside her and working them around like drunken bobbins. “Put your arms around me Agnes,” I said softly, slipping my hand out and pulling her to me so that I could get my legs between hers … “There, that’s the girl … take it easy now … it’ll stop soon.” And still talking about the church, the confessional, God love, and the whole bloody mess I managed to get it inside her. “You’re very good to me,” she said, just as though she didn’t know my prick was in her, “and I’m sorry I acted like a fool.” “I know, Agnes,” I said, “it’s all right … listen, grab me tighter … yeah, that’s it.” “I’m afraid the boat’s going to tip over,” she says, trying her best to keep her ass in position by paddling with her right hand. “Yes, let’s get back to the shore,” I said, and I start to pull away from her. “Oh don’t leave me,” she says, clutching me tighter. “Don’t leave me, I’ll drown.” Just then Francie comes running down to the water. “Hurry,” says Agnes, “hurry … I’ll drown.”

  Francie was a good sort, I must say. She certainly wasn’t a Catholic and if she had any morals they were of the reptilian order. She was one of those girls who are born to fuck. She had no aims, no great desires, showed no jealousy, held no grievances, was constantly cheerful and not at all unintelligent. At nights when we were sitting on the porch in the dark talking to the guests she would come over and sit on my lap with nothing on underneath her dress and I would slip it into her as she laughed and talked to the others. I think she would have brazened it out before the Pope if she had been given a chance. Back in the city, when I called on her at her home, she pulled the same stunt off in front of her mother whose sight, fortunately, was growing dim. If we went dancing and she got too hot in the pants she would drag me to a telephone booth and, queer girl that she was, she’d actually talk to some one, some one like Agnes for example, while pulling off the trick. She seemed to get a special pleasure out of doing it under people’s noses; she said there was more fun in it if you didn’t think about it too hard. In the crowded subway coming home from the beach, say, she’d slip her dress around so that the slit was in the middle and take my hand and put it right on her cunt. If the train was tightly packed and we were safely wedged in a corner she’d take my cock out of my fly and hold it in her two hands, as though it were a bird. Sometimes she’d get playful and hang her bag on it, as though to prove that there wasn’t the least danger. Another thing about her was that she didn’t pretend that I was the only guy she had on the string. Whether she told me everything I don’t know, but she certainly told me plenty. She told me about her affairs laughingly, while she was climbing over me or when I had it in her, or just when I was about to come. She would tell me how they went about it, how big they were or how small, what they said when they got excited and so on and so forth giving me every possible detail, just as though I were going to write a textbook on the subject. She didn’t seem to have the least feeling of sacredness about her own body or her feelings or anything connected with herself. “Francie, you bloody fucker,” I used to say, “you’ve got the morals of a clam.” “But you like me, don’t you?” she’d answer. “Men like to fuck, and so do women. It doesn’t harm anybody and it doesn’t mean you have to love every one you fuck does it? I wouldn’t want to be in love; it must be terrible to have to fuck the same man all the time, don’t you think? Listen, if you didn’t fuck anybody but me all the time you’d get tired of me quick, wouldn’t you? Sometimes it’s nice to be fucked by someone you don’t know at all. Yes, I think that’s the best of all,” she added – “there’s no complications, no telephone numbers, no love letters, no scraps, what? Listen, do you think this is very bad? Once I tried to get my brother to fuck me; you know what a sissy he is – he gives everybody a pain. I don’t remember exactly how it was any more, but anyway we were in the house alone and I was passionate that day. He came into my bedroom to ask me for something. I was lying there with my dress up, thinking about it and wanting it terribly, and when he came in I didn’t give a damn about his being my brother, I just thought of him as a man, and so I lay there with my skirt up and I told him I wasn’t feeling well, that I had a pain in my stomach. He wanted to run right out and get something for me but I told him no, just to rub my stomach a bit, that would do it good. I opened my waist and made him rub my bare skin. He was trying to keep his eyes on the wall, the big idiot, and rubbing me as though I were a piece of wood. ‘It’s not there, you chump,’ I said, ‘it’s lower down … what are you afraid of?’ And I pretended that I was in agony. Finally he touched me accidentally. There! that’s it!’ I shouted. ‘Oh do rub it, it feels so good!’ Do you know, the big sap actually massaged me for five minutes without realizing that it was all a game? I was so exasperated that I told him to get the hell out and leave me alone. ‘You’re a eunuch,’ I said, but he was such a sap I don’t think he knew what the word meant.” She laughed, thinking what a ninny her brother was. She said he probably still had his maiden. What did I think about it – was it so terribly bad? Of course she knew I wouldn’t think anything of the kind. “Listen Francie,” I said, “did you ever tell that story to the cop you’re going with?” She guessed she hadn’t. “I guess so too,” I said. “He’d beat the piss out of you if ever he heard that yarn.” “He’s socked me already,” she answered promptly
. “What?” I said, “you let him beat you up?” “I don’t ask him to,” she said, “but you know how quick-tempered he is. I don’t let anybody else sock me but somehow coming from him I don’t mind so much. Sometimes it makes me feel good inside … I don’t know, maybe a woman ought to get beaten up once in a while. It doesn’t hurt so much, if you really like a guy. And afterwards he’s so damned gentle – I almost feel ashamed of myself …”